Mailing lists and segmentations can be an email marketer’s worst nightmare. One wrong click and you can accidentally send donation appeals to your supporters who made major gifts yesterday, or send your latest campaign on polar bears to people who have told you that they only care about 3-toed sloths.

If you’ve made a segmentation error in the past, you can take comfort in knowing that it happens to everyone. Take George Washington University, for example, who sent an erroneous “Welcome to GWU” email to 200 early decision applicants last week. Several hours later, the would-be students received the bad news.

Segmenting your users based on their communications preferences and recent interactions with your organization is worth the effort − supporters stay engaged and look forward to messages from you. The more fine-tuned your audience, though, the easier it is to make a segmentation mistake. There are a few safeguards email marketers can take to ensure your email is always delivered to its intended target:

1. Use an email tool that automatically manages opt-outs and unsubscribes. That way human error won’t allow you to message people who have indicated they don’t want to hear from you.
2. Spot check your segments.  Once you’ve built your segment, make sure your list has the expected number of people on it and click in to a handful of records to verify that they should receive the email.
3. For advanced segmentations, have another person double-check your logic. Depending on the email tool you use, constructing queries for list segments can get complex. Robust tools allow nesting arguments, and/or statements, and behavioral targeting of users. It never hurts to have another pair of eyes on your work.

A little prevention goes a long way in keeping your subscribers happy.

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!

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…)

Fundraising is all about impact.  You want your message to convince donors that your cause is important, that their donation is necessary, and that you will do something worthwhile with their money.

It would seem only natural that, to show some big impact, you want to put some impressive statistics behind your work – dollars raised, lives saved, and so forth.  Right?

Wrong, actually.

It turns out, people aren’t so good with numbers, and numbers (especially big ones) don’t necessarily make people more likely to donate – often, the effect is the opposite.  Katya Andresen shows some great examples of campaigns – see which ones move you to give.  She guesses it’s not the one with the numbers front and center.

Here’s what is true:

• The more someone cares, the more likely they are to donate
• The more someone thinks they can make a difference, the more likely they are to donate

In this recent talk, Dr. Paul Slovic explains in some detail, with a lot of research to back him up, just why numbers won’t make people care.  The whole talk is worth watching, as he gets into a lot of the psychology behind donations. He specifically shows that people are more likely to donate to save a single person – 1 child, for instance – than to save 2, or 8, or hundreds.  In fact, the more people you claim to be saving, the less the claim will resonate.

There’s also the drop-in-the-bucket effect: it takes an intellectual leap to believe that your donation (combined with thousands of others) can save hundreds or thousands of people, but it’s fairly easy and intuitive to believe that your own donation can save one person.  Most donors feel more emotional connection with the idea of what their own donation can do.

Slovic talks about caring, in the context of saving lives.  But I think the problem with numbers is more basic than that, in some ways.  It’s easy to say that 5,000 is a big number, and 50,000 is a much bigger number… but most people have no sense of what they really mean.  I can’t visualize either of them, and I’m guessing you can’t either.  I certainly can’t count them on my fingers.  So, on some level, there’s no difference between them.  They’re both “big”; they are too big to easily understand, so the intuitive part of your brain is likely to skip over them, dismissing them as “big numbers.”  (For example, what does it really mean that the USA has a $1 trillion federal deficit?)

Thus, for most fundraising and advocacy efforts, you’ll be better off focusing on a single, real example than your very best statistics.  This is a large part of why organizations like Kiva and Heifer International are so successful – they focus on the small picture, on what you, as an individual, can do to help one real person.  (They have also both taken hits for misleading donors about where their money actually goes – transparency is especially important if you use this model.)

Don’t throw out all your numbers, though.  Slovic’s studies look at low-dollar, one-time donations, often with first-time donors to that organization.  His studies show pretty clearly that numbers aren’t effective in those cases.  But what about long-time donors, or major donors?  They’re already supportive of your work, and are likely more invested in it.  They might want to know the numbers behind your successes, and are more likely to spend the time to understand them.  This is pure, unsupported conjecture on my part, but I would imagine that a few significant, well-framed statistics could well have an effect on your loyal donors.  I’d love to see someone do a study on this.  You could try it out with your donors and see what happens.

There will also be times when you really do need to convey the scope of your work with statistics.  Check out some thoughts on how to put your statistics in context and make them more meaningful.

A few things to think about, with online fundraising and advocacy in particular:

• Keep the stats to a minimum.
• When you do use numbers, put them in context as much as possible.
• When you do use numbers, use as few as possible – the more numbers you include, the less meaningful each becomes.
• Focus on one example of a person you can help – but make sure you state somewhere whether donations will really go towards that person/campaign/country or whether supporters will be making a general donation
• Use images with a high emotional impact – but don’t assume that all email recipients will see the image.  Many email clients disable images by default.
• Reinforce the images by using them on your landing page
• Call out key, emotionally-charged words and phrases to help make your point (especially to users with images disabled)

The future is here, and its name is Wave.

Not really… but the much anticipated Google Wave has arrived in “preview” mode. When Google says “preview,” they mean “we can’t call it beta yet”, and it’s available through a limited number of invitations to people who are willing to deal with lots of bugs in order to get an early peek at this tool.

The idea behind Wave is that email has been around, mostly unchanged, for a long time – so Wave purports to be what email would have been if it were developed using today’s technology and for today’s web user. Not everyone feels that Google’s description of Wave is accurate, however. Daniel Tenner blogged recently that Wave is not communications 2.0 at all, saying:

“Is Wave the next Twitter? Nope. Is it the next Facebook? Nope. Is it going to replace Instant Messengers? Possibly, in some circumstances, but not any time soon.. I believe this is partly Google’s fault: they released Wave to geeks and hackers and social media folks first. But Wave is not a geek/hacker tool, or a social media tool, it’s a corporate tool that solves work problems (more on that later). On the other hand, they never claimed it would be a Facebook replacement or a Twitter killer.”

Confused yet? Check out a new collaborative user manual, read Lifehacker’s introduction, or Google’s hefty hour-long demo (below), and you’ll have a good idea of what it’s all about.

(more…)

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.

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?

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!

A couple of months ago, I was frustrated with several academic journal websites which did not have the necessities of web 2.0 sharing features which can make their site useful to the new generation of scholars.  The suggestions I gave centered around adding “share this” or “add this” functionality that would allow site visitors to add a link to their delicious bookmarks, share it with their friends on facebook or twitter, or possibly send to a friend via email.

These changes are institutional and my message mostly fell on deaf ears. One did get back to me and asked if I could help them as part of their student volunteer staff. We’ll cover that in another article.

The problem of adding such functionality is that it can be a chore if the content itself is not ready for sharing. For example, PDFs are never good material to link to on facebook, because they won’t create a nice looking story feed item. Pages that don’t have images won’t look nice either. Apart from cosmetic errors which can be a hurdle to success in implementing these simple tools, time and effort are always a problem for busy organizations.

There is an easy solution provided by wibiya. They offer a way for anyone that publishes content to add an interactive web 2.0 toolbar which sits at the bottom of your webpage no matter where a user is on your site. Similar to the “Start” bar in Windows and the “Apple” bar in Mac OS, this utility is very useful.
Although it integrates with Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, and any website well, the best feature I believe is in it’s ability to create a Facebook community.

What does Wibiya say about itself?

“Wibiya enables blogs to integrate the most exciting services, applications and widgets of their choice into their blog through customized web-based toolbars.
Our platform offers a one-stop solution for integrating, managing and tracking third-party applications.

Currently we offer a fixed set of tools such as creating a blog community via facebook connect,
enabling twitter alerts on your blog and enabling post navigation but there is a lot to wait for as we will be adding more and more application through time.”

I hope you have time to evaluate if this is a useful tool for your organization. It could save you more time and money than you expect.

With all the talk about Slacktivism going around lately, both pro and con, I was impressed to see it in fine form yesterday, all over Facebook.

Slacktivism is the fine art of one-click activism, and it’s been panned as a way to feel good but accomplish nothing.  But from the time I woke up yesterday to the time I went to bed, I watched this statement grow and spread through my Facebook network, and it didn’t feel like an empty gesture:

No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.

It’s simple, direct, and easy to join in. It got the attention of the White House, for one. I’d be surprised if plenty of Congresspeople didn’t see it, too. But the striking thing to me is that, in a debate that’s been known for anger and misinformation, this simple, positive message spread so fast and far. Where a few people might have spoken out in favor of health care reform of their own accord, this statement had (probably) thousands of people speaking out with a single voice and showing their support for an issue in desperate need of supporters.

I haven’t heard where this effort started – whether it’s the careful plan of an anonymous cause marketer – but I like to think it was a spontaneous, grassroots statement.

As a marketer contemplating the implications, I’ve got a lot of lingering questions about what this means.  How many people posted it?  How far did it spread?  On a closed network like Facebook, it may be impossible to find out.  There’s no signup to track, or link to click – just a plain-text post to your status.

But we can ask about the impact: Did it change the debate? Probably not too much.  Did it get attention? Most definitely. I don’t know whether it spurred dialog or just made a statement – if you have any anecdotes, please share them in the comments!

I, for one, found this to be a very inspiring example – Slacktivism at its best.

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If you think this is cool, here’s one last bit of shameless self-promotion: today is your last day to vote and comment for our panel Can Double-Clicking Change the World? at SXSW and bring together some of the finest minds in the field (including the recent addition of Clay Shirky!) to continue this discussion in Austin.

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.

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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!

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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.

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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!

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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!

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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.

This morning, I read an email with an interesting question from my colleague Jo:

I don’t get this.

http://summerofsocialgood.com/

It looks like this is a huge, well-funded, well-organized program.  It also shows that someone (say… Mashable) is really, really invested in showing that you can do fundraising with social media.

But aren’t they going about it backwards?  I thought “social media for social good” meant rallying people on social media who care about your particular cause, not rallying people who care a lot about social media and then challenging them to support “social good” in general…

They’ve got the big name organizations, but the campaign’s not about them at all.  Or am I missing something?

Very astute question. What is going on here? What is Summer for Social Good really about?

(more…)

If you’re like me, you just can’t hear enough about using multivariate testing to optimize nonprofit web pages. If you’re in DC on Wednesday morning, don’t miss the Bridge Conference’s early bird session on MVT (that’s 8:30 AM – don’t forget to set your alarm clock!).

I’ll be giving an overview of MVT, and Feeding America’s webmaster, Dan Michel, will give us the skinny on their latest testing. We’ll talk together about the characteristics of a successful test and how to know if MVT is a good fit for your organization.

If you’ve been thinking about setting up a testing program or are just interested in recent case studies, this session won’t disappoint.

What’s that? 8:30 AM is too early, you say? In that case, check out Beaconfire’s white paper on multivariate testing.

PS – If you’re going to be at Bridge Thursday, don’t miss Iron Chef: Battle Nonprofit

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!

When you run a search engine marketing campaign using Google AdWords, much of your success is based on your reputation, measured by “quality scores” that Google assigns.  The quality score rewards advertisers for what Google considers “good behavior”: if your ads are relevant to searchers, you’ll be rewarded with better placements at lower cost.  Each keyword you run has its own quality score, which is affected primarily by its relevancy to your ads and landing pages – you can view the score for each keyword, and should try to eliminate any with a score of “poor”, meaning 4 or lower.

You also have an  account-wide quality score.  This score is not shared with you, but it affects your ad placements and your keyword quality scores.  It is primarily based on historical clickthrough rate and keyword performance, along with a slew of other factors.  The exact calculations behind quality scores are a guarded Google secret – Google has formally shared the major factors that affect your score, but not the details.  (What would be the fun in that?)

In real life, when your reputation is damaged, it can take a lot of hard work to restore it.  The same goes for your AdWords quality score – but it can be done!  Our client, the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA) learned this when they discovered a big problem with their own quality score.  They had applied for a Google Grant about 6 months prior, and were waiting for their account to be activated. Due to a communications error, NPCA never learned when their grant was approved – Google set up their account, and their ads started running unattended.  By the time they discovered what had happened (6 months later), the damage was done.  As you’d expect for an account with no monitoring, their initial campaign performed badly, and their quality score plummeted.

After the jump, learn how NPCA boosted their quality score and saved their AdWords campaign. (more…)

Online video has become an increasingly popular tool used by non-profits to raise awareness. If you’re using video online and need some inspiration, or just want to see what others are doing, take a look at these non-profits who are educating and getting people involved through the use of video.

Interactive Campaigns

These campaigns encourage visitors to get involved by recording and contributing their own videos or photos:

• 24 Hours for Darfur has collected over 900 personal video appeals from celebrities, politicians, Darfurians, and citizens around the world. The campaign aims to strengthen Darfur advocacy and enable individuals to send their appeals to political leaders.
• Witness.org – The Hub is an interactive community for human rights, where you can upload your own content or watch, comment on and share content from others. They also provide a great Video Advocacy Toolkit.
• Stand Up 2 Cancer asked visitors to “Submit your own picture or video and tell the world what you stand for! Cancer affects all of us, what are you standing for?” and used the submissions to create this video.

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Take a look down at the bottom of this post.  See all those little icons?  You may know what they are for, you may not, but they are a feature that now appear on most blogs and an increasing number of Web sites.  The idea is that you can click one of those icons and, by doing so, submit a link to this post to the associated social networking site.  Why would you want to do this?  If you don’t know the answer to that question then I would suggest that there is no reason at all to do so.  But if the question you are pondering on is whether you should add these kinds of links to your Web site or blog, then by all means read on.

These icons are not merely shortcuts to the sites that the represent, they actually perform an action associated with the function of that site.  As such, they are more like little applications than links, per se.  I’d say that there are three main reasons to put an application-like shortcut to anything, social network or otherwise, on your website:

1. To give your visitors a quicker way to accomplish something they already do
2. To demonstrate that you are the kind of site that does this sort of thing
3. To educate your users and try to get them to start doing something about which didn’t already know

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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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Recently, there’s been a proliferation of url shortening services, driven largely by Twitter’s 140 character limit and the need to keep links as short as possible to fit in your tweets.  They are run on websites with names like bit.ly and tr.im, as well as the classic tinyurl.com.  As a user of the internet, I have a serious dislike of these cryptic little URLs, and I went searching to find out if they came with other problems I hadn’t thought of, especially problems for SEO.  It turns out that they’re not as bad as I suspected, but they do have some serious downsides (some even say they’re evil).  If you’re trying to make a name for your nonprofit in social media, these are issues you’ll want to watch out for.

Shortening urls provides some important benefits to the person sharing the link, which is why they’ve become so popular.  Aside from taking up less space (thus making them more tweetable), many of the services provide tracking data, giving you details about how your content is being used.  That can be really fun for the casual user, and valuable for organizations.  Some people think they look tidier than long urls.

But there are two (or maybe three) other parties affected by the shortened url, and they aren’t so well served by it. (more…)

If you are one of the record number of people attending NTC in two weeks, there is one session you will not want to miss: This is Iron Chef … Battle Non Profit.

Using just one secret ingredient (a small Bay Area 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? You be the judge, NTC! 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 April 27th 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.

For more info on the session, listen to this podcast interview. Hope to see you there!