Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

My colleague Jon Stahl at ONENW sent along a great article about tools, technology, and technology literacy. In turn, he was referring to an article by Eugene Kim - so now that I’m writing about BOTH of those articles - this is starting to be pretty nested.

So here’s the takeaway (in three parts):

• Eugene was recently reminded that the technology fluency of any group is varied - and that it can be easy to let tech tools (or even possible tech tools) stop the conversation. Better to leave talking about those tools until later!
• Jon’s takeaway was also terrific -when thinking about technology tools, it can be easy to drop into what Jon calls “magical thinking” - that sense that if you just find the right tool all will be well - when in reality - the better effort is to get your process and objectives clarified.
• And me? I think a combination of both:

• Some of us assume the best of technology, and some the worst - and when we’re problem solving, planning and dreaming how to do our work more effectively - it’s not fair to make those assumptions for the rest of the group!
• Clarity about goals and objectives and outcomes should drive the process, not the available tools, nor the magical ones!

We’ve standardized our website work in Plone, a terrific Content Management System. Out of the gate, Plone performs very well in search tests - but those are just the easy wins - the technology piece of helping your site be searchable, rather than the people piece!

The folks at Human Service Solutions have published a very nice (and pretty short - just 5 pages) article called SEO Fundamentals. (SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization), and I think it is a must read. Here’s a a great framing question:

If your organization’s mission has to do with environmental protection, are your target visitors most likely to search for “acid rain”, “save the forests”, “toxic waste”, “greenhouse effect”, or all of the above? Do you want to reach visitors who are local, regional or national in scope? These are considerations that need careful attention as you begin the SEO process.

You should read the entire 5 page article - it will take 10-15 minutes at the most! Implementing a strong search plan isn’t rocket science for most - just work to research, test, and then implement - and then do it all over again!

NPower Seattle hosted our third annual Innovation Awards Luncheon this month, where we recognized three nonprofits who have used technology to further their mission in an innovative way.

You can read all about the nominees on our website - but the top three included:

• Planned Parenthood for their “Talking About Sex” podcast
• Within Reach for their Parent Help 123 website tools
• Real GRRLS for their projects teaching video and other life skills to young women AND creating marketing video’s for nonprofits!

You can also read a bit more about the winner over on Brier Dudley’s Blog - Brier blogs for The Seattle Times, and was kind enough to mention our event!

The folks at Smashing Magazine have published a terrific article about web design, called 10 Principles for Effective Web Design. You should read it - some of the information is new and some has made an appearance here in my blog.

Here are a few of my favorite tips -and items that we try to incorporate into our designs!

1. Manage to focus users’ attention:

The human eye is a highly non-linear device, and web-users can instantly recognize edges, patterns and motions. This is why video-based advertisements are extremely annoying and distracting, but from the marketing perspective they perfectly do the job of capturing users’ attention.

2. Make use of effective writing

Talk business. Avoid cute or clever names, marketing-induced names, company-specific names, and unfamiliar technical names. For instance, if you describe a service and want users to create an account, “sign up” is better than “start now!” which is again better than “explore our services”.

And there’s a lot more - so you really should read the entire article. Increasingly, I’m asking customers to spend as much time as possible developing their content - all of the studies about eye tracking, site navigation and more - all point out that your content will trump your visual design and layout!

Looking for web design help for your nonprofit? The team at Elevacion is offering some assistance to nonprofits with a dollar to dollar match:

For each dollar your non-profit spends on web design, programming, or other media related work, we will match that dollar with a dollar of our own.

In 2007, we allocated approximately $150,000 worth of assistance to 55 non-profits in order to help them with web design, programming, and media work. In 2008, we will allocate $400,000 to non-profits on a first come, first service basis.

You can read their application for more information!

I’m biased of course, since we implement Salesforce for nonprofits! We’ve spent a lot of time working with the tools that Salesforce offers, and we’ve created a template that we use as the start for all of our Salesforce projects. More about that in a bit.

There are at least three templates (or versions) that we know about:

• Salesforce Enterprise
• Salesforce Nonprofit Template
• NPower Seattle Template

Enterprise is what Salesforce delivers to their for profit customers. It’s terrific - it includes a set of standard defaults for how things work. Granted, it doesn’t do some of the things that many nonprofits need (manage households, for instance), but it is full-featured. We think it is a great starting spot for nonprofits - so we use this as our base layer.

The Salesforce Nonprofit Template is the basic installation that many nonprofits install when they sign up for donated licenses from Salesforce. In this template, some of the names have been changes (An Opportunity is called a Donation, and a an Account is called an Organization, for example). And there are a few basic tool additions, too. We’ve actually used that as our starting layer a few times - but found that for everything that we really liked, there were an equal number of things that we had to undo. This template may very well meet your needs,and is the best choice for nonprofits that do note have a Salesforce implementation consultant to help.

The NPower Seattle Template is terrific alternative to the Nonprofit Template - we start with the Enterprise offering, and then build out the needed tools for managing households, for creating and tracking matching and soft credits, recurring and pledged giving, sets the stage for deeper tracking for volunteers and more.

Even so - we further customize that template for almost all of our customers. Most nonprofits have business needs that are particular (even if they aren’t unique, if you get what I mean). For instance - we assume that any nonprofit that is tracking donations opportunities will have stages, such as:

1. Prospecting
2. Pledged
3. Won - Need Thank You
4. Closed Won (or Lost)

But some agencies might include a stage for “Held Meeting” or something else - a way to manage grants or major gifts - so your process may include additional steps

Additionally - some agencies have particular needs around, say, tracking guardianship, or selling books, or managing an event schedule. So even though our template is fully formed - there’s more work to do, such as integrating inquiry forms from your website,  working with PayPal or another payment vendor, and more!

Bottom line - you should know the right questions to ask! Our friends at Idealware have done it again, and provided a concise posting about what you should know.

And I’d add one thought: You can post your video content to Google or YouTube, and display it on your website without incurring bandwidth charges. If you measure your site statistics - you’ll get a sense of how many people are watching that content -and that may guide you should you need to move to a hosted service!

Great question -and the answer is surprising when you start adding things up!

If you are a nonprofit customer using the Enterprise Edition, you get:

• 1GB of “general” storage
• 250MB of document storage.

If you’re managing your music or picture collection on your computer at home or at work, you know that you can burn through 1GB pretty fast. But when all you’re storing in Salesforce is text based data - name, comments, giving history, contact history - well - that takes almost no space at all.

We’ve helped many nonprofits use Salesforce, and we’re using it, too. And no one has hit more than 5% of that storage limit. When I try this on for size, it helps to to remember:

• One gigabyte can hold over 1,000 novels at 100,000 words per novel
• Is about 18 hours of MP3 music
• Is about 12 hours of Flash video
• The Human Genome is less than a gigabyte of data!

Of course, if you are adding documents, pictures, or other files to your Salesforce database - you’ll want to monitor your usage - and make sure that you touch base with the Salesforce Foundation to inquire about purchasing more if needed!

I just finished reading a terrific (and short!) blog post by Seth Godin about permission based marketing - and he makes a clear difference between what you can do in a legal fashion just because you have an email address and what you SHOULD do to build trust with your stakeholders and community.

I think he’s spot on - here’s the quote that I like the best:

Permission doesn’t have to be a one-way broadcast medium. The internet means you can treat different people differently, and it demands that you figure out how to let your permission base choose what they hear and in what format.

Although Godin is looking a bit more at the for profit community - I think he’s on to something that we can use in our sector, too.