Chart of APA for Progress site traffic

What we have above is a chart detailing the last six months of traffic for APA for Progress. In return for my volunteer work with them, I asked that I be able to blog freely about the site’s growth and how I did it on basically a very, very tiny budget.

Be aware that the time period in the chart above begins the day before Obama’s inauguration so there is no bump from the political campaigning of last year. Also, the group had a very low number of new blog entries on it and was unable to get a bump from the campaign. Site traffic has grown from 91 visits a week to an all-time high of 2,356 about two weeks ago. The site is probably going to undergo a summer slump as many students will be on vacation but I expect the traffic to grow again during the fall. At the time I found them, APAP had suffered the loss of a previous Drupal site and was temporarily on a WordPress site as a stopgap measure. In other words, they were simply like many other tiny nonprofits in terms of the transitory nature of their IT assets.

First, let’s list APA for Progress’s online and offline assets:

• Email list of around 3000 people
• Facebook group of 1000 people
• APAP’s Volunteer Executive Director does offline organizing with college campuses showing a film about Vincent Chin
• Extensive contacts with Asian American political figures and the Democratic party
• Overcrowded WordPress blog (way way too many widgets)

With little money and no traffic, APAP had to figure out how to maximize their current assets. I ran into them as a way to work off my Obama addiction. I decided that they would make a great lab for many ideas swirling around in my head as to how nonprofits should carry out their advocacy campaigns on the Web.

Over time, I’ve had to seriously rethink the role that nonprofits can play on the Web. Most of the time, nonprofits like to use Web sites to promote their mission and monetize their traffic. It’s basically a 20th century industrial model akin to radio and TV. The nonprofit broadcasts and the donor listens. The problem with this model is that it’s a guaranteed way of falling straight into the black hole of mediocre web design and low site traffic. There’s been a lot of discussion in the last few years given to email marketing and social media but primarily email and social media end up being used in the same way: to broadcast a nonprofit’s news and events. Just because your site has some moderate interactivity given you by an email vendor or your CRM, it’s not going to fundamentally change the nature of your site.

And unfortunately, much is made of social media’s ability to break up this model to the detriment of what I believe should be the cornerstone of a nonprofit’s online strategy: the Web site.  Social media (in this case, Facebook and Twitter) simply cannot carry the burden of the work. It cannot generate traffic on a consistent basis and relies all too often on the most mercurial of personal relationships. If your nonprofit has little penetration with the right digital media rockstars, it’s difficult to get your message out there. This is not to say that your nonprofit should NOT have a social media inititative. If your constitutencies include young people, you should definitely have a Facebook fan page or Facebook group for your organization. You CAN use Facebook to drive traffic to your site but mostly for increasing traffic to your already popular blog entries.

What APAP needed was a surefire way of generating site traffic without hoping on hitting a social media jackpot and absent a compelling event that would organically drive interest in a nonprofit like APAP that dealt primarily with Asian American politics. It’s difficult to raise interest in politics regardless of your ethnicity if you’re not in an election cycle.

Because of this, I had to think about the assets that tiny nonprofits have. All small nonprofits are mostly made up of a collection of people interested in working on a particular issue. Their main assets are their fundraising and community relationships. This means that you have to grow and nurture those relationships into an online design. I’ve got a couple of “theorems” about nonprofits as a result:

1. Nonprofits best serve as news aggregators due to their in-depth domain knowledge and consistent advocacy of particular public policy positions
2. They don’t have the ability to produce news content on their own easily and should use volunteers to help them out

These two observations have a strong impact on the way I believe nonprofits should create their sites in the future.  It suggests that nonprofits can use their staff to create a strong editorial “filter” on news items happening in their geographic catchbasin. It also suggests that they should use their existing community of volunteers to build out content that more closely matches their advocacy positions.

These observations simply hung in the air until I started thinking further about taking these observations and turning them into an operational plan that could be implemented into APAP’s website. After working on this blog for two years, I had learned a lot about SEO and was intrigued by the success of sites like the Huffington Post and Daily Kos. I thought to myself: what can be gleaned from those sites and be applied to nonprofits? Here are my simple recommendations that I think nonprofit websites should adopt from news sites.

1. Big headlines get clicks
   There’s no doubt that Huffington Post does an amazing job of organizing the front page of its site to cue readers as to the most important thing that they should click on.  This type of headline design originated from  drudgereport.com. In fact, I consider this to be Matt Drudge’s singular insight on website information architecture.
2. Pictures next to headlines get more clicks
   You’d think this was pretty obvious but it’s not. However, most commercial news site have adopted this as a standard. Great examples are Yahoo! News and MSNBC.
3. Big pictures next to big headlines get even more clicks
   If you need more data on this, I can give it to you but this is pretty much common sense if you accept the first two ideas.
4. Give people an anchor to look at — i.e. headlines with pictures
   This means putting all the big headlines and pictures into one area in a prominent portion of your Web site – just like the Huffington Post. You’re making it SUPER easy for the user to understand what he or she needs to click on. No more random clicking from users looking for the good stuff.
5. Aggregate the news for your nonprofit vertical
   Use the strong editorial filter function that is inherent in your nonprofit to rearrange the day’s news in terms of how it affects your constituency or policy goal. Act like your nonprofit cares about the world’s current events.
6. The order of presentation for your news is YOUR value added
   What makes your editorial filter stronger is the sense imparted to the reader that you are making it easy for them to imbibe your view of the world. This means you really mean it when your biggest 30 pixel high headline is really important.
7. Tag, tag, tag, and tag again
   Tags are one of the ways Google tries to understand your blog entries and pages on your site. Don’t forget this part. SEO is everything.
8. Magazine-style layout is the future of nonprofit web sites
   And ultimately, what you’re doing is creating a news magazine akin to Huffington Post. This is not the same as creating a newsletter. Newsletters aren’t done on an ad hoc basis like the front page of your website. They also don’t tend to aggregate news sources and are more about the internal operations of your nonprofit.
9. Timeliness is everything
   Like all news magazines, your website has to thrive on timeliness both for more referrals from Google search and for establishing a reputation as a competent and driven nonprofit directly immersed in the issues of the day.
10. Allow your users to blog on your site
    Yes, I know established nonprofits would fear this user-generated content the most. However, small nonprofits have very little access to paid staff and should consider this to be their secret weapon to establishing mindshare within their constituencies.  That is, when you’re broke, you should adopt user-generated content.

So ultimately, my earlier two theorems and these ten tips combined together into the current site design for APA for Progress. I understand that these strategies would create a fairly radical shift in the way nonprofits organize and distribute their communications. It’s a user-centered model built on serving users with content that doesn’t necessarily originate from the nonprofit. Indeed, most of the people creating the content are not staff.

This has tremendous ramifications for the way a nonprofit will organize itself on the web. With the informal and highly opinionated nature of most user-generated content, it’s probably a good idea to include a disclaimer saying that your organization doesn’t necessarily share the opinions of its bloggers. It also means the traditional role of a communications director moves less from creating press releases to more of a “business development” role asking other blogs and nonprofits in the same policy space to syndicate content from the site by either linking to it or republishing. It also means using your contacts to generate good “gets” — getting good guest bloggers or having important individuals participate in conference calls to your membership or in live video conferences. There are many different ways to use traditional PR means to get more traffic for your site.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a remarkably labor-intensive endeavor. Writing content and/or getting people to write for your site is time consuming. However, it IS free. And when you’ve got more time than money, this is a fairly clear way of getting your nonprofit out there. Oh, and how much did this project cost? Less than $600 for the Drupal redesign.

socialmarkets’ President, Jeff Tuller, is on NPR’s Marketplace today talking about socialmarkets. A differing opinion about socialmarkets is presented by Trent Stamp. One amazing thing we’ve found is that the people who actually like us the most are nonprofits themselves. We’ve found that the smaller a nonprofit is, the more entrepreneurial they are. As a result, we have five nonprofits listing on our site and none of them are over 15 million in annual revenue. Don’t forget this is an alpha release so we’re still testing assumptions, workflow processes and the user interfaces themselves. As we get more data, we’ll start tweaking the site to accommodate that strange thing known as reality.

And then of course, there are people like Trent Stamp. He’s welcome to share his opinion about socialmarkets but it’s funny for him to have offered one because to my knowledge at least, he’s never seen our development site or ever talked to us. It makes me wonder if the question given to him was specifically about us or some other question about the general quantifiability of social good.

One more thing you ought to notice? 11/21 is when we ring our opening bell. One of our volunteers, Rachael Barrett, has kindly donated a desk bell for us to push when we go live. Ring ring ring!

Update: Man, does our office have a lot of echoes to it! Please please please help us decorate our walls. We’ll take your suggestions and if you have kids, please have them draw their rendition of socialmarkets for us (and yes, we know it’s going to be shall we say, abstract). We will hang it up, take a photo and put it up at blog.socialmarkets.org.

Amongst 7,000 of my closest friends, here I sit at the opening of DreamForce 2007, the SalesForce.com extravaganza being held this week in San Francisco, (see http://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce). My quest: to figure out if this marvel of SAAS (software as a service) can live up to Allan’s devotion as a key element in his stack. (http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/more-about-my-stack-of-stacks). I always thought a stack was something best served with maple syrup, but anyway…

I will be interviewing customers with the singular question: Can you say mine works?, and if yes, or even sort of yes, what is it doing for you?

Something that we should all take to the bank: when SalesForce talks to the plenary, and when they talk to the special sessions devoted to the press and analysts, one-third of their success stories come from the nonprofit sector. When CEO Marc Benioff gave his keynote, the fourth point he made was to stress their corporate commitment to the 1/1/1 idea. (see http://www.salesforcefoundation.org/). They are serious about their commitment to philanthropy.

I am off to rub elbows with people to find out if their’s works.
Doug Yeager

[ED: Yes, folks, Doug Yeager is Non-Profit Tech Blog's first guest blogger!!! If you want to guest blog for me, send me e-mail at abenamer@nonprofittechblog.org.]

Ok, so you’d think the easy answer is… why not e-mail the document to them? They do. However, not all nonprofits have Internet access even in this day and age. Ok, so you think, there’s got to be a better way. Let’s set up a fax server and a document management system to watch over all these documents. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea. Heavy iron, new hardware, more IT toys. There’s some truth to this conventional solution. It’s probably a solution that we’ll be implementing anyway. However, it’s a longer-term solution dependent on larger capital funding. What can be done now? It looks like this IT guy is going to have to convince people of the necessity for Internet access for these smaller nonprofits.

However, the volume of faxing is probably asymmetric. That is, my org probably faxes a lot more than the smaller partners. For them, faxing is probably not the chore it is for us. Are there any goodies I can produce that will get them to REALLY want to get Internet access. Aha! So I’m thinking salesforce.com. What? You ask? How does salesforce.com enter into this equation? For that, we need to think about SaaS and what it really means and what’s in those faxes anyway?

I’m looking at the fax. They’re case files, that is, papers containing the whys and wherefores of how this client became in danger of being homeless and supporting documentation about how they were denied an application by the local city agency in charge of rental assistance. Fifty page case files are the norm. However, looking at the files, I see lots of structured data. Data that can be represented as fields. Fields that can show up in a salesforce.com implementation. That’s right, I’m building a case management system in salesforce.com. So… this means I can offer my fellow nonprofits a chance to interact with me in a meaningful way through data interchange. And because they can get their own copy of Salesforce.com, we can have two open systems talking to one another. Isn’t that really what faxing is all about? And in the process, they help themselves. We’ll probably ask these nonprofits to not only get Internet access but sign up for salesforce.com as well. Talk about market penetration on their part. I could never ask other nonprofits to do, say a Raiser’s Edge deployment just for solving my org’s problems. Sigh. Yet another lost opportunity for Blackbaud. At some point, this is all going to pile up and they’ll end up in a limited market while salesforce.com and its ecosystem gobble up nonprofit after nonprofit in precisely the manner I’m considering.

So that’s the quick and dirty vision of the eviction prevention application I’m building. I’m wondering though, does anyone out there want to volunteer for my org so they can get some experience building a Salesforce app too? If you’re interested, e-mail me at abenamer [at] nonprofittechblog.org.

There’s now an additional RSS feed available on this site. You can now get a RSS feed relating only to comments on the site. You can now also subscribe to comments via e-mail without having to actually post one. Even better, you no longer have to login to the site to post comments. I won’t be moderating them either as I’m hoping that the spammers can’t get past the CAPTCHA — the comments are all yours. If they do get past the CAPTCHA, then back to logins we go. You can also rate each others comments by click on the thumbs up and thumbs down icons at the end of each comment. Try it out!

Some things that may annoy you — I’m using sIFR technology. Basically, this site looks MUCH better if you’re Flash enabled. Go check it out. It may actually have an impact on your org’s next Web site (or not).

But let’s take that whole notion of “consumer philanthropy” and put that back in the Economy 2.0 space. Wouldn’t it be possible to move the hardest social services cases in the nonprofit sector over to the Web? And wouldn’t it take just a little more thinking to get people to donate to those cases, in effect, becoming a consumer philanthropist? We’re basically applying the network effect to donations and ending up with another shading on the notion of consumer philanthropy. It’s not so much big-money philanthropy but online retail philanthropy. Unlike Tom Watson, I can’t proudly herald the notion that “consumer philanthropy” is here. However, I think I know what consumer philanthropy 2.0 might look like…

We basically spent an hour looking at YouTube and Google videos both great and small and playing around with Windows Media Center’s Windows Dancer application. A videotaped dancer spins around like Mr. Clippy while you play music. The software tries to do beat detection on the song to synch up the video with your music. It’s pretty cheesy. It was obvious that we were totally geeking out and needed a public outlet to unleash the frustration of being an ubergeek with no place to go…

We used to work at Proxicom, a once-dead but recently revived Web consulting firm and we still had other contacts in the industry so Silvio did a lot of legwork and got them all together. Fantastic has been the only word I’ve used describe it. In some ways, a Geekout Summit is the total antidote to techie boredom. It’s pure nonmarket activity — knowledge sharing at its most collegial. Frankly, I haven’t blogged about the Geekout Summit because Silvio has put so much effort into it and didn’t want to be a budinsky about things but it looks its finally time to reach out beyond our original circles and try to get more geeks to come on by and discuss their obsessions.

I know nonprofit techies have a lot of obsessions so here are some ground rules (for those you are who such ubergeeks they need Powerpoint to discuss things)

1. Use Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule of Powerpoint. No more than ten slides, no longer than twenty minutes and no font smaller than thirty points…
2. Please use humor in your presentation. Ideally, you ought to be able to take a step back from your obsession and recognize it as such. Hey, self-reflexive geekdom is much, MUCH cooler than the uh, normal kind.
3. Visual aids are MUCH better than presenting the audience with a bunch of XML/RDF code. I mean, that’s VERY sexy and all, but think of this as a show and tell to a college-educated crowd.

Some uber geek topics we haven’t seen yet: space elevator, cosplay, nerds who know how to hack automobile software, discussion of the technological singularity (“rapture of the nerds”), LOTR, geocaching, VOIP, VXML, latest nerd glossary as it applies to TV series fandom, turntablism, your best Weird Al impression, Roomba mods, etc. etc. If you’re a Make magazine reader (or even better, you’ve submitted an article) then come on down. If you read Gizmodo’s Low End Theory column and you wanna show off some decidedly low-tech piece of crap, come to the next one too.

Things you can do with manseo

If you would like to add your own links in the future, please go to the MANSEO search page. At that page, you can add yourself as a contributor.

Google provides Google Marker so you can add a site just by clicking a link on your toolbar. Check it out. It works just like del.icio.us and all the other social bookmarking widgets.

You can add manseo to your Google homepage by clicking on . It’s pretty slick.

I took the entire Nonprofit Blog Exchange blogroll and my previous non-profit technology websites and rolled them up into one. I then went through and added refinements to the blogs. This means that I had to go through the entire list of sites and categorize them based on the following categories:

• for_fundraisers
• for_marketers
• for_techies
• for_managers
• for_advocates
• personal_blogs
• nonprofit_advocacy_blogs

I think additional refinements can be created by contributors to manseo but I don’t know that for a fact. If you wish suggest refinements, you can always e-mail abenamer['at']nonprofittechblog.org.

I’m not quite done yet but I think I’ve only got 20 blogs left to categorize. I’ve also started playing around with the AJAX Search API that is now able to access custom search engines. I have to say it doesn’t work so well but you can take a look at it by going to the future manseo page.

Update (11/18/2006):
179 links are now in the search engine. There are now six collaborators to the engine. There is also a Google Group for manseo.

http://ext337.org

http://www.getactive.com

http://www.groundspring.org

http://www.blackbaud.com

http://www.convio.com

http://www.kintera.com

http://www.footholdtechnologies.com http://www.footholdtechnology.com

http://www.cvm.org

http://beth.typepad.com/

http://www.techsoup.org

http://www.onew.org

http://www.npower.org

http://www.nten.org

http://www.nonprofittechblog.org

http://nten.typepad.com/

http://michaelatmo.blogspot.com/

http://brianglass.blogs.com/

http://blog.deborah.elizabeth.finn.com/blog

http://www.todayicried.com/

http://www.zenofnptech.org

If you have any suggestions for more sites or would like me to add yours, e-mail me at abenamer['at']nonprofittechblog.org. I’m all for expanding the search engine to include more resources for nonprofit technology workers. And look! There are vendors on the list! Whoever said I was vendist? And no, that wasn’t me who added that flickr tag to the nptech RSS feed.

Update (6:51 PM 11/08/2006)
I just added:

http://www.democracyinaction.org

http://www.sagenonprofit.com

Update (6:13 PM 11/09/2006)
I just added:

http://www.compass.net

http://afprc11.blogspot.com/

http://www.zeidman.info

Update (8:14 PM 11/09/2006)

http://www.wildapricot.com

Update (10:41 AM 11/09/2006)

http://www.picnet.net

http://www.nonprofitsoapbox.com

FINAL UPDATE (11/13)
This search engine has been deprecated in favor of manseo.

Hi everyone,

Is anyone interested in creating a closed forum for frank discussion of vendors? I’d like to keep it only for nonprofit tech workers only (verified by e-mail originating from a domain run by a 501c3). I have a ton of RFPs coming out and I want to know about other nonprofits’ experiences with their IT vendors as well as other things besides…

It seemed innocuous enough or so I thought (naively). Well I started a fairly controversial (at least to most vendors and consultants) e-mail thread. In general, it seems vendors think that we’re going to whisper behind their backs in the closed forum and use it for bitch sessions about them. Another consultant even took the absurd position that an open e-mail list was much like a peer-reviewed journal that would be more reliable in information. Hey guy, even peer-reviewed journals make mistakes. Some even claimed that were vendors to do what I proposed it would be called price fixing. These attitudes are so misguided I’ve given up trying to respond. I’m just disappointed that our reputations stand so low with our vendors and consultants that the first thing they think about a closed forum for nonprofit tech workers is how unprofessional we supposedly are.

However, most of the tech workers and rightly so, seemed to think that it was just a good idea.

You see, nonprofit tech workers have a bit of a problem. We don’t always have the time to make great RFPs nor do we have the time to know our vendors. We use software packages that are unique to our sector alone from Blackbaud’s Raiser Edge to Fund E-Z to CitySoft. Worse, we don’t have forums where the membership is comprised only of tech workers. There are no slick magazines like CIO, InfoWorld or NetworkComputing with tons of information about nonprofit software and nonprofit tech vendors. Worse, we don’t have a way to share what we do know in a private way with our peers.

What we do have are the 501tech lists hosted by NTEN. Unfortunately with our vendors also there with us, it leads to odd, stilted conversations where everyone clams up about their vendor relationships. Nobody feels comfortable sharing a frank conversation about their vendors especially with the vendor and the vendor’s competitors listening in on the conversation.

Well, it’s about to change: there’s a new NTEN affinity group that is open only to nonprofit tech workers whose e-mail addresses are originating from a .org and whose organization is a 501c3. I will personally verify your membership by calling your workplace. If you are interested in joining the e-mail group, please go to the nptechhelp sign-up page. After membership is verified, you can start posting.

Sorry, membership is limited only to nonprofit tech workers who are currently employed by a 501c3. Exceptions will be made on a case-by-case basis but only after consultation with the list. These rules I’m sure will change in the future especially if we start adding nonprofit tech workers outside the US but we’ll work that out as we go along.

And if you have any questions about this issue in general, feel free to send e-mail to abenamer['at']nonprofittechblog.org.