MoveOn.org wants you to know that every vote counts.  Especially yours.  Yes, you!  In fact, your vote could be the deciding vote.  Really!

For Obama, a solid lead in the polls means a danger that his supporters - people who would definitely vote if the race were close - might not feel the urgency to vote.  So what does an advocacy group do for the people who, after weeks of increasingly frequent ads, emails, text messages, phone calls, and other reminders about the importance of voting, just aren’t that motivated?

Last week, MoveOn sent me a video showing just what will happen if I, personally, don’t vote: I will be personally responsible for changing the result of the presidential race.  The video shows the full effects of me not voting, including news reports and interviews calling me out by name.  And once I’ve watched the video, with a couple clicks of a mouse I can send it to all my friends and family with their names to show them just what will happen if they don’t vote.

This election cycle has pushed the boundaries of online marketing in many ways, but this video may be my favorite because it’s just so fun.  It has all the hallmarks of a great campaign:

• It’s thoroughly entertaining
• It’s got a serious message
• The goal is clear and simple (”go vote!”)
• It’s easy to pass along to a friend

All these things make it a wonderfully viral message.  I think the humor helps a great deal with that: it’s less intimidating to send someone a serious request wrapped up in a joke than to make the serious request outright.  And the use of dynamic content (the name of the recipient, which appears throughout the video) makes it both funnier and more effective.

And it seems to be working: MoveOn has reported that this video was sent over 6 million times in less than a week, with another week to go before the election.  Not bad at all!

Part One of an Exciting Two-Part Series!

In this episode, we explore why iPhone and its applications are the Robot Devil..

The iPhone, somewhat justifiably, gets a lot of criticism for being the downfall of Western civilization, the reason the U.S. is in a state of economic turmoil, the bane of Miro’s existance, and so on. Instead of putting our money in our 401(k), purchasing war bonds, or buying nutritious cans of condensed soup to feed our hungry children, many Americans are going out and spending money they don’t have on flat screen televisions, designer handbags, and sleek little phones that do tricks. What has our nation come to, you ask, when people nationwide camp out overnight or wait in the line that goes around the block to buy a phone?

Get your ire up below the fold… (more…)

Now that you’ve seen the benefits of performing a usability audit, you’re probably wondering, “What else can we do to improve the reach and effectiveness of our organization’s Web presence?” The answer might be to apply those same audit principles and steps to your online marketing and engagement programs.

“Marketing audits are similar to usability audits, but marketing audits have the more focused goal of getting people to complete a transaction,” noted Ali, Beaconfire’s Online Campaigns and Marketing Director, in a recent conversation.  “A marketing audit includes setting up a ladder of engagement, choosing the steps you want people to ascend, ordering them (setting priorities), and identifying tactics to get your target audience to progress up the ladder.” (more…)

THERE - I said it. Sue me.

After 13 years in the Web I never thought I would become a Color Hater. I mean come on! I should be thanking my lucky stars on a daily basis that I’m not a print designer where color would haunt my waking hours, shake me from dread-filled-press-check nightmares in a cold sweat and fill my head with foreign concepts that I’m challenged to parse. Swatch books. CMYK vs spot color. ICC profiles. Ink draw downs. Press characterizations. Spectrodensitometers. Substrate ink absorption. Monitor calibration to the micron. And ::gasp:: resolutions above 72 dpi. Just thinking about is enough to make me break out in hives.

In truth, the web has come a long way in terms of how we manage color. We all remember the dark days of ye old web-safe palette. “What do you mean I can only use 216 colors — I’m an Artist! How do expect me to work under these circumstances?” Over time, monitor sizes and resolution have increased, new web graphic optimization models and formats have emerged, true standards based design has exploded on the scene, and the list of technological improvements can go on and on and on. But the bottom line is that now we can be nearly 100% confident that what we create on our machine will still bear more than a passing resemblance on the end-user’s screen, platform and browser differences notwithstanding. Deus ex machina — we’re saved!

However, all advances aside, I’m starting to get the distinct impression that color is managing us instead, and I’d like to lodge a formal complaint.

Recently I had a color run-in, which heretofore will be known as “The day I wondered why I didn’t go to law school after all”. While developing a design for one of our clients, the graphic files ended up passing through many hands per our usual design & production process. As careful as I thought I had been with keeping the colors true through the workflow, when we had a test site to look at, it became clear that something was rotten in the state of Firefox. Suddenly, inexplicably, the organization’s blue logo stubbornly refused to match the rest of the page in a glaringly “I gotta be MEEE” sort of way.

No problem. I’m a trained professional. This is cake, I said to myself, giddily cloaked with the hubris of web color/technology superhero powers. I adjusted the “official” logo color to match the site (with client permission of course) and optimized that puppy as a browser-friendly, alpha-channeled, gamma-corrected .png. The logo shifted color in the browser before my eyes, sneering at me as if to say “You’ll need to do better than THAT.” I played with a PMS/Hex color translator to ensure the colors were identical. The universe mocked my pain. I even changed all color profiles and re calibrated my monitors before optimizing for the millionth time. The logo staunchly refused to play ball. And then, for a brief shining moment, I got it to work (in Firefox) only to see it shift again (in IE). I always knew Microsoft was out to get me.

In the end, the developer, PM and I decided the only option was one last Hail Mary pass, and that if we failed, we’d draw straws to decide who’d tell the client their logo was as un-matchable as a gay Buddhist on eHarmony.

I. Made. It. a . JPG.

Praise the lord and pass the potatoes — it worked. I could bore you with why I think it worked (Format and cross browser incompatibilities, lossy vs lossless image compression which affected the bit depth indexing and shifted the color to the closest available shade) but I’d like to think it’s simple as this: I was making it all too complex because I could. The GOWC (Gods Of Web Color, for those playing the home game) clearly wanted to teach me a lesson that day, and it wasn’t just “You’d have sucked as a lawyer.” Perhaps in the end, no matter how far you think you’ve come on the web, sometimes you just have to kick it old school.

With news of Obama’s $150 million month still fresh on my mind, I saw an email from him appear in my inbox with the subject line “You Decide.” Skimming the email, I hoped that it would lead me to a donation form that asked me to determine which states my contributions to go to. Sadly, my hopes were dashed - it was just another standard donation form.

This makes sense - in general, restricted giving is dangerous, as your supporters aren’t always the best judges of how you should spend your campaign resources (as any field organizer will tell you if asked about yard signs). But look at the place where Senator Obama is at:

• Ahead in the polls by about 6 points nationally
• Winning enough states by 8 or more to get to 270 EVs without even considering battlegrounds
• Flush with cash, to the point that he’s running TV ads 3 to 1 in states where he’s competing with McCain, and running unopposed in other states
• Expanding the map to states that no one considered remotely near the table a year ago
• Running out of time to place more TV buys

This is no reason to be overconfident - as a Democrat, I’m quite used to playing Charlie Brown to the electorate’s Lucy. But it is a reason to consider bold new ways to involve your contributors: why not just let them pick the states to target their fundraising?

First, consider that this one fundraising campaign is a drop in the bucket - you’ve got plenty of other appeals, not to mention big dollar fundraisers and merch. Plus the value of money is dropping daily - a dollar given today is worth much less than that same dollar in May, since he’s pretty much hit the saturation point with TV anyway and has started expanding to XBox Live and iPhones.

Second, there’s no reason the campaign has to get too specific. Don’t let donors determine exactly what the contribution is for, but maybe just the state or general expense area. With so many states in play, it’s unlikely that more than a token amount of money will go to states where it’s completely wasted, since even Massachusetts and DC have field expenses that could be reallocated later.

But more than anything, it gives donors a sense of ownership in the campaign. They’ve seen countless presentations by David Plouffe with his charts and maps showing the plan for victory, so why not let your most dedicated supporters direct their contributions to make it possible - I’d be willing to bet that the results would look a lot like the maps that the campaign is looking at.

Non-profits lucky enough to find themselves the recipient of similar windfalls should also consider relinquishing control to donors. As long as you make the choices such that almost anything is good, and set up disclaimers to allow you to shift unallocated dollars to general revenue, the benefits of increased giving that always come from restricted dollars should outweigh the headache to your accounting department. And while you’ll still have to do much of your fundraising as unrestricted so that it can be used to pay for less photogenic programs, like administrative costs, a few “donors choice” restricted fundraisers a year can do wonders for your net revenue.

For Barack Obama’s campaign today, a restricted gift isn’t really restricted - there’s almost no bad place to spend his money. Telling the donors, “You decide” and meaning it would keep up the tidal fundraising that’s been a sign of the massive grassroots support he’s enjoyed so far - and might do the same for your non-profit.

… the International Academy of Visual Arts, that is. Beaconfire has been honored with four Silver 2008 W3 Awards for Outstanding Website Design in the following categories:

Activism: Free the Slaves
Best Visual Appeal: Free the Slaves
Charitable Organizations/Non profit: Share Our Strength
Best Home Page: Share Our Strength

Big thanks to our tireless project & design teams and hearty congratulations to our award-winning clients!

In the early days of web design there wasn’t a great deal of difference between a web designer and a web developer. A lot of organizations took the two roles, threw in a few skills like network administrator and content editing and termed the whole thing a “webmaster”, a virtual wizard of all things Internet, a magical being of tech. And while there are still plenty of these arcane heroes amongst us, a gradual transition away from the all-in-one approach due to concepts like separation of content from presentation and layered tiers of programming have divided these aspects into defined roles performed by different employees with rather more mundane titles like “engineer”.

At Beaconfire, the Information Architects (IAs) are distinct from the Interface Engineers (IEs), who are distinct from the Software Engineers (SEs). Since we’re also technology agnostic, our Interface Engineers try to cut portable HTML that can be used in any system or language, and our programmers try to make that HTML work with minimal changes in the Content Management System or custom application they develop. As Web 2.0 interfaces utilizing RIA technologies like AJAX become more ubiquitous, it’s natural to assume that the separation of interface and programming roles would continue to expand and solidify as the skills become more specialized and exacting to master.

And yet… two very different modern technologies that heavily leverage CSS are bringing design and development closer together again: JQuery and Microformats.

(more…)

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend ForeSee Results‘ Digital Citizen 2008 Summit.  I was only able to attend the first half of the event due to client meetings in the afternoon. One morning session was fairly sales-oriented. One was a fun case study about the National Park Service web site (which I particularly enjoyed because the National Parks Conservation Association is a BF client).

But the best session I was able to attend was Eric Peterson’s opening keynote. Aside from being a really engaging speaker, Peterson is also pretty much a guru in the art and science of web analytics (and do follow the link to his site, because he offers a ton of free resources there).

Peterson opened with the concept that satisfaction is a function of expectations. “Well, duh,” you’re probably thinking, but how many times do we disappoint our constituents not because what we’re offering is bad, but because we led them to expect something different than what they got?

Peterson also immediately disabused us of the notion that occasionally running a report out of Google Analytics is sufficient. While the tools themselves have improved in the past 15 years, he pointed out that the really important, useful advances have been made in taking that data and turning it into knowledge organizations can act on.

Peterson pointed out that organizations all make one of three errors in trying beneficially use information about their web traffic beneficially:

• An investment gap - because even free tools aren’t free.
• A staffing gap - because data without interpretation and application is just a big pile of numbers.
• A process gap - because unless you’re willing to change your business processes based on what you learn, you’ll never see a return on your investment.

These parallel the three factors that have to be in order so that organizations can effectively make sense of their web traffic: technology, people, and process. And, as you might guess, the last one is the hard one.

Peterson went on to describe an analysis ecosystem, made up of analytics tools, personalization, multivariate testing, and the voice/experience of the customer. Rather than trying to explain the full concept here, I’ll point out that he’s written a white paper that’s available for free download (from ForeSee Results) and that lays out how all these factors interact to provide both quantitative and qualitative data to give organizations a complete picture of how to improve their constituents’ experiences with them.

And finally, if this topic really interests you, be sure to check out the next Web Analytics Wednesday in your area.

Edited Friday, October 10 at 9:48 am to add:  The slides of all the presentations are now available for free download.

A couple of Saturday’s ago, a team of Beaconfire staffers and families joined Ocean Conservancy for their annual International Coastal Cleanup.  Every year, teams around the world give up their Saturday to clean up all the crap that’s been dumped along our local shore lines.  There were teams working along rivers, lakes, oceans, and streams doing what we can to prevent our local crap from floating out to sea and becoming international crap and doing more damage to marine wildlife.  Our team worked along the Anacostia River in Washington, DC.  Last year, this event cleaned up 6 million pounds of debris off of 33,000 miles of shoreline in 76 countries by 378,000 participants.  Once the event coordinators of this year’s event finish tallying the results, we’re hoping to have made an even bigger impact.  (On a side note, Beaconfire is also proud to have built the online tool the event coordinators are using to report the results from thousands of events around the world.)  In photo from left to right: Elizabeth Engel, Lynn Labieniec, Mickie Cervino, Eric Eckl, Jennifer Bagnall-Stuart, Killian Cervino, Kindra Tully, Kristin Niemi-Gillig, Jeff Herron, Michael Cervino, Taylor Snook.