We are pleased to announce the launch of the Brick Factory, a Washington, DC-based digital agency founded by former employees of The Bivings Group. You can read the details of the transition here.

As a result of the change, The Bivings Report will no longer be updated, although we intend to keep the site up as an archive of the great content that has been produced over the years.  To read new entries, please check out the Brick Factory blog, Brick by Brick.

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.

(2) Tell tell people where the money will go. 

The money raised for the September campaign will be used to purchase a drilling rig that will help provide potable drinking water to 40,000 people a year.  charity:water provides a detailed breakdown of how the rig will make an impact and how the money that is raised will be spent.  People are more likely to donate if they know exactly how the money they give will be used.

(3) Use matching.

If charity: water reaches its goal, a donor has agreed to match the $1,200,000 and purchase a second rig for the organization.  For donors, this essentially means that their donation will be doubled.  I know this isn’t a tactic everyone can use.  However I would advise non-profits to pitch the concept to large supporters. 

(4) Use video to mobilize.

charity: water has been a pioneer in the use of online video to mobilize.  This years September campaign video (embedded below) is fantastic. 

After watching that video, it is hard not to be inspired to pull out your credit card and make a donation.  Video can inspire emotion in a way that straight text can’t.

(5) Don’t just encourage people to donate, encourage them to fundraise.  

Economic times are tough, so there is only so much the average person can give to an organization like charity: water.  In an effort to give people ways to help beyond donating, charity: water has a robust online fundraising system that allows people to tap into their own networks to help charity: water reach its goal.  For a long time, this took the form of encouraging supporters to ask friends and family to donate to charity: water in lieu of birthday gifts.  While charity: water appears to have built their own custom fundraising system, tools such as Crowdrise and Rally provide inexpensive ways for organizations to launch similar fundraising campaigns.

Your most passionate supporters want to help you.  Provide them with ways to.

Bianchini Launches Mightybell To Harness The Power Of Baby Steps

Mightybell looks like a really intriguing new online service, and given the team behind it will definitely be worth watching.  Beyond the obvious self help style applications, I could see political and public affairs organizations using the service to help educate about issues or mobilize supporters to a campaign or cause. 

As a sports fan and iPhone user, one of the sites I frequently access on my phone is ESPN.com.  ESPN recently launched a new mobile site for iPhones, which is more robust and app-like than just about any mobile site I’ve seen.  As a reference point, below are screenshots of the ESPN mobile site in 2008 and today.

While they may not look that different superficially, the site today is much more sophisticated and user friendly than it was in 2008.  It is all about the details:

• The new ESPN mobile site has become much more video-focused the last few years.  As you browse the site just about every section has the option to play video on your phone.
• In 2008, the ESPN site just featured one top story.  Now the mobile site has a Top Story slider that allows you to cycle through articles in a manner similar to the experience on www.espn.com. 
• The mobile sites navigation system has been optimized to work really well for touch screens.  In 2008 it was a bit mysterious.
• The search is featured prominently on the site today, and the results you get when searching by topic focus on delivering the most timely information first.
• The MyESPN area allows you to customize the headlines you see by team/sport, allowing easy access to the topics you care about.

ESPN has worked hard to create a thoughtful mobile experience that focuses on getting users to the content they need without any tension.  For me, the simplicity and focus on content of the ESPN mobile site is a not reprieve from the clutter that you find on ESPN.com and other news sites. 

Although this clocks in at 70 slides,  if you only read and apply the first 30 slides your YouTube channel will be better than most. Indeed rather than producing something overly complex with tons of fancy buzzwords YouTube has put together a fairly concise (and free) outline of how to best utilize the platform. So will this put amateur YouTube ‘mavens’ ‘evangelists’ and other ‘ninjas’ out of business? Perhaps we can only hope, but as General Patton said, having proper instruction (or orders) is only worth 10%:

“The remaining 90 percent consists in assuring proper and vigorous execution of the order.”

While most of the suggestions here are indeed relatively straightforward, if you have not tried to set up annotations or design a custom background before, it is advisable to at least set up a testing account before making modifications to your organization’s official channel. Sometimes it can also be hard for subject matter experts in their own fields to take a step back and think about how their target audience, and the general public at large views their content. In this respect, retaining the services of qualified advisors can help in adding perspective.

So how important is the debt ceiling crisis?  So important it has gotten the Obama team to actually use Twitter.  I’m only sort of kidding. 

It is understood that the 2008 Obama campaign was the most successful digital campaign ever.   Given how well run it was, it always seemed strange to me that they never really did much on Twitter.  They built a massive following to be sure (over 9 million followers at last count), but the updates have typically been fluffy.  Lots of stuff about President Obama’s travel schedule, what he was eating and the game he was watching at a given moment. 

The last few months things seem to have changed, at least to me.  Team Obama has started playing offense on Twitter.  President Obama did a Twitter-centric town hall back in early July.  The Office of the Vice President joined Twitter.  And most importantly, Team Obama has started using the account to promote his agenda, aggressively.  As you’ll see below, throughout the day today  President Obama has been using Twitter to mobilize followers to pressure specific legislators in key states in support ofa  debt ceiling compromise.  Below is a sample. 

Will it help?  Who knows.  But I think the aggressiveness being shown is a clear sign of how important the debt ceiling negotiation is to President Obama (and the country).  They are attempting to mobilize support using any means necessary. 

Update: Mashable has an article with more details about this.  The Obama campaign ended up sending more than 100 tweets targeting Republicans in all 50 states.  According to Mashable they lost 14,000 followers in the process.  I think it would have been more effective if they had been a bit more targeted.  Sending that many tweets in that short of a timeframe is annoying to followers and comes off as a tad desperate.

Humans and machines have been intertwined for as long as anyone currently reading these words can remember. Recently though, the discussion has turned to whether this relationship affects our mutual memories. In essence, do we remember things? Or do we, as a collective human race, simply remember to google them?

The study publicized this week by the New York Times comes was spearheaded by Dr. Lindsey Sparrow and the Psychology Department of Columbia University. They tested people on 40 different bits of trivia, entered by the subjects into computers. The catch? Half of those tested typed the questions believe they would be able to call those bits of information back from the computer. The other half were told the information entered into the computer would be deleted. The study found “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read”. Your mind knows now, in these trying times, when to focus and remember, and when to not pass “go” and head directly to Google.

The other major example of this memory erosion shows a lapse in so-called “transactive memory”, which the Times defines as “the notion that we rely on our family, friends and co-workers as well as reference material to store information for us.” We count on landmarks, images, scents, smells and people to remind us basic facts and logical connections. Thanks to the internet, the study finds, we no l longer place memory information with these familiar tools in our brain; instead, we simply remember to use the technology at hand to retrieve the information. The take-away at the end of the article? Dr. Sparrow’s bombshell: “Human memory is adapting to new communications technology.”

This is not news. Take for example the demographic of people who accessed this article via tweet, blog post, or even the online edition of the paper. They wouldn’t even have read those words if their brain hadn’t adapted, at some point, to each one of these information transmission systems. Acclaimed author and journalist Jonah Lehrer writes at Wired: “for most of human history, the only other reliable source of information were other people. What these experiments reveal is that we treat the search engine like a particularly clever friend.” Our buddy Google has always got our collective back. Lehrer, the author of “Proust Was A Neuroscientist” explains that this is easier to understand if you think of the human mind as a computer. “Although we like to think of our cortical hard drive as infinite in capacity, it’s actually pretty constrained” he writes, “which is why we’re always looking for ways to not remember stuff”.

To put the limits of our mind in context, it’s important to remember how much information is thrown at us daily. Google recently announced that the new Google + network transmits 1 billion items of information per day. Facebook? They say 4 billion items of information. Twitter countered with their own staggering statistic: 350 billion pieces of information (if you could call most tweets actual information) per day. Divided by the number of “real” Twitter users as determined by Business Insider, 56 million, that means each twitter user absorbs 6, 250 pieces of information daily.
Is it really that hard to believe that we can’t remember anything?

We build websites in Drupal every day at the Bivings Group. And every day, we answer questions for clients that are simple, easy things for us to change. Sites built in Drupal are inherently very easy to change and are often malleable to a degree. The problem is that many people see the full-blown Content Management System as an unknowable hurdle-they think that if the larger problems, handled by developers and programmers, can’t be managed by a non-computer scientist than many other things in the site must also be nigh-impossible. This is simply not true.

Here are five public-facing edits that can be made easily by anyone with the most basic of computer skills. These tips will not only help you manage your site, but will allow you a better perception of websites and online programs as manageable constructs that aren’t built and maintained by aliens or magic-wielding online warlocks.

  1. Changing the Navigation of Your Website

A large number of requests from our clients relate to the navigation of their site. The best way to make changes to the Navigation is through the administrative “Structures” tab. From there, go to “Menus”. This is where your site navigation lives. Click on the Menu you would like to edit, and then select the individual tab or navigation item you want to alter.

  2. Creating a New Page

Your website will at some point need a new page. Whether this is a last-minute Press Release or a hastily-announced new campaign, at some point you’ll need a new page at the drop of a hat. Go to Content in the Admin bar. Click on Add Content. Select “Basic Page”. Add a title, body text, and a menu item if you want it in the main or sub navigation. Now you’ve got yourself a brand new page.

  3. Changing the recipient of a webform

Most sites have some variation of a webform-whether it’s a Contact Us, an Application, or an Information Request form. These are handled easily through Drupal and can be extremely helpful for a variety of purposes. Often, the person who is initially assigned to be the recipient of the form isn’t always the person that manages that information forever, and it needs to be changed. Go to “webforms” under “content”. Click “edit” next to the webform you would like to alter. The webform recipient’s e-mail address is in the “E-mail to Address” field.

 4. Creating An Unpublished Page

Sometimes, the most beautiful creations aren’t quite ready for the mass audience of the internet. This is where Drupal’s “unpublish” tool comes in handy. Create a page (see item #2) Open “Publishing Options” at the bottom of the page. When “Unpublished” is selected, that new page won’t be viewable by non-admin users. Your secret is safe.

 5. Adding A New User Profile

Much of Drupal is based on user roles. Certain users have access to the deepest darkest corners of your site; others can only see the shiny surface. To control these limits, enter the “User Management” tab of the Admin toolbar. To add a new user, click on “User” and the “Add User” link should appear. You then have the options to create a username and password, attach an e-mail address, and control the level of access that user has.

These 5 simple tips will hopefully help you feel more control over your Drupal site-however, it is worth remembering that Drupal is comprised of many different moving parts, all interconnected, and one thing gone wrong can create serious problems. It’s always best to work with certified, proven Drupal developers-like us!

Like many, I’ve spent the past few weeks playing around with the new social network Google+.  The most interesting aspect of Google+ is Circles, the tool for organizing contacts (social graph) on the network.  Here’s a quick video overview:

So why does Circles matter?  It differentiates Google+ from Twitter and Facebook.

On Facebook, to have a relationship with someone you both have to opt in.  You have to become “friends”.  Due to this restriction, most interactions on Facebook are private.

On Twitter, you follow people and people follow you.  While there are ways to figure out if someone reciprocates your follow, it isn’t critical to the use of the service.  The primary point of Twitter is to find interesting people to follow.  The service is primarily public.

With Circles, Google+ has sort of split the difference between Facebook (private) and Twitter (public).  They have left it to users to decide how they want to use the service.

When you decide to add a contact on Google+, you are automatically asked to put the contact in a circle.  By default, Google has a a few predefined circles.  Some of the predefined circles imply intimacy (Family, Friends), while others imply only loose connections (Following, Acquaintance).  You can also create custom circles.

When posting an update, you decide which of your circles to share information with.   And that’s it.

This is a really elegant solution for a number of reasons:

• Adding someone to a circle is less of a commitment than adding someone as a friend on Facebook. Circles just doesn’t have the drama associated with Facebook “friendships”.  At the same time, the inclusion by default of circles such as Family and Friends makes it possible for adding someone to to be more of a commitment than simply following someone on Twitter.
• Circles lets you define your relationship with someone in private. While you are notified when you are added to a circle by another user, you have no idea which particularly circle you are included in.  So someone that has added me to a circle called “BFF” will never know if I’ve only added them to a general circle called ‘Following”.  While this sort of grouping is possible to do in Facebook, it is not nearly as fundamental to the experience as it is with Google+.
• Circles forces you to categorize contacts. To add a contact, you have to put them into a circle.  You have to make a choice. This requirement forces you to think through how you want to categorize your contacts, which ultimately makes you think through how you want to use the service.

As a result of all of this, Circles allows people to use the service publicly, privately or through some hybrid model determined by the user.  Scoble can use the service to amass 40,000+ followers in a week while at the same time my college buddy can use it to post photos from his wedding only viewable to three people.

The sharing flexibility of Google+ allows the service to fill a nice little void between Twitter (public) and Facebook (private). If Google+ succeeds, I think it will largely be because of the elegance and flexibility of Circles.

What do you think?

For the latest edition of SLURP140 – we partnered with the National Journal's Innovation Works Conference on Thursday July 13th. For this event, our talented designers created a custom skin for the SLURP140 tool and integrated NJ's logo. We'll be tracking both #njinnovation and #njliveevents – and will update this blog post with usage statistics after the conference. Follow along at http://www.slurp140.com/nationaljournal/

From the conference website:

Innovation isn’t just about the latest new gadget; it’s the vital spark that improves the quality of our lives. Join us as we discuss how best to tap tomorrow’s hottest innovations with the potential to spur job growth throughout the economy.

Hot Topics:

• Foreshadowing the Future: The Next Big 5 Innovations
• Boosting U.S. Competitiveness Through Innovation 
• What Best Drives Innovation and How Washington Can Help
• Role of Social Media in Connecting Citizens to Government
• Role of Creativity and Culture in Driving Innovation
• The Innovation Blueprint

Featured Speakers:

• John P. Holdren, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and Co-Chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)
• The Honorable Kevin McCarthy, Majority Whip, U.S. House of Representatives

Special Presentations on Innovations That Will Drive the Future by:

• Arun Majumdar, Director, Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, United States Department of Energy 
• Robert Atkinson, President, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation 
• Ceci Connolly, Senior Adviser, McKinsey Center for Health Reform 
• Ronald A. Klain, President, Case Holdings
• Simon J. Tripp, Senior Director of Technology Partnership Practice, Battelle