This past week I had the chance to attend the Convio ’08 Summit with my colleague Andrew at Forum One. The conference was held in Austin, Texas and provided a few days to meet-up with other NP Techers (so great to see all of you!), catch up on some of the latest trends in the industry, and of course, eat GREAT food ).

Since I spent most of the time during the conference chatting with non profits and standing at our organization’s booth in the exhibit hall, I didn’t have a lot of time to attend panels. When I did have the opportunity, most of the discussions were fairly similar to those I participated in at NTC ’08. The one discussion that did feel new was the keynote by Tony Elischer, Managing Director of UK-based consulting firm THINK.

Elischer broke the stigma barriers and actually talked about non profit technology through the lens of the recession. While I think a lot of us were hoping that this economy stuff is really just a bad dream that we’ll wake up from in a few weeks, I think it was good to acknowledge the situation and actually talk about realistic expectations and tactics.

I wrote up my impressions from his Tony’s presentation on the Forum One Influence blog, and hope it can be of some inspiration (and comfort) to organizations who are nervous and vigilant during these changing times.