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.

The website redesign holy grail

So, I've asked for it and now I'm getting it: ideas on how we can improve the website.

Today’s email:

This is a very cool tool and one that would be awesome to replicate on our website. Take the tour. Different things pop up as you move your cursor. Click on them and you'll see more details. www.riverventure.org/columbia/index.html

When I first came to American Rivers I was a little surprised how little pride folks took to their online image, so I made it a priority to create a little excitement over the redesign process—hence the web 2.0 brown bag lunch. And, what better way to do that than open the door to feedback, ideas, suggestions, confessions, etc.

And I’ve gotten some great feedback, but I can’t help but wonder if I’m creating unrealistic expectations. It's obvious I get excited over this stuff (just ask my wife about my wiki rants), but can there be too much of a build up? Basically, is the hint of the ‘redesign process’ creating a Holy Grail syndrome? Yes, sky’s the limits with what we can do, but there has to be some limitations.

The biggest challenge (surprise!) is probably money, then probably Convio, and lastly, ‘eyes bigger than our stomach’ feeling. Meaning, if we want user generated content, many may not realize how much backend work it takes to properly manage it. We don’t want to bite off more than we can chew with what is required to maintain a site full of bells and whistles - just because we build it doesn't mean they will come...the dreaded ‘field of dreams’ complex.

So, getting folks is excited is good, but what happens if we can’t live up to those expectations. Am I really advancing the ball here by rallying the troops? Yes, I want ideas, buy-in, and excitement, but what if our site redesign turns out to be less than what folks are imagining.

I guess that’s one reason I feel the need to air this process out a bit.

1996 - 2006: American Rivers Online

Wow, here’s a little history worth exploring:

Planning for the Web: American Rivers
A large river conservation organization shares the process they went through to develop a new Web site designed to help them achieve their mission of saving America's waterways.

Not sure how I stumbled upon this little nugget, but very interesting. This article was from April 2000, which by web standards dates it to B.C. Not to bore you, but American Rivers launched their first website in 1996. To put that in perspective, my first official ‘surf’ wasn’t until 1998 when I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Guyana (strange I know).

I like when Rebecca Wodder, President of America Rivers, said, “the site definitely grew out of the recognition that [the Web] is an important force at work in the world and we can either harness it, or get run over by it.” Amen, applies to today too.

Have we been run over? It's possible, but who hasn't blinked, coughed, or got distracted with something else and missed some aspect of the technology boat? Fortunately, there's a pretty big sweet spot to easily reengage.

And how will we look to launch our new site? I'm thinking we shoot to unveil our new website the same time of year as before. April, in conjunction with American Rivers' annual announcement of the "Most Endangered Rivers" list, would be a perfect time to 'wow' our audience and um, hopefully the staff.

You heard it here, April 2007! Who wants to place a bet on that?

Act for Healthy Rivers' course is set - so we hope

Though nothing is finalized, it feels like we're at least one step closer to choosing the direction of the HealthyRivers.org. (btw, healthyrivers.org = Act for Healthy Rivers)

No longer will groups pledge their support of 30+ things when they endorse Citizens Agenda for Rivers—slightly ambitious, wouldn’t you say? This was one of the earlier efforts to mobilize the river movement. All in all successful on many levels from what I understand, but the biggest take away for us was River Lobby Day.

Since then, the challenge for us has been how do we build on this momentum around one single issue, sewage in our rivers. When we sent the Request for Proposal out to 10+ firms in July 2006, we had in mind a website with password protected corners to serve river groups. As a resource to these river groups, we wanted to provide a platform for groups to share their experiences, engage one another, and most importantly, take action.

We met with Development Seed again last Friday to follow up on a conversation that I had with them earlier in the week. We went through a second round (review our first meeting) of what we wanted and what we thought we wanted from a site, only in the end to receive a little tough love—which we needed.

The fundamental challenge for us was balancing the altruistic nature of our intentions, river groups uniting to combat shit in our rivers, with the reality that most of Joe public isn't aware of the issue.

I searched Google News for ‘sewage spills’ and there were over 400 articles. October 26th's headline: “More than 2.7 million gallons of untreated sewage leaked or spilled from pipes in the Cape Fear region in the past year. Most of it ran into our creeks and rivers.” Yuk.

Anyhow, in attempt to address the need of creating buzz with a site that provides a lot of useful information, we're exploring two COMPLETELY different websites (because they are different audiences) for this particular campaign.

One being the subversive, if not childish, attempt at making this effort go viral, and two, providing the sound background information needed to justify the seriousness of our overall effort to organize river groups and provide useful information for groups to take back to their constituents.

But when this is all said and done, how childish can we be? Um, unsure at this point until we pitch the idea to senior staff. And have the Steering Committee get on board. Cross your fingers.

Post Convio conference wrap up

The photo has excitement all over it—nothing like a conference with 375 of my Convio peeps to elicit a sense of giddiness. But actually, it was pretty good.

On October 23^rd and 24^th, myself and 375 of my closest peers met in Washington, DC, for Convio’s first Customer Summit. Grant it, I wasn’t really looking forward to the 2-day event, but it surprisingly worked out pretty well.

A couple of interesting points to note of the changes on the horizon were 1) enhanced reporting (report writer) capability for clients, 2) benchmark reporting capability from within Convio’s client base—we can learn how we stack up to others of similar size and market niche, and 3) use of widgets for the finger on the pulse web 2.0 play—how many donating river lovers have an account with MySpace? Not sure about that one, but worth seeing where it goes.

I took a few pages of notes, but the coolest (like most events of this stature) part of the two-day conference was the interaction with folks in my position at organizations across the spectrum. I also seemed to add to my list of wants and needs for us to accomplish over the next month—primarily list growth.

For an organization of our size, we have a very small house file of usable email addresses. And, on that note, we’re actually going backwards—losing more people than we’re taking in through the online subscription page (though we recently overhauled the process—love the feedback if you subscribe).

In fact, our conversion rate is approximately 1%, while Convio’s ‘Environment’ clients’ conversion rate is about 4.7%. Typically 2-3% is considered good. We have some room to grow, to say the least.

So, I think the next step for us is to create a basic welcome email series for new subscribers as well just making sure what page you land on, you can subscribe to our monthly newsletter.

Cool, American Rivers PSA on YouTube

Not sure who did this, but very cool. It would be kind of fun if we could work with high schools, colleges, and/or universities to produce similar advocacy pieces as a part of thier studies. Love to know who made this and how it came about.

The PSA video could even be another contest...that is if we get past some of the hurdles with our legal team. We're currently experiencing a Flickr photo contest hold up, though hope to have it resolved by next week's newsletter blast.

Flickr - ing for our web photos

Growing up stealing was a bad thing. So were lies. But at what age does the line of thinking go from stealing to borrowing and lying to exaggerating?

I think I might have crossed that line pretty early and for web work, well, the term stealing shamelessly often refers to cool stuff. Why else would Joe public be able to view the source of a page? It’s got to be more than just the dork inside of you to giggle.

Soap box moment: good work should be shared. I know, spoken like someone who just stole, but its flattering, right? The Nature Conservancy has launched a very cool photo contest on Flickr...and now so are we.

On top of that we're looking to move all of our publication photos to flickr so that they can become more easily search, stored, and shared amongst staff and potentially the public. Photos can also be geotagged for that worldly view. And folks can subscribe to individual tags too. Check out the Flickr badge in the blog bling to the right. I've become a huge fan of Flickr.

The contest we're running will help us generate cool photos to potentially use on our new website, online and offline newsletter, membership calendar, annual report, and all of the other pubs that call for compelling river images. Very cool stuff that we're launching next week.

Ahhh, automation

After going back and forth for a bit, we decided to automate the registration process for the National River Cleanup Week website. It doubled our costs, but will hopefully save valuable staff time in the end.

The basic process entails an online form that collects the data fields listed below. Before submitting the form, the registrant will enter several characters from a Captcha box which prevents automated form bots from submitting the form. Upon successful submission, an automated email message is sent to the registrant containing a username (email address) and password (which allows the registrant to log in to the website later and update their data, if necessary), along with a confirmation link. Clicking the automated link in the message completes the registration process by validating the registrant's email address.

This process won't avoid false registrations entirely, but it requires a valid email address since the registrant has to receive the confirmation message in order to finalize registration. It's the best method if we wish to automate the entire registration process, short of an administrator approving/disapproving each registration (which is still the safest method but requires oversight).

As an administrator, we will be able to:

• review the entire list at any time and edit or disable a registrant's data.
• search the list based on various data fields.
• export the data to a delimited file for use with other software.
• send an HTML email message to any or all registrants.

Attempting to keep our registration form lean, we’ve reduced the number of items from a pretty big list to the one below. This information will then be used to populate a Google map for volunteers to search and find a cleanup close to them. Pretty hot.

Contact Name
Contact Email
Organization
Address
City
State
Zip
Phone
Cleanup Date
Cleanup Time
Cleanup Location
Estimated Cleanup Distance (in miles)
Estimated number of volunteers
Estimated number of trash bags needed

It’s hard not to feel we’ve somehow packed our bags, but have left something behind. Honing in on this information now, early in the development, requires a good bit of vision for the site…and since it’s a new site, to a certain extent, hard to imagine we’ve thought of everything. We won’t be able to go back and make changes to the registration process without incurring significant costs.

Somehow I still feel like I left my wallet at home.

Being on the right page

A friend pointed out that the underlying connection between my attempt to open up the web design process and the overall mission of American Rivers may not, by certain powers that be, be perceived as a good thing. Point taken.

His suggestion: add a disclaimer—which I did (look down and to the right). So, it’s my understanding other than here that American Rivers has never blogged before and though there are no specific blog policies in place, I just wanted to make it clear that this effort is solely my doing and not the organization. Taking it one step further, I've changed the URL from americanrivers.blogspot.com to inwardout.blogspot.com.

This blog, in its earnest, is the attempt to put my actions where my mouth is—I believe, and have been preaching internally, in web design transparency as well as the benefit derived from an open dialogue.

And for me personally, it’s a social media test to some extent. I won’t go in to the details, but read more here.

Rain Gardens

The buzz seems to be catching on internally. Thanks to Brad (National Media Director) and our first YouTube video, I think folks in the office are pretty psyched about the potential to engage visitors visually. Right on. Some other groups are doing it here and here.

Planting the 2.0 seed

With no idea what to expect, our brown bag lunch appeared to be a success. Folks seemed engaged, which is good, though I hope they left with a healthy amount of confusion and were not totally overwhelmed. Time will tell, but Page put on a great show.

For me, the most important thing that came out of the lunch was the emphasis that web 2.0 is a philosophy. Basically, it’s how we go about our work and may very well open some doors about how we not only collaborate with our partners, but how information is shared. There is an obvious connection between open source and non-profit work. Many non-profiters, live, work, and play in communities—communities being the essence of our work too—and the concept of adding value (or having value added) to existing bodies of work is very appealing. Similar to healthy rivers, open source platforms rely on healthy communities.

There’s a fine line here with too much information, but hopefully the discussion today was enough of a jumping off point to have folks explore some of the online tools, such as Digg, del.icio.us, Flickr, etc.

A seed was planted today and as we proceed with the redesign(s), hopefully I can come back and water it from time to time - cheesey I know, but true. The success of our online work may depend on it.

Convio Customer Summit

Next Monday and Tuesday will be interesting. The first ever Convio Customer Summit is being held in DC and new 2.0 tools are being discussed (released?), kind of psyched to hear what's in store—though I'm cautiously optimistic.

On Monday, I meeting our Convio consultant who will hopefully put us track. Our relationship with Convio has been fairly tenuous and I get the impression we’re a problem child who just hasn’t lived up to expectations. This is true, but historically there has been a little bit of unhappiness with our Convio relationship.

Recognizing our inability to perform to the level we’re capable of (very small house file and make little effort to raise money online), Convio is providing eight months (2-month of strategic development, 6-months of action) of free consulting services. A welcome relief with added pressure to put us on track and begin showing a ROI—which we desperately need to justify the gigantic cost associated with the tools. Looking forward to the event.

The artist formerly known as Citizens Agenda for Rivers

Our meeting two weeks ago for Act for Healthy Rivers started with the best intentions: provide needed resources to groups on the ground on how to stop sewage from seeping in to our rivers. Pretty down right professional, if not admirable, but exciting?

Shit in our rivers is a HUGE issue, but there is not a federal law to enforce notification. When it rains (for DC it only takes an inch of rain), raw sewage flows in to our rivers because of out dated sewage systems. And when it happens, no one really knows about it.

This is not like if a tree falls, does anyone hear it? kind of thing. Sewage overflow typically stinks, not to mention it pollutes our rivers, but if you swim, fish, boat, do all the stuff you enjoy doing on a river, do you know recreating after a downpour is a bad idea?

Basically, there is no federal law that requires notification of sewage overflow. Hence our effort to reshape the campaign formerly known as the Citizens Agenda for Healthy Rivers to one that is action based—Act for Healthy Rivers.

Thinking that acting for healthy rivers meant giving the tools to local/national groups for their continued action, we drafted a 5-page request for proposal. Sent it out to 10 firms/consultants and eventually selected Development Seed to lead the online effort.

Well, during our brainstorming—the one with good intentions—session, we basically tossed up in the air that sewage ain’t sexy. Wait, hold the phone, sewage has no sizzle? Surprise. That’s when were sidetracked with the idea of sending poop to Congress. Gasp, but hmmm.

We just received our “Meeting Notes” from Development Seed who laid out the two completely different websites—two different audiences too. But we can only do one and the idea of combining these iniatives seems like we'll only weaken the overall effort. Tough call, wonky site for river groups or viral-based action?

Option 1: Build a wonky resource rich website targeting river groups

Option 2: Build an awareness raising campaign targeting the masses

We’re meeting on Friday to discuss.

Rallying the troops with 2.0

I'm not sure if organizing a brown bag lunch for all staff on the hoopla that surrounds web 2.0 is asking for punishment or providing too much information?

Oh well, it's too late and I don’t buy either one. I sense there is not a great deal of pride in our website, in fact, when asked about the overall impression of AR’s site, a third of those who responded to a recent staff survey said they were a “a little embarrassed.”

If there is one thing that can come out of the year-long process, it’s that folks get involved with how we present ourselves online. And more importantly, begin taking ownership of some of the pages. Throughout this journey, one way I’ll measure my own success is by the staff’s level of investment in the process.

If that’s the case, the An Introduction to Web 2.0 brown bag lunch is step one.

In an effort to rally the troops, the game plan is below (lead by guest wizkid, Page Sands). We'll follow up with more practical sessions, but wanted to at least start with the 30,000 view.

An Introduction to Web 2.0: What is it and why does it matter? In this first of several sessions, we'll examine the basics of Web 2.0, the tools and technologies, and how they can be applied to organizations of all types.

An overview into the background and history of Web 2.0 including:

• software applications and tools (del.icio.us, flickr, mashups)
• blogs, wikis (both externally and within organizations)
• RSS and searching into the future (RSS, Bloglines, and Google News)
• tags
• motivations for use (free and opensource software movements + internally within organizations)