Having just barely survived phase 1 of our “Logo Lift” here at Beaconfire, I have only one thing to say: Ouch.

I won’t even fake naïveté here because I knew deep down it would be harder than expected. I’ve had the front row seat to many a client rebranding train wreck before, but I’ve always played the role of supportive consultant. The “expert” voice. The one saying “Good God, how hard can it be to design a great logo? Tell your agency to get on with it already!”

Yeah. Karma’s a bitch.

For those uninitiated, the process of designing a logo usually includes the creation of a unique “mark” or graphic treatment paired with an appropriate font/type. Together, these should represent, at a single glance, your company’s mission, vision, methodology and style. While settling upon a new font choice was tricky, we managed to relatively quickly agree to one we all loved. However I totally underestimated how complex, terrifying and fraught with peril the search for a revised mark would be. My blood pressure reached new highs when we spent 2 weeks without any clue how to integrate the mark. Visions of blank business cards and logo-less postcards swam in front of my eyes. My job, I was certain, hung in the balance. No doubt about it, I was in full-on panic.

In my defense, since we weren’t totally rebranding but rather hoping to “update” our existing logo (both mark and type), I thought it would somehow be easier. Don’t know what I was smoking. Lesson of the year: Creating something “new” that retains the brand equity of the “old” yet still feels like “us” is not unlike juggling. Blindfolded. On crutches. With flaming chainsaws.

All challenges aside, I can proudly report we will not be going barefoot as originally feared, and that we now have a shiny “new” logo that we are very very proud of.

But just to keep you all guessing, the actual logo is embargoed until the official reveal at our 10th anniversary celebration in March – Patience is a virtue my friends (or at least that’s what I’m told). However, I can share some of logos (out of the nearly 100 versions created) that we didn’t choose just to whet your appetite for the real thing in the spring.

After all of this, I can honestly say that I have a far greater appreciation of what our clients go through during this often painstaking & frustrating process. So next time I don’t offer you a glass of wine or a valium before addressing your branding needs, just smack me. You’re all remarkably brave souls.

Ok, cats and kittens – it’s quiz time. Got your pencils ready?

What single phrase when uttered aloud can send shivers down the spine of even the most stalwart organization executive? No, it’s not “Recession” (although a close second). If you guessed “Audit” you’re way off although “Website redesign” gets you warmer. Give up?

It’s “Rebranding”, officially defined as: “the process of giving a product or an organization a new image, in order to make it more attractive or successful.” Unofficially, defined as “Oh, Crap.”

Normally, it’s my job to help guide a client through this exciting, challenging and sometimes unpredictable process. I get to play therapist/subject matter expert/spiritual guide/bad guy as needed, without having any real skin in the game other than wanting the best for my client. Well, the chickens, they’ve come home to roost: Beaconfire is about to embark on this very process. And I’m not too proud to say that I’m a little freaked out. “The cobbler’s children have no shoes” ain’t just a saying, knowwhatImean?

Fueled by our 10 year anniversary next year (and a healthy dose of adrenaline/caffeine/insanity) we have decided to embark on a “LogoLift” ( i.e. not a full rebranding but a modernization of our existing brand) as we enter our next 10 years. Retaining brand equity at the same time as “re-imagining” the logo will be our first trick, followed closely by a redefinition of our voice across all communication vehicles. Piece of cake, right? The process kicks off this afternoon, and I think I’m more nervous for this “creative workshop” than for the ones I regularly lead for our clients. Why? Because my “Client” is a very smart, opinionated consultant – and we all know that no good can come from working with people like THAT.

Normally, I would offer the following helpful advice for a client starting down this auspicious path:

Simple imagery: The most effective is often the least complicated
Make a connection: Draw the audience in, don’t alienate them
Great typography: Clean, direct, engaging, but not lifeless.
Limited color palette: Pick 1 or 2 colors and work with hues to give depth and interest. Avoid applying mission symbolism to colors.
Don’t overthink it: If you cant explain how the logo represents your org to your mother in less than 10 words, try again.

Let’s hope I won’t be eating my words come Spring. As long as my blood pressure remains in an acceptable range, I will document our progress along the way, and let you know if we will celebrate our 10th with shoes on or not. Wish us luck?

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!

True Web developers are like superheroes with magic powers, at least to someone like me, who has only enough technical skills to make me dangerous.

So when we have an opening for a new superhero, I get very excited. When we have two openings, I get downright overwhelmed.

We’re looking for a couple of fantastic developers to join our team and help provide technical solutions to our clients.

Tech Lead / Consultant - The Technical Lead’s powers are experience and leadership.  He/she uses these powers to provide both objective technical analysis, as well as lead the implementation and integration of possible solutions. He/she also possesses the power to do hands-on programming as part of the project team.

Web Developer/Software Engineer with .NET – The developer’s powers are amazing .NET (C#) programming skills and a deep knowledge of Web technology.  He/she will use these powers to implement websites in various content management systems, create custom applications for the Web, integrate Web sites with other client back-end systems, consult with clients on available technologies and evaluate technology options.

To find out more about these positions, click on the “about us” link and go to “careers”.

So put your cape on and join Beaconfire.  Help our clients use technology to make an even greater impact in the world.

I’ll never get tired of saying this. The envelope please – Beaconfire just won four Web Marketing Association 2009 Web Awards including:

Free The Slaves, Outstanding Website
Share Our Strength, Non Profit Standard of Excellence
Wildlife Conservation Society, Non Profit Standard of Excellence

Huge thanks to all our project teams for the great work, and to our award-winning clients for being such Rockstars!

If you’re not busy on Saturday, why don’t you join one of the waterway clean up projects being organized by Ocean Conservancy?  On Saturday, Sept 19th people around the world will be pitching in, diving in, and helping clean up any body of water we can get our hands on (or near).  Last year teams around the world picked up 6.8 million pounds of trash which means that’s 6.8 million pounds less that’ll end up in our oceans.  Over 400,000 volunteers, 100 countries, and 42 states participated in last year’s worthwhile effort.

A Beaconfire crew will be joining the Ocean Conservancy team to work on the banks of the Anacostia River.  You can learn more about this international event (and sign up!) at www.oceanconservancy.org/icc

Odds are, you have heard about all the amazing Non Profit panels being proposed for South by Southwest interactive 2010, and your vote has been courted over and over again. After 2 weeks of this (with one more to go), odds are even higher that Panel-Picker fatigue has hit an all time high and the last thing you want to see are the letters s-x-s-w in that order.

Rather than hear from us about our amazing panels yet again, we thought we would share some comments from the sxsw community. The people are talking, and we invite YOU to join the conversation. Panel picker voting ends on Friday, Sept 4th so don’t delay – time is running out to weigh in on these great panel ideas, like these folks have:

Will Kiva Kill Your Nonprofit? Donations 2.0

Ted Fickes, The Wilderness Society
Definitely an interesting set of questions. Do people need or even want most/many organizations when there are local and/or highly focused or short-term projects out there and ready made ways to raise $ for them?

Sundeep Ahuja, The Extraordinaries
These days I see a lot of non-profits and cause oriented organizations borrowing pages from Kiva.org – from fundraising to marketing, Kiva.org has almost become an example of a “next-generation” non-profit. There’s something about the way Kiva.org embraces transparency, operations, and engagement which has made it a phenomena. WRT fundraising specifically, in a way Kiva is doing what Radiohead did when they launched their album for free and asked fans to pay what they wished; at the point of transaction, Kiva says “hey, we’re offering this service for free, but if you wish to help us do what we do, please pitch in” — and it’s working. I for one am very curious to see if this model (and the associated transparency and required operational efficiency) might work for other organizations as fundraising is one of the biggest challenges non-profits face.

Skylar Woodward, Kiva
I’m really looking forward to this discussion! We spend so much time engrossed in our model we don’t often get to step outside of Kivaland and consider how this is affecting online philanthropy at large. The intimacy and transparency of a Kiva loan certainly comes at a cost. To what extent is it reasonable to expect other organizations to correlate every dollar to good done in the world? Are we setting donor expectations too high or is this the reality of technology-enabled world driven by postmodern values? If this is the future, how do we scale operations, especially on a non-profit budget, to keep accurate data flowing between donors and recipients?!? At Kiva we’ve certainly had to find the balance between perceived impact and explaining what’s actually going on under the code and on the ground.

Cynthia Greenwood
This is a great idea for a panel. One of my concerns about these new online giving models is whether big donors will now choose to go online to fund loans to entrepreneurs of their choosing versus giving donations that can be used at the organization’s discretion to support the most needed programs and operations. Perhaps this could be addressed by the panel.

Milo Sybrant, Amnesty International
This discussion proves to be an interesting one because it raises important questions about the ethics of direct-to-beneficiary fundraising when the human lives are involved. It’s one thing to make a gift to cover the costs of snacks for children in a New York City school (as is possible through orgs like DonorsChoose). But it’s a different proposition to ask someone to make a contribution in order to get a specific political prisoner released from detention in Iran.

Joe Baker, Care2
This should be an interesting panel. It is fairly straightforward to see how the Kiva/DonorsChoose models of micro loans and direct donations can apply to/possibly supplant organizations that primarily serve as bundlers, vetters, and conduits for individual projects and direct assistance. I’m curious to see how the panelists feel the model can apply to other spheres such as advocacy groups.

Can Double-Clicking Change The World? Slacktivism 101

Robert Rosenthal,Volunteer match
Have to say, there’s a delicious irony to a bunch of people in a room watching other people talk about other people slacking. Causes in Facebook ($10 million from 240,000 causes, or $41 per cause) has been a convenient target for slacktivism charges because it’s big and they’ve been open about their numbers, but I think it’s clear our communities need a better model than “click for change”. At some point, individuals need to donate either real time or real money in order to make a difference. Should be a good panel.

Jean Russell, Nuture.biz
Really great issue to debate. i hope we can talk about what has traction without a lot of action and what looks sexy, but doesn’t get much traction – from both an activist org view as well as a contributor/slacker view.

Kiva Wilson, Kaboom.org
I’m stoked to see that SXSW has finally decided to take on this most worthy of topics. Slacktivism opens SO many doors for causes and volunteer/service opportunities. I’m eager to hear what the panelists have to say on the matter.

Michael Cooper
This is a great topic. Non-profits are doing some of the best work in the social media sphere – experimenting where others fear to tread. Big projects have big barriers to entry. If non-profits are to generate mass action, they must use these forms of media to have low barriers of entry to start and encourage folks to take the next step. Should be a great discussion.

Kathryn Lusk
I love this topic – it’s exciting to think about the potential for “slacktivism” to inspire real live activism!

Data, Data, Everywhere: Drowning in a Sea of Analytics

Danielle Brigida, National Wildlife Federation
I think it’s really important to pick the data you track carefully! There is so much to choose from. I hope this panel gets picked!

Jason Cooper, Kaboom.org
As someone who used to compile monthly reports in excess of 50 pages on everything you could imagine related to analytics, I’m very interested in hearing about Question #9. (“What stats can I ignore? “)

Joseph Kelly, Infochimps
Beaconfire does great work. Learning about actionable metrics is a metalesson that can be applied in all sorts of other fields. It will be interesting to see what you guys come up with.

Yoga For Social Networkers: Striking The Right Pose

Renee Hamilton, Operation Smile
I love this idea and the yoga tie in–it seems like it will benefit both newbies and experienced social media geeks who are always look for ways to stretch our time and talents and new positions for us to get into!

Ed Schipul, Schipul: the Web Marketing Company
Great to see Beaconfire, a strong supporter of the non-profit community and a firm that walks-the-talk, representing at SXSW. Not sure I can do the interactive portion of the presentation…. oooooh shiny! … oh wait, what was I writing about? Oh ya, I am in favor of any panel that helps us naturally limit our ADD tendencies and gain focus. This is timely for non profits, for businesses and for ourselves during the Great Recession!

It’s Not All About You: Respecting Your Users

Raffi Darrow, Rdesign inc
I wish everyone knew this: your site isn’t there for you, it’s there for your users!

Thank you for your support! Panel selection decisions will be made in October so watch this space – hopefully we will have some good news to report.

Beaconfire is proud to be selected as a 2009 Webby Honoree in the Activism category for Free The Slaves.

From the Webby’s Site:
“With nearly 70 categories, Website entries make up the majority of Webby Awards Winners, Nominees and Honorees. Some are beautiful to look at and interact with. Others are a testament to usability and functionality. And a handful excel across the board. To be selected among the best is an incredible achievement worthy of praise — and perhaps a little bragging.

Of the nearly 10,000 entries submitted to the 13th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an Official Honoree. This honor signifies an outstanding caliber of work. Congratulations to all of our Official Honoree selections!”

Wow. Just Wow. And yay! We’re very excited to be included with the other 11 fabulous projects in this category, and must thank Gravitate Design Studios for their partnership in creating this amazing site.

Michael Cervino was interviewed by Triplepundit for their “Philanthropy In Five” series. Read what he has to say about why we do what we do at Beaconfire, and what role philanthropy plays both in the work we do for our clients, as well as in our own business model.

In just over a week, the worlds hippest, smartest, network-iest people in technology will be converging upon Austin for South by Southwest interactive (known as SxSW-i to those in the know) and Beaconfire will be there in full force. Not only are we sponsoring THE coolest spot for non profits to hang out in (The Beacon – Lounge with a Conscience, Room 19A 4th floor) BUT you can meet the (in)famous Michael Cervino, Ali Cherry, Jo Miles, and yours truly (Eve Simon) there. What more can you ask for?

To get updates on all the cool things happening in The Beacon, including events from Blackbaud Internet solutions, Free Range Studios, NTEN, Operation Smile, Feeding America and Opportunity International, follow @TheBeaconsxsw on Twitter all week.

We hope to meet many of you in Austin next week, so please seek us out to say hi. For those not able to make the trip, we will be blogging between March 13-17, so hopefully you’ll feel like you’re there with us.

Want to meet the best & brightest non-profit Geekeratti in Austin this March? Between mind-bending panel sessions, do you need a place to hang with your world-saving entourage, collaborate with colleagues, pull up some WiFi or just get your blog on? You’re in luck – Beaconfire is sponsoring the hottest ticket in town.

Introducing The Beacon, Lounge with a Conscience.

Watch this space over the next few months for updates, great event info and a few surprises thrown in just ‘cuz we’re cool like that. Now, since our momma’s raised us right, we’d like to share the bounty with our friends in the non profit community by offering this unique stage as a blank canvas for your own event during SXSW week.

Interested? Contact me for details.

There’s a line from the animated Comedy Central show Dr. Katz that used to run in the 90s … a patient wonders aloud to the psychiatrist (the aforementioned Dr. Katz) why he’s paying exorbitant hourly fees for weekly sessions when he feels like he’s doing pretty good on his own. The doctor explains there are times when he’s overqualified and suggests all the patient really needs is just a “smart aunt”. It’s always reminded me of technical consulting – some clients need ongoing sessions with trained experts, and some just need the equivalent of smart aunt to dispense advice and nudge them along (and some need pretty intense psychotherapy, but that’s neither here nor there…)

Psychiatrist, non-profit consultant. We have similar goals – help the client to help themselves, to the point where they don’t need us anymore. Sounds like planned obsolescence… but don’t worry about us, “plenty more patients where those came from” and all that, ha-ha. The more we get to play the smart aunt role, the more clients we help. Personally, I love the smart aunt role. Don’t get me wrong, if a client needs to lay on the couch while we guide them to a successful project, then that’s what they need. But they’re paying for the privilege. And I’d really rather they spent their money on saving the world. To that end, here is some advice on making consultants work for you.

Is This a Website or a Data Integration Project?

You want a new website and a checklist of features. Forums? Check. Events calendar? Check. RSS? Check. Single sign-on with your AMS and Active Directory? Che… Wait a second, see what you did there? You just started a new project, whether you knew it or not, and whether the PM calls it one or not, and it isn’t part of your website. No, your website is part of it – a data integration project that extends to several of your systems of which the website is one. It might be a mini project or a major project, but it and your website are separate initiatives, initiatives that require their own planning, own meetings and own set of core team members that may or may not overlap. Get that new project started right or kick it out to another phase, or you’ll be spinning your wheels and burning hours.

More after the jump…

(more…)

Beaconfire is proud and excited to announce the launch of our refreshed Web site. It’s been in the works for several months, and it’s finally ready for public consumption. Our last major redesign occurred about three years ago, and the site was looking a little dusty.

Some of the new site features include:

• An interactive Flash design portfolio
• Fun facts about the team members at Beaconfire
• Blog postings integrated across the various sections of the site
• New options to sort and filter our ever-expanding client list

Most Beaconfire staff members had a hand in working on the site at some point over the past few months. Rahul and Adebo led the tech work. Creative Director Eve put together the new look. IA whiz Amy created the new site architecture. Eric, Elizabeth and Ali worked together on a new tone and copy for the site. Tim and Marissa did the HTML cuts. Michael acted as the executive sponsor, and Lynn was our “client” and did all the user acceptance testing. And Jennifer managed the project and kept us all moving in and around a very busy fall for our clients.

Beaconfire is hosting a round table in downtown Washington DC from 3-5 pm on Friday, November 14 on the topic of Web Usability for Associations: Designing for Your Members.

During this casual gathering, we will share examples from some associations we’ve worked with, showing how small changes to their Web sites led to major improvements across a wide range of online activities: joins, renewals, registrations, purchases, participation, advocacy, and volunteering.

The session is designed to encourage networking and learning. A wine and cheese reception will be followed by a short presentation of several association case studies and a free-flowing discussion about how your association can implement, test, and benefit from usability improvements.

For more information, please contact Elizabeth Weaver Engel at elizabeth.engel@beaconfire.com or 703.894.0080 x257.

… 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!

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.

When a couple of Beaconfire folks got back from South by Southwest Interactive Festival 2008, we were talking about the minimal representation of nonprofit organizations and pondered, why can’t nonprofits “celebrate the creativity and passion behind the coolest new media technologies” too? Well we put our creative heads together about what we could do about it and came up with, what we think, is a really cool way to showcase some of the ways nonprofits can push the envelope to engage a wider, more active audience online. Now, we just need you to help us make it happen by voting (and commenting) on the SXSW panel picker!

Three teams. Two days. One special ingredient.
THIS is Iron Chef America…Battle Non profit.

Our nimble Chairwoman, the incomparable Beth Kanter, will bring together the best of the best for this epic battle at the 2009 South by Southwest Interactive Festival (March 13-17th). Each team of 3 web experts, chosen from the leaders in the non profit marketing and social media sector (including Beaconfire and Free Range Studios), will meet in the heat of Austin to offer one small deserving non profit organization a delectable 3 course meal featuring: a tasty new homepage, a well-seasoned fundraising campaign, and a perfectly balanced social networking & marketing plan.

We need your help to get there: vote for us on SXSW’s 2009 conference panel picker! Layered with explosive technologies, unique concepts and best practices like you’ve never tasted before, this will be a battle for the ages!

Before South by Southwest, the three teams, each consisting of a designer, a marketing consultant and a social networking guru from different companies, will have 48 hours to collaborate and produce the final “Dishes”, and document the experience. In Austin, at the SXSW panel session, each team will serve their final “menu” to the client and the panel audience, who will vote in real time according to the following categories: unique design & visual concepts, out-of-the box strategic thinking, and the best use of social networking technologies to support the goals of the “special ingredient.”

Who will prevail and change the future for one lucky organization? It’s up to YOU. Vote for us now so that we can whip up this meal and then join us at SXSW and vote for the best team!

We’re proud to announce the launch of our first Facebook application: Employees! Employees allows page managers to add bios for individuals without linking to their actual profiles, hitting the balance between showing off their team and respecting the privacy of their actual Facebook accounts.

We came up with the idea for Employees when we were first building our own Facebook page: we wanted to show off the Beaconfire staff, but many of us didn’t want links directly to our personal Facebook profiles. In addition, because of the way Facebook cordons people off, those profiles would mostly only be viewable by folks in the Washington DC area. We also wanted to be able to write short bios on what our staff do at Beaconfire so that people looking to work with us knew a little about the people they’d meet.

Adding Employees to your Facebook page is easy – just click here to learn more about the application and click “Add to Page.” Then you can populate it with your team’s bios and pictures (sorry, caricatures not included!). If you’d like to see Employees in action, just visit Beaconfire’s Facebook page to try it out (about halfway down on the right).

Building this application taught us a lot about working in an entirely new space – unlike most development projects we work on, where the platform is stable, the Facebook developer environment is always changing. In the next couple weeks, we’ll have a few posts here on the Wire about developing for Facebook, and some of what we learned – part of this project was getting our feet wet on a project for ourselves so we’ll be prepared to dive right in when we start work on client applications.

Beaconfire will be presenting at the 2008 Bridge Conference, which will take place at the Hilton Washington Hotel in Washington, DC, July 23-25, 2008.

Beaconfire VP & Co-Founder Michael Cervino will be presenting Micro Campaign Sites and Communication Integration on Thursday, July 24 from 10:30 am – noon. One of the fundamental dilemmas in any fundraising campaign is how to find real estate for it on your site. But what if your campaign WAS the site? More and more organizations are using micro-sites to highlight their various campaigns, build brand around issues, and serve as the hub for their fundraising efforts. In this session, participants will explore several examples of micro-sites and the on- and off-line communications used to drive donations.

Tuesday night was shaping up to be a typical evening in the exhibit hall at this week’s AMA Nonprofit Marketing Conference. Michael Cervino and I were chatting up conference attendees and handing out Beaconfire literature and tchotkes (a small BF-branded booklight/flashlight), glasses of white wine in hand, as the highly efficient Mandarin Oriental staff circulated with hot hors d’oeuvres.

Midway through the reception, a young gentleman who was attending the conference with his family stopped by the booth. Michael offered him a booklight, and he politely declined. “Are you sure?” asked Michael. “They’re free.” “No thank you,” he responded and moved on to the next booth. We both shrugged and returned to working the room.

About 30 minutes later, the young man returned with his father. Pointing to the booklights, he asked, “May I have one of these?” “Of course,” I responded, thinking that he had changed his mind or gotten the OK from Dad. He picked one up and asked, “Would you like a picture?” “Yes, thank you!” He then presented me with the above drawing. Dad explained that his son was an avid reader and had very much wanted one of our booklights, but didn’t feel right about accepting one without giving us something in return.

I can only hope that this is truly representative of The Future, because if it’s led by people like this young man, I think it looks pretty bright.