NP Technology News Feed
USAID Challenge: Final 3 Projects Awarded
Congratulations to the top three finalists in the USAID Development 2.0 Challenge! There were 115 projects submitted, and the community narrowed the list down to just 15 in December. The USAID judging panel has reviewed the featured projects and announced the top 3!
USAID Challenge Finalists:
Computer Recycling
Have your current computers reached the end of their useful life with the organization? Because computer equipment is fast becoming a major solid waste problem (especially monitors), we believe the best way for environmental organizations to retire their outdated computers is to recycle them.
Recycling computers requires some effort and sometimes a bit of cost. The best option is to take advantage of local computer recycling options in your community. This is the most convenient and inexpensive way to make sure your computer equipment is recycled appropriately. The bad news is that not every community has computer recycling programs.
Here are some options in the Pacific Northwest:
British Columbia Vancouver- Intercon Solutions
http://www.interconrecycling.com
Nanaimo
- Nanaimo Recycling Exchange
http://www.recycling.bc.ca
- Idaho Department of Environmental Quality http://www.deq.state.id.us/assistance/recycle.htm
- Computers for Kids
- Montana Department of Environmental Quality
http://www.deq.mt.gov/Recycle/cpuList.asp
- Free Geek
http://www.freegeek.org/recycle.php - StRUT
http://www.strut.org
- E-Waste Solutions
Eugene
- Computer Reuse and Recycling
http://www.laneccrc.org
- Computer Recovery Project
http://your.kingcounty.gov/solidwaste/index.asp
A longer listing of Northwest electronics recycling providers can be
found at http://www.recyclingadvocates.org/wepsi/recycle.htm
If there's no computer recycling service available in your area, you
may need to look farther afield. Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition is one
of the leading groups working on responsible e-waste recycling
issues. They maintain links to electronics recycling resources at http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/recycle/recycle_otherstates.htm.
For more information on e-waste-related policy issues, see Silicon
Valley Toxics Coalition's "Clean Computer Campaign" at http://www.svtc.org/cleancc/index.html.
Thanks to Alex McCallum and Suzanne for updates and suggestions.
How to Generate Website Traffic
One of the questions we're most frequently asked is "How do I get more traffic to my website?" You've posted your content, you've told all your friends, and yet you are still seeing fewer visitors than you'd like. What can you do?
The answer is going to vary a bit for each website (different audiences, different goals, different content), but here are some ideas:
- Write original, well-researched content. This is probably the most important point to remember. As an environmental non-profit, you are an expert on a least one issue, so put your best foot forward and get your valuable information online. Read about Change.Org's Content Strategy here.
- Reach out to other organizations. Ask them to link to pages on your site. Comment on their blog articles where you can often include links back to your own website. This also gives you the chance to spread your knowledge about the topics you know about
- Remember Search Engine Optimization, or SEO as it's often called. There are a number of techniques you can employ to make your content more findable by search engines
- Send Email to Your Members. This includes both email newsletters, and email action alerts (donation asks, advocacy, event announcements). You can use email to drive traffic to your website by linking frequently to pages on your website
- Embrace Web Analytics. You probably already have Google Analytics installed on your site, but if not, it’s a really good idea. In the world of web analytics, you can start to analyze which parts of your site get more traffic than others and begin to make decisions about how to present your content in different ways. It definitely takes some time to learn, but the best place to start is to start tracking some basic metrics to establish baseline data
If you have already incorporated these ideas and still are not seeing results or you are curious about what else you can be doing, you will need to fully evaluate your online communications goals. It might be time for a website redesign, content re-writing, and/or a marketing or outreach campaign. In support of these activities, ONE/Northwest offers Strategy Consulting services to groups wanting to expand their base or engage their members in new ways.
Relationships MatterIt's also good to remember that quality is important too. Don't just chase higher and higher numbers, spend some time and cultivate meaningful relationships with your current site visitors and organization members. If you're a locally focused group working on a single issue (friends of the neighborhood creek for example), then you can't expect large numbers of site visitors, but those visitors are likely to be local and interested in your issue. If you're working to become the next big national movement, then obviously strength will come in numbers (although you can cultivate meaningful relationships as well).
Find Inspiration in your Email List
With all the hubbub, it's easy to lose site of the real people your email list names represent. These are people that have signed up to hear from your organization because they care about your work and want to support you. So once you have a chance to catch your breath you might want to reconnect with them and get inspired about your outreach all over again.
Here is a little experiment you might want to try with your email or donor list to reconnect.
What:
Take 1 hour a quarter (or even once a month) to check in on who is signing up for your emails or donating to your organization.
Pick 10 (or 20 or 50 if you are fast and efficient) names at random from your supporter list and quickly review their records.
- What do you know about them?
- Where do they live, how long have they been with you?
- Notice any trends or similarities?
- Any surprises?
- Take a couple minutes and use your imagination to think about who they are, why they signed up and what they were hoping to get from your organization.
The point of this little exercise is not to find hard data or facts to plan your next campaign around, but to get into the mindset of connecting with your email names as real people.
Taking a look at who is on your list and seeing the names and locations is a great reminder that your list is made up of actual people and it helps to keep this at the forefront of your communications.
Doing this once can reignite your connection to your list members, doing it regularly can provide more insight into why people have signed up and can help you write emails that are more authentic and relevant to the recipients.
Part Two:
If you really want to get some information, take another hour or so and write a handful of random supporters a personal email thanking them for their support and asking what they think of the emails they receive from your organization. Although you don't want to judge too much based on such a small sample, you can bet that if you hear the same complaint or compliment repeatedly its worth thinking about and maybe investigating further.
You might want to include a couple of specific items like the following:
- Why did you sign up for our email - what were you hoping to receive?
- Do you read our emails regularly?
- What is your favorite part of them
- What is your least favorite thing about our emails?
- Do you receive too many or too few emails from us?
- What would you like to see more of?
- Offer them a link or piece of information that they might find useful - a new article on the web or fact that you have a facebook group for instance.
Why do this?
It just takes a small effort to show respect: By taking an hour to reach out and respond, you will have shown your supporter that you are paying attention to the needs of your audience and made them feel special. Since this is a casual effort you control the volume and flow of feedback so it doesn't have to become a giant undertaking or time suck.
New input leads to new ideas: You might also find that its a good way to generate new ideas for segmentation, campaigns and ways to personalize your merge fields in the future. And I believe that having a few personal interactions with some of your list members will change the way you approach your broader communications as well.
Feel good about what you do: Having people give you their email address and invite you to their inbox is a sign that they are on your side and want to be a part of what you do. And if they give you their clicks or money they are showing just how good they feel about being connected with you. That is really pretty amazing and pretty cool if you think about it.
Again, this isn't about accurate statistics about your list, although of course you should make time to review and understand your big picture data too. This is just an exercise to inspire you about your email audience - people just like you that care about your work and your mission. Seeing that you have people in your corner that care about your cause can give you a boost of much needed energy for your next email effort and all the work that comes with doing it well.
Guidelines For Using CSS In Email Newsletters
Email newsletters are more popular than ever, and everyone loves to design a rich website-like newsletter for their subscribers. Unfortunately, email isn't the web. Your beautiful design work might look great in one email client, but chances are when you look at the same work a different email client the results will not be the same.
Why? In a nutshell, some email clients are moving away from full CSS support. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the technology that allows for modern, powerful, flexible website designs. (If you don't know what CSS is or how to use it, chances are the rest of this article isn't for you -- but show it to your email newsletter designer!)
As of early 2007, Gmail is the most restrictive as it will ignore all external and embedded style sheets. (It will support inline styles.) Worse, Microsoft's just-released Outlook 2007 actually takes a few big steps backwards in its CSS support. (Check out Campaign Monitor's article for the shocking lowdown!) For this reason, we consider compatability with Gmail to be the baseline CSS support to design to. If it looks great in Gmail, chances are, it will look great in most other clients.
Even with inline styles, there are some restrictions. Fortunately, deprecated tag attributes will fill the role of certain disabled inline styles.
So here are ONE/Northwest's guidelines for creating successful email newsletters that will look good even in the worst email clients. We don't mention much about design aesthetics, just coding practices that will succeed in all environments. (For testing, we used Gmail, Outlook 2003, Outlook Web Access, Hotmail, and Yahoo).
Things To Avoid-
Do not rely on external (<link rel="stylesheet">) or embedded style sheets (those contained within the <style> tag above the <body> tag). This is the most important thing to avoid. Many email services cut everything above the body tag and disable external style sheets.
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Don't use javascript in an email newsletter. Ever. There's no better way to have your newsletter marked as spam.
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Don't use tag attributes on the <body> tag (such as widths or background colors). Most email services ignore the <body> tag. You can try putting your whole newsletter inside a <div> and apply inline styles to it. Results may vary.
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Use tables for layout. Lots of them. You're welcome to try <div> tags for positioning and layout, but our research shows that tables are more consistently supported. C'mon now. Get over your table-phobia and embrace the box model.
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Use inline styles liberally in tables. In fact, you'll find you can get the best mileage out of inline styles in <td> tags. That way you are setting up little style regions within each table. Think of these inline styles as miniature style sheets. This allows non-technical users to swap content in and out of pre-formatted cells in a modular fashion.
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Declare width, cellpadding, and cellspacing for all tables and table cells. Doing so will result in a fixed width for the template. This helps because most people will view a newsletter in a preview pane which is much smaller than the width of their monitor. Don't leave widths to chance because many email clients like to "fill in the blank" which can break the design.
- Test your newsletter by sending to yourself or colleagues. This will give you the best chance to catch any problems before your whole subscriber list does! Send test messages to a variety of email clients such as Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail.
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Don't use background images. Gmail, among others, will ignore any url() attribute in an inline style, and the simple background= tag attribute. You can use background colors if you wish (bgcolor tag attribute or background-color: css statement).
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Don't use images for important content like calls to action, headlines and links to your web site. Outlook, Gmail and others turn images off until allowed by the user. If your entire newsletter is graphical, all your recipients are going to see is a lot of broken images.
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Provide alt text for all images. That way the reader will see some content in place of the disabled images. This works particularly well for logos.
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Declare BOTH height AND width parameters for images. Some email clients will default to "0" for undeclared height or width. Poor old Outlook Web Access especially needs this for your table layout to display properly.
External sources:
An awesome article by Xavier Frenette which lines out exactly which properties, tags, and selectors are or are not supported by various email clients.
A similar article by David Greiner which includes information about Macintosh
Campaign Monitor's Guide to CSS Support in Email
Campaign Monitor's rundown on CSS support in Outlook 2007
Gaming For A Cause
Its challenging to produce a concise, compelling story to illustrate what are often complex problems with various interrelated challenges. It's one thing to produce a short story about a kid in the foster care system who "made it", and quite another to illustrate the complex and maddening government process this same kid had to navigate year after year.
Can games help? A number of organizations have tried. And the strategy would seem to make sense - a recent Pew study finds that more than half of American adults play video games, including a third of those over 65. An interesting example is the ReDistricting Game, which invites people to engage in many of the same decisions elected officials make when determining congressional districts. Another is Escape from Woomera, a game that reconstructs Australian immigration detention centers, and invites players to explore and attempt to break out of these facilities. The Planet Green Game, a collaboration between Starbucks and Global Green USA, challenges players to green a virtual town. Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, allow players to define themselves anew and build communities - nonprofits from TechSoup to NPR engage large constituencies this way.
Games allow the producer to define the rules for engagement tightly coupled with a visual story, helping to direct participants to make various choices that illustrate critical consequences of our actions in real life.
Developing game applications on a small nonprofit budget is challenging, but can be doable. NTEN sponsored a session on video games for social change in 2007 to in part address this point. I am interested to learn more about afforable strategies for nonprofits to use gaming as an engagement strategy.
The most tragic victim of the financial collapse
With only two weeks left in the Bush administration, these things are going the way of the Confederate dollar.
The United Church of Christ Social Media and Connecting With a Younger Audience: A Case Study (Part III: Strategy)
These varied social media suggestions make up the third part of my on-going case study of and strategy suggestions for the United Church of Christ's social media strategy, it's attempt to resonance with young people (Millennials in particular), and its potentially forward-moving direction.
New Years Resolution Idea - Clean Data
Daily/Weekly
- Back-up database. Set up an automated backup to be generated that can be download weekly.
- Duplicate check. Check “Demand Tools” reports regularly to check for duplicates and other redundant data.
- Scan for junk leads. Doing regular scans for junk Lead records that are filled with gibberish values from sources like online forms.
- Check For & Tackle Incomplete Records. While most CRMs can validate or require certain data fields, it’s not always easy to ensure a value for every field at the time when a record is generated. For example, if staff import a list of event attendees with only name, title and phone numbers, it has very little value if it needs to be used in an email or direct mail campaign. While appending missing data is may require a lot of manual effort which will feel time consuming, it is a necessary evil to ensure that you have ‘actionable’ data.
- Returned mail. Update contact records when mail is returned. [Determine policy…what happens? Alert to owner? Purge? Phone call?]
Weekly/Monthly
- Run executive reports weekly/monthly. Use key organizational reports to spot poor data (as well as poor performance). Data that doesn’t match expectations are either an indicator of poor data management or poor performance by the individual.
- Scan communications lists. Review lists (reports) that School Volunteers will use for communications (email, invitation lists, etc.). Is there missing data? Is data in the right format?
- Run exceptions reports monthly. Run reports run monthly to find records with incorrect picklist values.
Quarterly
- Post email cleaning. Use tools in VerticalResponse to identify Returned Mail or Bounced emails so that bad lead records can be updated/purged.
- Delete or archive old data. Organizations merge, get acquired or shut down, contacts change addresses, change jobs, move within an organization …CRM data does expire. This is an area which is not easily automated and requires investment of time and energy. The more regularly you check for expired data, the healthier your data will be. According to one source, a database unchecked for an entire year can see as much as 30% expired data.
- Data enrichment. Regularly ask what additional data in each record would help staff do more and have better insight. Adding political campaign contributions? Adding annual revenues of Community Based Organizations or Foundations?
You will meet a handsome online non-profit...
Alex Steed's recent connective predictions post got us at Social Ch@nge thinking about the future of technology and civil society. Here's our predictions for 2009 and beyond, based on some of the trends we've been watching at Social Ch@nge this year.
1) Cells will save lives
Social Actions Round Up #21: The New Year Gets Started with Two Changes and a CauseWired
Over the holidays, online changemakers did not cease to churn out news. Below you will find the latest Social Actions round-up, bringing us up to date with the movers and shakers of online social activism. We'd like to start the New Year by featuring three breaking stories.
The Myth of KISS
The fact is, it's not easy to manage even a home computer. It's gotten better: they're nice enough to color code the audio ports on a new PC, and put little labels below the connectors, and more and more things connect over USB, making the "where do I plug it in?" question a little easier to answer. And, wow, they even put a few ports on the front now. But we're a long way from the day when operating a computer is as easy as operating a toaster, and I, for one, question whether that will be a happy day.
My biggest case in point is email. Email is the application that everyone in the family knows and uses. It's compelling. Even the most technology-averse people can't escape the argument that communicating with family, friends and associates electronically is inexpensive and convenient. But the problem I see is that, once most people learn email, they don't want to learn anything else. Want online community? Sign me up for the email mailing list. Want news headlines and informational updates? Send it in the email. The problem with this is that email is an astonishingly useful application, but there's a point where it breaks down, and that point is when the volume of email becomes greater than the capacity to keep up with it. Email has a huge flaw as an information management tool: important things scroll out of sight. It's a FIFO medium (First In, First Out), that doesn't prioritize information for you, so that message from Aunt Irma supercedes the spam from the travel agency which supercedes the alert that your home is in foreclosure which supercedes the announcement that dog food is on sale... you get my point. And managing the email, staying on top of it and storing it in folders is a job.
So I advocate for making an early investment that pays off later -- learn a few more applications. Read RSS feeds in an RSS reader; visit your major social networks and online communities at their web sites; eschew the mailing lists -- or subscribe using an alternate email account that you follow with another application. Do some research before investing in any application or gadget -- there's a powerful argument that digitizing your music will save you time and effort in the long run, but that's of little use if, as happened with a friend of mine, you buy the iPod the day before you're shipped out to an island on military duty, with no chance to get any music on it. Keep It Separated, Sally, and Knowledge Informs Strategy, Sam. Because the idea that funneling all of that information through one conduit is somehow simpler than doing some up front research, management, prioritization and segmentation of information is a self-defeating myth.
* Substitute your favorite subjective noun starting with the letter "S".
iVision calls for Papers for Cyber Criminality Colloquiium
i-Vission International, the same organization managing the Douala Net Tuesday, is organizing an international colloquium in Douala, Cameroon, for February 19-21, 2009, and is currently calling for papers. The topic is: The Impact of Cyber Criminality on the Economy of a Developing Nation.
The deadline to submit an essay is January 19, 2009. More details below.
3-Day ColloquiumThe Impact of Cyber Criminality on the Economy of a Developing Nation
Ten Resolutions to Green Your Technology
Many nonprofits are thinking about "green" New Year's resolutions and the best ways to recycle obsolete computers and other hardware. Here is our Top 10 List to help you make more environmentally-conscious choices about technology recycling and green IT practices that can be implemented year-round.
Thoughts on Software Imprisonment
In discussing a web project with a prospective client recently, they were very excited to build their website using open source tools to avoid vendor lock-in. "This way, we can use anyone who knows the code to support our site," they told me. I used to nod reflexively at this comment, but instead I replied, "Well, you will have the keys, but they can be hard to use."
Under appreciated as a data analyst, philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in shackles." What does it mean to be locked in to your vendor, to your software or hardware? I just replaced my dead laptop with a shiny new Macbook Pro with a full Apple warranty - I feel so much more free to toss around my laptop, while knowing that if I have anyone else try to repair it, I void my warranty. Did I just drink the Apple lock-in Kool-Aid or did I make a smart investment?
As reported by David Meyer, Microsoft has just filed a patent for "metered computing" - you get a heavily subsidized computer and pay for how much you use of it. DaaS - Desktops as a Service? Its appealing to have your hardware all taken care of - we enjoy this service with our web hosts, email providers, database service providers. Would I want to pay per hour of computer use in return for hardware and desktop software support? Will I be more upset if Microsoft tells me I can't monkey with my computer configuration, or if my system breaks down after the warrenty expires?
Each of our lock-in scenarios differ. While the open source Drupal website content management system may indeed have hundreds of thousands of users with all kinds of special Drupal administrative skills, that does not automatically mean I will be able to find one that will support my software implementation. It can and often does take work to open that lock with a new support provider. I may feel less locked into a proprietary database vendor if I have ready access to export all my data along with consistant support and predicable costs. Sure, my database vendor may simply disappear, and I need to get a new database. However, frequently we see open source consultants disappearing, and new ones declaring the system unfit to continue. In both cases, the vendor lock-in problem manifests into being locked-out.
Vendor lock-in sometimes takes an oversized role in discussions around best fit software solutions. We all want to easily use as much of our software as is useful to us, for as long as possible. Affordability, usability, access, support, licensing all play a role in determining this best fit solution.
Tangental Asides # 1: Reading, Engineering, and Fertilization of the "Mind Garden"
In such a me-manner, I began editing and paring down another entry from my UCC Social Media Case Study and I ended up with more text than I began with. The following, an address of "social media strategy/implementation" versus engineering, the importance of reading books, talking with people and fertilizing "mind gardens," and the relevance of organizers and intellectuals published before 2000, was a tangental thought that best stands alone.
Engaging N2 Users - Pt III
Okay, I'm back.
Thanks to you who are emailing me privately and commenting here on the blog. Let's jump right in. I got this message anonymously (this is part of a longer email)...
"I have a somewhat specific interest that I thought I'd pass along in the spirit of two-way media. I am a young professional working at a membership-based environmental nonprofit. My background is nontechnical... I am trying to transition some...academic knowledge into job skills.
How To Make a Budget: Non-Profit Survival Skills for 2009
Budgets are an inescapable reality of non-profit life, and they’re especially important when everyone’s panicking about economic crisis. Here’s a step by step guide on how to make a budget, and start 2009 off panic-free. (More...)
Links for 2008-12-30 [del.icio.us]
- YouTube, Twitter: Weapons in Israel's Info War
"The blogosphere and new media are another war zone," she says. "We have to be relevant there."
[Revisiting] The United Church of Christ Social Media Case Study
In October, I looked at the population of my mother's United Church of Christ congregation and I noticed that it was relatively devoid of teens, 20-somethings, and folks in their early thirties. How could the church use social media to retain these potential members, I asked. I took a look at how the church was presently utilizing social media, met with Rev.
