Blogs

From the Adaptive Path blog, a great story that cuts to the heart about the importance of careful graphic and functional design:

My family is participating in the Guest at Your Table again this year. It’s a program that collects money for social justice causes. The cardboard box that you put money into sits on your dinner table, and on one side of the box is a panel about people not having access to clean drinking water. As I explained this to my six-year-old daughter, her response was, “Wow, we’re so lucky to have faucets!” For her, the whole system of reservoirs, pipes, plumbing, sewage treatment, etc. was completely summarized by the one visible part of the system: the faucets.

How often this is true, especially with digital products. What users physically experience represents the system to them, and how it works. The interface is the system. You can have the greatest interaction design or information architecture in the world, but wrapped in crappy industrial or visual design with poor affordances, the entire system is perceived to be bad.

“The interface is the system.” This is so true, and something we struggle with in the nonprofit space. I would go even farther than these guys have: for the many applications that are trying to be mainstream, it doesn’t matter how incredibly nifty the functionality is. If the 60 year old, non-technical director of development can’t figure out how to use it - in fact, if she isn’t inspired to use it because it’s easy and un-intimidating looking – the functionality might as well not exist.

I just switched our RSS feed over to be tracked through FeedBurner (Stats! Woohoo! You have no idea what a stats junkie I am), and it was surprisingly easy, though you wouldn’t know it from the complete lack of any kind of useful Google-able help on the subject. So for anyone out there trying to do the same, here’s how to go about it.

I realized after writing this up that there's a lot of assumptions involved. Namely, this assumes that you're publishing your Blogger blog via FTP to a web server you have some control over (i.e. your blog shows up at www.yoururl.com/blog rather than at blogspot). And then it assumes that you have access to CPanel for your webserver, or can otherwise setup a temporary redirect. The process requires no particular tech skills, though it's a bit conceptually techie.

So just to start with, the goal here is to give anyone requesting the Idealware feed a FeedBurner URL, so FeedBurner can track visits, clicks, etc. If you already have a RSS feed, you need a way to redirect the URL for that feed to Feedburner, so you can track all your subscribers without making people manually switch feeds. Conceptually, this process does exactly that. However, we can’t just redirect from the original URL to the FeedBurner URL, because, well, the FeedBurner URL is looking at the original URL for the content of the feed. So Feedburner looks to your original URL, which looks to FeedBurner, which looks to your original URL… infinite loop. So instead, we’re going to setup a second feed URL which doesn’t do anything but provide the content.

Note that if you don’t have any feed subscribers yet, you don’t need to do all this – you can just create the Feedburner feed and put that in as your feed option for new subscribers, rather than fool around with redirects.

So here are the steps:

1. In Blogger, change the name of your feed so that it is posted to a new URL. To do this, go to Settings -> Site Feed, and change the Site Feed Filename and Site Feed URL. My filename was originally atom.xml and my URL was http://www.idealware.org/blog/atom.xml; I changed them to atom_fb.xml and http://www.idealware.org/blog/atom_fb.xml. It doesn’t matter what you change them to as long as it’s different and the file name matches the URL. Remember what your old URL was.
2. In Feedburner, create a Feedburner feed for this new URL. So just paste the URL from above into the giant Ready to Burn Your Feed field on the homepage. Or if you’ve already setup a feed, you can change the URL for the original feed by clicking Edit Feed Details on the top of your dashboard.
3. Now all there is to do is to redirect from your old URL to the Feedburner URL, with the standard temporary redirect. To do this through CPanel (a utility offered by a lot of shared web hosts), go to Manage Redirects. Type in your old URL in the field on the left (mine was http://www.idealware.org/blog/atom.xml); type in the Feedburner URL after the arrow (mine was http://feeds.feedburner.com/idealware). Click Add.
4. Done! Enjoy the glut of statistics on your feed. Wohoo!

Note that people say it’s not optimal for search engine optimization to create temporary redirects like this (though search engines aren’t doing much with RSS feeds now anyway). I think it’s highly preferable, however, to creating a permanent redirect which irrevocably links your public feed to FeedBurner, which is the only other option on most shared webhosts.

A selection of nonprofit-applicable software news and articles from the last couple weeks....

Whiteboarding Tools and Technology Miniguide (Kolabora)
Another great mini-guide from Kolabora - this one on tools that allow you to show applications and whiteboard remotely. It provides an overview of typical features and then mini-reviews of 18 different tools.

The Center for Disease Control's Second Life (Spare Change)
A terrific, detailed case study about the Center for Disease Control's involvement in the online virtual world Second Life, with an emphasis on the outreach potential and the organizational politics of ventures like these.

Donor Management Software Comparison (TechSoup)
TechSoup talks to eight donor management database vendors and summarizes what they had to say in a useful matrix.

The State of Open Source software for Nonprofits (NetSquared)
NetSquared has released (okay, a little belatedly) a podcast of the State of Open Source panel from their conference in the spring.

Social Bookmarking Showdown (Wired)
A useful set of reviews of the top social bookmarking software, with overviews, ratings, and detailed reviews.

Web-Conferencing Tools: Right for You? (TechSoup)
A broad overview of a number of web-conferencing tools, including information on pricing and a few features.

Beta Lauch of ChipIn, a fundraising widget for blogs (ChipIn)
An interesting new service that allows you to integrate a paypal donation feature with a thermometer graphic onto your blog or website.

A Roundup of Widgets (Beth's Blog)
Beth Kanter experiments with widgets - prepackaged functionalites that you can add to your blog (to add a poll, say, or pull in Flickr images) - and reports back

It's your last chance to register for the Ten Common Mistakes in Selecting a Donor Database (And How to Avoid them) - this online seminar is TOMMORROW - Wed, Oct 24th at 11:00 Pacific time. View more or register now at www.idealware.org/online_seminars/

Are you trying to find the right donor database for your organization? Robert L. Weiner will walk through ten common mistakes that can prevent you from selecting the right database and managing it effectively. Robert, the host of TechSoup's Technology for Fundraising online forum, has been helping nonprofits select database software for more than ten years. He'll expand greatly on his article of the same name to provide many practical tips and techniques to allow you to choose a database that's great for you.

The webinar, part of the NTEN and Idealware Software Review Series, is $60 for NTEN members or Idealware eNews subscribers, or $100 otherwise (hint: it's free to register for Idealware enews). View more or register now at www.idealware.org/online_seminars/

Beth Kanter has posted an interesting, quick interview with Christopher J. Mackie from The Andrew Mellon Foundation, from the Technology in the Arts Conference. They talk about the issue of nonprofits keeping up to speed in technology and how difficult it is. Mr. Mackie had some interesting comments that really resonated for me:

Beth Kanter
You mentioned the difficulty of people who work in nonprofits and arts organizations keeping up with the technology – it’s just so difficult and time consuming. What’s your advice around that?

Christopher J. Mackie
I think the biggest thing to think about in terms of keeping up is that even people like me - who are paid more or less full time to keep up - can’t keep up on our own. We depend heavily on networks. You should be depending heavily on networks. There are people like you in other organizations around the country and around the world. The key is to find the people who sit in seats like yours, who see the world the way you see it, who have organizations that are close enough to yours to be relevant but different enough that the diversity actually adds value to you. And then…figure out ways to keep in touch with them and to share ideas and share insights and share links to new developments - so you’re leveraging your own investment of time and energy with the investment of all the other people in your network.

I think this is right on - but also, well, easier said than done. Conferences are certainly a great way for those interested in technology to meet others interested in technology, but what about the huge majority of nonprofits who have no one focused on technology, or who's technologists are struggling just to keep the computers running, let alone reach out to others and share ideas? How can we support their expansion of knowledge and personal networks?

And in practice, organizations that are similar in some aspects are different than others. Perhaps another organization has a similar philosophy on outreach, and we can share a lot of best practices about communications and engaging the audience. However, if I look at accounting software, there's no reason to suspect that same organization is also similar to me in financial setup. So in reality we're talking about a number of different networks that overlap and change over time. There's no question that a great nonprofit technologist should be seeking out and developing these networks. But how many are allowed the time or have the skills to do this effectively?

Idealware is in fact my answer to these issues. I feel strongly that many organizations are "close enough to yours to be relevant" when you're looking at specific technology solutions. If you're looking for, say, a tool to manage your member data and member related functions, there is a pretty finite number of core needs. There will be a few organizations whose needs are way different than the mainstream, but the large majority of organizations will fall into maybe four to six different types when it comes to this specific area. And thus by researching the needs of organizations, understanding the software offered, and writing a report that addresses the concerns of these particular organizational types, we can address the core needs of the majority of organizations - shortcutting each individual nonprofit’s process of understanding what's working for other organizations.

No, it's not as good as a strong, individually formed network of like-minded organizations. But these reports would be a lot better than nothing for the vast number of nonprofits who don't have those networks. And by forming a community around these reports, with online and real-time discussion, we can also help to create the networks that will help with other technology needs down the road.