In addition to allegedly leading marketing efforts here at Sproutit, I also co-direct a nonprofit venture called Blogswana. Blogswana is an attempt to use social software tools to increase AIDS awareness in the African country of Botswana. One of the problems we had was email.

A typical lumbering, old-style kill-crush-destroy NGO (non-governmental organization) has a huge overhead: Tons of Western-salaried employees, insurance, office space, sub-contractors and, of course, expensive suites of software, including email management. Naturally, the overhead a company like this needs is gigantic.

One of the criticisms of the old-style NGO is that, at best, only pennies on the dollar get to the people who need it. The other complaint is that the money that does get into the target country winds up more often gilding toilets in presidential palaces than providing for the hungry or sick. But lately, there have been the first stirrings of a movement I (unapologetically) call, NGO 2.0.

Like for-profit companies of the 2.0-ish persuation, NGOs of our ilk are adaptible, agile, entrepreneurial, direct-to-user outfits that utilize “customer” content creation. We use as many web applications as we can; in fact, that’s all we use. But here’s the problem: email.

Unfortunately, the top three providers of free, web-based email services are also egregious flaunters of ethical business standards. They assist tyranical governments in censoring their citizens and even help them to convict them of trumped up crimes. All for the sake of theoretical, future increases in market share. It’s hard to be a do-gooder with an email that twirls its moustache like a silent movie villain.

Alternatives, such as Hushmail, though well-built and ethically smirch-free, are difficult for the average person to use.

So, to make a short story long, I decided to put my mail where my money was and employ Sproutit’s Mailroom, not just as an email management system but as our primary email service.

In addition to sending and receiving email for free and from anywhere, Mailroom also gives us the ability to answer and manage the email as a team, which is integral to our efficiency and was a monstrous pain before. It also, equipt as it is with a quick-learning artificial intelligence, automatically forwards mail to the proper recipient, while allowing acess to anyone in the company. It also suggests proper responses to day-to-day inquiries.

I’m really pleased with this solution and I would encourage all the rest of you out there who are involved with non-profits to consider Mailroom, like us, both as an email management system that is particularly well suited to the collaborative, NGO 2.0 way of doing business and as your primary email service.