Raised Eyebrow Blog

In preparing an upcoming presentation for a client I found myself leafing through notes and google searches to get an exhaustive list of the different between Facebook Pages and Groups (I know the general difference, but wanted to make sure I was 100% prepared to answer all the ins outs of each, and always like to check in on the latest happenings at evolving beast that is Facebook). Here are two great posts that outline the differences between the two, if you’ve found yourself wondering which is best for you organization/cause/business:

• Search Engine Journal’s post includes a comparison table that is handy dandy. I would point out, however, that while it is true you can “message all members” with both as they say, there is a notable difference between messaging your Page’s fans vs. your Group members. With the former, the message goes out in the form of an “update” which can be easily ignored by users (if I’m any indication, they can in fact be routinely ignored). The latter, offers direct inbox sending options, though only for groups under 1,200 members (or perhaps 5,000 I’ve found conflicting info on that number).
• Advergirl’s post lists out the pros and cons of each, playing champion and devil’s advocate for both options.

The summary seems to be that for a long standing, more engaged approach with a community you want a Page, not a Group, but check out the comparisons and decide for yourself.

(As a side note, you can turn an existing Facebook Group into a Page, but you need to be the admin contact for the original group, and you need to contact Facebook directly to do it. No sense of what the ETA on turn around time for that is).

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”

I came across Matt Haughey’s post This is How Social Media Really Works via a friend’s blog this afternoon and it’s finally got me focusing a whole mess of thoughts about Social Media that have been floating around in my brain for the last several months about strategic use of Social Media as a part of your larger communications or marketing plan.

To summarize Matt’s post, if you haven’t already headed over there to read it, he describes a recent purchase he made and how he came across the company he ultimately bought from. Matt was looking to upgrade the swingset in his backyard, his path to purchase went something like this: follow friend on Twitter > one day that friend happens to tweet about the Obama’s buying new swingset for Whitehouse > Matt, because he’s currently interested in swingsets, checks out friend’s blog post that contains more details about the swingset, including a link to the manufacturer of said soon to be presidential swingset > website for swingset vendor is particularly well designed and easy to use > Matt buys swingset.

Matt’s conclusion for this is that, well I’ll just quote him here:

“there are thousands of people all over twitter and blogs that think throwing thousands of dollars at people that describe themselves as a “marketing guru” is the way to increase their company sales. I’m here to say I think that may very well be a waste of money, time, and energy.”

He goes on to conclude the article with the following:

“So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.”

And I agree. Wholeheartedly. But does that mean I think you shouldn’t participate in Social Media as a marketing pursuit be it for a company, a non-profit, a campaign or what have you? No. I do think however — and I’m really not alone in this — that you should see your participation in Social Media — Twitter, Facebook, etc. — as a way to extend your reach, build your community and engage in conversation with customers. And, as you do that — and do it well — you will find that you start getting good Earned Social Media and it will pay off in droves in sales, participation, supporters etc. That means not using Social Media to just let people know directly about your products, sales, fundraising campaigns etc. In fact, you should probably limit how much of that you do through Social Media channels altogether as it detracts from the community building side of things.

I’ve been advocating for clients to get earned online media for many a year now. I think it is by far one of the most effective online strategies to boost sales/supporters/donations etc. and lucky for you it is pretty easy to get. Easier to get than earned media offline anyway, as the barrier to entry is really low. A review on a blog, or an interview with a blogger is a great entry point to earned online media. Obviously, depending on the reach of the blogger or an online magazine, the impact will vary widely, but much like offline earned media it tends to be the kind of thing that builds and grows overtime. With Social Media you’re looking for the same thing. People retweeting a useful resource you post online, or perhaps even better people tweeting links directly to a blog post you’ve written on a company or organizational blog, or another page on your website will help drive pre-qualified (already interested) traffic to your website. As Matt’s scenario displays, that one pre-qualified lead — he was already particularly interested in swingsets — will be far more valuable than thousands of curious folks who just happen to click on a link from your Twitter feed.

The final piece from Matt’s blog post that I want to point to — and I’m aware I’ve got a huge bias here — is a comment he makes about the vendor having “a great website” which, combined with a local lot where he could test out the playground in person, ultimately helped to seal the deal. If when he followed that link he hadn’t been able to quickly and easily get the info that he wanted, he probably would have clicked away and this story would never have been written. When you’re investing in Social Media — be it dollars or simply the valuable time of staff used to tweet and updating Facebook — you are ulitmately investing in driving traffic to your website. If your website isn’t in top form, you may want to spend those Social Media marketing resources on fixing things up at your primary online communications point first.

TED, purveyors of mindblowing talks by some of the world’s most visionary thinkers (and most engaging speakers), made a big announcement today: they’ve launched their Open Translation Project, which currently provides subtitles for TED talks in 40 languages.

Translating content is not revolutionary in and of itself — although as someone who has worked on multi-language websites, I can tell you that successful translation efforts require a truly mind-boggling amount of careful planning and even more careful execution — but TED has done something very interesting here, that’s worth a closer look for anyone providing rich content and hoping to reach a broad audience.

The translations are made possible through the efforts of volunteer translators. Here’s how TED is handling quality control:

Rather than simply translate a few talks into a handful of major languages, TED and technology partner, dotSUB developed a set of tools that allow participants around the world to translate their favorite talks into their own language. This approach is scalable, and — importantly — allows speakers of less-dominant languages an equal opportunity to spread ideas within their communities.

To seed the site, a handful of talks were professionally translated into 20 languages. But all translations going forward will be provided by volunteers. At launch, volunteer translators had already contributed more than 200 published translations (with 450 more in development). These volunteers range from well-organized groups working together in their own language, to lone translators working individually and matched by TED with others.

To help ensure quality, we generate an approved, professional English transcript for each talk. (This is the transcript upon which all translations are based.) Once the talk is translated, we then require every translation to be reviewed by a second fluent speaker before publishing it on TED. TED controls the final “publish” button. All translators and reviewers are credited by name for their work. After publication, we provide feedback mechanisms for ongoing discussion or improvement around the translation.

I find that second-to-last sentence noteworthy, as well: “All translators and reviewers are credited by name for their work.” I watched a sweet little emoticon story that was translated by a fellow named Clement Genzmer, whose profile page lists the three talks he has translated, as well as talks for which he has reviewed the translation. (Importantly, the links to those talks also credit a co-translator/translation reviewer.)

Not only does TED provide subtitles for each talk, but they have also developed interactive transcripts that enhance the TED experience from all kinds of perspectives:

Along with subtitles, every talk on TED.com now features a time-coded, interactive transcript, which allows users to select any phrase and have the video play from that point. The transcripts are fully indexable by search engines, exposing previously inaccessible content within the talks themselves. For example, searching on Google for “green roof” will ultimately help you find the moment in architect William McDonough’s talk when he discusses Ford’s River Rouge plant, and also the moment in Majora Carter’s talk when she speaks of her green roof project in the South Bronx. Transcripts will index in all available languages.

I can see these transcripts being of enormous benefit to visually impaired users (although the transcripts do not, to my knowledge, include descriptions of visual elements such as slides shown during the presentations, which is an obvious limitation), as well as people watching videos more than once, who may want to skip directly to a particular point in a video.

I’m incredibly impressed with TED’s efforts to make their content more accessible to people everywhere, and with the methodology they’ve used. I do see one oversight, however, which is that I would love to see them include sign-language interpretation, to allow deaf people a richer TED experience. Perhaps once they’ve seen some success with written translations they will explore the idea of offering picture-in-picture sign language interpretation — this, too, could be volunteer contributed.

As providers/builders/magicians of technology it is natural for our clients to come to us when they want to add new features to their websites. And while it’s kind of our job to get the job done, I often find that I start out a conversation about adding “new feature x” with investigative questions about what the reasoning behind the new feature is and how it will be supported with internal resources. Sometimes, I even end up talking clients out of adding some new feature (which ultimately would give us money and business) in favour of redirecting them to pay more attention to content/people time spent on what they’ve already got. This article looking at how too many features can harm your online community hits the nail on the head on this topic, and can be broadened out to include most online applications not just those in community websites. The biggest take away comes near the end of the article with this paragraph:

Don’t be tricked into thinking that members demand certain features and functionality. Members aren’t really interested in the technology behind a community – they are far more interested in the people and human activity taking place there.

I’ve been compiling notes from the various conferences I’ve been at over the last few weeks and plan to post them up here, many centre around the common thread that the technologies available to us today are ultimately there to support larger visions, they are not in and of themselves the final prize. Whether that translates into pouring resources into supporting people over new technology, or using social media to support and enhance campaigns but not as a campaign itself, the technology can’t be the leader in the equation however shiny and cool it may be.

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.

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!

Slate has a great article up on “The 10 cunning ways public radio stations convince you to give them money” — as I was reading it (and listening to the fabulous audio clips that accompany the article), I reflected on how many of these same smart fundraising techniques apply to good causes everywhere.

Personally, I am a big fan (and longtime supporter) of KEXP, the Seattle-based radio station that also delivers their exceptional music programming online, and one of the things I have always admired about them is their sheer genius when it comes to fundraising. (They’re in the middle of pledge week right now, as a matter of fact, should you feel inclined to give to a great cause.) One year during pledge drive they accepted bids on seemingly random items scattered around the station, so that for, say, $500 (I can’t remember the actual amount), you could get your name on the front of the coffee machine, where staffers would grab a cup of joe. For $1000, you might get your name on a microphone that’s used every day for in-studio performances by some of the best musicians in the world. And so on. The intimacy and immediacy of the items one could sponsor made them incredibly appealing to listeners like me. (I still want my name on that coffee machine.)

I think of all the techniques described in the Slate article, the one that’s most effective at getting my credit card out is this one:

8. Niche marketing

The best of public radio’s weekend shows have distinct personalities: the discursive storytelling of This American Life, the self-deprecating bickering of Car Talk, and the cozy in-jokes of A Prairie Home Companion. All these shows produce special pledge editions, pitching in their signature styles. Ira Glass clearly missed his calling in sales; he is a master of the “ask.” He appeals to his people in their native tongue, sarcasm, calling on them to show their love for the show rather than the station it happens to be playing on: “There is one sure way that you can send a signal to this radio station that you like this program, and that you want them to continue running this program, and that is to call right now. …. Not later, not in an hour, during that other show that comes after us.”

I want to be made to feel special — to feel like I belong to a community of people with whom I share certain common interests and values. If you can make me feel understood and valued, then you will gain my loyalty, and with my loyalty comes a much greater willingness to part with my hard-earned cash.

And you know what didn’t make the list? Fearmongering. (Yes, they did include guilt-tripping, because where would fundraisers be without the ability to tug on heartstrings?) I, for one, would really love it if I never received another fundraising letter that implied the world was on the brink of destruction and that only my dollars could save us from apocalypse, whether the end of the world was coming in the shape of environmental, cultural, or social degradation. I am rarely motivated to action by doom-and-gloom scenarios; what does motivate me is a clearly articulated vision of a better world that I want to live in — even if it’s just a world where The Pixies still get played on the radio every day.