Nonprofit Technology Consulting

Your photo speaks volumes about you: make sure those volumes are filled in with your hopes, aspirations, personality and talent and not the result of a haphazard occurrence that you have been too careless to display. Your quality picture will pay off big: and the more visible you are, the higher the return. So get ready to collect.

Facebook just released new posting functionality for offers that will help businesses post deals to their Timeline for fans to redeem.   Currently the functionality being released is to a limited number of Facebook Business Pages, but will eventually be available to select types of businesses.  We have seen this option become available for clients with Local Business Pages and it is currently free to use.  Facebook has created a help section to guide administrators and fans through the of

A few months ago we started the initiative to redesign the content creation screen, following our research and design proposal we have now finished usability testing a prototype.

The results are in and participants had a neutral or mildly favorable response to the content creation prototype. Participants found it easy to add content (create and edit) and it was clear to participants that the sidebar is related to the content but it is not central to the activity of content creation. This was good news to us! It confirmed that our direction was good and we where encouraged by all the positive feedback from the community.

We would like help bringing this to Drupal core in Implement the new create content page design. We need help on all fronts, but primarily in fixing a number of outstanding problems and carrying out code reviews.

• Core

VirtualBox, Vagrant, Ruby, and Git have all gone through upgrades (major and minor) since I wrote the chapter on installing them in Multi-Site Drupal. While this hasn't made much of a difference for Mac and Linux/UNIX, Windows 7 support is now much better.

Here is a guide for installing the Multi-Site vagrant image for Drupal 7 on Windows 7. (If you're interested in running Drupal Vagrant, these instructions will work for that project as well.)

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Corporate blogs are especially challenging given multiple contributors and groups participating. Whether you’re an individual starting a blog, a start-up, mid-size company or large corporation the steps to promote follow the same path. Promotions for blogging and how you treat the blog are woven together. I’ll outline overarching promotions tactics you can employ to promote your blog and gain wider visibility.

When an online visitor logs in to your website using one of their social networks, their social profile data and login behavior are captured, aggregated, and ... presented in a clear Google-inspired analytics dashboard. The analytics provide insight into your clients’ social profiles and tell you: who is logging in, sharing, sending referrals back to your website as well as through which network.

This short and sweet B2B case study discussed by Sandy Carter of IBM shows us some numbers on how Premier, an alliance of 2500 community hospitals, leverages their online community. Awesome.

The following transcript is for the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfPKKisE88w :

Hello, my name is Aaron Winborn. I am a developer for Advomatic, the author of Drupal Multimedia, and a contributor and a co-maintainer of several Drupal modules, including the Media suite of modules.

Today, I will demonstrate a new feature of the Media: YouTube module: browsing and searching videos directly from YouTube, in the media browser itself. So first, let’s set up our environment.

We are assuming that you already know how to install Drupal. If not, you can find information at Drupal.org.

So right now we are at the modules administration page. We are interested in the modules under the Media package. You will need to install and enable the File Entity module (version 7.x-2.x), and the same version of the Media module.

We will not enable the included Media Field module; it is there for legacy purposes, and has been deprecated in favor of core’s File Field.

The Media Internet Sources module, included with the Media module, is a dependency of the Media: YouTube module, so we will enable that.

Next will be the Media: YouTube module, also version 7.x-2.x.

Finally, we will install the WYSIWYG module.

Let’s start by configuring WYSIWYG. We do that by going to Configuration > Content Authoring > WYSIWYG profiles. Note that I have also installed and enabled the Admin Menu module and the Admin Menu Toolbar module, which gives us the fancy drop-down menus for administration that you see here.

Now in order to use WYSIWYG, you need to have also installed a third-party WYSIWYG library, such as CKEditor or TinyMCE. You need to follow the instructions with the WYSIWYG module to install that, although it is quite simple actually. You just download and unpack the file into the sites/all/libraries folder. You can see that I am using CKEditor here.

The WYSIWYG module allows us to set up profiles for the various text formats on our site; in this demo, we will edit the Filtered HTML format.

Open up the buttons and plug-ins field set next. Then check the Media Browser check box. That will add the media browser button to our WYSIWYG editor, which we will see soon.

In order to use that however, we need to configure the filter in question. In fact, I believe that if we do not do this step 1st, we will get an error message, complete with a link to the format configuration page.

On this page, we need to check the box next to “Convert Media tags to markup”. That is the answer to the number 1 support question that we get in the Media queue, which is, “Why is there bracketed goobly gook instead of my images?”

So now, as we will see, everything should be working now. So let’s test it.

Here on the create article page, we see a fancy button on the body text area! Let’s click it.

And there we go.

These are thumbnails being pulled directly from YouTube. How about that?

And there is even a ghetto pager, or at least previous/next links.

And you can also search YouTube directly from our browser.

So now we will select a video and submit it. Add a title and save the node. And there we go.

And that’s it really. Well, almost.

There are some more settings, specifically here to control which tabs show up for WYSIWYG. Note that at the time of this demonstration, you will not have this functionality unless you install the patch over at node 1434118.

To complete the demo, we will also do the same for fields. Let’s add a field to hold YouTube videos. We will call it Media, and it will be a file field with a Media file selector widget.

Here, let’s reorder it as well for the demo.

We leave everything at their default settings.

Hold on, I forgot that we need to allow the YouTube URI scheme. And the video file type.

So now we will create a new article, and select the media.

And here we have all the tabs available to our browser, including the new and improved YouTube tab.

And also, let us look at another new feature of the media module: My files!

This has been a long-awaited feature for the Media module as well.

Now here comes the 2nd most asked question in the support queue: “How come there is a link to my file, rather than the file itself?”

Let’s just fix that now.

Now we are in the file type administration page, where we can configure the display for each of our file types. Note that we can also add fields to our files, although we are not going to do that in this demo.

We will jump to the video display...

No, we want to make sure that our large formatter is set up properly for YouTube. And it is, so let’s set up that as the formatter for our Media file field.

And there it is, as a generic file, which is simply a link to the file stream itself. We will change that to rendered file. And then we set the view mode to large.

While we are in there, we can do the same for our teasers. We will just set that to the preview view mode, which by default will display a thumbnail.

Whoops, I forgot to save it. Let’s just do that again.

And there is the video.

And there is the thumbnail.

Well done!

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The DrupalCon Munich team was excited about the interest for this year's scholarship award, with 57 applications submitted. The DrupalCon scholarship program allows Drupal Community members, who would otherwise not be able to attend DrupalCon, to benefit from the DrupalCon experience as the Drupal Community benefits from each scholar's attendance.

The scholarship committee has made the final selection, and we are proud to present these deserving Drupalistas with Scholarships. Scholarships give access persons who would like to attend DrupalCon but lack financial resources to do so. The following awardees will be attending this year's conference in Munich, where the theme will be 'Open Up! Connecting systems and people’.

Scholarship Recipients*:

• Greg Dunlap
• Cathleen Theys
• Jeremy Thorson
• Yves Chedemois
• Thomas Svenson
• Karyn Cassio
• Capi Etheriel
• Jessica M.
• Wolfgang Ziegler

*We will add more recipients to this list as we confirm.

We would like to thank everyone who applied for a scholarship, and congratulate those of you who were selected.

Scholarships

Word to the wise: if you are a business- FOLLOW YOUR FOLLOWERS. You might think you look like some kind of star to have a few thousand folks following you (whereas you follow about four people), but what does that say to your followers?

With 900 million users on the social media site it is a wonder that there are not any other millionaires walking away from this IPO. With Success stories like Zuckerberg’s the masses can continue to sit on the sidelines and watch the celebrities’ wallets’ girth grow.

It's an open secret that George Lucas based much of Star Wars on Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces. By using archetypes, Lucas tapped into something elemental in human psychology and created a cultural phenomenon.

So, why don't we try the same thing? At our upcoming webinar, "Using Brand Archetypes to Find Your Voice in Social Media", we'll help you match your organizational voice to one of the 12 major brand archetypes. By focusing your voice, you'll strengthen your brand and better engage your supporters.

This is going to be a fun one, so why don't you:

Learn more and register today >>

In this webinar, you'll learn:

• How to identify the 12 major brand archetypes
• How to find which archetype best matches your organization
• How to tap into the power of the archetype to strengthen your voice in social media

And did you know that The Matrix followed the same basic blueprint? I'm beginning to think all movies should be based on Campbell's work.

I’ve been recommending PostPlanner to many of my clients (and friends) for months now.

If you don’t know what PostPlanner is, it’s a way to schedule, manage and measure updates on your Facebook Page (here’s a video tutorial).

They recently added a feature that allows you to quickly see what time of day is best for you to update your Page.

Now Facebook Insights does allow you to download a CSV file and figure this out manually, but it takes a while to prepare the data for analysis (date posted and time posted live in the same cell – yuk).

How to view the best posting time in PostPlanner

With PostPlanner, all you have to do is rank your updates by likes, comments and/or clicks to see what time of day seems to be most prevalent.

The following two screen shots shows what seems to work in terms of time of day:

Time of day is just one factor

I should mention here that there are many other factors that increase engagement. Here are the biggies:

• Is the content optimized for Facebook? Cross-posting the same content across multiple channels generally doesn’t work as well as understanding the culture and technology of each platform.
• Is it interesting? Your content has to be interesting to your fans (you don’t matter) for them to share it. Their homebase is the Newsfeed, which they scan.
• Is it relevant to your audience? Knowing your audience well is the number one rule for content marketing.

The key in analyzing the performance of your content is to look for patterns and continue to experiment. Are your best images text-based? Are your best status updates questions or tips? How long are your best videos? What is the subject matter? What do you think?

GM left Facebook because they forgot the one cardinal rule - always please the client.

In creating the mobile application for the Chicago DrupalCon, our team learned quite a few things about iOS/Android Drupal-based mobile app development. This article will distill a couple of hundred hours of our work into a few lessons you can use on your next Drupal-based mobile application.

Assemble a Good Team

One thing we realized early on was that if we wanted this project to be a success we were going to need to treat it like a proper project. Proper meant actually bringing on a UX person to make sure the app made sense. It also meant that it should have a backend engineer and a front end developer.

Our engineer for the backend was Larry Garfield (known as Crell in the Drupal world), our UX person was Jen Simmons, and I brought up the front-end development side of things.

Outline Your Requirements

After determining our resources, we outlined our requirements and their importance. We found it helpful to break this down into three categories; must do, important but not critical, and nice to have.

For our project, the list of application requirements went like this:

Author Patrick Teglia

Pat is an experienced Drupal front-end developer and mobile app enthusiast currently working for Palantir.net as a Senior Developer, building wicked cool things such as the DrupalCon mobile app.

Note from Beth:    In March,  I had the pleasure of co-presenting at the GEO Conference (Grantmakers for Effective Organizations) with Kathy Reich, Director, Organizational Effectiveness Program at the Packard Foundation and Jared Raynor, Director of Evaluation at TCC Group, that helped OE analyze its “goldmine” of grantee data.  The learning in public (slides and resources here).  During the conference, “a small army of guest bloggers [and] grantmakers, who [attended GEO] posted their reflections on the session and LIP in general on my blog.  These are here:

• Bridge Building or Trust Busting: A Warts-and-All Reflection on “Learning in Public”?
• Learning in Public Challenges and Actions
• Learning in Public: To What End?
• Is a Culture of Learning Required To Learn in Public?
• The Outcome of Our Outcomes

Last month the OE Team at the Packard Foundation shared this guest post about the next steps in their public learning journey as part of program review.  This post shares the latest learning from their quest to revise and refresh the program strategy by learning in public.

Packard OE Strategy Session: Laying Everything Out on the Table – Guest Post by the Packard Foundation OE Program Team

Have you reorganized your filing cabinet lately? You have to take everything out, decide what to keep and what to throw away, and then organize the materials for easy retrieval later. There is always that moment when everything seems chaotic, before once again, the contents of your cabinet have some semblance of order and logic. *cue sighs of relief*

Packard OE did something similar during its strategic planning retreat, which was full of insightful exchanges between staff, consultants, and advisors.   The image above shows what we came up with.

We still have a long way to go in synthesizing the numerous inputs, including a large constellation of trends, grantee priorities, values, economic realities, and more. And while we would welcome any input on our strategic questions we wanted to continue highlighting a few questions for which we would like specific advice:

• How do you use intermediaries to help non-profit organizations build their organizational capacity? Have you evaluated your work with intermediaries, and if so, what lessons have you learned?
• Have you participated in a great peer learning community—either in person or online? What made it great? Are there particular topics or issues that lend themselves to peer learning? When you’re designing a peer learning experience, what pitfalls should you avoid?

Please visit the OE Strategy Refresh site and share your thoughts on these questions and, more importantly, your stories. Not too jazzed about sharing in a public forum? Then please feel free to contact us directly. Collaboration on this process will lead to a well-informed strategy, enabling us to better serve a variety of organizational needs all over the world.

P.S. Your input will help us draft a set of hypotheses—in the form of possible paths for Packard OE to take in coming years—to be tested among our grantees, colleagues, and all of you. Stay tuned!

We’re really excited about this process and we’d love your feedback!

OE Staff: (left-to-right) Gurpreet, Dora, Kathy, Cheryl, Brian

The OE Team:   Flowing from Packard Foundation’s Founders’ business philosophy of nurturing leaders and giving them the freedom to pursue promising approaches, the Packard Foundation assists in building the leadership skills and management capacity of their grantees.   The Organizational Effectiveness and Philanthropy program supports their current grantees to allow them to undertake projects that transform their organizations in a sustained and meaningful way. These grants address the many organizational and capacity challenges that may affect nonprofits—from strategic planning and board development needs to mergers and executive transitions.  To this end, they advance the organizational effectiveness of current Foundation grantees by supporting projects that improve their management, governance, and leadership by developing strategies, systems, structures, and skills. The Foundation also makes grants to help advance and support the field of private philanthropy.

Here are some of the articles and posts we've bookmarked on Apricot Jam this week.

We are moving away from classic machines which require a lot of input and interaction towards devices and, more importantly, infrastructures which would enable us to forget about the machine and focus on content, thus providing and obtaining relevant information or help with getting a job done.

Or could GM’s move be, as some insiders are theorizing, a result of Google recognizing the advertising competition with Facebook and luring companies away, perhaps with the promise of free ads? Either way, it’s a significant loss for Facebook. But is it really about just Facebook ads and GM?

Social login provides visitors of a website the option to register or sign-in using any of their preferred social network accounts such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to name only a few. The visitor’s experience is simplified and companies gain access to the visitor’s social data for accurate lead information, even prepopulate registration forms and upload profile pictures. Here are 5 ways to help increase registrations using social login...