Beaconfire Wire

Are we there yet?

It’s been months in the planning, and it’s hard to believe it’s here: SXSW Interactive starts this week.  Beaconfire is ready, packing our bags and heading out to Austin.  On Friday, the Beacon Lounge will open on the 3rd floor of the Austin Convention Center, and the fun will begin.

If you’ll be there, check out what we’ve got planned for the lounge – and be sure to stop by and say hi!  We can’t wait to meet all the non-profit, socially-conscious geekeratti at this geekiest of conferences.

Don’t forget to add out panel, Will Kiva Kill Your Nonprofit?, to your schedule.  These nonprofit rockstars are going to uncover the future of fundraising, and you won’t want to miss it.

If you won’t be there, you can still follow the excitement.  Just subscribe to the Beacon Blog, where you’re sure to find great insights, interviews, and other surprises as the conference gears up.

Failure is not a topic we usually highlight on our blog.  But the biggest failures can be the most valuable learning experiences.  The other day, Michael Cervino chatted with our CEO, Lynn Labieniec, to find out what she’s learned from projects gone wrong.  Take a look.

Google Buzz is the new kid in social networking, and it hasn’t gotten a lot of love. It was rolled out a couple weeks ago with very little fanfare, showing up on Gmail users’ homepage one day.  The initial criticism was all about privacy controls, as Kesah explained last week.  To Google’s credit, they’ve moved quickly to address the most serious issues, and thus quieted a lot of the complaints.

But putting aside the rough edges and works-in-progress, Buzz has some potential.  What’s more, I think we need it, or something like it, in the social networking space.

Let’s look at two of the key players in this space: Facebook and Twitter.

Twitter is all about openness.  It’s got bare-bones features, with a robust API, so that most of the available functionality isn’t actually created by Twitter.  Many Twitter users don’t even use twitter.com to access their account, because so many 3rd-party tools give you that access.  It’s also almost entirely public.  While you can send private messages through Twitter, the whole point is public dialogue. There’s almost no personal data tied to Twitter; you can auto-tweet your content from other sources, but all your demographic info is separate.

Facebook, one could argue, is all about privacy, relationships, and data.  Their status update feature serves a similar purpose to Twitter, but can be limited to your circle of friends. They have very nuanced (and often hard to manage) privacy controls, and the assumed behavior for most users is that their content on Facebook is only available to their network of friends. Increasingly, Facebook is pushing itself as a marketing tool; their greatest value is the amount of your data that they own and can leverage for their advertisers and developers.  If Twitter is all about your public content, Facebook is all about your data and your network.

With Facebook’s recent updates to their privacy structure, a lot of people see them pushing for more monetizable content at the expense of user preferences.  Facebook makes no real secret about the fact that they are there to market to you. And as Facebook pushes harder on marketing and user data, I have to wonder if there’s a friendlier alternative.

I would love for Buzz to be that alternative.  It isn’t yet, but it has the potential. It’s clearly still under development, and I’m sure it will change as it grows, but there are promising signs that it could change into something good:

• It’s well integrated with other Google services.  Maybe the integration’s a little clunky at this point, but they’re making it easy to move between Buzz and emails, chat, RSS, and other media.
• It’s open, or will be.  Google has already announced their intention to make Buzz a “fully open and distributed platform for conversations”.
• There’s no marketing yet.  And while there inevitably will be, it seems likely that it will be context-based like the rest of Google’s advertising – not based on your personal data like Facebook ads.  There won’t be the same pressure to surrender up your personal information to the marketing gods.
• It’s easy to find your friends.  Odds are that the friends you communicate with over email are the same friends you’ll want to connect with on Buzz.  Now that Buzz no longer auto-follows all your contacts who use it, it could form the basis of a social network comprised of all the people you already interact with most closely.

Of course, Google needs to avoid some of the pitfalls other services have faced.  They need to figure out their privacy settings, to make them simple yet robust.  They also need to avoid becoming FriendFeed – it’s great that they made it easy to flow all your feeds into Buzz, but if no one uses it for the status update feature (which is at the core of Facebook and Twitter) then it’s a pale substitute.

Are you listening, Google?  If you are, I’d also like a lightning-fast internet connection, a flying car, and a pony…  you know, as long as you’re granting wishes.

What do you think? Is it crazy to think that Buzz could be the next, best thing in social networking?

If you haven’t been to the American Lung Association Web site in a while, you might want to take a look.  Beaconfire redesigned the site, which launched in December on the Convio platform.  Content is now much easier to find, in spite of how deep and rich the site is.  The design now reflects the mission and stature of the organization.  Calls to action are prominent and direct. It’s also easier to find programs and your local information.  You might say it’s actually a breath of fresh air!  Check it out at www.lungusa.org.

CSS3, which is not yet an approved standard, allows for the inclusion of OpenType and TrueType fonts via the @font-face rule. This is great because there are no browser plugins or addons making the browser render pretty fonts, as there is with sIFR, which requires Flash. This method also leaves your page code alone and, while it does require JavaScript in some cases (see below), does not re-write your HTML in any way.

Typekit

Typekit offers an easy way to take advantage of the capabilities of @font-face without you needing to code for all browsers, obtain licenses for the fonts that you use, and manage the server-side requirements of uploading fonts and such.

It does still cost money (just as licensing fonts would were you to roll your own @font-face setup) but the cost is not bad and you have access to hundreds of fonts that have been licensed to Typekit.

I’m using the free “Trial” license for this post.  I can choose from about 100 different fonts but am allowed to use only two fonts on a single website.  The trial license also requires me to have the badge you see in the lower right corner of the site present on all pages on which the Typekit JavaScript is present.  Most non-personal sites will get what they need with the “Portfolio” plan for about $50/yr.  If you want to use Typekit on “https”, or secure, pages or accomodate more than 20GB monthly traffic, you’ll have to pay $249.99/year.  A big difference to be sure.

Regular old font replaced by a neat one called “John Doe.”

This is great, but the first person I see using “Coquette” in the content of their site gets the silent treatment from me for a good long time.

The way it works is that you create an account at Typekit.com and put together what they call a “kit” by browsing the fonts online and clicking the “add” button.   Then, in your “kit editor” you tell it what CSS selectors (CSS classes, IDs or HTML tags) you want the font to be applied to; the weights and styles (bold, italic, etc.) you will want to use, and what plain fonts you would like to deliver to browsers that do not support @fontface (yup, browser support rears its ugly head again!).  After clicking the “Publish” button, you grab a small snippet of JavaScript, add it to the pages on which you would like to apply this new font, and you’re good to go.  Just add the class name you defined when you built your kit to the elements you want styled and it just works.

From creating my account to styling the text you see above was less than five minutes.  I added the JavaScript snippet to the template for this entire blog and I don’t have to think about it again.

As mentioned, Typekit does require JavaScript which is used to generate the link to your “kit” that you created at Typekit.com. The script does not in any way alter the HTML your page originally contained as sIFR does to replace text with a Flash version of the same text.

Also, though you may see a flash of un-styled text as your page begins to load, this method is much quicker to load than sIFR. sIFR fonts will generally look smoother because of the way that they are drawn by the Flash, but are also not re-sizable on older browsers that do not increase the size of everything on the page as the latest versions of Firefox and IE do (and as Opera has for some time).

So, while I have yet to use TypeKit on a client Web site, I’ve not seen anything so far that would stop me from doing so.

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.

So, you have a website. It looks good, works well, and is kept updated — great! But what else should you be doing on a regular basis to ensure its success?

Google Webmaster Tools is a free service provided by Google that will help you to see the “big picture” of how your site exists on the web and how you can improve both its presence and performance. To get started, log in with any Google Account. You’ll need to add your site and complete a brief verification process. Then you’re ready to go.

Here are a few things you can accomplish through Webmaster Tools:

Learn about Incoming Traffic

Understanding the intentions of incoming visitors will help you to make sure they have a positive experience on your site.

• View Top Search Queries shows when and how your web site is appearing in Google search results. Which keywords display your site the most? Which result in click-throughs? Learning the answers to these questions (and identifying the differences between them) will help you to ensure that your site’s content meets the needs of incoming traffic. If certain keywords are missing from the list or ranked lower than you would expect, you may need to add more content to your site related to that keyword and ensure that others are linking to it.

  More highlights after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

After logging into my gmail account and getting an announcement to check out the new social networking feature Google rolled out, I was eager to find out what all the Buzz was about.  I clicked through to the link and to my surprise I was already following 31 people and 26 people were following me without ever activating a thing.  After poking around, I realized that whether you  like it or not the wealth of information Google knows about you is quickly becoming less and less private.  Before you get behind the wheel, I suggest you read on to understand the consequences of your buzz. Read the rest of this entry »

To take our minds off the second blizzard in a week currently bearing down on us here in the DC area, let’s think about happier things. Like Austin Texas, & South by Southwest Interactive. And, ya know, the sun.

With hundreds of panels and what seems like miles of convention center to cover at sxsw interactive, it has been challenging for folks working in the non profit sector to find a place where you can easily meet up with peers, unwind your brain, or just share all the cool stuff you’re absorbing with other people who “get it”.

At SXSW 2009, with the help of our partners and colleagues, we planted The Beacon: Lounge with a Conscience at the Austin Convention Center, hoping to give nonprofit professionals and the socially conscious community a place of their own. And our little seedling flourished. More than 500 people hung out at the Beacon last year, enjoying the comfy couches, the free wi-fi, the daily coffee and snacks, and the company of their peers.

This year, we’re excited to watch the Beacon grow bigger and better than ever with the rockin’ events we’ve planned:

• Morning coffee with panelists from “Will Kiva Kill Your Non Profit”.
• A daily social media rockstar interview/broadcast by Mark Horvath of Invisible People.
• A gallery of Mike Rohde’s beloved Sketchnotes.
• SoapBox lunches and talks for a cause.
• Afternoon acoustic concerts, including local & virtual musicians, sponsored by BlackBaud, befitting Sweet Relief, Musicians Fund.
• And of course, a place for you to hang your hat, rest your feet and catch your breath.

So if you want to get your good on at SxSW, there’s no better place for it than The Beacon: Lounge with a Conscience. Check out The Beacon Blog for the latest update and follow us @thebeaconsxsw.

And just for a thrill, check out the blurb sxsw wrote about us today. We’re downright giggly about it. (ok, I am).

This post was originally supposed to be about the ASAE Technology Conference. We here at Beaconfire are big fans of the conference – attending, exhibiting, presenting – and we were once again looking forward to being a part of the expo and programming. But the recent (historic) weather in the DC area has forced the cancellation of this year’s event.

Fortunately for conference registrants and other interested parties, an intrepid band of volunteers led by Socialfish’s Maddie Grant and Lindy Dreyer, along with Omnipress, ThePort, NFi Studios, and Avectra, sprang into action and created UnTech10, the Technology Unconference. What is an unconference? It’s an informal, participant-led gathering to explore the topics that were going to be addressed in the official ASAE conference. Free to the nonprofit and association community, UnTech10 will feature live and virtual presentations from Technology Conference speakers. Beaconfire will be leading a session on using metrics to optimize your social media presence.

It’s unfortunate that the official event had to be canceled, but we encourage all of you who are a part of the nonprofit and association community to check out UnTech10, and participate as you can. It is open to all; you can register here, view the list of sessions, and follow the conference on Twitter using the #unTech10 tag.

In January, the American Federation of Teachers, AFL-CIO, launched their new website, www.AFT.org. Its more than 1.4 million members represent teachers, paraprofessionals and school-related personnel, higher education faculty and staff, local, state and federal employees, nurses and other healthcare professionals, early childhood educators and retirees.

Among other goals, AFT engaged Beaconfire to redesign their 5-year old site to balance the needs of multiple audiences with a more modern and inviting look and feel. Our redesign process involved stakeholder interviews, a creative visioning exercise, a review of peer organizations, a card sorting exercise to gather user input and developing personas representing AFT’s target audiences, in addition to our typical discovery process of defining goals, audiences and features. All these steps resulted in a new information architecture and visual design for the site. In addition to the design, Beaconfire re-engineered the AFT Voices feature on the web site that asks their members to share their voice on important questions and issues for their professions and their constituencies. The new design was implemented by OmniUpdate, AFT’s CMS software vendor.

The new Voices tool automates what was a very manual and time consuming process for posting questions to and comments by members on the website. The new tool has an administrative console where AFT editors can create and publish questions, receive email notifications, moderate and publish responses, and view statistics on questions and comments. It allows members to post their comments and a photo real time, and to vote and rate others’ responses; Editor’s picks and highly rated comments sort to the top. Previously, AFT manually inputted questions and comments from their print publications onto the website, which only enabled them to post a fraction of the number of actual comments received.

The new look and feel, and the Voices tool in particular, have helped to achieve two other key goals for the site – to engage and interact with members online, and allow more members to see themselves on the site and to understand they are part of a larger movement. It’s been a pleasure working with the nice folks at the AFT to make their goals come true!

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!

These days, writing effective and efficient specifications for web sites should involve less narrative description and more visual depiction. It used to be that in conveying client desires to the engineers, we felt more of a need to write everything out, to be sure nothing was lost in translation. And to show and have proof that we heard our clients loud and clear.

However, now we can lean much more on visuals in our specs and less on narrative to get the job done quicker. Our “blueprint” is now one showing pictures of what we intend to build, that rough out various objects in an application or on a web page. And in some cases, the pictures “work” like real apps. or web pages in a prototype we can create for demonstration and testing.

Part of this is due to the way that specification tools have evolved. Tools such as Axure, which we use here at Beaconfire, include nice out-of-the-box visual “widgets” and design patterns that we can easily drag and drop into place. You can also spend time building your own if need be and store them in a library, for next time. These visuals are capable of conveying much of how the interface with function. Then any description needed can be added as an annotation that the tool manages for us. Also, such tools can publish out prototypes and specifications as HTML, giving us a handy web-based version of our spec for client review and for reference by the engineers.

We can also lean more on visuals rather than narrative, as certain design patterns and ideas have become so common on the web that they no longer require long narrative to describe them. A picture of the design pattern does just fine on its own, as there is an existing understanding and expectation we can rely on. Just as some things in the real world are already understood – you wouldn’t describe the action of a door knob turning to open a door in your house’s blueprint for instance – so are many things on the web.

For example, think of drop-down menus on a web site. Just labeling the object a ‘drop-down menu’ already sets plenty of expectation around how the object will work based on established norms. There is no need to describe the process of mousing over a primary label and triggering secondary navigation to drop-down below. It’s just expected. There may be specifics we still need to capture… “Delay .5 milliseconds before fading in the secondary nav…” but these are additive to or exceptions to established behaviors.

However, regardless of how common place objects in your spec might be, how much and what type of description you include still needs to be considered carefully based on the two typical audiences for specifications: the engineers doing the building, and clients approving that your spec meets their needs and desires. While the engineers will be able to intuit many behaviors from visuals with little description, you may need to describe more to be sure clients fully understand the spec.

Still if objects are already visual – or better yet interactions can be demonstrated with a working prototype – you can use the visuals to explain and demonstrate to clients that you heard them loud and clear. And that the spec reflects all of their wishes, along with smart interface design.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Periodically, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors.

Twitter is an increasingly important player in social media – even Congress is tweeting. But while some people love Twitter, others love to hate it.  We asked our staff: To tweet? Or not to tweet?

(As a twist, tweeters were limited to 140 characters in their defense.  For non-tweeters, no limits.  It seemed only appropriate.)

Amadie, Marketing Consultant (@amadie): I tweet on online community, fundraising, analytics, and general randomness. My TweetCloud: tweetstats.com/gr…

Tim, Functional Consultant: I swore I would never – and didn’t see how it was anything but splattering my friends with the minutiae of my life.  Now I splatter daily.

Mark, Functional Consultant: 2 tweet, bt carefuly. No m@r hw shrt or fleeting, tweets stik arnd, r srchable & shw up lk NEthing. esp if ura celeb. Ask Gilbert Arenas.

Shiloh, Marketing Consultant: RT @Mark: tweet carefully. No m@r hw shrt or fleeting, twts stik arnd, r srchable & shw up lk NEthing. esp if ura celeb. Ask Gilbert Arenas.

Miro, Software Engineer: Tweeting needs to die a quick and painful death, at least in its 140 character iteration. The phone technology is progressing at such a point that within a few years, we should have fully web and email-enabled phones in every hand at which point the silly texting limitations and hvng t abbr evrythg is just a ridiculous requirement.

Instead of limiting our communication by the early 20^th century technology, we should move it all forward by about a hundred years, and just call it all data … voice, web, texting, email. It’s all just bytes moving around.

While tweeting has its useful social uses (see Iran, natural disasters), and should be kept around for those reasons, far too many abuse it and try to make it deeper than it should be. See tweeting from Congress people as they’re in session, and the likes of Sarah Palin. If your entire thought can fit into 140 chars, maybe you should keep it to yourself.

Jo, Marketing Consultant: I tried to like Twitter.  I really did. I got an account, I followed a bunch of smart, entertaining people… but I gave up. There was too much noise, not enough signal.  And in too many cases, no thought behind the content.  Twitter has some good uses, I’ll admit… but give me a good ol’ blog, and I’ll be much happier.

As some of you may remember, last March Beaconfire created “The Beacon: Lounge with a Conscience”, a gathering place at south by southwest interactive for tech social do-gooders and the nonprofit geekeratti (like you!) to find one another, share ideas and decompress between sessions. With the comfy furniture, great WiFi, cool ambience, and daily refreshments (thanks to our friends at Blackbaud, Free Range Studios, NTEN, The Capital Area Food Bank, Opportunity International, and Operation Smile) the joint was always jumping and became the nptech hub at SxSW.

This year, we’re doing it again, hopefully even better. The Beacon will host a daily acoustic concert put on by local Austin musicians, offer up great food & drink, and provide even more hanging out space than last year. And if that’s not enough for you, we are lucky to be showcasing the amazing work of Mike Rhode, a SxSW icon for his “Sketchnotes” and soon to be released 37 Signals “Rework” book.

This is where YOU, our dear readers, come in! To honor the nptech community at the core of The Beacon’s very existence, we want to gloriously and unabashedly adorn the walls of the lounge with posters/artwork from nonprofit organizations like yours. What better opportunity will you have to show off your great design, as well as raise awareness at South by Southwest for important causes that everyone should know about.

Interested? Email me for details at eve.simon@beaconfire.com. We will need all posters in hand by Feb 15th, and hope that we can showcase as many of them as possible in The Beacon Lounge at sxsw this March.

Beautiful fonts are one of the holy grails of Web Design.  Along with CSS-based equal height columns, better support for image transparency, browsers that all display pages the same (or at the very least the death of IE6), and a vending machine stocking drinks with higher caffeine content than Mountain Dew, the ability to use any font we want in a page design would make us (mostly) very happy indeed.

There is something to be said for sticking with a fairly limited set of fonts for the main content of your site.  After all, people actually have to read what we write and our usual set of fonts are nicely readable for the most part.  But when it comes to headlines we may want to use something a bit more elegant than Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, Times New Roman, or Georgia.

Read the rest of this entry »

As the New Year begins and resolutions to quit smoking proliferate, Beaconfire is pleased to be working with the The American Legacy Foundation and their smoking cessation program – BecomeAnEX.org. The EX campaign is about re-learning your life without cigarettes and the EX site plays an important role in helping smokers learn their triggers and then maximize support from family, friends and the community of users at the EX community.

Recently, Beaconfire helped Legacy revitalize their website and migrate their users from Ning to the Elgg social networking software solution. Read more after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Each year about this time, nonprofit marketeers sit hunched over monitors, anxiously awaiting year end returns. The current economy has not helped ease fundraisers’ sleepless nights, though overall donors still give generously this time of year.

Whether your organization focuses on email appeals or symbolic holiday gifts, matching gifts from corporate partners or private donors, tax-deduction plugs or holiday tie-ins, many organizations use will use total donations through December 31 as a key marker to build budgets and programs for the year ahead.

Here are 3 common mistakes of end of year appeals:

1. Sending too few messages.
If your organization only sends one or two messages per year, mark your calendar for July 2010 – that’s a great time to begin planning year end efforts for next year. Make sure to invite your organization’s most creative minds, and plan a communications stream that stretches from pre-Thanksgiving to post-New Years.

2. Lack of continuity between messages.
A good end of year campaign tells a story, building from the first email to the last. The asks, tactics, and even authors may be different, but the arc of the story should be clear, positive, and hopeful. Your supporters likely get messages from multiple organizations and you want yours to be recognizable.

3. Thank you’s as an afterthought
In the rush to create compelling campaigns, we sometimes forget that donors choose individual organizations because they are passionate about the mission. Think about how your donors connect to your work and whether there are new, more meaningful ways to acknowledge their commitment.

Happy New Year!

As web sites get bigger and more sophisticated, it seems like more and more of our build work involves working and collaborating with multiple parties, rather than just working directly with a few folks on the client team. Now projects frequently require bringing other vendors and stakeholders to the table – design firms, brand agencies, technology vendors, you name it. From a project management perspective, this adds a layer of complexity to the project, and requires adapting some of our standard practices and tactics.

Communications. This is the Project Management equivalent of “location, location, location” to real estate. In successful project management, too much communication is rarely the problem (ok, so maybe it’s possible). When partnering with multiple parties, this is absolutely critical for success. At Beaconfire this means:

• Clearly identifying and understanding the makeup of each of the project teams. Who are your peer PMs? Who are the decision makers that need to signoff for approval? If possible, gather all the key players around a table for a real meet and greet. You’ll be spending a lot of time together, and it’s great to put names with faces, especially in today’s virtual world.
• Out of the gate everyone is invited to our project extranet. We use a tool called Central Desktop , but Basecamp or other collaboration tools will work. The bottom line is that using only email to communicate just won’t cut it. By having all documents and exchanges in one place, people can more easily map in and out of the project.
• Create a clear project schedule and definition of tasks. Sometimes we find it worthwhile to create a separate Roles and Responsibilities matrix. This lists the major project tasks, and identifies the specific person responsible for the task as well as those who also need to weigh in.
• Schedule meetings and calls in advance. Scheduling is always a challenge, but can be nightmare as teams get bigger and more diverse. Creating a Workshop Guide at the onset, listing all the upcoming meetings, a brief description and required attendees can go a long way to help with this.
• Extra meetings. I know, I know. No more meetings. As a PM, sometimes I avoid having a team meeting by sending a detailed Project Update / Recap email to everyone. However, it is really important to meet frequently as a group to talk through the latest issues and make sure everyone is on the same page. To respect people’s time, I do try to make sure only the necessary people are invited to the meeting. Or, I start the meeting with a topic relevant to a person, and then let them go while we continue the rest of the meeting.
• For team meetings, it is critical that the PM prepares an agenda IN ADVANCE. Meeting notes are also important to make sure there is a record of decisions and next steps. As a time saver, I’ve also learned to take rough meeting notes right into our project extranet. They may not be pretty, but they do the trick.
• Finally, it is worth taking extra time to document the basics. This includes developing a Project Charter that contains all the key information about the project, creating high-level systems diagrams, API documentation, etc. Taking a few extra hours to define key information will save hours of miscommunication and frustration in the end.

This isn’t rocket science, but taking the time to follow some of these steps will go a long way in ensuring a happy project team and successful project delivery.