Resource Roundup 6/26

New Screencast: Web Analytics Demystified (Beth's Blog)
Another fabulous Beth Kanter screencast, this one about analyzing the performance of your website through Google Analytics. And I'm not just recommending it because you can hear my voice apparently booming out of a cave...

Three Strategies to Find the Right Email Frequency (EmailLabs)
Nice summary of how to decide how often you should send emails to your list

Video Editing 2.0: 8 Ways to Remix Online Videos (Read/Write Web)
Nice roundup of tools that allow you to edit online videos through an online interface

Mobile Phones and Social Activism (TechSoup)
Great article from Ethan Zucherman about the important use of cell phones in advocacy, especially outside the US

Chart of Social Media Behavior (BusinessWeek)
An amazing chart showing how different age groups take part in the social media world. Useful, and a fabulous example of information design. (tip of the hat to Sea Change Strategies)

MacArthur Foundation: Virtual World Event on Philanthropy (Beth's Blog)
Well, I don't usually post about SecondLife, but this is particularly interesting: the MacArthur Foundation convened a SecondLife event to talk about what role they should take in virtual worlds. Beth Kanter offers coverage in her usual thorough manner.

Show Me the Numbers: Can Group Fundraising Help You? (TechSoup)
A fabulous article that outlines benchmarks and metrics to help you know what to expect from a group fundraising campaign.

June articles up!

Our June articles are up on the site and ready for your viewing pleasure.

First off, we have the conclusion of Paul Hagen's two part series on Searching for CRM. Last month, Paul talked about the methods that can help you understand what you need from a Constituent Relationship Management system. This month, in his In Search of CRM Part 2: Searching for Software article, he offers some advice in the thorny area of choosing CRM software. Vendors may lead you to believe that there's good all-in-one solutions, but Paul tells you differently. And as always from Paul there's a nifty (and useful!) diagram.

Also this month, we have a great article about software and communication tools that can help in peace-building efforts - Building Peace Through Information and Communications Technologies - from Teresa Crawford, a consultant who's at the forefront of the international circuit rider movement, and Skip Cole, a Senior Program Officer at the United States Institute of Peace. Peace-building involves a wide variety of efforts, including helping people communicate, view information, make decisions, and understand each other better. Skip and Teresa give a tour of what's been done and what's possible.

Resource Roundup 6/19

Tech Briefing for Funders- with Estimated Costs! (via London Regional ICT Champion)
Report from the ICT Hub, making the case to funders that technology costs need to be support. It also includes a very useful table of what you should expect to pay for various technology products and services.

Using Wikipedia to Extend Digital Collections (D-Lib Magazine)
Really interesting article about a library that is integrating pieces of their collection into Wikipedia, to expand their outreach and drive traffic to their site.

Content-Filtering Tools Part 1 and Part 2 - (TechSoup)
Great overview of things to consider when thinking through content-filtering tools for your public computers.

Web CMS Kudos and Shortcomings, Circa 2007 (CMSWatch)
Mini awards ceremony for content management systems, giving great insight into what systems are particularly strong in a whole host of attributes, and which are lagging - as well as some interesting insight into how the open source systems stack up against the proprietary ones.

Monitor and Check Web Site or Server Uptime and Availability for Free (My Digital Life)
Great overview of services that will periodically ping your website or server and notify you if they're down, including thumbnail descriptions of 13 different free services to help.

Is It OK that Google Owns Us? (eWeek)
Detailed and nicely balanced article about the data that Google collects about us, what they do with it, and whether we should be alarmed.

Facebook Causes and Effects (Beaconfire Wire)
Quick but useful roundup of what nonprofits are doing with Facebook's new functionality that allows you to build your own Facebook widget

Do-gooders doing Google Earth (CNET)
Nice story about nonprofit use of Google Earth, with several compelling examples

Orchestras go online to reach new audiences and save on costs (Boston Globe)
Interesting look at how orchestras are using websites and multi-media to attract new audiences

Creating a data driven culture using Google Analytics (Beth's Blog)
Great case study of how South Hams CVS (a UK nonprofit) is using Google Analytics

CMS Deployment Patterns (Enter Content Here)
Useful, although technical, overview of a key consideration for content management on high trafficked sites - whether the content is rendered into page templates in advance, or on the fly when presenting it to users.

Choosing an Internet Service Provider (ICT Hub Knowledgebase)
A walk-through of the areas to consider when choosing an Internet Service Provider

Will Social Networks Change the Nature of Philanthropy? (OnPhilanthropy)
A look at how nonprofits are using social networks like Facebook, and their impact on philanthropy as a whole.

Last Chance for our Introduction to CMSs Online Seminar

Time's running out to register for our Introduction to Content Management Systems online seminar, which is TOMORROW, Tuesday, from 1:00 -2:30 EST. This is an online version of the workshop I gave, to rave reviews, at Third Sector New England - I'm excited to bring it online to a wider audience!

If you need a way to update your website, but you're not sure where to start, this is the session for you. We'll talk about what content management systems are, and look at various affordable options for updating your website text and images, including using What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get software like DreamWeaver and Contribute, website-in-a-box tools like Homesite, blog tools like WordPress, open source tools like Joomla and Drupal, and more. Register now.

Hope to see you there!

Google Analytics: Underreporting, or just reporting differently?

I gave a brief talk about Google Analytics to a bunch of OneWorld folks last week. An interesting question came up, about Google Analytics’ rumored underreporting of web stats.

There’s no question in my mind that GA does report less traffic than many other web analytics tools - particularly compared to offline tools that look directly at server logs. For instance, the Idealware site has been recently getting about 800-900 visits a day according to AWStats, one of the analytics packages that's offered by our webhost. According to GA, though, we top out at about 600 visits a day.

It's disconcerting, no question, but does that mean that GA is underreporting? Or is AWStats overreporting? I did some research on this topic, and came up with a number of factors that can cause the discrepancy. You decide what you think.

• People with Javascript or cookies turned off. Any analytics package that relies on a snippet of code added to the site will only report on visitors who have Javascript and cookies turned on. Folks estimate that this will miss between 11-15% percent of users.
• Robots and Spiders. Google Analytics fairly rigorously excludes automated processes (like the tools that search engines use to gather site information) from their stats. Other tools are likely to be much less rigorous, unless you're actually updating your tool by hand to account for new automated processes.
  
• Differences in visitor calculations. Any tool that doesn't rely on a chunk of code added to the site has no particularly accurate way to count visitors, as opposed to just arbitrary hits on a server, and is likely to over count visits based on things like people using proxy servers (coming in via AOL, for instance) and people who step away from their computer and then come back. Relying on cookies, as Google Analytics does, is much more accurate.
• Problems in adding the GA code. Some people say they are seeing enormous drops and inconsistencies. Other hypothesize, and I tend to agree, that it seems likely that they haven't effectively added the piece of GA code that it uses to track traffic.
  
• Google Iffy-ness. At the end of the day, there's also reports of just occasional weirdness. I don't think that it's likely that GA stats are just wrong most of the time. I do think, though, that occasionally there will be blips where it goes out, stops reporting for a short chunk of time, is slow to update, etc. It's a free tool, and it doesn't make sense to rely on it if you need 100% accurate stats at a moment's notice 100% of the time. For the rest of us mere mortals, though, it's likely fine.
  

Here's my primary sources for this (the comments, as much or more than the posts)

How reliable is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is Under-Reporting, or is it?

Web Numbers: What's Real?

Study on Technology Adoption Among Arts Organizations

A group of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon have just released an interesting study on how arts organizations of various sizes think about and make decisions about technology: Technology Motivators and Usage in Not-for-Profit Arts Organizations

In addition to an interesting framework for technology decisions, it includes some great thumbnail sketches of the technology use of specific organizations. Among other things, these sketches give us important reminders of the day-to-day technology struggles of real nonprofits - the big technology investments the nonprofits mentioned focused heavily on the infrastructural, including printers, phone service, and even a new roof.

(Full disclosure: I was on the advisory committee for the study)

See you at the Grassroots Use of Technology Conference!

For all my fellow New Englanders out there...

The Organizers' Collaborative puts on a annual conference, the Grassroots Use of Technology, which is this year in Lowell, MA (right outside Boston) on Saturday, June 23rd. I've heard great things, and this year I'm excited to be able to go, and to give a talk on Online Donation software. There's also a Penguin Day on the preceeding Friday, where I'll be faciliating a session on open source content management systems.

Anyone out there going? I'd love to meet up!

Resource Roundup 6/6

Blackbaud User Society (BlackBUS)
Not so much a new resource as one I've neglected to point out: the Blackbaud User Society website has very active forums and more, with discussions of Raisers Edge and other Blackbaud tools

Google and Salesforce Tightly Integrate Adwords Products (TechCrunch)
Google and Salesforce annouce a partnership that will allow nonprofits to track what Google Adword inspired each donor or activists to action.

A beginner's guide to Facebook for non-profits (Wild Apricot Blog)
A nice overview, with screenshots, of how to get started in Facebook

Voluntary Sector IT Survey (CharityFinance)
Detailed report about the state of technology in UK nonprofits

Keep it Classified: E-mail Encryption for Small Business (Small Business Computing)
A nice look at what it means to encrypt email, and software that can help you to do it.

How to Design for Word-of-Mouth (Bokardo)
Tips to create web/ email designs that will help foster word of mouth.

Launching the Web 2.0 Framework (Trends in the Living Networks)
A concise view of the nature of Web 2.0, particularly suitable for senior executives of larger orgs

A Look at the State of the Semantic Web (Ziff Davis)
Ziff Davis's eWeek offers a useful look at what the semantic web is (in brief, it's a powerful but in-it's-infancy way to allow smart interaction with web content), examples of real life implementations, and a roundup of tools that let you create sematic web data entries.

The Return of Idealware Webinars

After a long and arduous saga (mostly involving a much more complicated quest for event registration and webinar software than I had expected), the Idealware webinars are back and better than ever! We're offering all the great stuff that we've offered before, including seminars like Choosing Email Software, Comparing Open Source CMSs, Getting Started with Online Donation Tools, Choosing a Low Cost Constituent Database, and newer ones like an Introduction to CMSs, and Data Integration Basics. And they're now almost all priced much lower: just $40/ person.

View our whole schedule of webinars for the next six weeks at http://www.idealware.org/online_seminars/

Might your constituents, staff, clients, or friends be interested in a friendly, tactical overview of one of these areas? Pass the word!

Have you Worked with CMSs for Simple Sites, or Online Auction Software?

Let's try something new. We're in the midst of researching two separate articles, one about Online Auction software, and one on ways to manage content that make sense for simple sites (so for instance, looking at the pros and cons of WYSIWYG tools, website-in-a-box tools, blog tools for building whole websites, and actual simple CMSs).

Are you a consultant or nonprofit staffer who's thought through the software options for either of these two areas? I'd love to talk to you about your experiences. Anyone who participates (the commitment is only about an hour - a bit of time to talk with me, and then a bit of time to review a draft of the article) will be credited in the article as a contributor, with a link to your site. Both these articles will be published on both Idealware and TechSoup, so should give you some nice exposure.

If you're willing to contribute, drop me a line at laura@idealware.org

Please note that I really don't want to hear from you if you distribute software in either of these areas. Emailing me is not going to effect whether your product appears - that's not how these articles work. Please see our How Can I Get My Software Included post for info on how it does work. Emailing me product information, or, particularly, telling me that you can impartially weigh the options anyway, is only going to irritate me.