Five Fundraising Tips from the charity:water September Campaign
From a fundraising perspective, one of the great successes of the last few years has been charity: water. In five years the organization has evolved from a lean startup charity into a fundraising juggernaut that has raised millions online and provided potable water to an estimated two million people.
The organization just rolled out its annual September campaign, which is their big fundraising push each year. While charity: water clearly has more resources at its disposal than the average non-profit at this point, the fundamental set up of the campaign is something that any organization should be able to replicate.
(1) Set a goal and a timeline.
The goal of this year’s September campaign is to raise $1,200,000 by the end of September. On their site they include a real-time counter showing their progress in the campaign.
Setting clear goals like this and showing progress helps to make donors feel invested in the campaign and creates a sense of community.
Continue reading “Five Fundraising Tips from the charity:water September Campaign” »
Announcing Giving eCards
An increasing part of our work at The Bivings Group revolves around helping non-profits and political organizations fine tune their fundraising strategies. This work has taught us that raising money is tough. The down economy has created fierce competition for donor dollars, so organizations have to get creative in order for their solicitations to have an impact.
Into this environment we’re pleased to launch Givings eCards, a new product that provides organizations with a creative and cost-effective way to raise money online.
An eCard is a personalized image and message that an organization’s supporters can send to their friends and family. Giving eCards allows your supporters to not only send a custom eCard through the site, but make a donation to your organization in someone’s name.
Here is how it works from an organizational perspective:
- Organizations sign up for a free account on www.givingecards.com. When signing up, the organization reserves a custom URL for their Giving eCards page (www.givingecards.com/page_name).
- Once the account is created, organizations upload their custom designed eCards to their account. eCards can be categorized dynamically, allowing for sets of cards to be created for common occasions such as birthdays,the 4th of July, graduation, etc.
- Once the eCards are uploaded, the organization promotes their eCard page to their supporter base via email, social media, website links, etc.
- As supporters donate and send cards on behalf of friends and family, the money is automatically deposited into the Paypal account of the organization. Giving eCards takes 5% of the amount raised on top of Paypal’s fees.
- Organizations can access and export all donor information from their Giving eCards control panel at any time.
We’re planning to launch the product in closed beta next week with a more complete roll out in July. If you are interested in giving the product a whirl, please visit www.givingecards.com and sign up to request access to the beta.
Stay tuned….
eCards Organization Page
eCard Purchase Page
11 Things We Love About Drupal 7
Since its release in January of this year, we have used Drupal 7 for all of our new Drupal-based development projects. As a firm, we had thousands and thousands of hours of experience in Drupal 6. There are significant differences between Drupal 6 and 7, so working with the new platform has been a bit of an adjustment for us. Now that we’ve got our sea legs under us, we wanted to share the good and the bad of our experience with the platform so far.
I asked The Bivings Group’s resident Drupal gurus Chris Roane and Mike Lockard for their thoughts, and what follows is a collective list of what we love about Drupal 7. A list breaking down our frustrations will follow in a few days.
(1) The default administrative theme is greatly improved.
In earlier versions of Drupal, the default administrative theme was a bit homely and hard for new, non-technical users to navigate. There were a series of contributed modules for Drupal 6 you could install to improve the situation, but it was an extra step you had to take, and additional moving parts you have to deal with when updating. Drupal now has a slick and user friendly administrative theme as part of core. The administrative interface now includes Ajax goodness, an overall admin toolbar, shortcuts and generally increased loading times.
(2) Improved support for WYSWYG’s.
In Drupal 6 you could enable WYSWYG functionality by installing external modules, but they never seemed to work quite right. Drupal 7 makes the integration of WYSWYG editors more seamless. The end result is that they work better.
(3) Drupal 7 loads faster.
A long time complaint about Drupal is that it makes a lot of database calls, causing high server load that lead to speed issues when serving un-cached pages. Drupal 6 was a big improvement, but Drupal 7 features significantly less SQL queries causing sites to load faster.
(4) CCK is now part of core Drupal.
When working with Drupal 6, installing the Content Construction Kit (CCK) module was pretty much a requirement. CCK has been moved into core and rebranded as the Field API. Moving CCK into core gives developers the power to add fields to not only content types, but also to People, Taxonomy, etc.
(5) The image/file upload feature that is included in the Field API is invaluable.
Uploading files along with content in Drupal 6 was always a bit of a clunky process. Getting it to function the way you wanted was always a battle. In Drupal 7 what you can do right out of the box is much improved:
- The Field API allows you to specify which file types you want to allow (JPG, GIF, PDF, DOC, etc.). It also lets you set upload limits and maximum dimensions when uploading images.
- Files are now uploaded via an AJAX interface. After the file is uploaded it is immediately displayed in the form, where the user sees the file name and can delete the file right there. Further, as the file is uploaded the user sees a loading image so they can be confident that the file is getting loaded.
The end result is more flexibility for developers, and a better experience for administrators. All of this was possible in Drupal 6, but it was a battle to get to the functionality you wanted. The fact that these features are now integrated into the Field API will save developers a lot of headaches.
(6) There is more flexibility in what kind of content can be a custom content type.
In Drupal 6, content types were really designed to be text fields, with the Body field required for all custom content types you created. In Drupal 7, this requirement has been removed. This makes it less clunky to create non-text based custom content types for assets such as PDFs or images.
(7) Working with jQuery plugins is much easier in Drupal 7.
jQuery is probably the most popular JavaScript library, and allows for the rapid development of client side site features. Drupal 7 has made it much easier in general to use jQuery in your themes, and also ships with a jQuery 1.4.4, which is much faster and more feature rich than jQuery 1.2.6, which was the default in Drupal 6. For the front-end developers out there, this is a big improvement that will save lots of time.
(8) Drupal 7 uses PHP Data Objects (PDOs), which allows for developers to more easily write portable code.
By making this switch, Drupal 7 is no longer dependent on any specific type of database. The result is greater flexibility.
(9) There are a lot more hooks, which allow for more customizations on a deeper level.
Hooks are what allow for the modules you write for Drupal to connect to Drupal core. In Drupal 7, there are a lot more hooks and they have separated hooks that were used for multiple tasks into smaller pieces. This makes Drupal 7 truly modular, and gives developers the ability to create deeper customizations.
(10) Drupal 7 is much easier to update.
Keeping Drupal 6 current was a hassle, as to update a module you had to download it, unpack it, upload it again and then run the update. Drupal 7 features an Update manager that tells you when a module is out of date and allows you to update it right from the web interface. Much, much easier, and more like the experience in WordPress.
(11) Blocks are much easier to configure.
In Drupal 6, to create a block you have to first create a block on the page you want it to appear, and then go to the slow-loading block overview page to set where on the page you want it to appear. In Drupal 7 this is all done in one step. While it sounds trivial, this can save a lot of time on more complicated sites.
Update: You can read our post listing some negatives about Drupal 7 here.
Yobongo and Viral Nature of Beta Invites
As part of the launch process, new tech startups typically run a closed beta testing phase where a limited group of users can kick the tires of their new site. This period allows for startups to get discreet feedback from impartial users, while also testing how the product scales without launching to the whole world. As someone who likes to try out the latest shiny new thing, the last few years I’ve become pretty familiar with the methods tech startups use to dole out these beta invites, which many of us treasure.
Typically start ups will launch a one page placeholder homepage where users can enter an email address to get on the beta tester waiting list. Over time, the site owners will slowly start sending invites to the beta testers they have recuited. Typically, in addition to access themselves the initial beta testers are also given a limited number of invites (usually 5) that they can give to their friends. This process causes the test group to grow in an organic and manageable manner. This is the method sites like Gmail and Rockmelt have used to roll out their beta test phases.
Beyond making sure the site is functional and stable, these beta periods are also critical opportunities for start ups to build buzz about their new product. By severely limiting the number of people who have access to their product during this closed beta period, start ups create a false shortage as a way of increasing demand. The initial people with access feel special, and people without access want in. People want things they can’t have.
The invites that a beta tester receives along with access to the site are equally cherished. Again, this is basic psychology at work. Beta testers not only have the keys to the kingdom themselves, but they have the ability to give keys to the kingdom to others. For many, the invites are actually more important than getting access to the site itself. I myself am guilty of getting access to beta sites and quickly giving away my invites without actually testing the site myself in any depth.
Over the last few days, I’ve noticed a number of people post about a new startup called Yobonga on Twitter and Facebook. After seeing multiple posts, I clicked through and checked out the site to see what all the fuss was about. I learned that Yobonga appears to be some sort of mobile, location-based chat service with an exceedingly clever way to dispensing beta invites.
Yobongo’s homepage is pretty typical – featuring a few sentences about the product, a video and a form you fill out to get on the invite list. After signing up for the beta list I understood what the fuss was about. Yobongo is giving early access to their product to people who not only sign up themselves, but get three other additional people to sign up as well. It is basically a giant, and sustainable, pyramid scheme, designed to build buzz about the product. Below is a screenshot of the invite page.
So the buzz I was seeing on Twitter and Facebook wasn’t from people who tried and loved Yobongo, but instead from folks trying to recruit others to join the email list so they could get early access to the product. While I must admit to being a little annoyed by all the buzz I saw online, I have to acknowledge the cleverness of what Yobongo is doing. I hope the product is as good as the marketing behind it.
The Curse of WYSIWYG Editors
WYSIWYG editors sometimes make me want to scream!
For instance, it is sometimes hard to make desired edits. I can never get them to do a simple line break, for example; whenever I try, a new paragraph begins. To create a line break, I go into the html and adjust the code. However, the whole point of what-you-see-is-what-you-get is to avoid having to directly deal with the html, right?
Regardless, most of the time when using these editors, I am in the code view. In fact, I think that Notepad is the html editor that I use most frequently. This makes it so much easier to get tables, padding, image alignment, etc. more closely aligned with what is desired.
Additionally, the tags an editor uses may not match with the css of the site. A person may want to emulate the style of text on the same site (maybe even page) and will try to style it accordingly only to get frustrated when this does not work. If someone uses such an editor since they may not know html, what would enable them to modify the page or site’s css – let alone do in-line style tag attributes? Fortunately, I haven’t run across an issue like this here at The Bivings Group (we have a good production team), but this has to happen.
Another problem that I do come across is laying out a page in Drupal or WordPress for a client. Sometimes I have to code the html to achieve the desired results since that is the only way I can get it to work with the editor. The problem is that the client who plans to change the page over time typically does not have any html skills (which is totally fine – that’s why we use WYSIWYG editors), and they lack the knowledge to make the necessary changes. This either forces them to rely upon someone who knows html to make changes or to have the page laid out in a less appealing way that is manageable without directly coding html. Neither option is optimal.
I’ll reluctantly acknowledge that these editors may empower people more than they frustrate them. More and more people now have the ability to manage websites even though they may have no html, graphic design, or programming expertise. That is a good thing. However, I bet most of us who use these editors occasionally feel like typing “UGH!!!” and then bold, italicize, underline it while changing its color to red and increasing its size…
Feel free to list a favorite editor in the comments. I really don’t have one since I spend most of my time in the code view, but editors that color code tags like Dreamweaver does are appealing.
Bonus - I found this gem on Wikipedia: “WYSIMOLWYG, What You See Is More Or Less What You Get, recognizing that most WYSIWYG implementations are imperfect.”