Joel Spolsky has a long history with technology - at Microsoft, at his own company, as a blogger and as an author. I was delighted to read about his experiences with creating a new website for his company - it is both entertaining and informative. Here’s one of the key takeaway’s:
”Which led us into several rounds of iteration by “a committee of tasteless slobs,” that committee being mostly me, and somehow we ended up with a design that just got worse and worse and worse the more we tweaked it.”
Design by committee can be challenging- even when you are keenly aware of your audience and your branding. I recommend reading the entire article!
Yes it can! You’ve probably heard the dreaded words “search engine optimization” or SEO a lot. The team at TechSoup held a great online event (and subsequent documentation) that describes what that really means (and what you can do to achieve better rankings). Here are the top things you can do to better your search ranking:
- Having a “good” site
- Finding out what keywords and phrases people use to find sites like yours.
Using the keywords and phrases on your site as much as possible AND still using good English
- Submitting to as many search engines and directories as possible.
The short answer though, isn’t about technology, it’s about marketing, testing, and research. Back in the day, you could “trick” the search engines by typing the name of your nonprofit over and over again in the keyword section of your website. Not only did the search engines get wise to that - they became adept at punishing folks that cheat!
Today, you have to use keywords properly, and you have to encourage links to your site. Short of that, you have to pay a search engine (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo) to get better results.
I’m reminded a bit of fundraising and the ubiquitios “donate now” button, which many thought would revolutionize fundraising for our sector. The truth is - it didn’t. We discovered that while a donate now button can make it easier for some people to donate - you STILL had to bring them to your site, develop a relationship, and tell your story effectivly - both before and AFTER receiving a donation. And that is hard work!
So is optimizing your site. There aren’t any magic bullets or quick answers - but there are a lot of resources, including a local Seattle company called SEOMOZ -and they are providing a lot of free information regarding increasing your search rankings. The Seattle Times has an article about this local company, which is worth a read.
I’ve been meeting with our friends and collaborators at ONE/NW - and we were talking about our shared work (we both help nonprofits with websites and databases - ONE/NW has a special focus on the environment) and we were talking about the challenges of helping nonprofits who are pressed for time figure out their audience. Here’s the funny part:
“Our audience is the general public”
That’s right - just the general public. It’s funny because it is true (in the very broadest sense) but also because it isn’t - we all know that when you deliver a message aimed at someone in particular it is much more effective than the message aimed at the entire world.
Sometimes, this is just a matter of a little education and a lot of resource. NPower has a terrific tookit that any agency can use to get started. And many communities have both for and nonprofit vendors that can help.
Here at NPower Seattle - we know a lot about audience identification, about branding, about strategy - but mostly from the “how can we help you implement that?” side of things.
We’ll be providing more tips and links and resources as we create and discover them, so keep an eye on our website. And in the meantime - here’s a quick note about one local agency that I think hit their audience identification spot on:
They serve the homeless community - and in particular, those needing help with alcohol or other drug addictions. Sometimes, our first impulse is to think that our customers (or clients, or consumers, or constituents) are our primary audience - but - in this case - it simply isn’t true. For this particular agency - the folks needing service are reached through other channels than the web. Donors and other social service agencies, though - those audiences ARE more easily reached via a targeted website and communications plan!
The online storage wars are heating up - there is a new tool available from DivShare, which is free. Here’s what they say about their service:
DivShare is a new type of web host. We’re all about freedom and simplicity. Upload your videos, photos and other files, and we’ll host them forever, for free. You can embed your files anywhere, and co-brand your download pages. How? We’re ad-supported, but fear not, we’ll never invade you with obnoxious or offensive ads.
That seems like a pretty good deal to me. Of course, the proof is in the pudding - will this tool work effectively, stay free and thus be a contender for storing mission critical data as part of a disaster recovery plan?
They have a remarkably short and readable privacy policy, too.
Microsoft has two new tools out, one which appears to have similar functionality to Evite, but with an emphasis on what happened after the event (pictures, blogs, and so on) as well as a home server software package.
The planning service is called Windows Live Events, and it will allow you to use a series of templates (again, like Evite) to modify the way the event looks and so on. The major difference appears to be that the organizer can also create a website post event to maintain those pictures notes and so on.
The Home Server software has also been released to retailers. The NPower team hasn’t had the opportunity to review this new tool - but many of the promised features might make this an attractive tool for nonprofit who are just getting started. Features include a daily backup, file sharing to others in your network, PC health monitoring tools, and more.
I’m always delighted to see new tools being offered - and can’t wait to see if the nonprofit sector can leverage either or both of these to deliver on their mission!
Amazon provided a service level agreement to go with their S3 online storage offering - I haven’t read all of the details yet, but they are promising a 99.9% uptime guarantee - and if they miss that mark - you receive a discount on your bill!
I’ll leave the debate regarding this as an effective online backup to some of my colleagues with better hardware skills than I have - but I suspect that for a mini-disaster recovery plan - this might be both attractive and affordable.
I used their online calculator to see what it would cost every month to store 20GB of data, including moving 20GB from your machine to S3 (that would be to get your backup to their site initially) and that price was $11.00.
Your monthly cost (assuming you didn’t need to update that emergency set of information) would be $3.00, and when you moved all 20GB back to your local machine, it would cost $4.00.
With the new service level agreement - this might be a terrific way to build redundancy into your backup solution - copy your mission critical data once a month (or once a quarter, or once a week - depending on your risk tolerance) and continue using your local backup tools for your everyday needs.
What happens when your website helps you seamlessly collect donations (or registrations for events and classes), when your newsletter lets you select your contacts from your database, and when your website displays the class schedule from your database?
You’re getting close to effective use - your database integrates with your enews tools, your website “talks” to your database, your website visitors participate by giving or signing up, and you can track them in your database.
Create once, use many times.
My colleagues here at NPower Seattle have been working hard at identifying and integrating tools - and while we have a lot to learn - we’re getting really good at integrating these tools.
We use Plone and Salesforce for many of the web and database needs of our customers, and we’re gradually helping nonprofits integrate Vertical Response and the payment tools offered by PayPal.
Kudos to Evan Callahan and Jesse Snyder for both their hard work and their strategic thinking. Obviously, every nonprofit applies business rules in a different way, so we’ll always have to think and code creatively. But now that we’ve integrated these, working out the unique kinks and logic that is particular to another agency won’t be as challenging.
I’ve just returned from a terrific vacation - and I’ll get back to posting just as soon as I get through my inbox! In the meantime, I am participating in the Idealware seminar tomorrow about open source CMS tools - I’ll be carrying the torch for Plone. You can still register by visiting the Idealware site!
