Eric Nee: In this sections from Craigslist Foundation, Internet marketing experts explain how a user-centric website and effective email marketing can catapult your non-profit towards its goals. This diverse panel demystifies the web-development process explaining how to reach out to old and new supporters after your site has launched, from the Conversations Network's Social Innovation Channel.

[Musical interlude]

Alana Conner: Hi, this is Alana Conner.

Eric: And I'm Eric Nee. We're your hosts on Social Innovation Conversations.

Welcome to the free pod-cast series of Craigslist Foundations non-profit bootcamps, which are designed to help people help people. To learn more about Craigslist Foundation or the non-profit bootcamp conferences, visit www.craigslistfoundation.org.

This series is funded by the Community Technology Foundation of California, which helps under-served communities secure social justice, access and equality through the application of information and communications technologies.

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Eric: And now here's our presentation from the Craigslist Foundation.

Jeff Patrick: So we're going to spend sometime this afternoon talking about online fundraising, marketing, communications, all that good stuff. Basically the kind of thing that you can do on the web. So we've split it into three pieces, each of us has a slightly different take on it, but I think the combination of three are going to be really interesting.

Before we get started, let's do a quick survey. So how many people work for a non-profit? This is a participation sport. How many people work for a non-profit that has zero to ten employees? Is that maybe half? How about ten to fifty employees? OK, a lot fewer. Fifty or more? Some big ones there. OK great.

How many of you are directly involved in one way or another with what your organization does on the Internet? Whether it web site or... Holy cow, well apparently you're in the right place.

[laughter]

Welcome. Great, thank you. So let's jump into it. In the next twenty or thirty minutes, what I'm going to do is go through three things and talk a little bit about spuds, spinach and banana splits.

So we're going to talk about spuds. Seasoned curly fries, or mashed 'taters, really the focus here is around websites and what it means to have a primary website versus campaign sites. The idea here is that rather than just drone on about what websites are, we're going to look exclusively at examples of websites and talk about characteristics of primary sites and campaign sites, because I bet lots of you do both of those, so therefore rather than get into the nuts and bolts of how they work, at least for this part of the presentation, we're going to talk a little bit about what makes a good one, some things to avoid.

In the spinach section, Popeye's going to help us do the advocacy, this is going to be about emails. So we're going to talk about the same basic concept, but cut across the spectrum of advocacy, fundraising and informational emails or newsletters as we usually call them.

And banana splits, it's about the idea of bringing together those two pieces, websites and emails or actually conversely most of the time it's the email takes you to the website and why it's important to have those two integrated.

So spuds. Spuds come in lots of flavors. Your basic potato, if you have the right recipe, you can create a pretty sexy-looking curly fry. On the other hand you can go with the traditional tried-and-true mashed 'taters if you like. So at the end of the day, what you do with your website is going to depend a lot on what your objectives are. We're going to take a look at a couple of sites and we're going to talk about how you can make curly fries, or how you can make mashed potatoes. Both of them are good, both have a purpose, but they serve very different objectives.

There was a few people who didn't think the curly fries were so good. Is that right? I saw that.

[laughter]

So a primary website. Your primary website is your main website - your website that's the anchor, the foundation. It's the place where people end up when they type in your URL. This is the website that has the role of: branding your organization, providing the basic information about your organization, and supplying the information that people are going to want to know when they qualify you as a nonprofit that they're going to want to donate to, advocate on behalf of, support in some way.

In this particular case, we're looking at one of our clients, the Defenders of Wildlife, and what is their C4 site. So they have a 501C4, which is a politically oriented organization, but this is the basic site that acts as their anchor. If you want to know something about what they're doing, you're going to go to this site. www.defendersactionfund.org.

Let's go to characteristics. If we look at the characteristics of this particular site, we notice a bunch of things. So what do we got? So websites. We notice a whole bunch of things right away. Up at the top left, we see their logo. We see the iconic wolf, which is for them, given that they're an environmental conservation organization, is the single image that captures and brands the organization.

We see a very brief outline of what they do, and we have the picture of the capitol. It's pretty easy to tell pretty quickly what these guys are about, right? From a design standpoint, we can see right away, in the first two or three seconds that you look at the site, what these guys are about.

The layout of the site itself, characteristic set number two, is the standard three-column layout. A large center column that has your primary content, and a left and right-hand column that have what we call ads. It's internal ads for information and for other features on the site that you can cross-link to other sections in the site.

Why is this a primary site? What makes this a primary site? This is a primary site because number one, it's relatively conservative. There's no flashing lights, there's no sound, there's no flash movies. The colors are all pretty sedate, bordering on cool. The basic layout has a lot of white space. It's friendly but it's not overly warm.

What are they trying to do here? Well, recognize that we go back to objectives. In this case, the audience for this site is three groups. It's legislators on the hill, journalists, and supports who are interested in the political activities of this organization.

Listen, if you're going to talk to those audiences, what you probably don't want to do is jump up and down, raise your hands, run around naked, and yell out loud. What you want to do is establish a professional, credible, formal, rather than informal... make an impression on those folks in a way that's going to say "Not tree huggers, serious folks that we need to think about taking seriously and listening to". Every organization doesn't do that, but in this case, Defenders has chosen to do that given their particular history, background, and branding.

This is a primary site. It has some content that's going to provide some forms of interactivity, so it's not just about reading the site, although that's certainly a primary element of it. It also has a take action button, as well as a donate button, and read some more, the report card, which is a section of the site that provides the record of some legislators, how they voted on issues that are important to the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund.

Primary site. Remember. Objective works, establish credibility, look professional, get their attention, but don't yell at them. With this site, they've managed to say we're here, you should notice us. You should recognize that we're someone that's important to this arena, conservationism, and environmentalism. But they really haven't done a lot in terms of grabbing your attention in any great way.

All right, site number two. It's a campaign site. Same organization. Very, very different look. Very, very different layout, and very different set of objectives. Interestingly enough, mostly the same audience.

So same organization goes with a totally different look. The only thing that's really consistent about this look and the content that's on this site is that, once again, they slap the brand up in the top left in the conventional position, top left, and said, "Hey, we're Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund", but have gone with a completely different look because it's a campaign site.

Why? Because in a campaign site, you want to be a bit more aggressive, you want to get their attention and you want to get them to take action, right? Pretty straightforward set of objectives. Not so worried about establishing credibility, although it is certainly an element of it; not so worried about being professional, it is more about jumping up and down and saying, "Hey notice me, we want you to do this, I will tell you a little bit about why you should do that, but mostly I just want you to do it. It is a campaign site.

Main site versus campaign site. Design here is relatively campy. It is in the graphic design perspective, it is a bit more graphically oriented, a little less about the text, the educational pieces. And if we look at the layout itself, we notice they have gone to a bit different approach, which is a two-column layout. In this half, most of the page they are going with what is their primary calls to action and over here we have yet more calls to action. This site is about doing something.

The first site was primarily about learning, getting to know, making an impression and oh, by the way, you can take some actions. Here it is much more about watching the videos, the ads, much more about volunteering, much more about seeing the campaign ads, looking at the blog roll, reading his record. And then up here in the main menu, this site, if you were to look at the site map, you'd find that it is probably about 10 times smaller than the previous site.

So, couple of characteristic differences besides the design, the overall amount of content in this campaign site is significantly less. Why? Well, because this site is about getting people in, getting them to notice you, and getting them to take action. And so, there is some amount of supporting information, but generally speaking if you roll around this site, you will find they tend to point you back to the other site. If you want to know something, go back to the primary site and that's where you will find the research, the programmatic information, the legislative information. So in this case, we can see that the difference between a primary website and a campaign site is very much about the objectives in each case. In the first case, establishing credibility and in the second case is getting people to take action.

So, campaign site #2. Totally different, yet again by way of design, it is a little bit more mellow. The idea here was they did go for eye-catching stuff. They wanted to grab your attention immediately, but in this case it is done more with the animal photos. It turns out if you look at the statistics for what happens online for these folks, whether it is an email campaign or it is a website, people just automatically are sort of drawn to the animal photos. As a result they put in lots of them. In this case, it is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. If you know this issue at all, it has been raging now since the Bush administration has been in and it has been a primary focus for these folks along with many environmental organizations.

So, this initiative is actually quite important to them. And we can see in this case, we have taken one step further from where we were with Pombo, which is there pretty much is nothing on this page, but house votes to open refuge to drilling. If you wondered what this site was about, it doesn't take long to find out.

And the second thing that is in here, if you imagine where your eye is drawn on this site, it is the polar bear and it is the "take action now." It is pretty straightforward. There really is not a whole lot else to do here; there is not a lot more pages on this site. So, from the design perspective, it is different than Pombo, in that it is not quite so wacky. But it is certainly eye-catching, in that they have used the photos of these animals that we know play very well with the audience. And then they have gone straight to the sort of "What do you want us to do?" "We would want you take action."

OK, similar one, another campaign, Save Idaho Wolves, uses a similar future, but there is a big difference here. Well, big from the standpoint that I think it takes it to the next level. So, we have sort of gone from the main site which is about education, information, establishing the foundation to Pombo, which sort of said, we pretty much want you to come here and take action. To the previous one you looked at, they pretty much only say, we want you to take action. And they have gone to up the ante here by saying we want you to do three things for us. And you know what, we are going to give them to you, one, two and three.

It doesn't get much more straightforward than that. Shy of standing up, taking them by the arm, walking them over and having actually type in on the keyboard, you don't get much more straightforward than this. Iconic imagery grabs your attention, beautiful photogenic images of what are the wolves, which is again one of the most popular animals that they deal with. And they have made it real simple.

Intro, here is what it is about. One: Donate. Two: Take action. Three: Send an ecard to a friend.

So, give us money, support us in our legislative policy making and spread the word. So, the viral piece, it says "If you like these images send them to a friend. Introduce them to the campaign and they will come back and do the same thing."

All right, let's wrap up Defenders with one last one.

So, we all remember the Exxon Valdez. Still not a pretty situation and in this particular case, there is a website. And if it is not clear, this is the actual home page for the website. And I have blown up what is the header section in this area. I think it gets your attention, pretty sure.

The interesting thing about this site is that #1, you see something very interesting which is there is no logo up here. There is no logo up here, although by the way the branding is nicely done in terms of getting your attention and making it very clear what this site is about. There is no logo out there because it is a coalition site. So, we have now gone from main site to campaign site, which is strictly owned by defenders to a coalition site. Real common scenario for organizations who are doing stuff on the web or in general who are doing programmatic efforts or policy making and activism with a group, with a coalition.

So, what do we do from a branding perspective? The idea here is simply that we have eliminated the organization altogether. So, instead of dual branded, organization plus campaign, we are going to simply a campaign branding. And what we have done then is sort of put that the whole way across the header here. The idea is simply this. There were too many organizations that participated in the coalition to ever get all of the logos up there. So, they have sort of dispensed with and if you go to the "about campaign" section, you will certainly see all of them listed. And it is a very impressive list by the way.

It would have been interesting to see if there was a better way of building in some of those organizations because they are big brands and they are the kind of things that I think lend credibility to this campaign.

But the interesting thing about this site which takes it yet again to the next level. We talked about how we have gone from the main site and talked about how aggressive you want to be in a campaign site, they have kind of taken it to the fullest extension here. And that is, on this home page, not only are they saying take action, but they are actually putting the "take action" form right here. So, if you are into advocacy, it doesn't get much more straightforward than getting to a home page that basically says "Fill in your name, send an email, we will figure out which legislator it needs to go to and they are going to get your message that supports our particular campaign." They put the form right on the home page.

So, in terms of websites' characteristics and things that make sort of home sites or primary sites different from campaign sites, you can get the sense that you have sort of a scale, a grade of just how aggressive you can be, and how you want to be aggressive based on your design and the content that you are presenting on that site.

Some things that are typically common to every campaign site is there are fewer pages, normally, and they are much more oriented to action But in this case we can see we have taken it pretty much to the limit. Which is you can take the action right on the home page. By the way I would say that this is something we see a lot, which is sort of this organically growing home page. It s something that is not necessarily highly recommended from a best practices standpoint for a home page. Which is, if you look at it, I suspect that is probably at least three pages long.

We usually recommend only one to two pages max for a web page as a general standard. So, having it three pages long, usually what happens is most organizations find that overtime, someone says, "We need to add this in the site." So, they say, "Well, where do we add it?" Well, we will put it at the bottom of the home page or we will put it at the top and move everything down because that stuff that is on there is pretty important. Of course, the bottom line is that not that many people actually see what is done here anyway.

So, a strategic use of your home page is actually quite important. Can you all see over here OK? I am going to try and move around a little bit. Go ahead.

[pause]

OK. So let's move into second section. Talk about emails and then we will pull them both together in the last couple of minutes. Go ahead.

[pause]

Next slide. All right, emails. There's our friends at Breast Cancer Fund are here today. Do a wonderful job with their email and in this case we are going to look at a fund raising email and I broke it up into sections. We will do the same thing. We will look at what are the best practices for various parts of this email. So, we are going to dissect it and talk about the pieces.

The header. So, from this section of email, we have blown up this and we can see a few things that are important to making an email successful, some of them much more important than others. The first one is this, "if you are unable to view this message, click here." Very simple tactic, it says when that email arrives in some inbox, it is just not visible. It is HTML, it doesn't get rendered properly, it doesn't look right, it gets messed up, so I can't see it.

But you should know that when it first comes into their inbox, if nothing else, this particular text is going to show. It is simple text. When it does, they can click on that and they can go to a web page version of this guy. It is a great way to ensure that the extra 2, 3, 5% of the people who can't happen to see this will actually get a chance to see the email. So, it is small, but it is easy to do, so we suggest that you do it.

What else is up here? We put the date, we put the logo, establishes identity, it is above the fold, it is above the section that you can see without having to scroll in your email client, and we establish who the organization is.

And then this is a very, very important piece. This is the same on every fundraising email they send. "Urgent appeal" says two things. One it is urgent and we know that is one of the four things we do to build a good email, to build a successful email campaign. So we have established urgency immediately by saying so. And an appeal tells people that I am going to appeal to you and most folks understand that is code for "we are going to ask you for some money."

Why is it important to do this? It is very important to tell people what you want up front. There are some folks who often ask the question, "Why don't I just kind of keep them guessing until I actually get to my ask?" I mean seriously they ask that question and I am not sure that it is not sort of a great exercise to go through, which is how straightforward do you really want to be when you are asking for money. So, there are a lot of development directors I am sure in here and we all talk about this question.

I will tell you in email, you are better off being more straightforward. Make it shorter, make it more direct, and in many cases, you can make it little more informal. That's things that are different between direct mail and email. Can be shorter, should be more to the point while still developing the story that is your ask. And thirdly, you can be a bit more informal if you choose to because email, as a tool, tends to be a little bit less formal. So, we have told them up front what we are going to ask them. And if they choose not to read it, it is because they know that they are not going to give. If they are interested, they are at least going to scroll down.

We have two other items here. Forward to a friend and not a subscriber. We are always asking folks to tell someone else, that is pretty standard fare. We put it in the header that way everybody has a good chance of seeing it. So, not a subscriber but we are only sending it to subscribers. Why were we to have not a subscriber in there? Well, the easy answer is that if you do forward it on, then whoever is going to get it is not a subscriber. So, we want to give him the opportunity of building your email list.

Figure it this way, for every new person that adds to your email list, it is worth about figure anywhere from $1 to $3. We would like to do that because it monetizes the idea that putting new people on that list has value. So, it is real. When you go to an event, you are collecting names. Add them to your database, it is really valuable stuff. And we would like to put that number on it because, in general, that is what it will cost you to go out and get a new one. Anywhere from $1 to $5 typically.

I am going to just finish up with this particular email and then we will just jump ahead and do the last bit, which ties them together.

OK, so in this case, you are looking at the first section, which is personalized "Dear Jeff", of course just like in direct mail. And this is very important piece, which is the call to action. And we call this whole setup a single call to action template, which is you are really only asking them to do one thing. So, the first thing we do is right up here, which is actually found here, top right, above the fold. Tells them very briefly what it is you want them to do and you can't hardly miss the button. It says "click here to donate." Pretty obvious what we are asking them to do, pretty obvious how you go about doing it. The last thing you want to do is make them jump through hoops to make it happen, OK.

Center section. Couple of things. You see, we have repeated the call to action within the text. It is pretty standard best practices to always repeat the call to action multiple times throughout your story as you develop the appeal. The idea is you never want to make them have to go very far to figure out where they click. So, go ahead and donate. And that repetition gives them ample opportunity to see it. And then down here some PS that allows them to actually forward on the email and subscribe.

OK, footer. Last bit of the email. First piece is the mission. Why the mission? Not everybody who receives this email knows your organization well. Some may not know it at all if the email has been forwarded to them. Give them a quick and easy way to understand who is sending this message and why they should be interested. We repeated their slogan, and at the bottom is the basic information required by CAN-SPAM, which is telling who's sending the information. And guess what, one more time, forward this to an email subscribe today.

OK last bit. Most of the email marketing applications will provide the opportunity to do this. Allow people to unsubscribe or edit their profile. Usually automatically edit, but if it's not, you should add it. And then in this case is a really nice feature is to prevent mail box filters from deleting mailings. Add newsletter@ breastcancerfund.org. Basically you're saying that this is a good way for our emails not to end up in your spam folder.

So we have a couple of other ones here and when you go to look at the presentation you can see some of the variations on a theme for some of these.

And then banana split. So in the last couple of minutes let's talk about knowing that you've done your website, whether it's a campaign site or a main site and you've done your emails, we want to talk about how you want to integrate the two.

Home page for Arizona University. Big, beautiful, very little content. It's mostly to support new visitors. They had a very small list. We knew most people who were coming to the site were going to be new. We didn't want to give them a lot of information. What we wanted to do was grab their attention.

There's a rotating set of photos in here that are absolutely gorgeous, and basically what this page does is said: "hey notice me, aren't I beautiful, go check something out". This is the inside page, so from the website prospective you can see the difference between the home page and an inside page where we've used different designs. Altogether possible to do. Don't hesitate to think about changing up a little bit if it's necessary to achieve what you want to do. Three column design, sand stone background, similar color scheme. A lot of the same branding elements that are carried over even though it's a very different looking page.

This is actually an email. So we're going to our email and you can find a lot of the same common elements that we just talked about in the emails that we looked at. But in this case my point, more than anything, is you'll notice how similar this email is to that website, at least the inside pages. The key theme here is when people move from their email inbox where they live, and click on a link and go to your website where you live, you need that to be a very easy transition. It needs to be a transition that has a lot of common elements, and they need to understand that they are still talking to the same organization. The more different it is, the more disruptive it's going to be, the fewer number of conversions, the more people that are going to tend to take off and say: "I don't understand it, I don't know what's going on, this doesn't feel like the same site, this might not be kosher, This must be messed up."

So the concept of the banana split in this case is you have two halves of the banana, but when you eat that banana split, you eat the whole thing. It all gets consumed as one sort of event. And that's true, when you think about your email and you think about your website, we need to think about them together. They need to be consistent in terms of their branding, about the messaging, and about the general look and feel that you have.

So to kind of wrap it up lets do one more. This particular organization has one more email. This is one that goes out to the alumni base and is strictly about that stuff that I think all of us alums what to know about, which is: hey what is everybody else doing. We created a news letter for them that's all about some of their more interesting... They had this thing where everybody at the organization felt like they weren't highlighting how interesting the base was. So we created a news letter that had really cool photography, that had some really interesting story about what alums around the world are actually doing.

But you notice in this case two things. There's a lot of the same branding elements, but that this email carries all of the same basic characteristics we talked about, but the look and feel's a bit different. Why? Because it's going to tend to go to a younger audience, number one. So it's a bit hipper looking but still carries a lot of the same branding elements. And number two, it needed to look a little different from the other one so that we didn't get the two confused.

So what were the concepts there? The concepts were, in terms of your banana split, two halves of the banana, part of the same sundae, consume them all together. When you're thinking about what you're doing on the Internet, think about your email, think about your website. Make sure that that experience moving from the email, when they get it, to your website remains consistent throughout the whole process.

Eric: Thank you Jeff.

[Audience Applauds]

Alana: Thank you so much Jeff. Jeff expected to have a lot more time, so sorry. Next we're going to have Favi from Tumis. And one thing to keep in mind: there's a lot of the concepts that are being thrown out today assume... so questions might be, "But how do I create a brand? How do I create the content for my web site? How do I know what messaging I'm sending out? How do I do the emails?" And also, "How do I go about designing the web site?"

So all of these three amazing people run companies that can help you create your web site, do all of the content, create your theme. Different non-profits have different budget levels, different capabilities. Some have development staff, communications staff, some don't.

So there are definitely ways, on a small budget, to go about creating your company without having to contract one of these kinds of organizations for doing the whole thing. You can bring them in, they can do some basics with you, and then you can get members, volunteers, board members who have the skills to maybe create the web site for you. They can all talk to you about branding,

I'm from Media Alliance. We also teach a lot of classes around: How do you do strategic communications? How do you do branding? How do you get your stuff online? So you can find out all those background information from any one of the four of us by taking our classes. Here's Favi.

Favianna Rodriguez: Thank you everybody for being here. My name is Faviana and I'm one of the founders of Tumis. We're based in Oakland. And today what I'm actually going to talk about some case studies and how we helped some organizations. Because these case studies all went through different processes but they're all working in collaboration with each other. And feel free to ask me questions as the presentation goes.

So, number one: I want to talk about three case studies of three organizations that we're working with, all of which are catering to youth and youth organizations. Now, the way that we're thinking about our presence on the Internet, is thinking about how we as a sector, as a youth organizing, youth development sector, are establishing a new kind of presence on the Internet that is not about profit, it's not about making money off teenagers.

Now, the thing that's important... [audience noise] Excuse me? Oh... What's important about this collaboration is that it is coming from a youth centered, youth-led perspective, where we're looking critically at race, gender, class, sexuality and the decisions that are being made and how we communicate to our audiences via the Internet.

And so what we're considering is, what are our offline strategies, what are our on-the-ground strategies to reaching out to people and how do we carry those into the Internet? Some principles that we look at is... one, how do we look at the needs of the users? What are the needs of the users, whether you're talking to communities that are immigrant communities, bilingual communities, youth communities. What are their needs and how do you reach out to them in a way that's relevant? We also believe that technologists should come from the communities that they're trying to serve.

The truth is that many times, women are almost invisible, people of color in the technology world, and that the way that we shape technology and we shape our presence is shaped by our value system and what we bring to the table and our experiences. The principle that web-based technologies can support organizing work but not replace it. And so to have a truly successful web presence also means looking at how your organization is doing on the ground, mobilizing how it is that you're trying to grow your base.

In this particular case study, is that young people, especially young people of color, are really creating important movements through hip-hop, through online communities, that can't be ignored, and how do we leverage that so that these organizations could become stronger? So that's how we approached the project.

So I want to talk about the process because I think that it's really helpful to think about, well what steps is it important to go through? The first thing is, this graph is in the handouts, but the first is really planning around what do you want to do with your site? Because when you plan around what you want to do with your site you have to take into account certain things.

One of them is the capacity of your organization. If you're going to do a web site that has content that's going to be changing, you want to make sure you have the people to develop that content. Whether it's developing new stories or blogs, who is going to be in-charge of that and what is your capacity to do that. The other thing is what are your organizing goals, what are your goals in your nonprofit? Is it to organize a certain kind of community base? Is it to take an action with a certain target in mind? What are your goals?

The other thing is: what is your messaging? What are your campaigns and how can you message your campaigns to reach the audience that you want to speak to? And so, in the first phase, what we would like to do is develop, OK, what is your roadmap and what are going to be the requirements for you to develop them. For example, I am sure a lot of you have heard things like blogs, well what is an RSS or what is an audio cast. Some of those things may not even be useful to what you are trying to do. In our case, we were trying to reach out to young people of color who are primarily on MySpace.

And so, we know we needed things like YouTube, which a little video interface. We knew we needed music. We knew we needed very kind of short blurbs of new stories because that was the audience we were trying to reach out to. Likewise, if we are trying to reach out to an immigrant audience, we know that we have to have a different kind of messaging. We know that we have to have something bilingual that is not longer than a page. And so, when you think about that, it will inform what your requirements are and then you move into doing something called wireframes, which I also encourage people to think about. Which is really mapping out the architecture of your site.

From there, moving into design, creating your content, engineering and then entering the content in your site. Now, creating content is something that I think also people forget and they just kind of leave it towards the end. But creating your content is very important to your web presence. Because for example, if you want to have an opinion piece about the media monopoly and how in FCC, for example. Then you need to make sure that you have the staff to do that, but also that you have some kind of protocol or some kind of process for how that media gets developed. And then also different user levels.

One of the things that now you can do is have certain kind of admins where you have a senior administrator kind of looking at all the events that are posted. You can have someone that is a little lower level who would post, for example, just updates, staff updates, staff bios. So, you have to develop that process within your organization so that your website can be successful. Because otherwise you get things where you have outdated content and that is never good.

The next step that is also important is the testing, testing it on multiple platforms, testing it with your users, encouraging feedback, training, training your staff, so that they also feel empowered and take ownership of the site. Because the other thing is for us for a really successful site, it is important to have different members of your staff create content. If you have that kind of buy-in, then you can have a good content driven site. And then finally, the launch.

So, I am going to go ahead and talk about the case studies. We will go ahead and jump into that. So, the first one, BLOC. BLOC was a national organization where they build leadership of youth organizers. And one of their objectives was wanting to build a website for youth who were doing activism work, which is really a growing sector now. Youth who are politically active, who are either part of organizations that they were technologically savvy. Those were the kind of people that BLOC wanted to reach out to.

The other thing is to have some kind of web portal where youth and adult social justice committee groups could share strategies, they could talk to each other, they can share curriculums, they could share things like books, best practices. And they wanted to have collaboration and partnership with other youth organizations that could create content. For example, there are a few online youth magazines in the Bay area like WireTap, YouthNoise. And so BLOC reached out to them as their news content partner.

This is what the website looks for BLOC. I am sorry it is so light, but the color is not great. And so, what this is, in the top as you can see our audience is young people, identified as hip-hop activists. And what they have, each of them, is able to create circles on a website. They are able to link up to other people. Kind of like on MySpace where you can say, you know, "So and so is my friend, I belong to this gay pride committee, I belong to this women's group."

They can profile what it is that they belong to and they could also post their documents for each other, whether it is like a flier to get out the vote. They could also do blogs because one of the things is that we found that young people have to do in various focus groups throughout the country, a lot of young people wanted to write, writing little short blogs and opinion pieces.

The other thing is they wanted to connect to each other. They wanted to post photos of each other and identify who their allies were. And so, we created an interface, very similar to MySpace, that would allow them to kind of link to each other say, you know, who are their favorite political icons, who are their revolutionaries, what is their theory of change. So, very different than Rupert Murdock's MySpace, is all of this was from a social justice perspective, but the tools were very similar.

The next organization, Future 5000. Now, these three organizations collaborated because they knew that they wanted to have an impact on the Internet that was more than just the place people would come read the news. They wanted to really have people network on their site and they knew that young people right now, the content that is available to young people, that is about social consciousness, about changing the world, there is very little because of the large presence of like MTVs and MySpace. A lot of it is more towards entertainment, dating, commercialism. Right?

So, these organizations wanted to have a shift in that. And in order to have a shift in that, on the national level, they needed to form a collaboration.

So, Future 5000. The first thing we did with Future 5000 is help identify what their goals were going to be and how they fit within this circle of youth organizations. So, what their goal was? #1 to build the current, smaller youth organizations. Because also some of these youth organizations didn't have their own websites or they had like one of their free pages, something that would be given to them by their web host provider. They wanted to inform the youth about what is happening. You know, hey do you know what are the K-through-12 requirements, how can you fight for ethnic studies in your high schools. They wanted to really make this an action oriented site.

The other thing is they wanted to be a reference. And the reason they are called Future 5000 is because they wanted to have a database available of who are all the youth organizations in their country, what are they working for, what is their staff size.

And if any of you are interested, another part of web development is also creating content and information that you may not be able to find. One interesting project that we are working on is profiling how foundations give money and how systematically sometimes foundations actually give more to hospitals and educational institutions than small organizations. But in order to do that, we had to track the data and create a force that would have that data.

The next thing is they wanted people to take action on their site and they wanted to be the central admin. And now the reason I am going over this is because here they planned. They planned what their goals were going to be on the website and what were going to be their areas of work. And that turned then into an action plan. And this was even before design, even before any kind of development started, any kind of coding, engineering, was the high-level overview of what are the objective that they are going to do. So, for example, in July, August, September, you see that: Provide general information about Future 5000, launch a new identity, create online reports.

In 2007, they are trying to build more sophisticated reports, create a centralized calendar, create a posting tool for events opportunities. So, they put their objectives into releases according to their capacity and into something that was doable so that they would launch kind of in phases. So that is something else I encourage you to think about is how can you plan it out and have your website kind of grow according to how your users react to it or according to your capacity.

And this is the Future 5000 web interface. It is kind of hard to read, but in the Future 5000 directory, you can actually search to see what youth organizations are doing. For example, electoral politics. Who is working with youth who identify as gay, who are working with youth who identify with different cultures. And so, after they planned it out, then design began.

And the final website, which is Youth Media Council, also brought some to the table. And what they brought was actually an analysis of what this tool called the Internet is, and how can we use it to shape, not just what we do whether it is environmentalism, but what do we do as media communicators considering that so much of the Internet is trying to be controlled and considering that so much of the media is controlled by right wing corporations. So, how does that dialog enter then into what these young people are going to be doing. So, the Youth Media Council was dedicated to building the media capacity of these youth organizations, so that they not only had a great website, but they had good messaging. They were able to say this is our campaign against Clear Channel Communications because they play xyz and we demand that they play more positive music. That was actually one of their campaign goals.

And the Youth Media Council, which is something really similar to what Jeff was saying is that this is their central website, their main primary website and they have two subsites for their campaigns. So, the YMC, the Youth Media Council, this is their home page.

The Media Action Center, which I am going to show you next is actually all geared around FCC and demanding accountability from Clear Channel across the country demanding media accountability locally and at the national level and taking action in terms of media.

And the final one, Echo Communication, how did they build the capacity of young media makers? Well, they had online tools, they had how to write your own press release. We are currently building with the Youth Media Counsel and Media Alliance a press database, so that you can find press contacts that have written in favor of certain issues or made comments on how press contacts react to certain social issues. And so, they are building a youth centered database for that. But they have their main interface but you could also get to different parts of their site. So, this is their primary one and then take a look at their Media Action Center. It is very different, it is very catered to youth who listen to hip-hop stations, but that was their main audience. And so, they needed something funky, they needed something that you could roll over, the radio will change, so that youth can engaged.

And so, on that note, I want to just kind of close off by saying, "Well, who are we? Who is Tumis?" Because I think that it is important to talk about what our values are, especially when you are thinking about selecting who you are gong to work with. How do we move more towards doing something that is value based. With Tumis, we offer services of course in technology, but also we are people of color owned and staffed and we are bilingual. And so, many of the projects that we take on are looking at communities and looking at, well how do we speak to these communities in ways that are relevant, that will be successful. Because, for example, consider Spanish-speaking communities, their online presence is this big, but if you think out 10 years, that community is going to grow. So, how do we think about speaking to those communities in a way that is culturally relevant?

The other thing is we as a firm relocated our offices into San Antonio, which is home to the largest immigrant community, one of the largest ones in the country. And so, how we look at technology building is the decisions that we make when we design, the decisions that we make, the political decisions that we make to expand our organizing goals and to really know. What we are trying to do is, we are trying to change the world, we are trying to change the planet, but how do we translate those objectives, as a organization, into our online media strategy.

[applause]

Jeff: Thank you very much Favianna. Brett?

Brett Blackaby: So, we come at this from a slightly different but kind of related perspective and that is the world of online politics. And, as Jeff said, you will see there are a lot of similarities, but there are some differences. And I am also going to emphasize a few things that are a little bit different and extend on some of the comments that Favianna and Jeff made, so that we are not repeating a lot of the same ground here.

Let me give you a little bit about our experience and our philosophy, which sort of guides the way we think about online projects. And then talk a little bit about the three areas we think of about when you want to map our your online strategy, and covering all those bases. At the end, because you've heard a lot, the three things to take away from whatever I tell you, to put them right there, because I think you can boil a lot of this down into three quick and easy to remember phrases.

So a little bit about my experience, and kind of where we are. We came into online politics by managing the online fundraising operation for General Clark's presidential campaign in '03 and '04, which was a very fast burn. From September through February, although we also were active in the "Draft Clark" movement building up to it. Anyway, the key numbers there were $7 million raised in five months, which actually represented 40% of what the campaign raised overall, and that all came through the web. And building a list of about 250, 000 folks. We left the campaign and started a consulting company, and have been continuing to work in politics.

We still work with General Clark, Senator Boxer, Lahey, Levin, Durbin, Landrieu, Klobuchar, who's running for senate in Minnesota. Jim Webb, who's running against the evil George Alan in Virginia. Nick Lampson who's running against Tom DeLay, but now isn't, because Tom DeLay is out in Texas. And a couple folks, Deborah Bonham and John Cheung, who are running state-wide here in California. So a variety of political projects. Campaigns, as well as political action committees and organizations that have longer duration than a shorter campaign.

I come at this very much from a management consulting background. I spent some time at Mackenzie and also at E*Trade doing online marketing. I'm sort of applying a lot of those skills to politics. Maybe you'll see some of that in the presentation.

Our philosophy is that an online strategy is very much about a website, but there's a lot more to it, as well. That's a lot of what I'm going to talk about. If you think Field of Dreams, "If you build it they will come", that's probably not going to happen for most folks. There's a lot more work, once you build the website. How do you get people there? How do you get people coming back? Jeff alluded to that. It's a lot about email, it's a lot about building that relationship and getting people familiar with you so they're comfortable and come back.

That leads into the second point. You really have to develop an online communications program. Use email marketing. Reach out to blogs. Tell people what they should know, when they should know it. Don't just expect they're going to find out about it of their own volition. You really need to push content out to folks.

The third component, and this is often a problem in campaigns, is that your online program really needs to be integrated into everything else that you're doing. There are a lot of folks in politics who don't really know what to do with the Internet. So sometimes you're out there like the bastard step child, off to the side. Where we've seen success is when whatever you're doing on the web is really integrated very tightly into everything else that's going on in the campaign, or in a nonprofit organization. When there's an event coming up, it's promoted on the web. That when you're talking about releasing some big new initiative, it's pushed out in an email. Anything you're doing on the web then also is talked about through traditional channels. If you're running an online advocacy campaign about X, Y, and Z, you should be using every other opportunity and every other venue to talk about it. That's not just a web thing - that's an organizational thing that you're doing, and so the promotion of that doesn't need to be limited to the web, either. So integration is really key.

Fourth, when you're thinking about messaging, and this is also a big trap that political campaigns fall into, is messaging supporters in a one-dimensional way. Just give me money, or just give me your time, or just sign my petition. Falling into a trap. You're only asking different sets of people for different sets of things based on how they came to you in the first place.

I think what you learn over time, again, we've seen this a lot in politics, is you may give $50, and that's your first connection to your organization. But you may also want to spend five hours a month volunteering, or you may also want to be coming to events, or you may also want to be recruiting your friends. So you should be using your messaging program to activate people and give people lots of opportunities to participate, and that kind of goes into what the fifth bullet is about.

So on one slide, those are our guiding principles in terms of what we talk to clients about in building an effective online program.

So a quick and very ugly visual about how we map out the landscape. At the top, you have the communities of people you're trying to reach, whether they be your existing supporters, grassroots activists, donors, bloggers, members of the media. In the case of political campaigns, also includes voters.

In the middle is this online infrastructure that you're building. The core of it is whatever that website is. That also includes things like whatever you're using to blast out your emails. It also includes things like whether or not you have a blog, whether or not you have online petitions, whether or not you have a mechanism for people to write letters to the editor. All those sorts of features fit in this online infrastructure.

On the back end is really the key asset that you're trying to maximize over time, and that's building your database. It's building the universe of people that are supporting your organization. Everything that you're doing in the middle should be about how you're communicating with the folks at the top, and how you're building a bigger and bigger list, and a bigger and bigger set of people you're communicating with.

If you look at that kind of map, there are three key inflection points, and I'll talk about two of them. The first one is over on the right, is really designing, building, and managing that web infrastructure on an ongoing basis. Jeff and Favianna have talked a lot about that, and I won't go into that in any great detail because they've done it very effectively, and talked about that very effectively.

What I'm going to talk about is the other two pieces, which is how do you grow your email database. This is marketing 101. When you're looking at what you expect to raise from a fundraising email, there are some basic metrics, but one of the most important metrics is how many people are getting it to begin with? Whether it's 10, 000 people, or 100, 000 people, or 1, 000, 000 people, it exponentially makes a huge difference in terms of what your return is going to be. So don't forget, and spend some time thinking about how to grow that, and I'll provide a few ideas on that as we go on.

The third piece, which is up at the top, which is kind of the relationship between your online infrastructure and all those people, is that outbound communications program. It's targeting different groups, and tailoring messages that you're pushing out to those folks. So I'm going to spend time talking about two and three, but really we talk about it in three pieces. It's the infrastructure, building and managing it. It's growing and expanding the email database, and it's managing your online fundraising and communications program, which in shorthand is email.

So on growing the database. There's just a laundry list of things. Different of these may work for more effectively for some folks than others. Things like viral marketing campaigns - if you have a petition or an advocacy campaign, and Jeff talked about this with some of his clients, where you're trying to galvanize people to take some action, mobilize people to take some action. You're trying to get your existing members to do that, but you're also wanting your existing members to tell everybody else about that, and that's a really effective list building technique. As a matter of fact, it's easier to say "Join Barbara Boxer in condemning Condoleezza Rice for our Iraq policy" and getting people to sign up for that, than it is to sign up for Barbara Boxer email. The advocacy accomplishes two things. One is there's an action, and two is you're building the list. The other one is less interesting, and just does one of those things.

So we use petitions and advocacy campaigns as really a mechanism for list building quite often. You can couple that with any of these things here. Reaching out to blogs, especially targeted blogs that fit into the universe of people that you're trying to reach. We do a lot of work with Daily Coast, and Atrios, and Mighty D, and a lot of political blogs, and getting our clients to be posting out there and communicating with that community.

Using search engines, again, these are things that are often over looked, but very cheaply you can buy keywords that have to do with the mission of your organization, so if people are looking for "Saving Mono Lake", or this that and the other thing, and pop up a little ad about what you're doing to help save Mono Lake. People can find you when they're looking for you at a time when they're actively looking for that keyword, or information about that, and your organization pops up a little ad. That's a very effective time to be marketing to people.

Renting email lists, doing small-mine advertising, there's plenty of those things floating around. A big one, I think, and again we use this a lot in politics where there are a lot of endorsements and partnerships and things, is working with supportive organizations and doing some sort of mutual "Well, you email your folks about this, and then we'll email our folks about that." You're kind of reaching in to other universes. And again, we often use a petition or advocacy campaign as the mechanism that Barbara Boxer might get Phil Angelides to send something about something that Barbara Boxer cares about; which helps her sign up people, and find people; and Phil Angelides' will care about what Boxer cares about. And vice-versa, we'd offer the same thing.

Skip to the bottom. Again, growing your email database isn't just done online, it's done offline. Again, Jeff talked about this as well, but collecting emails at every event. Just a sign-up list where asking people for email, or again, it can be a paper copy of an advocacy campaign or petition that you're running. Just some mechanism of collecting information, you'd be amazed. Again during the Clark Campaign in New Hampshire, General Clark was at all these events with a thousand - two thousand people we had the hardest time getting field staff just to do some of the most basic and simple things. I think we really lost an opportunity to really reach out to folks. You know, if people are coming to your event, they're interested, right? And so you should be collecting information to continue dialog with them after the event concludes.

I've only got a couple minutes so I'll walk you through one quick case study. This is what we did with Senator Boxer during the Condoleeza Rice confirmation hearings. We launched an online advocacy campaign. Senator Boxer was sort of leading the opposition to the Rice nomination. And so we had her own existing email list, and we developed this petition campaign where people could stand up and tell Senator Boxer to ask the hard questions. It was a very popular campaign, a lot of people participated.

We also complimented what we did to emailing our existing folks by really a rapid - literally within a day or two days - putting together this little online marketing campaign where we bought some search engine ads on Google and on Yahoo! For important keywords. So any time anybody was looking for "Condi Rice" or "Barbara Boxer" or "confirmation hearings", they'd get an ad that said, "Sign Barbara Boxer's petition to hold Condi Rice accountable." And we got a lot of people through that.

We ran some blog ads on some of the political blogs. We had Senator Boxer do an interview with some of the DailyKos bloggers who talked about the fact that what they talked about with her. And so we spent a couple thousand dollars and brought in 7500 new supporters in that process through the paid piece. But then, overall, with what we did to our email list and what our email list did by circulating it around to their friends and family, we collected just about a 100,000 petition signatures and doubled the list in about three weeks.

A lot of this is finding opportunities and taking advantage of opportunities as they present themselves, and just being able to kind of adapt, and see something and say "I can build my own online campaign around it. No one else is doing it. I'm just going to go for it."

A couple of other quick things, and I'll skip through a few of these things. These will be in the presentation, but a lot of things with online marketing is always managing what your spending, and having an eye towards, "Is this an effective return?" And I'll leave this in the presentation. You can read it kind of at your leisure.

So we talked about list-building. The other piece is actually the fund-raising and communications program, which is email. And two big things to think about here, is kind of the strategy behind it. What's the right frequency for you? I think in political campaigns we have sometimes the luxury to message very frequently. If it's an urgent campaign and during the Clark campaign we were messaging two or three times a week.

But other campaigns and other organizations, weekly or maybe semi-monthly may be more appropriate because you obviously don't want to really burn out the list. You also want to balance what you're doing amongst lots of different things. You don't want always to be asking for money. So balancing among fund-raising, advocacy campaigns, mobilization messages, come to an event, come volunteer, or educating about some subject, be thoughtful about what the schedule looks like, how often and what you're saying. And then on the bottom, sort of the execution of the program, it's really about writing effective and compelling copy.

And there's three kind of pieces in that: there's the open rate, the click-through rate, and the conversion rate, in terms of what you're doing. Jeff also talked about this. The only elements really that you have to maximize the rate at which people are opening your message, that decision is based on the "from line" and the "subject line" because that is all the information that people really have before they decide whether or not they are going to open your message.

So, think about that, and again, I think we have seen the same kind of thing where a "from line" from an individual, at least in our work, has tended to be a little more effective than just the vanilla name of an organization. And changing that up, so sometimes it is Barbara Boxer, sometimes maybe it will be Diane Feinstein, sometimes it will be Phil Angelides or whatever. It is always coming from info@barbaraboxer.com but sometimes it is a different name that people recognize. A little variety there I think also helps increase your open rate overtime.

Click-through rate is all about what is in the mail, it is the copy, it is the links, making sure that what you are asking people to do in the message is clear and compelling.

And then the conversion rate. Once people actually get to the page where they are doing whatever it is that you are asking them to do is making that as streamlined and easy as possible, as few hoops that people need to jump through as possible, as few boxes that they need to fill out as possible, and minimize opportunities to click away and stray away. If you provide a lot of links in that landing page that are other than "Contribute" or "Sign a petition" or whatever, it is just more opportunity for people to leave and not do what you asked them to do in the first place.

Segmenting your list, sending target messages based on whether someone has given before, whether they have participated in advocacy campaign before. Make sure you are smart about what you are asking people to do based on your previous knowledge of their history.

Visible online fund raising goals are good like the thermometers that Jeff talked about. Other organizations have found success with these sort of grassroots fund raising pages where people can setup their own personal page. Like "This is Brent's page to help Barbara Boxer", "Brent's page to help Wes Clark" or whatever. I am trying to raise $100 for my friends. Those tend to be a little more compelling than someone just getting a generic message, because it is actually coming from a friend or someone who they trust.

And another big part of this at the end is to think about is, you are never going to get it perfect and you are certainly not going to get it perfect to begin with. A lot of this is you have to think about this as the process that you are trying things. Somethings will work, somethings won't. You are testing, you are evaluating, you are gauging your progress. And based on what you are learning, what is working, what is not working, make sure you are baking that back into what you are doing down the road. Because it is a very evolutionary-the beauty of sort of online and on the Internet is it doesn't take you three months to sort of see what happens. I mean you know what happens to an email in a day or two. And the next time you send an email out next week, take what you learned from what you just did and bake that in, so that you are taking advantage of those learnings next time.

And I got to finish, so to wrap up, here are the three things to take away. Online strategy is more than just the website, the website is important, but there are a lot of other things to think about and that is a little bit of what we have been talking about today. Two, don't expect that people are just going to come to the website every week, you need to use your email to tell people what they need to know. And three, always be thinking in the back of your mind, "How can I grow my list? How can I expand my universe?"

Well, I have a copy of the presentation on the website, but also feel free to email me or come up, and for Jeff and Favianna, the same. If you want copies of it, I am happy to share it and provide it. Thanks.

[applause].

[Music interlude].

Eric: We hope you enjoyed this free podcast from the Nonprofit Boot Camp series. Craigslist Foundation produces events and online tools that provide knowledge, resources and visibility to the next generation of nonprofit leaders. To learn more about Craigslist Foundation or the Nonprofit Boot Camp conferences, visit www.craigslistfoundation.org.

This series is funded by the Community Technology Foundation of California, which helps under-served communities secure social justice, access and equality through the application of information in communications technologies.

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Eric: My name is Eric Nee, and I hope you will join me next time for another program from the Nonprofit Boot Camp series.