blog

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.