Madison’s own nonprofit leader Alnisa Allgood, the driving force behind the Collaborative for Good and events like Nonprofit Draft Day and the Social Good Summit, has been named one of the top 25 nonprofit technology influencers in the US by BizTech Magazine.
“I was on Twitter this morning and going through the notifications and stuff, and somebody had congratulated me. And I’m like, ‘So what are you congratulating me on?’” she said in an interview Tuesday. “And then I clicked through it, and I was just ‘Oh.’ And it was a good feeling, because in a lot of arenas I’m pretty low key about what it is that I do, so I feel like I would have been very easy to overlook.”
The magazine focused on the Twitter account of Allgood’s company Nonprofit Tech, which provides technology consulting to meet the unique needs of nonprofit organizations.
“I think what’s unique for nonprofits to a degree, is the combination of they need things to be pretty flexible, they need things to be highly affordable, and they need solutions that don’t take a really long time to comprehend,” she said. “But then a lot of it is also just identifying where we think technology trends are going, so that we can ramp up nonprofits earlier for those things.”
For example, Allgood was able to prepare her clients for the move to the cloud that took place across the technology industry a few years ago.
“A lot of the nonprofits that we work with were more ready and able to take advantage of switches to the cloud that were happening, because we saw that change coming,” she said. “And what we try to do with the nonprofits that we work with, is keep them abreast of those types of things, that these types of changes are coming.”
She also helps keep her 10,000 Twitter followers up on those trends, which is what landed her on the BizTech list.
“I answer questions on Twitter, on Quora. I share resources with people,” she said. “If I find good articles and things I share, I highlight other people who I think are saying good things. My twitter presence as Nonprofit Tech is way stronger than my LinkedIn presence as Nonprofit Tech. But, my LinkedIn presence as me is also a mixture of technology, tips and thoughts, and stuff like that mixed in with collaboration and social good, social entrepreneurship and things like that.”
Allgood said she already followed 18 of the 25 people on the list, and feels fortunate to be listed among them.
“Beth Kanter typically stands out, leaps and bounds, mostly for the fact that she’s making a lot of this information very digestible for people, and then pushing the boundaries on certain types of use, like data usage in non profit,” Allgood said. “She’s a powerhouse in the field, and more specifically I think not only does she always have good information, and she’s getting early access to a lot of different things, but also just because it’s what she does, like in terms of speaking engagements and things like that, day in and day out. She’s either researching or speaking. Yesenia Soleto does Smart Digital out of Chicago, and she’s great. And so most of her information is, I think, is around web and social media communications type of stuff.”
Soleto has even spoken at the Madison Nonprofit Day Conference, Allgood said.
“It was a nice validation,” Allgood said. “it was great to be included with a lot of the other people on the list. It’s nice that a business magazine is kind of acknowledging it is a field of interest in that there are strong leaders in the field that people can follow and learn from.”
