Connections : interactive design

Blackbaud NetCommunity API is for the Birds

Steve MacLaughlin — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 00:27:00 GMT

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.

Extreme Website Makeovers

Steve MacLaughlin — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 20:53:00 GMT

(originally posted on BlogBaud)

Before coming to Blackbaud in 2004, I spent many moons on the interactive design/information architecture/user experience/visual communication side of the world. So while I’ve been immersed enough in the technical bits & bytes to grok about it — my interest and passion has always been with the human rods & cones side of things.

A major focus when we started building our Blackbaud Interactive group was to provide a comprehensive set of design services. This meant bringing in a lot of talented designers with experience in both the for-profit and nonprofit world. I’m proud to say that we now have one of the largest and most experienced interactive design teams serving the nonprofit industry operating from both our Charleston and London offices.

Blackbaud Interactive recently began work on its 100th complete website redesign project built on NetCommunity. What started out as a new part of our overall online design services has grown dramatically. The team does a variety of redesign strategy, information architecture, usability testing, content analysis, creative concept and styleguide design, and other services for our clients. I thought I would share some important lessons learned to help organizations about to undertake any website redesign project.

Don’t Accept Blind Designs: There is still a practice of design shops offering to do “blind design” or “speculative design” in an attempt to earn a client’s business. This usually involves a design shop taking some thrown together or recycled designs and presenting them as part of their RFP or proposal. There might be some initial “ohs” and “ahs” but these fade once discussions start about a client’s goals, objectives, brand, etc. Good creative work never happens in a vacuum. Good creative work takes careful analysis, two-way discussion, and uses a proven process that brings the best ideas to the surface.

Don’t Design by Committee: A camel is a horse that has been designed by a committee. Committees often destroy the creative process because more minds don’t necessarily mean more great ideas. Groups of people have the tendency to pile on so many extras that the original concept collapses under its own weight. Getting buy-in from various stakeholders is important, but our experience has shown that making a single individual or small group responsible for approving creative concepts is the best approach.

Don’t Fall Prey to the NASCAR Effect: The homepage of a website is one of the most important parts of any online presence. And everyone wants to have their program featured front-and-center. This explains why the main page of so many sites resemble the front quarter panel of a stockcar. Lots of graphics, icons, links, sections, callouts, and content in a small space — all fighting for eyeball attention. If everything is important, then nothing appears important. Not to mention that their are actually some heuristics around how much is too much and what is usually just right.

Don’t Move All of Your Old Stuff: If you bought a brand new house, then you probably wouldn’t you just move all your old stuff in without doing some clean-up. Otherwise you end up with a great new place that quickly starts looking just like your old digs before too long. A site redesign offers a great opportunity to go through all of your content, images, etc. and give them all a good scrub down. In addition to any new information architecture or content analysis activities there should be some content cleansing. A good rule of thumb is updating or dropping any non-historical content that hasn’t been updated in eight months. Also check the website traffic logs for least visited pages that might need to be revived or retired.

Don’t Launch without a Soft Launch: Sadly, I’ve seen it too many times. After months of redesigning a brand new site comes the big public unveiling and within minutes someone finds a typo or a broken link or something worse. This usually happens because there wasn’t a soft launch of the website to certain key insiders and a select group of external constituents. Get a fresh set of eyes on the site before launching it to the rest of the world. Even the best designers and content authors develop a certain amount of “tunnel vision” from staring at the same pages for too long. They practice the coin toss for the Super Bowl. You should practice the launch of your website.

These are just some of the key pitfalls to avoid when launching your newly designed online presence. The website you save might be your own.