For sxsw 2012, not only have my awesome colleagues at Beaconfire, our partners and our clients come up with some amazing sessions, but this year’s batch of nonprofit/social good panels are some of the best ever.

Without further ado, vote for all these great ideas. If you feel so inclined, add your comments to the panel page as well – sxsw wants to hear what our community thinks about these sessions:

Beaconfire Panels:
Web ROI: It’s not dollars, it’s (common) sense
Lynn Labieniec & Marissa Goldsmith

Shit Code: When Good Code is Betrayed
Scott Lenger, Chrissy Rey, Marco Rodgers & Rob Tarr

UX Smackdown! User testing techniques in the ring
Rebecca Sherrill, Aviva Rosenstein, John Whalen, Kyle Soucy, and Michael Summers

Be a Design Superhero: Vanquish the Wasted Pretty
Eve Simon, Lawrence Swiader, Traci Sym, Maria Giudice

Change Happens: Improv For An Unpredictable World
Jordan & Amanda Hirsch

Expose Yourself: Create a Design career Mashup
Eve Simon & Stephen P Anderson

Our Partners & Clients:
How to Make Social Media Work for Social Good
Amanda Lehner, Ad Council

Fight Addiction: Twitter, facebook & 4square
Sharon Carothers, Legacy

Build. Community is easy, saving the world is hard
Eric Asche, Legacy

Fight Addiction: Twitter, Facebook & 4square
Sharon Carothers & Eric Asche, Legacy

Fighting Addiction in a Digital World
Jeff Costantino, Legacy

The Hills are Alive … With Social Data
Annie Lynsen, Small Act

Transforming Frequent Users into Brand Evangelists
Aaron Mushro, Legacy

Epic Fail! When Social Good Goes bad
Chad Norman, Blackbaud

When the Webinator and Mobile Have a Love Child
Jill Ward, Convio

Tipping Point between Native Apps vs. Web Apps
Aaron Mushro, Legacy

Social Media Boundaries: Personal/Personnel Policy
Amy Sample Ward, NTEN

Mother Goose Got Punked: Next Gen Visual Stories
Nancy Cole, PhotoPhilanthropy

Other Amazing Greater Good Sessions:
Revenge of the Generalists
Hashtags and Non-Profit Community Development
It’s Not Slacktivism: Truth of Online Organizing
Better Nonprofit Websites: 52 Tweaks in 52 Weeks
Positively Inspired Change Campaigns
Boost Fundraising & Engagement w/ “Gamification”
Celebs & Causes: a thin line btwn #winning & #fail
Social Media for the Non-Sexy Cause
Under the Social Good Hood
Turning Online Donors Into Change Investors
101 Social Media Tactics for Nonprofits
Making Social Media Measurement Sexy
Let’s Talk Video for Social Change
No brochures: digital storytelling for nonprofits
Philanthropy and the Corporate World
Sparking Real World Action with Social Media

If there are other Nonprofit/Social Good session ideas we missed on this list, add your link to the comments and we will update!

Small Organization: 300 Years of FOSSIL FUELS in 300 Seconds

By the Post Carbon Institute

Medium Organization: Meet the Digits

By Ronald McDonald House Charities of Austin

Large Organizations: A Public Service Announcement not approved by AJWS

By the American Jewish World Service

Best Thrifty Video: It’s in Your Hands

By Watershed Media

Congratulations to all of the winners and to everyone else who participated in the contest. You can find these videos, as well as videos from the semi-finalists at Youtube’s DoGooder Nonprofit Video Awards page.

There is a lot of back and forth between organizations and consultants.  Many of Beaconfire’s staff worked at a nonprofit before they came here. Some have worked at many nonprofits over the course of their career.  When staff leave here, it’s not unusual for them to go back to working at nonprofits. Personally, I’ve only worked on the consulting side, so I talked to some of my colleagues with nonprofit backgrounds to understand how consulting is different than working for an org.

Doing Good

Whichever side of the fence you’re working on, there’s one powerful reason to work in the nonprofit sector: working for a good cause. Whether they previously worked in government or the corporate world, or stumbled into a nonprofit right out of college, everyone I talked to said that doing good was a big reason they came to the sector, and a big reason they stayed. Some were drawn to a specific cause, while others had a more general desire to do good.

When you work for an NPO, you have the opportunity to dedicate yourself to a single cause, often one that you feel a personal connection to. As consultants, we don’t get to pick the cause we’re working on each day, but the tradeoff is that we get to work on many great causes over time, far more than any one nonprofit could offer.

Time and Money

There are benefits and drawbacks on both sides. A smaller salary is an almost universal drawback of working at an NPO… but, it can be offset by a deep, personal sense of accomplishment in your org’s achievements. Consultants get to feel accomplishment too, of course, but we’re always a step removed from our clients’ successes.

I had expected that longer hours would also be part of the nonprofit experience, but in my colleagues’ experience, that’s not always true, and depends more on the culture of the organization and your position in it. The same is true in consulting. Neither is a guarantee of a 9-5 workday.

Working Culture

In some ways, small nonprofits are as different from large nonprofits as any nonprofit is from consulting. Smaller orgs have an energetic staff, and lots of opportunity for individual staffers. If you want to learn something, like how to build a website or manage social media, you can do it.  (A couple people said this was their entry into nonprofit tech: they volunteered to build their org’s very first website.)  In contrast, larger orgs tend to develop a hierarchical reporting structure, which limits your ability to step outside your role. Large organizations can be weighed down with bureaucracy. But at a nonprofit of any size, motivated and capable people are crucial to success.

When they first came to Beaconfire, the biggest difference was the pace of work. At a nonprofit, doing a timesheet usually meant writing in 8 hours for each day.  As consultants, we measure our days in 15-minute increments, which can feel like a lot of pressure to make every minute count.  We’re constantly required to work efficiently – knowing just how many hours we’ve been allocated to get a task done – and to efficiently switch between tasks and clients at need. They found it “exhausting” at first, though they adjusted to it soon enough.

Outside Looking In

Everyone agreed that their nonprofit experience makes them better consultants, helping them empathize with clients and anticipate their needs. They also found that working with multiple clients helped offset the common frustrations of nonprofit work – if one of your clients is going through a difficult period, you can empathize with them while still feeling pleased that other projects are moving ahead smoothly.

The flip side of working with multiple clients is that, as a consultant, you may work only on part of a project, because both your time and the client’s budget are limited. Only certain roles are involved from the beginning to end of a project. For people who like to see the big picture behind their work, this is sometimes disappointing.

Their experiences also helped them understand the role consultants play within an organization. In many nonprofits, consultants are a respected voice, and as outsiders, they can be free to say things that internal staff can’t. Once they adjusted to this role, several people found it liberating and rewarding to help clients speak up to management, and communicate difficult points.

To me, this was the most interesting thing I learned in our conversations: just how much my colleagues’ experiences at nonprofit jobs helped inform their work at Beaconfire, and makes them better, more understanding consultants for our clients.

1. Encourage links from supporters

One of the most important factors for SEO is having incoming links from reputable external web sites. As a non-profit, you have an advantage in this area, because you likely have supporters who are happy to promote your cause with a link. Take advantage of this — if your organization has a blog or makes announcements online, make sure that content is easily shareable. Provide logos, badges, or widgets that your supporters can easily plug into their own web sites.

Beware of linked badges/graphics that don’t give search engines enough information. From NTEN’s Blog:

Badges are an excellent way to get your supporters linking to you, but too many nonprofits make a common mistake: they fail to incorporate text links into their badges. Search engines prefer text links to graphics, as they signal which keywords are related to the linked page. (Remember, search engines can’t read graphics. Yet.) So, ask your supporters for links and be sure to provide them with SEO-friendly badges.

2. Don’t forget about pages hosted elsewhere

If your donation form isn't hosted on your site, it won't appear in your Google Sitelinks.

The pages stored in your content management system may already be search engine optimized — but if some of your most important pages are hosted elsewhere (through your CRM system, for example), they may not be optimized in the same way.

• The externally hosted page may have a different domain name than the rest of your site, which makes it difficult for search engines to associate it with your organization. For example, a donation form hosted on a separate domain cannot be listed as one of your Google Sitelinks. However, if you create a “Donate” page on your own site that directs users to your donation form, that can appear as a Google Sitelink.
• You may not have as much control over the format, URL, title, heading usage, and meta tags for pages hosted elsewhere. Take the time to identify workarounds or dig deeper into the customization options for your highest priority pages.

3. Evaluate the calls-to-action throughout your site

• Identify the pages on your site that already receive plenty of traffic from search engines, then make sure your most important calls-to-action are featured or at least accessible from those pages.
• Make your calls-to-action SEO friendly by incorporating text links containing strong keywords and using alt tags for banners/images.

4. Manage your online identity

• Which is more recognizable to your target audience: your organization’s full name or its acronym? Or maybe neither — are people most likely to be searching for a well-publicized project or campaign you’ve run recently? Does it depend on the audience? Account for these variations in your SEO strategy.
• Be sure that your website is listed where it should be, both in broad non-profit listings sites (Idealist, Charity Navigator) and in topic or geographically-focused resources.

5. Do your keyword homework

• When branding new campaigns and projects, do keyword research. Does the title of your new campaign align with the terms that your audience is searching for?
• Identify the keywords that are most specific to your cause and be able to differentiate yourself.

Do you have other SEO ideas that non-profits should have on their radar? Post them in the comments.

Other key findings:

• 75% of nonprofits say they’ll email supporters at least monthly.
• Facebook comes after only websites and email as important communications tools for nonprofits.
• Quarterly is the most popular frequency for nonprofits to send direct mail to the average supporter.
• What excites nonprofit communicators: new ways to connect w/ supporters, social media & better comm integration.
• What scares nonprofit communicators: money woes, hard-to-implement comm strategies & lack of staff time.

Facebook

• Understand the FB algorithms: The default view on Facebook, Top News, shows only a small selection of posts from your friends (and pages you’ve “liked”). If you switch to the Most Recent tab you’ll see how much content isn’t included. Facebook uses a sophisticated set of algorithms to determine which content you see on the Top News tab. An important factor is the number of likes and comments the content has received, so you’ll often want to ask questions in your posts and phrase updates so that it’s more likely people will “like” your post.
• FB Advertising: Facebook allows you to advertise either Facebook pages or websites that are external to Facebook. When you advertise your pages on Facebook, a “like” box will appear next to your ad, allowing people to become fans of your page with a single click.
• Facebook tab as landing page: Since your primary goal on Facebook is likely not to simply increase wall posts, you may want to create a custom default landing tab on your page. Many custom tabs include an arrow pointing to the like button or a registration form (possibly with an offer to induce signups). It’s also possible to show different content to Facebook fans and non-fans. Exclusive content and special offers that are only available to fans can be a great way to induce people to “like” your page.

Twitter

• Following others: Twitter users will often follow you after receiving an alert that you are following them. When using this strategy you may want to target your universe by searching for tweets with relevant words or hashtags, or follow reporters, bloggers, and others who are influential players in your field.
• Hashtags: You can tweet using relevant hash tags or use trending topics to increase the number of people who will see your content. You can also start a tag for a contest or conversation and encourage others to include it in their tweets.
• Write for RTs: Tweeted responses (i.e. tweets starting with @name) only appear in the feed of people who follow both you and the person you are responding to. While good for relationship-building, these messages do not show up for your full potential universe. Retweets, on the other hand, will show up for everyone who follows the person who posted the RT. Encouraging responses through questions can be less useful than brief tweets designed to be retweeted (thought they can help to build relationships)

Email

• Petitions and letters to legislators: This time-honored technique can help you build targeted lists while simultaneously engaging in efforts to support your lobbying initiatives. An eCRM advocacy tool like CapWiz and Salsa can help strengthen your grassroots advocacy program and make it easier to manage. This is an especially good tactic if you are encouraging compelling actions since the new emails you get are likely to take action again in the future.
• List acquisition: While blanket spamming can be counterproductive, acquiring targeted lists from trusted vendors like Care2 or Change.org can be a great way of expanding your audience. Be sure to segment your lists! Where it makes sense, you could also ask a strategic partner to send out an email to their list on your behalf, with a call to action that will help build your list. It’s recommended to use URL sourcing codes so you’ll be able to use your website analytics software to identify whether this tactic was effective (and should potentially be repeated).
• Special offers: Providing special access information on your website (possibly in conjunction with search engine marketing) can be a great way to expand your email lists. You can offer white papers (targeted to strategically desirable demographics), or allow people to sign up for webinars once they have provided their email address.

Do you have other techniques that have helped you to build your outreach capacity? Leave your tips in the comments.

That breathing space is a good place for a little reflection.  After the ball drops, and before a slew of new projects start up, you might take some time to step back, and think about where you are, and where you’re going.

In business, as in personal life, having too many resolutions makes it hard to keep any of them.  At Beaconfire, we thought of plenty of ideas for our own resolutions: areas where we’d like to help our clients do better. But when we boiled down all our ideas, we found that we had two core resolutions to keep: Know Yourself. Know Your Audience.

Each of these is a tall order. But there are many small things you can do to achieve them, no matter what area you’re working in. After the jump, see what Beaconfire staff had to say.

Project Management

Know yourself: Plan for the new year

January is a time that many organizations hold strategy and planning session for the new year. Kesah noted that it’s easy for these meetings to get unfocused; but there are ways to keep them productive and meaningful:

• Plan ahead: Create an agenda and set goals prior to meeting, share documentation and have stakeholders review them ahead of time
• Keep the team focused: There can be a lot of material to cover along with much excitement, so make sure someone is to watching the time and keeping the discussion on track
• Reflect back: Concentrate on what did and did not work well and use these lessons in shaping your conversations for the new year. Refer to your analytics and other key data for measures of past success.
• Look ahead: Don’t be afraid to think big, but establish realistic goals and priorities for the new year
• Establish next steps: A lot of great ideas can come out of these meetings. In order for them to not get lost, it’s important to take careful notes and set aside some time to discuss the next steps. At the very least, establish who will determine the action items from the meeting and follow up with the rest of the team.
• Don’t lose sight of the big picture: Once the new year is in full swing, it can be easy to get caught up in day-to-day operations and neglect the larger objectives. Revisit the established goals on a quarterly basis and assess progress to make sure nothing falls to the wayside.

Know your audience: Meet your constituents, online and offline

You rely on your constituents to act on your behalf. But, when you’re deep in the weeds in your online marketing efforts, it’s easy to get disconnected from them.  Michael had a suggestion for keeping your constituents close in mind.

Resolve to spend 1 hour a month talking directly with your constituents about their interests and what they think of your marketing efforts. This can be a live phone call, an email exchange, a focus group, tweeting or whatever other method puts you directly in touch with them. Getting to know your audience means stepping into their shoes, seeing past the quantitative numbers and into the values, thoughts and emotions that drive them. It is these intangibles that will most inform how to shape your future efforts.

Know yourself: Make decisions that work

Making decisions is hard, and the bigger the group of stakeholders, the more difficult it can be to find solutions that work for everyone.  Changing your plans repeatedly can endanger your timeline and budget.

Amanda finds that knowing what you’re trying to accomplish, and focusing on shared goals, can help simplify the decision-making process. Core teams in non-profits should make sure to communicate with each other about their goals for a project – before communicating your goals to a consultant.

It also helps to identify key decision makers who will have the final say.  Project goals should be a continuing theme, so that when decisions need to be made in groups or feedback is required, members of the team are less likely to contradict each other.  Feedback is most useful when it is in line with the overall project goals, rather than individual or departmental preference.

Design

Know yourself: Tell your designers what you really need

As our Creative Director, Eve helps clients face the challenge of “know thyself” every day.  Too often the design process is seen as something foreign & mystical, with designers wielding special mind-reading powers & creating magical visuals out of thin air. Logically, everyone knows that’s not true. Practically, designers realize how hard it can be to articulate what you envision when you don’t speak their language.

In the new year, expect designers to ask you more questions, dig deeper into your unique story, and push you (gently) to unearth the core of your organization’s authentic self. In return, be honest with yourself, and be prepared to reflect hard on what your organization really needs from a design.

Social Media

Know yourself: Give your social program a strong start

Maybe your organization hasn’t jumped on the social media bandwagon yet.  If you’re still not committed to social media, Ashleigh says that 2011 is the time to figure out a strategy that works for you.

Your staff have limited time and resources to experiment with social media. As a result, it’s best to start by evaluating how you’ll use it, including:

• the goals you’ll be pursuing
• the number of sites you’ll be using
• how many internal staff hours you have to manage these properties
• who’s managing it all
• how you’ll measure success

It’s important to dedicate at least one employee to be in charge of managing these marketing channels (though they need not focus on it full-time). Don’t plan to use social media and then give minimal effort. You can get great results from social media, but only if you put in the necessary energy.

If you don’t have the internal or external resources to dedicate much time to social media marketing, consider starting small, using just one social network like Twitter or Facebook. Research the site you’re using and determine what types of messages may work best, then plan out your messaging. Consider using a tool to manage and schedule posts, which frees up time for other work.

Know your audience: Get insights from Twitter and Facebook

If your organization is already active on social media, Rob suggests that you can learn a lot about your audience from watching how they interact on social networks you’re using.

On Twitter, keep on top of your new follower email notifications. Instead of just noting the number of new followers, click through to each follower’s account, and see what they’re tweeting about. If you notice themes, perhaps you can incorporate that into your future tweeting strategy. If you see active tweeters with lots of followers, you may want to consider them influencers, and try to develop a relationship with them.

Facebook lets you learn more about your fans on a demographic level. In addition to the data that Facebook Insights provides about your fans (i.e. ages, cities, etc), you can also analyze your potential supporters on a more granular level through their advertising system, if you create an ad that is targeted to your existing fans. For example, if you’re a locally based educational organization, you could track which colleges are providing you with the most fans. This technique can provide unexpected insights into your constituencies.

Analytics

Know Yourself: Getting the big picture from your data

How can you improve if you don’t know where you’re starting from?  When you start planning, Jo thinks it’s helpful to have a foundation of solid data… but chances are good that you don’t have just one system that can tell you clearly how you’re doing. Instead, you probably have several databases, each with pieces of information you need:

• web traffic from your analytics package
• online donation and constituent information from your eCRM
• email responses from your ESP
• your direct mail database

…and maybe others as well. To get the big picture, you need to bring together these diverse sources of data, and make sense of them in relation to each other.

Make a dashboard that lets you compare the most important numbers at a glance, and check it every month.  If donations are on the decline, does that correspond with a drop in web traffic? Is it because you sent out fewer emails? In the new year, we’ll be pushing our clients to put this picture together and start asking bigger questions than they can ask of any one tool on its own.

Know your audience: Do more segmentation

For Marissa’s New Year’s Resolution, she’ll make an effort to approach web analytics from a more audience-centric perspective – and you should, too.

In analytics, “audience” doesn’t just mean segmenting new and return visitors. It means thinking about web personas – donors, advocates, media, interested newcomers, etc. -  and translating those personas into analytics segments. The best overall success is one where each segment of your population feels they’ve accomplished something, whether it’s a new visitor wanting to make a donation or a member of the media looking for your press releases.

Your web visitors aren’t all the same – and you should strive to recognize that in your analytics.

Mobile

Know yourself: Build the right mobile experience

Creating a mobile program may be in your plans for 2011 – it’s one of the fastest-growing areas of new media. Tim notes that there are lots of ways to engage with mobile users, but not all may be right for your needs.  Perhaps your mobile experience should be something users browse on the web (a website, or a more condensed “app” experience), or maybe it should be an app that users download and install on their mobile device, is a question that nearly always comes up at some point in “The Mobile Discussion.”

“Native apps” are very popular and the idea seems, on its face, quite simple: users download it and it’s there on your device to use any time you want. Unfortunately, the truth is a bit more blurred than that. Web based experiences can look, and act, a lot like a native app. And a native app could depend on a data connection, similar to web-based apps. Native apps are able to use all the hardware features of the device (GPS, accelerometer, etc.) that web-based apps are (sometimes) barred from accessing, but which of those features do you really need?

Figuring out the best way to present your mobile experience – in an optimized version of your regular site, a special mobile site, or an app – means figuring out first what you want to accomplish, and the best format to do that.  Mobile is an exciting, tempting world – but don’t dive in without first considering how it will work for you.

Know your audience: Mobile content

Rebecca stresses the importance of picking the right content to emphasize on the mobile version of your site – the content that your visitors need most.  You’ve got limited real estate, so identify the tasks that your mobile visitors are most likely to be doing on your site through their phones. For example:

• Get contact information
• Make a donation
• Get the location of an event

What is the most critical content to help them accomplish those tasks? Display that content up front, and keep it short and sweet. Other content should be removed completely or linked less prominently, so that it doesn’t get in the way of those high-priority tasks.

Are you making your own resolutions to use and manage technology better in 2011?  We’d love to hear what you’re planning!

Although I may have made the rounds of the Congressional circuit, first as an intern to Senator Schumer, then managing constituent correspondence for Congressman Mike Honda and most recently handling new media for House democratic leadership, I’m now realizing how much Congressional offices can learn from their non-profit counterparts (and vice versa!)

In my brief time here, I’ve been blown away by the thought that goes into conversion maximization, SEO/SEM, branding, improving user experience, and other key strategic objectives. Luckily there are many low cost / high ROI opportunities  that Congressional offices can take advantage of, such as utilizing innovative (but franking-friendly) email list growth techniques and gaining a better understanding of SEO strategies.

There’s also a lot of room for nonprofits to learn to engage more effectively with Congress. While there are fundamental problems in grassroots communications to Congress, it’s exciting to observe the progress being made to improve that dialogue. It will be interesting to see whether projects like Sunlight Labs and PopVox will fundamentally change the grassroots communications landscape.

In the following weeks I plan on sharing more observations based on my experience in the trenches, along with suggestions for both nonprofits and Congressional offices. With every passing day I’m discover how much each could learn from the other. Stay tuned!

Top Ten came to us at Beaconfire to help them with some important enhancements to their already designed site in eZ Publish. Among other things, we helped them by implementing the Pricegrabber, EcoRebates and Milo APIs which allows users to find local prices, rebates and availability respectively. We also enhanced the overall look of their product grid views as well as adding more usable navigation to their “How We Evaluate” section. On the backend, we automated the top 10 lists to make their content entry much more efficient as well as setting things up to allow for tied rankings if energy criteria were equal. Another important bit of functionality we implemented on the Top 10 site was the archive page which links from the bottom of the top 10 lists and shows products that were previously listed in the top 10 over the last six months.

We are very excited to be working with Top Ten USA because we believe the work they are doing is very important and has the potential to bring consumer awareness to the next level. If you aren’t already concerned about energy efficiency, you might start by checking out the top 10 reasons why you should be.

NOTE: This article is for those who have an extreme case of the Mondays, but still want to make an effort to engage donors.

Question: what is the one piece of last minute fundraising advice you would give non profits that haven’t planned for any year-end giving?

Jo, Marketing Consultant:

Around the Holidays
 “Year-end fundraising” is used to describe two very different types of appeals, which are lumped together because they happen around the same time of year.  Holiday giving – focused around Thanksgiving and the various December holidays – is a good opportunity for donors to show their generosity by making a gift donation in someone’s name, or simply to support a good cause at a time of year when we’re all supposed to think about doing good. Holiday fundraising is all about the warm fuzzies.

Donate for Tax Purposes
On the other hand, true year-end donations usually happen in the last week of the year, when non profits remind their donors: “hey, you know all those tax-deductible donations you wanted to make in 2010? Better do it now!” Year-end donors are also interested in doing good things for the larger community, but they’re more focused on meeting that 12/31 deadline for tax purposes.  (And, usually, they give more money than holiday donors, so your ask can be higher.) Even if you’re putting together a last-minute, bare-bones fundraising campaign, think about how holiday and year-end giving can both play a role.

Mark, Functional Consultant:

Celebrities
Secure a celebrity endorsement and have that person ask for donations through web videos, related images, email marketing and social media like Twitter. A good tactic includes sending out a series of well-timed tweets. Of course too, choose a celebrity that will likely appeal to a majority of constituents.

Amy, Functional Consultant:

Include Images AND Text
Make sure that your most impactful content is included as text in your solicitation emails. The text needs to visible even if images are not displayed.  Many users do not bother to download pictures in their email. So if your key messaging is image-based, potential donors will never see what great work you could do with their donations.

Marissa, Functional Consultant:

Entice Them with What You Need
Test readers about something this year that you can use next year.  

Remember, planning for year end fundraising typically starts in late summer – just to ensure you’re prepared to solicit donations effectively, in every possible way. But if you’re like many who haven’t had time to focus on planning, there’s still hope. Make sure you are transparent in your messaging, engage donors in a real and meaningful cause and use common sense, and you’re bound to raise something.