Archive for the ‘blog posts’ Category
Friday, February 19th, 2010
This is basically the same as my comment on my Idealware post about Sprout Builder shutting down.
Something of an update via Facebook fan pages, which I suppose is a sign of the times.
First, in the group Jeff Wassermen started and mentions in the comments on my first post and Johanna mentions on Idealware “Spurned Sproutbuilders Unite!” Carnet did indeed say that all existing Sprout subscribers that are members of the group can get the half price discount ($1500 a year) by emailing info@sproutinc.com with subject line “early adopter discount” . You’ll need to give the email address you used for your Sprout account , if different your paypal email so they can send you a manual invoice. This is because you will need to pay the for the full year up front and they are discontinuing Pay Pal billing.
Also on Beth Kanter’s Facebook fan page there is a reply to Jon Dunn’s post about Sprout’s discontinuation from Michelle Wohl at Sprout saying that they “..are working with existing Sprout non-profit clients on pricing. Please email support@sproutinc.com for info. ” And Beth’s indication that it will be on an individual basis.
The company has expressed their concern for nonprofits and intentions to do all they can to support them in the past, so its likely they will offer some sort of discount for 5013c organizations.
In any case, all nonprofits using Sprout would be wise to contact them soon and see what can be done for your organization.
Monday, February 15th, 2010
The do-it-yourself widget maker so many nonprofits grew to know and love, Sprout Builder, announced today that they are shutting down all subscription service to concentrate on their enterprise ($3000 a year +) offerings. This is sad news for nonprofits using the service and if you are one of them you’ll want to read the Sprout FAQ right away. You’ll have a little lead time to find a solution though - until the end of March to be precise.
Just about a year ago the service went from free to fee and although there are probably more alternatives now, my post about what else is out there may come in handy again.
[Update: I posted more on this topic at Idealware's blog and am hoping that post becomes a place for sharing alternatives and what's to do for those losing their Sprouts - please check it out and contribute your solutions and ideas]
Monday, December 14th, 2009
Little Things Can Mean A Lot: 404 Pages
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
Easily Overlooked Opportunities to Polish your Brand Online
You’ve probably heard the adage that your brand isn’t just your logo or tagline, its every experience people have with your organization. And its true that having a consistent message in everything you do, from the words your staff uses answer the phone to exactly matching your colors on print materials, does pay off in terms of presenting your organization as professional and clear about your mission.
I have been thinking lately about small ways you can extend your organization’s brand and personality online that are often overlooked. As always I get the most excited about those that are fairly inexpensive, not too difficult to execute and that provide a lot of bang for your buck. I’ve decided to do a small series of these over the next few weeks. Here’s the first - a friendly 404 can say a lot about how much you care about your web site visitors.
404 pages
When visitors can’t find what they are looking for on your site it can put them off, even though it might be in no way your fault. Its not just good usability to customize your “page not found” page it’s also an opportunity to reinforce your messaging and brand.
An Error 404 page is what your web server will display when the URL in the browser can’t be found. Instead of the boring or unfriendly default “Not Found The requested URL /oops was not found on this server. This document cannot be retrieved” you can help your visitors find what they are looking for on your site.
First you’ll need to find out how you access that page (this might be via the hosting company control panel or in your content management system) and then add helpful tips to reorient the user and provide paths to your most popular, important or interesting content. Not only is this more friendly but its a good opportunity to reinforce your messages for the visitor and show them what’s available.
What should your 404 include?
A friendly message and a search form are good ideas, as is a list of links to major site sections or popular content. At minimum you want to be sure that your site navigation is available on this page or a link to the site home page to help retain and orient visitors on your site.
And if you can add your sitemap, it will help your visitors find what they are looking for and show off all the great stuff on your site. Ideally you would also include a link to email the webmaster or a form to submit broken links in case it’s a bad link on your site that landed them on this page.
Check out how some organizations do this:
Whether you go simple with just a nice message and link back home, or get really fancy and try to guess what they were looking for, its a vast improvement over the default error page that can send the wrong message about your organization.
In my opinion, a short statement and bulleted list is most helpful to guide users to their intended information and its best to avoid being too cutesy or clever on these pages. Visitors are already frustrated so reminding them they may have made a mistake or forcing them to read a lot of text probably isn’t going to improve their mood or associations with your organization.
More tips and ideas on good 404’s
And some specifics for some common open source content management systems
Saturday, May 9th, 2009
The Nonprofit Technology Conference in San Francisco at the end of April was really great this year. The opening speaker Clay Shirkey (author, Here Comes Everybody) was fantastic and amazingly quotable. I liked that he was able to project both a 30,000 ft view of the social media landscape and drive home some very practical and common sense lessons that nonprofits can use right away.
While I was there I took the opportunity to interview fellow bloggers for the Idealware blog and am posting their thoughts on that site.
Here are the first two Get to know the Idealware Blogger interviews:
Part 1: Steve Backman
Part 2: Laura Quinn
Look for the next in the series coming soon. I had the best time getting to chat with these super smart people and look forward to continuing the converstations post NTC. Really it was, as always, all of the brilliant dedicated people that make the conference a yearly tradition and I am already looking forward to Atlanta next year.
Monday, April 20th, 2009
How to Share PowerPoint Presentations Online
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
Recently a client came to me with a question about how best to offer PowerPoint presentations from previous conferences online. I thought I would share the notes I gave them here for others that might want to see the pros and cons of the various options.
In my client’s case it was important that viewers not be able to edit the original file, so we took additional steps needed to protect the file. I’ll include a basic how-to or just linking to the original file as well as a couple of links for the other options.
Upload the PPT (or PPS) to your web server and provide a download link
This is probably the easiest option if your content management system allows .ppt or .pps files to be uploaded through its media management system. Even if you need to manually upload the file via FTP and link it on a web page the process is not too complicated.
Since the Web doesn’t handle big files (over 10 mgs) as well as our hard drives do, reducing the file size by optimizing the presentation is a good idea.
In PowerPoint you can also save your file as a “PowerPoint Show” which always opens in slide show view so viewers don’t have access to edit your material. Another way to prevent changes is to assign a password for modifications.
PowerPoint 2003 - Tools>Options>Security
PowerPoint 2007 - Save As>Tools>General Options
Pros:
- No conversion necessary beyond save as in PowerPoint itself/ No need to learn new software
- Ability to share original file with collaborators if desired
- You host and maintain control of your files.
Cons:
- Can result in large files to upload and download - so describe file size for visitors when offering presentations for download
- Only viewable with software that reads .ppt and .pps files
Resources:
- How to trim down the size of your PowerPoint presentation
- Lock PowerPoint File From Being Edited
- List of free Powerpoint viewer programs
Convert to PDF
PDF or Portable Document Files have become something of a de facto standard for online file links. The software to view these files is available on most operating systems or as a free download from Adobe, so its a safe bet that anyone and everyone will be able to see your material once its converted to this file type.
You can do this by choosing the Save As PDF option from within PowerPoint and through the options in the Print menu on most systems. You’ll want to optimize the file size if you have access to a PDF editing program since the resulting file might even larger than the original.
Pros:
- Standard file format that will appear the same to users on all platforms
- Embeds fonts and images and can be optimized to reduce file size.
- Not editable by the end viewer
Cons:
- Can mangle presentation formatting
- Individual slides are difficult to reference or find
- Doesn’t retain transitions and animations.
- Browsers deal with PDF files differently and user experience can be poor and unpredictable
Resources:
- How to Save PowerPoint as PDF
- Free PowerPoint to PDF converter (haven’t used)
- Optimize PDF files
Use an online service for slide sharing
There are several good online services for sharing (and even creating) slide-based presentations. Slideshare.net is one of the first and most mature and like Zoho and the others allows you to import/upload your PowerPoint (or Keynote) presentations to be converted to their own sharing format. The usual Software as a Service caveats apply here as with any other “free” service on the web.
Pros:
- Enables remote presentations easily since it is browser based
- Hosts the files so you don’t have to use your own server or bandwidth serving large files.
- Most include version and organization options that can help you keep track of presentations if you have a lot of them.
Cons:
- Not all features of the original PowerPoint may be available in the online service so read through their conversion information carefully if you have media or animations that are crucial to your presentation.
- Currently free but could require advertising or fees in the future and your materials are hosted on their servers so losing access to them is always a possiblity.
- May not allow downloads for presentation files.
Resources:
- SlideShare.net
- Zoho Show
- Online Slideshows: Not So Scary
There are additional options if you are interested in modifying the final presentation and distributing it as a movie, flash presentation or web pages. Microsoft provides some basic tools for doing this right in the program itself and there are third party tools that yield even more robust final products.
Whichever method you choose you might also want to check out the resources at Social Source Commons for some added alternatives and file compression tools.
I hope the information here will make it fairly painless to share and reuse your presentation content for your web audience and get more mileage out of the ideas and effort that went into its original purpose. If you have recommendations on software or other sharing methods, please leave them in the comments below.
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
More Fun with Open Source Content Management
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
I’m really thrilled that the Idealware report comparing 4 top-notch open source content management systems is now available. I think it will prove invaluable to nonprofits of all shapes and sizes for a long time to come and know I will be recommended reading for many friends and potential and future clients.
Even if you have already seen the CMS Showdown and the competition sites implemented on WordPress, Drupal and Joomla now that the report is out they are worth another look.
If you didn’t make it to SXSW conference or haven’t heard about this brilliant project - here is an excerpt from the site:
Originally presented at South By Southwest Interactive in March, 2009, the Ultimate Showdown of Content Management System Destiny is an “Iron Chef”-style competition pitting three teams of all-star Web developers from the Drupal, Joomla! and WordPress communities against each other to develop the same Web site in each of their chosen open source content management platforms.
In addition to a fascinating look behind the scenes at each teams decision-making process, there are lots of productive insights to be gained by looking at the finished products of their labors. Many of the key points in the Idealware report are evident on the demo sites and by reading the team notes.
Despite (or maybe because of) the 100 hour total development time limit, each site demonstrates its system’s strengths and weakness fairly accurately or I should say in keeping with my own experiences of them. Not all of them managed to accomplish all the requirements, which points out what takes more time or work to implement for that particular system.
One thing that can be confusing is that the specifications for the site required that most of the content be available only to authenticated users. The sites for Drupal and Joomla, who were able to achieve this, seem a bit bare, especially Drupal where they didn’t create any publicly viewable items in some areas. So you can’t access the galleries, blogs or member listings and its a pity that there doesn’t seem to be a demo user/password available anywhere to see the full sites. If anyone knows of one, I would love to take a look.
Also, sadly there was no invitation for a Plone team this time around, but if you want to see it included next time I’d suggest you contact the organizers.
Check out the CMS Showdown as a handy companion piece to the Idealware CMS report for a real world apples to apples demonstration (sort of) of how each system looks at some familiar features. And read the team notes on cmsshowdown.com for some helpful hints and tricks the they used on the sites.
Tuesday, March 10th, 2009
Great Resources on Vendor Websites
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
One of the great things about working in the nonprofit sector is the spirit of sharing and helping one another succeed that I continue to find among organizations and consultants for online technologies. Many resources on how to choose technology and how to use it wisely are available from great nonprofit and consulting companies. But the hungry mind wants more so, although it might be obvious, I wanted to share another great way to find metrics, best practices and how to guides - technology vendors resource sections.
Over the years I have found that many vendors of both nonprofit and for profit technology and services offer a wealth of high quality information on their sites that cover far more than just their own products. I see it as enlightened self-interest, since successful customers are happy customers and the basics apply no matter what platform you are using for your web site, fundraising or bulk email.
Here are just few that I have found worth checking in on regularly, but be sure to check for a resources section on your own vendor’s websites.
Email Vendors
http://mailchimp.com/resources/
http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/
http://www.emaillabs.com/best_practices/ (Lyris)
Websites and Fundraising
http://www.wildapricot.com/resources.aspx
http://www.convio.com/resources/
and some older but still useful items at Kintera/Blackbaud
Network for Good has a whole site about fundraising:
http://www.fundraising123.org/
But wait there’s more!
Don’t forget that most of the time resources for profit companies are equally useful in the nonprofit sector or can be with a little adaptation. Check out sites offering general best practices like Marketing Sherpa and Copyblogger. You can find good advice and information that applies equally to any type of communications strategy.
Please share your own favorite vendor or for profit resources in the comments and we can all learn a little more.
Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
Minimum Usability Testing: Now there’s no excuse not to do it.
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
According to the author of the web usability bible “Don’t Make Me Think” Steve Krug, testing one user is 100% better than testing none and testing one user early in the project is better than testing 50 near the end. To that end, I’d like to suggest testing 5 or 10 more often and found a couple of services that make it possible.
While I am afraid that too many of my Idealware blog posts have been focusing on cheap or free resources, I do believe that the easier it is for nonprofits to do usability testing regularly the better their sites will be - so here is one more post about a couple of low cost options.
Feedback Army:
Strictly a quick an dirty sort of testing, I stumbled across this crowd-sourced usability service on a blog and had to check it out. For $10 you get to set up your own questions or scenario and receive responses from 10 reviewers.
The results are, as you might expect for that sort of money, a mixed bag from a wide generic set of users. Although I really don’t believe any site should be targeting anything so broad as “general public” it can be helpful to have this kind of input. I would see this as useful for organizations doing a redesign to try out a couple of different directions or make a specific design choice (red or orange for that donate button?).
The site provides a bit of guidance for how to get the best and most useful responses and I have to say, man, is it fast - less than a day turnaround time to collect 10.
The reviewers come from a service called Mechanical Turk which, although I have been around the web a while, I had never heard of before. Its an Amazon program where users offer and accept small tasks best done by humans for small fees. Its feels a little creepy, and I do have some doubts about ethics and ramifications, but apparently it has a big following and fan base on both sides. Feedback Army acts as oversight and interface in order to maintain quality control, so only reviews they judge to fulfill your requirements filter back to you.
Overall I found the feedback to be helpful in my test case and will probably use this again when I need an “outside perspective” on design decisions.
Usertesting.com
A comment from the original blog post pointed me to Usertesting.com, which is a bit more expensive ($20 per tester) but which blew me away with what you get for your money. I submitted my site for a trial and received an incredibly well thought out and thorough review video in which you see the user’s screen and mouse movements while listening to a narrative of what they are thinking as they complete your request and answer your questions. It gave me a lot of new ideas and insight about where I was missing the mark by being too close to the subject. In addition you get a standard written report answering basic usability questions that is also useful.
Jakob Nielsen, the godfather of usability testing, makes a good case that testing 5 users will yield the highest value of information in the most economic way - so for $100, a nonprofit could conduct some of the worthwhile usability testing that seems to always fall through the cracks.
And of course if you ask the right questions you can also test new ideas and designs with your own supporters using a survey tool like Survey Monkey for free, so there really is no excuse not to do usability testing at this point.
More on quick and dirty usability testing and why you need it, as well as what to test and how, can be found on Jakob Nielsen’s site:
Fast, Good and Cheap:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/fast-methods.html
Usability for $200
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030602.html
Usability on Nonprofit Web sites
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/government-nonprofit.html
Sunday, February 8th, 2009
Sproutbuilder Update and Alternatives
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
Last month nifty WYSIWYG online flash widget maker Sproutbuilder announced its plan to move to all pay accounts by March and like a lot of organizations I was pretty concerned about what this meant for my nonprofit clients. Assurances that Sprout Inc. is committed to the sector turned into the news that there would be limited free accounts and some discount for official organizations. Last week a modified pricing structure was announced and some solid information about what is available for nonprofits became available.
The short story is that verified nonprofits can create up to 5 widgets (sprouts) with 100MB Storage and 10GB bandwidth available with a free account. Other pricing tiers will be half price or $30/mo for 5-15 sprouts and $150/mo for 15-30.
While this is decidedly good news, I did feel the need in the interim to see what alternatives exist and if any are worth exploring in more depth. The caveats about any free application or software service still apply of course and the original Idealware post on these developments by Michelle Murrain is well worth reading.
At first it looks like there are more options and decisions to make than on a new cell phone plan. But when I narrowed down the field with the following criteria some likely candidates emerged.
1. Offers a free version and looks to remain so
2. Interface to build widgets doesn’t require HTML, javascript or programming knowledge
3. Interface is relatively easy to use
4. Ability to have many types of content on several pages or tabs - photos, video, feeds, text areas
5. Ability to customize formatting and style elements, background, text etc.
Alternatives I plan to check out in more depth include Wix, PopFly (from Microsoft) and iWidgets. I have just done a little preliminary investigation and playing around at this point, but here are my notes on each and a longer list of the other options I found.
Wix: http://www.wix.com/
Probably the closest match to Sproutbuilder’s ease of use and functionality but definitely geared more towards the MySpace style and audience. This shows in the widget building interface making it a bit jumbled and not that efficient for building tasks. They do have some nice add in elements like Google maps and a contact form. Free version includes a self-promotional footer when the widget is embedded.
Popfly : http://www.popfly.com/
I haven’t made it far into actually producing a widget yet because it requires Microsoft Silverlight browser plug in to be installed on my computer and I am not sure I want to make that kind of commitment yet to something I may never use. The orientation here is on flash games and mash-ups, but it does seem possible to create content+feed type widgets as well. I would love to hear from anyone that has tried or is using this since the idea of easy-to-make, shareable game widgets seems appealing for some nonprofits.
iWidget: http://www.iwidgets.com/
Advertising is added to widgets that don’t contain any of their own, so the fit for the nonprofit community isn’t great. The interface required an initial set up that included URL links to images hosted elsewhere, which might be a slight technology barrier but the actual content addition and customization interface seems solid.
The others
Widgetbox: http://www.widgetbox.com/
Seems powerful but requires pretty solid coding knowledge it looks like.
Yahoo Widgets: http://widgets.yahoo.com/widgets/widget-maker
Also a probably a pretty powerful tool for those with tech chops.
Blist Widgets: http://www.blist.com/what-is-blist/blist-widgets
Pretty sweet looking excel spreadsheet type data display widgets with interactive possiblities but limited to data input/output as far as I can tell.
Dapper widgets: http://www.dapper.net
Offers the ability to generate a wide variety of output types (google gadgets for example) from data collected from a web site - static or RSS feed and might be worth another look.
KickApps: http://www.kickapps.com/widgets
Seems like widget creation is part of a larger package that requires a $100 minimum fee.
Clearspring: http://www.clearspring.com/services/widgetmedia
A forerunner in the widget field but it doesn’t look like they have any free or nonprofit plans available.
These notes were the result of a very quick look around and I would be happy for any additions or corrections to my brief survey and initial thoughts. There are a lot of neat services out there and I know I didn’t find all of them or look at all of the functionalities they offer. None of the ones I summarized seems to have the same combination of ease of use and power found in Sproutbuilder though, so for now their 5 widgets for free plan still looks like a good starting place for nonprofits wanting to create their first widgets.
Monday, January 12th, 2009
Should you use a volunteer or intern to do your social media?
(originally posted at idealware.org/blog)
Lately I have been doing some research about options for communications for Idealware and its become apparent that most organizations are hedging their bets with social media and cautiously dipping toes (sometimes more) into outreach on sites like My Space and Facebook. Everyone seems to agree on the potential of this area but its tricky to devote resources into getting involved in new arenas when resources are stretched tight as it is and desperately needed elsewhere.
One of the recurrent suggestions I keep hearing is to get a youngster (from teen to 30) that has a native understanding of MySpace, Facebook and Twitter to help you out - like an intern or volunteer. Seems like a good idea to me, that keeps the organization up to date, open to new opportunities and avoids a painful (and expensive) learning curve for staff that are already a bit overwhelmed managing “older” technologies like the Web site CMS and CRM software.
So on the one hand, it seems like a great way to explore social media without a big investment in fledgling area that is not yet proven to really be effective. But on the other, something about hearing it over and over made me slightly queasy. Indulging in a little navel gazing I realized that it sounded an awful lot like what organizations were saying and doing about getting on the Web in the first place. “Our board member’s son is a whiz with that internet stuff and he can make us a Web site for free!”
Don’t get me wrong - a lot of talented and generous folks created Web sites for organizations that otherwise would not have been able to get online. And it was a good thing. But look at how we are now - most organizations would not dream of leaving such an important piece of their communications solely in the hands of an intern or volunteer based on their youth and tech skills.
Of course the land of social media is also a horse of an entirely different color. In general, it’s much more modular and less rigid, so it can evolve more gracefully than Web sites did in the past, reducing the risk involved. And organizations seem to consider it a supplemental outreach channel at best - but then weren’t Web sites once seen that way too?
So I still think enlisting young supporters is always a good idea and that playing to their strengths and knowledge of the new outreach channels just makes sense. But all of this just has me wondering if organizations will be saying something like “Oh, our [insert social media tool here] is so bad - it was done by a volunteer kid for us years ago - can you fix it?” at some point in the future. Will social media become so important that current experimental forays will come to haunt their organizations? I really don’t know.
What do you think? Will organizations regret not making a serious investment in this part of their communications now or will they be glad that they were smart enough to take advantage of the skills and smarts of low budget resources while getting under way? What started as a little brain tickle has piqued my curiosity and I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on the subject.
