February 2008 - Posts
The great part about my job is that I get to work with a wide variety of so many nonprofit organizations. And from time to time you draw more of a personal connection to the things a nonprofit is doing. This post is about one of those connections.
I grew up in Jamestown, New York, home of the naturalist Roger Tory Peterson. As a kid, we used to make several visits each year to the Jamestown Audubon Center and Sanctuary. You could spend all day out there counting birds, bugs, snakes, turtles, frogs, flowers, squirrels, and woodchuck holes. And winters in Western New York can be rough so spotting a Robin was always a welcome first sign of spring.
Up the road a few miles in Ithaca is the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. The Lab is a nonprofit membership institution whose mission is to interpret and conserve the earth's biological diversity through research, education, and citizen science focused on birds. The Lab is also the home of the Macaulay Library, which has the largest collection of animal sounds in the world. The library has more than 160,000 recordings and a growing archive of natural history videos. And they are doing some really cool stuff online.
The Lab helps operate several online websites including All About Birds, eBird, and The Great Backyard Birdcount. The newest website is LivingBird.org. This is the online version of Living Bird, the Lab's member magazine that is published four times a year. They decided to publish the first online issue for anyone to view. Starting in April, they will be putting the newest online issues behind a login for members only. All past issues can still be viewed for free. The website was built using Blackbaud NetCommunity and not only looks amazing but also takes advantage of the Blackbaud NetCommunity API.
Now, some of you may be wondering why I'm devoting a bunch of time to talking about a website for bird watchers. Well, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, which tracks wildlife recreation, birdwatching is now a hobby of 47.8 million Americans. The birdwatching trend continues to grow as both hunting and fishing have been in decline. That's something worth chirping about. And it speaks to how nonprofit organizations often serve a very unique and distinct group of constituents.
The interesting thing about the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is how they have transformed themselves from a mainly research and conservation focused organization to also adding a sizeable membership base to help support these activities. The Lab has successfully done something many nonprofit organizations struggle with — get people to be passionate about what your organization does and be willing to support it loyally.
Many nonprofits struggle with what content to publish online and more importantly what types of content are valuable enough to keep constituents coming back for more. They key to solving this problem is to think like a constituent and create some personas around what would compel them to give their time and attention online. The staff at the Lab has clearly done their homework and I think they've done a great job on the new LivingBird.org site.
Birdwatchers want to see birds, get information about birds in their area, learn about new places to explore, and have an opportunity to read and share stories about something they are passionate about. The LivingBird.org website does an excellent job of combining content from the printed magazine and special web only content that includes amazing video and photographic content.
It's the kind of content that extends the experience into some new directions, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology used the BBNC API to make it happen. The talented web design and development team at the Lab built a variety of extensible parts for BBNC including the following:
Flash Video Player: A XML-based flash video player that is H.264 capable, delivering HD quality video over the Internet. The Macaulay Library already uses H.264 encoding for all of their videos. For the first time, the Lab can now deliver the library's high quality video online. Content managers can just add the URL of a simple XML file into the part and this will automatically feed the movies into the flash video player.
Lightbox Photo Gallery: A XML-based photo lightbox gallery that allows visitors to view selected photos online. Just like the flash player, the custom part was built to make it very easy for a content manager to prepare the XML of photos in the slideshow. The custom part does the rest of the work and generates the dynamic photo gallery. The part is all HTML and CSS based, so it can be styled any way the designer wants to display the content.
There are several other really cool custom parts that the team at the Lab also developed including an ad rotator for internal promotions and ads, Google custom search, and some other parts that help enhance the online experience. With all the talkie talk about open-this and open-that I think it's always worth showing real examples of a real open API in action. The LivingBird.org site is proof positive of one of many Blackbaud NetCommunity customers taking full advantage of our open API.
Beth Kanter is giving away a copy of People to People Fundraising at the Nonprofit Technology Conference next month. Beth will give it to the person who posts the best comment about using person-to-person fundraising strategies on her blog. A few people have already posted comments. So even if you don't win...there are some good ideas to read through.
Ted Hart has launched a companion website for the of People to People Fundraising over at http://www.p2pfundraising.org. There is a free enewsletter you can sign up for along with some more information about the book, the authors, and some forums.
Ted, James Greenfield, and I will be doing a book signing at AFP's 45th International Conference on Fundraising on April 1st from 11:30am to 12:30pm. (No word on whether or not this is some kind of April Fools Day joke.)
Next week I'll be blogging about a few new things, including the Blackbaud NetCommunity API, some promising online trends, and hopefully other things worth reading.
The launch of Blackbaud's new forums also means the launch of some new blogs. So I'm very pleased to unveil this new weblog, Connections, which will continue some topics from BlogBaud and other writing that I have done in the past. So, what's with the name? Let me try and explain...
One of my favorite television programs growing up was Connections, and it was hosted by science historian James Burke. The premise of the show was that innovation rarely happens in isolation, but instead it usually comes from a series of connected events. One episode explained the connections between the Normans wearing stirrups at the Battle of Hastings and how it led to the modern telecommunications industry of today. (Trust me, it's a lot more interesting than it sounds.)
Many years of first-hand observations have taught me two things: 1) History always repeats itself. 2) Success comes from a series of failures.
If you want to know what is going to happen next, then just look for the pattern in history it most closely resembles. (iTunes is just a repeat of the singles records market from the 50s and 60s.) And very often it takes a lot of trial and error before someone gets it just right. (Edison didn't invent the light bulb. He just improved on everyone else's failures.)
This was a theme that I picked up on in People to People Fundraising when trying to demystify the changing nature of online communities. There are patterns and trends that nonprofit organizations can look to in order to help understand where things are going. Sometimes it's as clear as day and sometimes it's as clear as pluff mud. So when it came to naming this new blog the choice was pretty clear.
This blog will be about making connections between where things have been, where they are now, and where they are going in the future. I'll be sharing some ideas, sharing some photos (like the one above), providing a sneak peek at Blackbaud solutions, and doing some out of the ordinary things every now and then. This will certainly not be the typical marketing puff piece platform masquerading as a personal weblog. That's not really my style anyhow.
So let's get started making connections...
(originally posted on BlogBaud)
Yesterday’s BlackBerry outage gave me a chance to catch up on some reading. (But let’s just keep that between me and you.) So here are some blogs and articles worth a look:
Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new blog called Brainstorm that I’ve added to my reading list. While all of the content isn’t fundraising specific it is always wise to keep tabs on trends in any area, especially higher education.
Todd Cohen - Todd gives his $0.02 in a post called “Storm brewing for nonprofits” that deals with the impact of a recession on the nonprofit world. This whole topic is springing up a lot lately and opinions vary on what it all might mean. What I think everyone would agree on is that if you’re waiting until something bad happens to prepare or change strategies, then it’s probably too late to avoid some problems.
The NonProfit Times - They pick up on an article from MarketingSherpa about “10 mistakes to avoid with email newsletters.” One tip not on the list is to remember to always have some form of “call to action” in your email newsletters. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an ask, but never miss an opportunity to drive action from an interaction. It could be a poll, a survey, or something else that engages more than just your constituents’ eyes.
Tim Davies - A straightforward “One page guide to Google Alerts” that should help anyone trying to measure the reach and awareness of their online efforts. I remember the days when you’d pay big bucks for a clipping service or spending hours in LexisNexis trying to research a topic.
Tech Soup - Beth Kanter continues to demystify Web 2.0 with her article called “Eight Secrets of Effective Online Networking.” This article is a follow up to “Determining Your Social Network Needs” that Beth wrote a few weeks ago. These are both worth spending some time reading, thinking, and discussing at your organizations.
Garrett Keating - A great three part series about writing custom parts for Blackbaud NetCommunity. Always good to see things out there in the wild taking shape. And it shows how blogs and Wikis can peacefully coexist no matter who’s publishing the content.
(originally posted on BlogBaud)
Blackbaud recently released the 2007 State of the Nonprofit Industry Survey and you can click here to download a copy. The SONI survey was conducted between July 17th and August 11th, 2007 and had a total of 1,140 respondents. All surveys and polls should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do provide some insight into a snapshot in time.
I have picked out a couple of interesting stats after having a chance to look through the results. Here are some findings from the “Technology/Internet Usage” section:
- 98.5% of respondents have a website.
- 92% believe a unified database is very important.
- 88% use their website to market their organization/educate the public.
- 68% use online fundraising tools.
- 67% believe that it is important to use email.
- 48% actively use online fundraising strategies (compared to 43% in 2006 and 35% in 2005).
- 29% see their websites as effective in achieving their Internet goals.
This is a similar trend from the 2006 SONI survey. And I think it shows that many nonprofits are still stuck in Web 0.5 or Web 1.0 mode when it comes to engaging constituents online. They believe it is an important communication channel, they are continuing to think strategically about using the Internet, but they still use it mostly for one-way communication.
The key dot to connect is that 88% of nonprofits believe the primary purpose of their website is to be a marketing device, but 71% of respondents don’t think they are meeting their Internet goals. Does that mean that they should just try harder at their online marketing efforts? No, that would be the definition of insanity.
Websites that are just brochureware or only used for marketing purposes belong in a museum. What about online advocacy, people to people fundraising, social media, volunteering, etc? That doesn’t mean that you can’t use the Web to clarify your message and inform the public, but it can’t be the end-all be-all raison d’être. Otherwise you really can’t complain when your online efforts don’t produce measurable and meaningful results.
The question then becomes: How does an organization move from a Web 1.0 presence online to a more Web 2.0 presence online? And how do you balance the marketing messages with the development programs? I’ll tackle the answer to those questions in a future blog post…