A call out to Designing Inward Out

Cool stuff. Alan Rosenblatt's blog, Dr. DigiPol: Caring for Politics in the Digital Age, had some nice things to say about what I'm attempting to do here. It was very much appreciated as well as his efforts in the advocacy field to bring folks together for roundtable discussions.

However, I do want to make it clear that though this blog addresses some of the changes within my organization, it is separate from the organization. My intention is to keep the focus on the process of a website redesign and not the organization. Thanks, had to say it again.

This is the stuff that I know about, but I'm sure there's more. Check out some of Alan's work here, here, and here.

Hungry for a Feedburner feed

Last August I visited Convio in Austin, TX, and asked them when they would fix their RSS feature—I could never get it to work properly. At the time, it seemed pretty shabby, but I don't think many clients were clamoring for it. However, to their credit, Convio addressed the faulty feeds.

For this blog, I wanted to test out Feedburner for our future web work, so I signed up and got the ball rolling—look down and to the right in the blog bling area. You can add the feed to your news reader / aggregator or sign up to receive new posts via email (a new feature that is very cool). And, what’s great about Feedburner is that I can track everything!

I was a little bummed that I couldn’t use this service on our national site since we’re working within a closed box, Convio. Anyhow, I just assumed we couldn’t utilize Feedburner until a friend said:

Mmm. Couldn't you just burn a feedburner feed from a working feed? In other words, burn a feed from a feed? If that makes sense?

Duh, perfect dorky sense—hadn't thought of that. Thanks man (you know who you are) and we're doing just that now, burning a feedburner feed from a working feed. Cool. I really want to track the subscriptions since our reporting metric indicates the Convio RSS link is one of the more popular links on the site—I find that a little surprising, but maybe we’re on to something here.

Do our supporters prefer feeds over email? Wouldn't that be great.

Being unprepared has a strong bite

From what I understand about our website to date is that it’s been largely reacting to organizational needs.

To a certain extent, this is expected as the web is the primary means in which we reach our audience(s) and typically comes in to play after some big event. However, as we move forward I hope we can become a little more proactive with our attempt to connect our supporters to new river developments.

For example, last week senior staff talked about how we planned to respond to the 2006 elections. We batted around ideas, but failed to come to a conclusion or a plan of action. We talked about emails, photos, quotes, and even video, but as time wound down, I ended up waiting until the very last minute to do anything.

On the morning following the 2006 election (still in a shocked stupor from the previous night’s vote tally), I realized that the web was not prepared to capture the events.

So, with about 30 minutes to spare before our president was to address the organization, I rushed out and bought a $20 microphone while my colleague downloaded www.audacity.com, free audio software. We planned on at least audiotaping the event, then uploading it to Gcast, a free podcasting service, and eventually posting to our site. We have no home for this on the site, but wanted to do something.

Well, it smelled of a disaster from the beginning. There were lots of folks involved and with an equal number of ideas, but no clear direction and many changes along the way. I already felt like I was backpedaling once the election neared and had not taken ownership of the web side of things. In the end, we added a homepage header, created “a letter from the president,” and sent it to our online activists. Not too bad, but it felt like a great deal of energy was spent after the fact.

I’m not a big golfer these days, but it basically felt like we hit the green with a low riding screamer; it wasn’t pretty, but in the end it worked. That’s not the way I hope we move forward with future web developments.

Wiki-ing for volunteer help

I can be persistent, and at times impatient, but I’m really jonesing for my organization to test out a wiki. There’s a lot of buzz floating around wikis (great podcast) online, and everyone knows within the organization that I’ve been proselytizing like no tomorrow, but can we take the leap of faith…let go of the notion of message control?

I’ve been trying to pitch various uses of wikis within, such as Riverpedia, Toolkitpedia, MERpedia, or and Outreachpedia, and though there’s been interest, I can’t land the kill. I’ve been putting on the hard sell and it’s got to be getting annoying, but I’m pretty eager to give it a test run outside of our organization.

My latest idea: dress up the wiki as a spreadsheet and ask for the public’s help to map out our national site’s information architecture (IA) by conducting a content inventory analysis. I’d love for folks to weigh in on this process (like, um, the blog here) and help us break down the pages that live on our site…the building blocks for the redesign process.

Can we really turn our visitors, online activists, and supporters into virtual volunteers—working at their own pace? That would be cool and it even plays in to Tim Reilly’s #4 core competency.

Web metrics: Crazy Egg vs. Google Analytics

We're testing out two different reporting mechanisms, but man they’re off. I really like Google Analytics and have been using it to gauge interaction for this blog as a larger test for the redesigned pages of our national site.

However, I’m a big fan of cross referencing web reporting metrics, so a friend suggested I try Crazy Egg which gives you the first 5000 pages free. And, along with that you get some pretty cool visuals, like a heat map. I love the thought of a heat map—sort of a poor man’s version of eye-tracking—to get a sense of what draws attention on a page. This is great for testing new designs and figuring out what is hot (no pun intended), but the trouble is that I can’t quite get it to work properly. Arrggh.

Fortunately though, boldly placed on the top navigation bar is the link, “Report a Bug,” so I did—which, btw, seems too well placed. Not sure what is up with the heat map as well as the counter, but visits reported by Crazy Egg are 20x greater than my Google Analytic visits. That’s a pretty big discrepancy.

And, I won’t even get in to Convio’s reporting mechanisms, yuck. Not that I know a great deal about manipulating data (though I’d love to learn more), I get the sense that AWStats kind of bites for drilling down for more detailed information.

It's a philosophy people

Tim O’Reilly’s list of core competencies that define Web 2.0 is interesting to ponder as we embark on a redesign that will be contained within a closed system, Convio. However, what is interesting to note and remember as we move forward is the fourth rule: Harnessing collective intelligence.

From our brown bag lunch last month, we were hopefully able to demonstrate that Web 2.0 is a philosophy. Though we may be limited—trust me there are many perks too—with our proprietary software giant, Convio; we can at least attempt conduct our redesign with the premise that everyone who visits our site has value to add. The trick, however, will be giving them the opportunity to do so in a clear, concise, and engaging manner. But I guess that's the fun part too.

Web 2.0 core competencies:

• Services, not packaged software, with cost-effective scalability
• Control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that get richer as more people use them
• Trusting users as co-developers
• Harnessing collective intelligence
• Leveraging the long tail through customer self-service
• Software above the level of a single device
• Lightweight user interfaces, development models, AND business models

Upward battle: our Alexa traffic ranking

I recently learned about Alexa and found that our national site traffic rank was 909,229. Ouch, almost wish I didn’t see that, but on the bright side of things, we can only go up.

I'd like to know of other ways we can measure our online footprint. I think this is an opportunity to take some baseline vitals early in our redesign process and and share it with others in the hopes of demonstrating growth online down the road...specifically, during our FY07 budget session (March).

I've got to begin creating some metrics for our work online if I ever hope to grow the program within the organization.

Some more cool stuff to know:
Speed: Very Fast (80% of sites are slower), Avg Load Time: .9 Seconds
Other sites that link to this site: 475
Online Since: 29-Oct-1998

To put our traffic in perspective, some of our ‘competitors’ are below:

• Traffic Rank for waterkeeper.org: 1,693,919
• Traffic Rank for rivernetwork.org: 1,277,101
• Traffic Rank for riverkeeper.org: 649,695
• Traffic Rank for americanwhitewater.org: 193,381
• Traffic Rank for nrdc.org: 57,977
• Traffic Rank for greenpeace.org: 7,326

This is also interesting; at of the people who have visited our site, they have also visited:

• River Network - www.rivernetwork.org
• Clean Water Action - www.cleanwateraction.org
• The BPD Water and Sanitation Cluster - www.bpd-waterandsanitation.org
• American Water Relief - www.americanwaterrelief.org
• EPA Admits Fluoridated - Water Harms Millions home.att.net/~gtigerclaw/EPAresponse.html
• Clean Water and Oceans - NRDC www.nrdc.org/water
• Citizens for Safe Water Around Badger (CSWAB) - cswab.org
• Clean Water Fund - cleanwaterfund.org
• American Whitewater - americanwhitewater.org
• Australian Conservation Foundation: Rivers and Water Campaigmn

Website rough draft: National River Cleanup Week

NationalRiverCleanup.org is beggining to take shape. We have a first draft of the site and will look it over with folks on staff this week as we're still shooting for a December launch (though November would be ideal). Our designer is still working on the maps, but at least we can start reviewing the existing page content. This will be a work in progress.

Discovery phase launched: survey to online activists

We met with Bemporad/Baranowski Marketing Group (BBMG)—the firm leading our branding and 'web look' efforts—again late last week to follow up with our online activist survey. Though we've had a session with BBMG early last month to gauge staff wants / needs, this will essentially kick off the user side of our re-branding effort.

We're shooting for a November 13th email survey to the targeted group—those who've taken action in the last six months—and will post a link on our website to capture the viewpoints of our traffic. (Btw, I saw Washington Area Bicycle Association do this and thought it was pretty cool—though it’s been a few months and I haven’t heard a thing. I read the blog daily too!).

Anyhow, I hope this will at least let the cat out of the bag that we’re planning a website redesign. The survey questions are below; are we missing anything?

PART ONE [Issues & Activism]

1. What is the most important U.S. organization that comes to mind when you think of the environment?
2. What is the most serious threat facing rivers in the United States today?
3. What would you most like to see American Rivers accomplish over the next year? Over the next five years? [Open-ended]

PART TWO [Perceptions]

4. What American Rivers focus area most inspires you?
5. How would you describe the organization’s greatest strength? What about its greatest challenge? [Open-ended]
6. If you had to summarize American Rivers in one word, what word would you choose? Why that word? [Open-ended]

PART THREE [Donations & Benefits]

7. In your view, what is the most compelling reason someone should join American Rivers?
8. What is the highest minimum membership level you would deem reasonable to join?

PART FOUR [Web Communications]

9. How often do you visit the American Rivers website?
10. Which section of the website do you use the most?
11. What content would you like to see covered more thoroughly on the website?
12. Of the following, what environmental websites do you visit most often?
13. Outside the environmental arena, which websites do you visit most often in general? [Open-ended]
14. In general, what do your favorite websites offer that American Rivers’ website does NOT offer?

PART FIVE [Demographics]

15. What is your gender?
16. Which category best describes your age?
17. Which category best describes your race?
18. Which category best describes your level of education?
19. Which category best describes your annual household income?

More blog bling added

I've added Designing Inward Out to Feedburner as well as included a 'Subscribe' link for those who don't have a news reader / aggregator set up. Very cool. And, as I'm continually learning more about Del.icio.us, I've added a tag cloud to the blog bling on the right. This will hopefully serve as a great resource for me (and hopefully others) as my organization goes through multiple website redesigns.

Spies = intellipedia, river movement = riverpedia

Currently, our national site boasts a glossary link, but it goes to USGS’ website. That’s less than ideal. And, one of better pages that define the various terms used in river conservation work is on a website that has been on its way out, restoringrivers.org.

The staff survey we did last month revealed that over half of my co-workers felt we do not speak to our newbies, first time web visitors, well. Not sure if a running list of river terms breaks down those barriers, but what if our river glossary was dynamic. Yup, a Riverpedia. That would be pretty cool. We could capture all of the terms relevant to river conservation virgins to the leading professionals—and the professionals could help us edit the list!

We’re already exploring wikis internally for document control purposes, but I really like the idea of exploring a Riverpedia. This would first of all allow anyone in the organization to add new words, edit existing ones, and / or manage pages relevant to their specific work. I really like the idea of decentralizing knowledge…as well as the need for multiple updates to be completed by the web team.

Techsoup has a new glossary that is a great example of how we could structure our Riverpedia.

New audio introduction added to the blog

Again, all of this is a testing ground for stuff we're beginning to experiment with as we go through our website redesigns.

The podcast tool I'm using is Gcast. They provides a free service that is extremely easy to use and one that can be done on the fly with a cell phone.

Interviews would be pretty cool. Maybe, I can chat with some of my co-workers as we go through the redesign process or better yet, some of our supporters - possibly even the design consultants, developers, and firms we're working with.

We have though begun testing the use of Gcast internally with field reports and we recently launched a Tim Palmer interview in our monthly newsletter. To date, we've gotten some pretty good feedback from folks.

I like the audio intro, but over the coming weeks I'd like to try a video introduction...in a van down by the river. I have no video editing skills, and in fact, have never attempted to edit video or let alone shoot video. But I'd like to learn as well as test out these.

Wiki, wiki, you're so fine...for spies?

I swear, this is not from the Onion: Gov’t launches a "top secret" Intellipedia system.

I see this as somehow reinforcing the use of wikis; albeit, a little scary when it comes to national security, but cool. Over the last few months I’ve attempted to spread the wiki cheer around the office. And, there have plenty of soap box moments—a little embarrassing in hindsight—but I get pretty excited over this stuff.

I think there is great potential for wikis in the workplace. Good god, with the amount of document trafficking we all do, wouldn’t it be nice to receive just updates? As well as cut out all the useless emails—I think 25% of my day is spent hitting the delete button.

Fortunately, I think some of it may be sticking. Every April, for the last 20+ years, American Rivers releases a report titled, America’s Most Endangered Rivers. It’s a big time suck for us, but an endeavor well worth our effort. Basically, it’s our trump card—we generate (and get) a lot of attention when the report is released. It has essentially become our biggest branding opportunity too. We see 5x as much traffic over a few days and reporters—not to mention groups too—can’t wait to get their paws on the names of the rivers before the report is released. Confidentiality, to say the least, is huge.

In fact, I just received the folder of the rivers who made the first cut, and it’s marked with a big CONFIDENTIAL stamp. After the proposals are scrutinized, the selection committee will narrow the list to eventually 10 rivers.

After that, we work extensively with our partner to gather more information, e.g. text, photos, graphics, etc. And thus, the challenge for us, is managing the flow of information. And all of this has to be done in complete secrecy.

How do we manage this process? We went around with a few ideas and wikis made it to the top the list, for now. Of course, when I saw an opening, I started pushing for completely opening the communication channels and creating a blog. Easy cowboy. Not smooth, so I decided to give it a rest for the last couple of weeks. But, I’ve decided to hit the war path again.

I’d like to lay on the offensive for creating 10 private wikis, one for each river. There are a couple of candidates, Wikispaces.com (we’re currently using a private wiki internally for our department), Jot.com (just bought out by Google), and Socialtext.com (just learned of it today).

Not sure what the best fit for us will be, but I’d love to test it out…like this blog, it’s somewhat of an experiment.

Flickr photo contest has been launched

An hour in and we have 6 members to our group - okay, three of them are either staff or friends, but nonetheless we're live.

No photos as of yet, but at least we're off with our first Flickr photo contest.

See our work here as well as the American Rivers group on Flickr's here.

Wish list: an interactive panorama

Click on the photo and choose a 'full screen' panorama, then drag the mouse over the photo to view the valley - cool huh?

This was just a little more excitement following up with another individual about possible things we could do.

We are an organization so visually deprived on our existing site, this would rock!

Why would this rock? We already know our online photo albums are viewed more than any other page on our site and the tool through Convio is not that good in the first place. We can make American Rivers so much more visual and interactive...baby steps though.