Archive for December, 2006

Having a well-executed and simple website can be a great, low-cost extension of your non-profit - or a huge waste of time. As many charities increase their visibility during the holidays, I’m struck by how many have churned away obvious hours into sites that offer little that would help them move towards their stated organizational goals.

I’m not picking on one non-profit here - this is prevalent and widespread. I also realize that most sites are donated or done by volunteers. But, this is the point of my post. With limited resources, it makes sense to put every minute or dollar to good use. Here are a few tips for your non-profit website that will help accomplish more with limited resources.

First - keep this in mind: If you have 15 seconds to do something on your website with a visitor, what is it going to be? Impress them with your animated graphics? Show cute photos? List news events from 2 years ago? Show them the weather? Give long-winded history of your organization? I’m sorry to be so blunt, but my goal is to help. I’m here to tell you that you do have 15 seconds - use it wisely.

• Spend 90% of your time on your top 2 website goals. Really… write them down and every time you sit down to work on your website ask yourself if there’s a direct correlation.
• Spend 50% of your website efforts obtaining links to build awareness, traffic, and search rank. Make sure you have top of the line banners to provide other websites to link to you, as well as pre-written link text. Develop a variety of banners for various websites and make them easy to get on your site. Provide them with the needed HTML so that the webmaster on the other end has little work to do. As donors to link to you. All that matters is that you get them pointed at your domain name. Give them lots of kudos and encourage them to link. Big donors deserve their own web page or blog post if they want it. That same page can be linked from a “current donors” list. .
• Break down the content of your site into heading > summary > detail blocks. Your web pages should be skimmable, so break it down. Check out my article about writing skimmable web copy..
• Make sure your national organization provides a link to you..
• If your group is involved in events with lots of “Kodak Moments” then have a digital camera ready to capture them. Choose the best (only) and upload those to a dedicated Flickr account. Then set up one of the simple Flickr Flash slide shows on your website. It’s incredibly easy. TIP: Make a photo set called “Latest” that you refer to on your site - then you can shuffle pictures in-and-out of that “photo set” within Flickr. The website will show the latest ones automatically on the badge!.
• Be absolutely sure that the “Title” tag of your website matches the most common search people do to find you. If your non-profit is called “Kidspromise of Kentucky”, then you don’t want a title tag that says “Untitled Page” or “Home Page” — it should say “Kidspromise of Kentucky - Children’s Charity in KY” for example.
• Do not put dated material (e.g. news) unless you commit to updating it. If you cannot make such a commitment, keep your website date-independent. Stale news items causes people to worry the rest of the site is out-of-date..
• Never use a splash page (a page you must ‘get through’ before seeing your real home page.) Never waste your limited time on “flash animation” or other frivolous endeavors. For every minute spent on such a thing, you could have found several in-bound links or possibly improved your sites readability.
• If your entire site will be updated by one energetic person, consider using a blogging platform as the centerpiece of your entire website - and no, you don’t have to call it a blog. You can choose from dozens of free blogging templates. I recommend wordpress as your blogging environment, but have someone help you set it up on your own domain name. One inexpensive and quick way to set it up is to use bluehost.com as they host Wordpress 2.0 out of the box. Other blogging environments are fine, too. Call it a website. It’s okay.. Just make absolutely sure you use your own domain name!
• In your printed material, give people a reason to visit your site. “We’re on the web” is not a reason. “You can donate on our site today - any amount will help a child.” is a reason. See illustration..

See the tips above….

Resources

Raising Thousands (if Not Tens of Thousands) of Dollars With Email - A Review
Top 10 Tips for Online Fundraising
Study Finds Online Donors Are Younger, More Generous

Santa brought my kids each an Airzooka for Christmas. We had fun playing with it, and housecats all across Kentucky now understand it’s time to duck for cover when this big honkin’ thing comes out.

But my youngest daughters’ Airzooka had a broken handle right from the box. We taped it together and I sent a quick email over to the company. WITHIN HOURS, Inventor Brian Jordan at Airzooka had emailed me back and already sent out a new one. (His story is pretty cool, too.)

It arrived in a box today and her Airzooka is in prime working condition. No Charge, No Hassle. Now we’re back in business - and the cats are back in hiding. And I’m eying the mega zooka so I can re-establish who’s head honcho around the house. Some people are even adding laser sights to them.

This kind of remarkable service, even for a silly cubical toy, is blog-worthy. Now everyone get one - they’re old-fashioned non-video-game type fun.

NOTE:
You can get your Airzooka using my ThinkGeek link over to the right and I’ll make about TWELVE CENTS! Whooo hoo!

I’m sitting here wondering if anyone in Lexington is watching the activity over in the Triad in North Carolina.

They’re bending over backwards to lure Google to locate a big server farm to Caldwell County - most recently in the form of a $4.8m grant from their Job Development Investment fund. Google (via Madras Integration, so says The News & Observer) is holding $600m worth of investment and 210 jobs - most of which would be over $48k per year.

Wouldn’t it be a great idea to see a big server farm out at Coldstream Research Campus? How about a new bus service between Coldstream and downtown restaurants that runs every 10 minutes on weekdays?

Could UK supply enough graduates enough REASON to stay in Lexington to work at a Google or similar company? There have been some ideas moved around.

But we have a lot going for us as a city… Even downtown is looking up. Graham Pohl wrote in this week’s Business Lexington, our downtown matters, and there’s a lot happening. Housing starts outside the ring are slowing. Still, the stats show that we have a long way to go in some areas.

Perhaps we’re starting to listen to Richard Florida’s wisdom. I think that the best solutions are a mix of Dr. Florida’s solutions and incintives such as those Lenoir’s people are bringing up. If Lexington can continue to improve its vibrance for the young engineering crowd without losing its already-established family-friendly and well-educated lifestyle things are definitely looking up.

Warning - geeky post.

I had been putting off setting up an apache test server (Apache 2.2 with PHP 5.5) here in the “lab” until this week and allowed about 30 minutes to set it up. Two hours later I was still mucking about.

The Apache service kept colliding with another service on Port 80 - okay, freak out time. What could be running on port 80 on my machine…. After scouring to be sure that IIS was completely and totally GONE, scanning my httpd.conf and php.ini files until my head hurt, I finally got some wisdom and looked at the event log to find that SKYPE (of all things) is answering port 80. Whew… Nasty little option there, obviously meant to give those with laptops a way of bypassing hard-core firewalls when using Skype on the go.

With Skype running, Apache cannot start. The fix is to go in and un-check the “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections” box on the connections tab. Restart Apache and you’re good.

What made this so tricky is that it matters what order you load things up in. Whichever service binds to port 80 first gets to keep it, and neither one seem to do a good job of alerting you of problems.

Hacker, Spammer, and Virus Writers’ Motivations Shifting

A troubling shift was noted by computer security companies. Motivations for hackers and virus authors shifted from ego to cash, leading to recruitment of a new breed of talented, socially-aware programmers. With money on the line, the sloppy “fire and forget” mentality of previous virus creators is being trade in for much more rigorous and well-engineered solutions that are much harder to hunt down.

Bloggers and Social Networking Staff Get Official Titles and Departments

I could have skipped the stats and told you of Proctor and Gamble’s “Holistic Customer Communication” department and that would probably make the point. But it’s still amazing to hear the numbers, so here’s a few. Technorati.com is tracking over 50 million blogs (41% in English) and that’s doubling every 6 months. Yep, it’s 175,000 new blogs created each day. While many quickly (and mercifully) die, it’s possible for a single, influential blogger to change the course of a Fortune 500 company marketing plan or a political campaign. Suddenly PR firms have to learn to manage the “credibility gap” between their marketing message and the one formed by the blogosphere.

Location Awareness in Everyday Devices Gets Cheap.

The market for personal GPS systems is expected to double from Q3 to Q4 2006 to 2.3 million units and the price for aftermarket devices is dropping into the $300 range. With “GPS-on-a-chip” digital cameras which can tag every photo with a “where taken” location and cell phones that give directions, “mapvertising” and subscription-based proximity services have legs to stand-on. Combine this with RFID tags and other embedded location solutions to track and map even the smallest items.

Media Middlemen Are Starting to Find Things Dicey.

Content Creators are getting wiser and technology is getting better. With production and delivery costs a tiny fraction of traditional methods artists and producers can keep more of their advertising revenue as it gets sent directly to the bottom line. The video delivery to portable devices is expanding this network even wider. A musician with a Macintosh, a good Microphone and a quiet basement can now produce their own album and distribute it on the Internet for near zero cost. It’s probably getting very hard to sign one’s life away in a record contract anymore.

Citizen Journalisms with Phone Cams Turn Up EverywhereInternet-connected and camera-enabled mobile phones now make it possible to report digitally on news as it happens, and upload it to the web without anyone realizing it’s happening. Videos and photos from cell phones began to be of usable quality for the evening news and the courtroom.Reputation Management Emerges (Emergency!)

With cameras, blogs, and emails recording every party and idiotic predicament you find yourself in, you may want to prepare explanations for those before heading over to the interview or asking for an investment. The Internet is inherently redundant, so deleting an embarrassing photo or blog post usually has little effect with sites like waybackmachine.com recording the Internet. People are suddenly thinking about their legacy on the web, and it’s going to change the behavior of millions.

Bluetooth Hits Critical Mass, Advertisers Awaken Bluetooth phones are in just about everyone’s pockets these days and the short-range networks are very inexpensive to set up (around $15 for the hardware.) Advertisers are now beginning to think of ways to use these, combined with the Internet, to build proximity-enabled marketing to draw customers closer to their stores, restaurants, and movie theatres.

The number of Linux Developers Matches the Number of Windows Developers. One of the main reasons here is the fact that many more developers than ever are working on web applications and most web servers are Apache (running on Linux) but there is plenty of evidence of a fundamental shift. It Microsoft 5 years and 10,000 people 5 years to create Vista – a gigantic corporate gamble. Will they be able to repeat that in the new world? Or will most office-like applications simply become part of the Internet?

Google launches “Docs and Spreadsheets” Together. Okay, Google had the Writely Word Processor and Google Spreadsheets before, but they were still boutique products. It took combining the two on the new Google “docs and spreadsheets” system to make this a tipping point for office suite software. If Google finally fires up a feature set that matches most of Office Vista, and gives it away, I think millions will skip the next Office upgrade. Yes, it was a rather small move, but I think it is changing the thought process of those using it more than any one web application ever did.

The First Wave of Bad Podcasts Died - Quality is Improving
When Podcasting started, and then again when iTunes started distributing them, lots of really awful podcasts launched. They were the worst - boring, useless and downright idiotic. They seem to be dying, and the first phase of purification is happening. I’m finding that many more podcasts I try out are worth subscribing to now. It’s taken three years, but this hash-out bodes well for the channel. Podcasting has had a very slow run on the subscription side, and that puzzles me - but the medium is very, very young.

Timberland.com has worked hard on adding lots of features to their website. Lots of neato ajax and drag and drop coolness. It’s such a shame that the entire event can be ruined by a single little 180×120 pixel gray box continually popping up when all I want to do is buy some presents. Object Error. Branding Error. Timberland = Error.

An old-school catalog website with tried-and-true add-to-cart and checkout buttons would have taken my order and maintained my enthusiasm for the brand. I’d be looking forward to my shoes and cap. I’d probably not tell my friend about the coolness of their website - only about my great shoes. If you plan to build hot new features on your site, make sure it’s worth the risks. Usually your products and content should be the star - not the site itself.

I’m truly hopeful that this gentleman finds someone to help him with what looks to be a very ambitious web project. But what I wanted to point out is how they are probably excluding the cream of the crop by their contact technique:

1. using blind carbon copy and a mass-email to god-knows-how-many web firms. This is the equivalent to throwing it on the wall and seeing what sticks.
2. providing almost no information except that they want a site like a (six-digit-website-here) and saying “send a quote.” I know of no reputable web firm who would spend 15 seconds on a quote for this. If any web firm can send a quote based on this request then we have ourselves proof of psychic powers here, folks.
3. Using ad-sponsored email. Now, this is a little bit controversial, but hiding yourself behind an anonymous email address is not a very good first impression. First off, it has the look of spam, or possibly a scam of some sort (this one probably wasn’t) and secondly, my spam filter marked it as suspicious.
4. Using an extremely undescriptive subject “website”. Minor nit, but there is a correlation between someone serious about what they’re doing and someone just banging out emails.

I’ll be updating my blog to Wordpress over the holiday, so probably not posting much in terms of real content. If anyone out there has tips (thanks for yours, Andy) I’m always happy to hear them.

I think it was Dilbert who said “Gift Certificates are like cash, only less useful.”

It’s true! I honestly don’t “get” gift cards as a consumer, but I do understand their commercial appeal. Especially around this time of year. The National Retailers Federation says that $25 billion (5%) of all retail purchases will be gift cards this holiday. That’s a lot of money tied up in easily lost plastic. And it means that many more purchases will be made after the holidays, giving merchants a chance to adjust discounts to recover from poor merchandising decisions even more than the usual after-Christmas sales allow.

Merchants make TENS OF MILLIONS in profit from UNUSED gift card balances. Now THERE’S a racket! Right now I have four gift cards in my wallet. Each of them has about $2 in “change” on it. I’ll never use it. I’ve been in each of these stores several times - and forgotten each time. Ah… the system, it works perfectly!

As a consumer, I feel that if you can’t think of anything to give someone, and you want to do something nice for them - go to the bank and get some cold, crisp cash - or top up a debit card - or a paypal account.

Then… they really DO have a choice… Hey, and if they have a few bucks left over, they can buy a candy bar.

Another tacky blow-up decoration hits the dust. And the guy was slashing with such vigor (joy?)… Frosty just keeps on smiling. “So many decorations, so little time.” The guy’s mugshot is priceless - he can’t even hide his smile. Video Included.

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