Here at Beaconfire, we’re as excited as anybody about Web 2.0 — but the good-old-fashioned listserv is the online community of choice for those with serious activist inclinations, at least environmental activists.

That’s the conclusion of a study we’re releasing today called Network of Networks: Email Lists, Nature Protection, and Pollution Control. After monitoring 64 environmental listservs for about six months and surveying the subscribers, we found that these groups are hotbeds of civic activism and social networking. Subscribers reported extraordinarily high participation in a wide variety of behavior such as writing Congress, calling radio talk shows, attending public hearings, and giving speeches — and they said they placed high value on the listservs’ role in helping them stay in touch with peers.

Of particular note for nonprofit organizations, concerned citizens formed many of these groups on their own initiative without any assistance or participation from a formal organization, and participants on most of these lists pay little attention to the activities of the national environmental groups. Those national organizations that figure out how to overcome this gap and successfully engage with these outspoken citizens stand reap some big rewards.

Download the report: Network of Networks: Email Lists, Nature Protection, and Pollution Control

Beaconfire’s constantly thinking about new technologies and techniques for outreach to our client’s advocates, donors, volunteers, staff, etc. Typically, though, we’re focussing on real-world consitutents. I must admit I haven’t given much thought, until today, about outreach to virtual constituents. An eye opening blog posting by Nedra Weinreich changed that. Nedra posts her interview with John Anderton, who is responsible for bringing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to Second Life (the virtual world with nearly 5 million “residents”). What are other nonprofits doing in Second Life?

• American Cancer Society raised $40,000 with a virtual walk-a-thon in Second Life.
• Friends of the Urban Forest allows you to plant a virtual tree to help their program to plant real trees in San Francisio.
• Commonwealth Island in Second Life consists of a “rugged, coniferous island housing several nonprofits, including Greenpeace and ACLU”
• There’s an education campaign to help end the genocide in Darfur in “Camp Darfur”.

Second Life has a very helpful Non-Profits Wiki page with all sorts of resources that are just begging to be explored. (I can feel it sucking me in…) And TechSoup has an interesting interview with 3 nonprofits (Lower Eastside Girls Club of New York, Global Kids, and Amoration) who are all operating in Second Live. So much to learn, so little time…

This New York Times editorial is a must-read for all online activists. Thomas Friedman writes about Environmental Defense and NRDC’s success in using online tools & techniques to fight TXU (big Texas power company) from building 11 “coal-fired, CO2-belching power plants”. Through the use of a campaign Web site with email newsletters, the partners were able to turn a local energy issue into a global environmental issue and gain a seat at the table to help TXU restructure its plans. Not only is it a facinating case study, but we all owe Environmental Defense and NRDC our gratitude. TXU “agreed to cut the number of new TXU coal plants from 11 to 3, to support a U.S. cap on greenhouse gas emissions and to commit TXU to plowing $400 million into energy-efficiency programs and doubling its purchase of wind power.” That’s a win for all of us. To read the editorial, you must have a “Times Select” subscription. Or here’s a link to a reprint on the free Pasadena Star News.

Recently, we had two different clients ask us for assistance in finding mass email tools that have built-in support for multiple languages. They were specifically interested in sending out Arabic and Chinese emails to their supporter list.

If you dabble in the area of internationalization (i18n) in tech tools, then you would agree with me when I say that it is particularly difficult to find a technology solution that can fully support languages like Arabic and Chinese. Generally, tech tools are really good in supporting languages that have a Latin-base (ex. Spanish). They are not that great with a non Latin-based language like Chinese. They are downright poor when it comes to a non Latin-based language that also reads from right-to-left (RTL) like Arabic. And, don’t even get me started on RTL languages that share most characters but not all (Arabic & Farsi/Persian).

Before we delve into the multi-lingual mass email support issues, here is an over-simplified version of the technically complex process of creating emails:

Email written up or “encoded” in a language (i.e. Arabic, Chinese, etc.) –> Sent out by bulk mailer –> Received by email server –> “Decoded” for view or display in your email client.

Side note – Problems in the decoding end of things require a separate post, so I will ignore it for now.

Most email solutions including < insert most eCRM and email marketing tool names here > do not go beyond Spanish for their multi-language support line item in the features list. So, no multi-lingual support, no encoding, no sending out, no nothing.

A small number of vendors and solutions support multi-lingual emails, but it ends up being an interim solution. In the encoding process, they create HTML emails where letters are represented by their numeric character references. This is somewhat akin to using & in HTML code to indicate &. All HTML-enabled email clients display this fine for the recipient to read. Most email clients, including the browser-based ones like Google and desktop-based ones like Outlook, are HTML-enabled these days. So, most recipients would have no problems with this solution.

The issue with this approach however is what happens in the back-end. This approach means that you can send out only HTML emails and not plain-text ones. If you viewed the source in these emails, you will see a string of these numeric character references. This means that many of the functions that depend on actual letters instead of numeric references (ex. search) will not work. Sort of reminds one of those Hollywood studio sets that look grand from the outside. :)

This approach runs out of its usefulness if your organization wants to (or is mandated by its mission to) provide the full-spectrum experience to your supporters, donors, and advocates who speak other languages. This is becoming an important need. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we recently had TWO clients ask for bulk email tools supporting multiple languages. So, hopefully things would change soon. But, much of this innovation will probably originate from regions where multiple languages are the norm rather than the exception.

A note in the “somewhat related” category – European Union has 23 official languages and India has 22. Conflict of interest or disclaimer or something of that sort – My native language is one of those non-Latin-based languages, so I may have “vested” interests.

A note in the related category – If you are developer, here is a slightly dated, but still relevant article on email, MIME, Content-Transfer-Encoding header, etc: http://www.eveandersson.com/arsdigita/asj/mime/

There is an interesting discussion following an AlistApart.com article entitled Where Our Standards Went Wrong, in which the author, Ethan Marcotte discusses two sides of the web standards debate. In the article, Ethan tries to refine the message we as standards advocates are delivering.

Yet while the benefits of valid code may not be glamorous, we canâ??and shouldâ??talk about them. Validation isnâ??t an end result or a final deliverable; itâ??s an ongoing process that continues long after a site launches. If we donâ??t put the proper tools and commitment in place, our work will start looking like a late â??90s throwback, and if we donâ??t provide guidance and education on validation, the polished, perfect pages we produced will be snapped into software thatâ??ll produce tag soup in seconds flat.

Ethan also discusses some of the problems with Content Management Systems (and their often third-party) text editors, which are often central to the standards issues we face when deploying web sites for clients. In the discussion following the article, several people touch on this aspect, and even (gasp) offer some solutions.

New Organizing Institute is conducting jam-packed three day training for non profits on online organizing and technology. The training is at the American Institute of Architects building. I am doing a session there this afternoon (shortly, actually :)) on data integration.

So, I walk in, register, and am told that the session is at the Bethune room. As I put my laptop bag down I realize that I am in the room that commemorates a historical moment. The conference room is named after Louise Bethune. If you are wondering, as I did, who Louise Bethune was, here is a short timeline of her life.

Louise Bethune FAIA

• 1881 Announced the opening of her office at the Convention of the Womenâ??s Congress, Buffalo, New York
• 1885 First woman admitted into the Western Association of Architects
• 1888 First woman admitted into the American Institute of Architects
• 1889 First woman fellow of the American Institute of Architects

This situation is rife with symbolism for me since today also happens to be International Womenâ??s Day. How cool is it to be doing a technology session in a room dedicated to Louise Bethune? So, I decide to blog about this and look for her on Wikipedia so I can link. But I find no references there. An inspiring but at the same time slightly disheartening symbolism alright. Thankfully Wikipedia had something on International Women’s Day. :)

With that note, here are some women in technology links for your reading pleasure on this International Womenâ??s Day:

• Louise Blanchard Bethune: Buffalo Feminist and America’s First Woman Architect (Buffalo Freenet)
• A Short History of Women in Technology (Linux Journal)
• Powering the Electrical Revolution (IEEE Virtual Museum on Women and Technology)
• From plugboards to petaflops: The evolving role of women at IBM (IBM Women in technology archive)

I salute the many, many women who blazed the trail for all of us to travel on. Happy International Womenâ??s Day everyone.

The countdown begins – one more month ’til NTC. If you haven’t already, sign up for this fabulous conference at www.nten.org/ntc. This year close to 1,000 folks from all corners of the nonprofit/technology space will gather to network, learn and share experiences. You’ll meet nonprofit staffers from CIO’s to IT Directors to Webmasters, developers, program staff, fundraisers, advocacy professionals, and more. Circuit riders, consultants and software providers round out a very vibrant mix. The sessions will cover all things tech in the nonprofit space including leadership, specific technologies, communications & marketing, integration, the list just goes on. I guarantee you’ll be spoiled for choice. This is probably the 4th or 5th year Beaconfire has attended and every year our commitment to NTEN and the conference grows — we truly value the programs and conference. This year it’s on our home turf, so expect to see quite a few Beaconfire staffers there. I’ll certainly be there from beginning to end — and not just because I’m the Board Chair of NTEN — because it’s the best opportunity I have all year to meet colleagues in the field in-person and learn about all the great work going on. Sign up today — you’re crazy not to!

It’s a question that comes at some point in nearly every design project we do: “Should we stick with 800 pixels as our maximum width when designing the site, or push it up to 1024 pixels?” Unfortunately, there really isn’t a cut-and-dried answer that fits all situations. As a result, the question will generate debate and discussion as if it were the first time it was asked.

It would be great if it were really so simple as to just pick a width and go with it. That’s often what is done, but there are issues that make the question worth taking a deeper look at. Issues that can vary from client to client.

Simply having more space to work with is often a designer’s purpose for suggesting a wider layout, while clients are often motivated by a desire to fit more on each page. Not surprisingly, these two goals can often end up colliding into each other after the design goes into a production environment.

Unfortunately, regardless of your reasons for wanting more space to work with, it’s not simply a design question. There are accessibility and usability questions as well.

Although the percentage of users browsing the web with a screen resolution of 800×600 is decreasing (between 10% and 30% depending on whose stats you’re looking at), those that do so may be using the lower resolution (and even increasing the font size further from there) because they have trouble reading the smaller text-sizes at today’s higher screen resolutions. To not take this group into consideration violates accessibility standards. That’s not to say that we have to stay with 800×600 layouts, it just means that we have to make sure we consider the impact of any layout.

Why choose? Why not use a liquid, or expandable, layout? Liquid layouts have been around forever but continue to make up the minority of sites that we build. Why? There are a few reasons, but with the increased importance of accessibility as well as the growing number of alternative devices (Cell phones, PDAs, smaller laptops, tablet PCs and other devices) used in the U.S. and, even more so, in the developing world, our need for more flexible layouts is increasing.

Liquid layouts are a bit trickier to code, but the issue that usually trips us up is one of control. By this, I mean the perception of control that we often feel we have, or need to have, over the layout of a page.

In the design phase of a project we work with static images depicting how the page should look. Sometimes we pass these static images (or ‘comps’) back and forth for weeks, tweaking and adjusting spacing, color, layout and imagery. Since we are unable to make “fluid” design mock-ups we start to develop a sort of tunnel vision with regard to the design at hand. We start to internalize the structure of the designed page as well as the design elements, and when confronted with the prospect of how the page may stretch and resize when coded with a fluid HTML template, we back quickly away from the lack of control over the design that, to date, we’ve had pixel-perfect control over.

Perhaps the problem stems from the static representations we work with during the design phase. Are there any options?  Do we need to start presenting design comps that show the same layout as it will appear at several different resoltions (including handhelds)?

We need to let go a little bit of our need for absolute control over our page layouts. It’s been said before and should be said often: The web is not print. While this is overstated quite often, it is certainly true.  If people could easily modify layout, font sizes, column counts, etc. in print, then they probably would. Browsing applications and devices give average users exactly that level of control over what they view; And they use it.

Whatever the solution, we will continue to be confronted with the question every time we design a site. And to reduce the question to one of design alone may be causing more problems in the long run than we foresee.