Raised Eyebrow Blog

We are absolutely thrilled to announce that as of yesterday afternoon the BC NDP has a brand new website (though depending on DNS propagation you may still see the old one, the new one should look like the image on the right here). It’s been many months of hard work, which one can say about nearly any project really, but few projects involve project contacts who are unable to take even a day off for more than 2 months (due to non-stop election fever around these parts lately), those guys and gals are superheros.

The website you see now is really a foundation for things to come. We’ve moved the BC NDP into Drupal and will be working with them in an ongoing relationship over the coming months to implement new features and functionality to build out a website that can better support the excellent work their team does in our province. As cool new features roll out, we’ll be sure to announce them here and there may even be some Drupal case study type content to contribute once we’ve all had a chance to catch our breath.

I’m particularly proud of our staff on the work they’ve done on this project and want to thank Melanie, Colin and Chris (who came into the project near the end) for all the hard work, talent and wicked brains they’ve put into the site. You’re all superstars.

I just came across a great and short list of 10 things that every nonprofit executive should know about Information Technology via TechSoup and wanted to repost it as a resource here. My favourite of the list of 10?

10. In a nonprofit organization, most strategic IT problems are actually organizational development problems.

Is it a CEO who is resistant to technical innovations? A board of directors that hesitates to make the commitment to raise the money need for the IT infrastructure? Line staff who are already stressed and overworked, and can’t stop to learn and implement new technologies? An inability to make outsourced IT consultants or in-house IT staff understand organizational processes? All the information technology in the world won’t resolve these issues, if you don’t address them at the organizational level.

I think we can all fall victim to wanting to believe that technology can solve all our problems — I for one like to fantasize that once I have enough apps installed my iPhone may actually save the world — but really technology alone isn’t the only answer. One of the things that we often do in our website development processes with our clients is help them work through a real life challenge/business case issue and then figure out how we can use their website to help them streamline things to work better/more efficiently, but without solving the initial challenge the website alone can not solve the problem.

As most of our friends and clients already know, Lauren and I published a book, The Boss of You, in the Spring of this year. The Boss of You is a guide for female entrepreneurs looking to start, grow and maintain a small business and it was truly a project of passion and love for Lauren and I. You see in addition to having a passion for the web and in particular how non-profits, activists and progressive business folks can use the web to make the world a better place, Lauren and I also have a long held passion for helping and collaborating with our fellow female entrepreneurs.

This week an article featuring us, and some other local female entrepreneurs came out in BC Business Magazine. Entitled What Women Want and written by Dorothy Bartoszewski, the piece touches on many topics that we covered in our book such as:

• The rate of growth of women in the business sector. Currently, in Canada, women are starting four out of every five new businesses.
• The different ways that women tend to measure success in their careers and business lives. Quoting from the article “a 2005 study that found that small-business owners look beyond mere profit or growth figures when assessing their business success. Other criteria they value include business excellence (such as positive customer relations), professional achievement (such as having control over their career) and personal satisfaction (such as balancing work/life demands and “giving back”). Women cared about these “other” criteria more than men did.”
• How we define sustainability as small business owners. Again quoting from the article “For these women, sustainability means paying themselves and their staff well; anything else, they say, isn’t sustainable over the long term. Bacon and Mears also choose to work with people they really enjoy; Raised Eyebrow’s clients are mostly non-profits and progressive businesses. Sustainability for Bacon and Mears also includes, in theory, avoiding the 24-7 workweeks typical of entrepreneurs – something the two women admit they didn’t always manage to achieve as they built their firm.”

In addition to all the positives the article also notes that the average female entrepreneur earns $30,000/year to the male $50,000. While some suggest this might have to do with women working less hours in order to be more flexible with their family lives (I’m really not sure who those women are, the ones I know who juggle work and family seem to work as much or more than their male counterparts), this trend disturbs me. We need to make sure that as women we are starting and running businesses that pay us competitive wages and salaries. While that’s more easily said than done, and while we are strong advocates for measuring success outside of an exclusively financial paradigm, I can’t stress enough the value of paying ourselves well.

The full article is well worth a read and includes the stories of some other local female entrepreneurs as well.

The title of this post comes from Nancy Scola, the creator of Twitter Vote Report which I blogged about last week. I just received an email from a reader, Simon Owens, who had the chance to interview Nancy along with some other folks that are using Social Media tools to engage citizens in monitoring the elections. His post about some of the different tools and websites in use out there is up on MediaShift, PBS’s blog and is well worth a read.

Every US Presidential election over the last 8 years (so two Bush victories and fingers crossed for a Democratic shift) has led to some innovative uses of the web for political organizing and campaigning. Those activities south of the border ultimately impact how many of our non-profit and political clients use the web in the years to come. This time out is certainly no exception, and the Obama campaign has been doing an impressive job throughout the Primaries and now through the election campaign, with both the official Obama website and other affiliated online campaigning ventures. At a conference I was at last week, what began to interest me more than that candidate work happening online was ways that the web is being used to monitor voter suppression/on-the-ground voting day issues. Two examples that have risen to the top for me are Theuptake.org and TwitterVoteReport.com:

• TheUptake.org is, in effect, a citizen journalism aggregating website, allowing users to upload campaign related video content that they produce to the website. They have a group within The Uptake of “Vote Chasers” that are focusing specifically on the highly contested states of Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Colorado and New Mexico to look at questionable tactics both parties are using to win those states. On November 4th, their citizen journalists will be monitoring polling stations to make sure voters are able to cast their ballots and reporting any voter suppression issues that arise. Due to the volume and distributed nature of their information gathering model — using many individuals who can capture video and images via cel phone technology — they’ll be able to report more widely than the current “traditional” news outlets can simply due to the sheer numbers of feet on the ground. The model is one that will be very familiar to any of you who recall the role of IndyMedia in the Seattle WTO events, though the advances in technology and the way that The Uptake is pulling content together and redistributing all contribute to a very strategic campaign.
• TwitterVoteReport.com is using Twitter feeds to get everyday citizens to report back on their voting day activities and then track those activities in one centralized place. In Twitter Vote Report’s own words, the idea is to achieve the following:
  

  Voters can read these messages and help one another solve problems, liking letting someone know when a polling place has been moved. Advocacy groups can use them to spot problems. Citizens can figure out how to lend fellow voters a hand. And the press can zero in on local voting stories worth telling. Just sending in short reports can help your fellow citizens to vote.

  They’re doing all of this through the use of specific “hash-tags” for people to report on specific topics, so things like “#machine” for voter machine issues, or “#wait:[minutes]” for reports of long lines at specific polling stations. Now there are, to date, a fairly limited number of registered US voters using Twitter, however, the concept of using the power of individuals to amass a larger picture of what is happening around a vital issue like voter access is a powerful vision for a seemingly frivolous tool like Twitter.

If you know of other cool web tools being used for election campaigning, please leave them in the comments, we could I’m sure write a book on all the examples out there.

The folks at Common Craft have put together a little web video explaining just what the heck Twitter is. I was at a conference last week and in a room full of three hundred attendees one of the speakers asked who in the audience was familiar with various Social Networking tools and Twitter was definitely the lowest one on the radar of people in the room. While this video doesn’t really get at how you can use Twitter for campaigning, capacity building and marketing it does a great job of the basics.

Please forgive the somewhat meta-title and topic of this post. I mean really, writing my first post on our new Raised Eyebrow blog about blogging. Isn’t that just a little bit too self-involved? Perhaps, but I was sparked to write it by a question that came to me by email this morning from a friend. Specifically, she asked:

I am looking for information, ideas, guidance etc. regarding the use of blogs as a means to share your project (whether business, music, clothing line etc.) with the world. How do you start? How do you gain credibility as a sincere ‘blogger’ - not a non-profit/business/clothing company/band seeking to use the medium to achieve your ends? How do you know that a blog is a good blog? How much time do you have to devote to blogging?

Now that’s a whole lot of questions. But I’ll do my best to tackle each of them:

1. How do you start? There are a few different ways to answer this question. The first is to focus on the technical, ie/ where do you get yourself a blog, but I think the question was more about the strategy/planning process of “creating” your blog. Figuring out things like what you’re going to write about, how you’re going to write it, how much research you need to do before you start writing your blog posts, and heck what your first post will even be about. The best place to start when thinking about writing a blog (and here I’m going to focus on more professional blogging and not personal journaling) is to think about why you want to write a blog and who your audience will be. Because we’re talking about blogging for business (or similarly in support of your non-profit organization or cause) we can fairly safely assume that you’re wanting to write a blog to help spread the word about your business/organization through building up your profile in the online community. Your audience, we can also assume, is potential customers, clients or supporters of your business/organization who you want to know more about your activities, the expertise you have in your area or topics related to your business/organization.
2. Credibility. The second question around credibility flows nicely out of the first one. Credibility online is very important. Online users can sniff out a plant or an overly PR crafted blog in a heartbeat and generally they won’t be too kind about it. So how do you build it? The same way you do offline: with open, honest communication and sincerity. Feel free to say that you’ve started your blog to help support your business/organization. In fact, that’s a must. But make sure that what you’re writing is enough to keep readers interested in coming back. So, for example, don’t just fill your blog with announcements about upcoming events and formal news releases, instead the kinds of tangental and more informal information that blogs are so well suited to. Things like: information about why you have switched to using a new type of packaging: because it’s more environmentally friendly, or because you’ve formed a solid personal relationship with a new local supplier, or even because it is cheaper and is allowing you to keep your final costs low at a time when other production costs are rising; stories about where your finding inspiration lately, everything from music you’re listening to at the office, to photos of inspiration boards you’ve got up as you’re designing the new product line/creating a new campaign. Anything really, as long as you’re comfortable with the degree to which the information is personal (and please, on a business blog make sure that the personal info you share does have professional relevance) and as long as it is honest and genuine.
3. How do you know that a blog is a good blog? Well that’s a bit tricky. There aren’t many gold standards to judge a blog by — though of course for the few and super famous there are the Bloggie awards — making it tricky to set out a list of criteria on which to judge the success of a blog. You can pay attention to your statistics (web stats that show how often your site is being visited), and you can check your ranking amongst other blogs in Technorati, but while numbers of visits is certainly an awesome thing, quality of visits is also going to be really important in judging the success of your blog from a business perspective.

   Setting out some criteria for how you’ll judge success is always a great idea at the start of any project, so here are some sample criteria that you could use to judge the success of your blog. Is it increasing business, ie/ are you making more sales, getting more members, raising more funds, etc.? Are you creating a positive online community that is helping to inspire you in your work? It’s easy to get burned out in our little worlds and blogging can be a great way to reach out to other like-minded folks to share ideas and recharge your inspiration batteries. Is it helping you share information about your work you had no other outlet for? Blogs can be a great way to communicate more informally with your audience, ie/ outside of press releases or even email newsletters, and often it will allow you to reach an audience you may not be able to reach with the more traditional media outlets.

4. How much time does it take? Well this is a rather appropriate question for me to be answering as I write my first blog post on a Saturday isn’t it. The answer can really vary. We’ve talked many of our clients out of blogging when we’ve been able to see that their resources are already way to thin for the work they currently have on their plate. With the number of blogs out there, and how frequently some of them are updated it can be really easy to think that blog posts can be tossed off as quickly as text messages. And sometimes they can. But often, and particularly when we’re talking about professional blogs which are likely to involve more research and thought than personal blogs, they can be really time consuming. The answer to how much time it takes really depends on a whole lot of factors. Basic things like: how quickly do you write? Or whether you plan to include a lot of photos and images that you’ll have to either take or research each time you post to the blog. It also depends how often you want your blog to be updated. If once a week is ok with you, then chances are you’ll be fine with an hour a week. If you’re looking at daily, then bump that time up. Writing a professional blog can also often mean keeping on top of topics in your industry, so reading other blogs in your industry, or subscribing to email newsletters and print newsletters/magazines to stay on top of things. That kind of research time also needs to be factored in to writing your blog, though you may already be doing that anyway.

I could easily go on and on about this topic, but I’ll close by giving you some links to some blogs written by some business folks we know that I think do a great job of supporting their businesses. You’ll notice these are all blogs authored by ladies, that’s cuz I’m going to cheat a bit and use examples from women we profiled in the book that Lauren and I authored recently, after all it is Saturday and I need to get away from the computer.

Awesome business blog examples:

• Poise the Blog: Cinnamon Cooper makes fabulous handbags, messenger bags and the like. She blogs about being a craft entrepreneur, about her products specifically and sometimes about life more generally.
• LunaBlog: The Lunapads International Blog is authored by the two owners of the company as well as their staff, and also includes guest posts by customers. They talk about all things related to alternative menstrual products, life as business owners, life as mothers of small children, other environmentally friendly choices they’re making, inspiring books they’re reading and new products they’re dreaming up.
• Vickie Howell’s Blog: Vickie has a tv show, several knitting books and her own line of yarn. She blogs about cool yarn projects she discovers online (knitting, crocheting, etc), new patterns, new podcasts she’s posted, and life as a rock star (ok so maybe not that last part so much, but Vickie is such a rock star that it seems fair to throw that in).