As most of you probably know, Windows Vista™ released today.

Some of you are probably celebrating while others might be hiding under a rock, hoping that it will all go away.

Both Best Buy and Circuit City devoted pages in their Sunday circulars this week on the release. Best Buy touting that they had over “60,000 trained specialists” ensuring that they would “match you up with a PC you’ll love.”

Apple decided to counter the release with one of their Mac vs. PC ads. Humorous as usual, it shows a nervous PC about to undergo surgery to prepare for the Windows Vista™ upgrade. A not so subtle jab at what the PC owners of the past have gone through as they updated their OS.

The above two spectrums seem to be equally matched by what the everyday user is thinking. On one hand, those who can’t wait and are updating as soon as possible and on the other those who could care less and happy to keep working on whatever is installed on their machine, as long as it works.

If you fall somewhere in between or need assistance trying to figure out what if anything you need to do, let me suggest looking at PC Mag’s Windows Vista™ - What you need to know site. I recently spent a good two hours reading up on the different stories offered up. I pretty much left the site overwhelmed with information and learning more than I could have possible hoped (and maybe wanted) to.

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Tom Churchill is the Product Support Manager, Technical and Developer Solutions at Blackbaud, overseeing the support for such products as Blackbaud NetCommunity, The Information Edge, Crystal; along with the support across the products for VBA, API and Read Only Database Assistance.

Tom joined the company in 1998, first as a member of The Raiser’s Edge customer support team, then as a technical support analyst and then as a member of Developer Solutions Support. He has supported RE:VBA and RE:API, the Blackbaud Developer Program and The Information Edge since the inception of each product. Tom has taught more than 175 days of Blackbaud training and was the lead RE:Open and RE:VBA/RE:API trainer for more than a year-and-a-half.

In his free time, he enjoys researching the Civil War. In April of 2003, a book he co-authored, called “The Civil War Research Guide,” was published by Stackpole Books.

This is a placeholder for Bo Crader’s bio.

We talk a lot about nonprofits using the social web to attract and engage donors, but the concepts trend more towards awareness than action. Using MySpace or YouTube to deliver your message to a broad audience is one thing - getting them to act is another.

That’s where SixDegrees.org, AOL Instant Messenger, and Network for Good come in. Someone had the brilliant idea to put these three ingredients into a giant Web 2.0 blender in the hopes of producing a tasty, social fundraising smoothie – and it looks like they have succeeded.

With Kevin Bacon as the natural pitchman, 6Degrees.org is asking donors to choose a nonprofit, then get 6 friends to give to the same organization. Network for Good is covering the online donations, while AOL’s MySpace equivalent AIM Pages handles the social aspect. The idea is to use a social network to form impromptu giving circles…got it?

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[Jim enters blog and steps up on soapbox]. How dare you treat my $25 donation as such an insignificant drop in the bucket. I could have had a decent meal, bought a new shirt, gone to a couple of movies. Or, better yet, I could have given this money to an organization that cares and appreciates my support of their mission! [Jim steps down off of his soapbox]

Here’s the story. Over the past several months I have made small gifts ($25) to a number of CLIENT organizations that I worked with during the same period. To be exact, I made 10 gifts of $25 each: seven made online, two sent by mail, and one handed to someone at the organization while I was onsite. These gifts represented my first donations to these particular organizations, and were undesignated so that the money could be used where it was most needed.

So far, so good, right? Here is where it gets interesting. Take a guess at how many acknowledgments I received for the 10 gifts I made. It’s less than half – actually, it’s way less than half. TWO! Two thank yous out of 10 gifts made! One from an online gift, and one from a mailed gift. And, yes, every organization had my mailing address and I did not indicate anywhere that I did not want to be acknowledged for my gift. Don’t blame this on me!

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One of our usability engineers recently received some negative feedback around constituent records in Infinity. Unlike previous Blackbaud applications where records open in a new window, constituent records in Infinity open in the main window. So to leave the record, you don’t “close” anything, you just navigate away, like you would from a Web page. A couple of users had some trouble adjusting to this new approach.

These were existing RE users, so our hope is that they were just reacting to a change in the pattern they’ve grown accustomed to. But “they’ll get used to it” always makes designers really uneasy. Will they? How can we be sure this was an issue of familiarity and not a fundamental design flaw?

We’ll continue to test this issue with both RE and non-RE users, but I think this highlights the reality of user feedback and decision making in the design process. User input is one of several tools designers have at their disposal to help make the tough decisions, including design patterns, design principles, usability heuristics and personal experience. All of these are invaluable resources for informing the design process, but rarely do they make design decisions crystal clear. They are all very open to interpretation. In the end, it is still up to individual decision makers to make the “right” call based on the information they have.

For this reason, the real power in user-centered design comes not from a few usability tests and design heuristics, but from the development of a culture that puts a priority on user experience and encourages an ongoing, iterative process of feedback and refinement. This process doesn’t end when a product is released - existing features should be constantly re-evaluated and every new customer treated as another opportunity to evaluate your design decisions. Through these ‘layers,’ the experience becomes more and more refined:

When your decision makers are making user-informed, skillful design decisions, the difference between these levels are minimized. The process is then allowed to focus primarily on adding efficiency and smoothing out rough edges while functionality is gradually expanded. And when changes are required, this isn’t seen as a failure, but as a natural part of the design process.

The folks over at NetSquared, GetActive, and Squidoo have assembled their list of “The 59 Smartest Nonprofit Organizations Online.” This list appears to be the follow-up to Seth Godin’s Org2.0 Cheat Sheet and Squidoo happens to be a company Seth founded. (Just connecting some dots.)

The list includes some well known organizations, some very innovative groups, and also a good number of Blackbaud clients. According to the list, “these organizations are winners because of their web 2.0 smarts and a willingness to engage their constituents far beyond asking them to dig into their pockets.”

The Agitator likes the idea of the list but gives poor marks for their overall execution. I wouldn’t be so harsh. The value in a list like this is that it is a conversation starter. It will get people thinking, talking, and sharing in their own organizations to drive change. These are all very good things and lead to steps in the right direction.

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I just ran across this great viral campaign and had to share it with you all. It’s a CO2 awareness piece that conveys a well-worn message in a unique way. Sure it’s a bit guerrilla, invasive, and possibly illegal, but I still love it. Congrats to BUND (the German arm of Friends of the Earth) - this concept is a breath of fresh dirty air.

Viral marketing is hard to track using metrics, but it gets noticed never the less. Local newspaper and television coverage are both free and potent, so don’t forget to explore concepts like this at your next planning meeting.

via Houtlog

Friday I was walking through the Product Development department when the Director of Core Technologies, Paul Gibson, waved me into a developer’s cube. I could tell by the look on their faces that they had something cool to show me. They sure did.

Paul Crowder (the dev) has been working on implementing platform-level support for KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in our upcoming Infinity application platform. KPIs will be featured throughout future applications built on the platform (Galileo, RE8, Bullseye etc.) Apologies for all the code names, we’ll cover those in a future post.

What are KPIs?

KPIs are quantifiable measurements that reflect the health of the organization. By quickly scanning an organization’s KPIs one should be able to get a solid idea on how things are tracking against the defined business goals. Some examples might be:

• Response Rate for a direct mail segment
• Number of gifts per day
• Avg days to close a major gift
• Gifts This Month
• Cost Per Dollar Raised

Those are just a few samples, but each one represents a single value that could be calculated and compared vs. an established goal.

Infinity’s KPI Platform

Editing a KPI Definition

Infinity’s base platform support provides the following for KPIs:

• A framework and UI for establishing, securing, and managing KPIs.
• A way to express a goal for a KPI.
• The ability to define warning and alert zones for a KPI as it progresses toward or deviates from it’s goal.
• An automated process to calculate KPI values and cache those values for quick rendering at a later time.
• A mechanism to back-calculate KPI values to establish historical trends.
• RSS support for KPI values so they can be monitored without running the application and logging in.
• A personal dashboard that can be customized by an end user to display the most important and relevant KPIs as the user sees fit.
• The ability to view the dashboard outside the application from any web browser without having to log in and navigate the application (assuming the user is authenticated).
• A stock set of KPI calculations “in the box”.
• Advanced support for creating custom KPIs using an open, extensible XML specification. (you’ll be hearing a lot about “specs” in the Infinity platform as I discuss it in future posts…)

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These first couple of weeks have been exciting to say the least. I really want to thank all of you who have left comments…your participation is welcome, if not needed, and you have the ears of nearly everyone here at Blackbaud. Keep those comments coming!

We have new readers arriving all the time, so I wanted to highlight some of the comments that caught my eye over the last few days.

A lot of readers were happy to see that Shaun Sullivan would be blogging, but Charlie Crystle thinks he may have found Shaun’s motivation:

It’s about time, Shaun! I figured once you stopped reading my blog you’d find the time to start your own.

Cason White really opened up the floor with his first two posts: A Dialog on Design, and Blackbaud 2.0. Cason and the entire Design team are excited to begin this dialog, and it sounds like a few of you feel the same way. Peter Gulka kept it broad when he wrote:

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Well, here goes. I’m just going to dive right in and see what happens. I’ve got to tell you, though, my heart’s beating a little faster right now. There are an awful lot of you out there, and I definitely feel a responsibility to respect your time and share something meaningful.

When Chad first talked to me about starting this blog, I was definitely excited to participate. I have talked to so many nonprofit professionals over my years with Blackbaud and had so many interesting exchanges about marketing and fundraising and data management and CRM, I knew I’d have plenty of thoughts to share. I hadn’t read many blogs, but at the time I didn’t figure I was that far behind. (Like Webster’s, blogs entered my consciousness around 2004.) As I’ve gotten more involved, however, I’ve realized how far behind I really am and its a little intimidating!

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Each week, billions of searches generate millions of dollars for companies like Google and Yahoo!. It’s hard to believe this much revenue can be generated simply from clicks and data retrieval. What if some of that cash could be diverted to your organization?

That question was on the minds of Ken and JJ Ramberg when they launched GoodSearch.com back in 2005. GoodSearch donates 50% of their ad revenue to nonprofit organizations…and the kicker is that users choose which ones. Here’s how it works:

On the GoodSearch homepage, choose from thousands of organizations or add your favorite cause to our list. Search the Internet just like you normally would — the site is powered by Yahoo!, so you’ll get the same high-quality search results you’re accustomed to. Fifty percent of the revenue generated from advertisers is shared with the charity, school or nonprofit organization of your choosing.

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I’m Cason White, an Interaction Designer at Blackbaud. I get fired up about creatively solving user problems and designing experiences that make people’s teeth tingle (in a good way).

My goal in this blog is to spur discussions about the design process, what makes for good design and how design is changing our industry and our world.

I’ve been at Blackbaud since 2005, when I moved back to the South after 8 years in Colorado. My career includes stints as an advertising executive, an instructional designer, an information architect and principal of a Web consulting firm.

Steve Mac in his post and Peter Gulka in his response to my previous post both allude to something important about the effect of Web2.0 thinking on business. So much of the Web2.0 hype is focused inappropriately on the new tools coming out and the groovy features (or lack thereof) that they are packing, rather than the changes to business strategy and customer expectations that these tools reflect. Even Seth Godin’s much-touted Org2.0 Cheat Sheet has a heavy emphasis on tools rather than the strategic use of these tools.

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I feel like we don’t talk anymore, you and me. I mean really talk. The kind of talk where I get you and you get me and there’s an understanding there. The kind that gets your blood pumping and your feet dancing and helps me design user experiences that rock your world and feel as though they took every ounce of your non-profit know-how and laid it out there in one elegant, easy to use tapestry. You know, that kind.

I see the conversations you have with other customers on the discussion boards and I get jealous. There’s passion and connection there – an energetic give-and-take that builds relationships and opens new doors to success. Why don’t we talk like that?

Sure, we do the usability testing thing. We get an hour of quality time together, you get to tell me about what you like and don’t like, and I nod understandingly while throwing in a few “hmmmms” and “interestings” here and there to try and look smart, but it’s not really a conversation, per se. Yes, we get some great, useful feedback and at least it’s a start, but it’s just not enough, is it? It’s like speed dating. Just when things are starting to click, the bell rings and we’re off to our separate worlds and it’s a heck of a time getting back together because we’re both so busy and I’m left feeling empty and alone and you’re left to wonder whatever happened to those suggestions you made and the magic of the moment slowly fades away like some distant memory.

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Putting 2006 behind us, of course it’s time to set down our resolutions for the new year. The thing that makes resolutions different from goals or plans is the idea that achieving them is primarily a matter of will or resolve. They can be…

• quantitative (lose 20 pounds!) or qualitative (eat healthier!)
• subjective (be a better person!) or objective (spend 10 hours a month helping out my favorite charity!)
• personal (appreciate the little things more!) or altruistic (make the world a better place!)

…but they are things that challenge us because they challenge our ability to overcome our limitations, our conditioning and our environment.

Of course, I’ve got my list of personal resolutions…..drop 20 pounds, finish the Cooper River Bridge Run in under 50 minutes, and complete a lengthy list of home improvement projects….just to name a few. However, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to try and come up with a New Year’s Resolution that has an impact on our Products team at Blackbaud and, by extension, the products we deliver. While surfing the web looking for some ideas, most of what I found centered on resolutions like “write more reusable code”, “comply with web standards” or “do more usability testing”; all worthwhile goals, but they didn’t capture my imagination or feel like what I was looking for.

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When you read something, you remember it.
When you do something, you believe it.

That’s what Madrid agency Zapping must have been thinking when they created this awareness campaign for a European nonprofit. In order to rent these shopping carts, customers must insert a coin into the child’s mouth. The text under the child reads, “You can feed a child for two days with what you spend renting this cart, Help.”

This ad may be short on subtlety, but it makes up for that with an abundance of clarity and creativity. I love when ads make me act, make me think, and make me care - this one does all three.

via Houtlog

The play on Marshall McLuhen’s famous phrase may be obvious, but the meaning it has for nonprofits may not be. We’ve just closed out a year where TIME’s Person of the Year was you, me, and everybody because of our participation in the Web 2.0 revolution. Congratulations!

I’m not so sure about the revolution part, but clearly the growth of personal content and collaboration has transformed the Web. We’re now in a new year where many nonprofits are trying to make meaning of all this stuff.

The Internet has always been more like radio than TV. You tune into things that interest you and the experience is so much more personal. The number of “stations” and strength of signal have only helped to drive greater online personalization. That perception of the Web is now taking on a new twist.

Up until recent years the Web has been dominated by text-driven experiences. Gerry McGovern just brought up this point in his latest weekly enewsletter issue that’s entitled “The Web at 15.” Gerry argues that “the Web is evolving, sure, but its foundation stone is the written word.” Clearly, we’re all now building on top of that foundation with some different materials.

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Happy New Year! I am excited about the start of a new year, and I cannot begin to tell you how “new” this year really is for me. I have a lot to celebrate, much of which I will share with you throughout the year. But, I do want to proudly announce that I am cancer-free! I just had to say that again. More details about that to come.

When I was asked to become a blogger, I was a bit surprised. Someone thought you might be interested in what I have to say. Believe me, I have a lot to say - just not sure others wanted to hear it. So, you be the judge. I hope you’ll give me lots of feedback, disagree with me when you think I am crazy, share this with your friends and colleagues, and teach me lots of new stuff.

That’s it for now - I plan to post at least a couple of times this coming week. Some of the topics flowing through my mind are centered around the care and feeding of donors - old and new, especially as we begin a new year. I’ll put my thoughts into whole sentences and post them right here.

Until then, happy fundraising!

Jim

I recently ran across a new video sharing site for nonprofits, DoGooder.tv. Very cool. The site is live right now, though in alpha, and allows nonprofits to post high-quality videos for a small fee free. They plan to include more community and online donation functionality down the road, so this is pretty exciting.

But will nonprofits flock to DoGooderTV instead of free alternatives like YouTube or Google Video? DoGooderTV will always have a captive audience looking for nonprofit content, but whether or not organizations will be willing to pay for that placement remains to be seen. Tracking…

Update: Michael says:

The site is 100% FREE! A new version is online now that allows nonprofits to create basic home pages and upload video.

That’s great news from the DoGooderTV camp - not only because the the service will be free, but social elements like creating pages are coming sooner rather than later.