The Engagement Pyramid: Six Levels of Connecting People and Social Change — Groundwire
Framework from Groundwire on Ladder of engagement
Unleashing the Power of Website Analytics
Nice overview information
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Reference for people trying to understand how domains work
Messaging Crisis for Nonprofits
Survey of 900+ nonprofits about communications practices finds problems in messaging, connecting to audience, and consistency.
WooRank | Website analysis tool
Engine to generate marketing tips to improve your website and drive more traffic.Pulls stats from a number of different places.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
Nearly all organizations are feeling the pull to be communicating more. Quality, of course, matters, but the shear quantity and frequency of communications that most organization seek to produce has increased dramatically, whether its blogs, tweets, commenting, web site updates, collaborations, cross posting, press releases, or good old print brochures. To stay abreast your organization needs to maximize its capacity for communication. At a time when there is no way you are hiring additional staff, that means making the staff you have as efficient and effective as possible. How do you do that? We recommend you: clarify your strategy, invest in automation, and get everyone participating. Here’s the first half (plus a bonus one!) ways to increase your organization’s communication capacity – come to the NTEN session to hear the rest!
Clarify Your Strategy
Before you hit the accelerator, you want to make sure that you know where you are going and the car is pointed in the right direction. If you have already done the strategy work, now is a good time to make sure you have shared it with everyone (not just the communications department). Here are some specific actions to take to clarify your strategy:
1. Define Your Audience – If you define your audience as everyone, you are wasting your time. Your cause might affect everyone, but it is more relevant for a more narrow demographic, such as single women 32-36. Pay attention to who you are communicating with so you can maximize the impact of your efforts.
2. Find out where you audience is and go there. Don’t waste time with channels that might be the next big thing (or a past big thing), if your target is using the old standby. Whether its print, social media, or conferences, be strategic about where you are spending your time.
3. Clarify your key messages. Take the time to clarify your primary and secondary messages for each of your targets.
4. Use research to establish your keywords. Google adwords has a great free tool for assessing the search frequency of your keywords. If you haven’t done your research, your keywords might be words no one else is using. Jargon anyone…?
Automation
Its not an easy time to make investments in technology. However, if your organization is functioning without a content management system and a relationship management system that serves all your database needs, chances are you are wasting time (re)entering data, recreating communications every time, or waiting on someone with the technical capacity to take care of content and communications tasks. If all of your web updates have to go through a single person, thats a pretty tight bottleneck on your capacity.
5. Stop entering data. Definitely stop entering data twice. A good constituent relationship management (CRM) system should be able to receive imports which you can leverage to have your users enter data in a form that has a spreadsheet and then import it or have it flow in directly via an API. If you are using different databases for different stakeholder groups, its likely you could realize efficiencies from centralizing information around certain processes and people in the organization. Check out tools like Google Spreadsheets (which can generate a form) if you don’t have anything available today for data collection.
6. Use an RSS reader to keep on top of news and trends. A well defined RSS feed will keep you up to date without wasting your time going to different sites or repeating the same searches.
7. Cross post. Tools like ping.fm and hootsuite.com allow you to post to Twitter, Facebook and more at the same time. Make sure that photos posted to Flickr and videos on YouTube come up on your Facebook page. By taking advantage of cross posting, you can make a limited amount of activity look like more and ensure that people coming to one site see more of your recent posts (but don’t abuse this – we want you in the conversation!).
8. Schedule communications. Block out a chunk of time each week where you can take care of several communications posts at once. You can schedule blog posts, tweets, and site updates for future dates, so that you can sit down and write three posts, but have them trickle out over the course of a week. A regular Twitter stream is more effective that 3 posts a week, all at the same time. By scheduling out updates, you keep your communication regular and you can repost, without spamming the airwaves. Use a tool like Hootsuite to schedule your tweets. This prevents tweets from interrupting your day, create and schedule many tweets all at once. Of course, you can also send real time!
Get Everyone Participating
A key aspect of increasing your organizations capacity for communication is increasing the number of people communicating. Communications can no longer be the realm solely of the communications department and the executive director. Since most of your staff has no formal training in communications, you have to make it easy!
9. Create templates for regularly used communications. Press releases, newsletters, thank you letters, and case studies all have a predictable format. People find it easier to fill in the blanks rather than starting from a blank slate. Templates also make sure that less experienced writers include all relevant information.
10. Have a centralized filesystem to store media. A reusable bank of success stories, “about us” paragraphs, bios, photos, videos, and statistics make it easier for people to respond in the moment and ensure that you brand and message are clear. Google Docs?
11. Teach writing for the web. The last time many of your staff wrote regularly was in university. College essays make bad web copy, but furthermore its easier to write for the web. Using fragments, bullet points, and top loading content is contrary to how most people were taught to write. A good writing for the web class may take only 90 minutes and will free your staff from the tendency to craft complex and grammatically varied sentences that will never get read (check out our overview at: http://www.ifpeople.net/learn/website/writing-for-the-web ).
12. Make communication part of everyone’s job. Its not enough to give people the ability to update the web site. It should be written into staff responsibilities that they complete basic tasks like updating the web site, writing blog updates of their work, and posting relevant information.
13. Use checklists. You never want a press release to go out without a link to your web page. Make sure this doesn’t happen by having simple checklists for different communication tasks. Everything from campaign emails to event postings can benefit from a check list.
For more great ideas on how to increase your organizations communication capacity, join our session at NTEN!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged communication, nonprofit, web2.0 | 1 Comment »
Want to work at an exciting company and make the world a better place? Check out our current openings, which include a full time CRM Consultant for our Atlanta office as well as interns in the area of Communications, Marketing and Web Development. More info at http://www.ifpeople.net/about/work
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged atlanta, crm, development, ifpeople, jobs, marketing, salesforce.com | Leave a Comment »
I was trying to add blob support to a Plone 3.3.4 site today and I ran into the error: ‘FileStorage’ object has no attribute ‘temporaryDirectory’
Now there is an issue for this error filed in the issue tracker that helpfully tells you to add a “blob-storage = …” line to your buildout. The problem was that I had that line already in my buildout. What I failed to notice at first is that I also had a ZODB mount point in my instance where my plone site was stored. Adding the “blob-storage = …” line to my buildout only configured blob support for the main ZODB. What I needed was to modify my buildout to include blob configuration for that mount point also.
This kind of set up requires that you use “zope-conf-additional” in your buildout. My configuration looked something like this:
zope-conf-additional = <zodb_db site1>
<filestorage>
path ${buildout:directory}/var/filestorage/site1/Data.fs
</filestorage>
mount-point /site1
</zodb_db>
To add blob support, it needed to look like this:
zope-conf-additional = <zodb_db site1>
<blobstorage>
blob-dir ${buildout:directory}/var/blobstorage/site1
<filestorage>
path ${buildout:directory}/var/filestorage/site1/Data.fs
</filestorage>
</blobstorage>
mount-point /site1
</zodb_db>
After making that change, I reran buildout, restarted my site, and my problem was solved.
Posted in plone | Tagged buildout, plone, plone.app.blob | 3 Comments »
Yesterday, ifPeople got out in our neighborhood – the same one Dr Martin Luther King, Jr was born in – for a day of service. We worked with Trees Atlanta to plant over 60 trees in Atlanta’s Forth Ward.
It was a gorgeous day and we even had the help of ifPeople’s youngest team member, Alon (our Junior Officer of Keepin’ It Real, aka JOKeR). In the photo you’ll see us beside our first (and most challenging) tree we planted, which was in a former parking lot.
Many thanks to all those who got out and made Monday a day “on” in honor of Dr. King’s legacy.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged atlanta, mlk, volunteer | Leave a Comment »
There Are Better Alternatives to Scrum | NetObjectives
Article overviewing scrum + lean as practical approach.
How to lay out the home page of your blog?
Tips on how to use space on a blog.
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »
I find the appexchange can be overwhelming with Apps, so we’ve started to chew threw some of the content there to make it more useful for us and our clients, as well as the public. In this first public review of salesforce.com apps, here’s a run-down of Project Management apps. Note that your opinion of these may vary greatly depending on how you think about project management! Hopefully it gives you the high-level overview in one place that will save you time in evaluating them. If you find this type of information helpful, I’d invite you to sign up for ifPeople’s newsletter.
Before jumping into the content, two trends for me and ifPeople I reflect on as I polish up this list of brief reviews:
1. Every few years (seems to be accelerating lately, though), I review project management apps. I’m a process junkie, and this is a little food for thought for me. Mostly, what’s out there is garbage and I’m big into productivity, collaboration and making it easier for people to do their jobs. (in case you’re curious, nothing on this list is very exciting in this regard…I got motivated to do this one for client needs as well as a business need to integrate hours logs with salesforce).
2. The two systems we use frequently with clients (Plone and salesforce.com) both have a huge range of products available. Our institutional knowledge of what works and doesn’t is very important to our clients (yet not something that needs to be locked up!) and we’ve been working to make that flow better internally as well. One thing worse than wasting our own time to get mostly useless info is having others have to suffer through the same thing. Certainly there’s a lot of trial-error with these systems and I sincerely hope everyone in the community will share what they learn to help save time for everyone!
Ok, without further ado…
. I filed a big for it, so hopefully it will get fixed soon.Was this helpful? Do you have another app you’d recommend that works in salesforce? Are you publishing an app and want some feedback? We welcome your comments below!
Also, if you find this information useful and want to stay in the loop, please sign up for ifPeople’s newsletter!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged app, appexchange, review, salesforce.com | 2 Comments »
Just last month, David Glick announced some great news in the Plone-salesforce integration world. salesforcepfgadapter 1.6b2 has been released!
The adapter is the glue lets you take your forms made using the point-and-click easy to make forms killer Plone app (aka PloneFormGen) and integrate them with Salesforce.com via the API. It’s awesome – build forms and then make one or many things in your database of relationship, whether it’s a simple lead or tie together multiple objects from one form (account + contact + opportunity). Real world use case – you want someone to sign up for your newsletter on your website. The form creates a lead record for them and adds them to your newsletter campaign. Next time you send the newsletter, you’ve got it all right there without any extra effort!
This integration has been around for a while (4-ish years, I think), so why are we all excited you might ask? It’s all about the upsert!
While it’s always been easy to send new records into salesforce.com from the PFG form, what about the case where you want to let a user update their contact info? Or even more generally, what about creating a form that lets people with an existing record in your database update their record and those that are new to create a new record? This is the mythical upsert (update + insert) we’ve been waiting for! And, as David said, “You might say this release puts the RU in CRUD 
“
Back in the fall, we started poking around and asking questions about the upsert branch that had some work done and was mostly functional even. ifPeople ran that code through some rigorous work for a project, did some testing, provided some patches, and filed a few bugs. Seems that David (Groundwire) was also busy on the code base and got some help from others in the community (Alex Tokar from Web Collective, Jesse Snyder from NPower Seattle, Emanuel Sartor with ifPeople) to get that branch code from the branch to a releaseable version. We’re glad to see it come to completion and grateful for the release management by David and Groundwire!
While this is released as a beta, this version has had some serious testing and work going into it. We’ve already got it in a production site that handles almost 2,000 users and ran load testing on the integration before launching that app.
Ok, so it’s not just about the upsert…there were several bugs squashed in this release! There is a now a better way to configure hardcoded values that should always get passed to a particular field in Salesforce (e.g. a Lead Source). Other goodies:
If you’d like a demo of how this integration works in live sites, please sign up for one of our upcoming free webinars!
For more on how to use these features and to download the latest, see the product page on plone.org.
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged cms, integration, nptech, opensource, plone, salesforce.com | Leave a Comment »
February will heating up in Atlanta! Not only will it be lots warmer than the Northeast and Midwest…we’ve got PyCon 2010 (the annual Python programming language conference) converging here. We hope to have you here! Today is the last day for early bird registration, so get on with it here.
Ok, if you’re still reading you need some more convincing, so here’s why you should care:
PyCon is where the thought leaders, community organizers, product developers, and enterprises using Python come together for an intense period of learning, exchange, and collaboration. In particular, we have:
This is a great chance to learn from others, gain new skills, and find out the coolest topics in open source! Have a look at the extensive sessions list (I’ll be giving 2 Plone-related talks, one on ecommerce and one on salesforce integration), check out a tutorial and consider staying a few extra days to sprint!
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged atlanta, conference, opensource, plone, pycon, python | Leave a Comment »
ifPeople News
