Raised Eyebrow Blog

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”

One of the questions that came up in a Usability Testing Session at the NTEN Conference this week was one that our non profit clients ask us all the time: “How do we involve our board in gathering feedback?” The implicit question there, and no offense to board members here, is “How do I involve my board but not get overly swayed/pushed by their feedback?” The further implied statement is that often boards don’t represent the target audiences for an organization and yet by priviledge of their positions they can really influence the website design and development process.

While there’s no magic bullet solution for this issue, one way to mitigate potential problems is to ask your board for very specific feedback. Re-articulate the website and communications goals and ask for specific feedback on those goals. Don’t ask “Do you like how it looks” ask “Do you think this website communicate the following: a sense of engagement, a sense of leadership, a sense of authority on issues, etc.” (But of course replace those feelings with whatever the goals for your project/your organization are). Then ask them questions based on other communications goals that were set out for the website like “Does this design make it easy to find the email sign up button?” or “Are you able to quickly see the latest information from our organization?” etc. We always help our clients draft these goals as a part of the initial design process, and reusing them to guide feedback from other stakeholders is a great way to get targeted feedback.

Of course there’s no way to guarantee that you’re not going to get feedback along the lines of “I really hate the colour green” or “The woman in that photo looks too much like my evil Aunt Mabel” but hopefully that helps you to get more targeted and useful information as well, which is the feedback you can focus on.

Another framework to try to apply, but I’ll warn you this one is really tricky, is to remind your board (or other stakeholders) before they give you feedback who the target audience is (assuming your board doesn’t match your target audience). And, if you’re comfortable enough with your board you may want to even explicitly remind them that they are not the target audience, or that they are not exclusively their target audience. A quick, gentle reminder along the lines of “Remember our website is one of the primary ways that our core program users, who are youth between the ages of 13-19 who typically access the internet from home on highspeed connections…” etc. is a great way to just help get people thinking about more than their personal preferences.

Smaller organizations often shy away from Usability Testing for fear of the big budgets that can be associated with it. One of the sessions I attended at the Non Profit Technology Conference today addressed this constraint and had some great suggestions for ways to incorporate usability testing on a small budget as well as some ways to simply reframe how you think about usability testing. Here’s a summary of some of those ideas:

• First off, if you have website statistics/analytics already installed on your website then you are (or can be) doing usability testing now. Looking at stats like “500 people visit our donations page each week but only 4 are donating”, “our website is getting 1000 visitors a week, but only 5 email newsletter signups”, or “of the top 5 pages being visited on the website only 2 lead to the content that supports our mission/vision/campaigns.” Evaluating these statistics regularly — or to make a plug here, having your web firm evaluate them — and watching for trends and then looking at what you can do to make iterative changes is a great way to do some low risk/low cost usability testing.
• Usability testing is about asking your audience/representative audiences questions. Why not ask them now rather than waiting to invest in a big usability testing process. Include a link to a basic survey (3-4 questions max) at the end of an email sign-up, donation process, volunteer form, etc. to ask them if their expectations were met, with simple “yes/no” type questions and then a link for people to email you with further comments and thoughts. Again, incorporate what feedback you can as budgets allow, but track and gather the information on an ongoing basis.
• When rolling out some new features, use Social Media to get usability testers. Post a link to the feature/design you want feedback on and link to a basic survey and get feedback via Twitter/Facebook/Email Newsletters etc.
• It’s also ok to launch your website and make some small mistakes. Websites can be tweaked and it doesn’t need to be perfect when you launch it. Listen to what your users are telling you (which means asking them) and then evolve your website over time based on feedback.

The big takeaway from the session for me was that yes usability testing can be expensive, especially if the feedback means overhauling your design/functionality, but don’t be afraid to ask the questions. Then you can start to figure out what kind of a budget you are going to need to evolve and improve your website, rather than flying blind.

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.

Are you a nonprofit or other self-defined “do-gooder”? Are you looking for tips and techniques on how to rock the social media stuff everyone’s talking about these days?

If so, I recommend you check out Net Tuesday’s free event next Tuesday (details are posted on both Meetup and Facebook — choose your poison). Here are the details:

Mini Social Media Camp for Nonprofits & Other Do Gooders!
When: Tuesday, April 28, 5:30-8:00 PM
Where: Workspace – #400 – 21 Water St, Vancouver, BC

Topics may include:

• How can my organization use Facebook to be more awesome? Should I use Pages or Groups?
• How can I use Twitter to find new supporters?
• How can I use free analytics tools to measure my success?
• How can my NGO use free Google adwords?

You’ll get a chance to pick three topics; each topic will be discussed in a 30-minute breakout group. I’ll be leading sessions on Twitter!

Please spread the word to friends and colleagues; I know there are a lot of people in the nonprofit sector who can benefit from this stuff!