Raised Eyebrow Blog

This month, our clients at Covenant House Vancouver were recognized for their exceptional blog, On the House, receiving an award from The Canadian Public Relations Society (CPRS). Covenant House shelters and counsels street youth, and over the past 10 years they’ve helped 10,000 young people with shelter, food, clothing, counseling and other support. Their blog launched on August 24th, 2009, and since then they’ve contributed over 150 posts. The blog is innovative as content is often contributed by the kids that come through Covenant House, telling of their journeys, their achievements, and even showcasing their art.

The CPRS award is a well-deserved honour. Covenant House’s blog is a great model for nonprofits who are looking to create more compelling blog content. Here are a few of the secrets of their success, as we see them:

1. Stories, stories, stories: On the House personalizes youth homelessness and the challenges that contribute to it.  By telling youth stories, for example the story of 13-year John, On the House helps helps educate prospective donors and volunteers as well as building stronger community among existing constituents.
2. Gratitude is infections: Covenant House posts letters they receive from donors (with permission) to their Donor Stories.  In the story Thank You, a donor wrote to give thanks for the call they received during Covenant House’s “thank-a-thon.”  In Feel Good Friday, Joanne wrote to explain how much it meant to her to be able to teach her children about giving to Covenant House Vancouver.
3. Self-promotion is more palatable when it’s surrounded with great content: On the House has a few asks and some promotion mixed in, such as Christmas is Coming.  Coupled with youth stories, it seems only natural that Covenant House should be asking for support to help these kids.
4. Show, don’t tell: Some of the most powerful posts are contributed by the youth Covenant House Vancouver serves: poetry, artwork, and prose tell the reader more than a third-person story ever could.  For example Gratitude for Donated Hockey Sticks, in which two youth thank you letters are reprinted.
5. Share your challenges: The blog content stays interesting because there’s lots of variety. Posts, like Youth Privacy Versus Good Communication, explore internal challenges Covenant House staff face every day, lending a human face to the organization and breaking down barriers between the staffer who’s writing and the reader.

Congratulations to Michelle Clausius and Kristy Hayter who have done an amazing job of bringing On the House to life. If you have minute, check out On the House.  The posts are often funny, informative, inspiring, and/or heartbreaking.  They’re compelling and worth the read.  Kudos to Covenant House for helping to give these talented young writers a voice.  Also, thanks for the important insights on the issues of youth and homelessness.

Vertical Response, an online newsletter software, recently released an update to their editor.  WOW!  What an improvement.

The old editor, used for editing custom HTML templates was pretty picky.  It reminded me of Microsoft Word, in that you might press return once and get a huge gaping hole in your layout. Or press backspace once and the entire design would disappear. Undo was a most used feature.  And often the remedy was to extract the source and fix things up in Dreamweaver, combing through line by line.

That said, I’ve always liked Vertical Response because I like the management interface, including the list manager, and after gaining enormous popularity, they are still offering their service FREE to nonprofits, which is awesome for many of our clients.

So recently I logged into Vertical Response and made a copy of a campaign and got the prompt “NEW: Copy to New Canvas Editor.”  I ticked the box and this opened the newsletter in the new editor and it was a beautiful transformation.

My favourite improvement is the Format drop-down, which allows you to apply paragraph styles defined in the CSS by simply highlighting text and choosing a style from the drop-down.  Prior to this you would have to copy a few characters from a paragraph with the formatting you wanted, paste it in the desired location, and then edit it.  So this was a big improvement.

Another plus is the tick box that allows you to automatically generate a text-based version of the email.  This prevents the need to carry content changes in two versions of the email.

If you are still using the old editor, give the new one a try.

When I used a PC, I found this utility that I used to keep track of my passwords.  Roboform is this happy will green dude who sits in your utility tray and keeps a list of all of your login accounts, their URLs, usernames, passwords and notes.  Launching an account is as easy as clicking on Roboform and selecting the account you’d like to launch and voila the site launches and Roboform fills your username and password and automatically logs you in.  Roboform works with a master password, so when you login to your computer to launch Roboform you need to enter a master password.  You can set how often you want to be prompted for the password.

When I moved to Mac, I missed the little green guy.  Every time I had to copy a url, username and password from a spreadsheet and paste them manually into an internet browser, the heart ache increased.  Plus, there was all kinds of silliness with the spreadsheet: who had it open, who deleted that field, what is the most current version of the FTP info, etc.

When I migrated to Mac I had accumulated 249 passwords in my Roboform! The amount of information that people are beginning to need to be able to track in their personal and professional lives is outrageous.

At Raised Eyebrow we have thousands of passwords and they needed to be stored uber securely.  Moreover, the data is a more complex set of information, Client Names, Contact Info, FTP Info, Database Info, CMS Info, Host Info, Stats Info, etc.  We combed through the market of Mac-based password keepers. 1Password, KeePassX seemed to be the best options that emerged at the time.  1Password, which is proprietary, seemed more feature rich, while KeePass, which is open source, seemed easier to install as a shared network installation.  Nonetheless, the amount of customization we required in terms of fields made neither solution appealing. So we kept on using a spreadsheet.

One day in utter frustration we had a brainstorming session.  We build websites, so maybe we could build an internal site that would keep our data?  From that session was born the idea for our super secure, one stop shop, password vault website.  That was 6 months ago.

Today, I just finished entering the last password from our main password list! What we developed in many respects is akin to a custom contact database.  We have different content types: Client, Website, Newsletter, Domain, etc.  Seeing the product, in its current state makes me wonder whether we should have invested the time we took to develop it into implementing and customizing a CRM (customer relationship manager)?  Could the data be accommodated in an off the shelf solution, like Salesforce or Daylight with customization?

Now, we are on the eve of embarking on a CRM implementation process. Starting such a process makes we wonder about all our systems: which ones work? Which ones should we keep? Which ones can be folded into the CRM? How can we streamline our workflow, while ensuring the integrity and security of our data?  How can specialized industries be best served by CRM software?

One major benefit from developing our password keeper is that we engaged in the exact process that would be required to clean up our data if we were going to import it into a CRM.  Instead of having a laundry list of every type of password in one long list, we have nice clean data parsed into types.  Also, it was like putting out a fire so that we wouldn’t be smoked out while we began to think about a CRM project. So, I’m happy with the path we’ve taken and looking forward to seeing what we do next.

If you have password overload, there are lots of solutions out there to make your life easier. And if you’ve recently done a CRM project in a all Mac environment, let me know how it went.

As of Tuesday, with each new Drupal 6 website we build, we will be providing access to an online manual. Like our paper manual, the online manual describes the basic functions of Drupal in easy to understand language and has customized client-specific content. But the new format also has many new benefits.

Book Module

The online manual uses the Drupal book module, which is a great because the book module lends to organizing things… like a book. The book module automatically creates a listing of the child entries, like a table of contents. You can order the child pages in any way you choose. I also like the book module because is has a printer-friendly version of each page. It does a really nice job of stripping out the unnecessary stuff and optimizing the content for printing, so you don’t get pages broken in half or extra white pages when you print.

Information in a New Dimension

What I loved about moving from a Word document to an online manual is how easily you can cross-reference. With the old manual, you could footnote or reference other pages, but ultimately it had to be a very important reference to disrupt the reader in this way. Now with the online manual, text and images can be linked to other sections of the manual. So if I think a word sounds a little jargon-like, but is still useful, I can add it to the glossary and link the word to its definition. This is great, because it allows us to introduce some language that we might have otherwise shied away from using. This is beneficial in the long run because it helps us develop a more accurate shared language with our clients to talk about their websites.

Keeping the Manual Up to Date

The best thing about the new manual is that if I discover an inaccuracy or a better explain something, I can simply log in and edit the site. Clients instantly have access to the up to date manual. Also, if a client adds a new feature, I can simply add a new page to their online manual and they will instantly have access to the file. This saves sending updated .pdfs and having many trees wasted as manuals are reprinted.

Works Great for Remote Training

We’ve also been experimenting with online meetings for trainings with remote clients and the new manual is great for this. I have three online trainings this summer!

Have You Ever Searched for Drupal Help?

Uhg! Lots of the information available online is too techie for words! Seriously, try Googling “Help Logging Into Drupal” and you’ll see that you get the weirdest stuff! Our help manual covers all the basic functions of editing and creating content for your site. Clients can access it from anywhere and it is constantly growing and evolving. There is a text-based search, allowing you to search the entire contents of your manual instantly, with a listing view of relevant results. It’s a help manual that really helps!

_______________________________

Thanks to the whole team at RE who helped conceive of, build, create content for, and test the Raised Eyebrow Help Website!

Vertical Response is free for 501(c)(3) equivalent organizations, which is pretty amazing deal in the world of newsletter software.  Apply by emailing proof of your 501(c)(3) equivalency to nonprofits@verticalresponse.com and you will start getting 10,000 credits applied to your account per month.

We work with a bunch of different newsletter software providers, including Constant Contact, Emma, MailChimp and Vertical Response.  More and more, newsletter software providers are allowing us to create custom templates—where we design a beautiful html newsletter and upload it to a client’s newsletter software.  Then, areas of the templates are editable by the client, allowing clients to produce eye-catching newsletters without having to know HTML.  Vertical Response doesn’t have a custom template function, but recently we discovered a work-around:

1.    Design a template in Dreamweaver and copy the HTML code
2.    Create an “Email Canvas” newsletter in Vertical Response
3.    Once inside the WYWIWYG, click on the second tab, Edit Source
4.    Delete the existing HTML and replace it with the HTML code for your template
5.    Click back on the “Edit Graphical” tab

Et voila! Vertical Response provides a graphical representation of the template that can be edited.  For the client, the user experience has its quirks.  Unlike MailChimp, where you can configure styles that can be applied to text via a drop-down menu, you’ll have to copy styles from existing text. Also, we found that sometimes deleting two characters would inadvertently delete a whole column.  But if you remember to have your fingers poised on control + z and save frequently, this was just a small nuisance. Idiosyncrasies aside, this implementation of Vertical Response allows a non-profit client to set up and start sending really great newsletters for only the cost of creating a template.

I’m walking down the stairs, leaving our office at Tides Renewal Centre and I’m behind this other dude in a suit and we are both shuffling along because we are checking our Blackberries while walking downstairs. This strikes me as stupid, but forms the basis of a polite exchange of Crackberry jokes.

Spilling out onto sun drenched Hastings Street, I wonder what will become of us? Like lemmings, we march forward into the centre of a hornets’ nest–the downtown east side on a hot Thursday. How many obstacles will we encounter as we type and walk? I squint and strain to the read the tiny print on my Blackberry’s browser while walking under Woodward’s scaffolding, oblivious to cement being poured above. I stop and open a text message—poised in the middle of an active construction site–to read the message my sweetie has no doubt composed on his iPhone while driving 110 kilometres per hour on the highway.

I flip back to my browser window and type “ban reading email while crossing the street.”

If you want to cross a street in New York City or Buffalo, a New York state senator says, you should be fined $100 if you do so while in a state of “iPod oblivion.” (A Ban on iPods While Crossing)

I’m fascinated by regulations against Darwinian self-elimination.  Helmet laws, seatbelt laws, no talking on cell phone laws—all these regulations enacted to prevent us from doing something stupid.  Or hurting other people while doing stupid things.

Part of me wonders whether these laws are just the result of poor manners?  We’ve developed these technologies and adopted them like beloved children, adored with a sudden fierceness.  We haven’t had much time to establish etiquette for their use.  Our passion interferes with our judgement.  Wouldn’t it be polite if people put their toys away and walked smiling down the street, tipping their hats to each other and marveling about the lovely June weather instead?

An old colleague of mine once took me aside and pleaded,  “It’s imperative that you share your ideas about what is appropriate use of the Blackberry with your co-workers.  We can’t have people checking their emails absentmindedly while we are in meetings.”  Where is our iPhone Miss Manners?  Who will save us from being decapitated while walking down the street or giving all our friends the impression we aren’t interested in what they have to say because we are texting instead of listening?

Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network