One of the things I really love about working with non-profit organizations is their passion. Very few people, if any, get into the non-profit sector because of the big paychecks or the lavish lifestyle. More often than not, the people who are involved in these organizations are there because they really believe in the cause and mission that their organization supports and promotes.

That being said, one thing that often disappoints me with nonprofit organizations is the lack of that passion and conviction in the content on their websites. I have to admit that I am pretty ardent about content, so maybe I'm a harsh critic. However, websites are a visual medium. Not unlike their print-based brethren, they rely heavily on a combination of visual design and content to convey the voice of the organization. When the combination of these two components doesn't accurately represent the organization, the purpose of the website and the mission of the organization is often lost.

Remember that, just like those of you that work for nonprofit organizations, people who donate to and advocate for these organizations are passionate about what the organization is doing, too. So highlight the great things your organization does that differentiates it from other organizations in the same vertical. Talk about who donations help, not just how they are allocated. Share volunteer experiences. Get excited about what you are doing, and spread that excitement all over the content on your site. Get a content strategy together to make sure that what you say on your site represents your organization, not just another website. Your passion and your dedication are important and inspirational - you've got a lot to say, and we want to hear it!

Additional Links
Check out the following links for more information about this topic:
Winning Content Persuades, Not Manipulates
Turn Usable Content into Winning Content

I just read a great article on the cost of free software, published by Boston Interactive.  They take some time to describe the merits of "free" software, or software that doesn't have a pricetag for taking it off the showroom floor.  They then spend a lot of time describing many of the costs of open source tools that are seldom considered. 

When you consider using open source (or make ANY decision around purchasing technology for your organization) you might want to consider the following:

1. You Get What You Pay For
What are you getting for the money (or no money)?  Is the tool reliable and dependable?  Can you talk to other users who have used the tool to solve similar problems, whether it's managing content or analyzing data, to the ones you're solving?  Have you outlined your needs thoroughly and can the tools meet most of them?

2. Deployment or Setup Costs
Every software product requires some kind of setup.  Off the shelf, it probably needs to be configured for your organization's needs.  How much will it cost to get that thing set up? Whether your staff or a consultant sets it up for you, there are definitely labor costs involved.

3. IT Expenses
Besides labor, what else will be required to support this system?  Will you need to purchase additional hardware (i.e. another web or database server) or software (e.g. MS SQL Server or Cold Fusion Server) to use the tool?  If you're not hosting it in-house, how much will it cost each month or annually to have someone else host the tool? 

4. Support
What kind of help will your organization need to maintain the tool over time?  Does someone need to deploy security patches and upgrades?  Is there someone you can call for help the moment you need it?  Or, are you going to have to post a question in an online user forum and wait for someone that can help you?

5. Openness
Is the tool you're selecting "open."  A lot of times we'll buy software that doesn't meet all of our needs, but that can be coupled with other tools to get 100% of the job done, just think of all the crazy things you do with MS Excel that other programs cannot do).  Be sure that the technology you select makes it easy to integrate with other solutions at the content, data, and authentication levels (assuming it's web based technology).  Also, consider the costs of doing this integration.  Just because the technology can be integrated doesn't mean it'll be cheap to do so.

6. Portability
You're making a significant investment in this technology because it's going to help you solve some process that's important to your business.  Just like mutual funds, you want to be sure your investment will go as far as possible.  Should you decide to move to some other tool to solve the same problem (i.e. moving from one CMS to another to support your organization's web site) be sure at a minimum you can move your data or content.  Also, keep in mind that the customizations you make getting this thing set up or need over time will complicate the portability of the investment you're making in this system.
 
Well, there they are.  Six things you should consider when considering open source or really any kind of software.  I'm excited to hear what others think of these and what else we should add to the list.

Building your housefile (list) is one of the key ingredients in developing a strong online presence. Like Sally discussed in her post on April 22, it is important to welcome a constant flow of constituents into your online home.  But, what are the next steps in maintaining that list?  Once you have a good list going, it is vital to keep that list clean, dust and clutter-free.  Mom always told you to keep your room clean.  Why should your constituent list be any different? 

Here are some tips to keeping a clean list:

• Decide on what data you want to collect and how you want it to be organized in your database.  For example, if you want to have a field in your database to store information on constituents’ pets’ names, decide where you want that information to live in the database and how you want to get it there.

• Draw a map.  Create a flowchart.  Put together some document with all of your database fields and the naming conventions for those fields.

•  Make sure all individuals in your organization have that document.  This will ensure that everyone in your organization will use the same naming conventions and mapping process when creating the online forms you use to collect constituents’ information.

•  If you have uniform response options you want to have listed on multiple choice questions (that are going to be used on many of your online forms), decide upon the answer options and make sure everyone in your organization has a document outlining those response options.

•  Clean up duplicate records often.  If you have the time to do this regularly, it can save you time in the future.

Essentially the most important ingredient to keeping your housefile (list) clean is to dust it regularly.  Empower your organization by coming up with a clear and outlined process of how you collect and store your data.  Doing so will allow you keep a tidy housefile that is easy to report on and analyze.

Let me cut to the chase.  This is a plea to get as many people as possible to take the NTEN CMS Survey.  This survey will feed into the most exciting piece or industry research to come along since the Wired Wealthy Report.

One of the things I do as Convio’s CMS Evangelist is spend a lot of time thinking about how to help nonprofit organizations use web based technology better.  What does “better” mean?  Well, in my opinion, I think we can all do “better” managing our web technology to objectives in two categories. 

The first category has to do with how well technology helps us make our public facing web presence as strong as possible.  Are we engaging new constituents?  Does the site look professional?  Do constituents find our content truly valuable? Are constituents supporting our organization’s objectives – be they learning, donating, or taking action?

The second category centers around how well technology allows us to be more strategic than tactical.  Does maintaining the site take lots of time from our IT team?  Can our business oriented staff manage content without taking 22 days of training?

These objectives can be affected positively or negatively by the choices we make regarding technology.  One of the biggest challenges to making good choices about the technology to use is the lack of information.  There’s nary a technologist alive who could tell you with relative certainty what tools people are using, what ones are good, and what ones are tough to use.

This is a long way of saying, “I think you should take a few minutes to take the NTEN CMS Survey.”

For a few more days, NTEN is asking people to tell them what works and what doesn’t.  They’ll compile the results shortly and make them available to the public.  This research effort is groundbreaking, as no one else has (or has made public) the results of such a survey.

So, help your colleagues and help yourself, take a few minutes to take the NTEN CMS Survey.

But some of the most interesting developments in the analytics world are actually around qualitative user data, such as that collected through tools called Web Use Recorders. These tools record individual browsing sessions to give you a more qualitative view, from your constituents' perspectives, of your site: where their  attention is drawn, what content is overlooked, how they scan your homepage.

So now what?, you ask. If our traffic data doesn't tell us "why," isn't always accurate, and isn't "just the numbers," why do I analyze this data at all.

The answer: Triangulation with other user research methods and data sources. Traffic data is a critical - but singular - pillar of user research. Without alternative techniques like user interviews or surveys, usability tests or focus groups, even the best-laid plans of metricians and analysts can only answer part of the eternal question:

Who are our constituents, what do they want, and why do they do what they do online?

1. Pick something that reinforces your organization's brand.  If you don't really have a brand or your brand is not a good one, you'll have to start somewhere else.  Your domain name doesn't need to be your organization's name, as long as it reinforces your brand.  Also, avoid using your organization's acronym unless it is your brand, like the World Wildlife Fund at www.wwf.org.  If someone further than 100 miles from your office won't recognize it, neither will anyone in Sandusky (unless of course you're within 100 miles of Sandusky).

Unless your organization's reach is local or regional  and very well known, it's unlikely that your acronym will get people to your site.  Northport Baptist Church at www.nbc.org probably thought it was a good idea to grab what appears to be some good online real estate, but I'd suggest that it's likely a confusing domain name.

2. Pick something meaningful.  The National Trust for Historic Preservation, has launched its new site at www.preservationnation.org.  While it breaks some of the rules mentioned later, it is consistent with its brand and is memorable.

3. Pick something without room for ambiguous interpretation.  Make sure whatever you pick could not possibly be misinterpreted as something else.  What do you think exists at www.denrescue.org?  It's not a wolf advocacy organization, it's the Denver Rescue Mission (which helps people who are experiencing homelessness).  Enough said.

4. Pick something that's not too long.  I think that four syllables should be the max for any domain name.  Preservation Nation (above) breaks that rule, but is otherwise pretty good.  Consider future needs for domain names for your web presence.  If you expect to have affiliate or program elements like ma.easterseals.com or www.jointogether.org/ca/

5. Pick the best real estate you can afford.  For your corporate site, be sure to buy your domain name using the .org top level domain.  The others (like .net, .mobi. and .us) usually aren't great ideas for your main site unless your organization's mission suggests it like Free Press at www.freepress.net. If you have a program site, a .com domain name is often good, like Free Press' other site www.savetheinternet.com.  Be prepared to spend more than the annual domain name registration fee if you need to buy your domain name from someone else who owns it.  I usually won't pay more than $1,000 for a domain name unless it's REALLY key to your web presence.

So those are my rules, anyone want to argue these?

Being married to a talented and beautiful anthropologist, I have found myself seeing the world through her lens more over the years.  Recently, I noticed that I’ve been paying lots of attention to how the language we use to describe our experience shapes our perceptions about things.  This affects how we see ourselves, interact with others, and solve problems.

Stop Talking About Your “Web Site”
I talk with a lot of people about how they plan to use online tools to support their organization’s mission and goals.   When I listen to the language we use to describe what we’re doing, their language tends to focus on our “web site.” As in, “we need to reach more people with our web site” or “our web site needs to be bigger.”

When an executive director pushes us to focus on a project around our “web site” to increase donations or signups or whatever, it’s not enough. It’s too narrow a definition of what, how and where we engage our constituents online.

Think about it.

Our web site exists within the much larger landscape that includes a sea of email, the mountain range called social networking, and search outposts dotting the hills.  If we don’t consider these things (and only focus on the web site) we’ve limited our ability to reach new audiences, drive more traffic, encourage donations, and engage more activists.

Start Talking About Your “Web Presence”
What I’m suggesting is that we need new language to describe what we’re doing for our organizations online.  So let’s consider thinking out side the web site and start thinking about our “web presence.” 

Let your web presence include thing like your:

• Organizational or corporate web site
• Micro (or program oriented) sites
• Editorial calendars for email and web content
• Presence on social networking sites like Facebook
• Social media sites like Flickr
• Marketing through search engines

Even if your organization doesn’t want to have a blog or twitter strategy today, it’s important to consider those things outside of your site if even to put them on the shelf for a while.  If we start by talking about our web site, we’ve already shut the door to many things that will make us successful.  So please, call it your web presence.  You'll be glad you did.

One of the key benefits of the Software as a Service (on-demand) model is the unique insight that the model provides from a data and analytics perspective. Because of that model we are able to obeserve aggregate data that helps nonprofit professionals answer three questions:

1) What online metrics should I focus on?

2) How is my organization doing? and

3) What targets should I set for my organization?

As a company we have 9 years of cummulative data and experience in the nonprofit sector, and a team of employees and partners with even more personal experience and expertise in analyzing data to provide actionable insight to our clients and the market.  Today, we are exctied to share the results of the second annual Convio Online Marketing Nonprofit Benchmark Index™ Study with the market. The NonProfit Times has featured the research in their current issue.

One of the lead researchers, Vinay Bhagat, sat down with us for a series of interviews on the study. Today, Vinay discusses the value of the research and some of the key trends. 

Convio clients can get the full report in the Convio Online Client Community. Visit our Web site for a summary of the benchmark report and to learn more.

We would be remiss if we didn't thank the study authors Quinn Donovan, Lynette Perkins and Vinay for the many hours they put into completing this project.

Last Saturday, I couldn't find my favorite pair of shoes. I looked everywhere downstairs, then finally went upstairs to look in the closet. Feeling frustrated and like I needed to take control, I started pulling clothes out of the closet, folding them, rehanging them, and even throwing some away. Then, I decided to reorganize my dresser drawers, getting progressively more frustrated at the disarray at which I was storing everything. Next thing I knew, I was in the car, heading to the store, buying new bins and organizers for storage. Too much money later, I headed back home, and began assembling containers and reorganizing. By the end of the day, I was tired, frustrated, and had some how managed to create a bigger mess than I had originally started with. To add insult to injury, I still could not find my favorite pair of shoes anywhere.

While I somehow doubt many care about my poor closet organization skills, we can draw a pretty useful analogy here to what happens with website management: you have to be able to define a problem before you can solve it.

Because I didn't define the problem (finding my shoes), there was no way that I could throttle my efforts to solve it. I got frustrated and immediately felt like I needed to fix everything at once.

When you find a shortcoming on your site, it's important to be able to define the problem - not the solution. If you cannot define the problem right away, then that is the problem.

For example, let's say you are seeing drops in traffic to your site. The problem may be that you need to do more marketing - easy enough. But, another issue may be that you had turnover at the organization and now no one knows how to update the content. Therefore, the content is getting stale, so no one is visiting because there's no new information. If you had chosen to do more marketing to drive traffic, you may have sent a lot of people to your site which has stale information - not good for credibility and certainly not a long-term solution to the issue at hand.

Being able to define a problem on your site is fundamental to finding a solution. Not unlike my closet scenario, throwing random solutions at a problem will likely result in some benefit. But, if you still can't find your shoes, then it's difficult to justify the expense of all of the other components,and you never actually solve the real problem.

Front-loading an issue with discovery - whether it be looking at site analytics, reviewing market trends, or just surveying users - can be extremely useful in helping to define what the actual problem is. Taking some time to sort out what the issues are will help exponentially in finding an appropriate solution.

Interested in reading more? Check out:

Solutioneering, or putting solutions before problems

Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign

Here at the National Technology Conference, it seems everyone is getting their "twit" on...or their "tweet" on...or whatever you want to call it.  They're looking at their phones to catch messages from the Twittersphere. Twitter is a "social networking and microblogging service utilising instant messaging, SMS or a web interface."

Basically twitterers create an account and then select their friends, colleagues, or topics they’d on which they’d like to get short updates. Lots of people use it to exchange quick notes by phone-based text messages, instant messenger, and/or a web based interface.

Someone who works for an international relief organization asked me recently, "What should my organization's Twitter strategy be?" I looked at her and said, "Nothing. You shouldn't have one."

Called me old fashioned. Call me a troglodyte. Call me whatever you want.

It's not that I don't love web 2.0 applications as much as the next guy. It's just that I think there are a ton of new, cool, awesome tools emerging every day; BUT, very few of us have used the current technology to its fullest. In seeking to use the latest and greatest, many of us forget that we’ve barely made use of the last great thing,

I should probably be clear. Developing a Twitter strategy today probably makes sense for your organization if:

• Your organization already has an awesome online presence with lots of useful content and you need to drive more traffic to it
• Your organization holds lots of events where people who are attending will benefit from a live, collective conscience
• Your organization is visitation focused, like a museum

If at least one of the three conditions don't apply to your organization, I'd say wait on developing that Twitter strategy. Instead here are five things you can do today to improve your online presence that will return real results.

1. Think about your audience
Take ten minutes to write down who the primary audience for your web site is. Think about what motivates them to support your organization. What tasks do you want them to perform on your web site? If you were in their shoes, what kind of content and features on your web site would compel them to action.

2. Tear apart your home page
Take a long hard look at your web page...then tear it apart. If this was someone else's home page, what kind of advice would you give them? Take five minutes and make a quick hit list. Is the home page too busy? Does the design look professional? Don't forget to make the changes you identify.

3. Make an editorial calendar
Lots of people get overwhelmed by the daunting task of keeping their site up to date. Make this large task a simple one. Start by planning out web content for the next year. Depending on your staff resources (1 or 100), create a plan for your content. Time new content based on the calendar. Will you need holiday content or content around events you KNOW will happen like Earth Day, the presidential election, or your annual report? Put these things on a calendar then plan around them.

Maybe I’m wrong about the immediate value or lack thereof Twitter. I was wrong about those blogs.

I'm not saying Twitter is a bad thing...I just think that there are more important things we can invest time and energy in. If you must, however, investigate how Twitter can enhance your online presence, here's a Twitter guide for newbies. And if you want to follow me, check out my Twitter feed, here.

But please, have a heart, I'm just getting started.

Welcome to Connection Café, a blog created from the hearts and minds of the employees of Convio. Our vision for this blog is to aggregate the latest trends, ideas and best practices for nonprofits online. Through discussions about online communication tactics, the latest in Web 2.0 strategies and integration of offline and online campaigns, we hope to share insight and create an open and honest dialogue in the nonprofit technology world.  

Unlike other corporate blogs you may have looked at, you won’t find information or sales pitches about our latest product and service offerings here. Instead, we are venturing out and doing something different - we’ll be writing about the issues you care about and the topics that can help you succeed online. From time to time that means our products and technologies and how clients are using them to get results will be part of the discussion, but we don’t want it to be a sales pitch, so let us know if we cross that line.

Connection Café will discuss how the Internet is fundamentally changing the way people connect with causes, forcing nonprofits to rethink the traditional models for communication, advocacy and fundraising. We want to share our internal resources and expertise with you, as well as information from our Fusion Partners and point you to other online sources that are having the same, or better, discussions. Bottom line, we want to keep you better connected and engaged with the people, ideas and technology that are driving the industry.

Over the past eight years, we’ve kept you connected with our Convio Connection newsletter, presence at industry events and our online client community. Now I’m inviting you - the nonprofit Executive Director, the weekend volunteer, the marketing/communications expert – to connect with us once again by being a part of our online discussion.

So, when we think we have something valuable to share, you’ll see it here. And while it may be natural for us to draw from past work experience, this blog is not about Convio as a company but rather the people, ideas and technology that are fueling the industry we serve. If you see us veering off that path or becoming too Convio-centric, send a note or post a comment to let us know. You have my word that we’ll listen to what you have to say.

I hope that each person who reads this blog will find something beneficial in the editorials, news and multimedia content we produce.  We also want to read your comments, get your suggestions and do our best to answer your questions – or find someone to answer them.  I encourage you to reach out and give us feedback from time to time on what we’re doing well and what we can improve on.

 -Gene, CEO