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Inspired by a post on Occum’s Razor, I recently applied for and received access to Google’s new Ad Planner (it took about a week for my application to be processed, so if you’re intrigued, don’t delay - apply right now. It’s okay - I can wait…). Test driving the tool, I found three things:

1. It’s immensely cool for a marketer, voter targeting guru, or demographics aficionado
2. It’s yet another example of how awesome Google is for giving us tools like this for free
3. It will make some privacy advocates likely go bonkers, as happened with some other Google innovations

Here’s the reader’s digest version: the Ad Planner leverages Google’s gigantic barrel o’ data to help users understand what sites people browse, based on a variety of demographic information and their other online behavior. It then helps you to build a list of sites to run advertising on, and even provides the ability to export your target list in MediaVisor (so that’s where that DoubleClick acquisition went).

The long version, as always, is a lot more complicated - the tool is very powerful, and not just for advertisers. Follow me below the fold to learn more…

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According to Roll Call (subscription req’d), the Senate recently revised their rules to allow Members to make use of YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and other free web applications on their sites, as long as they otherwise comply with franking rules:

Senators can now legally post YouTube videos on their Web sites, thanks to a long-awaited update to the chamber’s rules.

Until now, any Senator who embedded a YouTube video or linked to a Flickr album was in violation of outdated rules that required them to keep within the senate.gov domain. Some posted such links anyway, and few were reprimanded.

But last week, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee voted to allow Senators to use third-party sites.

This is pretty much indisputably a good thing. Not only does it allow Senators to bring their websites into the 21st century, but many of these tools foster interactions between citizens and their representatives in Washington. In addition, Congress’s ability to use technology is directly related to their ability to understand and regulate it wisely.

No movement yet on the House side, but hopefully we’ll see some changes there with the next Congress once they see how effectively their Senate colleagues make use of user-generated content tools.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest that Senators celebrate their new freedom by embedding this video on their homepages:

The other day I received Best Buy’s monthly coupon pack, which I once looked forward to as a way to justify to myself that I should go buy some DVDs or music (as it’s clearly intended to do). But over the last few months, the coupons’ focus has been less of the “triple points on anything” or “10% off these categories that you actual use” and more of “save a few bucks on our outrageously priced memory cards for people who’ve never heard of Newegg” or “save 10% on appliances and car stereos that cost more than your home and car.”

This naturally annoyed me, since I have pretty much no use for these coupons, and I realized that the offers started changing right around the time that I began using my reward zone card and gave them my preferences. Now, since Best Buy knows what I’ll already go buy without help, they’re using the coupon packs as a way to upsell me into other areas of the store.

As irked as I was at Best Buy (and right when the previous seasons of House and Heroes are out on DVD!), I realized that this is the same thing that we do as email marketers with so many of our constituents: bring them in on the promise of something they want (”Sign up to help the environment!”) in order to bring them to somewhere we want (”Become a monthly donor”). So much of the time, we’re pulling the same tricks as retail outlets, but then we’re shocked, shocked! when unsubscribe rates go up, open rates go down, and people hesitate before giving us their email addresses.

Tips on how we can mitigate this, and why it’s still somewhat inevitable, below the fold…

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Google keeps churning out the freebies, and we keep having fun with them. Take a look at Google Charts, a fast and easy way to visual charts on your Web site. No Photoshop necessary. In just a few minutes, I was able to create this visual, showing how many blog posts I’ve written in recent months:

As with all things Google, the possibilities are endless. You can put together variations of pie charts, Venn diagrams, bar graphs, maps, and meters. You can have an endless supply of colors. You can label and define your axes. There are dozens of variables.

To make a Google Chart, take you take the base URL http://chart.apis.google.com/chart and add variables to the end of it. These variables tell Google what the look of the chart will be.

So this URL:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=225×125&cht=gom&chd=t:70&chl=Donation Goals

will show you a “Goole-o-meter” graph that is 225 pixels wide by 125 pixels tall, that shows 70% completion, with the label “Donation Goals”.

You could have quite a bit of fun with this one. I’d like to try creating script-based calculators to allow the user to input numbers to instantly create a new graph.

In what ways will you use (or have you used) Google Charts?

• Are you regularly disappointed with the results of your online campaigns?
• Does your organization keep missing your Web traffic and engagement goals?
• Are users consistently bailing out of key transactions before completing them?
• Did you have to hire an extra staff person to deal with all the calls and emails from constituents who can’t find things on your Web site?
• Is your site a victim of “suburban sprawl,” as additional elements keep getting bolted onto a navigational structure that was never designed to support them?
• Are you thinking about a complete redesign but don’t know where to start?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, it might be time to consider doing a Web site usability audit.

In an ideal world, usability testing should follow on the heels of the design process as part of any site launch, but in the excitement of the new design and the rush to get the site up and running, it’s often overlooked.  Even if your organization performed thorough usability testing at launch, you need to take a critical look at your site from the perspective of how it works as opposed to how it looks periodically to guarantee it’s still working as it should.  The more vital your Web site is to your organization’s business goals, the more frequently you need to do this (Amazon.com, for instance, does significant usability testing every single day).

I recently had the opportunity to talk with two of Beaconfire’s usability experts, functional analysts Amy Knox and Brad Lehman, to learn a little more about the usability testing process.

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What if you could do something remarkable for others to shake up the cycle of your usual work routine, re-invigorate your creativity, while at the same time using your powers for good, would you?

Oh, and staying up all night to do it. Did I mention that?

The CreateAthon is a volunteer 24-hour marathon that provides high quality print and web design work for small local non profits, pro bono. Nationwide, in over 42 different local studios, this effort has benefited 1,008 nonprofit organizations with 2,143 projects valued at $8.4 million.

At 7:30am last Friday September 19th, a groggy but excited gang of 7 designers arrived at Basis Branding’s studio in Falls Church, VA ( the CreateAthon location in the DC metro area), set up our macbooks, reviewed the projects we’d been assigned, and started downing the first of many, many cups of coffee. During 90 minute discovery sessions with our new clients, we did what we usually do when we start a new project: defined scope, set deadlines and expectations, exchanged contact information and critical organization design assets, and planned the steps we would take to achieve our client’s goals. However, when we asked them “Will you be available for final approval around 2am?”, it became clear that we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

We worked tirelessly through the day and night, struggling with CSS cross-browser issues, blown deadlines, scope creep, creative blockages — all the things one usually encounters on a design project, only on a highly compressed time line without a second to spare. There was something electric in the air — an energy that made us push harder to solve every design challenge we came across, without settling for anything less than our best. By 5am on Saturday morning, the work was complete – be it brochure, web site, poster, marketing campaign, postcard – and the designers were giddy with exhaustion and ready to fall over. But like Christmas morning, we knew our clients had something wonderful to wake up to, and the pride and satisfaction of a job well done made every sleepless hour worthwhile.

This marked my 5th CreateAthon and I can honestly say this yearly event is one of the most intense, profound, challenging, exhausting and utterly soul-satisfying experiences in my professional life. Why? Because for brief period of time I am not only reminded why I love what I do for a living, but that with the right process, skill set and desire to change the world, if only a small corner of it, even the impossible is possible in 24 hours.

Did you know September is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month? In light of the occasion, the Prevent Cancer Foundation tapped Beaconfire to assist them in developing an online marketing campaign for the month. Soon after, Prostate Pete was born.

Pete is a friendly, helpful organ who leverages the power of internet marketing to provide education, help broach difficult conversations about health, and encourage regular exams. His ads - running across several blogs, news sites and health networks - lead users to a lighthearted quiz on prostate health and an e-card where they can forward Pete to friends and loved ones.

We’re excited to be working with the Prevent Cancer Foundation, an organization that has been working to fund cancer research and educate the public about ways to reduce cancer risk for over 20 years.

So, if you’re a little intrigued, go ahead and take the quiz. I promise it won’t hurt a bit!

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 Firefox 3 and Google Chrome just out, and IE8 and Safari 4 on the way, we asked our staff: What feature do you want most in your browser?

Michael, Principal Consultant: What I want? A mobile browser for the palm phone that works like the iPhone or better.

Miro, Software Engineer: I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again: the browser cores need to support many more objects natively. This includes tabbing/panels (in-page versions, not tabbing the way it exists to switch between documents), trees, native dragging and dropping between web elements, contextual menus, just to name a few. Make them fully supported, cross-browser compatible from day one.

The web developers are wasting too much time writing javascript and performing magic hacks to get the browsers to behave more like the desktop applications. Instead, raise the browser capability: do it rapidly, across the board, and soon.

Erika, Operations Manager: I want stability and compatibility.  It seems to me that every time there’s a new browser something gets lost or something changes so drastically that Web sites which aren’t even really that old don’t work anymore.  Or the new browser isn’t compatible with all of the other browsers and suddenly you find yourself having to do a lot of extra work to make sure your site works in yet another browser.

With our nonprofit clients, this means more money spent just trying to get the site to work.  Everyone has to draw the line somewhere, and that often means leaving out a certain percentage of the population because you can’t afford to make your site work with the browser they’ve chosen to use.  Choice is a great thing, as is innovation.  But if someone gets frustrated enough with your new browser because none of the web sites they go to will work, they’ll go back to what they were using before.

Tim, Functional Consultant: Everything I want a browser to do,  Firefox (with addons) does.   The Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug are indispensible and add functionality to the browser that makes coding HTML much easier.  I like the lean speed of Chrome, especially how it works with Google online applications, but I see it more as a window into those applications than as a general purpose browser since it can’t to a 10^th of what Firefox can.  If IE eventually includes the ability to easily install addons like Firefox does, it would be a toss-up as to which I’d prefer.

Mark, Functional Consultant: Feature-wise, I want tools that make browsing quicker and easier like mouse gesturing, tabbing, quick bookmarking, built in searching and lookups against sites I’ve been to. I also want developer analysis tools so I can look at and test changes to the underlying code, and get extended error information when problems occur. Firefox 3 is meeting these features for me.

From a design standpoint, I want a quick, secure and light core that doesn’t crash, or gives me ways to mitigate crashing. And one that lets me bolt on just the features I want and need. I feel like Chrome is that quick, secure and light core (so far) but doesn’t yet have the additional features available.

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: As much as I’d like to say stability, given the frequency with which Netvibes crashes my browser, in the end, the most important feature for me is compatibility with most websites. I’d rather not have to have IE open to work in a CMS, then open Firefox to read Digg, and keep opening different browsers for different purposes. This is why I never use Opera: the strict HTML reading seems designed to break things, rather than make them work.

Beyond that, I like a browser that gives me plenty of ability to customize features - Firefox and Internet Explorer are good about this, and Chrome has made some promises in this direction as well.

It seems like good news has been a little hard to come by recently so I was particularly happy this morning when I learned that Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the true inventor of the Web, has announced the creation of The World Wide Web Foundation. 

The Web Foundation will focus its programs around research, technology and social development, with a particular emphasis on global collaboration and outreach to underserved populations.  Currently, only about 20 percent of people access the Web. 

The Knight Foundation has provided a $5 million dollar grant to get the Web Foundation started on its path of connecting humanity via technology. 

I visited Barack Obama’s website yesterday looking to find his “Blueprint for Change” to convince an undecided voter (yes, they really do exist!) to vote for him. I guess I haven’t been on his site much in the last few months, though, because the clean, crisp design I remember seems to have been replaced by a Christmas tree that’s staggering from the weight of too many departmental ornaments. Not only has the homepage height been slowly increasing, with inclusion of more widgets along the righthand side, but top of the homepage has been crowded with so many calls to action, some are literally on top of each other.

Here’s a screenshot of his homepage above the fold a few months back (via nowitis):

And here’s a screenshot of the same from today:

Notice the difference? Analysis of how the space is used, and lessons for your nonprofit, below the fold…

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