Give me my computer! Photo provided by elblogazo under Flickr Creative Commons License

So a few weeks ago I started bawling like a baby about to cut a tooth when my computer began its slow ascent into computer heaven. It wouldn’t go quietly – one day it would work, the next day it wouldn’t. For weeks I bounced between machines at work, at home, even at my father-in-law’s house. And even when it finally took its last breath, I was still a few weeks away from getting new a computer, so I continued doing a shuffle between various work and home machines. In the past few weeks, I have worked quasi-regularly on seven different computers. Some stayed in my comfort zone (like my blazing fast home desktop), and some were well out of it (like the backup of the backup laptop here in the office).

I had a hard time coping those first few weeks of the great computer shuffle. But I found my own personal pacifier: the “cloud”. If I was going to move from computer to computer, I needed to start moving the basis of my operations from the thick client of a hard drive to the thin client of the Internet.

It was hard at first, but I managed, and even became comfortable, working with online services. Am I a permanent cloud-hopper? No. But I feel I can weather the crisis of a broken computer in stride now.

Here’s a look at some of the services I used:

• Microsoft Outlook Web Access – There was simply no getting around this one. I needed to check my email and update my calendar. It was nearly unbearable, but I made it through. I got by managing email and calendar, but I simply could not organize my tasks within this paltry interface.
• Remember the Milk – RTM is my lovey – now that I have it, I can’t live without it, and I take it with me everywhere. Where Outlook Web Access failed in my task organization, RTM picked up the slack and then some, so much so, that I’ve stuck with RTM. RTM allows me to quickly enter, tag, schedule, and search all my tasks.
• Meebo – Nothing was more frustrating than installing and reinstalling instant messaging clients, sometimes having my buddy list carry over, sometimes not. Meebo came to my rescue. I logged in once, and there was my full buddy list. Meebo did a great job when I was in need. But in the end, I just missed too many IMs as the client just sat in dozens of Firefox tabs I had open.
• Google Docs – While I had MS Office on every computer I used during this time, I never knew from one day to the next which version it would have, or whether I could use it to connect to our network. So any document I had to look at during this time, as long as it wasn’t super-secret or sensitive, found its way into my Google Docs. Additionally, I did not have access to OnTime, a tool we use for Bug tracking here at Beaconfire. So instead, I would use a Google Spreadsheet for bug tracking. It wasn’t ideal, but it got the job done.

Competition for panels is fierce: last year’s 450 panels were chosen from thousands and thousands of entries. We need your help to make sure that nonprofit programming is a big part of SXSW 2011. Beaconfire has submitted a number of panels that we’re really excited about, and there are a lot of other cool nonprofit-oriented panels in the running.

Whether you love SXSW, or just love seeing nonprofits well represented in the tech world, here’s how you can help:

• Go vote for these panels. It’s fast and easy. (You will need to register, but that’s easy too, I promise.)
• Leave a comment for these panels. (Comment in the Panel Picker, not on this post.) Comments carry more weight than votes. If you’re excited about a topic, or a speaker, say so!
• Share this post on Facebook and Twitter.

Voting starts now, and counts for a lot towards which panels get selected.

These are Beaconfire’s submissions for SXSW 2011. Just click to learn more, and to vote and comment!

You Mobile Non-profit: a play in three acts
Mobile is changing our lives, but it’s also changing the world for the better. We’re dying to share tactics, tools and trip-ups from organizations who have ventured deep into mobile and lived to tell.

Just ‘Cause: Can Technology Make Brand Irrelevant?
Thanks to technology, the line is starting to blur between the power of a household name brand and the passion of scrappy mission-focused organizations. Yet when it feels like nothing short of a crisis will engage people with your cause, how do you compel them to act? The battle of Cause vs Brand is on.

Method Tweeting for nonprofits: Much Ado About Something
When organizations use Twitter to promote themselves, it’s largely about playing a role. The person tweeting is tasked to be on message as the voice of the organization while creating a unique and engaging personality to draw an audience in. If Shakespeare on Twitter, how would he tweet?  We’ll pick the brains of people who live this challenge daily in the nonprofit sector.

Money for Nothing, and your Software for Free
Free beer! Free kittens! Free software! We all love to get something for free, especially when budgets are tight. But free things almost always come with hidden costs, and free software is no different. Some tools give you great power – but you have to know how to use it.  Others limit your options, or ignore what you really need.  Some may even be just what you‘re looking for. We’ll ask: what does free software really cost?

Guerilla Usability Testing: Creative Techniques for Great Results
Usability testing your interfaces is a crucial step in website or application development and evolution. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that the high cost or effort of usability testing often de-rails or excludes this important activity for non-profit organizations and small businesses. However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Learn how to go guerilla with your usability testing.

And here are our other favorite nonprofit-oriented panels from the panel picker:

• The New Citizen Philanthropy: Mixing Offline and Online
• How Social Networking Is Changing Advocacy
• A Conversation About Social Change Through Social Media
• Life After Blackbaud
• Getting Advanced with Social Media for Social Good
• Stalking Success: Privacy and Advocacy Can Be Friends
• How Many Rungs?: Social Change & the Engagement Ladder
• Putting the Public Back in Public Media
• Nonprofit Social Media Jam Session
• Nonprofits and Free Agents in a Networked World
• Crowdsourcing the Corporate/Nonprofit Partnership. Who Wins?
• Digital Campaigning: Views from the Frontline

Have we missed something?  Let us know in the comments!

I won’t even fake naïveté here because I knew deep down it would be harder than expected. I’ve had the front row seat to many a client rebranding train wreck before, but I’ve always played the role of supportive consultant. The “expert” voice. The one saying “Good God, how hard can it be to design a great logo? Tell your agency to get on with it already!”

Yeah. Karma’s a bitch.

For those uninitiated, the process of designing a logo usually includes the creation of a unique “mark” or graphic treatment paired with an appropriate font/type. Together, these should represent, at a single glance, your company’s mission, vision, methodology and style. While settling upon a new font choice was tricky, we managed to relatively quickly agree to one we all loved. However I totally underestimated how complex, terrifying and fraught with peril the search for a revised mark would be. My blood pressure reached new highs when we spent 2 weeks without any clue how to integrate the mark. Visions of blank business cards and logo-less postcards swam in front of my eyes. My job, I was certain, hung in the balance. No doubt about it, I was in full-on panic.

In my defense, since we weren’t totally rebranding but rather hoping to “update” our existing logo (both mark and type), I thought it would somehow be easier. Don’t know what I was smoking. Lesson of the year: Creating something “new” that retains the brand equity of the “old” yet still feels like “us” is not unlike juggling. Blindfolded. On crutches. With flaming chainsaws.

All challenges aside, I can proudly report we will not be going barefoot as originally feared, and that we now have a shiny “new” logo that we are very very proud of.

But just to keep you all guessing, the actual logo is embargoed until the official reveal at our 10th anniversary celebration in March – Patience is a virtue my friends (or at least that’s what I’m told). However, I can share some of logos (out of the nearly 100 versions created) that we didn’t choose just to whet your appetite for the real thing in the spring.

After all of this, I can honestly say that I have a far greater appreciation of what our clients go through during this often painstaking & frustrating process. So next time I don’t offer you a glass of wine or a valium before addressing your branding needs, just smack me. You’re all remarkably brave souls.

“A what?” he said?

“You know, “ I said, “A widget.”

But he didn’t know. I had ventured into that underworld of web jargon.

Most of us were introduced to the widget in our fourth grade math class: If one person at a factory can make 30 widgets in an hour, how many widgets can a factory that employs 3 people make in the course of a standard work day.

To those of us in the web business, a widget is a kind of mini-web application that can be easily distributed to any Web site. If you’ve got a petition campaign, and you can give your blog some code so that the campaign appears on their Web site, then you’ve got a widget.

But if our fourth grade widget factory can make 720 widgets in a day, it takes just a little bit longer for web developers to make just one. One mistake common mistake when it comes to widget design and development it to toss the widget aside as I kind of “mini-me” to the Web site, and assume it does not need much more in the way of design or development than the original application. But its tiny size can sometimes be a huge hurdle. Here are some things to consider when making a widget:

• Widgets come in all shapes and sizes. Make sure actions can fit in the space that a widget allows.
• Since your widget is a minified version of your larger web application, make sure you shrink any necessary elements (such as your logo).
• Put tracking in place so you can tell who your best promoters are.
• Widgets aren’t magical – if you want people to use your widget, you have to promote it.

Don’t treat your widget like an afterthought. If you put the time and effort into its layout, design, and functionality, you’ll have increased your reach faster than it takes three employees to make 500 widgets!

HTML Code

<div id=”skip-nav”>
<strong>Shortcut Navigation:</strong>
<ul>
<li><a href=”#content” accesskey=”p” title=”Skip to page content”>Page Content</a></li>
<li><a href=”#nav” accesskey=”n” title=”Skip to main navigation menu”>Site Navigation</a></li>
<li><a href=”#search” accesskey=”s” title=”Skip to search”>Search</a></li>
<li><a href=”#footer” accesskey=”f” title=”Skip to footer (ctrl/alt + f)”>Footer</a></li>
</ul>
</div> <!– end skip-nav –>

Most often, skip nav is hidden from visual users by shifting the content outside of the page viewing area (be sure to use a positioning property as display:none can render your content invisible to some devices). In this way traditional users who can scroll to what they’re after aren’t burdened with extra visual cruft while visually impaired users can jump around to the content they want.

Unfortunately, this approach ignores a number of different users. For example, skip nav could also be useful to sighted users who are unable, or simply choose not, to browse with a mouse and opt for a keyboard or other assistive device. Unfortunately, hiding this content off of the viewing area can create confusion.

One way we can improve this implementation is by using JavaScript/jQuery to display the content when it receives focus. This way we’re being accommodating to non-traditional users while still preserving the aesthetic integrity of the site.

The Plan

To do this we’ll test if any of the skip nav links have focus, and if so, show the container. We’ll set a timer that checks every 100ms to confirm a skip nav link still has focus, and if not we’ll run a function to hide it.

The JavaScript

Because only the links in the container can receive focus (at least without tweaks like tabindex) we’ll use their status to control when to open the container. So:

1. If a link receives focus add class nav-focus to the link, animate the container and give it class active.
2. Use setTimout to test if nav-focused no longer exists, and if so, close the container(use this instead of focusout to keep the container from closing when switching between links)

That’s the logic, here’s the demo beaconfire.com/blog/demo/skip-nav/.

To add it to your site add the HTML to your page and skipNavigation('name-of-container-id'); to your jQuery documenty read function

One last issue concerns the possiblity that JavaScirpt is turned off. A good habit is to use JavaScript to initialize elements rather than having default behaviors baked into the CSS. We’ll remove the CSSthat hides the skip nav, and do it with JavaScript.

$('body').addClass('js');

Now the following code hides the skip nav only if JavaScript is available:

.js #skip-nav {position:absolute; margin-left:-9999px;}

Note: This concept is based on a CSS based promoted by jimthatcher.com/skipnav.htm

It’s possible that they’re right; a good blog can be a real benefit to an organization, giving you a strong voice and a controlled channel to converse with your supporters.

But not all blogs are good.  A bad blog — one that’s rarely updated, where the content is full of marketing gimmicks or spam runs wild in the comments — can do you more harm than good. If you can’t put real effort into maintaining it, it will make you look lazy, and could even hurt your reputation.

Don’t get me wrong. I love blogs. But I love  good content even more, and a blog without good content isn’t much of a blog.

Before you take the plunge in starting your own blog, consider what you’re getting into. If you can’t answer “yes” to almost all of these questions, a blog may not be the right channel for you, at least not right now.

Will one person be in charge of updating it? If you don’t have a staff member who’s excited about it, and has the expertise to maintain it (or at least the will to learn), your blog may languish without attention. They don’t need to do all the writing (in fact, a blog may work best with many writers from across your organization), but someone needs to run the show.

Can you update often? You don’t need to post every day, or even every week, but any blog needs regular posts to draw readers. If posts are few and far between, readers will lose interest. If you don’t have staff with time to devote to blogging (and a manager to oversee the schedule), along with a steady stream of potential topics, you may not be able to maintain the volume you’d like.

Do you have good content to post? A blog is a great place to tell stories and share news that don’t fit into your other communication streams. But if all your best content goes to your email newsletter, or (worse yet) you face a monthly struggle to identify good content for your emails, then a blog is just going to compete, and will likely take second place.  Without compelling and unique content, geared towards your blog’s audience, you might as well be recruiting those readers straight to your email list.

Do you have an audience in mind? At the outset, you should have an idea of who will read your blog, and what it will add that they don’t get from your other communications. It could be a demographic group. It could be core supporters who want to know more about what you’re up to. It could be other bloggers. But it should be someone.

Will you allow comments? Blogs, like any social media, are about conversations. But plenty of nonprofits don’t allow comments on their blogs. Sometimes there are good reasons, but more often, comments are blocked out of fear of negativity.  Without commenters, a blog is a one-way news stream. In that case, why bother with a blog? Why not just update a news section on your website?  Comments, both positive and negative, generate energy around your cause and give legitimacy to your voice. You’ll certainly need to develop guidelines, and take the risk that negative voices will seek you out on your blog… but if you can’t take that risk, then your blog isn’t really a blog.

Will you monitor comments? On any blog, you’ll find good comments, boring comments, unflattering comments… and junk.  It’s usually a good policy to allow and engage with commenters who disagree with you, but it’s always necessary to set some standards.  There’s nothing more unprofessional than a slew of spam comments on each of your posts.   Even comments from “real” people should be removed if they are irrelevant or vulgar.  A spam filter will take care of most of the problems, but you still need to pay attention – encouraging the good commenters, engaging the controversial ones, and shutting out the truly unwanted.

Will you promote your blog? The main reason for writing a blog is (presumably) to have readers. How will you bring readers to you?  A message to your email list might be an obvious first step, but promoting your content in an ongoing way – by highlighting popular posts on your homepage, integrating blog content into your email stream, tweeting your favorite posts – will help your readership grow.  How can you encourage your colleagues to promote and take advantage of the blog in their own work?

Flash

The best way to think about Flash – for the purposes of this discussion – is as a bit of magic, included on a Web page just like an image, that can do all kinds of really cool animations, transitions, play sound and movies, and nearly display nearly identically on nearly all browsers that have the flash plug-in installed.

Flash has been around for quite a while and has a very robust set of tools (made by Adobe, and formerly by Macromedia).  It has been used to create the sites, movies, slideshows, or multimedia players, that you see on millions of Web sites.  For the sake of this comparison, I am going to talk specifically about slideshows that are created in Flash compared to those using  jQuery because that is the vast majority of the Flash that we have traditionally used in our projects.  And ’cause that’s what this post is titled.

Flash Advantages

• Great looking fonts
• Smooth, complex animations
• Robust development tools

jQuery

You may have noticed that I have referred to “slideshows created in Flash” and “slideshows using jQuery.”  This is a fundamental difference between the two.  While Flash is an embeddable object created in a specific application, jQuery is a JavaScript library that can add a bunch of really neat-o functionality and effects to elements that already exist on the page. This means that you have HTML, and then on top of that, you have jQuery making that HTML jump through all kinds of hoops, sit, roll over, and even sometimes, though hopefully not often: play dead.  jQuery is JavaScript, which means that some experience with the ubiquitous scripting language is going to make things much easier.  There are hundreds of plugins which exist as additional JavaScript files along with the HTML they need to act on that you can simply copy and paste in to your web page to add whatever slideshow you want.  Many of these existing plugins slideshows have comprehensive documentation that even those without lots of experience with JavaScript can follow.  Basically, if you know your way around HTML and CSS, you can figure out how to at least use jQuery.

The jQuery library can either be downloaded from the jQuery Web site, or you can link to hosted versions from jQuery, Google, or Microsoft. I tend to use the Google-hosted version because it is very popular and likely in use on many other sites. Because of that, if your visitors have previously visited a site using the same linked library that you do, their browser will not have to download it again and you’ll save the 150-ish KB of download that the library requires.

jQuery Advantages

• Generally smaller, and quicker (150KB+ though, for the main library)
• Less time to create, very simple to manage
• Superior accessibility and findability
• Works on iPhones
• Free

Picking One

There are many questions to consider before you when even decide to use a slideshow (see “Parting Shot” below).  I’d say that, if you do decide to add a slideshow to your page  jQuery will be the best choice in 98% of cases.  It offers most of the abilities of Flash (depending on how adept you are at JavaScript) and has the added advantage that it is used to animate images and text that already exist in the page.  This is of monumental importance to search engine optimization, accessibility, and cross-browser/cross-platform support.  That your images and text already exist in the page means that it is basic content that you manage in your authoring system.

Even if a visitor has all styles and JavaScript disabled in their browser** the content contained in your slideshow will be present for them to see (albeit in a way that may break the beautiful layout of your page which is already the case if they have styles turned off).  This is the essence of accessibility: that all content on your page is available to all visitors regardless of how they access your page.

There is no cut-and-dried answer to the question “Flash or jQuery,” though I’d argue that in the limited scope of slideshows jQuery has a decided advantage.  In the end it really depends on what you are trying to communicate, to whom you are trying to communicate it, and how you want it to look.  If you want to be able to use any beautiful font available to your designer, utilize sophisticated transitions (though jQuery can match much of Flash’s capabilities in this regard), ensure that your slideshow works on all browsers with the Flash plug-in installed, and don’t need to support iPhone users, then Flash may be your best bet.  If you are, however, willing to limit your font options, want to be sure that your content is available to all users, on all browsers, regardless of platform, and are willing to limit slightly the sophistication of transitions and animations, then jQuery is the clear winner.

Parting Shot

And that brings us to the end, but I simply cannot leave without a final parting shot regarding putting  a lot of time and money in to designing and developing a slideshow.  I, and others in the office are looking with an increasingly critical eye toward the effectiveness of using slideshows at all to highlight important information.  A too-cursory review of too-few site analytics begins to suggest that very, very (very!) few visitors see more than the first slide of any slideshow; Even fewer engage with the sideshow controls (if present, to move forward, back, or pause);  And fewer still click on any links found on slides beyond the first.  Do not assume that the third, or even second, slide will get any attention at all.

One of the drawbacks of many new interface options presented by Flash or jQuery (or any of the other JavaScript libraries out there) is that they have offered an easy solution to a very old problem: gigantic homepages where every department in an organization demands a presence.  Similarly to simply adding more and more content to a homepage until visitors have to scroll tens of screens down to read it all, we are now asking visitors to engage more and more frequently with tabs, slideshows, accordion widgets, and more to access the same “too much content.”  Have we just shorted the all-too-important conversation about focusing an organization’s message and simply allowing “all of it” to go on the homepage?  And what about people who don’t or can’t use these new widgets? Perhaps another blog post?  I nominate Jo!

** Chances are pretty good that if styles and JavaScript are disabled in a browser, so is Flash.  If your slideshow reads its content from an XML feed, the path to which you define in the JavaScript call to the Flash object, your slideshow will not work even if Flash is enabled but JavaScript is not.

If you missed their amazing day of viral content, you might be living in a cabin in the woods (without WiFi), but ReadWriteWeb has a very good summary of their campaign. In a nutshell, they released a series of dozens of viral videos, produced almost in real-time, where their Old Spice Man, Isaiah Mustafa, responded personally to comments on YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and bloggers.

There are a lot of factors you could point to as critical for their success, not all of which can be easily reproduced. For example:

• a great sense of humor (and the ability to laugh at themselves)
• an incredibly sexy, half-naked spokesman
• a now-legendary production team making ad-quality videos at a rate of 7 minutes per video
• lots of freedom from the corporate higher-ups

But what impressed me most, and the reason they became a trending topic on Twitter, is the personal attention they paid to their audience. Not everyone got flowers like Alyssa Milano.  But anyone who messaged Old Spice that day had a chance at their own video. You didn’t have to be a celebrity to get a few seconds of Mustafa’s personal attention.

Even if you didn’t get your own personal video response, you still felt like he might be talking to you. (And by “you,” I mean me.  I’m pretty sure he was talking to me.)

You can’t fake that kind of personal attention – but you can achieve it with a little hard work, no matter whether you’re a tiny non-profit or an international corporation. Maybe you don’t have the whole world paying attention to you.  But someone is paying attention, and you can pay attention right back at them. You don’t need a handsome spokesman, just a Twitter account, a Facebook page, or a volunteer with a phone.

Though, a handsome spokesman wouldn’t hurt.

Since it’s Friday, here are a couple more videos for you:

When the “Do I Care” of constituents meets with a spectacularly simple, compelling campaign message and call to action, rapid and radical growth is possible. This “perfect storm” is truly for the vast majority of organization.  For most, the break-through campaign is difficult to achieve and not necessarily something that their online marketing strategy should be based. Fortunately, the experiences of the past have taught many organizations that the “online campaign” is more like throwing the dice than a sound long-term strategy for consistent growth and engagement.

We contend that list growth is a core ongoing business practice of the organization requiring sustained staffing and financial investment over time. As with direct response fundraising, online list growth is not something you do once. Organizations need to continually recruit new online supporters to replace those who unsubscribe/go inactive. This can occur at a rate of 18-25% a year.

We are not saying that an initial campaign isn’t called for to jump-start the ongoing program of list building. Nor that one should never do an online campaign. Our position is quite the opposite – we contend that campaigns are a vital part of a larger growth and engagement strategy. Just not the only part. Further, choosing to do campaign and how should be the outcome of a strategic analysis of whether the campaign truly has a chance of achieving the goals versus an enthusiastic gamble on “a cool idea.”

We think the context for both the initial campaign and the longer journey need to be fully understood before dollars and time are spent in earnest. We have learned through our experiences on other clients that the following are pre-requisites for successful list growth:

We start by evaluating the “Do I Care” factor.

[“Do I Care” Factor] = [Personal Impact] * ([Policy Controversy] + [Media Coverage])

Within this context, comes the factor of compelling campaigns.

[Compelling Campaign] = ([Motivating Message] + [Clear Solution] + [Simple Action])*[Resources]

List growth is then the product of these:

[“Do I Care” Factor] * [Compelling Campaign] * [Marketing Reach] = [List Growth]

We lay these formulas out as a useful rubric to assess candidly and soberly whether an organization is in position to undertake a mass market list growth effort. As many of our clients know, 2009 and 2010 have presented a particularly persnickety marketplace for campaigning. Macro-level issues of the economy, jobs, and health care reform have dominated the constituent’s focus. So our calculation of whether the market is ripe for growth within certain issues areas is more complex than ever.

Example Readiness Rating

The Readiness Rating is an assessment of how well positioned an organization is for a particular campaign issue. This shouldn’t be used as a “pass/fail” scoring system to decide to more forward or not. The analysis simply provides an honest appraisal of where you are today and highlights gaps in readiness that could undermine the success of a campaign unless those gaps are closed.

As you will see, some of these gaps are internal to the organization like whether the message being put out is motivating or the online action is compelling. These gaps may be more easily closed than external factors such as whether the policy controversy is significant enough in the minds of constituents or whether the online conversation/media coverage exists in enough of a critical mass that the organization’s message and solution to the issue can tap into existing interest.

The following is a recent example from a client for their Readiness Rating as they considered undertaking a new campaign. The organization specifics have been altered to protect the innocent.

On the whole, this organization’s gaps are not insurmountable obstacles. The external personal interest passion is there (one of the hardest things to create if not present.) While the policy controversy is muddied for this organization at present, there is opportunity to pivot the campaign into a more prominent controversy in the marketplace.

Internally, the analysis revealed gaps that were not previously clear to stakeholders and decision-makers. The Readiness Rating can serve as a “reality-check” or going further, as a wake-up call that there are headwinds facing the campaign which could blow things off track. We’ve found the review enables an honest and open conversation about what the real constraints are, focuses creativity and problem-solving more appropriately to true barriers, and helps everyone involved understand the key factors the organization is going to need to manage through to achieve success.

There are likely a number of variables that could be added to this analysis to give a more complete picture. Do you have thoughts on what might be missing?