Another NTC has just wrapped up and I have that familiar feeling of brain fatigue, where my head literally hurts because of all the information that has been crammed in over the past few days. So many ideas, tools, and sources of inspiration that is at risk of fading away by the time I make it back to the office. To make sure everything I learned gets preserved and put into practice, here is my “general-gist” summary of the sessions I went to. This is just what I personally got out of the sessions, and not a summary of everything the session had to offer. I’ve included links to the slide decks, Twitter accounts and collaborative notes where available if you want more notes from the session.

Table of Contents

1. WordPress Day
2. Crafting your Nonprofit Story in a Digital World
3. How to be a AdWords Superhero
4. The 4 Strategic Foundations of Effective Websites
5. Diversity In Giving
6. Facebook Autoplay, Periscope, Snapchat Stories, and more…
7. Content Calendars and YOU! Creating Communications Harmony

WordPress Day

NTC had a few different pre-conference events for WordPress, Drupal and SalesForce. I had a session at WordPress Day which was organized by Cornershop Creative. Most of the sessions had content which was 30 mins or less, so I didn’t get as many notes as I did during the main conference sessions.

Why WordPress is perfect for Nonprofits

Slide Deck

Lesley Molecke – Cornershop Creative: @eckandgrumble
Ira Horowitz – Cornershop Creative: @ira_horowitz

This is simple…it’s all about the community and cost. It’s much easier to and cheaper to find WordPress developers than pretty much any other platform. The upgrade path is also much easier than Drupal. Going from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 takes an entire project, whereas WordPress upgrades can be a single click (in most cases).

My favorite quote was from a conversation I had with Chris at Cornershop Creative where he said that “In WordPress, your website can be powerful and complex. In Drupal, your website has to be powerful and complex.”

Plugins to check out:

WP Social Stream – A plugin that pulls in content from all your social platforms. Will be great to have on the Birthdays For All homepage, where we showcase our most current content.

Media Deduper – a plugin created by Cornershop Creative, the hosts of WordPress Day (and a bunch of awesome people), that removes duplicate images that you have in your bloated Media Library. I know we have a few of those.

Tidy Repo – The great thing about WordPress is the thousands of developers out there creating plugins for the platform to extend its functionality. That leads to a lot of great and terrible plugins, so how do you know which ones to go for? Tidy Repo tests and approves the best ones for you.

Crafting Your Nonprofit Story in a Digital World

Slide Deck

Ben Wong – Blackbaud: @bunmun
#NPStory

This was from my session at WordPress Day. You can watch a longer version from a webinar I did for Nonprofit Hub: http://nonprofithub.org/digitalstory/

Longform Content

Slide Deck

Courtney Clark – Forum One: @circlish
Kristina Bjoran – Forum One: @bjoran_identity

• You don’t have to go long form.
• Long form takes a lot of time and effort that might not be worth the ROI.
• Be wary of budgets, expect less and don’t promise the world.
• Not everyone is a good writer. Get a good copywriter.

The RESTful Future of WordPress

Slide Deck

Phil Crumm – 10Up: @pcrumm

• Learn JavaScript and look into ReactJS library created by Facebook for fast single page apps.
• Hello Calypso is an example of how the WordPress editorial experience can be rebuilt using the REST API

AppPressr can compile your WordPress site in a native mobile app

NTC Day One

How to be a Google AdWords Superhero #16NTCsuperhero

Slide Deck
Mark Hallman – Evergreen DM: @mark_hallman
Jason Shim – Pathways to Education Canada: @jasonshim
#16NTCsuperhero
Collaborative Notes: http://po.st/superhero-16NTC

• Use Google Autofill to see what phrases that people are searching for. Think about how your organization can help these people by serving them relevant content.
• Get inspiration from how Cosmopolitan magazines create their front page headlines. Concise and to the point.
• Use Google Trends to see when your target keywords are being searched for the most.
• Use Google Keyword Planner to research related keywords and phrases to your target keywords
• Learn from your mistakes on ineffective campaigns. Don’t delete your old campaigns, just pause them instead.
• Ultimate Guide to Google AdWords by Perry Marshall – $15 on Amazon

The 4 Strategic Foundations of Effective Websites

@constr_ctive
Ian Mariano – Constructive: @ianmariano
#16NTC4foundations
Collaborative Notes: http://po.st/4foundations-16NTC

• Your website is the epicenter of the universe for all your organization does. It’s the single most visible window into your organization.
• Brand Strategy
  • An internal and external understanding of an organization that informs every experience it creates for audiences.
  • Everyone in the team needs to understand the orgs core purpose and how they go about fulfilling that core purpose
• Content Strategy
  • The ways and means of creating meaningful, cohesive, engaging and sustainable content.
  • Establish your content goals and identify your content gaps. What do you need to create to meet your organizations objectives.
  • Content strategy should develop publishing flows that support goals from the backend to be presented well on the frontend
• Technology Strategy
  • Involve your technical web developers as early in the process as possible.
  • The team needs to have an understanding of the technical landscape.

• Design Strategy
  • Design Strategy ties everything together.
  • What is the visual language?

Diversity in Giving

• The philanthropic landscape is predominantly white.
• Minority groups aren’t always asked because of the assumption that they can’t afford to give.
• Having a diverse board means nothing if they don’t behave like a diverse board
• How diverse does your outreach need to be? Do you need to target Asians in South Carolina?
• When sharing stories with different groups, make sure the characters and themes are relateable to the target ethnic audience.
• African American donors tend to be older, and more inclined to give to religious or faith based orgs.
• Asians donors are young, tech savy and well educated. They spend a lot of time researching the org and cause before giving.
• Hispanic donors are the youngest group and give spontaneously based on emotion.

NTC Day Two

Facebook Auto-Play, Periscope, SnapChat stories and More…

Slide Deck
Carie Lewis Carlson – Humane Society of USA: @cariegrls
Lara Koch – Humane Society of USA: @larakoch
Michael Hoffman – See3: @Michael_Hoffman
Bridgett Colling – See3: @BridgettColling
#16NTCvideo
Collaborative Notes: http://po.st/video-16NTC

• Video helps tell stories in a way that resonates with people
• Humane Society of USA has a specific content strategy for Facebook
• Check out www.samedaypups.com. The video received lots of engagement,
• How people react to Facebook videos affects the reach. Videos boost engagement, boosts newsfeed reach for future posts.
• You can’t publish any video and expect results, needs to be good video.
• Even great videos won’t translate directly to donations.
• Video is useful for the fundraising cycle, but not necessarily for the giving moment. Video is an important part to get donors ready to be donors.
• Video improves click through rates of emails. Beth Kanter has some data
• Ideas for good videos:
  • Include subtitles for videos so that sound isn’t needed.
  • Short but clickable headline, don’t include everything in the headline. Leave some wonder.
  • Videos that look like gif memes have shown to perform well.
  • How to videos
  • Learn from Buzzfeed e.g Tasty video
• Content strategy should be about what people care about and are interested in, not about how awesome you are.
• FYI – Humane Society of USA has about 100 people in their communications team.

Content Calendars and You! Creating Communications Harmony

• As a communications director, your time is spent herding a lot of cats. Your #1 cat herding tool is an editorial calendar. It’s a roadmap for digital communications strategy
• You are mapping out a roadtrip for your content
• The editorial calendar eliminates the battles over whose turn it is to have their content published
• The calendar should be organization wide
• It lets non-communications staff know how long it takes to create content
• Large orgs can use shared Google calendar, Basecamp, SalesForce
• Small orgs should use Google Spreadsheet
• Organize the calendar by milestones and communication channels.
• Give your program staff communications training e.g. teach them the orgs Facebook strategy. Teach them the tools and when to use them.

6 themes of the challenges presented by the people in the session:

• No buy-in from management
• No time to plan ahead
• Too many priority messages
• Program staff don’t help
• Trouble creating great content
• No strategy behind editorial calendar

The post Everything I learned from 3 days at NTC 2016 appeared first on Select B.

Giant Conf is over for another year. If you missed it, and don’t have time to read my notes, maybe you can get something from this word cloud. Not sure if it’s truly based on the number of occurrences of each word but it’s close. My overall takeaways in 5 sentences are:

1. Ask the right questions.
2. Fail early and often to accelerate learning.
3. Perfection is a barrier to progress and creativity.
4. Design is about solving problems.
5. Critique is a skill that needs to be practiced.

The post Giant Conf 2015: Summary in 5 Sentences appeared first on Select B.

Giant Conf is over for another year and I felt energized and inspired to go into work and make mistakes, stop being perfect, fail often and ask lots of questions. Over the three days I saw 20 different speakers and had fun trying to keep up these notes. Revisiting them here helped solidify some of the concepts in my head. I hope they become useful to you somehow.

Thanks to everyone at Giant Conf for making this another great learning experience!

Learn it forward – Leslie Jensen-Inman

The general gist: Cultivate a culture of learning. Take time everyday to share what you’ve learned and how you will do things differently in the future.

• Comprise teams with senior folks with more experience
• These are the people that others can learn from
• Help junior designers learn from their mistakes
• 4 stages of learning:

1. Unconscious incompetence – You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know what you’re doing wrong.

2. Conscious incompetence – You know that you’re doing things wrong.

3. Conscious competence – You know how to do things right, but it takes conscious effort.

4. Unconscious competence – You do things well in your natural flow.

Center Centre

• The Center Centre wants to be a learning organization, not just an organization for learning like most schools.
• They want to build a culture of life-long learners.
• They share mistakes and failures everyday in a daily standup meeting.
• They ask the same 5 questions in the meeting everyday:

1. What did you get done?
2. What are your goals for the next standup?
3. What is preventing me from getting things done?
4. What’s the risk or unknown about what you’re doing?
5. What did you learn and how will that change the way you approach things in the future.

• Leaders need to demonstrate that it’s ok to make mistakes.
• Be comfortable with not knowing.
• Mistakes are outcomes that you want to delete
• Successes are outcomes that you want to repeat

4 components of community:

• Membership – feeling of belonging to the community
• Influence – feeling of being able to make a difference to the group
• Integration and fulfillment of needs – being able to help others and fill gaps in the team
• Shared emotional connection – shared history, experiences, and successes

Voice and Content: Giving Your UX It’s Soul – Steve Stegelin

The general gist: Content is at the heart of the interaction and conversation with the user. Think about what kind of human character and personality you want to present to the user. Don’t make your app or website sound like HAL9000.

• As designers, developers, and UXers, we create interactions and conversations with users.
• People are interacting with a machine, but it’s up to us to give the machine the life and soul of a human. We pull the strings behind the code
• What personality and voice does your app have?
• Content is at the heart of the interaction, but it’s also the thing that gets overlooked first.

Examples of app personalities

• MailChimp – cheeky personality, fun, uses humor. The voice is a feature of the experience.
• TurboTax – more serious, but it can empathizes with users who may be experiencing a bad moment such as finding out that they owe taxes. It uses approachable language e.g. “put a dent in your tax bill”.

• Assess your audience, what is the threshold for humor?
• You can start small by having fun with error messages.
• Using Lorem Ipsum text doesn’t provide context. Copy is too important to the experience to put in Lorem Ipsum and say that “someone will put in the real content later”. Don’t let content be an afterthought.
• UX, design and copywriters should be working together from day one.
• Content should be part of the entire experience.

Empathy when designing for users who want to cheat you – Sharon Bautista

The general gist: Security and fraud is something that is rarely discussed in design circles, but it’s become a huge problem for many industries. Employ security measures and ask clients about security requirements. Understand how security impacts the user experience.

• Fraud is something that all UXers should think about if we want to be effective business partners to our clients and citizens
• Fraud is a human problem, and what we do in response to fraud impacts the user experience.
• Different types of fraud
  • Big Time Fraud – Hollywood style hacking.
  • Little Time Fraud – real hacking, less sophisticated methods, e.g. social engineering, calling in pretending to be someone else.
• 4 dimensions of empathy
  • Perspective-taking
  • Staying out of judgment
  • Recognizing emotion in other people
  • Communicating that recognition.
• Map interactions by role-playing
  • One person acts as the user, the other person acts as the app.
  • This helps to build empathy in each interaction.
• Things to do to combat fraud:
  • Create a more secure network: http://akta.com/white-papers/5-ux-ui-improvements-create-secure-network/
  • Don’t require command line
  • Support mobile access that doesn’t entail storing data on the device.
  • Avoid letting the front end mirror the backend

Designing Together Apart – Jared Ponchot

The general gist: The components of creative work are insight, energy and focus. These components don’t have to come from a fancy, hipster office space with purposely designed “interaction-points”. Lullabot manages to provide these components in a distributed workspace i.e. with no central office.

The essentials components for creative work:

• Insight
• Energy
• Focus

Insights

• You have to work to get insights
• You need to create the space for research to happen
• Client budgets and timelines inhibit research and it’s usually the thing that gets cut.
• Some research is better than none
• Find ways to build fascination
• We’re all curious when we’re children, but we lose curiosity as we mature
• Choice improves creativity

5:15

• Email once a week to remind people to write their 5:15 to answer a question e.g.
  • What’s gone well?
  • What can be done to make your life better?
• A 5:15 takes 15 mins to write and 5 mins to read

Energy

• Care about space
• Give individual power to change their space
• Woody Allen – momentary change in space can change shifts in creative energy.
• The collaboration myth – Quiet by Susan Cain: http://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/dp/0307352153

Focus

• Use tools to aid remote collaboration e.g. Ipevo camera: http://www.ipevo.com/prods/Point-2-View-USB-Camera
• Find ways to communicate visually as much as possible.
• Words are an abstraction of reality

Critique

• Get intentional with critique
• Invisionapp for prototypoing
• Critique for insights
• Ask good questions and make them see something that they didn’t see before.
• Build trust, celebrate accomplishments

Next level collaboration: The Future of Content and Web Design – Rebekah Cancino

The general gist: Today’s challenges require deep collaboration between multiple roles. Be open to other people’s ideas. Respect their craft and expertise. Understand that everyone is responsible for the outcome of the project.

• Meeting demands of multi device web is a demand on communication
• Collaboration is greater than the sum of its parts.
• Effective collaboration
  • Create alignment
  • Remove politics
  • Reduce rework
  • Boost morale
• A culture of openness isn’t automatic. What’s inside a culture of openness?
• Personal Openness
  • Starts with the individual
  • Being open to ideas of others
  • Give signals to know that they’re open to collaborate
  • Suspend judgement
  • Know what you don’t know, and don’t pretend to know what you don’t know
  • Ask lots of questions
  • Respect skills strengths and different ways of working
  • Include people who disagree with you
  • Invite opposing view points
• Active Openness
  • We’re all responsible for outcome
  • Jump in where we can help and add value
  • Understand disciplines of team members
  • Ask teammates about their work
  • Diversify your education – understand other roles
  • For each interaction ask:
    • What is the user thinking?
    • How are they feeling?
    • What are they doing?
  • Outward Openness
    • Research as a team
    • Empathy map as a team – Stanford design school: https://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/themes/dschool/method-cards/empathy-map.pdf
    • Invite users to design with you
    • Take your best idea off the table – it forces you to create new ideas
  • Exponential Openness
    • High fidelity communication requires spending lots of time together, not just 1 hour meetings.
    • Make sure everyone is invited
    • Get executives involved earlier at the beginning
    • Do work together. Don’t just talk about the work.

Preparing for the UX Apocalypse – Dan Willis

The general gist: Standard UX practices that we use today won’t help us with a the multi-device/multi-channel world our users are living in.

How to prepare for the apocalypse

• Get your head out of your ass
• Get right with service design
• Design for the ecosystem
• Open up the design process – use critique, start small, don’t wait, try stuff
• Be bold – judge success over the long term

You can read notes from day one here and here.

Day two session notes are here.

The post Giant Conf 2015: Day Three Session Notes – Leslie Jensen-Inman, Steve Stegelin, Sharon Bautista, Rebekah Cancino, Jared Ponchot, Dan Willis appeared first on Select B.

Totally taking onboard one of the themes from Giant Conf 2015 with these notes: “Don’t be perfect.” These notes are far from perfect, but I know that if I don’t get them out right now, they’ll be forever lost in Evernote. So here they are in all their raw, unperfected beauty.

You can read my notes from sessions by Scott Berkun, Kevin Hoffman and more.

And more notes here, from Jaimee Newberry, Denise Jacobs plus more.

Why Linus needs to Ditch his Blanket; Hacking beyond the perimeter of the comfort zone – Sonya Looney

The general gist: Go on an adventure and challenge yourself outside of your comfort zone. The more you do it the more you will learn, grow, and feel alive.

• Children have a security blanket because it makes them feel safe, brings comfort, relieves anxiety.
• What is your security blanket?
• Your “safe place” can be where you go to recharge, but it can also be a prison.
• Your attitude is the difference between an ordeal and an adventure – Bob Bitchin
• Life begins at the end of your comfort zone
• I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying again – Michael Jordan
• Children are naturally curious, aren’t afraid to chase their dreams, see the funny side of situations, and are brutally honest.
• Kids in poverty can still laugh. Find the fun in everything you do, even when things aren’t going perfectly.
• You will either step forward into growth, or step backwards into safety.
• There’s no heavier burden than a great potential. – Linus
• It takes a lot of work and commitment to be great at something.
• At the end of your life you don’t want to say, “I could have”, say, “I did”.
• Decide not to be perfect – aspire to be better not perfect.
• What is failure? Failure is giving up. Failure is not trying.
• Focus on why you can do somethings, not why you can’t
• Attitude is a choice, being positive is a choice. Misery is optional
• Cherokee Fable: http://www.nanticokeindians.org/tale_of_two_wolves.cfm

Discussing Design without losing your mind – Adam Connor

The general gist: Critiques are an important part of the communication process in design. It goes beyond just providing feedback. It’s a skill that takes practice.

• Feedback is a broad concept.
• There are different types of feedback:
  • Reaction e.g. “Good lord! That’s horrible!” This doesn’t tell us much about the objectives.
  • Direction e.g. “You should have done this…” This takes a bit more thought, but it jumps to solutions.
  • Critique – This includes objectives and connects it with something in the design and presents a solution.

Rules of Critique

• Avoid problem solving – by diving into problem solving you miss the chance to gather ideas from a brainstorm.
• Everyone is equal
• Everyone is a critic – get everyone to speak up. Quiet people can throw off the dynamic because you don’t know what they are thinking and they may take those thoughts outside of the meeting.
• The person being critiqued is responsible for the next steps
• Goal is to identify opportunities for improvement
• Lead a critique with questions. Questions will remove assumptions and creates conversation.
• Some sample critique questions:
  • What was the creator trying to achieve?
  • What choices did they make to try to get there?
  • How did they try to achieve it?
  • How effective were their choices?
  • Why is or isn’t what they did effective?

Standalone Critiques

• Critiques don’t have to be formal.
• It should be part of an iterative process to improve the design
• Invite people from different roles to give critique
• Less than 6 people, less than an hour.
• Active listening – repeat back as you understood it.
• Round robin & quotas
• De Bono: 6 Thinking Hats: http://www.debonogroup.com/six_thinking_hats.php

Design Reviews With Clients

• They are difficult, because you’re looking to “sign off” on the design.
• If the client doesn’t see what they want, they will give a checklist of revisions. This goes against everything in a critique e.g. not focused on objectives.
• Try to get useful feedback from clients. Always reiterate goals and objectives.
• Take control of the presentation.
• Take the opportunity to set the stage and frame the conversation and recap objectives that were defined.

Set Foundations

• Agree on Personas – the user archetypes that you’re designing for.
• Goals
• Principles
• Scenarios – stories that include a use case and persona, thoughts and feelings as they move through the sequence of interactions.

Building an innovation program that engages employees and executives – Michele Marut

The general gist: Most companies don’t allocate time for innovation. Employees feel like they don’t have time to invest in new ideas. Executives don’t know how to evaluate ideas. AutoDesk created an Innovation Program that involves a “Lunch’n’Learn” with pizza, and applying learnings to a real project.

The problem:

• Employees pitch new ideas to executives
• Execs have budget constraints in mind
• Execs didn’t know how to evaluate ideas
• There is no existing framework for innovation beyond the product roadmap
• Executives felt threatened, because new ideas could take resources away from their projects.

The solution:

• Lunch n Learn with pizza
• Watch videos of available conference presentations
• Created a self service website for international employees to watch videos
• Coaching and office hours were available for follow up learning

Use Your Experience – Sandy Culver Plemmons

The general gist: Your skills could be of huge value to nonprofits looking to make a difference in the world. All small nonprofits struggle with budget and time to do anything properly when it comes to design and digital marketing. Build bridges where others see holes. Use your talents to make a difference.

Designing What Matters – Elizabeth Eadie

The general gist: You can benefit from being an outsider to your industry. In places where design isn’t prevalent, find ways to rock the boat. Start slow and see what people will tolerate.

• Teach everything that you know. Teach others how to appreciate design.
• If you’re not asked to speak, you should ask to speak
• Adopt allies in your company, people who are receptive to your ideas.
• Hire the best people that you can get your hands on.
• Fill your gaps, fill your blind spots
• Hire people better than you.
• Don’t hold back on teaching everyone
• Make a ripple, teach other people to ripple.

Wicked Ambiguity – Jonathon Colman

• There is no such thing as perfect. Stop being perfect. Perfection is a barrier to our progress and creativity.
• Fail as often and as quickly as we can.
• Reward learning, stop punishing failure.

Graphic Treasures From the American Underbelly – Aaron Draplin

The general gist: Aaron covered a familiar theme of seeking out amazing design from unlikely places. Learn from simple, timeless design pieces. Do things for the right reasons (not money). Make things you love and it will pay off in the end.

The session was too much of a spectacle for me to take notes. Aaron is the type of personality that the design world needs. A true master of the humblebrag.

The post Giant Conf 2015: Day Two – Sonya Looney, Adam Connor, Michele Marut, Sandy Culver Plemmons, Elizabeth Eadie, Jonathon Colman, Aaron Draplin appeared first on Select B.

I had some good feedback from people about the detail of my notes from day one at Giant Conf 2015. This was really down to how well structured some of the sessions were, especially from Scott Berkun and Kevin Hoffman’s sessions. Some of the other speakers spent a lot of time telling personal stories, which were awesome and inspiring, but I found myself only taking notes of the main point of the story and left out a lot of the detail.

Here are the rest of my notes from day one.

Pulling the breaks: fostering transparency, communication, and collaboration in design teams – Eduardo F. Ortiz

The general gist: Share everything you do. Put everything out in the public domain. The feedback you get will validate your ideas and process.

• Design in the open. – share tools, share artifacts, share documentation
• DOCter template for project documentation: https://github.com/cfpb/DOCter
• Empathy – Show empathy towards the community
• Collaboration – Collaborate with your users. Everyone can provide value.
• Transparency – Be honest with how decisions are made with your team.
• Align your team with a common goal.

Does this paragraph make me look fat? – Joshua Mauldin

The general gist: A beginners overview of the basic concepts in typography. Helvetica is over used.

• A typeface is a collection
• A font is a specific version of a typeface
• General typeface categories:
  • Serif
  • Sans-Serif
  • Slab-Serif
  • Decorative
  • Script
• Choose typefaces that represents the tone of the brand.
• Check for Multilanguage support, and support for oldstyle figures
• Sans-Serif usually work best for headlines. Serif is better for readability in print.
• Give enough leading/line-height to make it easy to read from line to line. You have to consider the readability on small and large screens.
• When pairing typefaces, try taking them from the same designer or the same historical era.
• http://www.sudtipos.com
• http://www.typography.com
• http://www.marksimonson.com

Through Burnout and Back Again: UX Skills that Saved My Life – Jaimee Newberry

The general gist: Love what you do because life is short. The design toolkit is there to solve problems. They can be used to dig you out of your burnout and help design your life. Don’t give up. Keep going and celebrate small wins.

• “All I want to do, is go the distance” – Rocky Balboa
• Understand the problem. Ask the right questions.
• Try different things to make the puzzle pieces fit together
• Design should be about finding solutions to problems.
• Example: Disney Magic Band – solved the contextual problem of having to carry stuff around the park such as credit cards, room key, ID.
• Book recommendation: The Power of Habit – Charles Duhigg
• Change habits by:
  • Trigger – Knowing how to identify the problem e.g. licking your teeth to know if they feel rough/dirty
  • Action – what to do about it e.g. brush your teeth
  • Reward – the outcome e.g. fresh breath
• Tiny Habits method to change your behavior: http://tinyhabits.com/
• Break down the habits into small tasks and tiny changes.
• “Celebrate the little things” congratulate yourself on what you do get done.
• Iterate
  • Watch fail or succeed, learn and then try again
  • It’s not about what’s next, it’s about what’s important
  • Test, tweak and revise

Infinite Possibilities – Denise Jacobs

The general gist: Creativity is a highly sought after skill for leaders. Everybody has creativity in them, but not everybody exercises it.

• A TIME poll found that 94% of people said that creativity was a skill they sought after.
• IBM study found that creativity is the most important leadership skill
• 80% of 6 yr old kids say they’re creative. By 16 only 10% of kids say they are creative.
• Amp up your creativity frequency with practice.
  • Come up with 10 ideas a day. They don’t have to be good ideas.
  • Train your brain to come up with ideas.
• How often do you actually listen to your own ideas?
• How often do you give them time and attention and actually doing something with them?
• You can choose to be creative. It’s not a guarantee that it will come, but you have a better chance than if you choose not to be creative.
• Fixed Mindset vs Growth Mindset
• Fixed Mindset
  • Believes in talent
  • Fears failure
  • Strives for perfection
  • Compares to others
• Growth Mindset
  • Believes in learning
  • Feeds curiosity
  • Self referential
  • Not afraid of failure
• Change from a Fixed to Growth mindset:
  • Listen out for your fixed mindset voice e.g. “I can’t do this, I’m not smart enough”
  • Realize you have a choice. If you don’t try, you fail.
• Adopt a beginners mind and always be learning.
• Release the tyranny of the expert. Don’t expect or try to know everything.
• Relearn from friends, rediscover the familiar.
• Experience flow: when you’re in a timeless, transcendent state with extreme focus.

The post Giant Conf 2015: Day One Session Notes continued appeared first on Select B.

Giant Conf is a design/UX conference held in Charleston, SC. It was pretty exciting to see it come out of nowhere, but still able to pull in an impressive roster of speakers in its debut year in 2014. I was there to experience it just a few months after I went to Austin for SXSW.

SXSW is an example of a conference that’s grown too big to be easily enjoyed without a ton of planning and fatigue. You have to meticulously plan out your days to make the most of it. You have to physically prepare for lots of walking around and standing in line to get into sessions. There’s also the stress of worrying that you might not get into the session you stood in line for an hour for. On average, I saw about 4 sessions a day.

With Giant on the other hand, I was able to roll into the Charleston Music Hall in the morning. Grab a free coffee and breakfast pastries, sit in the beautiful theater and listen to top draw speakers such as Aaron Draplin, Ethan Marcotte, and Jared Spool. With only 3 venues, each within a few minutes walking distance, I was able to get about 6-7 sessions a day.

Anyway…I was meaning to write about Giant last year, but life happened. One year later, I’m back at Giant Conf 2015, and this time I’m determined to get something written here. So here are my edited notes from the first 3 sessions from day one:

DISCLAIMER: These notes are from my own memory, understanding and interpretation of the content from the sessions. My note taking skills definitely deteriorated as the day went on.

You can read more session notes from day one in this post.

5 Dangerous Ideas For Designers – Scott Berkun

• The easiest way to be interesting is to be honest. If you value progress and want your team to create something truly great, then be honest with your feedback.

• Idea #1: Everyone is a designer

  • Design in the broadest sense is about finding solutions to problems/challenges
  • Book recommendation: Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design by Jane Fulton Suri
  • Don’t be elitist when talking to clients.
  • Everyone is a designer, but the vast majority are really terrible designers.
  • Be an ambassador for good ideas. The word evangelist has theological origins and assumes that there is only one right answer.

• Idea #2: You have no power

  • Generally, designers don’t have power. People who have power are those who seek it.
  • Designers are usually a small piece of the decision making process. True artists on the other hand are in full control of their work and don’t have to listen to anybody (edit: not sure if I totally agree with this, artists still have to please the gallery and other business entities)
  • Use less jargon. The person who uses the most jargon has the least confidence in their own ideas.
  • Job titles don’t mean anything. People don’t include you in meetings because of your job title, but because of the effect that you have on the process.
  • Different types of power:
    • Granted – power that is given to you by title
    • Earned – power that is earned through your actions
    • Claimed – power that is claimed because of a need e.g. designer entrepreneurs: http://designerfund.com/

• Idea #3: Generalists are in charge

  • CEOs and Presidents are generalists
  • If there are 5 people in a meeting, you have less power than you think
  • In-room power vs Out-of-room power: I think this is about the way decisions are made in meetings and the way people can influence those key decision makers before the meetings.
  • Learn to influence the human system.

• Idea #4: We all work in sales

  • No matter who you are, or how successful you’ve been…everyone has to pitch ideas.
  • Don Draper style pitching is bullshit. Charisma can’t sell bad ideas.
  • Designer’s sales tools: prototyping, meetings, presentations, etc
  • Learn the perspectives of people you don’t like.

• Idea #5: Creativity is a risk

  • We’ve romanticized creativity. There are plenty of myths about innovation and how we come up with new ideas: http://scottberkun.com/2013/ten-myths-of-innnovation/
  • Don’t use the word ‘Innovation’. The next time you hear someone used that word, ask “What do you mean by innovation?”
  • Those in power benefit from the status quo and therefore are resistant to new ideas.
  • Ideas get shot down: Idea Killers: http://www.ideakillers.net/
  • Inspiration only matters if behaviors change. There’s no point in being inspired by a book, speech or presentation if behaviors don’t change.
  • When was the last time you were uncomfortable? That’s what creativity feels like.

Better Meetings With Co-Design – Kevin Hoffman

• We have a lot of tools to replace meetings, but the tools are not collaboration. They are part of the workflow.
• Collaboration is when the whole is greater than the sum.
• One study showed that a predictor of the success of teams was meetings. Meetings lead to collaboration.
• Co-Design is a process that involves all the stakeholders e.g. leadership, users, designers.
• Requires people to be open to ideas from anyone. Anyone can add value.
• The bigger the team meeting, the more points of agreement have to be established.

• Always try to ask better questions:

  • Proud Inquiry vs Humble Inquiry (Book by Edgar H Schein)
  • Proud Inquiry
    • When a questions is asked because they want to tell you something. E.g. Do you want to go ice skating? I ask because I was an Olympic figure skater.
    • Asking questions with an assumption built-in. E.g. Did that experience make you feel angry?
  • Humble Inquiry
    • Example: How do you do?
    • Put other people’s emotions before your own.
    • Feeling questions: How did that make you feel? How do you feel about that? Vs Did that make you mad?
    • Motivation questions: Why did you do that?
    • Action questions: What did you do?
    • System questions, questions about the environment and context: What resources did you have?
• MTV Case Study
  • People watch live TV during award ceremony
  • Two types of viewer:
    • Lean-In Viewer: people who view on larger screens. Give more attention to the viewing experience.
    • Lean-Back Viewer: people who casually watch, may be looking on Twitter on mobile device. Might be doing other things at the same time.
  • Think about what people do before, after and during the awards ceremony. Can apply this thought to any platform where people engage.
• Discussion Architecture
  • Meetings should be designed.
  • What is the culture of meetings within your company?
  • Navigating conflict is part of the job. Conflict will always arise, so it’s best to deal with it head on in meetings.
  • Get to a decision point in meetings.

Practical techniques for Field Research – Brad Nunnally

• Technology will fail you. Make sure your test subject is comfortable using tools such as WebEx before the session.
• Take travel time into account.
• Small talk matters. It helps build a connection with the interviewee.
• When you’re interviewing someone, you’re in control. – Barbara Walters
• Keep energy levels consistently high throughout out the day. Take breaks to recharge your batteries.
• Your curiosity and sense of wonder is your greatest weapon as a researcher.

Read more sessions notes from day one.

The post Giant Conf 2015: My Day One Session Notes appeared first on Select B.

It’s not everyday you get a text from your wife telling you that she’s starting a nonprofit. In case you don’t know what that looks like:

My wife, Steffi, is a stay-at-home mom. She is a qualified attorney, but she spends her days looking after our two kids. It’s not uncommon for Steffi to declare to me that she’s starting something new. Usually she’ll announce something like, “healthy living starts tomorrow”. Or “lets get rid of Comcast”. Although she usually has the truest of intentions, more often than not, I know that her declarations aren’t going to have too much impact on me if I just smile and nod.

So my reaction to her announcement about starting a nonprofit was the same as usual. At least it was until she called me on my drive home from work to pitch me the concept. She told me that the nonprofit was going to be called, Birthdays for All. The lightbulb in my head turned on immediately. She didn’t really need to say much else, because I was already sold.

My first thought was a flashback to our daughter’s birthdays. We always wanted her to feel like she was the most important, special, and loved girl in the world on her birthday. We would spend so much time and effort into making it happen. So the idea of Birthdays For All resonated with me. Why can’t all kids feel the same on their birthdays? I know that the vast majority of kids aren’t as lucky as my own.

There are too many kids out there that don’t even get any attention whatsoever on their birthday. Could Birthdays For All help solve that problem?

That was a question that we were both willing to sink in a lot of time to answer. So we both got to work. She handled the business administration during the day, while I worked on the user experience, branding and web design. In less than a month, we launched the Birthdays For All website. We got the word out to our friends and family on Facebook and immediately started receiving donations and building our email list.

Thanks to everyone who supported us, we were able to buy presents to all the June birthdays.

It’s amazing how today’s technology allows us to take an idea and make it something real in no time at all. Here is a list of platforms that made it possible:

• Lucid Chart – for planning and wireframing
• BlueHost – web hosting
• WordPress – CMS
• Stripe – payment platform
• GravityForms – WordPress plugin to create forms
• MailChimp – for email marketing
• Facebook Ads – to get the word out

Please go and check out the website: https://www.birthdaysforall.org

Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/BirthdaysForAll

The post What happens when your wife tells you that she’s starting a nonprofit appeared first on Select B.

I just spent the last week at BBCON 2014, where I had the privilege of speaking with a ton of different nonprofit organizations about their websites and online strategy. With each nonprofit that I spoke to, I needed to find out the basic information about them. Since I was face to face with the people who work for the nonprofit, I gathered this information in conversation. I was able to hear directly from them about who they were, what they did, how they do it, etc. Most importantly, I got to experience their passion for the cause and why what they do is so important to the world.

Most donors won’t have the opportunity to speak face to face with the organization; to hear about them and see their passion first hand. They will rely on the organization’s website to give them the necessary information. I came across a common theme at BBCON, not many of the websites I went to did a good job of telling potential donors about their organization and making them care enough to want to support their mission. This is where the About Us page has an important role.

No matter how well established the nonprofit organization is, it still needs to tell the new visitors who they are, what they do, and most importantly why they do what they do.  The About Us page is where new visitors will turn to when deciding if they want to have a deeper relationship with the organization. These things are important to communicate on the Homepage, but the Homepage has too many other things to do to be able to do a good job of convincing a potential donor that the organization and its cause is worthy of their hard earned cash.

There are 5 things that I believe a nonprofit organization must have on their About Us page:

1. The mission statement
2. What they do
3. How they do it
4. The impact they have
5. Who they are

I started writing about each of these 5 things in detail for this blog post, but it became too long. So instead I’ll cover each one in a separate post, starting with writing the mission statement.

1. The Mission Statement

Obvious, right? Of course as a nonprofit you need to share what your mission is, but in order to set yourself apart from other organizations, you need to start with why your organization exists. For a deep dive into the power of “why”, pick up a copy of Simon Sinek’s book, “Start With Why”, or watch his TED talk on How Great Leader’s Inspire Action. If you don’t have time for either, just take this quote with you:

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it” – Simon Sinek

Why statements are inherently more difficult to compose than what statements, but they help people be inspired by a higher level of purpose.

As an example, the National Wildlife Foundation focuses on why they do what they do in their mission statement:

Inspiring American’s to protect wildlife for our children’s future

It’s ok to include some of the what or how when describing your mission if it helps you differentiate your organization with others. For example, Heifer International’s mission statement:

To work with communities to end hunger and poverty and care for the Earth

Of course, there are no rules when it comes to communicating your mission. You can stand out in other ways, such as jumping to extremes. For example, you can make a statement with extreme minimalism, such as TED’s:

Spreading Ideas

Or the extreme no-BS approach of Charity:Water’s

Bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations

Your approach will depend on the personality of your brand, but the key is to have this mission declared loud and proud on your About Us page. If your visitor can only read one sentence about your organization, it should be your mission statement.

Thanks for reading this post! If you’d like to be notified when I post the next 4 things to have on your About Us page, then please subscribe to this blog or follow me on Twitter.

The post 5 things nonprofit organizations need to have on their About Us page appeared first on Select B.

Whilst at SXSW 2014, I managed to glean some marketing tips and trends from nonprofit experts such as David Neff (@daveiam) and Beth Kanter (@kanter) at the Future of Nonprofits session held at the Driskell Hotel. Here are 9 tips and trends that I interpreted and tweeted:

1. Reach Gen-Z by getting content into smaller form factors. Mobile devices are the primary way that tweens use to access the Internet, so content needs to be adapted to smaller screens. That 19 page PDF annual report isn’t going to cut through the extreme amount of content accessible at their finger tips. Break up the content so that it is smaller and easier to digest with less time and attention.
2. The number of B Corps will rise. It may make more sense for arts/cultural organizations to register as a #BCorp versus a 501(c)(3). These organizations don’t have the same urgency and cause based stories that more traditional nonprofits may have. As a B Corp, they can still support the community but have more options to generate income.
3. Less fundraising, more marketing. Instead of directly asking for money, nonprofits need to focus on marketing their stories to draw people in and give them something to connect to.
4. Bring media back to social media. Nonprofits need to produce better videos, photos and infographics that people consume and share quickly. People love to share media, especially infographics, which allow people to process information much more quickly and get shared more than just text and images combined.
5. Listen out for micro-trends and micro-interests with tools such as @socialmention. Find out what people are talking about within your field and who your key influencers are who talk about your subject. Join the conversation in real-time, by talking about topics that are being discussed right this second.
6. Cultivate informal and network learning. Help the social media savvy millennials learn about your cause with your content, and target #philanthroteens to crowdsource motivation. This generation of philanthropic teens love to learn from their peers and their own discovery.
7. Capitalize on the joy of the internet. Put a positive spin on your mission and story. You can build support by spreading happiness. Even if your cause is difficult to talk about, focus on the success stories and try to find a humorous side.
8. Create more video content with @vineapp and @instagram. You don’t need big budget productions to show authenticity and your impact.
9. Listen to the needs of your supporters to keep them happy. Measure your donor retention rate and create a strategy to optimize by taking care of your biggest fans.

Thanks to the following who discussed these trends and topics at SXSW (sorry, I’m missing some names here):

David Neff (@daveiam)
Beth Kantor (@kanter)
Corey Pudhorodsky (@coreypud)
Rob Wu (@robjwu)
Mark Horvath (@hardleynormal)

The post 9 Nonprofit Marketing Tips and Trends for the Future appeared first on Select B.

This post is about the LESS CSS framework that is supposed to make CSS development quicker and easier. This is how it’s described on the official site:

LESS extends CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions. LESS runs on both the client-side (Chrome, Safari, Firefox) and server-side, with Node.js and Rhino.

LESS is MORE

So why is everyone so excited about LESS? Here are just 3 features to get your geek juices flowing:

Variables

Tired of copying and pasting the same hex color code throughout your stylesheet in multiple places? What if you need to change that color? Well, variables will save you some find and replacement time. Just define your variable once in your stylesheet once with an easy name to remember, then use that variable name instead of the color code e.g.

@primaryColor: #262262;
#contentPrimary h1{ color: @primaryColor;}

Nested Rules

I like to write my list-based menu styles with the parent container ID as my main identifier to determine the style of the menu. For example:
#wrapNav .menu{ list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0}
#wrapNav .menu li{ display: block; float: left;}
#wrapNav .menu li a{ display: block; padding: 0.25rem; font-size: 1rem; color: #333;}

That’s a lot of #wrapNav’s and .menu’s. We can write this in a way that makes more sense visually with LESS:

#wrapNav{
     .menu{ list-style: none; margin: 0; padding: 0;
          li{  display: block; float: left;
               a{ display: block; padding: 0.25rem; font-size: 1rem; color: #333;}
          }
      }
}

Mixins

Let’s say you have a set of properties that you want to keep consistent across multiple rules for different elements. For example, you want your border-radius to always be 3px. You can do this:

@roundedness: 3px;

.round-borders{
border: 1px solid #333;
-moz-border-radius: @roundedness;
-webkit-border-radius: @roundedness;
-khtml-border-radius: @roundedness;
-ms-border-radius: @roundedness;
}

.box{
color: red;
.round-borders;
}

.differentBox{
color: blue;
.round-borders;
}

If this has got you excited, you read more about parametric mixins, operations, color and math functions at lesscss.org.

How do I start using it?

This is where it can start getting complicated. LESS has to be compiled by a compiler to translate the LESS files into standard CSS. This can be done in 3 different ways:

1. Client-side. LESS can be compiled with JavaScript executed in the browser with the less.js script. This is the easiest to implement, but the slowest to render.
2. Server-side. This is the best for workflow and fasted to load, but I’ve heard it can be difficult to install on the server in some environments.
3. Local. You can use a free local compiler such as LESS.app which will convert your .less file into standard CSS . You can start using this method right now!

What do you think?

Is LESS totally awesome or is it a departure from web standards? Does it really speed up the workflow that much or is it a pain to remember the syntax? How do you think this would work in a collaborative team environment? What would your clients think? Could they care LESS?!

Feel free to discuss over lunch, around the dinner table or in the comments!

The post LESS CSS appeared first on Select B.