Raised Eyebrow Blog

One of the sessions I attended at the Non Profit Technology Conference today focused on the impact of visitor satisfaction to a website.The primary message: the more satisfied a visitor is the more they are likely to engage with your organization. A no brainer? Perhaps, but when you think of engagement as impacting your capacity as an organization in it leading to more donations, volunteers, more people recommending and distributing your information it becomes vital to pay attention to user satisfaction.

So how do you find out if site visitors are satisfied? Satisfaction can’t really be measured in straight up website statistics (even with the magic of Google Analytics). The best way to find out how satisfied your users are is to ask them. Asking your users how satisfied with your current website they are, is a particularly great time investment to undertake if you’re looking at redesigning or redeveloping your website. Our clients often ask us what kinds of questions they should be asking when they survey their website users, so here’s a great framework to use to develop your own survey.

Questions you can ask your users to measure satisfaction:

1. Content. Some sample questions to ask: How does the quality of information you present measure up? How up to date isquality of info, how up to date is it?
2. Functionality. How useful is the website? Does it increase convenience for the site visitor? Is there a sufficient variety of features available on your website?
3. Images. Does the image of the organization presented online match how they think of you offline? Does it match how you want to be perceived?
4. Look and feel. Does the mood of the website match how they perceive your organization?
5. Navigation. How easy is the site to use? How easy was it to find things?

There are many specific questions you can fill into those top level categories to match your organization and your users, but hopefully that’s a useful starting framework.

The website we designed for Pivot Legal LLP has been entered in the PopVox Awards.

The PopVox Awards, if you don’t know, are people’s choice awards given out during Vancouver Digital Media Week in May. The Pivot site, which we’re very thrilled with, has been entered in the Best Website Category (naturally). You can vote for it here, though I warn you the site’s interface isn’t super easy to get around. Winning this award would obviously be great for Raised Eyebrow, but also wonderful for raising profile for Pivot. So, please go vote and tell a friend!

This Friday, January 30th, on the eve of the 9th anniversary of Raised Eyebrow, we’re moving offices. And we couldn’t be more thrilled about it.

It feels like a lifetime ago (though to be fair 9 years is almost a lifetime in technology land) that Lauren and I first ventured out on our own and started Raised Eyebrow. In those days we worked in a corner of her bedroom, soon graduating to taking over half of the livingroom in her basement suite and eventually finding our office space in the Dominion Building. We’ve moved around in this building, first co-habitating with the lovely Lindsay Simmonds, who designed our current logo, and eventually moving into a larger space on the 4th floor as our company grew. We’ve really loved being in this building, we have amazing neighbours and we’re a big fan of the neighbourhood and the heritage qualities of the building itself. That said, we’re pretty excited about starting a new chapter.

The really good news about our new office space is that we’re staying in Gastown (right across the street in fact), are getting a whole bunch of really excellent new building neighbours, while staying very close to all our current building pals. We’re moving into the Flack Block, also known as the Tides Renewal Centre, a heritage building that has been lovingly restored and improved by Robert Fung and Salient Group with interior design by Penner & Associates. The work they’ve done is truly gorgeous and will be such an inspiring place to come and work for all of us. The building also has some really wonderful shared amenities that will be a real plus for all of us: a bike room, showers, storage, shared kitchens on each floor, and some really excellent shared meeting rooms and facilities.

The building was originally constructed in 1898 as a product of Thomas Flack’s success in the gold industry at the end of that century. Historically it has housed jewellers, a basement level bathhouse, a speakeasy, and many many small businesses over the years. In its new incarnation the building will house Renewal Partners, Tides Canada, Hollyhock Leadership Institute, Penner & Associates, Forest Ethics, Rainforest Solutions Project, and of course us. The space we’ve taken is also a bit too roomy for our current needs, and so we’ll be having a few roommates to fill the place up. So far we’ve got Bill Weaver from Across Borders Media moving in, and over the next month we’ll be looking to have a few others join us. (If you’re a solo entrepreneur looking for a desk to rent, do get in touch with me and as the dust settles we’d be happy to talk about having you join us).

We’d love to have you come by and take a look at the building and all its stunning glory. Please give us a few days (a week or two?) to settle in and let us know you’re coming by so we can put the tea on for you.

Oh, and if you mail us things, our new address is:

Raised Eyebrow Web Studio Inc
209-163 West Hastings Street
Vancouver BC V6B 1H5

I’m working on preparing a “How to Blog” workshop for a client this month and have been scouring the web for follow up resources to leave the workshop participants with. Now I  happen to be a pretty big CBC Radio 1 geek and am in particular a fan of Nora Young’s show Spark (not suprisingly since it merges my love of public radio and technology into one smart package), and last year she did a great series with web vet Merlin Mann that stands as a kind of Blogging 101.  There’s a summary of the series with 6 pretty short podcasts that are well worth a listen if you’re struggling with how to start a blog or, like me, feeling like you could brush up on your current blogging technique. The lesson that I’ll be taking from the series and trying my darnedest to apply this year? Just write. You don’t need to worry about publishing all your blog posts, but get back in the habit of writing them (if you’ve fallen out of it like I have) and then publish the ones you think are worth it.

(PS: If you’re on the Twitter train you can be like me and follow Spark and Nora).

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.