Discovering new online marketing sources

A by-product of this effort to date (kind of unexpected too) is that I’m being introduced to folks in the marketing field.

Okay, introduced may be a strong word, but I’m at least being guided toward notable individuals with significant marketing experience who will benefit my organization’s work online. One notable is Katya Andresen, author of Robin Hood Marketing and Non-Profit Marketing Blog, Getting to the Point. She, along with Alan last month, recently wrote about my effort in her blog, even posted my responses to a few questions. Fun stuff.

I’ve also been reading as of late Beth’s Blog and Getting Attention, two more resources in the field. If there are others, and I’m sure there are, please leave a comment below or in the new ‘Talk to me’ section in the blog bling area.

Rivers: steeped in American history

This is not highly relevant to our website redesign, but there are a couple of things that I wanted to highlight with RiversandCreeks’ recent posting, Rivers in Art.

First of all, the blog post was written by American Whitewater’s Pacific Northwest Stewardship Director, Tom O’keefe. Secondly, it’s a great piece reflecting on a recent trip to Washington, DC - the post truly captures the social and cultural implications of rivers in American history.

And, lastly, what I’d like to mention is that aside from an employee writing about his relationship to rivers, the blog itself seems to reflect what I know about American Whitewater: they're a strong community of river enthusiasts.

I’m not sure how many staff members keep blogs in their personal time (or if the organization has a blog policy in place), but I was talking to Tom last week and learned a little more about their efforts online as an organization. Apparently, one person oversees the site and the community contributes to the development of the pages. In fact, there are approximately 300 contributors to the site. That’s a nice number of worker bees to have on your side to help out with the editing and updating of the various pages.

As a conservation organization first, I wonder how we can create a little more dialogue online with our community. And, I can't help but going back to the idea of something along the lines of a Riverpedia, similar to what Techsoup has done with their glossary.

I know we’re the expert advocates when it comes to rivers, but if we’re talking about Fluvial Geomorphology, wouldn’t we want the Fluvial Geomorphology experts to weigh in on the term?

Creating face time with your audience

Robert Scoble, the guy who put a human face on Microsoft with his blog Scobleizer, may not have been the first, but he did make blogging popular. Especially since he was doing it from the belly of the beast, cool stuff.

And let’s just imagine that the word Microsoft is interchangeable with Bill Gates (stretch I'm sure), but to the techie audience, I would suspect Robert Scoble is close behind.

However, for the environmental field, not sure who it would be, Robert F. Kennedy or Al Gore? Regardless of the face, I’d like to nominate David Miliband.

Who is David Miliband? Well, he’s the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the UK and his blog, David Miliband, is right on.

What a great example of non-sexy, government website that seeks public input while putting a face (literally) on the work. And in David's words:

This blog is my attempt to help bridge the gap - the growing and potentially dangerous gap - between politicians and the public. It will show what I'm doing, what I'm thinking about, and what I've read, heard or seen for myself which has sparked interest or influenced my ideas. My focus will be on my ministerial priorities. This supplements the existing ways of doing day-to-day business with me and my department.

Great stuff and maybe one day we can have departmental blogs that give our program work a unique voice too. I’d love to learn of more folks blogging from within, any leads or ideas?

Spreading the 2.0 cheer

I just read Steve Bridger’s piece, You’ve been promoted to “Buzz Director” (what, you don’t have one?), and found it very relevant to our website(s) redesign process. The post reads like a checklist and I’d definitely agree that certain shake-ups from within are key to an organization’s growth online and off.

However, I know there is a balance, but at what rate does one push, encourage, and nudge folks. Staff can probably attest to my proselytizing from within, but how much is too much (and do I want to be that guy too)? Sure, I want to go in this direction, but are we ready for it?

All said and done, I guess you have to pick your battles with the tools you use and the messages you permit to…um, let go a bit. And like most folks in my position, I’m always looking for ways to inject into the conversation additional ideas to present information and create an online community, but the opportunities are not always clear. My response: fabricate these moments by hosting a few brown bag lunches around web 2.0 to push some of the issues to the surface. So shallow, I know.

Our first one was last month and we basically introduced web 2.0. The next one is Friday, December 1, on RSS feeds. This should be interesting as it’s a laptop friendly event and we’ll go through identifying a feed, setting up a news aggregator (we’re using bloglines), and subscribing to it. Since most of the office uses Internet Explorer, IE 7 has made subscribing to feeds a lot easier.

Content inventory is complete

I started a content inventory late last week and I'm finally done—what an absolutely mind numbing experience. Our national website tally: 1,163 pages. Every page was touched at least once…possibly even twice.

My URL hand-crawl experience (and I feel it too) revealed the following:

• Over 800 html pages;
• Nearly 250 PDFs;
• 50-60 broken links;
• 25-40 word document downloads;
• Roughly a couple dozen photo album; and
• Less than a handful of video downloads.

This project took over 20 hours to complete. I just hope—aside from me getting a wee bit more intimate with our online content—that this is useful outside of the circle.

However, regarding our content and existing information architecture, I am more confused than I ever been. I would guess that over 90% of our pages have some sort of a past due date on them…which will require greater personal care and maintenance as we move forward with the discovery period.

A not so exciting, but necessary exercise

Late last week, I started a content inventory project (shoot me now) for our national site and though my left pinky and forefinger are nearly numb from the continued banging of the ‘ctrl c’ and ‘ctrl v’ function, I have to admit this is a pretty good exercise (discovered a dam cool photo page too) to become intimate with your web content.

And, really, what better reminder than a content inventory that LESS IS MORE when it comes to web content.

As the new guy to the organization (less than 6 months), I definitely didn’t have an idea of the breadth of our footprint online. There is a lot of stuff that is floating around on our domain name and I just haven’t explored every nook and cranny. And honestly, kind of feared it, but knew it would have to happen one of these days.

In an attempt to escape the headache (and added work time), I had the idea of turning this project over to our supporters in a wiki-like format, but it seemed to be more work to set it up than it was worth it. I also attempted to recruit a couple of able bodies internally, but when we sat down and talked about it, I ran into a redundant link issue.

I was a little perplexed (and it’s not completely cleared up either) with the idea of capturing the same link twice—mainly, how it can be avoided. See, our site navigation has a mind of its own as each region/program can lead you to another section, which may eventually lead you back to the starting place—or not. In many cases, the trail simply dies (e.g. PDF wall, page with two external links, etc) and there are no breadcrumbs to return home. And, not that one has to return home, but I believe that regardless of the entry page, one should be able to easily tell where he/she is within the site.

So, I’m following the leads of each section, thinking by doing it myself, I will at least have an inkling of an idea if I’ve been on that page previously, and that way I can stop before I get too far ahead.

I read Jeff Veen’s article and took his advice. Basically, I started at the home page, jumped on the top navigation, and begun diving in…link, by link, by link...by link. Some of our pages have 30+ links on them! Oy.

Anyhow, I’m capturing all of our html/PDF links and to date have roughly 450 completed. And I think I’m a third of the way there too. One toolkit alone had over 150 pages! For the redesigned site, we're shooting for 500-700 total pages.

Hopefully, I’m capturing every thing, but if you have any ideas how to speed this process up or what else should be noted on the spreadsheet, please let me know.

This is the information I'm currently pulling from the site:

Link ID
Link Name
Link
Content Owner (department)
Document Type
General Notes

Wish me luck. If there any additional resources that you’ve come across or tips from having gone through this before, please let me know. Thx.

New, new river trash photo selected

The right photo makes all of the difference and I think we found it. Disregard the previous post and implication that we settled on an image, because we found an even better photo for the National River Cleanup Week's flash introduction.

What makes this photo pretty cool is that there is an actual connection to our efforts; it was taken in 2005 during a cleanup by a volunteer (and/or supporter, employee, etc) of Friends of Coyote Creek. In fact, there are a lot of photos on Flickr pertaining to specific river cleanups (bodes well for us!).

I especially liked Tom's description of the photo:

An amazing assortment of junk collects in these rafts, swimming pool hoses, soccer balls, water jugs, juice boxes, beer bottles, soda cans, spent condoms, and anything and everything styrofoam.

...During the winter, trees fall into the creek and obstruct the flow. At the same time all of the litter along the streets is washed into the storm sewers and into the creek. The result is the trash rafts.

Fortunately, there are groups like the Friends of Coyote Creek who organize creek clean-ups and do creek maintenance to remove the obstructions to flow.

And fortunately there are folks like Tom who are active with their local groups. Thanks Tom as these words sum up the need for a LARGE outpouring of volunteer and organizer support in 2007. Stay tuned for NRCW website updates; it's getting to be crunch time.

River trash photo settled

The right photo to convey the right meaning is not always an easy thing to agree on. An understatement to say the least, but it’s an important process nonetheless.

It reminds me of choosing the right color of the paint for the bedroom, and though you might like a hint of yellow, your wife tells you that statistically couples are 75% more likely to quarrel in a yellow room. So yellow is out.

Statistics or not, the right paint as well as the right photo is key. For our national site, the top viewed page is our photo album, so images are very important.

We went back and forth with the leading trash image on the National River Cleanup website and I think we’re at a temporary resting place. Looks like we’re planning on keeping the original image [see above] but moving the photo up a bit so that the tires are a little more present, giving the feeling of trash instead polished rocks (i.e. Styrofoam).

This photo is from Flickr and is under a Creative Commons license with attribution, view it’s home.

Got the bot?

How do you improve your organization’s search engine ranking?

I worked for Away.com several years back and I remember coming across the term for the first time and thinking search engine optimization marketing was pretty obscure stuff. Not any more, and in fact, it's a booming business (read The Long Tail).

What I've come away with is that SEO is more of an art than a science and there are basically more things we can’t afford not to do. Leaving link farms and Google bombs aside (remember this is a non-profit, an ethical one at that), link reciprocity is still a must. However, trading links is not really the norm anymore and it's not that easy—why send folks off your page?

Though having our web pages linked from another site is still key, the competition has stiffened and the demand for dynamic web content has grown. Look at blogs, they typically have a good ranking, and wikipedia always comes up above the fold for me. Hands down, content is still king (bodes well for being in the mix and shaping the conversation online than the traditional approach of message control, don't it?) to reach new audiences, but what comes next? For me, this is somewhat of a gray area.

Here's what I know: Approximately 10-15% of our online traffic comes from search engines (and who am I kidding, 90% is from Google). But these numbers are nothing to sneeze at; the above percentage works out to be anywhere from 3,000 to 4,500 unique visits a month. And, if you break it down by our conversion rate, we recruit between 3 and 5 new supporters each month from search engine traffic—I'll save why our conversion rate is low for another day.

So, how do we grow our search engine traffic? Well, first of all, I think Google’s AdWords program is a good start and we are currently enrolled as a grantee. However, I haven’t been very good with the program given my newness and the growing demands of the web team, i.e. additional website redesigns. A big mistake there.

Secondly, create meta data for each page = language that only your website and Google crawlers speak. Um, I haven’t been that good with that either as most of our pages (so I believe) were created in haste and that information was not added.

Lastly, in addition to registering your website on all of the big search engines, introduce your sitemap to Google. To do so, I recently joined Google's webmaster tools and have begun to read the information that Google lays out pretty plainly on how we can best optimize our pages to be crawled by their bots.

Anyhow, take a look at Google’s SEO pages here, here, and here. If you know of anything else, or have tried something a little different that works well, please let me know. Or, include a link to an article in the comment section (you can also add it to my Del.icio.us page).

Unfortunately, I feel SEO is typically an afterthought, but I’d like to address it early in our redesign, so appreciate your input.

Our homepage header gets trashed

I've run this by some key individuals within the organization and the consensus is that this photo is not trashy enough.

Sure, there are tires and styrofoam products in the image, but it’s not that obvious. So, keeping in mind with what I learned the other day, we need to find a photo that contains a stronger call to arms for our national river cleanup website.

Though the trash in our rivers is plentiful (unfortunately), the right sized photos are not.

A couple images that may work are below, but this may take a little time and we’re starting to push the comfort level for when we would like to launch this site…first week in December!




Any of the above photos stand out? The bottom two of are from ShutterStock.com and the first one is a random image from Flickr (which btw had pages of river trash - there's even a group called River Trash). For the Flickr photo, I've got an email out to the owner to ask for his permission - I think it's the best one, but size may be an issue.

Google in reverse allows us to move forward

We’ve gone around the horn with the National River Cleanup Week registration process trying to find the most effective one-two combination and I think we’re on to something…a Google map in reverse.

Our challenge has been potentially plotting multiple 2007 cleanups on one river and all within the same zip code too. It's not too accurate and we definitely didn’t want to ask for the cleanup longitude and latitude, so we were stuck with finding the easiest and most precise way to capture an exact data point (2007 river cleanups) for the map.

The draft to date contains a blank map of the US and once an organizer decides he/she is ready to register, they go to the map and zoom in to the exact location and register—very cool.

I zoomed in (photo above) to my home in DC, then moved north a bit, and found the section of Rock Creek in Rock Creek Park that I wanted to organize a cleanup around and clicked ‘Save’. My coordinates were saved and I was then routed to a registration page that asked for additional, but necessary information. After that I got an email to confirm my registration (crucial authorization step) and then it’s up to me to recruit my cleanup volunteers, if I haven't done that already.

This seems to work very well and I really like that this gives the traditionally boring online registration process a little excitement and interaction.

Cropping photos clean for the web

The flash introduction to our National River Cleanup Week website looks great, however several folks who took a fresh look at it thought it was hard to tell that the photo of river trash was actually river trash.

I’m a little too close to the project, so I’m sort of useless, but more than one person mentioned the tough to tell river trash header. And that's enough for me.

So, we’re looking for another image, but we need a clean crop—a term I recently learned—and to further clarify PuffinWorks.com, our web developer, wrote this:

Attached [above] is a photo you sent me earlier that measures 500 x 375 pixels. I've outlined in red a crop measuring 500 x 100 pixels.

A clean crop is one like this that hasn't been compressed or changed in any fashion, but is simply sliced out of an entire photo.

We couldn't take the entire photo and compress it into this 500 x 100 pixel space or it would look squashed; likewise, we couldn't take this crop and stretch it into the size we need for your header image that is 770 pixels wide.

Thus, we've got to have a photo at least 770 pixels wide in order to "clean crop" a slice 770 x 230 pixels.

So the hunt continues for a good, clean cropped photo of river trash.

Google’s Sandbox is not the place to play

I learned a pretty big lesson yesterday. For one of our redesigns in motions, I’ve included the live link to the pages for folks to review our work to date. I’ve just learned that this is poor form.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been reaching out to various folks for their input and feedback. Well, with our work on the National River Cleanup Week taking shape, I wanted to share my efforts with our designer in Wyoming for his thoughts.

Over the last couple of years I’ve learned a great deal from PuffinWorks.com and have a lot of respect and admiration for the services they provide to progressive nonprofits.

PuffinWorks.com succeeds in providing nonprofits the technical expertise with a persistent 30,000' view. In my experience, either you’re a skilled developer or a keen strategist, rarely both.

Anyhow, when I shared my efforts to date with PuffinWorks.com, I learned of the potentially negative implications of making your test URL links live:

As soon as the Google bot indexes your blog, it will find the page links to NRCW and then attempt to index the pages. You don't want your NRCW pages indexed yet because they aren't complete--those may lead to broken links later if Google fails to remove them, which it frequently does, and thus you may end up in Google's sandbox--one of my clients just emerged after 18 months for a similar offense! Also, I will have to disconnect the form now; we don't want the public accessing this form because I haven't installed any security protections yet.

A fairly large bonehead move, so I removed any and all National River Cleanup links from the blog and from now on will only have screen shots. This blog is about sharing my experience and learning from others, but I don't want to bring down the house in the process.

Our first draft of 'the Google' map is live

We have a draft of the 2006 cleanup map. We're still addressing the issues noted earlier, but at least this gives us a great visual of previous cleanup efforts. Very cool.

Our primary audience is indeed the organizers, but we also want to attract prospective volunteers by having them search a cleanup in their state. This will be a second map and will allow prospective volunteers to find a cleanup going on near them as well as who to contact.

We just had a larger team meeting with fresh eyes and the feedback was great. The whole website redesign process is like peeling back an onion, corny but true. Basically, we're trying to peel back each layer, one at a time, careful to not jump ahead of ourselves.

I'm finding the trick is staying true to your layer, for example, addressing text while we're finalizing navigation is less than idea, but sometimes inevitable too. And, like many people, I find it hard to focus on one aspect when reviewing a new site, but this is important. I'm thinking I need to enter these conversations with more specific outcomes desired.

This means setting boundaries early on in regards to what we want to accomplish. Just an fyi to myself (can you do that?), but I've always found it hard to determine the best time during a redesign to solicit feedback. And I guess, as this blog hopefully attests to, earlier is probably better than later.

2nd draft: National River Cleanup Week

The second draft is complete. For this round, I sat down with our team leader and we went through the site, page by page. It’s not a big site, but took a little time to think about user scenarios.

Anyhow, we felt like the trash photo in the flash header was a little tough to tell that it was actually trash on a river. I've looked at it too many times now, does it look like trash to you?

It would be a little challenging to change it now unless we can find a “clean crop” photo (new language for me). Basically, not any photo will do, we need a photo that fits the header. Apparently compressing a photo to fit the 230px height doesn’t work. Dealing with photos is not one of my favorite web development activities.

We did away with the Contact tab in the top navigation and added it to the About Us tab. Other than that there were a couple of minor changes, nothing too big. The real crux here is the registration process: currently folks register and then once they confirm their username and password, return to the site and enter their cleanup details which will then be plugged on a Google map—cool.

However, there are challenges with that too since Google maps don’t necessarily work very well with a lot of data points. Apparently, Google is trying to fix it, but in the mean time we’ll have to use clusters. Stay tuned, hope to show you a draft of our Google map.