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

Like a lot of organizations, CITI probably talks more about practicing what we preach than actually doing it. So it was a pleasure to take action on our online strategy.  I sat down with our Online Strategist, Glennette Clark, a few months back and was the client for a change.  I’m sure it will resonate with many of you web managers when I let you know our website isn’t as perfect as we’d want it.  When you work on websites it seems you always see the stuff you need to fix and never the stuff that works right.  And a website – even a small one – can be such a huge project there is a real tendency to want to load up the content and let it be, despite knowing an integrated website is the best way to deliver content.  That is, a website where the content is not an after-thought but fully integrated in a marketing strategy that includes social media, press, and community, where all the parts reinforce the whole.

As a consulting firm, CITI knows our clients need to know what we do and how to get in touch with us, and our website has reflected that and not much more.  But as we advocate for our clients to do better at integrating their online presence with their long term community, fundraising, and mission goals, it has become clear that CITI needs to do a better job at that, ourselves.

Glennette’s consulting sessions started out with some standard questions and a questionnaire.  She briefed us on her obsession with measurements – explaining that even if you know where you want to go, if you don’t know how you are doing along the way then you’re going to end up somewhere else.  For every goal we thought of, Glennette challenged us to come up with a metric.  For several items, she helped us see that the metric that we were looking for wasn’t a web metric at all, and that we would have to delve into our internal sales database instead.  It was one of those exercises where you feel so righteous after the workout that you wonder why you put it off for so long.

I admit, one reason I delayed starting this project was nerves about everything we weren’t doing – either because I didn’t quite know what we needed, or just hadn’t ever got around to it.  Glennette was reassuring that everyone starts somewhere – the thing is to just start.  She didn’t assume I knew anything about analytics but didn’t baby talk it either. I’d been looking at our web stats online from time to time but not in any organized way.  It was a revelation to start pulling our web statistics into a usable report format we could share internally.

One interesting fact is the number of you who come to the CITI site searching for “online strategies” – welcome!  So you know you should be more organized in this discipline too.  After our initial meeting with Glennette we went off on our own for a month and worked on next steps from the action plan we’d created – immediate, short term, and longer term tasks to help organize our efforts.  We decided to focus initially on creating the monthly metrics report, and updating our keywords and metatags in the interim.  Next steps: social media strategies and converting the knowledge from our stats into content and findability.

If you’d like to catch up with Glennette yourself, she’ll be presenting on Wednesday the 19th at a webinar from 1-2pm:  The 10 Second Rule: Optimizing Your Website for Donations

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.

A new crop of links on ‘web 2.0′. They coming faster and faster — the discussion of how social networking and etc. fits into the big picture of organizational outreach is in full flower.

Frogloop, which is Care2’s blog, offers Why Every Nonprofit Should Embrace the Web 2.0 World.

The Washington Network Group is having an event in DC on Thursday, February 26 — ANTI-Social Media:
What Not to Do in Web 2.0.

And here’s kind of a strange one: Six ways to make Web 2.0 work from the McKinsey Quarterly. While it makes some passing reference to what it means by Web 2.0 (which is primarily a means for internal collaboration in larger business in this case), the bulk of the article is about how to engender organizational adoption of the new tool. Any new tool, really — I can’t imagine that the discussion would be much different if the new tool were say, the typewriter (text 2.0!) rather than longhand. I do hope to have time to read some of their source materials, though. Could be that the insights will be there. I’ll let you know.