ONE/Northwest

Writing Email Newsletters: Best Practices

sknox — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:10:11 GMT

For more ideas on writing email newsletters, visit the Vertical Response Blog

Writing an effective email newsletter is an exercise in brevity and restraint. It's very tempting to dress up your monthly newsletter with attractive graphics and lots of articles - much like how you might write a printed newsletter. However, an email newsletter and print newsletter are very different forms of communication. The average internet user receives dozens of emails every day. With your newsletter you are competing for a person's attention. Long, elaborate looking emails tend to be ignored.

Below are 8 things to consider when crafting your next email newsletter:

Keep it short! And link to your website whenever possible. Your newsletter should not contain the full text of each article (unless it's very short). Write a headline and lead-in paragraph, then link to your website for the full text. The idea is to grab people's attention quickly with easily digestible bits of information.
Use a minimum of graphical elements. Focus on useful and informative content, not pretty pictures. E-mail is just not the place for creative graphic design. E-mail messages based mainly on graphic images often are caught or blocked by SPAM filters. Also, most email clients turn images off by default unless the recipient explicitly turns them on.
Be consistent. Decide on a standard number of articles and a standard format for writing articles and stick to it! Always use the same colors and placement of elements within your newsletter. This will help in a number of ways: you'll build "brand identity" with your subscribers, they will find it easier to scan and read your newsletters if things are always in the same place, and you can do more effective analysis of your statistics.
Optimize for the preview pane. A large percentage of people only read email in their preview pane. This means that the top 200-300 pixels of your message is what people are going to see first. If all you have there is a large banner image, you won't get as many reads as you might if you include the titles of your articles in that space. Also keep an eye on the width of your newsletter. Under 700 pixels is best to account for low screen resolutions that some of your subscribers will have.
Use a table of contents. Put the titles of each article toward the top of your newsletter and use anchors to link to the text of each one. This allows people to quickly scan the articles in your newsletter.
Make your content scannable. Ideally you should have between 3 and 5 articles in each newsletter. More than 5 articles is just too long. Prioritize which articles you want to use and maybe keep some for the next newsletter. Use bulleted lists and boldface help make your articles scannable.
Use links properly. Avoid "click here" links. Instead use actionable language such as "read more . . .", "donate", or "unsubscribe". If you find that an article is more than about 200-300 words, cut it off and link to your website for the complete article.
Test, test, test! Send tests to a variety of email clients such as Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail. You can avoid embarrassing mistakes by viewing your newsletter in different environments.

At ONE/Northwest we do our best to create HTML templates that are optimized for delivery via email. However, the template is only part of the story - how you write your content can have a profound effect on deliverability and readability.

Additional Resources:

jons — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:05:33 GMT

Why take credit cards on your website?

If you enable your website to accept credit card payments, it offers your organization several important potential benefits:

Online credit card payments offer increased convenience for donors. Being able to take credit cards online lets your donors give to you instantly. No hassle of writing a check and mailing it off. Donors can receive immediate confirmation and appreciation for their donation.
Online credit card payments "close the loop" for online appeals. Email is a cheap and effective way to communicate with potential donors, and being able to accept credit card payments online allows donors to immediately "close the loop" by responding to an online appeal.
Online credit card payments save your organization staff time. With online payment systems, the funds are quickly and automatically transferred into your organization's bank account. You don't have to process checks or make deposits. In many cases, you can import contact and financial imformation directly into your database and accounting systems, which helps avoid data entry errors as well as saving staff time. Some systems even allow you to automate the process of sending "thank you" messages and tax receipts, saving additional time and money.
Online credit card payments are attractive to a new generation of tech-savvy donors. The membership of many environmental organizations is aging fast. A new generation of donors are much more "tranasctional" in nature, and are not people who want to write a check and "join" an organization. But they will give to support campaigns and organizations that make it fast, easy and deliver tangible results.
Online payments make it vastly easier to register people for events and to sell things. Online fundraising isn't the only use for online credit card capability. If your organization runs events or sells merchandise (or documents!) then online credit card payments make it much easier to run events and sell merchandise.

Caveats, cautions and curmudgeonliness

If you merely build it, they will not come. Having a quick, convenient way to accept gifts online does not constitute an online fundraising strategy. You still have to raise the interest in giving to your organization via appeal letters, emails, special events, other types of campaigns. Having an online payments system in place is an important part of the puzzle, but unless you have clear strategy for prospecting, cultivating, asking and stewarding your donors online, you'll never raise much money online.

It's also important to understand that online giving costs more than cashing a check (although not much more than taking a credit card in person or over the phone). Costs are typically 3-5% of the donation amount, plus setup and (in some cases) ongoing service fees. If your organization has a small, loyal group of checkwriting donors, then building online giving capacity just to serve those folks isn't worth the effort. But if you have an aggressive plan to use a variety of outreach tactics to build your donor base (beyond just the same old direct mail appeals), then online payments are probably an important tool.

State Charitable Registration

There's one potential catch, though. Laws in 39 of the 50 U.S. states require nonprofits to register as professional solicitors in order to solicit donations. Although there are efforts underway to update these pre-internet-era laws, it's still something of a legal gray area; these laws could be construed to apply to online solicitations. You should consult with your own legal advisor as to the necessity and method of registering for your particular situation. For background information, see:

http://www.nonprofits.org/npofaq/16/24.html
http://www.multistatefiling.org/b_introduction1.htm#which

Overview of the online payment process

The online payment cycle starts with a person choosing to donate to your organization. A form on your website (or on the site of an online payment vendor) collects contact and credit card information from the donor. The website then initiates a process to verify and charge the credit card. The money is deposited into a special kind of bank account, known as a merchant account. (The merchant account may be in your name, or it may be in the name of an online payment vendor.) This process is run by a piece of software called a payment gateway. The online payment software then sends the donor a receipt, and stores the information for later reporting to you.

If you're selling products or running events, your website may include a shopping cart system or a event registration system that manages a product catalog and inventory, or manages the logistics of complex events prior to collecting payments as described above.

Stratgies for enabling online payments

There are several basic strategies for enabling online payments:

1) Outsourced payment services

2) Build it yourself

STRATEGY #1: OUTSOURCED PAYMENT SERVICES

For most grassroots organizations, outsourcing your online payment/donation systems makes the most sense. There are several different varieties of these online payment services -- some focus exclusively on processing online donations for nonprofits, and others are more generic online payment/e-commerce services that may also allow you to sell merchandise, register folks for events, etc. Some services can pass information to your merchant account, and others do the entire transaction for you.

The number one rule is "Always read the fine print!" And believe us, there's a lot of it! Before you plunge into online donations, it's absolutely essential that you take the time to read and understand the terms of your agreement with any outside entity that will be handling money or names on behalf of your organization. Caveat emptor always applies.

It's also important to note some donation processing services are set up so that donors do not make a donation directly to your organization, but to a nonprofit pass-through affiliated with the donation processing service. While this generally isn't a problem in terms of image, there can be bookkeeping and administrative issues (e.g. public support test.) You should also keep in mind that donors who give to you through a donation portal can elect to remain anonymous from you. All online donation services have lengthy privacy policies; you should read these (along with all other fine print) before moving forward.

The four most important factors to consider when evaluating potential donation processing services:

1) Costs both upfront and ongoing
2) Method of funds transfer
3) Access to and privacy of donation data
4) Integration with your website

Based on these factors, we've found several online donation services whose services should be attractive to Northwest conservation groups. Keep in mind, though, that the e-commerce world is a fast-changing place, and this information may well be out of date by time you read it.

Recommendations for U.S. groups

GiftTool

http://www.gifttool.com

GiftTools provides relatively high-end online donations and event registration tools to nonprofits in the US and Canada. Cost is about $100, plus $25/month, $0.99 per transaction plus 3% if you use their merchant account, or you can bring your own existing merchant account.

Network For Good/Groundspring

http://www.networkforgood.org/npo

Network For Good is a non-profit created by the AOL Foundation. Network For Good acquired Groundspring's popular "DonateNow" online donation service in 2006, and offers low-cost online donation services to nonprofits. Cost is $199 for a customized donation page, plus $29.95/month and 3% per transaction.

PayPal Donations

http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/xcl/rec/donate-intro-outside

PayPal is a for-profit provider of online payment services that was acquired by online auctions behemoth eBay a while back. While PayPal doesn't specifically target nonprofits, their basic e-commerce services can be used quite effectively as a basic online donations and/or e-commerce solution for nonprofits. PayPay's pricing is quite attractive, with zero startup costs and 2.2-2.9% per-transaction fees. They offer a fairly robust feature set, including subscriptions and recurring donations. You can customize the payment workflow and data collection fields a fair amount, but PayPal offers only miminal abilities to customize the look and feel of the payment pages. As an extremely large company, customer service can be spotty sometimes, but their documentation is excellent, and their systems are designed for relatively non-technical users. The final caveat we'd offer about PayPal is that their tool gently encourages folks to become "PayPal members" in order to speed up future PayPal-powered transactions.

Democracy In Action

http://www.democracyinaction.org

Democracy In Action is Washington, DC-based nonprofit that provides a variety of online donation and online advocacy tools to grassroots organizations at affordable prices. Setup is self-service, which can a bit complex, but the costs are quite reasonable, and their tools integrate nicely with a database backend, email tools and more. Plan on a bit of consulting help in the setup proces, too. Democracy In Action is currently providing their tools as a bundle, rather than breaking out the online donation tool. If you need email newsletters, online advocacy, and online donations all in one suite, then DIA is a pretty good choice. Cost starts at about $100/month plus ~3% donation processing.

Recommendations for Canadian groups

There are several online payment providers who specialize in serving Canadian nonprofit/charitable organizations. Our top choices are:

GiftTool

http://www.gifttool.com

GiftTool is a relatively high-end Canadian provider, both in cost and features. (GiftTool also serves US groups!) It's the only provider serving Canadian group we've looked at that offers substantial customization of the giving form. Pricing is as follows:

$100 setup
$25/month ongoing cost
$0.99 + 3-4% per transaction

CanadaHelps

CanadaHelps is quite similar to US-based Network For Good (above). They provide a very inexpensive (3% per transaction), minimally-customizable service with few bells and whistles. It's a good entry-level solution for groups just getting started with online giving.

More information on online donation tool providers

ONE/Northwest has complied a detailed matrix that compares the features and costs of a number of leading online donation tool providers, including Groundspring DonateNow, Auctionpay, PayPal, Network For Good, Sporg, Democracy In Action, GiftTool, CanadaHelps, and Charity.ca. You can download this file at:

http://www.onenw.org/toolkit/online-donation-tools-matrix-1.3.xls

A more comprehensive -- and more recent -- look at the overall marketplace is Idealware's Fall 2005 report "Selecting an Online Donation Tool" which is avaialable at:

http://www.idealware.org/donations/intro.php

STRATEGY #2: BUILD IT YOURSELF

If your organization has complex online payment needs, or is planning on making online sales of merchandise a critical part of your operations, it may make sense to build your own online payments solution. However, most small organizations should steer clear of this route -- it can be expensive and complicated.

There are two components to building your own donation processing system:

1) The capacity to receive credit card information via a secure web page
2) The capacity to authorize the credit card transaction and deposit it to your bank account based on that information

RECEIVING CREDIT CARD INFORMATION SECURELY ONLINE

In order to receive credit card information from your website, your web hosting company will have to support a technology known as "SSL" (Secure Sockets Layer), which enables information--such as a credit card number--to be transmitted securely between a user's Web browser and your website. Many "basic" web hosting accounts, such as those that are provided for free with a dialup Internet access account, do not support SSL or don't support it at a reasonable cost. You may need to consider moving your website to a dedicated web hosting company. (See our article on domain-hosted websites for more info.) Most good web hosting companies support SSL under their plans that cost $15-25/month.

Once you have a SSL-enabled website in place, you then need to build the online donation form. There are lots of ways to do this, and all of them require that you have some knowledge of developing simple form pages on a website. Virtually all web-authoring software has form-building tools that are fairly capable. More experienced web developers can also use scripting technologies such as ColdFusion or PHP to build more advanced business logic into their donation pages. You can also use off-the-shelf e-commerce/shopping cart packages such as VP-ASP (http://www.vpasp.com) to build fairly complex online storefronts with a modest level of technical skill.

AUTHORIZING CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS

Authorizing your credit card transactions is an essential step in the process. When you set up a merchant account (if you haven't already), you will need to decide how you want to authorize the transactions. This can involve filling out the paper slip with an imprinter and calling a 1-800 number, using a dialup terminal and modem, or using an online system such as Authorize.net. Tell your bank representative what your expected volume will be. S/he should help you decide what authorization method makes the best financial sense for your organization. Automating your authorization capability--rather than just the capability to receive credit card information securely online--is a separate (but related) issue, and is the most complicated and expensive part of building your own online donation processing system. If you elect to authorize via 1-800 number or modem, then all you need to do is design your donation page the page that will "deliver" the credit card numbers securely to you for authorization and processing.

The main advantage of this "do-it-yourself" approach is that you have total control over the content, look and feel of your donation pages. The pages are seamlessly integrated into your site, and look exactly the way you want them to.

However, there are some disadvantages to the DIY approach. Unless you have a person on staff or a volunteer who is comfortable wading into HTML and scripting languages, you'll probably find this approach too technically demanding. The other disadvantage is the cost--an additional $15/month with most Web-hosting providers, plus additional annual fees if you have to provide your own SSL certificate, and possibly the significant expense of establishing online credit card authorization services.

CONCLUSION

Online payment services provide a low-effort way to add a basic online giving functionality to your website. Technically sophisticated organizations, or those that need total control over the look and feel of the donation page should look into developing their own capability, or at other donation services that, while higher-cost, do offer some customization options.

If you use any online donation service, it's essential to establish a well-designed, well-written "giving" page on your website BEFORE you send people hyperlinking off to the donation service. If people don't understand what's going on and have confidence that it's safe and secure, they won't do it.

Will online fundraising dramatically boost your bottom line? Probably not, and definitely not right away, unless you launch a corresponding online campaign pointing people to your donation page. Should your organization pursue online fundraising? Almost certainly. Giving money online is an idea that's here to stay. We ignore the opportunity that the Internet presents at our own peril. It's always wise, though, to move forward one step at a time, with realistic expectations, and a constant eye on the results.

Movement as Network

gideonr — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:52:52 GMT

In early 2004, ONE/Northwest’s executive director, Gideon Rosenblatt published a paper called “Movement as Network: Connecting People and Organizations in the Environmental Movement.” This think piece represents much of the philosophical underpinning of ONE/Northwest’s work in the decade ahead.

You can download the full paper in PDF format. Below is a synopsis of its core ideas.

Movement as Network: The environmental movement is not just some vague concept, but an actual entity. It is a network, made up of very real interconnections between people and organizations; a networked whole that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Fragmentation of the Movement: Today’s environmental organizations are so disconnected that they are barely recognizable as a movement – particularly by those within the movement itself. Some of this fragmentation is due to the broad diversity of environmental issues and the large number of places in which they occur. But a frustratingly large portion of the fragmentation is institutional. It stems from a lack of diversity in organizational models, which leads to competition for resources and resistance to building the kind of collaborations and value-added networks prevalent in newer industries within the private sector.

Fragmentation of Power: To engage on environmental issues in and around the places they live, citizens must choose from among a dizzying array of issue-specific organizations. While a small number of citizens do have a particular affinity for specific issues, most are frustrated by the movement’s failure to address their more holistic understanding and concerns around the environment. Citizens who do join the environmental movement are scattered across hundreds of tiny membership bases within issue-specific organizations. Their political clout is fragmented, thus critically weakening their political and economic power at the local and regional level.

Differentiated Roles in the Network: Movement as Network uses three prototypical organizational models as an analytical framework and prescription for addressing this fragmentation:

People Organizations serve as an interface between the environmental movement and various segments of society. They define themselves by the specific audiences they serve – and not by specific issues. In fact, they move from issue to issue, serving these audiences by “aggregating” issue-specific information and engagement opportunities supplied by Solution Organizations. People Organizations are largely missing at the local and regional environmental movement today, yet are essential to reaching new and broader audiences.
Solution Organizations define themselves by the issues they focus on and by the solutions they use to address these issues. Examples include land trusts, agency-specific watchdogs, and water policy experts. These organizations are critical to keeping long-term attention on specific problems, yet the large number of potential solutions and places in which they are needed is one of the key sources of the movement’s fragmentation.
Resource Organizations define themselves by the particular expertise or resources they bring to the rest of the network. Examples include foundations (which supply money) and capacity builders (which supply some particular expertise).

A Connected Network: These different types of organizations can be combined to form powerful new network clusters for the environmental movement:

People Organizations and Solution Organizations have the potential to form powerful new networks, where solutions are aggregated for specific audiences, much like retailers aggregate products for specific customer segments. These networks might start with news aggregation, with a People Organization pulling together and interpreting the most salient environmental happenings in a particular city or state. The organization would specialize in understanding what matters most to its audiences while pulling most, if not all, of its issue-specific expertise from Solution Organizations in its network. This collaboration could eventually lead to the aggregation of civic engagement opportunities, shifting fluidly from one campaign to another based on opportunity and audience interest.
Solution-Coordinating Networks help organizations with different solutions collaborate and target their different approaches on a particular issue. Forest campaigns, for example, might connect one group’s legal strategies with others’ public outreach and land acquisition work in a coordinated push for protection in a particular area. These types of solution networks typically take the form of short-term collaborations and account for the bulk of multi-organization campaigns in the environmental movement today.
Solution-Sharing Networks share knowledge and resources related to a particular solution to environmental problems. These networks tend to be geographically dispersed to minimize competition over resources. In some cases, the network is hub-like with the bulk of the expertise and innovation occurring in one centralized location. In others, the network is more peer-like with expertise shared in a more distributed fashion across organizations.
Resource Organizations are already pulling together loose outsourcing networks in which they supply needed expertise and resources to a variety of environmental organizations. ONE/Northwest works within this type of network, building skills and resources that can be distributed cost effectively through the Pacific Northwest environmental movement. Resource Organizations play a critical role in knitting the movement as a network. These organizations also need to be better networked to one another in order to provide clients with holistic and integrated services.

Network Building: The kinds of shifts in organizational behavior outlined in Movement as Network will not be easy. Entrenched ways of thinking and the sheer scale of the changes will lead many to conclude it is unrealistic and cannot be done. And yet, deep down inside we know that something is not right. We see that despite all its advances over the past quarter century, environmental protection is still dangerously dependent on short-term shifts in the political and economic climate. True and lasting environmental protection depends upon building a society that thrives in harmony with the natural world and this level of impact requires integrating environmental concerns into the fabric of society at a much deeper level than exists today. Working harder doesn’t get us there by itself. We need new models and new approaches. ONE/Northwest’s work over the next decade is focused on building the infrastructure, tools and strategies necessary to bring these new approaches into reality.

Guidelines For Using CSS In Email Newsletters

sknox — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:24:17 GMT

Email newsletters are more popular than ever, and everyone loves to design a rich website-like newsletter for their subscribers. Unfortunately, email isn't the web. Your beautiful design work might look great in one email program, but chances are when you look at the same work a different email program the results will not be the same.

Why? In a nutshell, some email clients are moving away from full CSS support. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the technology that allows for modern, powerful, flexible website designs. (If you don't know what CSS is or how to use it, chances are the rest of this article isn't for you -- but show it to your email newsletter designer!)

As of early 2007, Gmail is the most restrictive as it will ignore all external and embedded style sheets. (It will support inline styles.) Worse, Microsoft's just-released Outlook 2007 actually takes a few big steps backwards in its CSS support. (Check out Campaign Monitor's article for the shocking lowdown!) For this reason, we consider compatability with Gmail to be the baseline CSS support to design to. If it looks great in Gmail, chances are, it will look great in most other clients.

Even with inline styles, there are some restrictions. Fortunately, deprecated tag attributes will fill the role of certain disabled inline styles.

So here are ONE/Northwest's guidelines for creating successful email newsletters that will look good even in the worst email clients. We don't mention much about design aesthetics, just coding practices that will succeed in all environments. (For testing, we used Gmail, Outlook 2003, Outlook Web Access, Hotmail, and Yahoo).

Things To Avoid

Do not rely on external (<link rel="stylesheet">) or embedded style sheets (those contained within the <style> tag above the <body> tag). This is the most important thing to avoid. Many email services cut everything above the body tag and disable external style sheets.
Don't use javascript in an email newsletter. Ever. There's no better way to have your newsletter marked as spam.
Don't use tag attributes on the <body> tag (such as widths or background colors). Most email services ignore the <body> tag. You can try putting your whole newsletter inside a <div> and apply inline styles to it. Results may vary.

Things To Do

Use tables for layout. Lots of them. You're welcome to try <div> tags for positioning and layout, but our research shows that tables are more consistently supported. C'mon now. Get over your table-phobia. But do very simple layouts, avoiding lots of nested tables.
Use inline styles liberally in tables. In fact, you'll find you can get the best mileage out of inline styles in <td> tags. That way you are setting up little style regions within each table. Think of these inline styles as miniature style sheets. This allows non-technical users to swap content in and out of pre-formatted cells in a modular fashion.
Declare width, cellpadding, and cellspacing for all tables and table cells. Doing so will result in a fixed width for the template. This helps because most people will view a newsletter in a preview pane which is much smaller than the width of their monitor.
Test your newsletter by sending to yourself or colleagues. This will give you the chance to catch any problems before your whole subscriber list does! Send test messages to a variety of email clients such as Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail.

Images

Don't use background images. Gmail, among others, will ignore any url() attribute in an inline style, and the simple background= tag attribute. You can use background colors if you wish.
Don't use images for important content like calls to action, headlines and links to your web site. Outlook, Gmail and others turn images off until allowed by the user. If your entire newsletter is graphical, all your recipients are going to see is a lot of broken images.
Provide alt text for all images. That way the reader will see some content in place of the disabled images. This works particularly well for logos.
Declare BOTH height AND width parameters for images. Poor old Outlook Web Access especially needs this for your table layout to display properly.

External sources:

An awesome article by Xavier Frenette which lines out exactly which properties, tags, and selectors are or are not supported by various email clients.

A similar article by David Greiner which includes information about Macintosh

Campaign Monitor's Guide to CSS Support in Email

Campaign Monitor's rundown on CSS support in Outlook 2007

Update on DNS outage

jon — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 19:33:58 GMT

GKG.net provides domain registration and DNS hosting services to many ONE/Northwest clients (and to ONE/Northwest itself). On July 8th, beginning around 8AM PDT, GKG suffered a hardware failure that knocked them completely offline until around 2:30 PM PDT.

During that period of time, any ONE/Northwest clients who had DNS services at GKG had their websites and email services become unavailable. ONE/Northwest's servers were still up, but with no DNS service from GKG.net, client domains couldn't be resolved successfully and the sites became unreachable.

We offer our apologies to anyone who was affected by this outage. Downtime is never fun, and this was no exception.

DNS hosting is generally a very reliable service, and GKG has had an excellent track record over the past few years. Unfortunately, that solid record got a pretty big black mark today.

Here's what we're doing to make sure this doesn't happen again:

We're moving all of our clients' DNS records from GKG to a master ONE/Northwest account at ZoneEdit.com. ZoneEdit is an alternative DNS provider we've been using for a while, and we'll now make them our only primary DNS provider.
We'll also maintain backup copies of the DNS records on a ONE/Northwest-controlled server, so they can serve as a backup if ZoneEdit ever experiences this type of failure (very unlikely).

We'll be able to make these changes automatically in the background.

Sites we like that offer quality low-cost images

davida — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 23:43:08 GMT

A picture is worth a thousand words and thanks to many low-cost and free photo websites finding images for your site can cost you only pennies. Here are some great websites to scour if you want to find the perfect image for your website.

Keep in mind you always have to make sure you read the copyright information to ensure you are using the image as allowed by the copyright owner. We also suggest you make a note of where you got the image and what the licensing restrictions were when you upload it to your site. (In Plone you can add this information to your image description.)

iStockPhoto

An large and inexpensive stock photo library. http://istockphoto.com/

Flickr's Creative Commons pool

Flickr is photos and they have a great listing of photos that have the creative commons license attached to them. http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

Openphoto.net

Openphoto has a great assortment of photos and has the items tagged so it is easier to find an image by subject. http://www.openphoto.net

Rhizome Images

An exclusive collection driven by images of positive, negative, and alternative green concepts, the archive includes rights-managed and royalty-free images of solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, mining and general power images along with landscapes, architectural and botanicals images to name a few. A dynamic alternative to traditional big-box image libraries, the collection now holds more than 1,000 images. http://www.rhizomeimages.com/

ELATED ImageKits

These are images you can download for free to help you build your website. They include buttons, bars, animations, stock photos and more - all created by the Elated team. http://www.elated.com/imagekits

Photoshare

Photoshare is a service of The INFO Project helping international non-profits communicate health and development issues through photography. Images are for non-profit educational use. Their online photo database currently contains more than 13,000 cataloged images shared by colleagues around the world for documentary use. http://www.photoshare.org

Stock Xchng

A favorite around ONE/Northwest. They have both free and low cost photos available. http://www.sxc.hu

Mondolibrary

Mondolibrary is a quality image library, tailored to the needs of United Nations agencies, civil society organizations and public interest communicators, where you can find and download issue-relevant photos for your website or publications. Becoming a member is free. http://www.mondolibrary.net/

LuckyOliver

LuckyOliver is a community of photographers, designers and artists who buy and sell stock photos. Our stock photos and illustrations are high quality, low cost and legal. http://www.luckyoliver.com

Dreamstime.com

At Dreamstime.com you can find a large variety of royalty-free stock images. http://www.dreamstime.com

Video from Email Crafting and Best Practices Workshop

tiffany — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:16:32 GMT

We had a great turn out for our Email Crafting and Best Practices workshop--thank you to our speakers and to the brave folks who let us dissect their emails. If you want to check out the video from the evening, click here.

Salesforce Bandwidth Notes

schmittr — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:42:47 GMT

Bandwidth Required for Users

Salesforce.com is designed to use as little bandwidth as possible so that the site performs adequately over both high speed, dial-up, and over the air Internet connections.

While average page size is on the order of 90KB, salesforce.com uses compression as defined in the HTTP 1.1 standard to compress the HTML content before it is transmitted as data across the Internet to a user's computer. The compression often reduces the amount of transmitted data to as little as 10KB per page viewed due to the lack of image content. The site was designed with minimum bandwidth requirements in mind, hence are extensive use of color coding instead of images. Our average user also is known to view roughly 120 pages from our site per day.

Our application is stateless, therefore, there are no communication requirements in the background once the page loads like traditional client server applications e.g. Outlook. Therefore once the page loads there are no additional bandwidth requirements till a user queries or writes information to salesforce.com.

In practice we have found the bandwidth requirements for other commonly used programs place a much higher demand on Internet bandwidth. We have found through working with our customers that email (business & personal), email attachments, News, streaming video, stock update, place a much greater strain on the available bandwidth. We recommend the customer measure all activities to make sure they are evaluating a holistic demand on their network services. For example, is the Account Executive sending a 7MB marketing brochure or PowerPoint presentation to a customer.

The application of the formula "Peak bandwidth/number of users = average bandwidth per user" does not accurately portray the average bandwidth usage by the average user at salesforce.com. Salesforce.com handles considerably more transactions per second in aggregate from all our customers than any one individual customer would see from their end (since not all users would be actively loading pages simultaneously).

In short, it is difficult to specify customer bandwidth because of the nature of the Internet and individual corporate usage. Network latency, peering issues, bandwidth at upstream providers, users using their Internet connections for other use besides salesforce.com, etc. all affect the perceived performance of the connection and the amount of bandwidth required to keep performance adequate.

However we have had some success in understanding customer's requirements by considering the number of users, the think time between transactions and the average response time.

Bandwidth = P * U / ( T + R)

P = Average page size in Kilobits as opposed to kilobytes - This conversion is necessary as bandwidth is measured in bits and not bytes (8 bites to a byte). The average salesforce.com page size when compressed is typically in the range 10 Kilobytes - 20 Kilobytes or 80 kilobits - 160 kilobits. The midpoint is 120 Kilobits.
U = Number of logged on users, assume a concurrent logged in rate of 50 - 75% of user community.
T = User think time between transactions in seconds, typically figures here range from 10 seconds - 40 seconds in call center/service environments to 120 seconds - 300 seconds in sales environments
R = Average response time in seconds, use an average of 1 - 2 seconds per page refresh

For example:
Salesforce.com deployment of 80 users with 75% of the users concurrently logged in with a think time between transactions of 2 minutes:
Avg Bandwidth = 120 * 60 / ( 120 + 2 ) = 59 Kbits/sec

In a sales environment an active user would typically conduct around 15 - 20 transactions per hour.

HTTP 1.0 versus HTTP 1.1
Typical web pages (a HyperText Markup Language (HTML) document), contain many embedded objects - today twenty or more embedded objects are quite common. The large number of embedded objects represents a change from the environment in which the Web transfer protocol, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) was originally designed.

As a result, HTTP/1.0 handles multiple requests from the same server inefficiently, creating a separate TCP connection for each object. Each of these is an independent object and retrieved (or validated for change) separately. The common behavior for a web client, therefore, is to fetch the base HTML document, and then immediately fetch the embedded objects, which are typically located on the same server.
The recently released HTTP/1.1 standard was designed to address this problem by encouraging multiple transfers of objects over one connection.

HTTP/1.0 opens and closes a new TCP connection for each operation. Since most Web objects are small, this practice means a high fraction of packets are simply TCP control packets used to open and close a connection. Furthermore, when a TCP connection is first opened, TCP employs an algorithm known as slow start. Slow start uses the first several data packets to probe the network to determine the optimal transmission rate. Again, because Web objects are small, most objects are transferred before their TCP connection completes the slow start algorithm. In other words, most HTTP/1.0 operations use TCP at its least efficient. The results have been major problems due to resulting congestion and unnecessary overhead.

HTTP/1.1 leaves the TCP connection open between consecutive operations. This technique is called "persistent connections," which both avoids the costs of multiple opens and closes and reduces the impact of slow start. Persistent connections are more efficient than the current HTTP 1.0 practice of running multiple short TCP connections in parallel. NOTE: These persistent connections are only open for the duration of the page load � they do not remain open in the background.

HTTP/1.1 also enables transport compression of data types so those clients can retrieve HTML (or other) uncompressed documents using data compression; HTTP/1.0 does not have sufficient facilities for transport compression.

The following study showed that aggressive use of additional compression could save almost 40% of the bytes sent via HTTP:

Jeffrey C. Mogul, Fred Douglis, Anja Feldmann, and Balachander Krishnamurthy.
Potential benefits of delta encoding and data compression for HTTP.
In Proc. SIGCOMM '97 Conference, pages 181-194, Cannes, France, September 1997. ACM SIGCOMM.

Therefore we recommend at all times our customers use browsers that adhere to the HTTP 1.1 standard as it creates a number of efficiencies while using our service.

Relevant Solutions:
Use HTTP 1.1 through proxy connections:
https://na1.salesforce.com/501300000000grZ

Moment Stories and Movement Stories: Four Rules for Effective Email Alerts

jon — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:11:25 GMT

Ever wonder just how organizations like MoveOn structure their email alerts to make them as effective as possible? At a 2008 New Organizing Institute training in San Francisco, Ben Brandzel, former MoveOn.org Advocacy Director provided the following four rules for effective email alerts. ONE/Northwest staffers Drew Bernard took notes and adapted his talk into this text. Any wisdom is Ben's; any mistakes are ours.

Rule #1: Cut the fat

Keep alerts short and think like a reporter: put the most important stuff up top. Get rid of the wordy, patronizing "happy talk" that we all tend to start articles with. See Jakob Nielsen's article "Writing Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace" for more.

Rule #2: Track what works

Pay very close attention to what works and what doesn’t work. If an alert fails, don’t just assume it was an anomaly, figure out what was wrong with it and make the next one better.

Rule #3: Include a "Moment Story"

The first section of your email alert, before the action link, should be a Moment Story, which consists of three elements:

The “Cris-i-tunity”: a combination of crisis and opportunity: usually a reflection of something in the media or the opportunity for the campaign.
Reader-focused theory of change (RFTC): a chain of events that begins with the reader and ends with the crisis being happily resolved or opportunity has been achieved. Ask yourself, "Am I telling a story about a chain of reaction that leads to success."
The Ask: the first action that will trigger the chain of events that you have just outlined in your reader-focused theory of change that will resolve the cris-i-tunity

The last thing to do is to look for weak spots. You may find that some of it may be a stretch for your readers. Some of it may not seem realistic or credible. Edit until it does.

For example: Bush won’t actually back down on his global warming platform even if we flood him with emails. You might want to include a historical example. If you identify a weak spot in your RFTC to back up your point, then you might need to re-think your whole approach because it may not be compelling enough.

Rule #4: Include a "Movement Story"

The "Movement Story" is the part of your email in which you (briefly) recount the story of the movement that brought us to this opportunity for action.

The moment story draws you in; the movement story is what is going on. Tell stories about what is going on and how we got to this moment. Reflect back on the organization. Be specific in the story you are telling. Give people a story of success and that we are growing and getting better.

People often like to start their emails with the movement story. This is natural, but wrong! Move it below the action link.

"The Wired Wealthy" - Great Report!

jon — Fri, 16 May 2008 18:17:43 GMT

In March 2008, Convio, Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research released a report titled, "The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect with Your Middle and Major Donors." We think it's one of the most interesting, actionable pieces of online fundraising research we've ever read. If you're part of our world, you need to read this report.

Here's a quick snippet from the intro:

The wired wealthy are by definition engaged online and are generous givers. A closer look at demographics and practices adds some useful details.

First, they are very generous givers. Wired wealthy say they give an average of $10,896 each year to various causes, with a median gift of $4,500. And they are notably wealthy. More than twenty-five percent (25%) have household incomes above $200,000 per year. More than half have annual household incomes above $100,000.

Of the 13 participating charities and nonprofits that provided additional data, on average, high dollar donors make up about one percent (1%) of their records (high dollar defined as giving a cumulative total of $1,000 or more to the partner organization in an 18-month period). While small in numbers of people, that one percent (1%) is responsible for an average of thirty-two percent (32%) of the organization’s total dollars raised. Partner organizations reported having, on average, email addresses for twenty-five (25%) of their $1,000+ donors.

Demographically, wired wealthy are predominantly baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), with the center of gravity falling right in the middle of the baby boom cohort. And, they are extremely wired. They have been using the Internet for an average of 12 years. They are online an average of 18 hours per week. They know their way around the Web. They do their banking and bill paying online. They read the news online. They make purchases online. And, of course, most make charitable contributions online.

The wired wealthy have dabbled in various social networks and so-called "Web 2.0" venues, but do not appear to be among the heaviest adopters. One exception may be YouTube – more than half of wired wealthy respondents have watched at least one video. A quarter of this group at least occasionally read blogs. Perhaps predictably, Facebook and MySpace do not represent fertile hunting grounds to find or engage the wired wealthy.

Campaign Season and Technology Notes

tiffany — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:03:43 GMT

ONE/Northwest Program Manager Jon Stahl captured notes from our event on Campaign Season and Technology on his blog.

Here's a copy of them:

[18:00] I’m liveblogging from the event ONE/Northwest is hosting tonight, titled “Political Campaigns and Technology.” We’ve got about 50 people in our office here in Seattle, gathered together for a fast-paced peer-to-peer learning session in which we’re going to explore the various ways that political campaigns are using technology to build and sustain relationships, and what nonprofit activist organizations can learn from the fast-paced world of political campaigns.

Gideon Rosenblatt — ONE/Northwest Executive Director

Gideon is welcoming people, explaining the concept, how it relates to our work. We’ll have three speakers, followed by some group discussion and general socializing.

Karen Uffelman — ONE/Northwest Program Manager

Questions to audience:

In the last 12 months, how many have seen a candidate website? Lots
How many have been contacted by a candidate? Lots
How many have taken action on behalf of a candidate? Lots
How many would have 4 years ago? Lots (!)

[18:05] Karen: dramatic changes in how candidates are using technology. Karen posed several discussion questions for people to consider in small groups, which they are now doing…

[18:10] Report outs:

Group one:

What’s the most innovative use of interactive media you’ve seen this campaign season?

Viral videos used to hold candidates accountable for what they’re saying

Group two:

Have candidates lost control of their message because of new media?

Yes, but some campaigns have done a better job than others at using new media to get their messages out there. The technology itself is beginning to shape how candidates present themselves and their communications style. Think that Obama is less concerned with controlling events, more focused on explaining things as they occur. George Allen’s “macaca” video is an extreme example of loss of control. Control models are going to work less and les in the future.

Group three:

Have candidates lost control of their message because of new media?

You can’t control what people say about you online. The blogosphere has some tendency towards self-correction, though. Retractions and debunkings can happen very quickly.

Most innovative use of interactive media?

Email from Obama campaign: you’ve donated before, would you like to match a first-time donor? Can send personal message to the first-time donor, and they can respond to you. Very gratifying way to make a small personal connection with a fellow supporter.

Group four:

We talked mostly about the “relentlessness” of the Obama campaign’s online organizing work this year. In 2004, seemed more episodic than continuous. Lots more use of video from candidates; e.g. video of Obama on his donation page. Very slick.

Group five:

We talked about some of the tools we’ve seen on Facebook and their longer-term potential. How social networking has been used as a fundraising tool, ability to raise money very quickly. Rapid response of Ron Paul campaign around specific issues. Blast updates vs. segmentation.

Group six:

Increased turnout of youth vote during primary cycle. Challenge ahead is how to translate election excitement downballot and to ongoing long term issues. How can we get people to care about the fights that follow. League of Young Voters Facebook application attempts to find people through the campaign opportunity, get a sense of issue priorities as well.

Group seven:

Unexpectedly viral things. Change in tone of campaign emails from “donate now” to fake(?) insider emails. New phonebanking tools. Washington Trails’ experience creating a small Facebook application.

[18:25] Three Speakers

Brett Horvath - Your Revolution

A new nonpartisan nonprofit.

Show of hands: who has a Facebook account? (Many) Who actively uses it? (Few)

Your Revolution: building a Facebook app focused on voter registration. Hope to scale up voter registration efforts by leveraging the reach of the Facebook platform.

What differentiates Facebook from other social networking platforms: Facebook is a “social utility” that allows people to actively do things. Some stats about rapid growth of Facebook.

Massive protest in Colombia, organized via Facebook. Something different is going on here that’s not going on elsewhere.

Big difference between a website and a web presence. Facebook gives you access to lots of people who are already nearby and comfortable consuming information there.

Obama online: my.barackobama.com — allows users to self-organize, plan events, build groups. Houe parties, fundraisers, phonebanking etc. All outside of the control of the campaign.

Quick rundown of Your Revolution features:

Register to vote from within Facebook
Tell you which of your friends are registered to vote
Send a reminder/invite to your friends to get them to register to vote — peer pressure!
Ask about issue interests during process
Connect you with groups that are working on what you’re interested in.

Your Revolution gives nonprofits some collaboration and project management tools for their constituents.

Working with students to bring online voter registration to states around the nation (!) (Now: WA and AZ are the only two states that allow it, but Rock The Vote has technology for generating paper forms online.)

Questions for Brett:

Q: What kinds of privacy safeguards are there? How exposed is your personal information?

A: You can control how much info people see on Facebook. Your Revolution doesn’t keep or use any data from FB.

Q: Is hard to get off of Facebook?

A: Actually, yes. Hard to fully delete all of your profile information. This is generally pretty true of anything you put on the internet these days.

Q: How do you prevent voter reg. fraud?

A: Require valid drivers license info, which is verified by Secretary of State.

[18:50] George Chung - Win/Win Network

How Democratic Party technology has trickled down to interest groups.

An example: anti-immigrant ballot measures in Washington in recent years. Hard to defeat hot-button ballot initiatives like this. Insight: find all the people who voted against a previous anti-affirmative action initiative. Problem: it was virtually impossible to find, and we had to start from scratch. A “learning moment.” Each campaign should build long-term organizing capacity, win or lose.

Democratic political campaigns have consolidated their voter file databases and interfaces. Catalist, Voter Activation Network are two companies that were started by major Democratic party donors to consolidate disparate voter file, demographic and consumer data and then provide sophisticated applications built on top of that, e.g. phonebanking systems with real-time feedback. Trickling down to state parties and the precinct captain level.

Campaigns don’t end when the election is over. Then we go to elected officials and push for policy change. More thinking about cycles of accountability. Elections are means to policy ends.

Win/Win Network - started by Washington Progress Alliance. Goal is to defragment progressive issue communities at the state level so that we can work more powerfully together. Shared services, e.g. voter mobilization tools from Catalist/VAN.

[19:00]

Q: Doesn’t sharing of names among organizations like this pretty much amount to spamming people without their permission and run the risk of inundating people?

A: Learning from the work the environmental community has done here, how to get the word out without violating permission. We don’t actually share emails among groups.

[19:15] Steve Andersen - ONE/Northwest

I work on CRM systems for environmental groups. Constituent Relationship Management. Technologies and techniques for helping organizations develop relationships with their supporters. Companies use CRM to sell stuff. Nonprofits use it to build power. We use Salesforce.com as our main CRM tool; it’s not nonprofit-specific… it’s used by businesses, political campaigns, and nonprofits.

Four very quick demonstrations of how political campaigns use CRM.

1) Raising money…

… and reporting on that fundraising. A core component of any CRM system, but also one of the least interesting. Moving on…

2) Managing speaking opportunities

Candidates need to keep track of where they and their surrogates are going to appear, from a huge field of opportunities and possibilities. Nonprofit activists have the same problem. We’re currently working with Van Jones of the Ella Baker Center on a system for managing hundreds of speaking requests per month.

3) Influencing key decision makers

e.g. Superdelegates and precinct leaders. (Or, after the election, running issue campaigns for nonprofits). Quick demonstration of a system we built for Futurewise to track their success at influencing regulatory decisions around land-use. The same model can also be used to track efforts to secure endorsements for a candidate. Track decision makers, people & organizations who influence those decision-makers, whether they support or oppose us. Campaigns to our members who relate to that decisionmaker. Share all of this data with the campaign team.

4) Media tracking

How to keep track of all the blogs, viral video and online news coverage that campaigns are getting? Can’t just follow three networks and a few newspapers anymore. Quick demo of a media tracking tool we built for Futurewise. Media clips are connected to decision campaigns (above). Simple bookmarklets make it fast and easy to save items that you find in your web surfing.

“We haven’t had the need to clip YouTube videos for very long.”

Salesforce lets us build little tools like this really quickly. Took us about an hour to be able to clip & watch YouTube inside of YouTube.com.

[19:25] Questions

Q: Can you spit back out stuff that you capture?

A: We can get stuff back out through Salesfore’s APIs and show it via a website to the public, or pull it into an email message.

Q: Can data be linked to projects? Groups of people that might take action?

A: In principle, yes.

Q: How do you assess if an organization is ready for powerful new tools like this?

A: It’s hard.

[19:30] Gideon Rosenblatt - Thanks, Closing and General Hanging Out Time

These are the facets of a new kind of democratic process emerging. It’s all about putting power back into the hands of self-organizing groups of people.

With that, your loyal liveblogger went off to get a well-deserved beer.

Campaign Season and Technology

tiffany — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 02:53:14 GMT

From Ron Paul’s YouTube Channel to Obama's Facebook Page, the political season explodes with creative outreach and organizing using the latest technology and online resources.

What are some of the lessons we can take from political campaigns? What tools will live beyond the first Tuesday in November? Can strategies and tools borrowed from candidates make a difference on environmental issues like global warming and food safety?

ONE/Northwest has been thinking about the possibilities and we'd like to invite you to a join us in a conversation about:

effective calls to action
recruiting members, activists or actions through peer groups
managing information and relationships with existing and new constituents

Come share your thoughts with other smart people who are changing the world. We’ll have pizza and beer to fuel the discussion, a few speakers with specific examples, and an informal conversation on the possibilities that we’re seeing during this exciting political year.

UPDATE: Live blog of the event.

Online Social Networks Event Notes

jon — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 03:17:05 GMT

ONE/Northwest Program Manager Jon Stahl captured notes from our event on Online Social Networks on his blog.

ONE/Northwest

Writing Email Newsletters: Best Practices

Recommended Online Video Hosting Services

Recommended Video Hosting Providers

Free (i.e. best for nonprofits)

Fee-based (if you need a wee bit more power)

Action Alerts: Best Practices

Online Donation Tools

Caveats, cautions and curmudgeonliness

State Charitable Registration

Overview of the online payment process

Stratgies for enabling online payments

STRATEGY #1: OUTSOURCED PAYMENT SERVICES

Recommendations for U.S. groups

GiftTool

Network For Good/Groundspring

PayPal Donations

Democracy In Action

Recommendations for Canadian groups

GiftTool

CanadaHelps

More information on online donation tool providers

STRATEGY #2: BUILD IT YOURSELF

RECEIVING CREDIT CARD INFORMATION SECURELY ONLINE

AUTHORIZING CREDIT CARD TRANSACTIONS

CONCLUSION

Movement as Network

Guidelines For Using CSS In Email Newsletters

Things To Avoid

Things To Do

Images

External sources:

Update on DNS outage

Sites we like that offer quality low-cost images

Video from Email Crafting and Best Practices Workshop

Salesforce Bandwidth Notes

Moment Stories and Movement Stories: Four Rules for Effective Email Alerts

Rule #1: Cut the fat

Rule #2: Track what works

Rule #3: Include a "Moment Story"

Rule #4: Include a "Movement Story"

"The Wired Wealthy" - Great Report!

Campaign Season and Technology Notes

Campaign Season and Technology

Online Social Networks Event Notes