Beaconfire Wire

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!

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.

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)

Google has been slowly rolling out new features in Google Analytics over the past couple weeks – some more visible than others, but all of them pretty powerful.  If you haven’t seen them appear yet, you likely will soon.  I’ll let Google give you the full tour, but these are the highlights:

• Intelligence - this is the biggest, shiniest of all the new features.  We all know there’s a lot of useful, actionable information buried in our Analytics reports, but often don’t have the time to sift through and find them.  The Intelligence reports look through your data for significant trends and deviations from those trends, and tell you what they find, saving you some of the time of hunting for these insights yourself.  It won’t give you all the details, but it will tell you if you get a large spike in search traffic, or if your bounce rate peaks.  You can even set alerts for yourself, so that when you get, for example, a big spike in referring traffic, Analytics will send you an email and let you know you might have some important incoming links.  Don’t pack your bags for vacation yet – you’ll still have to review your data regularly, and analyze it yourself – but this tool will make it a lot easier to keep on top of trends.
• Pivot Tables – If you’re a data geek like me, and you love pivot tables in Excel, you’ll also love them in Google Analytics.  You can find them at the top of most reports with data tables, next to the other views.  This is great for doing a quick slice-and-dice of your data without downloading it for deeper analysis.  (This one has been around a little longer than some of the others, but hasn’t received a lot of attention – I think it’s great.)
• Advanced Filtering – Until now, filtering data in a report was mostly just useful for looking at a particular folder, or file extension, or page title (or else, you had to know a lot about scary-looking regular expressions).  Now, instead of filtering only on the primary dimension of the report, you can filter on any dimension or metric that’s visible.  Want to look at pages that got 100-200 visits, with an average time on site over 1 minute?  Want to find pages with the highest bounce rate that had more than one visitor?  Advanced filtering will be your friend.
• Goals - Goals have been around for a long time, but until recently, you could only have 4 of them.  Now, you can have up to 20, and Google has added some additional metrics that you can use for goals (like time on site).  Very handy.
• Custom Variables – This feature requires some custom coding, but soon you’ll be able to tag visitors, visits, and pageviews with identifying data.  For example, you could tag your news articles by category, and then see aggregate data about the categories in your reports.  This feature is still on the way, but should have a wide range of uses.

Just a few things that could make your life a little easier.

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

For as long as I can remember, our PM team has debated internally the value of the PMP certification for project managers. For many big corporations and the government, it is a key qualification for project managers. As a comparatively small company, this is not a prerequisite for our PMs. In fact, we generally prefer our PMs to have evolved into the position organically over time.

Why you ask?

From my experience, good project management is more a function of personality type and experience than a taught skill set. Sure, there are tactics and techniques that can be learned from a classroom and in books – but those are not what make a project manager successful. A good project manager has those skills, but more importantly, is detail oriented; able to keep a handle on a nearly unlimited set of discrete tasks; can manage diverse groups of people, ranging from internal teams to clients to vendors; and have the intestinal fortitude to tackle tough issues immediately head on.

None of that can be taught. It is a product of going through the meat grinder and having a personality that fits the job. My bias is routed in experience with other organizations’ PMP certified project managers – PMs who routinely struggle to make all of the pieces work together while simultaneously massaging the egos and personalities of the various parties involved to make them work in unison. Don’t get me wrong – I see value in the knowledge required for the PMP certification. I just think it is a toolset that needs to be employed by someone with a specific set of skills – otherwise it is ineffective.

Testing a Web site is a pretty big, and not often inexpensive, task. Cara already posted about some inexpensive tools for user-testing wireframes. But for your design, there’s an opportunity to go even lower-budget than that.

To do testing truly on the cheap, there is a new tool called fivesecondtest.com. It’s a way to test designs in five seconds or less. You upload your design, and then you can either invite specific users to test it, or you can open your test to the entire 5 second community. You have the option of creating memory tests or click tests. And as the name suggests, a tester looks at the design for five seconds, letting you know what items stand out on the page.

Of course, this is a very simplified approach. There is no task-based testing. As the site states, the tool is meant to “help you easily identify the most prominent elements of your user interfaces.” Nothing more, nothing less. And if you open up your design to the entire five second community, you’re likely not getting results from an average-joe user, but usability and design experts.

There are some paid plans that allow you to do some more sophisticated testing. But if you’re budget is beyond tight, it may be worthwhile to just upload an image and see what the testers say.

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

We all know that testing your wireframes to make sure your priority audiences can complete key tasks on your website-in-progress is a good idea – but is there an inexpensive way to do it? I was alerted to an online tool yesterday that can help you conduct tests quickly, easily and inexpensively, too.

Optimal Workshop’s Chalkmark (http://www.optimalworkshop.com/chalkmark_alt.htm) makes usability testing a snap. First identify the tasks you would like your audience to complete. Next, upload the image of your wireframe. Invite your audience(s) to participate and then wait for the results to roll in. The test results are returned in the form of a heat map (see image). You can immediately see where people chose to click on your wireframe to complete the task you put forward. Of course Chalkmark can’t give you all of the information you would get from true wireframe prototype testing, but if budget is a concern, some information is better than no information. And feedback directly from the audience your site is trying to reach? Priceless.

chalkmark heat map

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. With so much talk about the “death” of traditional news media and the growth of online alternatives, we asked our staff: How do you get your daily news? Do you still read a newspaper?

Susan, Administrative Assistant: When I was taking the metro, I would count on the Express for my daily news.  Now that I’m driving again, it’s all about WTOP news radio.

Amy, Functional Consultant: Indeed, I read the Washington Post every morning on my commute.  Sometimes, if I glance a picture or graphic in The Express over another commuter’s shoulder, I might read a little of that, too.  During the day I get my news from various news feeds on my iGoogle page – particularly CNN.com Headlines and “Top Stories” which pulls headlines across an array of providers (Bloomberg, The Post, The NY Times, Wall Street Journal, etc).

Tim, Functional Consultant: I haven’t read a paper in years.  During the day I get news via RSS feeds that I follow in Google Reader.  I listen to NPR radio shows via podcasts which I listen to during my commute.  Since picking up an iPhone, I increasingly get news via NPR, WSJ, Washington Post, and other apps.  In the evening I watch Jon Stewart who rounds out my daily news picture.  For real in-depth analysis, I read monthly and weekly magazines (Harpers, the New Yorker, and The Economist).

Andy, Project Manager: Every day I read DemocratandChronicle.com for local news, the Washingtonpost.com for national and political news, and search Google News for economic and financial stories of interest to me. I also read the print version of the Economist every week religiously.

Kristin, Project Manager: I listen to news radio on my drive in. Otherwise, re: papers, only on Sundays…it’s a luxury to sit down and read a paper these days…

Marissa, Functional Consultant: I get a Sunday Newspaper, but I don’t really read it for the news – I read it for that “Easy Like Sunday Morning” feel. I have an RSS Feed set up to send me local news. As for National News, I don’t have a specific way I follow it. I’m on the Internet all day, so somehow the really big news always trickles down to me somehow. I’m ashamed to admit it, but my most steady source for National News is the Daily Show.

Jeff, Principal Consultant: Yes newspaper every day. Something about seeing stories I wouldn’t normally choose to read.  I also use the AP news widget on blackberry when I don’t have the paper or want to see newer headlines.

Ali, Marketing Consultant: Washington Post online in the morning.  Facebook status updates in the evening.  Blogs on the weekends.  I spend about 2 minutes scanning the Post in the morning and click “read later” for articles that interest me.  This tags them to Instapaper on my iPhone so I can read them on the metro on the way home.  At night, I usually scan status updates for articles, blog posts or videos friends have found interesting.  I let them serve as an information filter.

Lynn, Principal Consultant: I use my Blackberry a lot and use the Google News Reader.  But I still enjoy sitting down with the physical newspaper over my morning breakfast.

Shiloh, Marketing Consultant: During the week I listen to NPR and supplement with my Facebook feed (my friends know what kinds of articles I’m interested in) and, if I’m lucky, episodes of the Daily Show/Colbert Report to put it all in perspective. I read the newspaper but only on weekends.

Amadie, Marketing Consultant: On the weekends, I love to sit down with the print newspaper – the Post on Saturday and Sunday, and the Sunday New York Times – and read them pretty much cover-to-cover. During the week, though, time is very limited. I follow several reputable national and local news sources on Twitter and scan the headlines throughout the day, and catch the top of the hour news on the Today Show while getting ready and the Daily Show each evening.

Jo, Marketing Consultant: I used to read the paper on the metro every morning, but I find it too big and awkward to read in a crowded train.  Now, I read the Washington Post via their mobile site on my way to work, supplemented with blogs later in the day.  And, of course, I need my dose of fake news from the Daily Show.

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.

I love analytics. I love diving into the data, looking at the numbers and finding new and actionable insights. But there is one thing about analytics I don’t love – monthly dashboard reports. You know what I mean – a spreadsheet showing visits, pageviews, new visitors, etc., compared from month to month in nice little columns, filling in a neatly formed Excel graph. While not always actionable, these reports do show big-picture trends, and your bosses and boards love that. In the world of analytics, monthly dashboard reports are a necessary evil.

However, I could never get Google Analytics to give me data in a form that really fit any of my monthly dashboard report needs. I’ve spent hours clicking, copying, pasting, and reformatting in search of the perfect dashboard report.

The tedium may come to an end, thanks to an Excel Plugin called Excellent Analytics. The plugin uses the Google Analytics API to allow you to run customizable Google Analytics reports right in Excel. And after you create a query, a few clicks will update the numbers in next month’s report.

So after you invest some time to set up your first Dashboard report with Excellent Analytics, all you need to do next month is copy and paste a few columns as values, and update your query. I tried it out for the first time this month, and I went from spending almost 4 hours on a dashboard report to 45 minutes.

Now that’s efficiency only an analytics geek could love.