• If you’re not sure what browsers support which features, consult sites like caniuse.com and html5please.com for a detailed comparison
• Using the new CSS3 Media Queries tag is a great way to build responsive websites (examples here), but you still have to decide what will be viewed on different size screens (not a small task)
• Even if you don’t yet have a mobile friendly website, specify percentage sizes on pages instead of exact pixel values
• As a starting point for new website pages, try html5boilerplate.com which includes some basic CSS and useful tools such as JQuery and Modernizr
• Consider what will happen if users don’t view your latest technical tricks (i.e. because of the browser or device they’re using) – will they still be able to get the data they need?  See Progressive Enhancement.
• On mobile, scrolling is OK but forcing viewers to constantly zoom in and out to view your content is not OK
• The latest tools from Adobe are Edge and Muse – but they’re still in development (and be careful with Muse, which is simpler to use but more limiting in what you can do)

Noble Desktop will be rolling out a new website soon which will demonstrate many of the technologies mentioned above.  Also check out their upcoming session on Mobile and Responsive Web Design.  (I’ve attended their classes – they’re excellent.)

P.S. Thanks to everyone who commented on my blog post last week on Blackbaud’s acquisition of Convio, including Blackbaud CEO Marc Chardon.

My wish list for the combined organization:

1. Blackbaud CEO Marc Chardon’s message mentions that integration between products such as the Raiser’s Edge and Luminate Online is high on the priority list.  But let’s not stop there – most nonprofits use products from multiple vendors, and need help in integrating data between them.  This requires a commitment to open APIs and in freely connecting to other platforms.
2. Blackbaud now has a dizzying array of software options, some which seem to duplicate each other.  Help us understand what’s best for our organizations’ needs and then recommend the appropriate solution – even if it’s not a Blackbaud product.
3. Be respectful of the talented Convio staff and help them integrate into Blackbaud with a minimum of pain.  Mergers are rarely easy.

Convio founder Vinay Bhagat chose not to move on to Blackbaud and left us with this inspiring message.  Fortunately, most of Convio’s management has already been integrated into the new organization.  Marc, as you have promised, show us how the combined company will help our nonprofits raise more money, engage our constituents and implement successful multi-channel campaigns.

• The average email open rate has ‘steadied’ at 14% (is this supposed to be good?) but some nonprofits get better results by segmentation, localization & personalization.
• While mobile devices accounted for 15-20% of email opens, those who read email on phones are less likely to click thru and take action.  But it can also help if the email is formatted to look good on a small screen.  Here’s tips on how to do it.
• The Red Cross demonstrated why segmentation doesn’t have to be difficult, identifying donors by monthly, institutional, emergency, lapsed and non-donors.
• Monthly donors constantly outperformed other segments.  (For a great example of a nonprofit that realizes this, take a look at City Harvest Rescue Partners campaign that specifically asks for monthly gifts.)
• While segmentation can improve email results, it will make even more of a difference if you prepare great content – as well as an engaging subject line.

Tonight I attended the monthly 501 Tech NYC get-together, which featured a capacity crowd at the NYC Foundation Center to hear takeaways from the recent Nonprofit Technology Conference.  Would you believe 10 presenters offered mini-versions of their event sessions?  Some highlights:

• US Fund for Unicef‘s Porter Mason stressed the neglected art of AB testing – emails, web pages, social media posts and added that ‘coding links must become normal practice.’  Take a look at WhichTestWon to test your instincts on what works best.
• Big Duck‘s Farra Trompeter (recently honored with a Community Award at the Nonprofit Tech Conference) offered an interesting flow chart approach to Is It Time to Rethink Your Website.  Important reminder – the work doesn’t end when your new website is rolled out, it’s an ongoing task.
• Causevox‘s Rob Wu finished the evening with tips on how to tell compelling stories, e.g. don’t talk about your organization, talk about your cause and your supporters.  Also, get everyone involved – not only the marketing / communications folks.

If you weren’t able to attend today’s events, make sure you download the eNonprofit Benchmarks Study and follow our 501 Tech NYC group on Facebook to stay informed.

1. There are many ways to approach a mobile strategy, as Idealware‘s Laura Quinn explained in More Than Apps: Affordable Program Delivery through Mobile Phones.   Do you know how your website looks on a mobile screen?  Use Mobile Phone Emulator to find out.  Do you give constituents a good reason to provide their mobile phone numbers on your forms (hint – don’t say ‘so we can add you to our list’)?  Try using Groupme for group text messaging (like email blasts by phone).  Look for ways to make your current website mobile friendly;  developing apps are usually not the best approach.  Also see Tech Soup‘s session review.
2. Matt Koltermann described a ‘blended’ approach in Building and Supporting Drupal Websites: In-House, Outhouse or Both?  Even if you outsource, Matt stressed the importance of involving in-house staff in development so they can maintain and support the application later (I completely agree).  He also suggested using a tool like Optimizely for AB testing (easier to use than Google Website Analyzer).  Using Drupal involves the combination of many add-on modules;  be careful before doing updates (as you are always prompted to do when new releases come out).  Make sure you include a contingency in your cost estimate.  BTW, it’s time to move to the latest version, Drupal 7.
3. Do you have the right organization structure for online success?  In Digital Team Structure – The Underlying Foundation for Innovation, John Mogus and Michael Silberman discussed different models for where your digital staff should work.  Not surprisingly, there is no perfect solution, but the ‘hybrid’ option – which places online resources in a dedicated digital group and in other departments seems to offer the most promise.  But to implement this successfully, an organization needs to work out reporting structure (i.e. who reports to who?) and how online strategy is planned. Take a look at the innovative Mobilisation Lab, implemented at Greenpeace for an innovative approach.  No matter what structure you use, it’s a must to have a culture where departments regularly talk and work with each other, esp. marketing / communications and fundraising.  Also see my blog post on this topic last year.
4. Probably one of the hardest decisions we all face is when to outsource, covered by Gabriel Nichols and Pam Kingpetcharat in the session When to Call in the Consultants: When to Leave Them Out.  As Matt explained in his Drupal session, a hybrid solution is usually best.  An interesting take: when an ‘expert’ gives a time estimate for a project, add 50%.  For internal staff, triple the estimate.  Some more things to consider:
1. does in-house staff have necessary expertise (and do they have time to learn?)
2. will skills gained be used in future by staff
3. is there a fixed time deadline? (using outside resources will speed implementation)
4. what will be loss to organization if deadline slips?
5. how well will internal stakeholders accept project setbacks?
5. Segmentation is a basic principle of effective constituent relationship management, yet few nonprofits do it well.  In Data Dive: Practical Segmentation Techniques, Jeff Shuck explained how Excel functionality such as filters, conditional formatting and pivot tables (they’re easier now than in older Excel versions) can help, as well as the free Analysis Toolpak add-in.   (Note to Nten – Jeff ended his presentation with an reaffirming message for all of us who work in nonprofit – may be worth a keynote talk next year)  A few more tips:
1. ask donors why they donated – critical data in getting to know your donors
2. you can ask for more data than you think (this will help you segment)
3. constituents give because of an affinity to the cause, not necessarily to your organization.  This is why you need to always focus on retention.
4. take a look at Tableau – visual analysis tool – less expensive than SPSS
5. find data analysis too difficult?  Get the books Statistics Without Tears or the Cartoon Guide to Statistics.
6. In Engaging Mobile Design, Beaconfire’s Scott Lenger suggested using Mobify as an easy way to create a mobile website (basic sites free, but some features cost more).  Responsive design (same site looks good on different size screens) is great, but is best considered when doing an overall website redesign.  Wondering if you really need a mobile site?  Check your web statistics bounce rate – if it’s higher for mobile visitors than for desktop users, then you probably do.  Make sure your forms work on small screens – here’s a great example from Feeding America.  Mobile shouldn’t be an after-thought to your web design, nor should it be handled as a ‘Phase 2′ project.
7. If your organization is on social media, then you need a policy.  Darim Online’s Lisa Colton and Idealware’s Andrea Barry both discussed the importance of focusing on your nonprofit’s core values in Maturing Your Organization’s Social Culture – By Creating a Policy?  Make sure you clarify staff roles, especially who will be:
1. main coordinator
2. primary listener / moderator
3. expected to post
4. allowed to post
5. content contributors

• how you can encourage a culture at your organization where fundraising responsibilities extend beyond the development department
• why it’s as important what you do after getting a donation as it is to encourage supporters to make that first gift
• addressing the dilemma of not asking for too much information about donors, yet having enough data to be able to develop segmentation strategies
• why it’s a good idea to ask donors how they want their funds to be used – and then reporting back on how you actually used their contributions
• how to encourage your strongest supporters to encourage others to donate to your organization
• why an editorial calendar is a must - and how often you should ask
• if you have limited resources (i.e. all of us), where to put your efforts first in implementing an effective online fundraising strategy

So Facebook is going public.  How will this affect its relationship with its many devotees, which is expected to increase to 1 BILLION later this year?  It’s a bit sad that Convio, not long after going public, agreed to be acquired by its long term competitor, Blackbaud, apparently to take advantage of a financial windfall.  (Also see my recent blog post.)  It will be interesting to watch the path Facebook follows once its loyalties move mostly to its shareholders.

Pinterest seems to be very popular lately.  Have you used it yet?  With all the social media tools available, Small Act (via my friend Shana Masterson) suggests you choose carefully how many you can manage.  (I’m posting regularly on Twitter and Facebook, but less so on LinkedIn and Google Plus so far, trying to find content which is appropriate to each platform.)

After they donate or take the actions you request, do you make sure to thank your donors? Here are some tips from Guidestar and a quiz from Network for Good.

Are you getting good response from your email marketing efforts?  Use these 7 tips for appeals and also 5 Best Practices for Increasing Email Subscribers Engagement.  (And go here if you need help in getting them to sign up to receive your emails.)

Thinking about getting a tablet, such as the iPad or Kindle Fire?  Here’s a good article to read first.

A short time later, your organization decides to open a second office, which has a different business focus than the first location.  But they ask if you can adapt your application for their needs, saying that they would like to go live in a month.  You try to get specific details about what they would like to see in the new system, but everyone is frantically busy and you end up having to make certain assumptions to revise the application for their needs.  But you push forward, and somehow are able to finish by the deadline.  Again, everyone is pleased.  Management again applauds your efforts.

Before you can savor your latest success, the first office asks if you can add some reports to the application which they hadn’t included in the original specifications.  (You had asked about reports, but were told that they would deal with that later.)  When reviewing their request, you realize that much of this information isn’t collected by the application, so you have to go back and revise some screens before creating the new reports.  And because of the tight deadline, you don’t have time to develop a front end interface to run the reports, but you say that’s OK because as the IT person, you can run them when requested.

You roll out the new reports and application changes, but then realize that your edits have broken something that is used by the first office.  So you need to go back and tweak the code a bit more and do more testing so that the application will work properly for both locations.  Due to some personnel changes at both locations, you also realize that you need to schedule user training.  And when they ask for user documentation, you realize that this was not done due to the rush to get things finished.

Eventually, your nonprofit keeps growing, and so does the use of your application was you originally designed for one office.  You keep making modifications, but these changes end up making the code increasingly complex.  (When you hire a new programmer to help you, it takes him months to figure out how everything works.)

Now your small application is in use by over 10 offices, all which use it a bit differently.  You’re now getting many requests for user support, and your tech support team can’t always help because they don’t fully understand how the application works.  When you speak to users from some of the earliest opened offices, you find out that many have established parallel systems in Excel and Access to handle situations that your software can’t accommodate.  Apparently, the business needs of your offices have changed so much that your application will need to be redesigned.

Finally you decide to have a meeting where you invite representatives from all of your offices to discuss what to do next.  Everyone says that their needs are unique and that they should receive special priority.  Many staff seem happy to continue using their personal spreadsheets and databases since it allows them to more easily manipulate and report on their data.  But your research department, which is trying to prepare organization wide reports to show the effectiveness of your work, is increasingly frustrated, saying that the data that they pull from your application is no longer accurate.

What to do next?  My recommendations:

1. Evaluate hosted solutions.  Unless your business need is very unusual, there’s probably something else out there that will meet at least 75% of your needs.
2. Look for the commonality between your offices’ work.  Even if you do end up having to build something yourself, there’s probably much functionality that will work for all.
3. Decide up front what reports will be needed, and in what format.  Give users the ability to manage their own data, otherwise they’ll again be tempted to enter data again in a parallel system.
4. Find out how other nonprofits of your type are handling similar requirements.  You may be able to learn from others’ experiences.
5. Sometimes you will need to say no when you don’t have the time to do the job right, or if you’re not getting the cooperation from stakeholders in defining requirements.  Better to be unpopular in the short run than to be blamed later for a system which doesn’t work as expected.
6. Use agile project management techniques to focus on short term deliverables.  This will allow you to more effectively respond to changing organization needs
7. Provide ongoing training for both new and experienced staff members.  Most systems aren’t easy enough for people to easily ‘figure out’ how they work
8. Get top management support, especially when you have to remind colleagues that not every request for program customizations can be handled.

Blackbaud’s most popular product has long been Raiser’s Edge, which provides unmatched functionality but is also beyond the financial reach of many small to medium nonprofits.  Despite efforts recently to make it more web based, RE is still primarily locally installed.  Of course Blackbaud has bought many other companies over the years which provide web options, such as eTapestry, Kintera, and PIDI, so many that it’s often hard to know how the multiple products all fit together.

In addition to its foundation online marketing platform (now Luminate), Convio took a significant risk by developing Common Ground, a web application built on Salesforce.  While Common Ground offers much less functionality than software like Raiser’s Edge, it offers the strong advantage of being able to connect well with other products due to its Salesforce infrastructure.  (Integration between platforms has been a major issue at every nonprofit I’ve worked for.)

While Blackbaud has been most active in acquisitions, let’s not forget that Convio also bought GetActive – and the transition of GetActive customers to the Convio platform was long and painful.

As many of my colleagues have said this week, it’s hard to know how this acquisition will pan out, and which products will continue to be maintained.  I have friends at both Blackbaud and Convio, and I can only hope that the inevitable personnel shakeup will be handled respectfully.

In my view, this merger may have the effect of reducing competition and innovation, which is always a bad thing.  However, this may also be a wake up call for those organizations who have not discovered the benefits of using open source solutions which are not tied to the fate of a particular vendor.

If you’re on the Progressive Exchange and Nten email lists, I encourage you to read the comments of my colleagues Peter Campbell, Michelle Murrain, Robert Weiner , Allen Gunn on Aspiration Tech and Alyson Kapin’s on Frogloop.  Also see Nten’s take and then join the free Nten conference call this Wednesday to further sort out what is likely to come next.

How a nonprofit is organized can greatly impact its online success.  From mid-2008, here’s Building a Successful Online Team.  In mid-2009, I followed up with a review of Convio‘s study on Why Organization Structure Matters.  Then in early 2011, I offered this Job Description for an Integrated Fundraising / Communications Position.

For more advice on digital strategy, read Tips for Online Success and How to Succeed Online – Even When You Think You Can’t.  It’s always worthwhile to learn from those who are doing it well in Practical Examples of Cross-Channel Success.

Website redesign is often a challenging process.  Here’s some Reasons Why (and Why Not) to Do a Website Redesign, and some additional tips.

Creating great content is key to engaging constituents.  Learn How to Develop Content Your Constituents Will Want to Read, how to Develop a Content Strategy and then What Content to Put in Each Channel.

Most nonprofits need to partner with companies who provide hosted software.  Here’s how to get the most of the relationship in Tips in Selecting and Working With an Online Vendor.

Do you give and attend webinars?  Here’s tips on how to present and how to get the most from participating in online events.

Finally, the hottest topics now are social media and mobile / tablets.  Read Insights into Developing a Social Media Strategy and my take last year on the New World of Mobile.

Thank you again for following my thoughts on the intersection of technology, communications and development for nonprofit organizations.

• A Few Words About Gratitude, on how we can carry the spirit of Thanksgiving throughout the year.  Also see, Thoughts at Thanksgiving on Gratitude
• I’ve often discussed the importance of groups working together within a nonprofit, including facilitation of a panel on Collaboration and Management in Cross-Departmental Web Projects
• I presented an Nten webinar on Project Management for Nonprofits, suggesting that nonprofits use techniques already in use by many for profit organizations
• I asked Who Handles ePhilanthropy in Your Organization, mentioning the trend towards a separate department to develop and implement online strategy  It’s also important to know how what NOT to do online, such as interviewing vendors before you’ve firmed up your requirements.  And here’s why organization structure matters.
• At successful nonprofits, staff are all involved in fundraising and communications, no matter what ‘department’ they are in.  See Why Everyone Is In Communications
• To succeed online, sooner or later we need the help of vendors providing hosted software.  Read my tips on working with an online vendor.
• This year after hearing about Michelle Misner’s wonderful experience at a webmaster group I participate in, I co-presented another Nten webinar on How to NY Public Library Successfully Project Managed a New Drupal Website.  If you’re planning a CMS rollout, whether or not you’re using Drupal, listening to Michelle tips on the recording is a must.

More highlights from past posts next week.  Meanwhile, thank you for reading my thoughts for the past five years.  I wish you a wonderful 2012!