When you’ve worked hard on an email campaign, you want to know how well it did. Depending on your CRM/email service, you probably have a plethora of statistics to consider: send rate, open rate, click-through rate, hard fails, soft fails… the list is either fantastic or overwhelming, depending on your point of view. While it’s great to have lots of data, it’s only useful if you know what to look at; you typically want to pull some meaningful, simplified picture out of this vast amount of information. Many people like to treat one metric as the end-all, be-all of email success: the open rate.

The open rate is a simple concept with a convoluted behind-the-scenes life. The idea is to count how many people open your email once they receive it. Simple enough. After all, they can’t read your content and take action for your organization if they don’t open the email. So open rate should be pretty important, right?

Not so fast. (more…)

Is the internet running out of domain names? Well, not really, but it could be argued that we’re running out of easily remembered and typed names. The combination of lower entry costs for even the smallest businesses to get online with the proliferation of microsites and redirects has led to a need for new real estate. The first wave of this was an attempt to make more use out of shared suffixes like .us, .info, and, of course, .tv (which provides a significant portion of the GNP of the nation of Tuvalu), but these never really caught on – people have been trained to look for the .com to identify something as a web site.

So ICANN is trying something new: custom top level domains. In about a year, they’ll be opening up the auction block for companies and organizations to set up their own top level domain. So if apple.com is already taken by the computer magnate, a business that sells the fruit could make a bid on the .apple suffix, allowing them to create easy to remember addresses like red.apple. ICANN has indicated that in the initial rush for top level domains, they’re going to stop speculators by taking intellectual property into account. And because top level domains can host an infinate number of domains within them, fruit.apple and iphone.apple can coexist peacefully.

Should your non-profit be considering a purchase of one of these new top level domains when they open up? Not immediately – ICANN is saying that the registration fee will be between $100,000 and $500,000, and no matter how unrecognizable your current URL is, it’s probably not the best use of your web dollars to switch. Look for these costs to go down in time – someone will likely sweep through the buy most of common names that are hard to trademark (.international, .foundation, and .association come to mind) and will be selling space there at a much lower rate.

Unfortunately, even companies that move on to their own top-level domains are unlikely to relinquish control over their current holdings, so those domains that they’re keeping from you probably won’t open up – they’re just too cheap to hold on to. But it remains to be seen if this new convention will catch on – how long did it take before people could start dropping the www from their domain name in publications?

Editor’s note: Periodically, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. With the release of Firefox 3 burning up the internets (no pun intended), we though we’d ask: Have you installed Firefox 3? Why or why not??

Kristin, Project Manager: No. Because I’d rather have everyone else troubleshoot the bugs for me…

Amy, Functional Consultant: I haven’t upgraded yet.  Mostly because my computer has been acting up lately and I don’t want to change anything that’s not currently broken :)  However, Mark was showing off some of the extremely cool new FF features in the functional team meeting this morning and I may have to go ahead anyway.

Tim, Functional Consultant: I’ve upgraded to Firefox 3 at home, but not yet at work.  At home, it’s all about being a user and I think Firefox offers a much better user experience than any other browser, and that Firefox 3 is a better experience than the previous version.  A huge item for me is that version 3 plugged some pretty egregious and long-standing memory problems.  Pretty much every improvement Mark mentioned in his earlier post is a compelling reason to switch.  The main reason that I’ve yet to upgrade at work is that there are several addons that are not yet compatible with version 3 (and now that I take a minute to check in on my favorite addon, “Google Browser Sync,” I see that it is no longer available for download.  Ouch!).  Oh well…back to the drawing board.

I guess I’ll install version 3 now.  Though I’ll run both versions instead of doing a complete upgrading since the page rendering and CSS support is slightly different in each.

Kesah, Client Manager: Although I have checked out Firefox 3, I’m not yet using it.  I usually hold out after a major software release so that I can avoid the initial bugs.  Also, from what I’ve heard not all the extensions are compatible with the new version yet.

Michael, Principal Consultant: It’s been on my list to do, but time to do it has held me back. Reading Mark’s review just moved it up on my priority list.

Joanna, Production Specialist: At home, I was automatically upgraded to Firefox 3 beta when I upgraded to the newest version of Ubuntu Linux.  That was a couple months ago.  Most of my plug-ins didn’t work in FF3 at the time, much to my dismay.  I think the plug-in situation has improved now, but I’m still holding off on upgrading at work until I’m convinced that my favorite tools will work.

Taylor, Software Engineer: I have it downloaded and installed but I have not been using it because all the extensions that I love so much aren’t all compatible with it yet, but I expect/hope they will in the coming weeks.

Lynn, Principal Consultant: I prefer to wait until others have helped the software provider work out all the kinks (or at least until the kinks have been identified so I can decide whether it matters to me or not).

Adebo, Software Engineer: Yes I upgraded to the new FF3.  I am an early adopter of software and technology in general, with consideration given to cost, so it was only natural to get the newest version.

Erika, Operations Manager: I haven’t updated yet.  I tend to hold off on updates like this until others have boldly gone before me and tested the waters.  If it ain’t broke, don’t update it, is my policy.  Firefox 2 seems to be working just fine for me at the moment.

Kate, Administrative Assistant: At home, yes, because I’m married to a techie who takes care of such things. Here, no, because Firefox 3 hasn’t knocked my socks off to the point that I want to be bothered upgrading it at work yet. If I’m pleased with it after playing around with it at home, I’ll likely make the switch here as well.

Elizabeth, Senior Consultant: Yes, because FB told me to. The only new software I automatically avoid like the plague is produced by a company that rhymes with Plicrosoft.

Miro, Software Engineer: I was running v2 at home (on Linux). Left it open over night. Next morning, it’s using up all the remaining memory on the machine, and it took me 5 minutes to even shut the thing down.

Memory leaks anyone? I’m waiting for the l33t users to do it first. I dare them.

Mark, Functional Consultant: I’ve upgraded at work, but not at home.

I made the switch fairly quickly mainly b/c Firefox is one of the few open source projects that has such a large community and great momentum behind it, that being an early adopter of a new version involves low risk. Also, I had tired of the memory problems that I was experiencing in version 2 (though those could have had more to do with add-ons than the core itself).

The new features also sounded enticing, and I have already found them to be a step forward in browsing.

Jeff, Principal Consultant: No time to do it yet.

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: As an IE aficionado, I just don’t use Firefox enough to upgrade yet. I’m sure I’ll move up eventually, but the only feature Firefox could add that could make me switch would be for Microsoft to set it as their new default browser for home users.

Have you upgraded yet? Leave your thoughts in the comments. If you’ve a web developer, Tim found some instructions to install both versions at once:

I found this very helpful article outlining how to install FF3 using a different profile from your existing FF2 install.  It will also allow you to run them simultaneously.  There is one piece missing in the instructions where you need to specify a different install directory and shortcut group name.  I chose Firefox3 (duh).

http://www.kensavage.com/index.php/archives/firefox3-and-firefox2/

Google’s new offering allows the talented python web developer to create and deploy a web application on it’s cloud of web servers. Although it’s currently in limited release, thousands of developers have signed on and there are numerous widgets and web applications that are up and running as of now.

Google’s App Engine allows anyone to “run [their] web applications on Google’s infrastructure.” The application environment lets first time users deploy their application on a free sub-domain on “appspot.com” or lets them use their own domain if they prefer. The cost to start is free and each account gets “500MB of storage and enough CPU and bandwidth for 5 million page views a month.”

To begin with, all applications must be written in Python as the base language and Google provides the popular code libraries as well as it’s own custom libraries that let developers talk to it’s Accounts and other custom systems. While in development, Developers can download a local web server environment to build and test their applications.

All that said and done, what does it really offer? Anyone can write Python web applications and build a scalable web farm (with the help of services like Amazon Cloud et. al). Google offers it’s Data Objects or entities which provide an easy framework for modeling, querying, and modifying data without having to write layers upon layers of code. This Data Objects API is reminiscent of the ActiveRecord design pattern in Ruby on Rails, and the LINQ system in .NET. Instead of “SQL”, however developers are directed to adapt their data skills to use “GQL” or Google Query Language. The datastore is very powerful because it’s simple, scalable, and does not have too steep of a learning curve.

There are other services, and they aren’t “revolutionary” but rather packaged nicely. Using built in API, any application can access remote websites using URL Fetch, send messages using Mail, manipulate Images, and utilize a scalable data caches using Memcache. Memcache is a caching solution that can scale across numerous servers. Part of Facebook’s scaling success is due to the fact that they use Memcache to store cached copies of data so that the database server isn’t taxed with the millions of “read only” queries. Having a “proper” memcache implementation readily available is as important in my opinion to the scalable “GQL Datastore” itself.

So now that you know what Google App Engine is, let’s take a look at some of the interesting and useful applications people have built.

TodoListr – A simple but useful example todo list application.

PlainLists – Another todo list application but follows David Allen’s GTD “contextual” task idea. 

MyTextFile – Very easy to use AJAX text editor which saves all revisions.

If you logged in to see, these aren’t going to be gaining traction of millions of users. They are proofs of concepts of basic functionality such as Single Signon using the Google Account’s API and data storage and retrieval based on Google’s DataStore API.

I’ve been playing for a few days now on the new version of Firefox that just came out (version 3.0), and with it there are some new features I’ve been enjoying. Also, I’ve noticed the increased performance and smaller memory footprint that has been touted, in comparison to earlier versions.

Feature-wise, I like the new keyhole concept for moving backwards and forwards. An arrow on right, gives me quick access to the last pages I’ve viewed in that window or tab.

I like the quick bookmarking feature in the address bar too. One click on the star bookmarks the page and categorizes it as “unsorted.” Two clicks brings up the bookmark management dialogue box, and you can quickly file it wherever need be. No more having to go into the bookmark manager, find something you’ve bookmarked and then assign it.

There are also added capabilities for tagging your bookmarks, so you can quickly add a tag or choose from an existing one to more quickly find your tagged content later. Handy smart folders now pull up recent tags, recent bookmarks and most visited sites, making the bookmarking features in Firefox more in line with what social networking sites are doing. Great help for those who are used to relying on the bookmarking within the browser. However, most savvy users who are adept at using these types of features have probably moved their regular bookmarking over to Delicious, Digg or other social bookmarking site. Not sure if this would be enough to bring them back to using Firefox bookmarks.

Another improvement in the browsing controls is the ability to start typing into the address box any term that may be in a URL or title of a page you’ve visited. Firefox will quickly bring back in a drop-down any matches from your browsing history. This is a nice time-saving feature for when you can’t quite remember a full URL, but may know part of it or part of a page title.

A smart change in password management is that Firefox waits until after you’ve logged in now to ask if you want it to save your password. This is helpful to those of us who often “fat finger” a password and inadvertently tell Firefox to remember a wrong password.

One small feature that is great for us web developers is the ability to choose what you’re zooming. View > Zoom has an option to zoom only text (by default you’re zooming the whole page just like IE now). This empowers the user more to customize their preferred browsing experience per their display and tastes.

Another nice one is the File > Send Link feature. This feature spawns an email in your default email application, which can be a client on your machine or a web based application! For instance I was able to define Yahoo Mail as my default email app and have Firefox spawn a new email in clicking this feature. In Outlook, it also pre-populated the subject line with the pages title and the body with the link. A great idea, as there is no reason that users should have to rely on Web developers to continually build this feature into sites (Email this Page). It makes so much sense for the browser to have this capability built in – just like the ability to create a print version.

Security features which I have yet had the chance to explore much are also a step forward. Firefox can deliver one-click information about the site you are on now when you click in the icon. It also warns you more noticeably when security certificates don’t match and when you land on a suspicious malware and phishing sites.

Finally, a major new feature with Firefox is its ability to run Web applications offline. As I haven’t seen a demo yet or found confirmation in other reviews, I’m not sure yet if it can also synch back up when the user reconnects online. Likely, this is the direction Mozilla is going with this – similar to Adobe Air.

So what’s missing?

I was surprised that there isn’t mouse gesturing built into the browser. This has been available for awhile as an add-on, but I would have thought that Mozilla would have folded it into the core browser. Still waiting for the mouse gesture add-on to be updated to work with the new version so I can have this time saving feature back.

Also auto form completion. At this point, I would like to be able to store the basics in my profile (name, address, email) and have the browser complete a form for me with one click. There are add-ons to do this, but this feels like a feature I want as part of the core – like remembering passwords.

Finally, I was kind of expecting Firefox to do more with RSS support. The Live Bookmarks are workable but I find managing them to be somewhat clumsy. Perhaps the thinking is that advanced users will continue migrating towards web-based aggregators like NetVibes, BlogLines or Google Reader, and that working more on the browsers ability to handle these is not time well spent. I guess there are always add-ons to take care of this one as well.

All in all I like the new Firefox. I’m also looking forward to how the final version of IE 8 and Apple’s next version of Safari stack up.

To download a copy of Firefox version 3.0 visit: http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/

Editor’s note: Periodically, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. This week, we thought we’d ask: How will you be volunteering this summer?

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: I’ll be going door to door and phone banking for the Obama campaign. Here’s to Virginia as a swing state!

Kristin, Project Manager: I will be participating in the Ocean Conservancy coastal cleanup in September.

Erika, Operations Manager: I will be volunteering for Quotidian Theatre Company, a local non-profit professional theater company, where all Board members are unpaid volunteers.

Elizabeth, Senior Consultant: I’m stepping up from chair-elect to chair of the Greater Washington Network’s CAE Action Team, continuing as part of the Greater Washington Network’s leadership council, and continuing as a member of ASAE’s Membership Section Council. I’m also proctoring the social media lab as a resource on wikis at the ASAE annual meeting. Finally, I’m serving as a judge for ASBO’s (the Association of School Business Officials International) Eagle awards.

Jeff, Principal Consultant: I’m the president of my neighborhood civic association. While this might not typically count as volunteering when folks are asked about this, in this case, we are a very active community so the effort is substantial. Trying to work the District government to come up with a plan to re-use the neighborhood elementary school building/grounds that the government just closed is a huge effort. So, I’ll spend my summer wrangling with the Mayor, his various deputies and agency heads, and our great councilmember to get commitments to what we’ve asked for and then to ensure they are honored. Fun!

Andy, Project Manager: I will be helping to generate attention and interest in the Power of One Solar Car Project. Right now, they are attempting to set the world distance record for a solar car by driving from Buffalo, NY to Inuvik, Northwest Territory (Canada) and back – a roundtrip distance of 10,000 miles.

I’m not sure if it’s a new feature or a function of Beaconfire’s Facebook Page reaching over 40 fans, but as I was posting an event earlier today, I noticed that updates can now be targeted to certain segments. While the system is currently relatively rudimentary, allowing only targeting based on geography, gender, and age, we’ll hopefully see something soon with the robustness of social ads (which we’ve discussed targeting here and here).

The true value of Facebook as a company is the data it holds. Hopefully we’ll see additional ways that users can leverage that data in more meaningful ways – imagine some of the ways you could make use of this kind of message segmentation:

• A nonpartisan non-profit could send one message to liberal supporters and another to conservatives, with two separate pitches for why they should donate
• You could send fans with more than two hundred friends a pitch to “Tell a Friend” while you send the rest a fundraising appeal
• If you have a large pool of celebrity talent, you could leverage that talent based on members’ other fan affiliations

These are all functions of integrating your messaging in with social networking – most members would never give this much information to an organization on its own, but will gladly share it with Facebook. It’s this ability to microtarget that will give socnets a competitive advantage over email in the next ten years, as they become more robust and full-featured.

In any case, while it may be just another example of how Facebook is akin to Calvinball, it’s a change that’s certainly in both users’ and organizations’ favor.

For the second year, American Express is running an online program that gathers input from card members on who they should give $2.5 million in funding to.  Over the next 4 months, with the help of a Web site and online tools, they will solicit project ideas and collect votes on which 5 projects will receive the funding.  It was really easy to participate last year and I’m looking forward to again this year.  Check it out at www.membersproject.com

The AP caused quite a stir over the weekend by demanding that a blogger remove even small quotes from AP articles, according to this Times story^*:

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

While it seems to have backed off from the stance that pretty much any use online shouldn’t be covered by fair use, AP has indicated that they want to define specific rules on pulling quotes from AP stories.

I suspect that this is an effort that is ill-thought out and doomed to failure (not to mention backlash) – to learn why, read below the fold…

(more…)

If  only getting to a site’s homepage was as simple as clicking your heels.

Typically I spend the days clicking away on my computer in the Beaconfire offices high above Arlington.  However, this past week my colleague Mark and I wrapped up a series of usability testing sessions for one of our esteemed clients.  It was a fascinating couple days.  During the testing sessions, we forayed into a health system  and found ourselves meeting with people who spend their days saving lives.  It was humbling, certainly, and also quite informative.  We discovered what happens in the Apheresis lab.  We repeatedly heard that you would not go to a cardiologist to have coronary artery bypass surgery; you’d see a cardiac surgeon for that.  Good things to know.

And, we discovered that some of what we techies have come to consider usability standards don’t seem to actually have cemented themselves as standards yet.  One of the most significant discoveries is that the use of a logo in the upper-left corner as the primary avenue to return to a site’s homepage is not yet a universally known convention. 

In the process of our low-fidelity prototype testing, we started each task on the prototype’s homepage.  Once the users completed the first task – helping Cousin Louisa find where she could have an MRI and what she needed to know to prepare for the procedure – users were told to return to the homepage to start the next task.  How did users get back home?

1. They clicked the “Back” arrow on the browser.
2. They clicked the “HOME” icon on the browser. 
3. They asked us how to get back home.

What did users not do?  They did not click on the logo to return to the homepage.  Nor did they seem to notice the “HOME” link in the breadcrumb trail at the top of each page.

Okay, okay, okay.  I’m exaggerating.  Of the 15 people we tested with, two people clicked the logo in the upper-left hand corner to return to the homepage.  And, of the same 15, two others found the breadcrumbs and clicked those.  Eleven people used the browser “Back” arrow to get to the homepage after each of the six tasks we presented.  Many of them mentioned that they expected to see “a box that says Home at the top” of the primary navigation items.  Others suggested that it could live somewhere at the top of the page above the search.  Either way, they wanted an explicit navigation item that said HOME outside of the body content.

Our testing sessions provided a lot of rich data that will inform our work on this project and others going forward.  While we may think getting people home is just a matter of clicking the logo (once, not three times in this case) it seems that, for now, we still need to provide an explicit nav item that will get folks there. 

With the advent of Web 2.0, services such as YouTube.com made the idea of video publishing and hosting a commonplace activity for amateurs, hosting its videos for free, and carrying advertisements on its pages.

With the online video frenzy, ad agencies have capitalized on this burgeoning industry of amateur producers, and in a couple of instances, even commissioned to the populace to make Superbowl ads. Now, there are specialized online hosting services in niche markets serving the needs of advertising agencies, businesses, and political campaigns to serve video content.
Now, more than ever, the popularity of an online video can directly translate into money and success, whether it is in the form of ad revenue, donations, or advocacy conversion. This makes the tracking of video statistics more important than ever.

There are several reasons someone could be interested in online video statistics. If you’re a cost-conscious webmaster paying for bandwidth, you will want to track the actual transfer of bytes over the internet, and not necessarily  how many times a video is viewed. In paying for advertising,  it is more important to measure how many unique people watched a video, or how many times these people watched the video all the way through.  TubeMogul is helping organizations answer these and other important questions. TubeMogul’s name has been coming up at Web 2.0 and Social Networking events. While their authority on the topic has yet to be fully proven, their research looks impressive.

In May of 2008, the company published an updated “What Counts as a View?” which “discusses the findings of an experiment to test which actions result in a ’view‘ as measured on 14 online video websites. There are other interesting pieces about how online video views are driving donations to presidential candidates.

Looking through Tubemogul’s research, you can get the notion of how a video’s popularity impacts different social groups and different interested parties, seeking to benefit from the video’s popularity. As a service, TubeMogul provides a broadcast mechanism to push video content from one central location to multiple sites and then aggregate the video views from those different sites into one dashboard which lets users track video statistics from 12 video sites at once (Screen shot). You can get a more descriptive overview of their services at their site.
Also of interest is Compete.com’s blog.  This interesting blog offers the Video Market Share measured in April for the top 20 Video Hosting sites. With GooTube (Google Video/YouTube) at the top with 50% market share and with a steady growth month by month, it seems to be the Tiger Woods of the video world.

Earlier this week, the fabulous new website for the Bronx Zoo went live at www.bronxzoo.com. Beaconfire and the Wildlife Conservation Society collaborated to bring this vibrant and engaging site to life. WCS staff developed a design that would encourage families to visit the zoo and connect with wildlife and wild nature by featuring the zoo’s incredible video and photographic assets.  Beaconfire provided guidance in defining the site specifications, implementing this complex design and then deploying the site in Sitecore CMS. From our point of view, one of the more exciting elements of the site won’t ever be directly seen by users — i.e. multi-site support.

The Bronx Zoo site is implemented to share its layouts, templates, and content renderings so that this site will support the 3 other New York City Zoos and the NY Aquarium sites as well. The implementation also supports a seasonal design strategy where the entire design can be swapped out by non-technical site administrators by changing just a handful of background and featured animal images. The word around our office is that our next field trip is to the Bronx Zoo. The next time you are planning to go to the zoo, visit BronxZoo.com to learn about how to make the most of your visit.

I was  thrilled to see ActBlue, the clearinghouse for Democratic donors to give online to pretty much any federal candidate or committee, recently raised their fifty millionth dollar since they opened their doors in 2004. That’s $50 million raised online, almost entirely outside of candidates official fundraising efforts (though a few candidates, notably Edwards in 2008, used ActBlue as their main fundraising engine). It’s $50 million in funds that were updated live, and visible to anyone, who wanted to know. And it’s $50 million that went not only to candidates on the top of the ballot, but all the way down, including the committees that pass it on.

ActBlue is one of the best examples of a site empowering supporters to take action on their own. Users can create their own page, select which candidates they’re supporting, give a reason, and send the address to friends, asking them to give. Like thousands of little PACs, these pages each have their own theme, whether it’s candidates who support a given issue to more trivial criteria (more left-handed Senators!).

And the site features many of the bells and whistles that non-profits have begun to make use of as well – auto-updating “thermometers” for users to post on blogs and socnet profiles, and special events.

Not only are all federal candidates added, but ActBlue has been moving on to the state level as well, in some cases all the way down to local county parties. And it’s not just the rock-star candidates who are raising money online with ActBlue. Part of what makes it cool is that for new candidates starting out who don’t have an online infrastructure yet, ActBlue gives them a way to accept online donations – a relatively formidable task for someone running for the state legislature without the budget for a dedicated online operation right out of the gate. And while big names like Barack Obama, Mark Warner, and Ned Lamont have certainly raised sizable contributions on this forum, so have more local candidates like Leslie Byrne, Darcy Burner, and Rick Noriega.

ActBlue is a great example of how supporters can self-organize – imagine if your non-profit had this kind of decentralized giving up that required no support from you (ActBlue is almost entirely funded by “tips” of 5 or 10% added onto donations). Facebook Causes recently reported $2.5 million raised in their first year of operations – nothing to sneeze at, but they’re also restricted only to the world of Facebook users and have significantly more competition in the space.

So here’s to you, ActBlue – here’s to fifty million more this cycle and even more innovation in the future!

Frequent visitors and subscribers to our RSS feed (you can be one too!) may have noticed a brief interruption in service recently. That’s because we’ve been recently upgrading our hosting infrastructure, updating to the very latest version of WordPress, and enhancing our RSS feed, all at the same time! This caused just a few hiccups, but we’re back up for good now, and should have lots of great posts in the next few days that were queued by the move (have you read Andrew’s post on strategy and process, or Eve’s post on feedback for creative folks?).

Among the exciting new features you can enjoy is subscription to the Beaconfire Wire via email. Following a suggestion by reader Norman Reiss, we’ve implemented Feedburner’s email update function, so if you’d prefer to see new posts in your inbox, just enter your address in the box to the left. While we’re not thrilled that it includes both a CAPTCHA and a second opt-in, we did like Feedburner’s copious configuration options and reporting – give it a try for your own blog! By signing up for email updates, you’ll receive a message every day around lunchtime, if there’s a new post in the previous 24 hours.

For those who prefer to read the Wire in their RSS readers, you may notice some new buttons on the bottom of each post – at the moment, we’ve added links to email, Digg, Stumble and share each post on Facebook, to make it easier than ever to share a post you found insightful or helpful. If there are other actions you think we should add, let us know in the comments.

No matter how you read the Beaconfire Wire, we’re glad to have you as a reader. Keep checking back regularly for our thoughts on non-profits and technology, the latest on our clients and partners, and more.

On May 20th, I had the honor of being a portfolio reviewer at the HOW Design 2008 Conference in Boston. 120 conference attendees (Students, young designers just starting out, and others looking for a reality check) signed up to show off their talents and get (hopefully) constructive criticism on where they were in their design careers, and what they might want to do in order to move to the next level.

And I’m still not sure who was more nervous that day, me or them.

As a design student once myself, dissolving tragically into puddles of salty tears after a professor ripped apart my work, portfolio reviews always felt like a special torture just this side of root canal: Something you had to do, which you knew was going to hurt a lot, and that you hoped would be for the best in the long run (although you were never really 100% sure at the time).

Now many years later, as both a seasoned designer/creative director and professor, I find my approach to the review of another’s work has become a fragile balance, tempering the importance of helping someone learn & grow with the reality of survival as a creative in an often-difficult world. Do you “tough love” them in order to make them stronger or do you handle the critique of their work with the delicacy afforded a Faberge egg? Is the “constructive” part of the critique like a bone you throw to soothe the bite of other feedback that may not be so great? Where does the line fall between telling it like it is, and suggesting how much better a few changes would make it?

Before the review, I really struggled with how to approach this group in Boston, wanting to make sure that no one walked away without something valuable. I found that some had prepared well with books that reflected a depth and breadth of work. Others showed glimpses of brilliance that just needed a little bit more coaxing to fully realize. Some argued with me, profanely, and told me where I could put my review. And yet others didn’t even seem to care, begging the question of why they bothered to show up in the first place.

No matter how they arrived at the review, I made sure each person left with something to think about, work on, and explore — but not with any answers. Every creative has to find that for themselves because there’s never only one that’s “right”, and that alone is a hard but critical lesson to learn.

Ultimately, the role of feedback (both good and bad) in the creative process at any level is to be the oxygen that feeds the fire. Without it, we could not survive, but sometimes special handling can inspire us create something we didn’t even notice was there all along.

Some organizations undertake technical projects without really planning to address the more fundamental issues of process, resourcing, and staffing. Technology-based projects need to be viewed holistically as human-technology systems, where evolution and adaption in one area precipitates change in the other as well. Investing heavily in new technologies without also revisiting and revising the processes and human components can result in dysfunction and entirely new inefficiencies.

Even though business process review and change usually makes its way into these project (explicitly or implicitly) out of necessity, it is common for organizations to resist the resourcing and staffing adjustments required to support a new system. New technology requires new skills, training, and in some cases new hires — all of which translate into additional costs. It is important to remember that these investments will reap long lasting savings and save innumerable headaches. Technology poorly implemented, executed, and supported can be horrendously counter-productive.

When there is training and/or hiring involved, there are likely to be questions about how to retrain and repurpose existing staff. In many cases, reporting structures and hierarchies need to be re-examined and reworked as well. These are difficult and politically charged questions that have very tangible impacts on staff, but if they are not addressed, the long term success of the project will be jeopardized. If everyone in an organization goes into a technical project realizing that such changes may be necessary, it can minimize the drama that this type of change can cause. Planning and preparation is the key (as always).

Keeping these things in mind can make your projects less painful and more successful. In the long run, your organization will be much better offer going into technical project with both eyes wide open, fully prepared for all that the work will entail.

Editor’s note: Periodically, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. This week, we thought we’d ask: What’s one tech toy or gadget everyone should have?

Andrew, Project Manager: Portable GPS, so you always know where you are during your adventures – big or small.

Michael, Principal Consultant: Let’s get real, no matter what tech gadget you have, the underlying need is POWER. That’s why my absolute favorite tech gadget is iGo. No matter where I am or what gadget needs juice, iGo fires me up.

If it only had an adaptor for my motorcycle, I’d be in heaven.

Milo, Marketing Consultant: It’s hard to exaggerate all the myriad little ways that smartphones make your life easier (pass time on the metro, keep track of tasks, send email, etc.). While their market penetration is still relatively low (<10%), smartphone usage is going to become more and more ubiquitous as cheaper and more advanced models are released.

Lynn, Principal Consultant: When you’re standing in front of a closed restaurant while the friend you were meeting has already figured it out and found a table at another eatery wondering why you’re not answering your cell phone (because it’s on your office desk, sigh), what other answer is there? What on earth did we do before cell phones!

Kate, Administrative Assistant: Cell phone. Let’s be honest with ourselves.

Miro, Software Engineer: A military grade GPS device, accurate to a foot, with driving directions. Cause you can’t get where you’re going in life without first knowing where you are.

Taylor, Software Engineer: After being delayed at the Miami airport for 6 hours and having no way of communicating with my (non-Spanish speaking) friend who was anxiously awaiting my arrival in San Jose, I am going to have to say cellphones.

Eric, Senior Consultant: For me, it’s the Blackberry. When the computer is off, it’s email and web browser (the first passable phone browser I’ve ever had) and when the computer is on, it’s a broadband modem.

Jo, Production Specialist: My favorite gadget that I actually own is my linux-compatible MP3 player, which lets me take all my music wherever I go, but these are at the top of my wish list:

• A GPS system for my car, because I have a habit of getting very lost when I drive in DC or Baltimore; it would be nice to have someone give me directions instead of me fumbling with a map.
• A Kindle, so I can read the news on the Metro without carrying a bulky newspaper, and when I finish the news, I can switch to any book that I’m reading.

Tim, Functional Consultant: I have tried and tried, and can’t think of a single gadget that I use that comes anywhere near being as indispensable as by cell phone. Nothing fancy though; I really liked having a Smartphone for a while, and being able to check email and browse the Web on the Metro, but I can easily live without that. What I can’t live without is a basic cell phone.

Elizabeth, Senior Consultant: In “I can’t live without it” order:

• Palm Tungsten T3 (I’m such a Luddite!)
• Cell phone
• iPod
• TiVO

Adebo, Software Engineer: The cell phone is a good one. But for TV viewers, I have to go with the TiVo. Nothing beats being able to skip ALL commercials, and watching what you want, when you want.

Amy, Functional Consultant: One gadget that has worked its way into my subconscious is TIVO. The ability to pause and rewind tv is fabulous – particularly for watching sports. Only one of my tvs has it but I invariably find myself trying to use the rewind button on the ones that don’t have it.

Erika, Operations Manaer: My favorite tech gadget is the wireless card in my computer that allows me to be sitting in a comfy chair in my living room instead of at the desk in my office upstairs. If I didn’t burn so easily, I’d be sitting outside enjoying the weather.

Cara, Project Manager: I agree DVRs and Cell Phones. I needed to give up my precious TiVo for a regular DVR and the usability of the DVR is a sad sad second compared to TiVo but I still wouldn’t like to be without it.

Rahul, Tech Lead: In the same manner, I use my iPod touch as my computer at home. I rarely use my laptop except if it’s work related and I can do just about anything through it’s Safari browser, including checking Outlook Web Access, Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Google News Reader, and of course Slashdot and Engadget. The best part of it now are the hacked applications like the book reader which I have a few books on now. No need to get a Kindle or the Sony eBook reader.

When I do get the iPhone 3g, I will still use the iTouch as a PC.

Shiloh, Productional Specialist: I have to agree that cell phones are the biggest gadget I can’t live without. My combo cell phone, mp3 player, fm radio and pedometer (which you wouldn’t think you’d use, but I check it daily) has everything I want while I wander around DC.

The other “tech gadget” I can’t live without is my Tune-A-Fish shower radio. Gotta have my NPR in the morning.

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: I love my GPS and my digital camera, but I’ve got to give props to weird things you can plug into your USB port, like a missile launcher, vacuum, and pencil sharpener. Taking the cake is a beverage chiller, ensuring that your soft drink is on an unstable surface mere feet from your computer.