Beaconfire VP Michael Cervino gives his five New Year’s resolutions for non-profits. This is the first in a new series of video blog posts (vlogs!) we will be bringing you.

Next month hear CEO Lynn Labeineic talk about her biggest failures as a consultant. You do not want to miss that one!

These days, writing effective and efficient specifications for web sites should involve less narrative description and more visual depiction. It used to be that in conveying client desires to the engineers, we felt more of a need to write everything out, to be sure nothing was lost in translation. And to show and have proof that we heard our clients loud and clear.

However, now we can lean much more on visuals in our specs and less on narrative to get the job done quicker. Our “blueprint” is now one showing pictures of what we intend to build, that rough out various objects in an application or on a web page. And in some cases, the pictures “work” like real apps. or web pages in a prototype we can create for demonstration and testing.

Part of this is due to the way that specification tools have evolved. Tools such as Axure, which we use here at Beaconfire, include nice out-of-the-box visual “widgets” and design patterns that we can easily drag and drop into place. You can also spend time building your own if need be and store them in a library, for next time. These visuals are capable of conveying much of how the interface with function. Then any description needed can be added as an annotation that the tool manages for us. Also, such tools can publish out prototypes and specifications as HTML, giving us a handy web-based version of our spec for client review and for reference by the engineers.

We can also lean more on visuals rather than narrative, as certain design patterns and ideas have become so common on the web that they no longer require long narrative to describe them. A picture of the design pattern does just fine on its own, as there is an existing understanding and expectation we can rely on. Just as some things in the real world are already understood – you wouldn’t describe the action of a door knob turning to open a door in your house’s blueprint for instance – so are many things on the web.

For example, think of drop-down menus on a web site. Just labeling the object a ‘drop-down menu’ already sets plenty of expectation around how the object will work based on established norms. There is no need to describe the process of mousing over a primary label and triggering secondary navigation to drop-down below. It’s just expected. There may be specifics we still need to capture… “Delay .5 milliseconds before fading in the secondary nav…” but these are additive to or exceptions to established behaviors.

However, regardless of how common place objects in your spec might be, how much and what type of description you include still needs to be considered carefully based on the two typical audiences for specifications: the engineers doing the building, and clients approving that your spec meets their needs and desires. While the engineers will be able to intuit many behaviors from visuals with little description, you may need to describe more to be sure clients fully understand the spec.

Still if objects are already visual – or better yet interactions can be demonstrated with a working prototype – you can use the visuals to explain and demonstrate to clients that you heard them loud and clear. And that the spec reflects all of their wishes, along with smart interface design.

I’m going to let you in on a little-known web marketing secret.  Ready?  Email is not a webpage. It’s true: your emails are actually different than your website.

Ok, maybe that’s not a big secret… actually, it’s not a secret at all.  It seems pretty obvious.  And yet, too many email marketers ignore that fact when they’re designing, writing, and sending emails.

An email is typically created with a single purpose in mind.  In that way, it’s no different than any page on your website, but the purpose itself probably is different.  Your email is targeting a different, narrower audience.  It is also probably asking the recipients for something, in a way that a typical webpage is not.  The email will also be displayed by a different technology (email clients are not like web browsers – all the standards-compliance sins of IE6 are a shadow compared to the bad behavior of most email clients) and will be viewed under very different circumstances: in a browser, in a stand-alone email client, in a preview pane, on a mobile device.

Keeping those differences in mind, here are some web practices to avoid when creating emails:

Don’t rely on images! It’s sad, but true: all your beautiful, carefully-crafted images simply won’t appear to the large percent of your users whose email client blocks images by default.  Even the alt text might not show up. No one knows exactly how many people have images disabled, but estimates say that about 50% of your recipients won’t see images.  Yet, many email marketers use images heavily – some even send emails that are entirely images!

You should still use images to drive your message home, but make sure your message will still make sense without them.  Don’t let your images be the only source of key content. Similarly, make sure they don’t take up too much space – because that space will show up as blank if images are disabled.

Some studies have shown big changes in action rates when images play a smaller role in the message. It’s not surprising; look at this email I got after reserving a hotel room, with and without images:

In contrast, here’s an example from Green America that does it right: even without images, I can see all the information in the message.  With images, it just looks a bit nicer.

More tips after the jump. (more…)

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.

Twitter is an increasingly important player in social media – even Congress is tweeting. But while some people love Twitter, others love to hate it.  We asked our staff: To tweet? Or not to tweet?

(As a twist, tweeters were limited to 140 characters in their defense.  For non-tweeters, no limits.  It seemed only appropriate.)

Amadie, Marketing Consultant (@amadie): I tweet on online community, fundraising, analytics, and general randomness. My TweetCloud: tweetstats.com/gr…

Tim, Functional Consultant: I swore I would never – and didn’t see how it was anything but splattering my friends with the minutiae of my life.  Now I splatter daily.

Mark, Functional Consultant: 2 tweet, bt carefuly. No m@r hw shrt or fleeting, tweets stik arnd, r srchable & shw up lk NEthing. esp if ura celeb. Ask Gilbert Arenas.

Shiloh, Marketing Consultant: RT @Mark: tweet carefully. No m@r hw shrt or fleeting, twts stik arnd, r srchable & shw up lk NEthing. esp if ura celeb. Ask Gilbert Arenas.

Miro, Software Engineer: Tweeting needs to die a quick and painful death, at least in its 140 character iteration. The phone technology is progressing at such a point that within a few years, we should have fully web and email-enabled phones in every hand at which point the silly texting limitations and hvng t abbr evrythg is just a ridiculous requirement.

Instead of limiting our communication by the early 20^th century technology, we should move it all forward by about a hundred years, and just call it all data … voice, web, texting, email. It’s all just bytes moving around.

While tweeting has its useful social uses (see Iran, natural disasters), and should be kept around for those reasons, far too many abuse it and try to make it deeper than it should be. See tweeting from Congress people as they’re in session, and the likes of Sarah Palin. If your entire thought can fit into 140 chars, maybe you should keep it to yourself.

Jo, Marketing Consultant: I tried to like Twitter.  I really did. I got an account, I followed a bunch of smart, entertaining people… but I gave up. There was too much noise, not enough signal.  And in too many cases, no thought behind the content.  Twitter has some good uses, I’ll admit… but give me a good ol’ blog, and I’ll be much happier.

As some of you may remember, last March Beaconfire created “The Beacon: Lounge with a Conscience”, a gathering place at south by southwest interactive for tech social do-gooders and the nonprofit geekeratti (like you!) to find one another, share ideas and decompress between sessions. With the comfy furniture, great WiFi, cool ambience, and daily refreshments (thanks to our friends at Blackbaud, Free Range Studios, NTEN, The Capital Area Food Bank, Opportunity International, and Operation Smile) the joint was always jumping and became the nptech hub at SxSW.

This year, we’re doing it again, hopefully even better. The Beacon will host a daily acoustic concert put on by local Austin musicians, offer up great food & drink, and provide even more hanging out space than last year. And if that’s not enough for you, we are lucky to be showcasing the amazing work of Mike Rhode, a SxSW icon for his “Sketchnotes” and soon to be released 37 Signals “Rework” book.

This is where YOU, our dear readers, come in! To honor the nptech community at the core of The Beacon’s very existence, we want to gloriously and unabashedly adorn the walls of the lounge with posters/artwork from nonprofit organizations like yours. What better opportunity will you have to show off your great design, as well as raise awareness at South by Southwest for important causes that everyone should know about.

Interested? Email me for details at eve.simon@beaconfire.com. We will need all posters in hand by Feb 15th, and hope that we can showcase as many of them as possible in The Beacon Lounge at sxsw this March.

Beautiful fonts are one of the holy grails of Web Design.  Along with CSS-based equal height columns, better support for image transparency, browsers that all display pages the same (or at the very least the death of IE6), and a vending machine stocking drinks with higher caffeine content than Mountain Dew, the ability to use any font we want in a page design would make us (mostly) very happy indeed.

There is something to be said for sticking with a fairly limited set of fonts for the main content of your site.  After all, people actually have to read what we write and our usual set of fonts are nicely readable for the most part.  But when it comes to headlines we may want to use something a bit more elegant than Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Georgia.

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As the New Year begins and resolutions to quit smoking proliferate, Beaconfire is pleased to be working with the The American Legacy Foundation and their smoking cessation program – BecomeAnEX.org. The EX campaign is about re-learning your life without cigarettes and the EX site plays an important role in helping smokers learn their triggers and then maximize support from family, friends and the community of users at the EX community.

Recently, Beaconfire helped Legacy revitalize their website and migrate their users from Ning to the Elgg social networking software solution. Read more after the jump. (more…)