Product Blogs

• The User’s Edge — The official blog of The Raiser’s Edge
• The Ledger — The official blog of The Financial Edge
• The Spotlight — The official blog of The Patron Edge
• The Book Bag — Blackbaud’s school software blog

Personal Blogs

• Connections — Steve MacLaughlin, Director of Internet Solutions
• Navigating the Fundraising Universe — Jim Bush, Enterprise Bus. Architect
• Webby Things — Chad Norman, Manager of Internet Marketing

Corporate Blogs

• From the Doc Side — The Product Documentation Team Blog
• Blackbaud News — Up-to-date Blackbaud News

Industry Blogs

• NetWits — Internet marketing, communication, tools, and technology

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The User’s Edge: The Official Blog of the Raiser’s Edge
The Ledger: The Official Blog of The Financial Edge
The Spotlight: The Official Blog of The Patron Edge

There are also a couple of personal blogs: Steve MacLaughlin’s Connections and my own Webby Things. The infamous Jim Bush is next, along with a few more brave souls we’re coaxing out of the ‘baud. Stay tuned for more, or just subscribe to Blackbaud Blogs (rss) and let us come to you.

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.

Perception is, indeed reality. This is an immutable truth. And each individual will perceive differently, regardless of how appropriately we package our organization with targeted messaging, visuals, and interactivity. I would imagine that if you’re reading this blog, you’re a non-profit professional. Furthermore, I would be led to believe that you have a particular interest in driving outcomes – fund development, awareness, program, or countless others. I’m not psychic, I simply determined my audience prior to crafting this message. You may be a membership, conservation, healthcare, higher education, grant making, social service, or another variety of NPO, but we all have one unifying commonality. We all seek to achieve one of the aforementioned outcomes, and we do so by our ability to influence individuals.

In order for us to successfully influence, we must understand our audience. As an example, as I choose words in this blog, I’m cautious about my use of constituent, member, supporter, prospect, client, community member, and other words. In marketing terms, these are all held equal as the consumer. However, my guess is that my use of the term consumer may prevent this information from truly resonating with my various target audiences, whether it be a marketing, development, program, or other executive-level officer.

Put it in perspective – it’s the equivalent of having a conversation with a current or prospective supporter, a VIP who you know everything about, whether it be from experience and relationship or BI. From recreational and philanthropic interests, to where his or her daughter practices ballet, you’re hopefully educated on who the individual is, what he or she likes, and the appropriate means by which they should be solicited. The same is true for audiences online – audiences that have hopefully been defined and segmented to the fullest extent your due diligence and resources will allow or, as is unfortunately often the case, assumed that you know their motivations and interests and structured your packages and appeals (aka information in the form of a pitch) based on false assumptions.

If the latter is the case, the most important lesson any non-profit afflicted by this misdirection can learn is that everyone is different – the best thing we can do is understand and guide our operations by this principle so that we can unite and target information by commonalities among these varying populations of clients, supporters, and prospects. After all, diversifying your target demographic is like diversifying funding – if you can build affinity with a new group, or strengthen relationships with existing groups of supporters, you’re better able to solicit and steward these individuals in the most personal, educated way. Go forth, and question your web site. Does it inspire you to get involved? Are you compelled to give? Do you come away from this interactive experience better educated about how your support (money, time, connections, etc…) impacts your organization’s ability to deliver a meaningful impact to the constituency it serves? This questioning could continue in perpetuity; however, if you said no to any of the above step back. Breathe deeply. Define your existing audience as it relates to your mission. Segment them as appropriate. And finally, craft an interactive experience that boils the blood and inspires – an experience that does so with the same standard of personal touch you would provide your most avid supporters.

Josh Hopkins is internet solutions manager at Blackbaud Interactive where he works with organizations around the globe to deliver executable, constituent-focused marketing strategies that drive fund development and engagement success for clients. Josh has worked and volunteered extensively within and alongside the non-profit sector, serving as chief marketing and fund development officer for the nation’s largest Hispanic social service provider prior to the Blackbaud team.

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.

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.

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…

A major focus when we started building our Blackbaud Interactive group was to provide a comprehensive set of design services. This meant bringing in a lot of talented designers with experience in both the for-profit and nonprofit world. I’m proud to say that we now have one of the largest and most experienced interactive design teams serving the nonprofit industry operating from both our Charleston and London offices.

Blackbaud Interactive recently began work on its 100th complete website redesign project built on NetCommunity. What started out as a new part of our overall online design services has grown dramatically. The team does a variety of redesign strategy, information architecture, usability testing, content analysis, creative concept and styleguide design, and other services for our clients. I thought I would share some important lessons learned to help organizations about to undertake any website redesign project.

Don’t Accept Blind Designs: There is still a practice of design shops offering to do “blind design” or “speculative design” in an attempt to earn a client’s business. This usually involves a design shop taking some thrown together or recycled designs and presenting them as part of their RFP or proposal. There might be some initial “ohs” and “ahs” but these fade once discussions start about a client’s goals, objectives, brand, etc. Good creative work never happens in a vacuum. Good creative work takes careful analysis, two-way discussion, and uses a proven process that brings the best ideas to the surface.

Don’t Design by Committee: A camel is a horse that has been designed by a committee. Committees often destroy the creative process because more minds don’t necessarily mean more great ideas. Groups of people have the tendency to pile on so many extras that the original concept collapses under its own weight. Getting buy-in from various stakeholders is important, but our experience has shown that making a single individual or small group responsible for approving creative concepts is the best approach.

Don’t Fall Prey to the NASCAR Effect: The homepage of a website is one of the most important parts of any online presence. And everyone wants to have their program featured front-and-center. This explains why the main page of so many sites resemble the front quarter panel of a stockcar. Lots of graphics, icons, links, sections, callouts, and content in a small space — all fighting for eyeball attention. If everything is important, then nothing appears important. Not to mention that their are actually some heuristics around how much is too much and what is usually just right.

Don’t Move All of Your Old Stuff: If you bought a brand new house, then you probably wouldn’t you just move all your old stuff in without doing some clean-up. Otherwise you end up with a great new place that quickly starts looking just like your old digs before too long. A site redesign offers a great opportunity to go through all of your content, images, etc. and give them all a good scrub down. In addition to any new information architecture or content analysis activities there should be some content cleansing. A good rule of thumb is updating or dropping any non-historical content that hasn’t been updated in eight months. Also check the website traffic logs for least visited pages that might need to be revived or retired.

Don’t Launch without a Soft Launch: Sadly, I’ve seen it too many times. After months of redesigning a brand new site comes the big public unveiling and within minutes someone finds a typo or a broken link or something worse. This usually happens because there wasn’t a soft launch of the website to certain key insiders and a select group of external constituents. Get a fresh set of eyes on the site before launching it to the rest of the world. Even the best designers and content authors develop a certain amount of “tunnel vision” from staring at the same pages for too long. They practice the coin toss for the Super Bowl. You should practice the launch of your website.

These are just some of the key pitfalls to avoid when launching your newly designed online presence. The website you save might be your own.

Allan Benamer - Allan’s latest entry is about Project Agape and his concerns that their Causes application on Facebook is not raising a tremendous amount of funds for nonprofits. I think it’s way too early to declare the winners and loosers because relationship building doesn’t translate into dollars over night.

Beth Kanter - Beth has a good post about the Social Media ROI and she references a blog entry from Tim Davies in the UK about Comparing Social Media with Paper Media to get a better perspective on things. This is some good thinking. If you took half of your 2008 printing budget, then what could you do online to get better results?

Don’t Tell the Donor - “A fundraiser” is concerned about the impact of a recession on nonprofit organizations. The entry also references a live discussion put on by The Chronicle of Philanthropy where several experts from the industry give their Outlook for 2008. Worth reading.

Marc Pitman - Marc covers “Fundraising Secret #11: Don’t be a Ned” using a reference from Groundhog Day. The entry explains why marketing approaches that sound more like an insurance salesperson are dead on arrival.

Philanthromedia - Susan Herr wraps up here three-part series on Promoting Sustainable Change in Africa. Content like this is really valuable because it deals with impact. Showing the impact of a program, not just the high-level goals, is an effective way to engage constituents online.

To get a better perspective on things across the pond I reached out to one of the local experts. Howard Lake launched UK Fundraising in 1996 and it’s one of the most respected sites in the UK covering the Third Sector. We met at Blackbaud’s European Conference last October. Here are some brief questions and answers that we exchanged this week:

Q: “The New Year always brings an opportunity to try some new approaches and techniques. What new trends in online fundraising are you seeing in the UK?”

A: “I can’t say I can see any trends across the sector, but, as elsewhere, some charities are trying out the growing number of tools - Facebook etc, blogs, podcasts, user generated content/online communities, etc. But it’s still a minority interest. You’ll see some sites now offering links from content to the social networking/book-marking sites (e.g. Charities Aid Foundation, Institute of Fundraising) but it’s still very unusual to see those icons/links on charity sites. Also, RSS is being used more, but again, it’s primarily for press releases/front page news rather than across the site e.g. jobs, appeal updates etc.”

Q: “The Institute of Fundraising has been leading an effort to make radical reforms to Gift Aid. What do you think the future holds for Gift Aid?”

A: “I don’t expect HMRC or government to shift on this. They can still argue that the sector isn’t making anywhere near enough of the opportunity it presents.”

Q: “Web 2.0, social networks, and people-to-people fundraising are still getting a lot of attention, but not-for-profits are still looking for results. Do you think charities in the UK have embraced these tools enough?”

A: “No. (smiling) I think, as in past uses of new media, many charities focus, understandably on a few key elements of online fundraising - online donations, promoting events, using Google AdWords. Now you’ll have a few developing a YouTube channel, or using the new MySpace nonprofit space, but will they also be encouraging supporters to share volunteer fundraising event experience/expertise on their website? Do they know if their fundraising news alerts are being distributed in RSS? Are they using any of the free online resources to find out about grant opportunities There are very few that seem to embrace or at least test the wider range. Even now, how many UK charities have a Facebook app, or even a Facebook page? So, still lots more to try, I’d say.