When you go to the theatre, it’s a given that the words of a playwright are being channeled through the characters on stage. Every line uttered is steeped in the identity of the person speaking, but placed there by the author, whose goal was to make a statement. It’s a fake-me-out that we all accept, a creation that we all buy into, because that’s the very nature of the thing, right?

So now, imagine Shakespeare was on Twitter.

Would he tweet as himself, or as one of the many personalities he created? Would the context of his 140 characters be different depending on “who” says it, even if the source is literally the same? And what about audience – how could he reach the right one given the many personalities he has to chose from?

Welcome of the murky and challenging world of creating a clearly branded and effective organizational identity online using Twitter as your vehicle.

In these days of social media madness, identity as a concept is already tenuous & intangible at best, yet more important than ever. Is it possible for an organization to express itself within the limited construct of Twitter without losing the context of its brand and reputation? Will the syntax and character limit make you look unprofessional? How can you tell is anyone is really listening, let alone caring? And if they are, how critical is it to be “on message” all the time?

It really boils down to this: Who the hell are you out “there”? Let’s turn to the immortal words of the Bard for guidance.

“To be, or not to be: that is the question.”- Hamlet
Should you even Tweet? If you want to make your brand more accessible, expand reach & leverage your audience, yes. If you’re “Keeping up w/ the Jones’s”, don’t bother.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”- Juliet
Select an @name that reflects the organization, not the person doing the tweeting. An identity crisis can negatively impact your brand & loose you audience.

“All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”- Jaques
Dress up the place! Design a background graphic that reinforces your brand and identity & create a custom icon that is more than just your logo, but not a personal photo.

“This above all: to thine own self be true.”- Polonius
Define a voice & stick to it. Consistency in tone paired w/an engaging style will gain you respect, credibility & above all else, followers. Your brand will thank you.

“Nothing will come of nothing.”- King Lear
Tweet regularly but be picky. If you only link to blog posts or RT people, no one will be interested in your tweets. Add value but don’t be afraid to jump in with both feet.

“Listen to many, speak to a few.”- William Shakespeare
Dedicate a staff member to monitor your account & do searches for interesting people & discussions where your organization can engage. Be deliberate in your choices.

“Brevity is the soul of wit”- Polonius
Think of Twitter as an exercise in focused expression. An elevator speech in 140 characters. Getting right to the point w/out fluff. (& URL shorteners can help alot).

“It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”- Macbeth
If you have nothing to say, don’t. Your tweets should interest your followers & reflect your brand’s skill with the medium. No one cares about your lunch order.

“The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation” - Mowbray
It’s very easy to dilute your brand & damage your reputation on twitter by not being strategic or careful about future impact. Think before you tweet.

“O brave new world that has such people in’t!”- Miranda
Twitter is powerful tool & a great way to reach people directly so take advantage of it. Grow a loyal following, show the human face of your org & you will reap the benefits.

For those still skeptical about getting an organization’s point of view across on Twitter without looking it like a 13 year old’s text message, don’t be. It’s totally doable. How do you know?

Each one of the points above was 140 characters or less.

{end scene}

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!

We hear it all the time. “Yeah, there’s an app for that.” It seems that, for every task you want to do, there’s a digital application that goes along with it, from organizing your recipes to promoting world peace.

If you have ever tried to coordinate your web team and client stakeholders, you know that often, email just doesn’t cut it. Emails get lost, deleted, lose their history trail, and can be disjointed. So when trying to get web teams and their clients to collaborate, what is the killer app that helps get everyone together?

The answer…none (at least, none that I’ve seen). No one single application is perfect at fostering true collaboration from the inception of a project through to completion. A good tool used by creative designer and client to cement the vision for a Web site is probably not the same tool that will help a QA tester communicate bugs and issues to the core tech team.

We at Beaconfire use a few tools for different phases of a project. Here are some examples of how Beaconfire uses some of its tools to foster collaboration.

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Much has changed since humanity acknowledged the word knowledge and started to classify the various subject matters into categories and taxonomies of learned disciplines.
The definition of knowledge is outside the scope of this article because of simple reasons. I am not as qualified as the university professors, or librarians who pour their blood, toil, trouble, and tears into the understanding of knowledge and wisdom.

What I do know about is what knowledge is online. Since Sir Tim Berners-Lee (Yes. He was knighted.) created the World Wide Web to link documents together on the then nascent Internet, knowledge became more than monolithic documents or books that were linked loosely via citations and references. Instead of specifying in APA, MLA, Chicago, or Turabian style where the source of a particular knowledge was, one could directly link it using something called “HyperText”, or what some know as “Hyper Text Markup Language”. Today, all websites that you see online are built with a combination of HTML, some JavaScript, and possibly some Flash or Java.
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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!

If you’re an avid follower of this blog, you may have noticed that the people at Beaconfire are full of great ideas, and not shy about lettin’ em loose on the world. From social media to design to web metrics to just general non profit tech guru-ness, we leave no stone unturned. But there is one thing we have not yet accomplished – and for that we need your help, dear readers.

Driven by our desire to share what we are most passionate about on a larger stage, we have submitted five innovative, thought provoking and exciting panel ideas for consideration at the South by Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, TX this coming March. Among the overwhelming landscape of 2210 other great ideas in the sxsw panel picker (a crowdsourcing approach to selecting conference content, which counts for 30% of the overall decision-making) we bravely stand toe to toe, competing with the rockstars, the uber geeks and other movers and shakers in the tech world. South By, we are Beaconfire! Hear us ROAR!

Helen Reddy-inspired bravado aside, in order to be able to present these great ideas anywhere outside of our own conference room, we desperately need you, our dedicated community, to help us. So now we humbly ask that you not only cast a “thumbs up” vote for our panels, but also post your insightful comments on each entry to let the sxsw “deciders” see how timely, thrilling, brilliant and ya know, really cool , our ideas are. You will have to make an account first, but we know that won’t hold you intrepid souls back. Forge onwards, brave readers, and let your voice be heard! Without further ado (or any additional hyperbole) – our panels:

Yoga for Social Networkers: Striking the Right Pose
Organizer & Speaker: Amadie Hart
There are hundreds of social networks, but only one you. Instead of overextending yourself, you need to bring focus on the important things and let go of the rest. Learn how to center your social media practice and balance your online activities. Bring your yoga mat! (don’t miss the video preview!)

Will Kiva Kill your non profit? Donations 2.0
Organized by Shiloh Stark, Jo Miles and Michael Cervino
Speakers: Skylar Woodward, Director of API development at Kiva; Ian Scott Haisley, OptINnow.org, Milo Sybrant, Amnesty International
Connecting donors directly to the beneficiaries of contributions is a game-changing fundraising strategy. Will traditional nonprofits need to adopt new technologies and fundraising models as donors demand greater accountability for their funds? This vibrant, moderated discussion will include representatives from Kiva, OptINnow, and 2 national advocacy organizations.

Can double-clicking change the world? Slacktivism 101
Organized by Eve Simon & Ali Cherry
Speakers: Jacob Colker, CEO of The Extraordinaries; Premal Shah, President of Kiva; and Jason Cooper, Online organizer for Kaboom.org and at least one other rockstar “surprise guest” to be named later.
Sl’ack-Ti-vism. Noun. Taking action for social change without lifting a finger. As the latest technology allows people to “engage” from their computers/phones rather than getting their hands dirty IRL, will this impact the future of volunteerism? A panel of experts will debate the pros & cons of couch potato activism.

Data Data Everywhere: Drowning in a sea of Analytics
Organizer & Speaker: Marissa Goldsmith
A Web site gives a nonprofit access to data that makes old school direct marketers salivate. But many organizations find themselves getting bogged down in producing graphs every month, obsessing over drops in pageviews, throwing their hands up on the air, and deciding they don’t have enough resources to maintain this kind of analytics analysis. Stop obsessing about the small stuff, and start learning about creating a goal-oriented, actionable analytics plan that can help your Web site thrive.

It’s not all about you: respecting your users
Organizer & Speaker: Jo Miles
Google practices it with AdWords. Facebook learned it the hard way. The truth is, your site isn’t there for you or your board; it’s there for your users. All the clever marketing tricks in the world won’t win their loyalty if you don’t give them a little respect.

Of course, not to be all “Me me me” about this, we also kindly ask that you share some panel picker love with these other great sxsw sessions, proposed by non profit tech rockstars, social media visionaries and really, really smart people:

Crowd Sourcing Innovative Social Change
Beth Kanter, Beth’s Blog

Non-Profits and Social Media: Not the Usual Suspects
David Neff, American Heart Association

The Real Housewives of Social Media
Jordan Viator, Convio

Advanced Brand Monitoring: Let the Haters Hate
Carie Lewis, The Humane Society of the United States

Competition > Innovation > Change: Examining Competitions For Social Change
Amy Sample Ward, NetSquared

Can Social Media Change Global Consciousness?
Panelists include: Amy Sample Ward, Danielle Brigida and Stacey Monk

Evolution, Creation and Extinction (of the organization)
Ted Fickes, The Wilderness Society

Handheld Awesome Detectors: Sustainable Apps
Rachel Weidinger, Rachel Weidinger Consulting

Building an Employee Platform for Social Change
Patrice Thramer, Nike, Inc

Doing More With Less: How Not-For-Profits Leverage Technology for Change
Nancy Lublin, DoSomething.org

Digital Marketing for Non-Profits
Amy Seidenwurm, LA Phil

A Different Documentary: Online Storytelling & Social Change
Boyd Neil, Hill & Knowlton Canada

The Socially Conscious Geek: Makin’ Money While Doin’ Good
Leif Utne, Zanby

SMS And Social Change: Lessons From Senegal
Terra Weikel, UNICEF

We all look forward to representin’ the non profit sector in Austin this spring, and can’t wait to see everyone in The Beacon: Lounge with a Conscience again. (details to come – watch this space!)

The iPhone is arguably the most advanced piece of technology commonly found in people’s hands these days. It has a GPS to tell you where you are. It has a phone to let you communicate with people. It has a multi-touch LCD screen that lets the user use the device with no more and no less than one button. The iPhone is a computer … with the Internet. Ten years ago, try to imagine describing to someone what an iPhone does and they’d think that you were talking Sci-Fi. Well, folks, as much as people like to deny it, Science Fiction becomes reality every day in our world.

Jules Verne could see us going to the moon, and John F. Kennedy  actually pushed our country to do it. Star Trek could see us using tri-corders, and Motorola created it as the first cell phone. In my opinion, the iPhone, it’s market of applications, and growing user base is the best way to gain access to and interact with information. It also helps you get in touch with people, but I think face to face is the best way to interface with other humans.

Over the course of my trip to New York City this weekend, I realized exactly how valuable my iPhone is. When I got off my bus at 31st Street and 7th Avenue, I wanted to use my gym membership at the sports club. I went online on my iPhone, looked up the nearest 24 hour gym in their network, and copied and pasted the address into the Google Maps application. In about 2 minutes, I was on my way. After I arrived and couldn’t get into the side of the building which was advertised, I looked up the phone number online, gave them a call and got in. That’s convenience.

The sports club’s web site is not optimized for the iPhone, but since the built-in Safari Browser is a full-fledged browser, I was able to navigate with some effort and get what I needed. If the web site was actually created for the iPhone, it would have saved me some time from zooming in and out, panning left and right to get around. If they had an "app" for that, I might have been able to log into it with my account and it would have been geo-location aware of where I was and tell me the nearest branches of the club. Why don’t they create an "app for that"?

This is all possible and contradictory to popular belief, the functionality that I just described doesn’t have to be developed as an iPhone Application. Much of the functionality can be created in HTML as a web application and placed on the Internet. Google has done a great job by making all of their applications as iPhone friendly "webapps" which behave like iPhone applications.

Recently, some plugins have been released to make your WordPress blog iPhone friendly. Available at Brave New Code, the WPTouch Mobile Theme and Plugin for WordPress takes your standard WordPress blog and makes it look, feel, and behave as an iPhone application with nice transitions.

Static Content Sites

Many organizations have also released informational web sites in a handy, iPhone friendly format. Their sole purpose is to disseminate information. Web Apps such as the Athens Tourist Guide :  and Pocket Cambridge : are basically lists and tables of static HTML that look nice on an iPhone or an iTouch. Do you have information that can be useful to iPhone users? There are some really easy ways to get it out there.

1. iWebKit – “Iwebkit is the revolutionnairy kit used to create high quality iPhone and iPod  touch websites in a few minutes and is based on an LGPL license. In the first 4 months of it’s existance the pack has greatly evolved from a basic idea to a project that has reached worldwide fame!”

2. iUI – It has the following

1. Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML
2. Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages
3. Ability to handle phone orientation changes
4. Provide a more "iPhone-like" experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

Dynamic Content Sites

Do you have programming ability or resources which you can utilize to push out your content from your organizational and institutional databases? You can probably use the aforementioned tools in conjunction with dynamic server side languages, but you might want to look into the following options to make your life easy.

1. ComponentOne iPhone Studio – ComponentOne’s studio is a rich set of ASP.NET Server Controls which is beyond compare when it comes to giving you a competitive advantage in creating dynamic applications fast. Some of the included server controls are : Calendar, ViewPort, CoverFlow ( Like the iTunes record browser ), and MultiView ( like the Photo explorer in the iPhone Camera application ).

2. iWebKit for Grails – This plugin provides integration with iWebkit, a powerful User Interface Library for Safari development on iPhone. By using this plugin, the grail developer will have an iphone web app skeleton (CSS and javascript) but also a extended tag library helping in creating iphone web pages in an easy,clean and fast way. If you are a Java developer or your company has them, and have gotten the hang of Groovy, this might be the path for you.

3. iUI with Asp.NET – iUI is very simple and some people have taken some steps to create their own integration for ASP.NET and iUI. This page points you to some third party resources which may be helpful for you in creating dynamic iUI applications.

Possible Scenarios and Tips

How can you capitalize on the iPhone and iTouch user? Here are some ideas which may work out for you.

1. If you have a Calendar of events, you can add iCalendar format links which can let users download the event data and add it to their iPhone Calendar.

2. If you have a location or event search which requires an address or a zip code, you can use W3C’s Geolocation API which is supported by the built-in Safari browser on iPhones.

3. If you have a member’s only directory, you can create an interface which can list people’s information as well as publish their contact info in the vCard format so that they can add it to their contact lists.

After our well-flavored and succulent presentation at NTC in April, The Iron Chefs are on the road again, this time at the Bridge Conference in the DC area. You now have NO reason to miss it!

To refresh your memory: Using just one secret ingredient (a small nonprofit), three web teams will compete in the heat of battle, offering up exceptional tasting ‘menus’, each featuring a delicious new homepage design, a well-seasoned fundraising campaign and a perfectly balanced social networking plan. Only one team can prevail – who will it be? Come see how this unique project brought together a dozen web pros from competing firms, created amazing work for a very special organization, and taught us all the true power of our industry. We promise you won’t leave hungry.

Beaconfire’s own Ali Cherry and yours truly will be moderating this unique session at 3:30 on July 23rd and Susan Finkelpearl of Free Range Studios, Andrew Cohen of Forum One Communications, and Maureen Wallbeoff of Firefly Partners will round out the panel’s incredible talent.

Don’t miss it!

Confession time. When I started designing for the web nearly 14 years ago, I pretty much made it all up as I went along. Brave souls all, we ventured out bravely into the wilderness, hoped for the best and called our mistakes “lessons learned”. Most of us survived to tell the tale, emerging stronger, smarter and a little more acclimated to this brave new world. Others just grew gills, but that’s a story for another time.

As the web industry has matured, it fascinates me that processes and best practices have developed to the degree that all of us are singing a similar song, even though we may not have all gotten the same memo. Working in the web these days feels like spending time on the Galapagos Islands. Evolving to fit our environment, we have somehow still retained the elements that make us all unique without sacrificing forward progress and growth. I always knew Darwin was a designer at heart.

So combining the passion I have for design with my desire to share what I have learned the hard way about the ways of the web, on occasion I stick my hand in the lion’s mouth and go talk to people about it.

Sharing the stage at OneWorld.net’s Web Design for Non Profits workshop with Mckenzine Lock (Senior Communications Manager, Communications and Outreach at Women Thrive Worldwide) and Shirley Sexton (Director of Interactive Marketing & Fundraising at See3 Communications) was further proof that we have learned how to speak the same language without sacrificing our own point of view. Exploring the challenges facing non profits on the web these days, we tackled the same subject from 3 different angles: as a designer who creates visual environments to support an organization’s complex ecosystem, a client who just survived a redesign rooted in best practices, and a marketing evangelist who lives and breathes this stuff every day.

And wouldn’t you know, without comparing notes or peeking at the other’s presentation ahead of time, we shared a cohesive message with our audience. Amazingly, we empowered these non profit professionals in their pursuit of a great new website for their organization, transformed their ability to achieve their goals, and left them excited to take their mission to a larger audience online.

Ain’t evolution fun? Check out my presentation here and tell us what you think!

Part of my role of late has been working with clients on Software Evaluations for CMS software. Sometimes we are hired as a stand alone project to make a CMS recommendation. Sometimes we evaluate and recommend CMSs as part of redesign of the client’s Website. Sometimes we use a formal process where  we gather and prioritize key client needs, identify key decision criteria,  then match requirements to product offerings narrowing the list from 8 to 4 to a final 2 vendors to demo to the client. Or alternatively, we use a more informal/faster/less costly approach, that leverages the  knowledge we’ve accumulated on past projects and simply matches the tools we know with their requirements and circumstances.

While many things vary from project to project — the client’s needs, budgets, technology preferences, interest in Open Source, the decision making team — our role is to lead clients to the point where they can make a decisions (yes this is the leading the horse to water part of the metaphor). However, there are some things happen on each project that amaze me including that sometimes you just can’t get the horse to drink from the right pond (have I extended the metaphor too far?). Read about the things that amaze me again and again, after the jump. (more…)

I was having a conversation the other day with a friend of mine about “robots that tweet for you” when I mentioned that our company Beaconfire Consulting had successfully mastered the art of Tweeting without actually Tweeting. Please note that I didn’t say “robots that sweep for you”, but then again, someone is probably working on that in Japan or the MIT Media Lab.

For better or for worse, since the global tipping point of Twitter was reached, everyone wants to be part of the action. If Twitter hasn’t come across your online radar, it’s probably because you are living under the proverbial rock and are a Luddite battling online reality. On second thought, if you are on the internet reading this blog post, then you probably aren’t a Luddite, just a Twitter Luddite. That’s ok. The Twitter sphere of knowledge is small and can be transferred from one person to another in usually a few sentences similar to the 140 character tweets.

Below, I’ve elaborated substantially to show you that there is a way that individuals and organizations can use this tool to keep their relationships better informed. I recognize that the audience for our blog here at Beaconfire  mostly consists of individuals in the non-profit industry. This knowledge however can be used by most anyone in any industry which uses the internet to interact with their customers, clients, constituents, or partners. Businesses and Governments, please utilize this knowledge wisely and don’t be evil. (That means you Google!)

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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.

Just last month the American Association of Homes and Services for the Aging (AAHSA) launched another Web site with Beaconfire’s help on Ektron – this one for their London Conference http://iahsa.net/LONDON/index.aspx. Last September, AAHSA launched its handsome new website, aahsa.org, powered by the Ektron content management system (CMS). The main site was designed by Portent Interactive which Beaconfire then implemented in Ektron.

AAHSA invested in replacing their static website with a CMS system to get the IT department out of the content creation process, reduce turn-around time in publishing content to the Web, and help enforce page layout and style. In addition to implementing the design templates, we migrated a number of custom .NET applications into the system, on time for AAHSA’s annual meeting held last year in Philadelphia, PA. So far, AAHSA has successfully migrated two affiliate sites into Ektron, thereby taking advantage of the same template structure and workflows and helping them to enforce organization-wide business processes for content management.

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Here at Beaconfire we tend to pride ourselves on our process. While our approach is highly effective and fairly well defined, there are still gray areas with which we sometimes struggle. Take for instance, our approach to workshops. When we set up workshops, we strive to include a group of stakeholders that represent those portions of the client’s organization whose work will be impacted by the project, key decision makers, those individuals whose buy-in is critical to making the project a success, and sometimes critical third-parties such as audience members or other vendors.

While this collaborative and consensus-building approach is highly effective in the world of not-for-profits in which we work, it can lead to significant delays and complications. There is an inherent conflict between consensus and efficiency. One of the gray areas around our process is deciding with the client core team who to should be included in our various workshops. As much as I would like to say that we have refined this into a science, I cannot. It is an art that we have not been able to formalize.

Determining the proper balance between including all key parties in these collaborative early meetings and keeping a project on time and on budget is tricky. To make this call, we rely on the client core team’s knowledge of how their organization works and them being candid about it. We then work with the client core team to use our best judgment based on past experience to figure out who to invite. Including too many parties can lead to one morass after another as consensus becomes exponentially more difficult with each person added. Omitting key individuals invariably leads to issues farther down the road. Thankfully, as long as the client core team is frank, we can generally find that correct balance, or adapt and evolve the process as soon as it becomes clear that the current mix of stakeholders is not working.

As much as we appreciate process, we have learned that flexibility and adaptability are the best tools to make our process work for each individual project and client.

Copyright, according to the US government is:

a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U. S. Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works. Section 106 of the 1976 Copyright Act generally gives the owner of copyright the exclusive right to do and to authorize others to do the following:

• To reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords;
• To prepare derivative works based upon the work;
• To distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending;
• To perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
• To display the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work; and

And it is automatically secured as soon as the work is created in a “fixed form,” whether or not the author formally registers.

Understandably, many people find this a little…confining.

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Few things scare clients like the “big black box” of development.  At the development phase, after intensive iterative rounds of creative and functional decisions with a tangible sense of back and forth, the client puts their faith in their consultant.  How do the client and consultant determine how well their development project is proceeding inside of that black box? Metrics – and the basic metric, understandably, is about budget.

Every time I discuss metrics, I realize that as a Tech Lead, my goals are not quite the same as a Project Manager – even Technical Project Managers.  Timeline, scope, budget – that’s what my PM is obsessing over.  Developers absorb the same concepts in a different way, through the classic adage “fast, good, cheap – pick 2.” But those demarcations make the most sense during discovery or design estimates.  In the middle of a build, things change.  My job is to make sure the build gets done no matter what, and my PM has to worry about it being paid for.  Scope is still vitally important, but budget, as it relates to profitability, is nearly meaningless to a Tech Lead, much to my PM’s chagrin.  It’s not that I don’t worry about the client’s budget, but that during development, the financial consequences of rates and margins are distilled down into staffing – how many developers of what skill for how many hours per week.  And timeline becomes the inevitable algebraic solution of when that staffing meets scope (with a little bit of magic pixie dust thrown in to the equation).

Recently, I was discussing metrics with a PM after a major build and had trouble articulating my thoughts.  It seemed to me we only achieved real clarity about tracking at the time when we had the least time to implement it.  A few days later, I came across a detailed email I’d written during the heady height of a previous build and completely forgotten about.   Not only did it address improvements to our current metrics, but it linked them all together to judge project health.  It was like reading the penned version of dream before some guy from Porlock wakes you up and everything turns vague and indistinct.  It was fantastic.

I couldn’t understand a word of it…

A little bit of clarity and some pretty charts, after the jump.

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It’s official, 2008 is over. The ball has dropped, presents have been unwrapped, and yesterday we inaugurated a new president. In the nonprofit online fundraising world, the end of the year means a brief respite from the days of frenetically paced emails, calculus-level equations to determine segmented content targeting, and new, specially designed holiday landing pages and donation forms. By now, you’re no longer anxiously watching donation figures in one of the worst financial periods of US history. Your numbers are in. It’s a perfect time for reflecting on what you learned and resolving to be stronger in 2009.

As you begin making the transition from year end fundraising to a solid plan for 2009, take stock of what worked and what didn’t. Look at the systems you used to implement your strategy last year. Where were the inefficiencies? Did you have any delays or late nights as a result of these inefficiencies? I know, I know, you made a special attempt to forget those over a beer at the office holiday party. But they were likely there, and you made a mental note to take care of them after the new year. Whether it’s tweaking your data integration to ensure accurate reporting, updating your web stylesheet to take care of that annoying spacing issue, expanding your social networking presence, or reviewing your donation funnel and forms to make sure they’re streamlined and user-friendly, it’s a great time to get started.

The specific line of questioning you use will depend on your role, but regardless of your position, mapping out your year now will ensure your enhancements have been implemented, tested and revised in plenty of time for holiday 2009.

I don’t feel too bold in saying that a specification (know in the industry as a “spec”) is the foundation of any web application, large or small. It informs user flow, technical design, QA, and, if done in conjunction with the wireframing process, creative design. Add to the mix third-party app integrations and analytics tracking, and you’ve got a document that needs to be all things to all people. That’s an awful lot of pressure to put on one little document. And because of that pressure, this little document tends to be not-so-little.

Specs for large web builds can get into the hundreds of pages. And yet they always seem to get a speedy sign-off. Why? Because a full spec is not exactly light reading – it’s more likely to be perused. But if it’s not closely followed, there can be kinks in development further on down the road.

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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…

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Answer:  Multivariate Testing (or MVT)

So what is it?  According to Wikipedia:

…multivariate testing is a process by which more than one component of a website may be tested in a live environment. It can be thought of in simple terms as numerous split tests or A/B tests performed on one page at the same time. Split tests and A/B tests are usually performed to determine the better of two content variations, multivariate testing can theoretically test the effectiveness of limitless combinations…In a nutshell, multivariate testing can be seen as allowing website visitors to vote with their clicks for which content they prefer and will stand the most chance of them proceeding to a defined goal.

Two Beaconfire staffers, Shiloh and Jo, recently won our Leadership & Innovation Award for their work on MVT, and I had the opportunity to sit down with them and find out more about it.

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