Community IT Innovators. Established 1993. Serving social mission organizations with integrated technology services you can trust.

We’re starting a new series of informal gatherings to discuss topics important to nonprofits. The idea is to bring people together to talk about your ideas, successes, failures, needs, and best practices.

Our goal is to create closer community ties, connecting you with other nonprofit professionals. We want to create an atmosphere where you can feel empowered to talk openly about your challenges at work and what we, as a community, can do to address them.

CITI will be hosting these events, but we’ll be learning as much from these events as anyone there. We hope you’ll join us for an evening of exploration and sharing.

Register now for the first forum on January 20 to discuss Social Media.  Many of you are likely already familiar with and using tools like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to spread your message and gain supporters.  Come share your story and learn more about how other organizations are using social media.

Save the dates! The CITIzens Forums will be on the first and third Wednesday evening of every month, each one discussing a different specific topic of interest.

• Jan 20 – Social Media
• Feb 3 – The Value of a CIO Perspective
• Feb 17 – Salesforce
• March 3 – Nonprofit Capital Markets
• Mar 17 – Raiser’s Edge
• Apr 21 – Post NTEN Conference Wrap-up
• May 19 – Data Management, Cleansing, & Conversion

CITI is proud to have helped push some great climate initiatives forward this week. While 1sky and Earth Track are both awesome initiatives, I’ll lead with the one where you can win fabulous prizes –

1sky’s 1climate 1tweet contest is looking for your sweetest tweet on climate change to help fuel the fight for the the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act of 2009. The best tweet will adorn a 1sky t-shirt, and five finalists (including the most retweeted entries) will win prizes.

Look to EarthTrack.net for information on government subsidies for climate changing energy projects. It may seem a little wonky, but the roots of climate change are fertilized with pork. Admitting we have a problem is the first, crucial step towards change. All you have to win at this site is the planet you love.

I am so happy to be partnering with organizations doing this work, and proud of my colleagues here who’ve helped them realize their visions.

Each year on October 15th, Blog Action Day brings together the world’s bloggers to spread awareness on a single subject in a united social action. This year’s topic is Climate Change.  As a sustainable company, we’ve posted frequently on being green and green IT practices, covering ways to reduce your carbon footprint as an organization, with particular focus on improving your computer network’s efficiency.

Our CEO David Deal will be on a panel on an upcoming Green Success! event October 22nd, joining several other local businesses and organizations to discuss operating sustainably and green trends.

Some highlights from the Climate Change-focused blogosphere today:

• CITI client 1 Sky focuses on addressing climate change everyday.  You can check out their blog The Skywriter for news and information on climate change science and policy.  Just a few of their posts from Blog Action Day include the impact small businesses can have on the climate change issue, the Global Security Challenge of Climate Change and the Organizing Power of a Slogan.  To crowdsource a concise, powerful message supporting strong climate legislation, 1Sky has recently launched a Twitter campaign #1Climate, working with CITI to create a twitter tracker.  The best climate slogan will be chosen by popularity as measured by “retweets” (or RT’s).

• CITI client Sojourners, who focuses on “articulating the biblical call to social justice,” blogs about the Theology of Ecology and the need to pay attention to climate change.

• Social media and nonprofit blogger Amy Sample Ward discusses the importance of knowing your audience. If you really know them, you can find a way they can connect with any issue or event, even one that might seem peripheral to your main focus.

• Beth Kanter wishes everyone a Happy Blog Action Day 09 from her nonprofit social media blog.

• If you use an iPhone, you may be interested in TUAW’s (”The Unofficial Apple Weblog”) post on five iPhone apps to save the world.

There’s nothing earthshaking in the new Alertbox posting on social media and RSS. Still, it’s nice to see things we think we know reinforced by credible research. And reinforcement of the fundamentals is always helpful.

Here are a few of the things that caught my eye:

• This strikes me as particularly well put — “[B]usiness messages appear in a context that’s permeated by personal messages. This context sets the stage for use. Businesses that post too often crowd out the user’s real friends and become unpopular (and thus risk being unfollowed). Users listed too-frequent postings as their top annoyance with following companies and organizations on social networks.”
• I love that the BBC is the counter-example “Users prefer a more casual style for business messages on social networks than what’s appropriate for most corporate communications. At the same time, they expect RSS feeds to be more business-like and to cut the chit-chat. Also, for some services — such as the BBC — people preferred a highly professional tone, even on social networks.”
• Here’s the most fundamental fundamental of them all, and the reason why any social networking effort needs to be part of an overall organizational strategy, with support beyond a single enthusiast. — “In some cases, companies had established a presence that they didn’t bother to update. These graveyard sites gave users a very negative impression when they were looking into companies’ social features. Even more irksome were cases in which friend requests weren’t promptly answered. Start using a social networking service only if you have the budget to support reasonably frequent postings.”
• Neilsen also points out that users rarely seek out an organization on social networks — they react to the social networking opportunity being pushed to the from the organization or from friends. Because it can be frustrating to search out an organization’s presence on social networks, the links to those pages need to be easy to find on an organization’s own site.
• The average usefulness of corporate/organizational messages was low. “The messages that received the highest scores had three things in common: they contained something of substance, were timely, and provided the kind of information that users expected from the source company or organization.” One user commented that she valued social networking messages that made her feel like she was “the first to know.”

Read the rest of the summary, and if that’s not enough, the full report has 107 usability guidelines. The link is at the bottom; the full report costs $198.

Last week, Glennette Clark presented a seminar on social media, covering key social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter and how to design and implement a social media strategy.  You can find the slides from the seminar here.

Attendees expanded the discussion, generating conversation around how to engage different demographic groups using social media, such as senior citizens, and the effectiveness of social media advertising.  With anecdotal examples, many agreed that social media was better for listening to and connecting with people on a personal level and building relationships than for targeted advertisements. All agreed that being deliberate about entering the social media realm and having clear goals for what you what to accomplish through social media was key.

With Clay Shirky’s popular opening keynote on the power of online communities and social media organizing (summarized with key quotes here), and dozens of sessions on social media related topics, NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference was atwitter (with blog links and quotes in the twitterverse) with strategies and panels on integrating social media like Twitter and Facebook into effective online organizing and advocacy campaigns.

One session by John Kenyon, however, stood out by emphasizing the basics of successful online communications – the importance of eating your vegetables before you get to the dessert of playing with social media.  Based on a chapter from the NTEN book: Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission and featuring William Neuheisel of DC Central Kitchen and Jennie Anderson of AIDS.gov, this session was packed with useful tips and case studies on how to move your website and email from lackluster to inspiring.

A few takeaways:

• Use metrics (such as Google Analytics) to analyze what people are looking at on your website and what you can spend less time working on
• The 4 C’s of effective websites:
  • Credibility: You have less than 1 minute to establish your credibility as the public face of your organization.
  • Cultivation: Invite visitors to participate and join in your cause, rather than simply stating what you do. Build relationships.
  • Clickability: Clicks are interactions; how can you provide information in different ways and give people lots of opportunities to “interact?”
  • Content: Keep it real, current, and concise.
• Coordinate e-newsletter, fundraising, direct mail and website campaigns for maximum impact.
• Integrate stories and connect emotionally with your audience.

In a live-tweeted session on organizing online for positive change, Ben Rattray summed it up thus: “The killer app is the content.”  While having a sustained organizational presence on social networking sites can help build brand awareness, having an authentic, consistent message that makes a connection with potential supporters remains the key to successful non-profit campaigns.

Whether you need guidance on your website and email campaigns, or feel ready to dive into social media, CITI can help you develop an online strategy action plan to measure and increase the effectiveness of your organization’s online presence.

Four developers from CITI are attending DrupalCon this week in our home town of Washington, DC.  Just like last year when CITI sent two developers to Boston, DrupalCon is again the best place not only for brushing up and learning new skills, but also for catching up with old friends and making new ones.

As always, when we sit through various sessions, we’re not only trying to learn as much as we can about how our fellow Drupalers are using and improving Drupal, we’re also trying to look at things through the lens of the social mission organizations that we serve. Over the next three days, we’ll be posting what we find in this vein and in our own geeky interest.

1. The GeoSpatial Web and Associated Modules

A number of Drupal modules are available in and production, assisted in large part by Development Seed, for creating mapping stacks that don’t have to rely on the standard Google Map.  After Jeff Miccolis of Development Seed explained the various Drupal tech and resources available (mapnik, mapstraciton, gmap, nicemap, cloudmade, http://www.opengeospatial.org, Open data commons, open street map and NASA to name a few), neogeographer Andrew Turner led a fast-paced primer on all the applications for geographic data beyond points on Google map that developers and organizations can leverage.

We’ve done our share of Google maps, but some of the more advanced applications have us champing at the bit to start playing around.

Video should be up soon, but in the meantime presentations by Andrew Turner can be found on his slideshare.

2. The Importance of Search and Drupal Search with ApacheSolr

In a presentation on Drupal Search, Acquia representatives and others talked about search functionality as the main way for people to find content on your website.  Traditional methods like nav menus or site maps are very structured approaches that tend to fail because: a) new content will inevitably end up not fitting neatly into the categories originally created via the IA process (especially w/ web 2.0 where site visitors are supplying much of the content), and b) it’s unrealistic to assume that site visitors would categorize your content in the same way as you would.  Example: if you wanted to buy hand made paper from Amazon.com which of the main nav categories would you look under?  They suggested that a search engine like Apache Solr could be configured so that site visitors run into fewer dead ends. Acquia is also now offering Apache Solr as a hosted service!

To sum it up: search capability should be robust and front and center on the home page, and not tucked away in the top right corner as an after thought.  It’s a better way to help people find the content they want than IA is.

Video

3. Data Collection Through SMS

With the web moving towards user generated data and the pervasiveness of handset, SMS can be an amazing tool for getting information from users.  A few of us sat in on a presentation by Will White on an SMS Framework module integration with Drupal for a proof of concept political polling operation.Will explained the Drupal module and its compatibility with other modules like user groups and user notifications. A few links:

SMS Framework Documentation
Decentralized Data Collection
Parsing Data from SMS Messages

A brief Q & A afterward offered up a plethora of free SMS campaign solutions including use of Twitter as a free SMS campaign platform, as well as Frontline SMS, gnokii, and dotgo.

Video is still being uploaded… we’ll link when it’s up!

4. Great New Features Coming in Drupal 7

In a great talk on new features for users and developers (about the second half) given by Drupal Documentation lead and release manager, Angie Byron (aka webchick), we learned a lot about improvements that will make our lives (and our clients’ lives) much easier with the next release of Drupal 7.

Video

All right, I’m on twitter, if only because I was intrigued by Glennette’s tale of twittering for info at the inauguration on the fly and finding out where the bottle necks were.  And if Dan Schorr is doing it at 90..  And from all the brouhaha on the Twestival, which was big enough to make its way out into the rest of the media where I picked it up. And because McKinsey – McKinsey! – is a-twittering something they call the McKQuarterly (unintentionally (?) creating images of McKQuarterpounders to me).  A perfect storm of nonprofit marketing guilt or I suppose a lingering suspicion at my own un-hipness.  And I can add movies to Netflix from my phone? Actually, that sounds incredibly useful.

Ok, and because Scott has such an awesome username.

CITI developer Greg Lavallee did this in his spare time — use Twitter to add movies to your NetFlix queue. Never again forget the name of that movie that that guy said you had to see.