Avinash Kaushik is a prolific writer and speaker about web analytics.  Here’s a quick summary of some of the key lessons he teaches in two great videos that we’ve watched recently here at ONE/Northwest, “Successful Web Analytics Approaches by Avinash Kaushik [YouTube]” and “Authors@Google: Avinash Kaushik [YouTube].”

1) Web analytics should produce action

The cliché says that knowledge is power, but in the case of web analytics, action is power. Information, in a classical sense, is something that helps your understanding of a particular topic. In analytics, your data (knowledge) is providing you information to understand how to best engage your audience. Use it! If your site needs a change in structure to help users reach key pages on your site, make those changes. Don’t be afraid to use two metrics together to find data. The key in non-profit marketing isn’t to make your site as user-friendly as possible; it is to help visitors get to the “goal” content they (and you) want them to get to. Make sure that you can convert as many visits into goals as you can.

2) Allocate resources using “the rules.”

It’s hard to know how to allocate limited resources to web analytics.  Here are two quick rules of thumb:

• 10% of resources for tools; 90% of resources for people. Web analytics require a human to figure out what the numbers mean.  Google Analytics is free, and provides all the tool power that most nonprofits need.
• 80% of time for analysis, 20% for reporting.  Reporting is an important aspect of analytics, but reports won’t get you useful data.  Analysis is required to actually understand your data.  Reports provide numbers, analysis provides meaning.

3) Don’t let HiPPOs make your decisions

Avinash contends that the majority of decisions are made by HiPPOs (highest paid person’s opinion). Don’t allow this if you have data to that supports an alternative! While the highest paid person is important in a business (usually because they do have good opinions), data is king. Web analytics allow you to use facts to make decisions, instead of using hunches.

Drip coffee may be going the way of the percolator but “email drip campaigns” are on the rise, and for good reason. And this morning, before the coffee beans even had a chance to work their magic, I received a boost of energy that will likely take me through the end of the day.

Salesforce can handle email drip campaigns and trigger based email campaigns with just a little planning and training. Steve Andersen shows how it’s done in a little video on his blog.

I am giddy with joy about this one!

Thanks, ONE/Northwest CRM Team, for working out the details on this!

I am very proud to report today that the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (THE “IP” court in the US) has upheld a free (ok, they call them “open source”) copyright license [PDF], explicitly pointing to the work of Creative Commons and others. (The specific license at issue was the Artistic License.) This is a very important victory, and I am very very happy that the Stanford Center for Internet and Society played a key role in securing it. Congratulations especially to Chris Ridder and Anthony Falzone at the Center.

In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the
theory of the GPL and all CC licenses. Put precisely, whether or not they are also contracts, they are copyright licenses which expire if you fail to abide by the terms of the license.

Important clarity and certainty by a critically important US Court.

• Hybrid Vigor: Plone + Salesforce Integration - Andrew Burkhalter
• Collective Good: Best Practices for Creating, Releasing and Maintaining Add-on Products for Plone - Jon Baldivieso
• When Good Code Goes Bad: Tools and Techniques for Troubleshooting Plone - David Glick
• Cat-Herding for Plone: Organizing and Executing a Successful Remote Sprint - Veda Williams

What I really love about this line-up is that it draws from the diverse aspects of our holistic web consulting process: integrating best-of-breed tools; supporting open-source community process and solving technical problems.

The value for having a social networking presence, at the moment, is two-fold.  One, it offers a way to connect with constituents in a non-traditional format (with the traditional format being email newsletters) and let them connect with one another.  You’re meeting people where they’re at, instead of trying to force them to only use your desired mode of interaction.  This is one reason why most of the self-branded social networks have been a waste of effort.  Two, a social network presence helps build a spirit of community and sharing around your campaign, enabling continual conversation, and press, about what you’re trying to do.

One of the hottest networks as of mid-2008 is Twitter, a social networking and micro-blogging service that focuses around posting short, 140-character messages.  If you haven’t a clue what Twitter is, or have only heard about it briefly, CommonCraft covers it well in a short video.  In regards to using Twitter, most people innovate quickly enough to figure out how to use the tool to best fit their purpose.  For organizations, however, it is more difficult, largely because they don’t know how they should use it to advance their mission.  Some, if they’re not feeling entirely creative, just pump their RSS feed into their organizational account.  Unfortunately, I think most people on Twitter already know how to subscribe to RSS, giving this type of account low value add.

On the bright side, there are examples of organizations using Twitter to effectively engage audience around their brand.  In my opinion, @MarsPhoenix for NASA’s Mars Phoenix mission is likely the best example.  Thanks to Twitter, I received messages on my mobile about the first discoveries of water ice on Mars, as well as the finding of perchlorate in the soil.  I’m interested in following because I receive valuable, relevant content that includes a certain degree of interactivity.  With Twitter, the delivery mechanisms are diverse, allowing me to receive that content when and where I want, let it be through SMS, Twhirl or the web.  Two other examples I think are better than the rest are @ComcastCares and @PickensPlan, although the Pickens Plan appears to be largely about self promotion, and little interactivity, and I just feel plain sorry for Frank, the customer service representative at Comcast behind the Twitter account.  Sticking up for Comcast, and its questionable business practices, without losing your cool has to be one tough job.  Twitter, in summary, is about short, interesting, and relevant updates which your community can respond to and interact with.

Everyone, and I’m generalizing, wants to get money out of Facebook. From my point of view, the desired immediate use is for fundraising and, in my opinion, that’s not what it’s there for.  Once Facebook itself actually starts making money, then you should go in for fundraising.  Until then, Facebook Pages, Groups, and Events are the most, uh, accessible methods of connecting with and leveraging the power of your audience.  I would list them as Events, Groups, and Pages in order of usefulness, too.  Events and Groups have the capability to invite friends directly, as well as to message attendees or members, where as you can only “share” a Page with a friend.  Pages, as far as I’m concerned, are a bit like badges and offer minimal functionality.  Any update you send with a Page has low, ignorable visibility on the login screen.  Additionally, if your campaign is event-based, with Events and Groups you can send reminders for actions closer and closer to the day.

Yesterday, I learned about the ColaLife project from an article on WorldChanging.  The goal of the project seems simple enough, to urge Coca-Cola to use part of its global supply chain to help deliver medical supplies.  In many parts of the world where Coca-Cola has market penetration and a mature distribution mechanism, it is apparently still quite difficult for non-profits to ship rehydration salts, etc.  Wanting to help raise awareness, and get Coca-Cola to do something beneficial for once, I joined ColaLife’s Facebook Group and invited all of my friends to do so as well.  Granted, it’s up to Simon Berry and the organizers to use their expanding power base towards an achievable objective, but I think can happen a lot quicker on Facebook and other social networks than traditional email.  Viral may be overhyped, but that’s exactly what’s happening.

MySpace still has a huge active userbase, but I don’t have a clue how to use it effectively.

Flickr is for photography. If your campaign, or whatever you’re up to, has a visual component, this is the platform to conduct it on.  It has huge potential  I see an example like The Nature Conservancy, which is currently running their 2008 Photo Contest by having people add images to the TNC Flickr group and tag them with “PhotoContest-TNC08,” as an excellent way to build community.  Furthermore, if you’re asking people to submit images to a Flickr group, why not highlight good ones on your blog once a week?  It’s an easy way to produce content and you’re showing your audience that you do care about their efforts.

As one final lesson, simply placing a “ShareThis” widget should not take the place of your efforts in building online community.  It doesn’t work.

The hidden ninja in all of this social networking buzz, of course, is delicious.  Think non-profit search.  More on that later.

You can sign up to host an event, or search for events in your area.

Technically, the site uses Plone, wrapped around Radical Designs’ “Revent” service for distributed event organizing.  It’s a nice example of simple integration between two excellent systems to achieve a powerful online engagement experience.

A few technical notes.  This blog is powered by Wordpress, an popular open-source blogging platform. We’ve taken advatanage of quite a few community-contributed plugin modules, includng Draft Notification, which sends the blog admin an email everytime a post is saved as “Pending Review,” and Redirection, a simple way to create 301 redirects.  The end of 404 “Page Not Found,” too, we can always hope.  If you’re interested in the whole Swiss Army knife of plugins, you can read up and find links to them on our colophon.

Most of our long-form content will continue to be published on our main website in the ONE/Northwest Toolkit.  Both sets of quality insights from the ONE/Northwest team come in two individually packaged RSS feeds, powered by Feedburner (probably the best RSS analytics tool out there).  We highly encourage you to subscribe to both, as we’ll try to limit how much we cross pollinate between them.  The first, “ONE/Northwest,” will generally be low traffic while the second, “ONE/Blog,” will have more frequent, shorter posts.

Oh, and by the way, please poke around the new blog a bit. This is the “beta that must not be named”, and we would appreciate hearing about any UI quirks and hiccups you come across.  Plus, as fans of secret staircases, we’ve hidden a few tricks with more to come.

Once the idea of “online social networks” starts tugging at their sleeve, these are the unfortunate kinds of questions that nonprofits start asking: How do I reach new audiences? How can I get my message out? What will get people to link to me? What will get people to forward my messages? What will get people to sign up? What will get people to use my donate widget?

[...]

One way to find out if your organization is ready to pursue the opportunities of online social networks is to look at whether you’re a good citizen of the communities with which you are already engaged. Here are some good indicators: Do you skim and read what other people
are writing online about the issues of concern to you and your communities? Do you encourage your stakeholders, your leaders, and even your staff to write about those issues in their own voice, in their own blogs and elsewhere? In your own new media communication, especially on
your website and in your email newsletter, do you link liberally to places other than your own website, where interesting observations and conversations are going on?

If your answers to these questions are no, then no matter how much you may talk about online communities, you are positioned to fail. There are probably plenty of habits and pressures within your organization that encourage you to look for short terms gains, to treat communities
as means rather than ends, as channels (like a mailing list) rather than as networks. The genuine respect that is the key to success takes this form: First use your resources to build community and only secondarily use community to build your resources.

Timely and useful sounding subject lines get much higher open rates than generic subject lines such as “July 2008 Newsletter”. Why not use a subject line that draws attention to the content within that issue? You might even use the title of the first article in the newsletter.

In addition to a good subject line, also be aware that your from address is very important too. Many Email Service Providers allow for a “From Label” meaning that a person would see a name instead of just the email address itself. Example: ONE/Northwest is our From Label for the ONE/List newsletter, while the actual from address is “info@onenw.org”. It’s best if you can be consistent about using the same From Label every time you send your newsletter or action alert.

Moving High Country News from an aging, inflexible homebrewed content management system to a sleek, modern, maintainable Plone-powered site was a 15-month project that involved:

• an in-depth on-site discovery process
• a detailed “bottom-up” estimating process
• migrating a 15-years-deep archive of over 10,000 articles
• building importers to suck in data from HCN offline subscription management system
• a new look and feel

But all the hard work we all put in has paid off. The site’s launched and humming along nicely. High Country News is one of the best independent news organizations in the country, and now they have one of the best open-source news organization websites as well! We’re looking forward to helping it continue to grow and evolve.