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Beaconfire’s constantly thinking about new technologies and techniques for outreach to our client’s advocates, donors, volunteers, staff, etc. Typically, though, we’re focussing on real-world consitutents. I must admit I haven’t given much thought, until today, about outreach to virtual constituents. An eye opening blog posting by Nedra Weinreich changed that. Nedra posts her interview with John Anderton, who is responsible for bringing the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to Second Life (the virtual world with nearly 5 million “residents”). What are other nonprofits doing in Second Life?

• American Cancer Society raised $40,000 with a virtual walk-a-thon in Second Life.
• Friends of the Urban Forest allows you to plant a virtual tree to help their program to plant real trees in San Francisio.
• Commonwealth Island in Second Life consists of a “rugged, coniferous island housing several nonprofits, including Greenpeace and ACLU”
• There’s an education campaign to help end the genocide in Darfur in “Camp Darfur”.

Second Life has a very helpful Non-Profits Wiki page with all sorts of resources that are just begging to be explored. (I can feel it sucking me in…) And TechSoup has an interesting interview with 3 nonprofits (Lower Eastside Girls Club of New York, Global Kids, and Amoration) who are all operating in Second Live. So much to learn, so little time…

Web 2.0 sites and marketing techniques influence everyone�?? news experience, even those who don�??t surf the net, that�??s the topline finding of a Wall Street Journal investigative piece called the �??Wizards of Buzz.�?�

The WSJ carefully profiled Digg, Newsvine, Netscape, Del.icio.us, and other �??social bookmarking�?� sites where users sift through billions of web links and highlight the dozen most interesting for each other. Prominent placement can also yield a sharp and immediate payoff �?? one startup website�??s traffic went from virtually nil to over 50,000 hits per day after appearing on the front page of Digg. Indirectly, by influencing journalists and bloggers, these sites shape the buzz around almost everything for everybody.

So how do nonprofits crack the Digg homepage, secure tens of thousands of visitors immediately and influence discussion about their cause far and wide? There are two laborious methods that work, and one quick and easy way that doesn�??t.

The first way that works is to get a top Digger to push it there for you. That involves identifying Diggers who are interested in the topic and either pitching them (or even paying them) to do it.

The second way that works is to have someone on staff or a serious volunteer to cultivate the community credibility to put it there themselves. This approach would yield repeat payoffs, but it�??s a serious investment of time: Top Diggers tell WSJ they are spending two or three hours daily on the site.

What doesn�??t work is having a bunch of staff sign up at Digg right before they need something to get big. I once found out the hard way how easy it is to run afoul of Digg�??s efforts to prevent this kind of manipulation of their community.

Last November, I gave a workshop to a group of environmental activists on various Web 2.0 organizing techniques. The workshop was a in a computer lab, so I helped everybody create an account with Digg and vote for one of the attendees�?? websites, just for practice. Two days later, Digg suspended my account. They only grudgingly restored it after some serious groveling and begging on my part.

As with all other online communities, active members get deferential treatment and �??Johnny Come Latelys�?� who hope to get something out of the community before they contribute anything to it can expect only limited success.

GetActive, NetSquared and Squidoo released a list of what they are calling the �??smartest nonprofit organizations online�?� today. We don�??t know what criteria they used to select the list of orgs they say have �??web 2.0 smarts and a willingness to engage their constituents far beyond asking them to dig into their pockets,�?� but it�??s fine list of worthy causes that are pursuing interesting efforts that blend technology and community.

Here’s the catch: They are inviting those who view the list to vote the orgs up or down, AND you have to create a Squidoo account to do so. It’s nice that there’s a participatory angle to all this, but there doesn’t seem to be a big payoff for winning so I’m not sure how many people will go to the trouble of creating a new web account to vote.

Anyhoo, four Beaconfire clients made the list, and we think they all deserve to be #1:

Oxfam America, for a recent YouTube campaign prodding Starbucks on the company�??s treatment of Ethiopian coffee farmers

Natural Resources Defense Council, for their engaging �??Biogems�?� website

Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, for cross-channel marketing efforts

Planned Parenthood Federation of America, for their specialized constituent database management

Congratulations to these orgs and all the others that made the list.

Our heads are still reeling from last night’s announcement about the Blackbaud/Target acquisition, when news comes from Sheeraz Haji, CEO of GetActive, that they have been acquired by Convio. Is there something in the water?

These two strong competitors in the nonprofit eCRM space have the potential to be an even stronger solution for their customers. GetActive’s roots are in the advocacy space and Convio’s in online fundraising. Taking the best of both products and merging into one solution, done right, will be very compelling.

Some of the same questions I raised in my earlier post about Blackbaud & Target are relevant here too (impact to competition etc). I also wonder how both companies will fare at merging their cultures - never an easy task…

Got an interesting call last night from Chuck Longfield, CEO of Target Software, letting me know that Blackbaud has acquired Target. There’s a rather thin press release on the Target site at http://www.targetsite.com/news/index.php
This is a huge event for the nonprofit software world and a smart move on Blackbaud’s part. Target’s clients are the larger nonprofits, where Blackbaud’s tend toward the small to mid-sized. Target’s done a great job of web-enabling their tools, even more so with their V10 release (so far anyway — it’s still in development). So Blackbaud gains a quite a lot. The question is what they’ll do with it and how will that impact the market. Target will continue operating as a separate company, according to Chuck and the press release. But can they do that forever? Blackbaud’s got a lot of experience in acquiring companies (one of which was a small software company I worked for in the mid-90’s) so they’ve probably got the process down pat. But will it work with a large company like Target?

The big question in my mind is what does this mean for the nonprofit users? With reduced competition, there’s less incentive to innovate and improve. We have to hope that there’s still enough competition among the other players in the market and that the nonprofit clients themselves can exert enough pressure to keep the innovations coming.

This will be a very interesting situation to watch…

For the latest IA Podcast, Jeff Parks and I talked about Beaconfire’s participation in World Usability Day on November 14. Specifically, we discussed the challenges non-profit organizations have in creating user friendly Web sites. We discussed brand, navigation, screen allocation, and calls to action.

• Listen to the podcast or subscribe through iTunes
• Download the World Usability Day Event Post-event Notes document (PDF - 718 KB)

As many of you know, Beaconfire participated in World Usability Day on Nov 14. Our event — Usability Make-over for Nonprofits — saw nineteen nonprofit organizations and some professional information architects. The discussion entailed issues that many nonprofits need to think through when re-designing their Web sites, including the use of brand space, call to action strategy, navigation, and labeling.

We’ve drafted a post-event document available for download here — World Usability Day Post-event Notes (PDF - 718 KB).

Tim Arnold and I, the presenters, are happy to answer any questions you may have:

• Olga Howard — olga.howard [at] beaconfire.com
• Tim Arnold — tim.arnold [at] beaconfire.com

Stay tuned for an upcoming podcast!

Jim, CEO of The Benetech Initiative, is one of this year’s 25 recipients of the annual MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each of the Fellows receives $500,000 in �??no strings attached�?� funding over the next five years.  If you don’t know Jim or his organization, check out The Benetech Initiative’s Web site at www.benetech.org. They’ve been doing awesome work over the last six years to develop cool technology solutions to address social needs (e.g. bookshare.org and Martus - a tool for human rights investigators).  Way to go Jim!

Our client Bread for the World has been honored with a GetActive "SuperStar" award for their redesigned bread.org. 

Bread was selected by GetActive’s clients, which includes over 800 organizations, in the category
"Best website using GetActive’s Website Management module."

Bread’s new site represents an enormous leap forward. As stated in their entry submission:

In 2005, www.bread.org went from a static site to a dynamic one driven by GetActive’s WSM. With the help of consultants from Beaconfire, we completely revamped the information architecture and the look to make the site cleaner, the navigation more transparent, and the information easier to find for both new and returning visitors. The response has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic.

Congratulations, Bread!

It wasn’t particularly earthshattering news that a recent poll by Harris Interactive found that U.S. adults have generally favorable views towards nonprofit organization, and that the vast majority of households have made some form of charitable donation over the past year.

But here at Beaconfire, we found it very interesting to cross-walk these findings with other research related to Internet use.

The poll found that young people have considerably more positive feelings about "nonprofit organizations, including charities, private foundations, faith-based organizations, and other philanthropic groups" than the generations that actually provide the most finanicial support to these institutions.

On a scale of 1-100, with 100 being the most positive…

• The overall average was 68
• Adults aged 18-24 were the most openly positive, with average rating of 88
• Adults aged 65+ were the most grudgingly positive, with an average rating of 53

Those same 18-24 year olds that report the most positive feelings towards nonprofit organizations are also the most frequent and sophisticated Internet users. Those senior citizens offering more qualified support of nonprofit organizations are one of the demographic groups least likely to be online.

There are other nuggets in the survey worth reading. Get it here.