The showdown: feeds vs. email

This redesign process has made me hungry for feeds. I eat them in the morning, at lunch time, and at night. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) has definitely changed the I receive my information, attempt to stay on top of my field, and enjoy my momentary breaks at work. My appetite ranges from BBC world news to techcrunch to ZeFrank. And the more feeds I devour, the less I read the paper stuff: Washington Post, Newsweek, The Economist, etc.

I've even evangelized the use around the office, at home (it's a sore point now, don't ask), and with friends. As we're going through the redesign, I'm constantly thinking about how we can RSS-ize the experience. But how much is too much?

When I search our partners, there aren't many who are using them. But even those who are, I wonder how many readers are even subscribing to the feed. And does that matter? The eNonprofit Benchmark Study reported in March 2006 a 10% drop in email open rates for non-profits; could the growing use of RSS and desire to control flow of information be one factor for the drop?

I'd like to think, but I don't believe email communication will ever be replaced by RSS (shucks). I know Feedburner has the option of tracking feeds, but we don't pay for that service. I would however, like to see some statistics on the use (Anyone, anyone?). For us, 12% of our audience surveyed said they'd like more dynamic content/RSS and another 26% said they would like more frequent updates.

If 38% of our audience wants regular updates, I will assume the same 38% also wants a way to manage those regular updates. I'll consider these folks as our prospective RSS audience. Not a bad size, but then again 62% still want our emails. Jacob Nielsen wrote:

Feeds are a cold medium in comparison with email newsletters. Feeds do not form the same relationship between company and customers that a good newsletter can build. We don't have data to calculate the relative business value of a newsletter subscriber compared to a feeds subscriber, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that companies make ten times as much money from each newsletter subscriber. Given that newsletters are a much more powerful and warm medium, it is probably best for most companies to encourage newsletter subscriptions and promote them over website feeds.

This make sense to me since I rarely remember where my information came from, but regardless of the source I still want the information. However, for those who continually provide me with the most targeted, relevant information, I will remember you, you, you, you, and you.

News to use: quantifying the online chatter

Last night I attended a Drupal meetup at the Science Club where Development Seed (the firm at the Act for Healthy Rivers helm) unveiled a team aggregator approach to quantifying the online chatter.

Following on The Cluetrain Manifesto’s market of conversations theme, Development Seed announced that they’ve finished the beta work on "Managing News"—a new tool that allows organizations to track, manage, analyze, and act on news.

Don’t understand? It took me a few rounds to follow the thought process, but think of it as a clipping service on steroids. Though conversations are already happening online about our work, it’s our choice whether or not we choose to have a seat at the table. The team aggregator approach allows an entire team to monitor news together.

Sponsored by the World Bank and World Resources Institute, “Managing News” appears to not only allow team members to capture the conversation as it’s happening, but process the information as it comes in and act on it appropriately. So, it's a communication as well as an outreach tool.

Though there seems to be greater significance for politics and international companies/large NGOs, there’s importance for even us as a relatively small, niche environmental non-profit.

Currently, I believe our press secretary searches Google, Yahoo! News, and Lexis Nexis for the latest organization news, but not the online chatter (hope to work on that in the near future). If Time’s person of the year is in fact you, shouldn’t we be listening to the “yous” out there?

For our work, I think it would behoove us to know bloggers as well as folks making videos, recording podcasts, and taking photos on or about rivers. If Time magazine is on the mark, quantifying as well as acting on the online chatter will inevitably allow us to strengthen our message: healthy rivers, healthy communities.

Go, go widget power...for fundraising

In partnership with Yahoo!, Network for Good recently launched their charity badge to leverage greater personal fundraising power - check out the one I created down and to the right.

Just last month I received an email from a supporter who wished to add an American Rivers widget to his MySpace page, but unfortunately we couldn't respond other than a logo taken from our site and a hyperlink to our donation page. It's kind of lame, but that's all we had at the time being. Fortunately, Convio is working on introducing a similar tool this January.

What's also cool about Network for Good's charity badge is that the user can add a photo of their choice or a link to a YouTube video. The downside (I learned after having created a badge) is that I can't return to edit the content, but I'm sure that won't be for long. I bet there will be some pretty neat improvements as we enter the new year and a viable option for us as we move forward with our redesigned website.

It would've been very cool to have suggested to our supporter that he personalize copy, create a badge, copy a snippet of code, and plug it on his site. Hopefully, in the near future, we can offer this.

There’s also a contest that Yahoo! is running, check it out here. And to learn more about Network for Good's efforts, read Katya's blog post.

Brown bag lunch #2: Creating & Using RSS

I continued my RSS tirade in the office last Friday with our second brown bag lunch (see the first), Creating & Using RSS. My push is probably getting annoying, but again, if we’re planning on offering this service on our website, I’d like for everyone to know how they work.

We hope to do some cool things online and staff involvement will be key. And, it’s not just necessary for program staff; I think it’s equally important for development and finance folks too. Sure, it’s relevant to our outward communications, but I’d also argue for the importance internally.

Streamlining our in house communication is a big issue, like many organizations, companies, associations, etc. How we manage documents, engage one another with our individual work, and collaborate on projects will greatly impact our success conserving rivers (um, so me think).

I guess that’s why this redesign is a big issue as we have the opportunity to expose the entire organization to a few new communication tools. If the redesign is phase 1, then the next step for us will be addressing how we as an organization communicate with one another. I’d love to know what non-profits have begun looking at their inward communications as well as dabbled with the idea of blogging, wikis, feeds, etc.

Anyhow, more on that later, back to the RSS brown bag. Eleven people showed up (one caller) to the brown bag lunch. We explored many aspects of feeds from what they look like to how they can make us more effective communicators—or the thought goes.

The biggest and best ‘ah, ha’ moment was the realization that one can subscribe to Google News tags which translates to no more visits to the site or hourly emails. The message of the day: information control—you get what you want, not what is sent.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of confused looks…hopefully, it was a healthy amount of confusion. But sensing the 11 attendees as our new feed evangelists, I followed up with an email inviting them to a free lunch where I would come to their desk and create an account, identify feeds, and subscribe them to the feed(s) of their choice. I’m not above a food bribe, but beer may work a little be better (note to self).

I don’t have my 40-slide PowerPoint presentation in a web format, so if anyone is game for a read, just let me know and I’ll send it to you separately in an email.

I’m not sure what out next brown bag lunch will be, but thinking about wikis. Any ideas for our January brown bag lunch? Would blogs be a better topic as a follow up to RSS?

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.