Blackbaud NetCommunity API is for the Birds

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.