Packaging Your Organization to Communicate Impact The Way the User Wants to Experience It

I’ve had the pleasure of consulting closely with countless unique clients with diverse missions, yet all face a common challenge. They struggle to position their organizations effectively in a manner which communicates the impact of their organization to various demographic segments. The challenge, common among most non-profits, goes beyond messaging to encompass internal operational silos, departmental or programmatic territorialism, false profiling of market segments due to lack of proper evidence, and an overall challenge in defining each organization’s role in changing the world for the community they serve in an appropriate way – all the while addressing the communications preferences of disparate populations. Does this sound like too many balls to juggle in the air? I argue this is not the case.

More often than not, organizations approach challenges such as user-intuitive information architecture (navigation) on their web site and through other communications channels without taking into account how unlike individuals will navigate and interpret information. An exercise recently conducted with one client’s technology and web review board unexpectedly triggered surprised looks as board members realized for the first time that individuals tasked with the same objective in reviewing, critiquing or navigating a web site will not only interpret and perceive navigation, visuals, interactivity, and messaging differently, but will adamantly argue that their views apply to all. They’re all disagreeing, but they’re all right – their way is “the right way.” One of the first lessons I learned in my career in non-profit fund development and marketing came to me from a mentor and VP at the world’s most popular cola creator. In chairing my organization’s PR and marketing committee, he operated under the mantra, perception is reality.

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Beginning today, I’ll be posting over at the new blog — Connections. This is the next little social media experiment from Blackbaud and there will be other blogs popping up soon. I’ve reposted my entries from BlogBaud and hope to take things in some new directions. I hope you’ll give it a look…

Yesterday’s BlackBerry outage gave me a chance to catch up on some reading. (But let’s just keep that between me and you.) So here are some blogs and articles worth a look:

Brainstorm - The Chronicle of Higher Education has a new blog called Brainstorm that I’ve added to my reading list. While all of the content isn’t fundraising specific it is always wise to keep tabs on trends in any area, especially higher education.

Todd Cohen - Todd gives his $0.02 in a post called “Storm brewing for nonprofits” that deals with the impact of a recession on the nonprofit world. This whole topic is springing up a lot lately and opinions vary on what it all might mean. What I think everyone would agree on is that if you’re waiting until something bad happens to prepare or change strategies, then it’s probably too late to avoid some problems.

The NonProfit Times - They pick up on an article from MarketingSherpa about “10 mistakes to avoid with email newsletters.” One tip not on the list is to remember to always have some form of “call to action” in your email newsletters. It doesn’t necessarily have to be an ask, but never miss an opportunity to drive action from an interaction. It could be a poll, a survey, or something else that engages more than just your constituents’ eyes.

Tim Davies - A straightforward “One page guide to Google Alerts” that should help anyone trying to measure the reach and awareness of their online efforts. I remember the days when you’d pay big bucks for a clipping service or spending hours in LexisNexis trying to research a topic.

Tech Soup - Beth Kanter continues to demystify Web 2.0 with her article called “Eight Secrets of Effective Online Networking.” This article is a follow up to “Determining Your Social Network Needs” that Beth wrote a few weeks ago. These are both worth spending some time reading, thinking, and discussing at your organizations.

Garrett Keating - A great three part series about writing custom parts for Blackbaud NetCommunity. Always good to see things out there in the wild taking shape. And it shows how blogs and Wikis can peacefully coexist no matter who’s publishing the content.

Designing for Extensibility

One of the coolest parts about building software is designing for extensibility. When you are building a system that must support extensibility you apply much more rigor around what programming interfaces are exposed, being sure they are resilient from release to release, and a whole host of other technical goo that I won’t bore you with. Extensibility is something we paid strict attention to in Blackbaud NetCommunity’s (BBNC) platform architecture.

The “cool” part comes when you look out at the BBNC developer community and see how many compelling solutions our customers and 3rd parties are building using the BBNC API. I’m not going to sugar coat it, this stuff takes solid programming skills and a good grasp of Web technologies, but if you posses those skills, this is a pretty rich canvas.

Frankly, the technical nature of the API has probably led us to be a bit too reticent in regards to discussing it. In the past, if a customer inquired, we’d happily respond with a link to the SDK and send them on their way. We’re working hard to get better in this area. This API layer has shipped “in the box” with BBNC since day one, and we’ve reached the point where people are blogging about it and discussing it in peer support forums etc. The API ecosystem has arrived so, expect to see continued momentum on this front from Blackbaud. I’ll include some links to some great resources for aspiring BBNC developers below. While we don’t have programming phone support around the API, there is a LOT of information out there now, and plenty of folks using it on their live Web Sites.

The BBNC Component Model

First, a little background. The NetCommunity component model is based around the concept of “parts.” Parts typically are designed around very specific scenarios (Take an online donation, self-service profile updates, targeting content based on member demographics etc.). Pages are typically composed of a number of parts which ultimately is served up as a Web Site’s content. Now, an important goal of the team was that these parts have a configuration user interface that a non-uber-Web-guru could be productive with. With each release of BBNC we refine existing parts, and roll out new ones. This has worked very well.

Enter the Developer - The BBNC API

So, given a well defined component model and set of core design idioms, the logical next step was making this architecture “pluggable.” The goal here was to provide the APIs, SDKs, samples and tools that a reasonably skilled developer could leverage to build their very own “custom” part that would surface in the system to the folks building the site as if they were intrinsic parts. Here were the high level scenarios we wanted to support in the API:

• Support for adding custom parts into the system, treated as fist class parts by all designer interfaces of BBNC.
• Support for fetching key data from The Raiser’s Edge via a custom Web Services based API extension mechanism.
• Support for riding on BBNC’s secure transaction pipleine for cases where data obtained by a custom part needs to be downloaded securely and processed in RE.

In the end, the resulting API supports all the key scenarios outlined above, and it really is gratifying to see what enterprising developers out there have built with minimal guidance from Blackbaud! Like I said, we’re getting better in this area.

Resources for Aspiring BBNC Coders

The NetCommunity API Wiki - Comprehensive set of documentation and samples in open Wiki format. Please contribute information!

Blackbaud Labs - At Blackbaud Labs we periodically release cool samples and screen casts covering the entire Blackbaud technology portfolio. We have featured BBNC’s API a lot recently so we encourage you to have a look.

There’s more to come, so sit tight. And thanks to all the developers out there building on the platform. The next release of BBNC has a good chunk of new stuff targeted directly at improving the API based on your feedback to date.

Blackbaud recently released the 2007 State of the Nonprofit Industry Survey and you can click here to download a copy. The SONI survey was conducted between July 17th and August 11th, 2007 and had a total of 1,140 respondents. All surveys and polls should be taken with a grain of salt, but they do provide some insight into a snapshot in time.

I have picked out a couple of interesting stats after having a chance to look through the results. Here are some findings from the “Technology/Internet Usage” section:

• 98.5% of respondents have a website.
• 92% believe a unified database is very important.
• 88% use their website to market their organization/educate the public.
• 68% use online fundraising tools.
• 67% believe that it is important to use email.
• 48% actively use online fundraising strategies (compared to 43% in 2006 and 35% in 2005).
• 29% see their websites as effective in achieving their Internet goals.

This is a similar trend from the 2006 SONI survey. And I think it shows that many nonprofits are still stuck in Web 0.5 or Web 1.0 mode when it comes to engaging constituents online. They believe it is an important communication channel, they are continuing to think strategically about using the Internet, but they still use it mostly for one-way communication.

The key dot to connect is that 88% of nonprofits believe the primary purpose of their website is to be a marketing device, but 71% of respondents don’t think they are meeting their Internet goals. Does that mean that they should just try harder at their online marketing efforts? No, that would be the definition of insanity.

Websites that are just brochureware or only used for marketing purposes belong in a museum. What about online advocacy, people to people fundraising, social media, volunteering, etc? That doesn’t mean that you can’t use the Web to clarify your message and inform the public, but it can’t be the end-all be-all raison d’être. Otherwise you really can’t complain when your online efforts don’t produce measurable and meaningful results.

The question then becomes: How does an organization move from a Web 1.0 presence online to a more Web 2.0 presence online? And how do you balance the marketing messages with the development programs? I’ll tackle the answer to those questions in a future blog post…