Foundations and Nonprofits Explore Search Engine Optimization

The Wednesday, November 2, 2011 meeting of Public Policy Communicators NYC had members discussing search engine optimization.  Specifically, we set out to explore how some of the most innovative methods being employed by the for-profit marketing sector to bring companies’ products and services to the top of search results could be employed by nonprofits and foundations to drive traffic to our own sites.

Our discussion was lead by Daniel Murphy, the owner of Electric Orange Creative. His marketing agency provides businesses and nonprofits of varying sizes affordable online marketing campaigns. Prior to Electric Orange, Daniel was one of the first employees at YouCast Corp, one of the first social media agencies in NYC and now a division of IAC. While at YouCast he was the creative force behind marketing campaigns for Nike, Schick, Snapple, Twitter, and Kanye West.

What SEO is – and ISN’T

Search Engine Optimization is a process that increases the probability that Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines will find your site, and most importantly, push you to the top of search results.  Without optimizing search, Murphy says, you are at a disadvantage with others competing with your ideas and your cause.

SEO is not paid search, which is advertising using CPC traffic (pay-per-click) associated with Google Ad Words and other similar services.

Using an example on a keyword search on real estate in a Manhattan neighborhood, Murphy said that the two big factors involved in SEO are the “page title” and the “meta description.” When you do a Google search these are the blue underlined title text and the longer “intro” text in black appearing beneath the title. The key to good SEO, Murphy said, is to make sure that the terms your users actually search on related to your issues are the ones that appear in your page titles and meta data (which is usually determined by the opening paragraph of your intro text, but can be altered).

He noted that search engines don’t see pictures, they only see the code behind the visuals.  So making sure your code has the right terms is essential.

While our discussion would focus on what we could do on our own sites to maximize SEO, he said there were other factors involved in the algorithms search engines use to rank results that are weighted even more heavily. Those are the number of links to the given page or to your site and the “credibility” of those sites.  So links from NYTimes.com, CNN.com and blogs with actual traffic and high domain authority will have a big impact on your SEO. That was a good reminder that story placement and traditional media relations are important aspects of creating good search results. (We spent probably more time than we should have talking about “follow” v. “nofollow” links. Only high traffic sites like NYTimes.com use nofollow links, but it may be worth your time, if one of their articles links to your organization to have the link be a “follow” link, which will improve your SEO.)

Still, doing all you can do with SEO on your own site is important because 77 percent of users choose organic over paid listings when they search. He said 42 percent of users click the top-ranking link, only 8 percent click the second link and click rates diminish further and further on down the list.

Most of Murphy’s advice presumes that the foundation or nonprofit is maintaining a blog on their site. His advice primarily centers on what communicators can do when crafting new articles to use the right words and coding to ensure that they have maximal SEO capacity.

Getting started with SEO: Keyword research is the key.

To truly understand how people search on the concepts associated with your cause and your issues, it helps to do some simple research. This is what you should do:

1. In your own mind, boil down your article topic to its essence – just a few key words. These are the words with which you will start your research.
2. Start a keyword “glossary.”  This is just so you have a record of your research for future reference, since you will probably want to use certain terms that seem like good prospects many times in the future.  Just create a table (can be in Excel or Google Docs or whatever spreadsheet program you like), and create column headings for “Keywords,” “Competition,” “Global Monthly Searches,” “Local Monthly Searches” and “Comments.”
3. Start your keyword research.  Go to Google Adwords’ keyword tool. Enter in the “Word or phrase” box the key words your article is about and hit “search.” Or, if you are wanting to refine the title and/or metadata for an already existing post on your site, paste the URL into the “website” box and hit “search.” This will bring up a long list of terms associated with your search criteria. This process can also be used when pulling search terms from your competitors’ sites, you simply enter the URL that is similar to your top and hit “search.”
4. Determine which keywords have both high search volume AND low competition. The terms from the search returns you should be most interested in, says Murphy, are those that have “low” competition and high numbers of global monthly searches. (Murphy also noted the term “Longtail Keywords,” which is commonly used to describe these terms.) For those terms that have those indications, click the box on the right for each one and then use the “download” box at the top of the table to download a CSV for Excel file, then just open that up and copy and paste the information into your Glossary for safe keeping and future reference.
5. Put those keywords into practice. Once you have done your keyword search, you not only have a better sense of what are the terms that people search on but also which have relatively little completion in terms of other sites that use those terms. Rework your article title and/or metadata/opening paragraph to give prominence to those terms.

Note: Dan Murphy’s presentation contains online demonstrations of how he did this for one of our member organizations, GrowNYC. Watching the demonstration is highly recommended.  You can view it here: http://electricorangecreative.com/november-presentation/

Some other pieces of advice from Murphy on SEO contained both in his presentation to the group and in the PowerPoint presentation video demonstrations:

- Title your photos. Double click on the photo in your blog editing software and bring up the photo information. Just add relevant keywords to the photo title and alternative “alt” description sections.

- Add links within your article to other articles on your site covering the same topic. This will improve your link numbers for the search algorithms. But try not to put too many links in your article, because the algorithms don’t like articles with too many links in them.

- If possible download the “All in one SEO pack” plugin for your blog. This plugin is for WordPress, but there are similar plugins for Drupal, Joomla, and other CMS. If you’re using the up-to-date version of WordPress to blog, this is essentially a “redu” of the insertion of keyword information you already put in your title and your intro paragraph.

- Make use of social networks. Your articles posted in Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites all help boost your article’s search engine optimization – as do the reTweets, “shares,” “likes,” etc. In your social networking efforts with links to your articles, you should be using the same keywords that you identify in your keyword research as much as possible in your messages.

The questions asked by participants at the lunch meeting mostly centered on individual organizations’ possible keywords and how those would be integrated into titles and opening paragraphs without debasing the enticing language that draws in readers who come from other avenues than search engines. Murphy said that it is an art form that must be practiced, but that good keywords should be contained in your title and opening paragraphs regardless. “Writing good content with the right keywords is the most important aspect of SEO,” he concluded.

He also said that the SEOMOZ blog is a great place for more information on search engine optimization.

Daniel Murphy can be reached at dan@electricorangecreative.com if you are interested in inquiring about Electric Orange services, or have any further questions.

Lunch Series Session on Search Engine Optimization

It’s time for the first Public Policy Communicators NYC meeting of autumn and we’ve got it scheduled for Wednesday, November 2, 2011. Take off your Halloween costume and come see what tricks and treats we have for you on the topic of search engine optimization.

“Are you doing all you can with SEO?”

Communicators have been talking about the practice of search engine optimization (SEO) for nearly a decade now.  And yet to many of us, it seems like a murky, mysterious or even meaningless set of activities.  When we read The New York Times article “Web Words That Lure the Readers” about some of the rather questionable tactics employed by the Huffington Post, it got us wondering if there were some creative practices in this domain that nonprofits and foundations could be using to draw larger audiences to the content on their sites.

And so we got ourselves an expert to clue us in to the most effective SEO methods:

Daniel Murphy is the owner of Electric Orange Creative, a boutique marketing agency launched in 2008. Electric Orange provides businesses and nonprofits of varying sizes affordable online marketing campaigns. Prior to Electric Orange, Daniel was one of the first employees at YouCast Corp, one of the first social media agencies in NYC and now a division of IAC. While at YouCast he was the creative force behind marketing campaigns for Nike, Schick, Snapple, Twitter, and Kanye West. Daniel graduated with a degree in Media Studies from Hunter College.

And here are the specifics on the next PPC-NYC meeting:

What:              Brown-bag lunch (that means bring your own lunch!)

When:            Wednesday, November 2, 2011; 12:00 – 2:00 p.m. (informal networking from 12:00-12:30, program begins at 12:30)

Topic:             Search Engine Optimization. Electric Orange Creative’s Daniel Murphy will lead our group discussion.

RSVP:           WE ARE CURRENTLY RUNNING A WAIT LIST.  If you would like to be put on that wait list or be included in future invitations, send an email to mremaley [at] ppcnyc [dot] org

by Michael Remaley, HAMILL REMALEY breakthrough communications & Public Policy Communicators – NYC

Among the many important and practical ideas that have stayed with me since last week’s Communications Network conference in Boston, perhaps the most penetrating has been one advanced by Eli Pariser in the first plenary. He spoke stirringly about a range of issues revolving around the themes of his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You.  The idea that really struck me was the connection he made between the mutating corporations controlling information and the great food-industrial complex that has had such an immense impact on our lives over the past 60 years.

My friend and colleague Lucas Held also talked about how this idea hit home for him at the conference. Over the past week, as I’ve clicked “like” several times and chosen which stories I wanted to read online, I’ve done so with Eli’s voice in the back of my head.

Pariser’s food/information corollary is brilliant. The comparison of the food industry and the companies controlling our information intake provides an exceedingly useful means of examining the existential conundrums we face in our daily information consumption.

As a hardcore fitness freak, I must admit that I have been condescending and judgmental toward those who are overweight. Even though I know that there are many elements of our system and policies that conspire against those who are overweight – food policy that makes sugars and grains cheap, transportation policies that keep people in cars, family histories that induce unhealthy diets and sedentary living – I still tend to blame individuals for their poor choices.

We now face a similar set of issues and questions around information intake and how we exercise our roles as engaged citizens. If the links you see and the results of your searches are basically the product of your previous explorations, do we have anyone but ourselves to blame for the quality of the information that these companies present us?

The PR flacks of the food industrial complex have for years told us that they simply produce the products that consumers want. But we’ve come to realize that what they have been selling us for more than half a century is not what our bodies need but what provides instant gratification and maximum profit for the companies. Pariser has performed an Upton Sinclair-like service by illuminating the fact that Facebook, Google, Amazon and the other powers of the Algorithm-Industrial-Complex are in a similar position to impact our lives.

In the past week, I’ve been clicking on more political postings, “like”-ing negative stories that I want more people to read and trying to spend less time online looking at items that are merely entertaining. Still, just as with the food industry, I know that my own healthy choices may have little impact on the rest of the world. So the question is, how can we create a system that encourages healthy information consumption and the exercise of active citizenship without limiting or otherwise “censoring” people’s access to LOLcats, TMZ and Ashton Kutcher’s Twitter feed.

I’ve been giving it a lot of thought since I heard Pariser’s message, but I still can’t offer any viable solutions. I suppose the first thing to do, just like the healthy eating/exercise problem, is raise awareness. But looking at our nation’s success in that realm, I’m skeptical of our ability to make progress through awareness alone. Perhaps we need to get the successful anti-smoking campaign people on this issue. I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on this.

On Wednesday, July 27, Public Policy Communicators NYC members met to focus on the topic “Making the Most of Google Analytics.”  The session was billed as an opportunity to go beyond the basic mechanics of using this essential tool to how communicators can utilize its functions to better understand target audiences and the messages that appeal to them.  We definitely went beyond Analytics 101 to the next stage of learning, and many came away saying they had lots of new information with which to experiment.

Our discussion leader Greg Olson, an AdWords account manager at Google, working out of the Cambridge office and a member of the Google Analytics specialist team that trains and supports this office, was joined by Jai Sen, a digital media strategy consultant who has worked with several PPC-NYC members in developing their online strategies, to extend the scope of the conversation.

Olson started with a brief overview to make sure we were all on the same page.  In a show of hands, almost all in the room were using Google Analytics already, almost everyone in the room raised their hands to indicate that they were doing the analytics themselves (as opposed to being fed reports by I.T. staff), but only a small number had gone beyond the basic reports of number of page views for each URL on their site.

He said the Google Analytics platform can be used to:

-       Measure the engagement of users on the site

-       Make marketing campaigns more effective and accountable

-       Help determine if the content you’re creating is effective

-       Develop better awareness of when and why visitors are entering and leaving your site

-       Use Google Analytics to compare response to different versions of content, for example sending two different versions of an email and measuring which one got a better response

-       Improve audience interaction with your organization on the site

He started by encouraging nonprofits and foundations to take a step back and focus first on their organizations’ objectives and really question how the website is supposed to support the mission of the organization.  He used the example of PPC member Connecticut Health Foundation, which has the mission of improving the health status of everyone in the state by focusing on children’s mental health, health policy and advocacy, oral health and racial and ethnic health disparities.  CT Health Foundation’s Jenn Whinnem added that their primary audiences are grant seekers and health policy professionals in the state who work on those issues.  She said that her organization was happy with the numbers of grant seekers coming to the site and the information they were accessing, but wanted to bring more policy information seekers to the site and extend their time on site.  Olson said that there were many tools associated with Google Analytics that could help in better understanding how they are doing in reaching that objective and how effective the organization’s communications are in contributing to it.

Sen agreed with Olson’s point that the most important thing to do is make sure there is a clear discussion of overall communications strategy in order to get to a good plan for measurement. Strategy and measurement should function as a loop, with measurement leading to optimization and vice versa. An analytics snapshot can give an organization a sense of what users are actually consuming, providing insight into where the focus should be on content creation.

Olson said that an important step in that process is to really set key performance indicators for the organization’s objectives. Organizations should ask themselves what would be an actual measure of success.  For example with CT Health Foundation, what is the size and scope of the health policy professional community and what numbers or types of those coming to the site would constitute progress? And, since the organization is already happy with the number of grant applicants, the focus of the Google Analytics work would focus on URLs that were NOT associated with the  /grants/how-to-apply/ subdirectory where grant application information resides.

The next thing to do, Olson said, was to set defined targets, within a concrete timeframe, for example “to increase page views from ‘information seeker’ visits by X% in the third quarter of this year.” Once your organization has gained clarity about the types and number of visitors you aim to bring to your site and what you want them to do there, you can much better utilize Google Analytics to guide your work.

There are four basic categories of questions about visitors and related analytics measures to apply, he said. They are:

1. Where do they come from? — Traffic sources
2. Where do they spend their time? — Content reports
3. Are they taking the right actions? — Goal tracking
4. Is visitor behavior changing? — Alerts and intelligence

Olson showed two different reports that spoke to the “where do they come from?” question. The first showed an “All Traffic” report, the one which most of those just getting started with Google Analytics are familiar. This report shows the sources from which visitors came to a given page on your site. In the example shown, the most number of visitors came to a home page from Google, from a specific blog, from YouTube and direct (no referral – visitors may have typed URL or had it bookmarked, etc.). The “All Traffic” report gives you a sense of how visitors come to your site and, said Olson, may alert you to sources you may not have known about. For example, maybe a particular blogger has written about your work, which produced many visits. Perhaps that blogger should receive more attention from your organization and might be a good partner in communications. The second report he showed provided a different take on “where do they come from?” and might be less familiar to Analytics users. It is the “Location” report. The report Olson showed displayed a map of the United States with the states color-coded by number of visitors to the site. He said this report can be drilled down to the city level, or you can enlarge it to the international level. He said the location report can be especially useful in understanding where the people are who are really interested in what you have to say. You might find, for example, that an unusually large number of visitors are located in an unexpected small corner of the state, which might prompt some important questions about why that is.

Olson and the group next spent a good chunk of time exploring a tool called the Google Analytics URL Builder.  This is a tool that you can use to get a better handle on how effective certain planned communications mechanisms are in driving people to your site and – importantly and different from other tools – how they proceed through the site once there. The URL builder works by adding additional data (called a “query string”) to the end of a normal link that is tracked specially by Google Analytics. He showed how you can use the tool to create a specific URL, say for an eNewsletter, to see if that communication tool gets people to click on a particular story and then moves them toward donating, clicking a link to contact a congressmen, reading other reports or whatever actions you would ideally like your visitors to take. The URL created through the URL Builder allows the Google Analytics system to track how many visitors come to the site through specific links and associate those visitors with all of the other types of information reports.

He then moved on to the topic of “Where do they spend their time?” and content reports.  He showed an Analytics report of a landing page that displayed for each source (what previous site the visitor came from) the number of visits, the number of bounces and the bounce rate (see here for a discussion of bounce rate versus exit rate). This report helps you better understand what sources tend to bring you visitors that immediately leave the site or proceed through to take the actions you desire. Because this report also shows the bounce rate over a period that you specify, you can better understand if certain communications you sent out produced visits that resulted in immediate bounces or longer stays with concrete actions on the site. Sen and Olson were careful to mention that, for specific types of pages, a high bounce rate is not necessarily a bad thing—some sites, for example, surface essential content on the home page, so if the user enters and leaves on that page, it does not necessarily mean that the page was not “successful.” The time the user spends on a single page, however, cannot be measured by Google Analytics (which calculates the time spent on a page by the next click on that page), so the “time on page” metric is complicated by a high bounce rate.

Next, Olson looked at a report that could be immensely helpful in answering, “Where are they spending their time?” For a given page on the site (say, a blog post), the report displayed the total number of page views, unique page views, average time on the page, bounce rate and exit rate. It also displayed the page views over a given period and the bounce rate for various sources from which the visitors came. He then showed a different way of answering the “Where are they spending their time?” question with an Analytics report on search terms.  This report showed what visitors are looking for on the site. It showed the total number of searches, the percentage of times visitors had to refine their search, the time they spent on the site after the search, and the depth of their action after the search.  The report also shows the top search terms, the number of times those terms were searched, the percentage of those who left the site immediately after the search, etc. Olson noted that the site’s search mechanism does not have to be Google-based to be able to do run this analysis.

To get at the question “Are they taking the right actions?” Olson strongly encouraged users to take advantage of the “Goals” function in Google Analytics. A “goal” is a website page that serves as conversions for your site. Some examples of good conversion goals are:

• A ‘thank you’ page after a user has submitted information through a form. This can track newsletter signups, donation receipts, email list subscriptions, job application forms, or contact forms.
• An ‘About us’ page
• A particular report, press release, news article or blog post.
• A page that leads visitor to a “contact your congressman” function

(With some extra code, goals can even be file downloads or on-page actions).

Using the goals function allows you to track how far visitors move toward the actions you want them to take on your site – and let’s you know a lot about the characteristics of those visitors in terms of where they came from, how they proceeded through the site, etc.  Goals do not need to be static, in fact, they should change over time.

He then showed an example of a Goal Overview Report that displayed the goal conversions over a given period, the total number of goal conversions, the value of those conversions (for example the total dollar value of tickets sold or donations made), the goal conversion rate and the abandonment rate.  This report also showed the top sources from which visitors came and the total conversions and conversion rates for each.

Olson then moved to the question of “How do I identify traffic trends on my site?” He showed a “Daily Events” report. Event tracking is a relatively new (2009) function in Google Analytics.  Any significant marketing event should be tracked so you can identify correlating traffic trends. You might do this with, say, a new press release, a newly launched campaign, the beginning of utilizing online advertising, an important eNewsletter or a major capital campaign. You may have these dates noted elsewhere, but Google Analytics annotations makes it quick and easy to see how communications events overlap trends in your site metrics. You can even create annotations of key external condition. For example, a major debate in the media about your issue or a disaster in your service area. These external events could be just as important to explaining trends over time as your own marketing and web efforts.

In summarizing, Olson said that making all of these tools useful hinges upon proper tracking, advanced segmentation and micro-conversions.  He showed the “advanced segments” tab in Google Analytics and talked briefly about the choices you can make to designate key groups and what you want them to do, which can be a big help in better understanding how those groups are using your site.

A discussion of filters followed. It was noted that you might want, for example, to look at site traffic without employees’ usage of the site.  This is best accomplished using the filter feature. Click this link to learn more about using filters in Google Analytics. Olson also briefly touched on the difference between filters and advanced segments in Google Analytics. Advanced Segments provides a way for historical data to be grouped by your criteria to investigate differences between groups. Filters in Google Analytics, on the other hand, provide a way to process the raw data coming into your account before you even see it. This can be used to look at site traffic without employees’ usage. Filters are applied at the profile level. The data cannot be re-processed, and any information filtered out in this way cannot be recovered, and so it is important to maintain one unfiltered ‘master’ profile for your site.

You can also use Google analytics to better understand what types of platform users are accessing your site and what they’re doing on it. For example, are people who come to the site through iPhones and Blackberry phones exiting the site immediately because they have a hard time viewing it? Click on this link to learn more about what can be learned about various mobile platforms through Google Analytics.

Sen pointed out that Google Analytics is the best analytics tool out there and recommends it to all clients. However, because of the way it works, it does have one important limitation that he wanted the group to be aware of. Because Google Analytics tracking code is contained in web pages, it does not track downloads of files, for example PDFs. Properly configured, it can track clicks to download links or buttons, but often PDFs are linked from outside sites, and Google Analytics would not capture this data. Sen recommends using Google Analytics in tandem with a logs analysis tool (such as Webalizer or AWStats) that analyze the server’s record of downloads. Sen and Olson cautioned that logs analysis tools yield much less accurate metrics on all other data (like vista, visitors, and page views), so Google Analytics is the better tool for all metrics other than downloads.

Lastly, Olson made several recommendations for links to more information on various aspects of Google Analytics usage.  These included:

• Google Analytics main page: www.google.com/analytics
• Google Analytics blog: www.analytics.blogspot.com
• Google Conversion University: http://www.google.com/support/conversionuniversity/
• Google Analytics in 60 Seconds: YouTube video series with 60-second videos focusing on different applications of Google Analytics. http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=85CE2D27BC6FD84B

For me, one key take-away from the session was that getting your organization deeper into analytics can be a very productive way of clarifying what exactly you want your target audiences to do on your site and how your site should really function to move those visitors to specific actions that support your organizational mission.  In the past, many of us have just settled for basic numbers about how many site visitors we had and couldn’t really, or didn’t bother to, ask fundamental questions about how our constituencies were actually using the site.  Optimal utilization of Google Analytics will force your organization to confront challenging questions about what its priorities are for how visitors should move through the site and what should be the end result.

The March 2011 meeting of Public Policy Communicators NYC focused on Website Impact Without Redesign – What are some of the most important functional elements you need to have on your website to drive traffic and increase audience interaction, but that don’t require an expensive, all-consuming site make-over?

Jai Sen led our discussion.  He is a digital communications consultant with deep experience in interactive media, website and application development, and user experience design. He has led a wide variety of projects in the commercial and nonprofit sectors, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation site redesign, and has most recently been an integral part of the team that relaunched the Atlantic Philanthropies website. He is currently working on the digital presence for the D5 coalition, an organization formed by grantmakers promoting diversity and inclusion in philanthropy.

Add-ons Not a Substitute for Design

Sen began by differentiating the elements we would be talking about from an actual redesign, saying that a redesign constitutes a total re-think of how you present and structure information online, it is usually time-consuming and budget-intensive and it addresses goals larger than simply driving traffic and increasing user interaction.

I have to admit that I thought the assembled participants would largely comprise communicators who simply didn’t have the money to do a redesign and were looking for some low-cost methods of sprucing sites up a bit.  But when Sen polled the room to ask how many had recently or were currently involved in total redesign, almost all hands went up.  So clearly folks interested in this topic aren’t looking to avoid a redesign, but are really looking for the latest tools and extra functionality to build upon existing sites.

Three Ways to Add Impact

Sen next listed three categories of add-ons that he would be helping the group to explore:

1. “Basics” that build on content already on a site or assets (like images) owned by an organization but not in use
2. Functional elements that can be “embedded” from outside sources
3. Plug-ins and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, a way of bringing outside sites’ feature sets into one’s own site)

Before getting into the first area of add-ons, Sen made the case that it is important for nonprofits and foundations to have a clear understanding of who is currently coming to the site, what they are coming for and what types of elements appeal to them.  He strongly advocated using Google Analytics and other measurement tools available on Facebook and YouTube to get a snapshot of existing traffic and an accurate starting point to build your add-on plans and then to measure the results of your experiments in adding functionality.

In the “Basics” area, Sen focused on blog functionality, which he made clear is not necessarily about producing lots of editorial content, but really about serialized and timely presentation of content of many varieties. He said the blog function is “easy publishing with lots of impact.” Serialized publishing (blogs functions) are easily installed at little cost. They also vastly improve organizations’ abilities to optimize social networking capacity. Any timely content can be presented in blog format, from events to news, and users are familiar and comfortable with it.

Sen showed an example of the Japan Society, whose home page appears to be based on a serial publishing (blog) function.  He noted how the page, despite its unusually large number of navigation options, appears visually dynamic and always fresh.  He said it also nicely demonstrates the next area of “basics” that he intended to discuss: adding lots of big-impact pictures.

While he didn’t put forth the platitude that a picture tells a thousand words, he certainly demonstrated that this is an eternal truth as he showed examples of the Robert Wood Johnson home page that makes good use of pictures that show the implications of its work to help draw in visitors and navigate the vast array of information on the site. Sen discussed how the Robert Wood Johnson redesign project was about moving from a text-heavy, dry look and feel to one that made the foundation’s work and mission immediately clear and apparent through the use of compelling photos of the organization’s work.

Sen says that images are easy to manage and insert into online content and instantly enhance the “reading” experience.  You can use free services like Flickr and Picassa to host images, but such services can provide many other tools that he would discuss later. He then showed a screen shot of the Rainforest Alliance home page, which, like the Robert Wood Johnson site, makes good use of high-impact photos to make the experience of using the site not only more appealing, but also easier to relate to. Audience members added from their own experience that you can obtain images through your own work or through sites like iStockPhoto and Creative Commons licenses. Sen commented that Creative Commons licenses (which allow anyone to use copyrighted material, as long ans the owner or creator of the material is acknowledged) can be a great way to raise awareness about your organization and even drive traffic. Just make sure that you do indeed get permission to use any image you use on your site and clearly indicate ownership of images you put online by using a copyright notice or Creative Commons statement.

Sen moved next to the category of “embeddables.” Among the most common and essential for nonprofits and foundations are “social shares” that create easy links to Facebook, Twitter and other social media, and allow users to easily share your content through those mechanisms.  He said these embeddables are very easy to add to a site and are really just image links.  He showed an example on The Atlantic Philanthropies site that has prominent embedded social media icons and talked about some of the successes that organization has had with them.

The next type of “embeddable” he discussed was video.  He made the case that using a service like YouTube or Vimeo is better than hosting video on your site for a number of reasons, mostly because you don’t have to worry about hosting considerations like bandwidth since the videos are housed on (and streamed from) the outside service. Audience members raised questions about whether YouTube or Vimeo is preferable. Sen has recommended YouTube to most of his clients because it allows you to customize the video playing page to look like your own branded site and has more users that may find your organization through keyword searches.  Still, he said, Vimeo is a good option that many nonprofits are finding useful.  Either is very easy to incorporate into your organization’s site.  They also allow for statistical analysis of traffic and easy sharing.

Slide shows are also increasingly popular and easy-to-deploy tools that lots of nonprofits are using.  And, users are much more likely to click on a link to a slide show than to view a video.  Sen said that Flickr and PictoBrowser provide two excellent, easily embeddable tools to create and display slide shows.  The shows can be simple pictures with captions, or they can be created with timed advancement and voiceover and music. It just depends on how much time and effort you want to put in.

He showed another example from The Atlantic Philanthropies site where a slideshow was seamlessly integrated into the site.  He also showed an example of a YouTube video embedded on The Atlantic Philanthropies website, which uses YouTube to house all its video. He said that, because Atlantic used YouTube to host the video and had tagged the video with lots of keywords, it had driven traffic to the organization’s website, thanks to YouTube’s large user base.

There are other embeddables that allow organizations to give site visitors audio and podcasts.  The group talked a bit about embeddables that allow a site to display publications in a magazine format with flipping pages and stunning graphics.  One of the best, and easiest to use formats for doing that is Issuu. Like YouTube, Issuu hosts the publication and can drive more users to your site when people search its site on keywords.

Sen then moved our discussion into the third category of add-on: Plug-ins and APIs.  Many are familiar with APIs like Twitter feeds that show up-to-the-second display of how your organization or key topics are being discussed on Twitter. Also in the API category are Facebook Connect features like showing on your site Facebook members who have “liked” your organization so that viewers can see their friends that also follow you on Facebook, or allowing visitors to sign in to your site with their Facebook logins.

The group spent a generous amount of time talking the many great attributes of Google Maps and the related APIs that nonprofits and foundations can use with it to display information in geographic form – for example showing where projects are located, the reach of an organization’s membership, or the prevalence of certain social conditions.

Sen also touched upon the Google Charts API, which generates charts and graphs instantly and can be used to dynamically display data.

He said the main plug-in features nonprofits and foundations should be aware of are those that facilitate community and social features for popular content management systems like Drupal and WordPress, two platforms that are extremely popular with foundations and nonprofits.

As is nearly always the case with PPC, the conversation continued on past the conversation leader’s presentation and brought up specific challenges and questions from assembled members.  A good deal of the conversation looped back to the idea of doing good analytics to know what your audience uses and likes and providing more of it.  Sen said, “you want to give the audience more of what they want, make it useful, accessible and shareable.”

Sen’s presentation is available online in pdf format at: www.sen-associates.com/ppc

Additionally, The Communications Network’s Bruce Trachtenberg later shared this very helpful and extensive list of “57 Things You Can Do Right Now to Improve Your Website” http://www.dhcommunications.com/2011/03/57-things-you-can-do-right-now-to-improve-your-website/ Check it out.  It has lots of great ideas.

Website Impact Without Redesign – How can you introduce functional elements that drive traffic to your website and increase audience interaction  without an expensive, time-consuming redesign?

We’ll be going beyond obvious enhancements like video, links to social media presences and recordings of webinars, and think creatively about functionality that enhances the unique mission of each of our organizations.

We have a great discussion leader who will help kick our thinking into high gear:

Jai Sen is a digital communications consultant with deep experience in interactive media, website and application development, and user experience design. He has led a wide variety of projects in the commercial and nonprofit sectors, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation site redesign, and has most recently been an integral part of the team that relaunched the Atlantic Philanthropies website. He is currently working on the digital presence for the D5 coalition, an organization formed by grantmakers promoting diversity in philanthropy.

Here are the specifics on the next PPC-NYC meeting:

What:  Brown-bag lunch (that means bring your own lunch!)

When:  Wednesday, March 23, 2011; 12:00 – 2:00 p.m. (informal networking from 12:00-12:30, program begins at 12:30)

Where:  Ford Foundation, 320 East 43^rd Street (between 1^st & 2^nd Ave), New York, NY

Topic:  Website Impact Without Redesign. Jai Sen will lead our group discussion.

RSVP:  Space is limited and our last several sessions had waiting lists, so please let me know that you are coming by emailing me at mremaley [at] ppcnyc [dot] org

The communications world has changed tremendously over the past five years.  There’s no arguing that.  But just how many ways has it changed for those of us in cause communications?  Social media, the evolving newspaper industry, “net neutrality” issues, personalized technology and mobile devices everywhere are just a few innovations and developments that come to mind.

Fenton Communication’s Chief Strategy Officer Lisa Witter has attempted to make sense of it all and delineate the major trends in a presentation titled “The New Normal: 12 Driving Forces in Communications.”

She has delivered this outline recently to groups such as the Skoll World Forum, the Conference Board, the National Association of Social Work Deans and Directors and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and most recently she spoke to a large group of communications professionals at a gathering at Philanthropy New York.

While her presentation and its core concepts were developed for purposes unrelated to the Communications Network annual conference, it is quite a nice quirk of timeliness that her 12 Driving Forces are being disseminated just before our annual meeting that starts on Wednesday

Many of these 12 forces, plus those on other people’s lists, will surely be discussed, dissected and debated at the conference.

The 12 Driving Forces Witter talked about had been identified through a scenario planning process lead by former MoveOn.org executive director Eli Pariser that drilled down on the question: “What is the future of media and how should cause communicators be preparing for the challenges and seizing the opportunities they present?” While the ideas she is presenting to audiences across the country come out of a learning process that occurred in Fall 2009, Witter is still refining and reorganizing the main points as the media world continues to see major shifts in short periods of time.

These are the most recent formulations of her 12 Driving Forces:

1. Mobile: Internet Everywhere
2. Globalized Net
3. Information Overload and Curation
4. Personalization and Filtering
5. Broadcast to Bi/Multi-Directional
6. The end of journalism?
7. Fragmentation by Affiliation
8. Convergence
9. Micro-Targeting and ROI Advertising
10. Transparency as a Value
11. Feedback is Instant
12. Authenticity/Voice/Uniqueness as a Value

As with many macro-level analyses, the areas of exploration here are not news to anyone who closely follows communications issues. Rather, it is the thoughtful explanation of how things are changing and what are the implications for practitioners around each of these driving forces that really has salience.  For example, it is not enough to know that consumers are using technological filters more and more to help manage the information coming at them. You have to know what filters they are using, how they work and how to design your communications to rise to the top. And it’s not enough to know that citizens are expecting greater transparency from all institutions, but exactly what that means for any foundation or nonprofit is different and requires a process of real soul searching delving into practical implications.  Witter’s presentation was a great prompt for my thinking on these topics.

I want to share with you what Witter says all this means for “cause communicators.” I will be keeping these implications in mind as I discuss communications trends with my colleagues in LA later this week.  She says that, while good storytelling will continue to be essential, how and where those stories are told and how they are passed along will change.  She says that to take advantage of the media evolution, you’ll need to develop these three new core competencies:

Content: Cause communicators must become their own media by creating original content that moves by being timely, emotion-driven and targeted.  Broadcast on multiple media platforms where you can engage audiences directly. Be part of the conversation by sharing and “remixing” content by others.

Calculate: Take advantage of digital metrics and the social web to “listen” online to who’s talking about your issues and how they’re talking about them.  Develop campaigns that join these conversations.  Take risks, experiment and refine.  Nurturing a culture of failure can lead to the best ideas.

Community: The media evolution has made it easier for people with the same passions to connect with each other.  Your role is to help them find each other and mobilize a community around your cause. This means putting your supporters, not your organization, at the center of your communications.  Catalyze ideas and encourage others to crowd-source and use their own creativity and networks to spread the word.

This is sage advice that communications professionals should take to heart and use to help their organizations navigate the new landscape. The 12 Driving Forces Witter has identified are important ones that we should all be thinking about as we evolve in our own communications work.  It’s rough terrain out there.  Better have as accurate a map as possible.

The September 2010 meeting of Public Policy Communicators NYC focused on “Communications Integration.” We examined what are some of the best methods and technologies to coordinate communications efforts so that work flow and content for websites, e-newsletters and social media are seamless and but not repetitive.  We had thoughtful presentations from systems experts representing Convio, Blackbaud and Network for Good, on streamlining marketing and communications efforts, which was followed by 45 minutes of Q&A that brought forth many great inquiries from PPC attendees.

In preparing for the session, we had asked each of the presenters to cover the same basic territory but from their own perspectives.  We asked them to:

-       Define the key terms that are often thrown around (i.e. CRM)
-       Talk generally about the range of options that are out there for bringing more efficiency and effectiveness to communications efforts (not just “donate now” functions, but online community building, functions that assist in advocacy and guide constituencies to action, ticketing/events management online, etc.)
-       Talk about how new technologies and services can help organizations better coordinate their social networking efforts and help save time
-       Quickly note the services their companies offer that can help get the job done

First up, Blackbaud’s Brooks Matthews and his colleague Jeff O’Toole.
(Contact Brooks at: 843.343.9442 or brooks.matthews@blackbaud.com)

The Blackbuad team emphasized something they called “TrueCRM” v. basic CRM.  There are lots of Customer Relationship Management systems out there, but TrueCRM is a system like Blackbaud’s that provides real-time data flow between your organization’s website and your CRM system so that there are seamless connections that thread your online information exchanges, email marketing, web content management and web strategy. This kind of “TrueCRM” system should ideally also be woven together with the organization’s utilization of data analytics, fundraising, relationship cultivation, membership development, events management, donor cultivation, advocacy and direct mail.

From Blackbaud’s perspective, there are 5 Key Components of Effective Communications:

1. Integrating online and offline communications systems
2. Learning about your supporters’ communications preferences
3. Targeting and personalizing all communications
4. Reporting on communications outcomes, which is key to determining future strategy
5. Diversifying communications methods.

Many organizations have their information in separate silos, Matthews said, and this is a big challenge for them.  In talking about the first point, O’Toole showed a screen-shot of a Blackbaud client’s database interface.  It showed over a dozen tabs that allowed the user to slice and dice data about an individual’s interactions with the nonprofit.  These tabs included: bio, addresses, salutations/affiliations (etc.), relationships, appeals, notes, gifts, attributes, media, actions, honor/memorial, prospect and NetCommunity. As O’Toole talked about a typical communicator’s needs around information integration, he showed how the system allowed the user to see in real-time exactly what kind of information the individual had received, how they had responded to the information (if at all) and how the individual was interacting with the organization through a variety of media.

As Blackbaud proceeded through its presentation, they showed how their system could be used to personalize messages to targeted audiences and to develop a better understanding of how messages are received.  They emphasized the importance of having a system that allows the organization to easily create reports on data flow and constituent response – not just whether or not certain pieces of communications had moved individuals to make donations, but whether or not they had shared information with others or taken other actions that are important to organizations trying to spread their messages beyond their established constituencies.  They finished their presentation with a short discussion of how their system could be used to track and utilize information about the organization’s social network viewers on sites like Facebook and YouTube.

Next up, Convio’s Christian Varano.
(Contact Christian at: 570.573.4659 or cvarano@convio.com)

In Convio’s presentation Christian first talked about how most organizations maintain several systems for tracking information, but which aren’t integrated.  These include a basic CRM or other donor management database, a direct mail database, a CMS system for managing website information, an email point tool, separate online fundraising tools, a system for managing an online store, an ERP/Finance/GL system, and an events tool.  An integrated system, such as one that could be provided by Convio, can tie all of those systems together to help build relationships and drive response rates higher. An integrated communications system recognizes key linkages with fundraising and other functions. It helps the organizations segment by demographics, by issue or by other chosen variables. And this ability to easily manage data is key to crafting and sending communications messages that build relationships.

One Convio slide showed a quote that many nonprofits may have heard on more than one occasion: “I only hear from them when they want money,” said the annoyed donor.  Convio’s presentation emphasized that an integrated communications system pulls information from online marketing elements (such as online fundraising, advocacy, e-commerce, peer-to-peer networks and special events) as well as offline marketing elements (such as campaigns, traditional fundraising, volunteer management, contact management and events) to form a fuller picture that can be viewed from many angles, as well as from either 1,000 feet up or the microscopic level.

Varano said that most clients come to Convio with a scattered set of existing systems that have grown up as technology evolved. He said Convio strives to create “holistic platform” solutions that help organizations personalize communications and establish ongoing dialogue with constituencies. These platforms also help organizations avoid spamming their audiences, which is the frequent result of messages coming out of an organization’s many communications silos.

He finished by noting that Convio’s platforms are based on open technology systems, which is important in a technology environment where the popular modes of communications are always changing.  Facebook, Twitter and YouTube may be popular today, he said, but who knows how folks will be communicating in the future and Convio’s open systems will allow for greater flexibility and change in the future.

Our third presenter was Network for Good’s Rebecca Higman
(Contact Rebecca at: 240.223.2648 or rebecca.higman@networkforgood.org)

Rebecca started by noting that Network for Good has a particularly rich understanding of the needs of nonprofits because it is one itself.  She then moved to the core of her presentation that emphasized that the point of communications integration is not to play with fancy software, but to bring greater efficiency AND effectiveness to one’s efforts.  She said that there are lots of new ways to communicate that some might not even know are options that can be integrated, such as tell-a-friend tools, share links (through social media) and online tools for tracking, reporting, “receipting,” donation pages, email outreach, online events, donor databases and more.  All of which can be coordinated with Network for Good systems. NFG has three systems – DonateNow, EmailNow powered by Emma and EventNow powered by givezooks – which can be used together or separately.

From Network for Good’s perspective, the bare essentials of an effective communications effort include:

-       A well-branded, easy to use website
-       The ability to process secure donations
-       An email campaign tool that complies with federal anti-spam laws (this was necessity that Higman emphasized as particularly important)
-       A website analytics tool
-       Great follow-up for online donors and supporters
-       Smooth integration of online and offline efforts
-       Regular reporting on all communications efforts so you can learn and correct as you go.

She said that it was possible for an organization to cobble all those things together, but a system like Network for Good’s makes it very easy and less likely that any of the pieces will fall through the cracks.

Higman moved beyond talking about just the systems, which were not dissimilar to those of the other presenters, to provide several helpful hints for communications and marketing efforts.  One that many meeting participants seemed to jot down was this: Donation appeals should go out at a 1:3 ratio. To avoid sounding like you’re always asking for money, your nonprofit should send at least 3 messages providing news, updates and program information for every one email that asks for a donation.

The Network for Good PowerPoint presentation also included “10 Ways to Amp Up Your Website,” “11 Ways to Amp Up Your Donate Page” and “9 Ways to Amp Up your Email Outreach.”  She also talked about ways of focusing on “superstars” within your constituencies – the 5 percent or so who are the most engaged and active – to help make your organizations case.  Higman gave several examples of how Network for Good’s services can help in that regard, including a brief overview of how it is helping organizations integrate its social network efforts with their other methods of communicating and developing stronger relationships.

The three presenters fielded questions for the next 45 minutes, which yielded rich insights.  One question was about whether or not any of the systems allowed users to integrate information from external media databases nonprofits and foundations commonly use such as Cision, Vocus and Burrelles/Luce. The general consensus from the presenters was that one could download information from those systems and import the information into the organization’s central CRM system, but keeping that information current would be a challenge. And, the nature of communications to media people is generally so different and separate that it didn’t seem to warrant the effort to integrate that information.

Several questions revolved around whether or not organizations subscribing to these integrated systems were expected to ditch all of their existing databases and move all of their information into new systems.  The presenters generally agreed that, while having all data under one unified system might be ideal, it is quite common for organizations to be attached to certain components of their existing systems, but that the new functionality can often be brought in piece by piece to work with existing systems.  Convio’s Varano said, “real integration in one system, that’s the nirvana, but it’s not the reality for most organizations.”

A strong attachment to existing systems and a desire to not “waste” resources that had already been spent on them was a strong undercurrent.  The presenters emphasized that it need not be an all-or-nothing scenario. For most organizations, the presenters seemed to agree, integrating donor databases with a high-functioning email program is the absolute barest necessity. If an organization were to embark on a truly comprehensive effort to work with a firm to design an optimally functioning system that integrates all of the functions discussed over the course of the presentations, it would probably take about nine months from beginning to end. There are a lot of questions to be asked over the course of such a project, but in the end, those answers and the process can dramatically sharpen the organization’s communications efforts.

We promised to make the speakers’ PowerPoint presentations available online.  However, our WordPress-based website won’t allow that much data on a page. So, if you would like to view any of the 3 presentation, please email mremaley [at] ppcnyc [dot] org to request a copy.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

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We usually end our PPC sessions by distributing a short survey on possible topics for future meetings.  Since previous surveys indicated a strong interest in the topic of “What Goes Into an Effective Annual Communications Plan?” that will be the topic for our November meeting. I ended the meeting by soliciting recommendations from the group on any potential discussion leaders for that topic. More recommendations are welcome.

We again live-tweeted the session from our official Twitter account: @PPCNYC.  If you can’t make it out of the office to the next PPC, follow along via Twitter!

Thanks again to all of our presenters for providing a GPS for this challenging communications integration terrain and to all the great PPC members who came and made the discussion so worthwhile.

Can games move people in ways that other forms of media like print, interactive websites and video can’t?  Some really smart people in foundations, government and media say it is absolutely true. However, if you are a skeptical communications professional, you probably have a lot of questions about that assertion.

A few weeks back, I came across a valuable piece on “social games” written by Marcia Stepanek in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The bulk of the piece was an interview with Games for Change chairman Alan Gershenfeld in which he made some very bold claims about the state of the social games movement, including:

“Today, almost every major foundation and major government agency is either funding games or looking at funding games.”

And…

“There are, certainly, a lot of examples of people who have created games that have created behavior change in the real world.”

Now, I believe that I am fairly well tuned-in to what philanthropic and nonprofit leaders are doing and what new forms of communication are gaining traction. I’ve heard a few examples of interesting social games that are indeed intriguing and I am very impressed that the MacArthur Foundation is investing $50 million in its Digital Media and Learning initiatives that have a strong emphasis on games. Still, I don’t think that that the vast majority of social-change leading organizations out there have given games a great deal of consideration.

That’s not to say that they shouldn’t be thinking about the potential of social games.  But we do need to provide more information about who is experimenting with social games, what are some concrete examples of success that point to the real potential of the medium and what are the factors that foundations and nonprofits considering gaming ought to think through before leaping forward.

Thankfully, two exceptionally thoughtful people helped me clarify my own thinking about social games.

First I talked to Jessica Goldfin, a Journalism Program Associate at the Knight Foundation who is immersed in the foundation’s growing commitment to social games.  She told me that Knight’s interest in the medium grew organically out of its Media Innovation Initiative after three of the 2007 Knight News Challenge winners were cutting-edge games that engaged citizens. That was three years ago.  There was no need to persuade Knight’s president Alberto Ibargüen of the medium’s potential, he was actually the major proponent of exploring what social games could accomplish.

While Goldfin herself is passionate about games and their ability to draw people into social problems and get them thinking and acting in new ways, she says that the foundation took an especially deliberate and studied approach to funding in this area.  As Knight sought to develop a strategy for funding games, Goldfin and her colleagues first gathered research and conducted interviews from a variety of sources including experienced game developers, leading academics in the field, the Entertainment Software Association, other funders and Games for Change. From their analysis they constructed a matrix of factors they felt were necessary to consider before funding a game, such as game genre, target audience, platform, time spent in the game, development costs, production length, necessary maintenance, marketing and distribution, and shelf life. “Game development is complicated,” says Goldfin.  “One of the most interesting things we learned is that sometimes the most compelling or successful socially-minded games don’t appear to be ostensibly related to the driving issue, but instead use design to engage people in new experiences. The best of these can create connections that lead to real world action.”

When asked about other foundations and nonprofits that are leaders in the field exploring the power of social games, Goldfin talked about MacArthur’s efforts, the National Science Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson’s Games for Health, ADM’s STEM education game, the UN World Food Programme, USAID and the Obama Administration.

“Games are becoming a dominant form of media,” she said, and then talked about Knight’s work in Macon, GA, and Biloxi, MS, where the Foundation is working with the game design firm Area/Code to create locative games to engage citizens and promote community problem solving.  In Macon, the game in development will use an alternative form of local currency to connect residents to each other and to their community. In Biloxi, the game will focus on increasing awareness and changing habits toward disaster preparation.”

According to Goldfin, there are lots of innovative social games that are getting traction.  She named the multiple games being used effectively in educational curriculum by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s iCivics initiative; an initiative of the World Wide Web Foundation that teaches kids how to create their own games; the World Bank Institute’s Evoke and the Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s Budget Ball game, among several that foundation has created.

She also talked about several of the leading game development companies doing innovative work on social games including Area/Code, Filament Games and Persuasive Games.

Next I talked to Games for Change’s new Co-President Asi Burak. He says that games have the power to bring people into a social condition that other forms of media cannot, that they “allow people to make real, meaningful choices and to get feedback on those choices.”  He described media like print and video as “linear/passive media” and said that those forms mostly project from a single, scripted perspective, whereas games allow people to explore multiple perspectives in an immersive way.  “It is quite powerful to put a person in another’s shoes. And, you can let people experience failure in a safe environment that allows for solution creation they wouldn’t otherwise experience.”

He noted Alan Gershenfeld’s previous comments on how several foundations that are funding games are becoming “accidental publishers,” and may not be aware just how complicated game development can be. It’s not like producing a video, which is fairly straightforward and the product can be played on many platforms.  Games production is exceedingly complex and the technologies for every platform are different – so you can’t produce a single game product that runs on the web, on a game console and on the various mobile platforms for iPhone, Android, etc.  Therefore, foundations and nonprofits interested in doing games need to take the time to really think through who they are trying to reach, what platforms the audience uses (and in what context) and what concrete social change they want to move toward.

In the coming months, Games for Change is going to be putting on their website a lot more information and advice for foundations and nonprofits looking to get into games, including a list of developers, case studies and key issues to consider.  They are also going to offer consulting services to those who would like more hands-on guidance.

He gave a very helpful list of “Eight Steps” in the game development process that any serious organization should discuss and detail before even beginning to reach out to potential game developers:

1. Audience. You should define your audience in very fine detail.  What is the age of the audience? What is their geographic location? What language do they speak? What is their socio-economic status? What is their gaming ability?
2. Context. Where would the audience be playing the game, in front of a computer, on the subway, on a mobile phone in Tehran? Would the player be assisted by a moderator or a teacher?
3. Goals. This is all about the impact you want to make.  What do you want users to take away from the game? Do you want your audience to take action in the real world? Donate? Learn specific information or skills? Have a change in perception?
4. Platform. This is strongly tied to audience, context and goals.  A game that runs on iPhone will appeal to a certain audience.  If you’re trying to reach young, poor African men, then an SMS-based game is more realistic.
5. Financial model and sustainability. You can’t just budget for the cost of creating a game. You need to budget for ongoing maintenance and upgrading of the game itself as well as costs for dissemination and publicizing the game beyond its launch.
6. Game Design. Not until this point can you fully consider the actual construction of the game and what “gameplay” will be taking place on the screen.  All the other decisions in the steps before should feed into the action on the screen that might be appealing to users and drive the impact goals you defined.
7. Execution. Given all the decisions that have been considered in the previous steps, who might be the best development team to partner with?  Plus, who are the other partners that would be key to distribution efforts and other aspects of sustainability?
8. Assessment. Developing concrete metrics of desired impact is important and obviously should be strongly linked to the goals of step 3.  Discussing the metrics is important, but so is planning how information will be collected and the costs associated with evaluation.

I asked Burak about some of the best examples of leaders in the field.  He also named MacArthur Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the World Bank Institute, and iCivics, but added USAID, the European Union and a host of U.S. government agencies.

At this point, I felt like I had heard a lot of really important information about what to consider and what some of the leading organizations are doing. But I still had questions about demonstrable impact.  I had asked both Goldfin and Burak to name an example of a game that had really created some significant social improvement.  Burak talked about how the “Darfur is Dying” game had generated “50,000 actions” (in the form of letters to legislators) and about an organization in India that had partnered with mobile carriers to embed an HIV awareness game on 64 million devices that had actually generated 10 million sessions.

Both Goldfin and Burak are strong believers in the importance of dedicating funds to evaluate the impact of games and are confident that research and experience will eventually substantiate the power of social games.

Goldfin and Burak also both said that the future of social games is surely in mobile platforms – games that are played on phones and other small devices.  More and more nonprofits and foundations are indeed creating iPhone and Android “apps” that provide consumers quick access to programmatic information, so perhaps social games are the next wave.

In the end, I came away from these conversations even more intrigued by the possibilities that social games present.  The complexity of the process for creating and disseminating them is daunting, but I think many nonprofits and foundations are up to the challenge.  I will definitely be keeping my eyes open for examples of success in this medium and maybe even playing a few social games myself to get a feel for what works.

Are you trying to build a sense of community among diverse audiences across multiple locations?

Then take note of what the Daniels Fund learned from a recent experiment using simulcast technology.

The Denver-based Daniels Fund was founded in 2000 upon the death of benefactor and cable TV pioneer Bill Daniels.  The foundation’s work covers seven program areas as well as two separate scholarship programs, all of which is pursued in four states: Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.  With populations spread out across some of the largest states in the nation in rural and urban areas, building a sense of community and common purpose among the foundation’s many constituencies has been a challenge.  But with the Daniels Fund 10th Anniversary approaching, the foundation saw and opportunity to bring people together in an innovative way.

The concept was fairly simple: Do an anniversary event, but do it in eight different locations at the same time and link the participants together through simulcast, AND make the simulcast available live to anyone who can’t be in one of those eight locations.  The successful execution, which took place on June 17, was anything but simple and was the product of a year of intense planning.

As with just about any complex endeavor, partnerships were key to this undertaking’s success.  With it’s grantmaking in Business Ethics, the Daniels Fund had established, deep relationships with eight university business schools across the region and those universities served as the hosts for live events that were to be linked through simulcast.  Early in the planning, the Daniels Fund reached out to Rocky Mountain PBS, which had a great deal of experience doing simulcast and public engagement.

Rocky Mountain PBS did much more than just produce the simulcast event. They also used existing footage and photos, conducted new interviews and produced a video that aired during the simulcast that inspired viewers with the story of Bill Daniels legacy and tied together much of the varied work supported by the foundation.

“Rocky Mountain PBS was amazing,” said Daniels Fund VP of Communications Peter Droege.  “PBS not only produced a complex simulcast without a hitch, they produced a number of videos for the event that will have enduring value for our organization.  Their commitment to the community and quality of production really showed through at every step of the way.  They are, for sure, the hardest working people in show business.”

Any communications director knows how challenging it can be to produce a big event that is very important to the organization.  Now think about producing eight of those events taking place at the exact same time and linking them together.  The strategy included having Daniels Fund board members serve as MCs at each of the eight event sites. The board of the Daniels Fund is made up of high profile business and civic leaders, so the presence of board members at the local events was seen as a sign of the foundation’s commitment to local communities.

A large number of nonprofit and communities leaders turned out at each celebration site that had its own short program before being connected to the simulcast.  This enabled the foundation to build a sense of togetherness within each location even before brining everyone together over the web across the region.

“That sense of coming together was really important for us,” Droege said. “We had folks who were grantees in one program area who knew nothing about our involvement in another.  We had scholarship students who didn’t really know about the grantmaking.  And with the inspiring video and an event that brought so many different people together we were able to make strides in fostering a greater sense of connectedness and identification with the Daniels Fund.”

All together, there were over 2,500 people at the live events and another 2,000 who logged on to watch the simulcast live.  Try getting that many people together for an event that isn’t the Super Bowl!  Perhaps the most important audience among the attendees and simulcast viewers were current and past Daniels Fund scholars.  The Fund aims to provide not just dollars for individuals’ education, but to imbue the awardees with a sense of carrying on Bill Daniels’ legacy.  So the 257 new scholars who were all present at the event certainly came away feeling like they were part of a community that expected them to achieve and give back.

Not only did the simulcast function to bring Daniels Fund constituencies together and helped the foundation tell the story of its impact over the previous 10 years to key audiences, it was also useful to the media.  Denver’s NBC affiliate 9News produced a stellar segment on the event using the simulcast footage without ever sending a crew to any of the sites.  Rocky Mountain PBS continues to host the video on its site and may produce a segment for general broadcasting.

“We are definitely going to do more of this in the future,” Droege says.  “The emerging technology is making amazing things possible and foundations should really be thinking about experimenting with what’s possible. Maybe consider starting with a small experiment with technology like bringing in a  board member from a remote location when they can’t be there in person. It really is a great way to increase involvement and engagement.”

Droege first started experimenting with live webcasts some time ago using WebEx to host an online press conference.  He found that media people loved it and he was able to convey information and take questions very efficiently.  So he saw the 10th Anniversary simulcast as the next big leap.  Initially, they planned to do an 8-way simulcast with feeds from each site, but concerns about the technical complexity and cost led to focusing on the largest site using a one-way simulcast to let the other sites see and hear what was going on there.

The Daniels Fund is excited about doing more live web casts.  In fact, they are converting an unused closet in their offices into a “Video Capture Studio” where they will do interviews and other live video feeds for a variety of foundation supported initiatives.  “The technology is becoming more user-friendly.  Communications people and foundation leaders should definitely give it a try and start thinking creatively about the many possibilities for using it to advance their work.”

These new tools require an investment of time, and some financial resources, too.  But according to the Daniels Fund, it is well worth the effort.