We all know that testing your wireframes to make sure your priority audiences can complete key tasks on your website-in-progress is a good idea – but is there an inexpensive way to do it? I was alerted to an online tool yesterday that can help you conduct tests quickly, easily and inexpensively, too.

Optimal Workshop’s Chalkmark (http://www.optimalworkshop.com/chalkmark_alt.htm) makes usability testing a snap. First identify the tasks you would like your audience to complete. Next, upload the image of your wireframe. Invite your audience(s) to participate and then wait for the results to roll in. The test results are returned in the form of a heat map (see image). You can immediately see where people chose to click on your wireframe to complete the task you put forward. Of course Chalkmark can’t give you all of the information you would get from true wireframe prototype testing, but if budget is a concern, some information is better than no information. And feedback directly from the audience your site is trying to reach? Priceless.

chalkmark heat map

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 so much talk about the “death” of traditional news media and the growth of online alternatives, we asked our staff: How do you get your daily news? Do you still read a newspaper?

Susan, Administrative Assistant: When I was taking the metro, I would count on the Express for my daily news.  Now that I’m driving again, it’s all about WTOP news radio.

Amy, Functional Consultant: Indeed, I read the Washington Post every morning on my commute.  Sometimes, if I glance a picture or graphic in The Express over another commuter’s shoulder, I might read a little of that, too.  During the day I get my news from various news feeds on my iGoogle page – particularly CNN.com Headlines and “Top Stories” which pulls headlines across an array of providers (Bloomberg, The Post, The NY Times, Wall Street Journal, etc).

Tim, Functional Consultant: I haven’t read a paper in years.  During the day I get news via RSS feeds that I follow in Google Reader.  I listen to NPR radio shows via podcasts which I listen to during my commute.  Since picking up an iPhone, I increasingly get news via NPR, WSJ, Washington Post, and other apps.  In the evening I watch Jon Stewart who rounds out my daily news picture.  For real in-depth analysis, I read monthly and weekly magazines (Harpers, the New Yorker, and The Economist).

Andy, Project Manager: Every day I read DemocratandChronicle.com for local news, the Washingtonpost.com for national and political news, and search Google News for economic and financial stories of interest to me. I also read the print version of the Economist every week religiously.

Kristin, Project Manager: I listen to news radio on my drive in. Otherwise, re: papers, only on Sundays…it’s a luxury to sit down and read a paper these days…

Marissa, Functional Consultant: I get a Sunday Newspaper, but I don’t really read it for the news – I read it for that “Easy Like Sunday Morning” feel. I have an RSS Feed set up to send me local news. As for National News, I don’t have a specific way I follow it. I’m on the Internet all day, so somehow the really big news always trickles down to me somehow. I’m ashamed to admit it, but my most steady source for National News is the Daily Show.

Jeff, Principal Consultant: Yes newspaper every day. Something about seeing stories I wouldn’t normally choose to read.  I also use the AP news widget on blackberry when I don’t have the paper or want to see newer headlines.

Ali, Marketing Consultant: Washington Post online in the morning.  Facebook status updates in the evening.  Blogs on the weekends.  I spend about 2 minutes scanning the Post in the morning and click “read later” for articles that interest me.  This tags them to Instapaper on my iPhone so I can read them on the metro on the way home.  At night, I usually scan status updates for articles, blog posts or videos friends have found interesting.  I let them serve as an information filter.

Lynn, Principal Consultant: I use my Blackberry a lot and use the Google News Reader.  But I still enjoy sitting down with the physical newspaper over my morning breakfast.

Shiloh, Marketing Consultant: During the week I listen to NPR and supplement with my Facebook feed (my friends know what kinds of articles I’m interested in) and, if I’m lucky, episodes of the Daily Show/Colbert Report to put it all in perspective. I read the newspaper but only on weekends.

Amadie, Marketing Consultant: On the weekends, I love to sit down with the print newspaper – the Post on Saturday and Sunday, and the Sunday New York Times – and read them pretty much cover-to-cover. During the week, though, time is very limited. I follow several reputable national and local news sources on Twitter and scan the headlines throughout the day, and catch the top of the hour news on the Today Show while getting ready and the Daily Show each evening.

Jo, Marketing Consultant: I used to read the paper on the metro every morning, but I find it too big and awkward to read in a crowded train.  Now, I read the Washington Post via their mobile site on my way to work, supplemented with blogs later in the day.  And, of course, I need my dose of fake news from the Daily Show.

The holiday season is almost upon us, and that means (apart from family time, good cheer, and lots of food) that you’ll probably be asking your supporters for money.

And so will everyone else.

Holiday fundraising is a fine balancing act.  On one hand, you want to make a strong push: ask early, ask often, ask for a lot.  On the other hand, at some point you get diminishing returns, as your less-enthusiastic supporters get sick of reading your fundraising emails (and maybe even unsubscribe!), and even your die-hard donors are just skimming your messages.  At the same time, it’s a fair bet that their inboxes are being flooded by fundraising messages from other non-profits; you want to stand out from the crowd, but not be part of the noise.

Sometimes, less is more.  What’s one way to strike a healthy balance?  Send fewer messages, but make them count more.  In a word: segmentation!

Your donors aren’t all the same.  So why should they get the same message sequence?

If Suzie always makes an honor gift for Christmas for each member of her family, don’t send her a slew of emails for months before and after.  A couple friendly reminders ought to do it.

Or, if George makes a year-end donation on December 31st every year, like clockwork, to help his tax status, you probably don’t need to ask him to buy a gift membership.

The beauty of email fundraising is that it’s dead easy to create message variations, custom email lists, and detailed reporting.  Your data won’t be as cut-and-dry as the examples above, but with a little analysis and brainstorming, you can probably come up with a manageable number of segments that capture the most common behaviors of your supporters.  Then, you can send each message only to the segments that it fits.

And to take “less is more” a step further: not every email needs to be a fundraising ask!  If every email you send is asking for money, your subscribers will come to expect that any new email from you will be… another ask for money. They can guess that without even opening it.  Let’s face it: it’s no fun to be asked for money over and over, no matter how worthy the cause.

Instead, mix it up a little.  Cultivate your supporters – and let them remember how much they value you.  Share a story about your work.  Thank them.  Let them know how much they mean to you.  Any message that has value beyond fundraising can help you deepen your connection with your supporters… and that has value of its own.

So when you’re setting up your holiday fundraising, beware of list fatigue!  Keep your messages relevant and properly targeted.  Fewer messages could mean more happy supporters.

I love analytics. I love diving into the data, looking at the numbers and finding new and actionable insights. But there is one thing about analytics I don’t love – monthly dashboard reports. You know what I mean – a spreadsheet showing visits, pageviews, new visitors, etc., compared from month to month in nice little columns, filling in a neatly formed Excel graph. While not always actionable, these reports do show big-picture trends, and your bosses and boards love that. In the world of analytics, monthly dashboard reports are a necessary evil.

However, I could never get Google Analytics to give me data in a form that really fit any of my monthly dashboard report needs. I’ve spent hours clicking, copying, pasting, and reformatting in search of the perfect dashboard report.

The tedium may come to an end, thanks to an Excel Plugin called Excellent Analytics. The plugin uses the Google Analytics API to allow you to run customizable Google Analytics reports right in Excel. And after you create a query, a few clicks will update the numbers in next month’s report.

So after you invest some time to set up your first Dashboard report with Excellent Analytics, all you need to do next month is copy and paste a few columns as values, and update your query. I tried it out for the first time this month, and I went from spending almost 4 hours on a dashboard report to 45 minutes.

Now that’s efficiency only an analytics geek could love.

… You really won’t want to miss THIS.

Remember back in August when we asked for your help to get our panel ideas accepted to South by Southwest Interactive? Well, this last week we have been dying to share really exciting news with you, but have been sworn to secrecy .. til NOW!

Thanks to the hard work, brilliance and tenacity of own Shiloh Stark, Jo Miles and Michael Cervino, “Will Kiva Kill Your Non Profit: Donations 2.0″ has been chosen, featuring Skylar Woodward from Kiva.

From sxsw head honcho’s email:
“We received more than than 2300 outstanding proposals via the SXSW PanelPicker — so being selected for the event means that your idea represents the best of the best of the best. Congrats!! And, thanks again for putting together such a great proposal.”

Does it get any better than that? See you all in Austin!

The economy is bad.  Donations are down, and you’re under pressure to bring them back up.  What would you do if someone offered your organization $10,000 a month for online advertising?  You’d snap it up, right?  And spend a few hours a month managing it?

Or would you apply, but then leave your ads languishing, unattended, for months on end, using only a fraction of your money?

I’m always amazed at how many eligible organizations haven’t signed up for the Google Grants program… and of those who have, how many are not using or managing their grant.  I’m not one to evangelize a product (in fact, Beaconfire is technology-agnostic), but Google Grants is unique in its scope and availability to nonprofits.

Applying for the program is, in many cases, an easy choice.  Here it is in a nutshell: if your organization meets certain criteria, Google will give you $10,000 per month in advertising on their Adwords tool, to use however you like.  (Adwords are those little text ads you see next to your Google search results.)  There are a few restrictions – for example, your bids are limited at $1, and you can only advertise within Google search results, not on other networks.  But it’s a great way to reach potentially interested web searchers, especially on topics where your site doesn’t rank on the first page of search results.

Once you have your grant, making good use of it is not hard. It doesn’t take a lot of time, either – just a few hours to learn the basics, and then a couple hours a month to maintain your account.  Yet, this is where a lot of organizations seem to falter.  You’re busy, and you’ve really been meaning to build out your campaign, you’ve planned to check and see how it’s doing, you’re going to get to it any day now…

It’s easy for “any day now” to stretch on for months, until you’ve forgotten all about your Adwords account.  And if you’re not paying attention to it, then it’s almost certainly not performing as well as it should.

An Adwords campaign is like a garden – even once you’ve planted it, you need to check on it and pull the weeds, add new plants as the seasons change, and generally keep an eye on things.  If you don’t, the weeds will take over, the bugs will eat your tomatoes, and you won’t get the results you want.

If you already have a grant, log into your Adwords account right now.  How much of your $10,000 did you spend in the past month?  What was your average clickthrough rate?  How many ad groups (topics) do you have?  If you haven’t been actively maintaining your account, chances are that you could do a lot better.

Of course, there’s no cost to under-using your grant – you’re just missing a big opportunity.  How big?  If you were using all of your grant money, and getting a modest 1% clickthrough rate, you’d be driving 10,000 extra visitors to your site each month, to landing pages of your choosing.  That’s not nothing.  If you follow a few simple guidelines, you can take much better advantage of that opportunity.

To me, these are the biggest things to watch out for:

• Log in at least once a month. Ideally, you should monitor your account once a week.  It may only take 15 minutes, but you can look for opportunities and trouble spots, and stay aware of how your campaign is doing.
• Use multiple variations on your keywords. Include plurals and misspellings.  Mix up the word order.  You’ll get more impressions… and thus, more clicks.
• Test variations on your ads. Even if you don’t have time to be scientific about it, include at least two different ads in each group.  You’ll often see that one does much better than the other.
• Watch your quality score! Each keyword is assigned a quality score, on a scale of 1-10, based on its relevance to your ads and your landing page.  You can see it by customizing the columns on your keywords view.  If your quality score slips, Google will start to place your ads lower in search results, which will in turn hurt your clickthrough rate.  One easy way to improve your account performance is to weed out (delete) any keyword with a quality score of 4 or lower.  If you’re seeing a whole lot of low quality scores, take a look at your ads and your landing page.  Are the keywords really relevant?  If so, tweak your ads to match them better.  If not, you probably shouldn’t use that keyword.
• Don’t just advertise on your brand. There are pros and cons to buying ads for brand-related keywords.  But it’s safe to say that if your brand keywords make up a major portion of your campaign, you’ve got a lot of room to expand.  Think creatively: what might your potential supporters be searching for that you could provide them?  What resources on your website could make a great landing page?
• Watch ROI… but not just ROI. When you’re paying for an ad campaign, you want every dollar to count – to drive new donations or acquisitions.  But if you have a grant and you’re currently not using all of it, you can afford to drive traffic to useful pages with (gasp) no clear conversion action.  You’ll be increasing your traffic and building brand loyalty… and some of those visitors probably will convert, too.

This is by no means a comprehensive guide to Adwords, but it’s a solid starting point for revitalizing your account and making good use of your free advertising dollars.  And in this economy, isn’t it nice to get something for free?

Myth #1: Monthly breast self-exams save lives

Most of us think that regular breast self-exams are a no-brainer, but the evidence actually shows that breast self-exam does not save lives or detect breast cancer at an earlier stage.

This myth, along with 30 other myths and truths about breast cancer, will be highlighted throughout the month of October by the National Breast Cancer Coalition (NBCC).

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and NBCC is doing what it does best – getting us to think critically about our assumptions and keeping us focused on the important part: finding a cure. To help translate this message online, Beaconfire partnered with NBCC on a redesigned homepage and new site skin that draws attention to common misconceptions about breast cancer and offers concrete action items for people ready to take the next step.

Today, I had the honor of speaking on a great panel sponsored by Google and the Ad Council along with Jane Kirchner from American Farmland Trust, Andrew Marshall fromthe Agency for Healthcare Quality and Research (AHRQ) and Carley Graham Garcia from Google.

Huge props to Kate Emanuel of the ad council for pulling it all together and inviting me to join the assembled rockstars. For anyone playing the home game who would like to see my part of the presentation, enjoy!