5. online possibilities
• increase your audiences (expand sphere of
influence and engage existing audience)
• engage them into taking specific action
(mobilize)
• you can organize (volunteers, movement)
• inform audience about the issue (education)
• you can develop campaigns
5
6. your process
what is your basic platform?
what are you going to do?
how do you know it’s working?
6
Flexible and powerful, Drupal is a great choice for more complex sites. It is not a simple system and requires customization to really have value. We specialize in Drupal development for medium to large sites. Drupal was designed from the ground up to be a community platform. It shines in this area, offering profiles, blogs and comments out of the box.
Joomla is the most polished and friendly looking of the systems, and is useful for a wide range of applications, but requires a substantial learning curve to add new pages or to add new sections into the site navigation bar.
Plone is powerful and robust. It’s best suited for organizations with very complex needs. It is used in enterprise. The system offers a huge degree of flexibility and control, and it supports almost infinitely complicated workflows. It is by far the most technically challenging.
Word-Press is, at heart, a blogging platform, and so has many blogging and comment features, but not robust support for more advanced functionality. WordPress is a great choice for straightforward, simply arranged Web sites. It does not tend to scale to support more complex sites, nor does it have any really complex workflow.
Movable type is another blogging platform but popularity is behind the others.
You can create a blog for free without hosting costs. For example, using Google’s Blogger website can give you an instant platform to start blogging on.
While we’ve looked at CMS’s, there are other ways to update websites. For the more technically savvy, Adobe’s Contribute has emerged as another way to directly change HTML by non-technical staff. This means that there is no database storing your content, it’s on the HTML files themselves.
Mailchimp is an example of a popular mail program.
This is another popular version.
Vertical Response is a email service provider that can link with Salesforce segmentation, which can be a powerful relationship.
Whatcounts works quite a bit with non-profits. However, they are big enterprise level services, but quite effective.
This for the more technically savvy, is the open source version of mailing list management.
Another set of tools is Google Groups. It provides you with a simple way to connect groups of people together via email. You can create an online discussion with archived postings that is entirely controllable.
Yahoo has the same idea.
Google can provide you with some additional tools to assist your work. Adwords is Google’s yellow page listings.
Adsense is the opposite. It’s for publishers to have a way to make money from Google Adwords too, by placing them on your website.
This is Yahoo’s version.
This is an advertising network that allows advertisers to connect with specific blogs that can provide a specific niche.
DIA is a very popular company that provides a number of specific campaign tools overall. Email blasts, signup forms, petitions, etc.
Network for Good is a non-profit that also provides campaign tools but has a specific specialty in online fundraising. Canadian presence is less.
Convio is a full featured enterprise level campaign tool provider. They provide a wide full service of consulting, implementation and design. They work best when you have an existing website already and are looking to increase the functionality.
Again, another campaign tool provider. Advocacy Online is local in Toronto. They have recently launched a CMS tool called Jammii as well.
BSD powered the MyBarackObama, which seems to have been a core part of the 2009 Barack Obama presidential campaign. They provide tools that do require extensive customization, but are top of the their class, given that experience.
Care2 provides an easy way to distribute additional information and encourage action. Their petition tool is very popular and is used a lot. You can leverage Care2 to provide campaign support.
Gift tool is a inexpensive tools provider that allows you to do a number of things such as membership payments, donations, event registration and my favourite, pledge-based fundraising events.
Click and pledge is another online suite for accepting donations. They have recently come to Canada.
This is another example of a pledge-based tool provider. Anyone have experience with them?
Thought I would through this in. It’s not open source, but it’s been recommended as a cool way to include video.
Ok this is a bit complicated. Basically, this provides you with a way to distribute your content. It was recently purchased by Google.
Don’t know a lot about this, but it provides discussion and information around issues related to personal democracy. [Why should I keep this slide??]
This I don’t know anything about, but was recommended as another tool provider that can help to manage the workflow of your organization, including events, contacts, members, email newsletters, donations, etc. It is a paid all in one service.
This is a crowd-powered campaign site. Mostly for specific grassroots campaigns.
Here’s a cool new tool from CiviCRM, which is a CRM. It’s an add on tool for CiviCRM that can allow your phonebank to be a virtual set of volunteers.
In the US, there’s a number of really great voter list to action/campaign tools. Here’s one of them, developed by grassroots folks.
Here is a specific niche provider – campaign tools for the environmental movement.
Facebook is a huge leader in the social media space. One third (35%) of American adult internet users have a profile on an online social network site, four times as many as three years ago, but still much lower than the 65% of online American teens who use social networks
The Nature Conservancy will showcase nature photographs on its website that are collected from supporters via a Flickr photo contest.
good campaigns integrated video into their efforts comprehensively, tying online persuasion to offline mobilization and using video as one of many different channels to deliver a given message. One of the campaigners was working with Ethiopian bloggers and asked them to embed the video on their sites, and they did. Then we sent an email to our supporters and asked them to look at the video and comment. We got 15-20,000 views. Starbucks responded with their own video with their side of the story, which raised Oxfam's profile and the story because the Oxfam video sat up at the top along with Starbucks' video. Then Slashdot talked about it, and the number of views doubled in a week or two so we had 50,000 views.
MySpace as a tool to drive advocacy support and volunteers. (fundraising on MySpace is extremely difficult to do apparently)
New way to manage multiple social networks with an ongoing stream of messages.
Ning is a free way to create online communities.
Another tool provider that focuses on Social Media apps.
Never used this, but this is a niche audience. A social network focussed on
Setting up google reader to follow various google alerts. Here this shows setting up a Google alert to be integrated into the reader.
Digg is a way to follow trending stories. For example, here is the search term “Greenpeace”
Another Netvibes idea.
Technorati is a great listing of blogs and the tags that go with them. One tag of interest is “nptech” which has been popularized for “non profit technology”.
Another tool for creating surveys.
This is another tool that can be used for CRM management but is open source. It integrates into drupal and Joomla.
Lovely Site! Love Beth Kanter.
Lots of amazing reviews.
Google earth outreach is a whole other way to create some interesting advocacy, especially for environmental campaigns.
Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts and also schedule tweets.