Tonight, I got to listen to a marketing class over at St. John’s college over in Queens, New York discuss the use of social media and how it would apply to Autism Speaks (I work there now as their Web architect). They were just as immersed in it as much as anyone else and they were all so very young (at least to this 41 year old). It’s amazing to me how quickly popular culture has picked up on social media. It’s only been five years since work started on Twitter and notice the use of “140 characters” as a lyric by a boy band.

And I think the readers have so far voted Perla Ni, head of greatnonprofits.org, to be the ultimate game changer. I’d like her to keep that lead and to do so, I urge you all to consider throwing in a vote. She’s trying to create a Yelp for Nonprofits which is sorely needed in the nonprofit world. Any time I see someone promoting democratic oversight of nonprofits, I’m all for it.

Drupal is very good at building complex websites that can vault a nonprofit past brochureware or a blog and into the position of being #1 on your subject matter. I’m sure Joomla can do the same but there are certain Drupal practices and modules that can fundamentally alter the balance of power between your nonprofit and the competition. If your nonprofit is interested in being the biggest and baddest Website on the block and in winning your vertical, I’m pretty convinced that Drupal is the technology that can take you there. Don’t get me wrong, I still love WordPress for smaller nonprofits but once your nonprofit has started to do multi-user blogging or if your nonprofit is very aggressive in the online space, you can’t really take WordPress in that direction. However, there are caveats. You WILL need dedicated staff or retain consultants to maintain the Drupal beast. It’s not cheap.

It’s important to note here that I support the use of Acquia Drupal instead of the regular Drupal distribution that you normally find. Acquia is the company that is dedicated full-time to Drupal development in much the same way Automattic supports WordPress development. They have created a customized distribution of Drupal called Acquia Drupal that bolsters Drupal’s ability to become a community website.

Here is a quick comparison of the feature sets between WordPress and Drupal that you should be aware of.

Ok, here’s some typical information architecture nomenclature that you’ll need to learn in order to discuss these strategies with a Web designer. Note: if your consultancy’s designer doesn’t know what you’re talking about, ask to see an information architect. If they don’t have one, they’re probably not right for your nonprofit redesign.

The river

The river is that stream of posts that you normally see in blogs. You can see this in effect on this blog with the blog entries listed by date from newest to oldest.

The (endless) queue

This is derived from a Drupal module called “nodequeue”. It basically allows you to order articles at will in whatever order your editors so desire. You won’t need a user to go in and manually hack out some HTML to make headlines for all the other blog entries on your site. In other words, it’s a human-powered headline builder for your website.

The teaser

This is the first few lines of the article used by Drupal and by WordPress to entice users to click on a link to that article.

The teaser thumbnail

This is the picture that accompanies the teaser. I also use teaser thumbnail videos but that’s a much more advanced tactic that I’ll discuss in another article.

Your Strategies

Nonprofit strategies mentioned in Part I that fall underneath the purview of a Drupal installation include (listed in the order that it would be encountered by the average reader):

• Magazine-style layouts
• News aggregation
• Editorial filtering function
• Blogging community

Key modules we will be discussing will be blog, imagecache, nodequeue, Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views. These modules constitute the core of any good Drupal community site as together they allow for a nearly infinite level of layout customization. CCK and Views are a profoundly powerful aspect of Drupal but they require a high level of technical knowledge to use properly. CCK allows you to create customized blog entries in which certain fields are used to specifically fill in portions of a magazine layout like the teaser thumbnail Views are a way in Drupal to customize the ordering and layout of specific pieces of content on your Web site. Those of you who have used report builders in Raiser’s Edge or Crystal Reports will be surprised that there is now the same capability in a CMS. Learn more about Views here. For those of you in Joomla world, CCK and Views don’t have any equivalents although there is something in beta that is rolling out.

Magazine-style layouts

Magazine-style layouts in Drupal are basically concerned with the layout of content comprised of a teaser, a teaser thumbnail, meta information like the name of the author and date, and the article itself. Let’s take a quick look at a typical “design pattern” for the headlines section of a web newsite.

Typical News Headline Design

It’s almost impossible to build this into a WordPress design consistently because WordPress has no built-in facility to automatically resize and crop images to fit into a specific size. WordPress is wonderful at one-blog-entry-at-a-time posting. However, a magazine style layout will require the ability to reformat and resize content into an existing template. WordPress doesn’t have that capability. By using CCK, Drupal allows developers to customize blog entries that a user fills out which can then be reformatted to fit an existing template. In essence, you can make a magazine lay-out composed of blog entries. In fact, the APAP web site is a perfect example of this, you’ll notice that an image is repurposed as a teaser thumbnail and as the lead image on many of the articles there. That’s only possible because of the imagecache module which allows for the dynamic resizing of your pictures depending on its position in a page. When you combine this all with Views, you have the groundwork for an automated news magazine website built entirely by your user community.

News aggregation

Your nonprofit will have to create personal blogging environments for its staff. This is where social media is remarkably useful and I wholly endorse THIS kind of use. Basically, you open up a Twitter account and start following other Twitterers who are in the same policy area as your nonprofit. You can also set up RSS feeds to do the same thing. Between Google Reader and Tweetdeck (I use Twhirl), you can have a fairly robust set of news items flowing into your desktop in real-time. Your editors can then pluck the necessary items from their feeds and write about it on the site. APAP has gotten a lot of hits using this process and has eventually gotten good search engine results page (SERP) rankings over time. This is crucial to building up your PageRank. When I started working with APAP, it was at three and now it’s at five. It’s moving up in the world. Also, it’s old Website Grader score was in the low 30s. It’s now at 95.5 indicating that we’re pushing up at the top of what’s available in terms of SEO but I still have a few tricks left up my sleeve to push that up higher.

Editorial filtering function

This strategy requires nonprofits to get their head wrapped around using their expert domain knowledge to filter out news items for their users. Once nonprofit management understands this, you need to implement this in Drupal. Here is the design pattern you should follow for this strategy.

Aggregate Your Headlines With a Nodequeue

What you are doing with an editorial filtering function is two things: your nonprofit is telling your users what it thinks is incredibly important to read with one big headline and your nonprofit  is shaping content based on site traffic using your queue.  Basically, your editors can see what is getting read by users in real-time and then adjust the queue accordingly. This is how the “Top Five” section gets reordered every day by editors on the Asian Pacific Americans for Progress site. If a post is in the river and starts getting traffic, we push it up to the Top Five to accelerate that process. The three modules you need for this is nodequeue, Views and imagecache.  The nodequeue module should be installed so that your editors can reorder the queue to suit their taste but the Views module is how you present the queue to your users. Imagecache is useful to dynamically resize your pics to fit the different layout options you can give yourself.

Can you do this in WordPress? Oddly, before I even heard about what nodequeue and Views could do, I actually had a crude node queue running at asianamericansforobama.com. With the help of another techie volunteer, we wrote a nodequeue-like piece of code that reordered the WordPress loop so that it would highlight the ten headlines with different colors and points sizes. This is why you see the large Huffington Post-style headlines over at that site. It wasn’t an easy kludge either and was prone to a problem wherein users would add too many posts to the queue. I very much prefer nodequeue over our WordPress hack.

Blogging community

Multi-user blogging capabilites  are available out of the box with Acquia Drupal and it’s fairly easy to simply turn on the blog module. This blog module is so attuned to a multi-user blog format that it has to be differently configured for single-user blogging. There’s even room to support distinct RSS feeds for every blog generated by every user. While Drupal can be extremely maddening at times, this is one of the things it gets incredibly and totally right.

In the end, your blogging workflow should look something like this:

Information Workflow

Basically, information from the outside world gets sliced and diced by your staff, which in turn, gets turned into user-generated content by your community.

Your Mission Should You Choose to Accept It

I don’t think you should go out and set up a Drupal site tomorrow. In fact, if you already have a Joomla site, there’s a good chance you can do this as well. What I do think is that nonprofit managers and techies should  work together to iron out these sorts of information architecture issues. Simply by improving the ability of the user to focus on important headlines, APAP generated a 10.73% increase in time on site while simultaneously seeing a 19.62% increase in absolute unique visitors during the month immediately after these changes were rolled out. To grow in site traffic yet improving the length of  each reader’s engagement with a web site is pretty hard to do. Generally speaking, any growth in site traffic tends to mean a decrease in average time on site. However, we were able to forestall that from occurring with the new information architecture redesign.

An alert reader has asked me for a chart on the effect of blog entries on site traffic. I took the time to create a little data table from the Google Analytics reports for APA for Progress. Please be aware that the Jun-09 figures were run on 6/22 so the figures are incomplete for June. These figures run from 1/1/2009 to 9/31/2009. In essence, I’m adding 3 months of extra data.

As you can see in the chart above, there’s a high correlation (.883) (previously .945) between the number of blog entries and the level of site traffic. There’s also an even higher correlation (.903) (previously .820) between the number of blog entries made per month and the number of Google searches that drove users to the site. The correlation numbers have switched mainly because some of the original content on the site in the last month turned out to be tremendously popular and generated a lot of social media buzz. That drives the correlation figures down and especially so for the correlation between blog entries and site traffic. That the correlation got even stronger between blog posts and Google traffic pretty much validates my thinking about blog posts, SEO and Google search traffic. Blog post volume does more to enhance your Google search traffic than it does to enhance your general site traffic volume. However, if your content quality goes up due to the practice involved in making posts and strategizing that comes with it, don’t be surprised to see your site traffic rise in an uncorrelated way with your blog post volume.

The lack of external events makes this data set almost the perfect illustration of a pure SEO play. Properly tagged blog entries with good metainfo will basically cause Google to better index your site. In turn, it will drive more traffic to your site, thus generating more loyal readers. This is because visitors do stay after hitting the site through a Google keyword search. They tend to accumulate on the site and get used to visiting it every so often. Think of Google as a way to give your website a shot at presenting itself to new users. In effect, each new blog entry complete with tagged keywords, is a way to hook more visitors into your site. The more attempts you make, the more likely you’ll be able to snag users into your traffic stream. And the more likely you can add these users to your blogging community. This should result in a workflow that looks like this:

Suggested Blog Workflow For Nonprofits

So here’s my thinking: I don’t think it really matters whether a nonprofit blogs to update a site. As long your posts conform somehow to already mentioned guidelines for building out your site, I’m pretty sure that if your nonprofit has the resources to post 2 or 3 times a day with its own people that it could eventually manage a similar growth pattern.

Here’s the kicker: most nonprofits don’t have the resources to post two or three times a day to their website. However, their volunteer base does. And this is why I believe blogs are essential to cash-strapped nonprofits. It allows you to get a chance to do multiple posts to your website with minimal cost. I don’t see how APA for Progress would ever have been able to sustain this torrid pace over six months without a blogging community. They’re set this month to break their monthly records and probably end up with around FOUR posts a day due to the addition of new bloggers in recent months.

Of course, the harried nonprofit manager will probably say that you’ll end up with new headaches as your try to fit your new bloggers into your existing communications strategy. Agreed, but first things first. Which problem would you rather have? The problem of managing of thriving a blogger community for your nonprofit or the silence that accompanies your nonprofit’s web initiatives? I opt for the noise.

Check out Animoto for a Cause! I’ve been a long time user of Animoto and I’m actually a paid subscriber to Animoto. I’ve had a lot of fun working with their software to make vacation videos out of pictures I’ve taken.  The way Animoto works is that you upload a bunch of pictures to their site and perhaps an MP3 for a soundtrack and their software creates a video out of your media. For nonprofits, this is a godsend especially since most nonprofits don’t have dedicated staff for making sophisticated multimedia. The time it takes to upload pics and video is nothing like the time necessary to create and edit a video. I highly recommend this software for nonprofits that hold frequent special events and want to promote them on their site. You can upload the video to YouTube and then embed it on your Web site for an instant promotional video of your work.

 Here’s the PR blurb from Animoto itself:

Video creation platform Animoto® (http://animoto.com) today released Animoto for a Cause (http://animoto.com/cause), giving non-profit organizations and community activists free and unlimited access to the full range of Animoto’s services, both standard and premium. Animoto is the web application that lets anyone quickly and easily create dynamic, professional-quality videos from their own photos and music.  Now organizations can use the service to promote their cause online in a multitude of ways, from posting and sharing videos on websites, YouTube and social networks, to downloading them to DVD for distribution at events.  Animoto for a Cause launches with more than 20 participating charities, ranging from national to regional, and applications are now being accepted from qualified organizations, groups, individuals, non-profits, and activists. 

 

This is the second part of Build A Nonprofit’s Technology Assets From The Ground Up, Part 1 OF 2. In this post, I talk about the website tiers of the Maslovian hierarchy of nonprofit technology needs for the small nonprofit. Unfortunately, this article about a nonprofit website is so long that I’ve decided to expand the series to one long posting for each of the website, CRM and social media layers in the pyramid. And that’s why this series is now four parts long and not two. 

Website

Why do I make having a website more important than a CRM? You need Web traffic first to get people to even read about your wonderful mission and programs.  The amount you raise for your nonprofit online will be a function of how much traffic your website is receiving. If you have a significant offline presence OR you already have a legacy donations management program in place, then you can switch this layer out for the CRM. This is where your work at the lower levels of the pyramid will start to pay off. A great mission, competent staff and a rock-solid network will definitely put you in position to work on your website. Most nonprofit missions usually have an educational and policy advocacy component to them. Your progress towards this portion of your mission can be measured by using website traffic numbers. Your website is also the demarcation point where you turn your previous investment in IT resources into something approaching revenue generation.  Yes, that’s right, I’m urging nonprofits to make sure that their IT efforts can actually make money for them.

Driving traffic to your website and then monetizing it will take a lot of design and analytics work. Unfortunately, nonprofits seem to be more concerned with how their website looks as opposed to how it functions. I urge you to flip those two priorities around in your head. You are spending hard earned donation dollars on your website. You owe it to your donors and your fundraising staff to maximize performance from your website. Some small nonprofits do incredibly well on the Web, if you’re reading this post, this is probably not you.

Design

Design always seems so simple. It’s the most visually creative and can garner all sorts of feedback from the stakeholders in your website from program managers to fundraisers to your donors. Before you start, be aware that making and designing a web site for a re-launch is relatively easy. The number one thing for all your stakeholders to remember in Web design is: it’s not about you. Your favorite color may be blue and you may love the font Helvetica but that doesn’t mean those are design choices that should be imposed on your nonprofit’s website. 

I strongly recommend that you read this book called The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites (2nd Edition). You don’t have to go through the whole thing but you should definitely read the first few chapters of this book. The book is intended to help you understand how websites are supposed to be designed and implemented from a design and usability point of view. Good design is key and you should certainly shoot for  the strong graphical quality of the websites listed here despite what I have to say about them.  Being a good looking website has all sorts of benefits to it like getting people to buy into your mission and then having them trust your donate button (if they get around to that).

Be aware though that design is only the beginning of this process. Frankly, it will merely start off your website but it will not be the thing you’ll be doing on a daily basis with your website. That’s what analytics is all about.

Analytics

Analytics is the art and science of looking at website traffic data and then implementing changes to your website in order to improve that website traffic. If you do it right, it will improve the articles you write for your website, the textual ads you place on other websites as well as how you serve your community on the web.

I suggest that you start with this book: Web Analytics: An Hour a Day. Both myself and Beth Kanter took a look at this book and found that it was extremely useful in understanding web traffic. I was already pretty into web analytics before the book and it served to validate techniques I was already using. Learning from this book will give you a huge leg up on improving your website traffic.

Many of the lessons I’ve learned on making a nonprofit website has been from my experiences managing nonprofit websites. To that end, if you want to see what I mean by managing traffic, please check out the traffic statistics for these three websites I’m currently managing for fun: asianamericansforobama.com and apaforprogress.org. and even this blog.

Analytics should take up several hours a week at first when your website is launched/relaunch. It’s akin to a video game where your Web analytics tools will give you daily feeback about your site’s design and content. Every new piece of content gives you yet another chance to connect to your Web audience and to rejigger the way you approach your mission. It’s like a grand experiment that takes place day after day. Unleash the mad scientist in you.

If you’re in the NYC area, please visit Mobile Tech For Social Change NewYork. It’s a $25 Barcamp over in Manhattan:

Event details

• A one-day event on Saturday, 21 February 2009 in New York/Hunter College’s ‘Black Box‘
• Exploring mobile tech to advance social development and social change goals  
• Interactive, particpatory, hands-on
• For anyone interested in how mobile phones are changing the way we

 

And no, I don’t know how that last bullet item ends. Think of it as a mystery you can solve by attending. It’s a pretty cheap event and I think it’ll be fun to watch what people are up to.

It’s always nice to see techies doing front-line work. From the UN Foundation:

Télécoms Sans Frontières’ (TSF) began humanitarian calling operations in Matanda, a transit camp situated 30 kms from the Congolese border where an estimated 10,000 people are sheltered.

The team also installed a satellite based Internet connection for aid agencies in Kihihi, a small town turned into a humanitarian base camp 30 minutes from Matanda. At present, aid organizations such as UNHCR, UNICEF, WFP, MSF, Oxfam, Save the Children or ACF are working to provide help to those who have lost everything after fleeing the fighting in Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

In less than a week, over 15,000 more Congolese refugees crossed into Uganda bringing the total number of refugees from the recent combats to almost 60,000. Initially located in Ishasha right at the border, the refugees were quickly moved as Nkunda rebels were approaching.

Check it out.

Above is a screen shot from Forbes.com. Check out the #1 most searched for item on the site. I find the word “charities” interesting as it is used interchangeably with the word “nonprofit” here in the US. I decided to take a look at a Google Trends comparison between the two terms. Check it out:

I’ve marked up the interesting peaks for the word “charities”. The first two arrows point to the 2004 tsunami and Hurricane Katrina disasters. The other arrows point to the seasonal peaks in giving every year. Clearly, that’s what we’re seeing when Forbes shows “charities” as its #1 search term.

For extra credit, I ran this Google Trends search and limited it so that it only covered searches in the US. You’ll find that there is an even more stark comparison between the two terms during times of disaster.

The lesson is: Yes, you are a nonprofit but use the word charity if you’re the kind of nonprofit that is sought after during disasters.

The news business however prefers to use the term nonprofit over charities. There are many more news items with the word “nonprofit” in it than there are items with the word “charities”.

In the last four years, search volumes for both terms have steadily dropped while the number of news items about nonprofits and charities have risen. I think this is attributable to the general economic downturn we’ve been seeing but it may also be that people are looking to particular web sites and simply using old bookmarks when they seek out charities.

If that second thesis is true, nonprofits that don’t have significant web presences are going to see diminishing returns as users start to home in on their preferred web sites when their need to contribute to charities rises. It’s hard to tell without more data than just a Google Trends chart but it’s certainly something to see if it holds in the future. All we really need is an economic recovery (not likely right now, I know) so we can see if the decrease in search volume continues. I’d love to hear your comments.