Raised Eyebrow Blog

Two years ago, Emira & I went to South by Southwest (AKA SXSW) for the first time, and presented a panel called “Boss Lady” that featured tips for online business owners from several of the savviest women entrepreneurs we know: Vickie Howell, Jenny Hart & Alex Beauchamp, all of whom appear in the pages of our book, The Boss of You. We had such a good time that we knew we wanted to go back as soon as humanly possible, though last year we were too busy getting our book out the door to attend the conference.

But this year we’re back, this time with a panel that we hope will prove helpful to geeks of both the design and techie varieties – both camps are in full force at SXSW’s Interactive conference, which is a pure, 24/7, all-out geekfest – who are looking to bring their values into their paid work, whether it’s by learning to work with clients in the nonprofit sector, creating apps that help mission-driven organizations work more effectively, or infusing some environmental or social-justice savvy into their workplaces. The panel’s called “Socially Conscious Geek: Makin’ Money While Doin’ Good”, and it takes place Saturday, March 13^th.

The topic was inspired by a topic our friend Noah Scalin (of Skull-A-Day and Another Limited Rebellion fame) spoke about at the 2009 HOW Conference. His focus was more on graphic design, since that’s his area of expertise, but when I asked him about riffing on his ideas for an interactive design audience, he shared his materials with me with typical generosity. (This is a guy who lives and breathes a DIY, share-and-share-alike mentality that a lot of designers could learn from. But that’s a topic for another day.)

This time I’ll be attending the conference solo, while Emira spends some time with her new baby; my co-facilitator for the session is Leif Utne, a friend and colleague who works for Zanby, a software company that specializes in supporting online social communities for change. Leif’s background includes a stint as the publisher of Worldchanging.org, and lots of experience building online communities; he’s also a journalist, activist and social entrepreneur.  Zanby is used to support The UpTake, a web video community that among other things was heavily involved in documenting the RNC and DNC prior to the 2008 election, and was also engaged in citizen vote monitoring during the election. He brings both amazing facilitation skills as well as a solid understanding of how businesses and nonprofits can work together in mutually beneficial ways.

We’ll be conducting our session in a highly interactive, inclusive format called a Core Conversation: Leif and I will be kick-starting the discussion and planting some seeds, but the idea is that whoever shows up will have a chance to step forward and contribute questions and ideas – so I’m really excited to see how it develops.

We’re hoping to address questions like:

• What is a socially conscious geek?
• How can I specialize in socially conscious work and earn a living wage?
• What are some of the unique opportunities and challenges of specializing in socially conscious work?
• What is the difference between non-profit and no-profit clients?
• How do I make the transition from corporate work to working with non-profit and/or mission-driven clients?
• What is the “triple bottom line” approach to business?
• What are some examples of alternative business models that are emerging among socially conscious geeks?
• How is socially conscious work different than “green” work?
• What are some examples of clients I might be able to work with as a socially conscious geek?
• How should I market myself to values-driven clients? Is it different from marketing to corporate clients?

Ultimately, though, the decisions about what we cover will rest with whoever shows up. So please help us spread the word – and if you’ll be at SXSW, we’d love to see you there!

Is there a better term for “nonprofit”? A recent article by Dan Pallotta at Harvard Business blogs begins, “Anyone who has thought about it for more than a nanosecond agrees that ‘nonprofit’ is about the worst possible summary we could give of ourselves and our work.” He goes on to argue that the nonprofit sector could stand to define itself in terms of what it is, rather than what it is not. (It’s a great post, and well worth reading, as are the unusually thoughtful comments that accompany it.) Pallotta’s suggestion is we move to using the term “Humanity Sector.”

This isn’t the first time I’ve come across the idea of renaming the nonprofit sector. Tom Suddes makes a compelling case in favour of using “for impact” instead — though personally, I’m not sure that distinguishes this sector from the business & government sectors in any useful way. Surely we all want to make an impact? (That being said, if you ever get to hear him talk about fundraising, do yourself a favour and go — he has some amazing insights and a great deal of charm.)

I’m also not convinced of the “humanity” moniker, because the nonprofit sector includes a lot of organizations that really don’t focus on humanity — there are astronomy educators and environmental justice warriors and all kinds of other groups for whom “humanity” isn’t the emphasis. I’ve heard “third sector” (which feels awkward & low-priority), “non-governmental” (okay, but uninspiring), “community profit” (can’t the community profit from corporate & governmental work as well?), and “public benefit” (see “community profit”) — but none of those work for me either.

Although I love the idea of moving away from “nonprofit,” I’d really like us to find an option that is both broadly inclusive of the wide variety of organizations within the sector, and clearly distinct from the focus of for-profit and governmental actors. Because the key differences that mark nonprofits are legal in nature, perhaps “nonprofit” is the simplest option.

But there is one other suggestion I quite like, with a couple of reservations: “the delta sector,” as proposed by Robert K. Ross in The Chronicle of Philanthropy. Yes, it sounds a bit like a Star Trek reference. But here’s his pitch:

Robert K. Ross, president of the California Endowment, a health foundation in Los Angeles, says he’s got just the word: “delta,” the Greek letter that signifies change. So, no more talk about the “nonprofit sector,” he said at the closing session of the National Conference on Volunteering and Service.

It’s now the “delta sector.”

“We need to be more intentionally about change and transformation,” he said. “Business as usual is leaving too many families broken and too many families and folks with hopelessness and despair.”

I’m not a hundred percent sold on “delta sector” — I’m not sure it works for arts organizations (or many conservative groups that actively resist change), and I’m also not convinced that change is a worthwhile motive in and of itself — but I like the sentiment behind it, and indeed behind all these ideas. It warms my former-English-major heart that so many good people are putting so much brain power towards thinking about the importance of language, and I’d love to see the nonprofit / for impact / humanity / delta sector wrestle with this some more and see if we can’t come up with a better name.

There are many ways to skin the cat when it comes to putting video on a Drupal site. I’ve tried and tested quite a few methods since my first introduction to Drupal 2 years ago. I’ve used Embedded Media Field as well as Video Filter but finally settled on the combination of FileField with JWPlayer or Flowplayer and in some cases the Media Mover Module for moving files to Amazon S3 storage. I’m going to use our recent launch of the CCPA website as a case study for how we currently handle video delivery. So let’s dissect this a little.

Uploading files

The video files need to be uploaded before we display them. This is best achieved using the wonderful Filefield Module. This is quite a simple yet powerful module developed/maintained by Lullabot, Nate Haug (quicksketch), whom I’ve had the pleasure of being trained by at one of their excellent Drupal Theming workshops. Once you install and enable the module you then add a new CCK field, of type “filefield”. In our case we have a content type called “Multimedia”. We add the field to this content type. You then need to configure the following:

1. Permitted upload file extensions

In most cases this is relatively straightforward, it’s just one file type. If you’re using JWPlayer or Flowplayer it will be FLV. Both these players are built to play Flash Video files (FLV). If you have Quicktime MOV’s or AVI’s that you want to upload then you’ll need to consider different options for playing video. For the purpose of this case study we’re just uploading FLV files.

2. File size restrictions

It’s very important that you set these, otherwise you may end up with users trying to upload 200MB videos, not a very good idea. I set this low as a learning feature for clients. Any reasonably long FLV file that is over 40MB is probably not optimized as well as it should be.

3. Path Settings

I like to keep all files that admin/editor users upload in a folder called uploads so that it’s easy to manage them later if they need to be exported etc.

Multimedia File Field Settings

Create a placeholder image

Most video players require some sort of poster/placeholder image to display before the video plays. In this case I created another FileField for the placeholder image. We’ll use that later on in conjunction with the ImageCache module to achieve our desired results.

Moving Files to Amazon S3

We’ve been using Amazon S3 for storing video files on quite a number of sites recently. One reason is that we were looking for a location off the webserver that could deliver the video, without impacting the performance of the server, so that in the event of a traffic spike the webserver wouldn’t fall over. We could also have used Amazon EC2 or another CDN service for this, however as most of our clients have a very regional (BC) audience. Most CDN’s have nodes in various locations across the US and Europe and this would have served no real improvement as the nearest cached version will always be in the same place for everyone.

So if they’re uploading the files directly to the Drupal site, how to the files get delivered from Amazon S3. That’s where the Media Mover module comes in. This module has many purposes, but for our needs it simply harvests all the files uploaded via the “Multimedia” content type and moves those files to Amazon S3 so that we can deliver them from there.

Download, install and enable the Media Mover module. You’ll also need an S3 account and will need to set that up via the module setting page. You then need to add a Configuration via https://www.yoursite.ca/admin/build/media_mover/add.

Media Mover has 4 actions which it performs on your files:

• Harvest – Define/collect the files you want to perform actions on
• Process – Perform certain actions on the files
• Storage – Where to store files once the actions have been carried out
• Complete – Final actions to perform on the files

So in this case we just want to harvest all Multimedia files and store them on Amazon S3.

So for clarification here Media Mover does NOT MOVE the files to Amazon S3, it simply COPIES them over to S3 and the original files remain on your server.

Media Mover Settings

Delivering the moved Video files

So this is where the Drupal theming trickery comes in. Flowplayer and JWPlayer are both Flash based FLV video players than can be called using Javascript and that’s exactly what I do on this site. In plain english this is what happens:

1. Output the placeholder image to screen as a link.
2. Use Javascript so that when the user clicks on the image the video plays.
3. Deliver the video from the file on Amazon S3 rather than the file on the webserver (Drupal site).

We need to modify three files to achive the above:

• template.php
• multimedia.js (a newly created JS file)
• node-multimedia.tpl.php (a custom template file for all multimedia types)

template.php file

Setting up all the variables we’re going to need to use as well as making the javascript available

if($variables['field_file'][0]['view']) { //If there is a file and there is something to display...
  if ($variables['field_aspect_ratio'][0]['value']) { //Aspect ratio handling
    $variables['aspect_ratio'] = $variables['field_aspect_ratio'][0]['value'];
  } else {
  $variables['aspect_ratio'] = 'normal';
  }
  $variables['multimedia_type'] = 'video'; //Set the type of multimedia - we also have audio and interactive...
  custom_theme_get_media_mover_files($variables['field_file'][0], $variables['media_mover'][3]); //Set the filepath to the media moved filepath...
  drupal_add_js(array('videoplayerpath' => path_to_theme() .'/scripts/plugins/flowplayer/flowplayer-3.1.1.swf'), 'setting'); //Set a JS variable to retrieve later...
  drupal_add_js(path_to_theme() .'/scripts/plugins/flowplayer/example/flowplayer-3.1.1.min.js', 'theme'); //Call the player...
  drupal_add_js(path_to_theme() .'/scripts/multimedia.js', 'theme');//Call the custom JQuery to handle creating the player...
}
 
/**
 * A function that takes a file object and a media_mover element array and set the file path to
 * its media moved path on Amazon S3 or wherever it moved to.
 *
 * It uses the unique file_id identifier to match file with media_mover file.
 *
 * $file = $variables['file_image'][0];
 * $media_mover = $variables['media_mover'][{id of media mover configuration}];
 *
 * @param 		&$file A Drupal file array (by reference)
 * @param 		$media_mover A media_mover file/element array
 */
function custom_theme_get_media_mover_files(&$file, $media_mover) {
  if(module_exists('media_mover_api') && $media_mover) { // If media mover is installed...
    foreach($media_mover as $media) { // Loop through each media_moved file...
      if($media['fid'] == $file['fid']) { // If they match (file id is a unique identifier...
        $file['filepath'] = $media['complete_file']; // Replace the attached file path with the media moved file path...
      }
    }
  }
} // custom_theme_get_media_mover_files()

Let me explain one thing in regards to line 9. I’ve created a custom function and I’m passing

$variables['media_mover'][3]

to my custom function. When you create a Media Mover configuration and map it to a CCK field, it creates an array in $variables to keep track of the Media Mover object. The array is called ‘media_mover’ and the number 3 in this case is the ID of the Media Mover configuration.

node-multimedia.tpl.php

Set up the template. Create a wrapper div with the placeholder image as the background image (this is run through imagecache) and display the play button as a link with the path set to the path of the Amazon S3 file. This link will also have an id attribute of ‘multimedia’. This is necessary as it allows us to attach the player, via Javascript, to this link.

<div id="containing-block">
<div id="video-wrapper" class="<?php print $aspect_ratio;?>">
<div>
     &lt; ?php print l('<img src="/'.path_to_theme().'/images/ccpa-button-play-large.png" alt="Play this video" />', $field_file[0]['filepath'], $options = array('html' => TRUE, 'attributes' => array('id' => 'multimedia', 'class' => $multimedia_type))); ?></div>
</div>
</div>

multimedia.js file

Hook the Flowplayer to the link, with id of ‘multimedia’, that we created in the template.

Drupal.behaviors.showMultimedia = function(context) {
  var interactive_path = $('#multimedia').attr('href'); /*Get the path to the video*/
  var interactive_image = $('#multimedia').css('background-image');	/*Get the path to the placeholder image*/
  interactive_image = interactive_image.slice(4,interactive_image.length-1);/*Tidying up the interactive image path*/
 
  if($('#multimedia').hasClass('video')) {/*If the link has a class of video*/
  $('#multimedia').flowplayer( /*Initialize the flowplayer and configure the controls*/
    Drupal.settings.basePath + Drupal.settings.videoplayerpath, /*Path to the player, gotten from temaplate.php*/
    {
      plugins: {
	controls: {
	  stop: true,
	  backgroundColor: '#efefef',
	  backgroundGradient: 'none',
	  borderRadius: '0px',
	  bufferColor: '#d2d6ab',
	  bufferGradient: 'none',
	  buttonColor: '#777777',
	  buttonOverColor: '#99a134',
	  durationColor: '#cccccc',
	  height: 25,
	  opacity: 1.0,
	  progressColor: '#99a134',
	  sliderColor: '#9999999',
	  sliderGradient: 'none',
	  timeBgColor: '#777777',
	  timeColor: '#ffffff',
	  tooltipColor: '#000000',
	  tooltipTextColor: '#ffffff',
	  volumeSliderColor: '#777777',
	  volumeSliderGradient: 'none'
	}
      }
    });
  }
};

I hope that was easy to follow. Now there’s one more thing to cover and that’s Aspect Ratio.

Aspect Ratio

The issue of aspect ratio is very important when figuring out how to display video. Not so recently YouTube switched all video display to the 16:9 ratio thus setting the stage for the proliferation of the widescreen aspect ratio across the web. So how do you allow the user to upload a video and choose it’s aspect ratio. I’m sure there are other ways to do this via Metadata etc, but for our needs on this site I used a CCK field. This is a simple CCK field set with three options:

1. None (defaults to 4:3)
2. Normal (4:3)
3. Widescreen (16:9)

Aspect Ratio Field Settings

We then check the value of this field in template.php above:

if ($variables['field_aspect_ratio'][0]['value']) { //Aspect ratio handling
    $variables['aspect_ratio'] = $variables['field_aspect_ratio'][0]['value'];
  } else {
  $variables['aspect_ratio'] = 'normal';
  }

and set a variable called ‘aspect_ratio” which we apply as a class to the div wrapping the video in the node-multimedia.tpl.php:

<div id="containing-block">
<div id="video-wrapper" class="<?php print $aspect_ratio;?>">
<div>
     < ?php print l('<img src="/'.path_to_theme().'/images/ccpa-button-play-large.png" alt="Play this video" />', $field_file[0]['filepath'], $options = array('html' => TRUE, 'attributes' => array('id' => 'multimedia', 'class' => $multimedia_type))); ?></div>
</div>
</div>

We have also created image cache presets for the placeholder images to account for both aspect ratios. These are named ‘multimedia_normal’ and ‘multimedia_widescreen’ and these have the appropriate dimensions associated with them:

Image Cache Presets

So using the amazing article on A List Apart for creating intrinsic ratios for video we use CSS to resize the player based on the aspect ratio chosen by the user.

style.css file

/* -- Multimedia -- */
#containing-block {
  width: 100%;
}
 
#video-wrapper {
  position: relative;
  padding-top: 25px;
  height: 0;
}
 
  #video-wrapper div,
  #video-wrapper embed,
  #video-wrapper object {
    position: absolute;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
  }
 
  #video-wrapper.normal {
    padding-bottom: 75%;
  }
 
  #video-wrapper.widescreen {
    padding-bottom: 56.25%;
  }
 
  * html #video-wrapper {
    margin-bottom: 45px;
    margin-bot\tom: 0;
  }
 
#video-wrapper #multimedia.audio {
  display:block;
  height:100%;
  margin:1em 0 0 0;
  text-align: center;
  width:100%;
}
 
#video-wrapper #multimedia {
  display:block;
}
 
  #video-wrapper.normal #multimedia img {
    /*margin:118.5px 0 0;*/
    margin:32% 42%;
  }
 
  #video-wrapper.widescreen #multimedia img {
    margin:22% 41%;
  }

And the end result looks something like this http://www.policyalternatives.ca/multimedia/matthew-poverty-and-looking-after-each-other-tough-times. They haven’t added any widescreen content yet, just testing content.

So what are the advantages of doing things this way?

1. You can easily use any player to play your flash files (all you need to do  is change the path to your player and a few configuration params in multimedia.js)
2. All your video content is hosted on and delivered from Amazon S3. But there is also a copy on your local server in the event of something going wrong on Amazon S3
3. You don’t have to worry about your video looking skewed due to aspect ratio problems
4. You can add many other apsect ratios pretty quickly
5. The video file is still downloadable when javascript is not present or disabled

I’d love to get feedback on how other do this, please leave a comment or send me an email and let me know how you deliver Video content on your site.

We are very proud to unveil a project we’ve been working on for several months now: a redesign of policyalternatives.ca, the online home of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. Canada’s leading progressive research institute, the CCPA is a prolific publisher of reports and studies, books, articles, commentary and fact sheets on issues ranging from income equality to environmental policy, privatization of public services, and beyond.

They are highly respected, but like many organizations working towards policy change, they don’t always reach as broad an audience as they might hope; not many people have the time and inclination to read an in-depth research report, so in recent years they have been creating more bite-sized, easy-to-digest content in both written and multimedia formats. As the range of content has grown, though, so has the need to cross-reference related materials — so the CCPA’s website needed to both invite visitors to browse through an extensive library in an intuitive and approachable way, but also allow people seeking more in-depth content to locate related materials quickly and easily. (One of our developers describes the complex interrelationships between the CCPA’s publications as “like Facebook for documents.”)

Their five year-old website, although rich in content and highly trafficked, didn’t offer visitors any way to easily share the CCPA’s content with their social networks, whether through Facebook or Twitter, or even through their own publications, blogs or presentations. Exchange of ideas is the CCPA’s raison d’etre, so it stands to reason that above and beyond extending the website’s “share this” features, the organization would benefit from encouraging online visitors to use and share its content — and they do, using a Creative Commons license.

This project was a complex one on several fronts, as we wrestled with improving navigation through the site (both via menus and site links as well as with improved search tools); updating the site’s look and feel; and migrating the extensive site content (along with the aforementioned relationships between content items) from a commercial CMS platform into Drupal.

Oh, and we also set up a shopping cart (for books, memberships, donations and journal subscriptions).

There’s a real sense of accomplishment here at Raised Eyebrow when we look at the final result, but of course on the web, there’s no such thing as a final edit. Our best hope, in fact, is that we’ve helped to create a solid platform upon which the CCPA can continue to build and extend over the coming years. So while right now we are celebrating the grand opening, the real fun in some ways is still to come. I’m sure we’ll see the CCPA continue to play a leadership role when it comes to presenting research online in accessible and innovative ways.

The past few weeks have been quiet here on our blog, and as often happens, that silence has been an indicator of just how busy things have been here at Raised Eyebrow headquarters. We’ve been putting the final touches on some exciting new websites that we’re very proud to share with the world. Two major redesigns have just launched – one for a wonderful nonprofit group here in British Columbia and the other for a foundation that’s changing the face of lung cancer research across the United States.

The Deaf Children’s Society of BC offers programs, support and resources for families of young children with hearing challenges that range from parent groups for new parents of deaf or hard of hearing infants, preschool and summer programs for young kids, to a library and bookstore where families can access print resources. Their small staff includes several speech-language pathologists and sign language instructors, and they came to us looking to extend the reach of the services they are able to offer through the web. We helped them extend their resources online through the use of instructional videos for new parents to learn sign language that can then be used with their children as they develop language and reading skills.

The new website is a clean but cheerful home for their fun, informative, instructional videos as well as detailed information about the society’s programs and services. Parents can learn sign language in child-sized portions – with signs grouped in themes like animals, colours, numbers, and of course the alphabet, which they can then use to help their young children with developing language skills.

Uniting Against Lung Cancer is a nonprofit foundation that formed in 2001 as Joan’s Legacy, in honour of 47 year-old New Yorker Joan Scarangello McNeive, who never smoked, but died after a valiant battle with lung cancer. Her family and friends rallied and established the foundation to fund research and raise awareness about the disease; over the years it has attracted partnerships with other family foundations, and now Uniting Against Lung Cancer serves as a connector for groups across the United States who are raising awareness and funds. To date, the foundation and its partners have awarded over $6 million in direct research grants in 20 different states.

We worked with Uniting’s staff and board to develop and implement a transition strategy for their online presence, as they re-branded from Joan’s Legacy to Uniting Against Lung Cancer. The new website better reflects the scope and reach of the foundation’s work, and showcases their mission, partners, and events in a design that evokes a deep breath of fresh air on a sunny day.

On a technical note: Both sites run on Drupal’s open-source CMS platform, which gives them a strong foundation on which to develop future site enhancements – something that’s increasingly top-of-mind for our clients. We’re finding that more of our clients are looking at an iterative approach to making site adjustments, and even after a major redesign such as these ones, there are often “wish list” items that we can add to a site over time. We find Drupal provides a robust framework that allows this iterative approach to work well.

Last week I blogged about Vancouver arts groups who are using Twitter to deepen their relationships with new and existing audiences, and I’d like to point to a couple more intriguing examples of social media tools finding new and wildly creative uses in the hands of arts organizations.

The first is an iPhone application I discovered recently, called The Extraordinaries. The Extraordinaries is a micro-volunteering application that enables iPhone users like myself to spend a couple of minutes here and there (I use it when I’m waiting at bus stops, or standing in line at the sandwich shop) tagging images for art galleries and libraries. (The current list of organizations who are benefiting from the service includes the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as groups from New Zealand, France, Portugal, Australia and Holland.)

Tagging — which is all I’ve been able to do via the app so far — is actually only the tip of the iceberg. The Extraordinaries’ website lists the following possibilities for future development:

• Translating a nonprofit’s Website into a foreign language
• Recording the GPS location of potholes and city infrastructure issues for municipalities
• Identifying birds for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
• Tagging images for the Smithsonian
• Transcribing ancient texts for ReCaptcha
• Reviewing congressional bills for hidden pork
• Fact checking for reporters

I’m really excited about where this could go. I encourage my fellow iPhone users to check it out — and if your organization could benefit from this kind of micro-volunteering, why not apply to be a pilot partner?

The second story I want to share may already be familiar to those of you in the classical music community, but for the rest of you: Did you know there’s an opera being composed on Twitter?

Yes, you read that right. So far there are 7 acts, and the entire libretto has been written in 140-character bursts by Twitter users. From what I can make out, the plot is rather serpentine, but holy heck is this a fun project! Talk about crowdsourcing your content! Anyone can tweet a line of the opera by using the hashtag #youropera, or sending their tweet to @youropera.

The whole thing is a project of the Royal Opera House in London, rather a grande dame of the classical scene, known as a fancy-pants venue for ballet & opera. The Twitter opera is part of their Deloitte Ignite series, a 3-day festival that’s a smidge more avant-garde than the Opera House’s usual fare — but still, I have to give them props for going out on a limb. A Twitter opera might seem a risky venture for far smaller, edgier companies, and I applaud the ROH for stepping up and giving it a shot.

And you know, even if your company isn’t ready to let your Twitter followers write your next show, you can always follow the example of Next to Normal, the Broadway musical whose rise to success seems to have been at least partially fuelled by its clever use of Twitter.

What’s next? All I know is that the arts community is sure to keep uncovering innovative ways to use social media to create, connect and inspire. More news as it happens…

Between my personal background in — and passion for — music, and the fact that many of our nonprofit clients hail from the arts sector, I try to keep an eye on how arts groups are using social media to achieve their missions. In particular, lately I’ve been looking around on Twitter to see which Vancouver arts groups are doing interesting things in the Twitterverse. I’m excited to see how many organizations are reaching out to new and existing audiences via Twitter, and I thought it might be of interest to some readers to hear about some Vancouver arts organizations who are doing a lot with 140 characters.

My focus tends to skew towards music, and classical music in particular, so you’ll definitely notice that bias here. I’ve also tried to limit the list to groups who are twittering actively, and conversing rather than simply broadcasting one-way announcements.

• Chan Centre for the Performing Arts at UBC*: Rachel Lowry at the Chan is doing a fantastic job of highlighting all kinds of interesting arts news, as well as sharing information about their upcoming events.
• Many of the big performing arts groups in town are making good use of Twitter, including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and The Arts Club. But the leader of the pack may be Ling Chan at Vancouver Opera, who has been doing a bang-up job of extending the opera company’s reach beyond the usual classical-music suspects. The opera’s Twitter feed features fun & interesting opera news, as well as exclusive offers for Vancouver Opera fans. In related social media news, the organization has been reaching out to bloggers as well, through their innovative Blogger Night at the Opera.
• World-renowned men’s choir Chor Leoni* has a great feed, which I believed is managed by arts marketer extraordinaire Bruce Hoffman. My favourite recent tweet from them pointed to a video of Bobby McFerrin leading the World Science Festival audience through a fascinating musical exercise.
  
• Pacific Cinematheque offers a delightful twist on the self-promotional announcement: each time they mention a film they’re screening, they include a quote from the script. (A recent example: “‘You’re wearing the wrong shade of lipstick, Mister.’ THE BLUE DAHLIA 9:20pm”.)
• Saturday Afternoon at the Opera, the CBC’s weekly opera show hosted by Bill Richardson (one of my all-time favourite Vancouverites), is relatively new to Twitter, but already making a splash with their contests to summarize opera plots in 140 characters.
• musica intima*, the a cappella (and conductorless) vocal ensemble with whom I used to sing, has a lively Twitter feed (though it seems to be on summer hiatus) written by two staff members and one of the group’s twelve singers. I particularly enjoyed the updates they posted while the group was on tour.
• The Dance Centre’s Twitter feed covers all things dance-related. I love that they write about everything from serious dance news to the latest episode of So You Think You Can Dance.
• For a couple of great examples of how festivals (whose “seasons” are short-lived by nature), check out the Vancouver Folk Fest, Vancouver Jazz Fest, and DOXA feeds.
• Pacific Baroque Orchestra is another Twitter newbie, but they’re posting actively about baroque & classical-era music and joining in the conversation.
• Finally, one of my favourite Twitter feeds comes from the Vancouver Public Library. They keep me up to date on everything from special collections I may not have heard about, to author readings, to branch closures. And they’re fun and funny.

Who have I missed? I’d love to hear of other examples. Please leave your suggestions in the comments.

(* = Raised Eyebrow clients)

Our new offices in the Flack Block bring us even closer (by a hundred feet or so) to the new Woodward’s site development that we’ve been watching evolve over the past couple of years — now we’re located in the same city block as the old Woodward’s store, which is slowly but surely transforming into a large-scale mixed-use project that promises to change the landscape of this part of the city when it’s completed.

We are just months away from the projected completion date, and buzz is building. Today I received an RFP (circulated by the Centre for Social Enterprise) for a social enterprise business opportunity in the new retail space at Woodward’s. Read on for more details…

RFP for a social enterprise within Vancouver’s Woodward’s development
July 4, 2009

Non-profit organizations are invited to respond to a Request for Proposal (RFP) for a social enterprise business opportunity in the new Woodward’s development at Hastings and Abbott Street.

The RFP is open to any Vancouver based non-profit organization with a social, cultural, or artistic mandate that wishes to operate a social enterprise in a retail space.

They define social enterprise as a non-profit organization which sells goods or provides services to provide both a financial and social return on investments. The final selection is subject to approval by Vancouver City Council.

Details are available in the RFP package which must be picked up in person at 300-515 West 10th Avenue, Vancouver, BC.

Deadline for RFP submissions is Friday, July 31, 2009 at 4 pm.

The RFP process for the social enterprise space at Woodward’s is being handled by the City of Vancouver’s Real Estate Department. Please contact them for further details at 604.873.7438 or via their 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’ve been thinking a lot about resistance to social media at the institutional level — and I use the term “social media” very broadly here, to include any web-based tools that facilitate participation by your constituents (AKA “users,” though I have a love/hate relationship with that word) — especially as it relates to our clients in the nonprofit world. We hear a lot of fears about incorporating social media tools, some of which include:

• We’ll lose control of our messaging.
• We’ll lose control of our content.
• We’ll get too much negative / problematic feedback.
• There’s no way to measure the results we’ll get.
• We can’t afford to allocate budget, time, and/or staff resources to this stuff.

I’m planning to write a series of blog posts addressing these fears one by one, but I want to start with the first one: the fear that by opening your organization up with Web 2.0 tools, your message will become diluted or distorted. This fear reflects an assumption that many of us in the communications & marketing industries (at least, those of us over the age of 25) grew up with — namely, that your message is something you can control in a top-down, across-the-board fashion.

Now, I like a set of good branding guidelines as well as the next designer, but one of the things that made me fall in love with the web was its remix culture. This is a medium where everyone has a voice, and wants to use it — where the paradox of our deeply human desire to simultaneously experience both a sense of perfect uniqueness and of belonging to a community is playing out in some very interesting ways.

Let’s take, for example, the personal blog. Someone carves out a space to talk about whatever subjects strike their fancy, and posts written, photographic, audio, or video content to a website, in a journal format. It is of course technically possible to write a blog that contains no links to other websites, or even that is closed to the public — but that’s the exception rather than the rule, and most blogs balance personal expression with community-building, via links within posts, blogrolls, and so on. Bloggers reference the stuff that inspires them, linking to other blogs, websites, books, you name it. And in doing so, they create a sort of hybrid web space that is both entirely personal, and which connects them up to the various people, organizations, and sites with which they feel an affinity.

Bloggers may be writing about your organization already. (Let’s hope so!) And if they are, you can be sure that there is already conversation out there in the world that you have lost control over. But the question you should be asking yourself is not, “How can we gain control of our messaging?” but rather, “How can we participate in this conversation?”

Slide by David Wilcox

[Above slide from David Wilcox's excellent blog post "We can't do that - and they mustn't do it either".]

There’s a pretty deep shift in terms of frameworks there, especially for organizations with roots that reach back before the Web as we know it was born. So how to we explain the concept to those fearful of change?

Here’s one idea. Something clicked for me when I saw this fabulous line from a slidecast from Steve Bridger:

As supporters increasingly want to mix giving their time, money, activism & influence… the time has come for charities to re-structure to reflect this.

The key word for me in that sentence is “influence.” Time, money & activism are the contributions the nonprofit sector has relied upon, historically. Influence, though, is new territory. There are debates raging everywhere about how to measure it, for starters. And there’s still a lot of resistance among organizations to opening up to multidimensional conversation with constituents, rather than communicating via the broadcast-media approach they’ve used for decades (distributing newsletters, sending direct mail, and so on).

There is, of course, a wide range of things nonprofits can work on to allow supporters to assert their influence more easily. One that Bridger touches upon is facilitating conversations that are scalable — for example, if your organization is mounting a campaign, spend some time crafting messages that can be passed on to the recipient’s network and still make sense when they’re coming from an intermediary — and explain to your supporters how spreading the word will help. Avaaz does a great job of this; they even include a dynamic calculator on all their petitions that tells prospective signers how many signatures have been provided so far, and how many remain to reach the target number.

Help people meet their individual needs through your work. People like to feel special, and they also like to feel part of something bigger than themselves; help them experience both by giving them ways to contribute their unique voices to your campaign. If it’s a letter-writing campaign, give them point-form notes and invite them to write their own emails; or follow the example of some of the big health charities and allow people to create their own fundraising web pages they can send around to their networks.

The risk, yes, is that you lose control over your message. But that control has been eroding for decades, anyway. So let’s focus on the opportunity, which Bridger sums up succinctly as follows:

Real engagements = when people do things for the cause you didn’t ask them to do.

Related links:

• We Are Media wiki entry for Dealing with Resistance
• Top 5 Fears About Social Media (and the 5 “counter-fears”)
• David Wilcox: “We can’t do that – and they mustn’t do it either”