Ever wonder how other organizations run their web projects so successfully? Learn through Talance Client Spotlights, where you can connect with peers to pick up inspiration and proven tips you can apply to your website or online course.

Caitlyn Slowe

Caitlyn Slowe is a master juggler. She’s the go-to person to manage what’s published and when on the Health Imperatives website, a health agency in Brockton, Mass. As her organization has discovered, the items that appear on the site receive a huge boost in traffic, so hers is a key position. Here’s how she manages the homepage and about 20 smaller sites on top of her other job duties. Hint: organization really matters.

What’s your title, and how does that fit in with managing the website?

I’m the Manager of Special Projects for Health Imperatives, and one of the “projects” that my title refers to is our new website. Health Imperatives has about 40 different program sites ranging from family planning programs to a domestic violence shelter to GLBT youth services and so on.

My title was created last year when we were preparing for the launch of the new website. In addition to managing the website, I still continue to do my previous responsibilities like grant writing, event coordination, budget tracking, report writing, etc., for several Health Imperatives programs.

What areas of the site are you primarily responsible for?

I manage all of the main page content for www.healthimperatives.org and about half of the program sub-sites (some programs manage their own). On the main page, I find and post content for “In the News,” create the Slides for the slideshow (and usually the pages that they link to) and post program updates under “Announcements.”

I also manage all of the main Health Imperatives social media sites, which currently include Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

How do you keep up on learning website manager skills?

I love NTEN’s (Nonprofit Technology Network) blogs and webinars on web design and management, and Mashable also has some excellent articles and tips on managing websites and social media. The Nonprofit Facebook Guy has great info geared specifically toward nonprofits. I’m fairly new to web management, so I basically try to read anything I can find relating to nonprofit web design or social media!

What does your day-to-day strategy look like for keeping the site updated?

One of the challenges I have with managing the website is that it is not my only job responsibility, so to make it more manageable for myself, I create a calendar for each month and map out how/when I’ll update the three sections of the main page (News, Slides, and Announcements).

A snapshot of Slowe's planning calendar

I seek out and write the News blurbs and design the Slides in advance so that I can spend a minimal amount of time dropping them onto the site when their day comes up on the calendar. It’s worked well so far!

I try to update at least two different main page sections per week to keep the info fresh, and I leave each item up for at least one-two weeks (unless it is time-sensitive) so frequent site visitors will see as much new content as possible.

For social media, I rely heavily on HootSuite to help me keep up to date. I aim to do at least one tweet per day, and I limit Facebook to three posts per week (usually Monday, Wednesday, Friday). HootSuite allows me to schedule a week or more worth of Twitter and Facebook updates in advance, which is a huge time-saver!

Hootsuite is a huge timesaver for Twitter campaigns

It’s been half a year since the new site launched. What trends do you see in usage?

We have seen an exciting increase in traffic to our website since the new page launched, and it seems that people are enjoying the new format. Google Analytics is a great tool to show results in real numbers – for instance:

In 2011 between 1/29-2/28 we saw 1,580 (unique) visitors

In 2012 during that same time month-long period we’ve had 4,123 (unique) visitors (yay!)

We’re also seeing an increase in new users (vs. returning users), which tells us that our website is reaching a broader audience than it has in the past.

We’re finding that events/trainings that are advertised on our main page slideshow are receiving drastic increases in attendance. For example, a recent recurring training saw a 150% increase in registration after we advertised it on the main page slideshow. Very exciting to see these results, and we’ll definitely continue to advertise this way!

What’s the most useful part of the site?

I’d say that the slideshow has been the most useful part of the site, because it’s the first thing visitors see and can help us direct them to certain program sub-sites that otherwise may not have gotten as much exposure.

The Shopping Cart has also been a very useful tool, as it allows people to make donations to specific programs and also lets them register for trainings or events online, which is definitely the preferred method for our web-savvy visitors!

This is an excellent question that I found while trolling through LinkedIn Answers, but it’s not unlike standard brainstorming questions I’m asked every time we launch an e-learning project.

Read the full discussion here, or check out these highlights:

The Machine is Us/ing Us. Very creative and compelling way to tell the story of Web 2.0 through imagery.

5 Tips for Success. Really funny video created by Articulate that shows the capabilities of their product and also outlines what doesn’t work with web presentations.

5 Tips for Success

Mortgage-Backed Securities. A good explanation of a complicated and possibly dry subject.

How about you? Seen any examples of e-learning videos lately that you particularly like? Add them in the comments below.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Ask on the comments form at the bottom of this page, on Twitter @talance, or on Facebook. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

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There’s a reason we learn to read with picture books rather than novels. A picture is worth a thousand words, right? We humans are very good at gathering meanings from pictures, even better than we are at interpreting words. Images carry powerful messages to which words can only aspire. You can gather a whole story from a picture (remember Life magazine?), but it’s easy to be distracted by just about anything while reading big blocks of text.

Using well-appointed pictures on your website, online course or other online initiative will not only help you tell your story better, but it can also help your visitors hear you.

Icons are quick informative hits, like this example from Mass Mentoring Partnership.

Favicons help you find the browser page you seek.

An evocative photo can earn a donation or volunteer, such as this stirring one from the Global Animal Foundation.

Here’s a quick test to see whether you’re using imagery effectively on your website: translate it into a language you don’t understand. Google has a good tool for this. Can you tell now what your site is about? Would it make sense to someone who had no background in your industry? If the answer is no, then you must think about what visual elements will help you to communicate your message better.

This issue of the Talance newsletter is all about imagery. Read on for tips and ideas to help you create and use graphics better. Here are a few articles from our blog to get you started:

Web Design Tips for Better Images

You’re Doing It All Wrong! How to Use Pictures on a Website

What Happens If You Go Bonkers for Pictures

20 Free Icon Sets for Non-Profits

The Good, The Bad, The Logo

Do you have any interesting stories about how you’re using imagery effectively? Send us your thoughts and suggestions, and we’ll feature them in an upcoming blog post.

We’re getting ready to launch a new website, and I want to know how it’s doing. What’s the best way to get honest feedback?

Thanks,
Roslyn Kruchten

The fact you’re asking that question already puts you on the road to a better website. A new online project doesn’t end when it launches. That’s just the ending of the development. Hopefully, you’ve done your homework into what your audience wants and needs before the launch, because then you can focus on how well you’ve delivered after that.

Here are a few good ways to get feedback on a new website, although it’s a good idea to check how well an established website is doing too.

Issue a survey – the same one you offered before beginning.

It’s always a good idea to put out a survey before you begin any web project to see how you might improve. Its results will tell you what you should build into the site, but it will also set benchmarks. Keep those results, and then after your new website has launched, you can issue the same survey and compare results.

Here’s a free user survey you can print out or e-mail to your audience.

Ask the people you know.

Simply send a message to the people in your contacts lists, though e-mail, on Twitter, Facebook or your other social media accounts. Ask people who have nothing to do with your industry, because they’ll give you insight and help point out jargon. You can ask them to simply respond to your message, or you can create a submission form for them to add anonymous comments.

Ask the people you don’t know.

Set up a quick test with a user testing tool like FiveSecondTest. This service lets you create two designs of a website and test it on a random sampling of people. People who see it vote with their gut for the version they like better. Anonymous testing can reveal preferences and problems that you can’t discover from asking your friends.

Set up a usability test.

If you’ve got the time and budget, the best thing to do is set up a usability test. Ideally, you’d have a focus group with subjects and interviewers, seriously studying how they do on your site. The W3C has some excellent test scripts and interview questions you can use to model your own session.

[Have a question you’d like answered? Ask on the comments form at the bottom of this page, on Twitter @talance, or on Facebook. We’ll review your question before posting (don’t be shy about asking!) and get back to you with a response.]

The following article first appeared in the Sustained! web magazine from PEJE, an organization that serves day schools. Ken Gordon is the Social Media Manager of PEJE. It’s an excellent article about how to build an online community on Facebook that can be applied to any organization.

Read the full article on Sustained!

Ken Gordon, Social Media Manager of PEJE

So you started, or joined, a Facebook page for your Jewish day school community. You put up a few posts… and the only response was the soft click of crickets in your backyard.

What now?

Now you grapple with an important and awkward truth: social media is not entirely obvious. Using Facebook is not like reading a book. Or listening to a teacher in class. Or, you know, just talking to another person. Social media is a strange new kind of human communication, and it has its own obscure commandments. For those of us who didn’t learn to talk and tweet at the same time, this stuff must be gleaned on the fly, later in life.

You won’t find a handbook on Jewish day school social media citizenship in the how-to section of any bookstore, or anywhere else for that matter. Indeed, the day school world is only starting to emigrate into this part of the universe. (Which is why AVI CHAI started their Social Media Academy for day schools, which is a great first introduction to the world of Fans and Followers.)

Point is: Your Facebook kehila may be very perplexed; if so, show them the proper way to behave by offering a few essential principles of good social citizenship. Be a mentsh and teach these new citizens the rules of the road—or just pass this column along, if you’re too busy—and soon we’ll all be Active Daily Users.

You’re a Regular

Encourage your people to build in regular—daily, weekly, etc.—visits to your social media sites. How to manage this? Ask them. Send an email to your colleagues or close friends in the community requesting that they set aside a regular time of day to engage your page. (Ten minutes over morning coffee sounds good to me.) As for people far outside your offline network: advise them, in your newsletters and/or your email signature, to stop regularly so they can catch all your great links, videos, and updates. Just be sure that you, and/or your administrator, post enough valuable and diverse content to warrant such regular visits. (On the PEJE FB page, we post plenty of articles that come from outside sources. People tend to find it refreshing and useful when you share content that isn’t just, say, “selling” your own stuff. Another tip: FB users in general, love video and photos.)

Lights! Camera! Action! Interaction!

The most important thing about social media is the interactivity of its participants. Newbies need to understand that their input is wanted—desperately wanted. We them to react to the material posted on a Facebook page (and maybe even react to other people’s reactions). How to do this? Glad you asked…

More Impressions than Rich Little

The most passive way to contribute to a FB community is to simply view a Status Update or Link on Your Wall. Facebook counts each “impression,” which The Next Web defines as the “raw number of times each entry has been seen on the wall and in the news feed of fans.” The page administrator will receive regular reports on the number of impressions, which will delineate the range of your influence and indicate what does and doesn’t interest your community.

Click and Read

Your people can do better than a few impressions. Actually clicking on a link posted by a Facebook user, and then reading it, is the first real step to joining the online community. If something catches your eye, be sure to click away.

You Like?

Hitting the Like button—beneath a link or status update—is an even more active form of Facebook behavior. Likability is Extremely Important in the social media world, and it’s also a good strategy for those of you who are seriously time-pressed. But it’s not as substantial a response as the following two methods.

Sharing Is Caring

Sharing is good because it helps spread the word around. And if you’re not the kind of person who likes to speak (or write) in public, this may be the best way you can serve in the PEJE social media crew. You click on the word “Share” right underneath the piece of content in question. A box opens up. You write in it, click the “Share” button, and it goes on your wall. Or you click the “Send a Message Instead” link. You fill in the names of the person/people you want to tell about this, write a message, and then send it off.

All the Rest Is Commentary

Write a response, a thoughtful response, to a Status Update or shared Link and you’ve done something with true social significance. The process is simple: You click on the word “Comment” right underneath the piece of content in question. A box opens up, and you write your comment. Simple. Note: Not every comment has to be a dissertation—such things are better employed in grad school and your Friends will likely lose interest in a lengthy response—but it is a good idea to respond intentionally when you’re commenting.

Answer the Call

When confronted by a good question in a Facebook status—good administrators are constantly asking questions—you answer it. It’s OK to hang back and read how other people respond … but it’s generally good manners and a healthy social attitude to answer legitimate questions put out to your Facebook community.

Be a Model

Note: you can’t be the only person on your Facebook page. Imagine a Facebook page that is nothing but status updates that get Liked and Commented On by the administrator. (This would be, as John Bender said in The Breakfast Club: “Sorta social—demented and sad, but social.”)

When you set up a FB page for your school, particularly when you’re first starting out, it’s essential that you invite some good role models to the party. People, that is, who know how to be a regularly active member of your community. So don’t be shy. It’s not cheating to ask for help, it’s essential. Remember, this is social media.

Two kinds of invitations may be necessary.

1. Invite people you know are comfortable with Facebook, and your community, to join your group. These are folks, let’s say, who know about day school and social media and will naturally become part of your community.
2. Invite qualified people to respond to a stimulating question. You can—and should—arrange debates. Find a provocative piece of content, ask a provocative question, and then invite several smart people (of varying opinions) to respond on the page. One great way to get people to respond: call FB friends out by name with a tag.

The great thing about modeling good social citizenship: it’s contagious. What are you waiting for? Stop reading this and show your community the way of FB. The more you engage the page, the more people will engage with you.

BY KEN GORDON

Ken Gordon is the Social Media Manager of PEJE. He cordially invites you to friend our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter.

Read the full article on Sustained!

The quickest shortcut to making your website look polished is to use icons. These little pictures, plenty of which are cheap or free, look way better than anything most mortals can do with Photoshop. A little pop of color, used judiciously, can help bring life to bland webpages. Coordinated sets of icons also make pages look like you put a modicum of thought into how the out-put looks. And, importantly, visitors are more likely act based off a compelling picture rather than a chunk of text.

So stop snagging any old picture off Google Image Search (naughty, naughty!). Here is a list of free icon sets guaranteed to make any non-profit’s webpage better, whether you’re into donations, social media, activism, environment, or health and human services. Have you seen anything I’ve left off? Leave a link in the comments.

Donations

Donate Now Buttons

Donate Now Buttons

Festive Donate Buttons

Festive Donate Icons

Open Source Icons (including money icons)

Open Source Icons

Themed Fundraising Buttons for Email

Themed Fundraising Buttons

Credit Card and PayPal Icons

Credit Card Images

Social Media

Vector Social Media Icon Set

Vector Social Media Icons

Scribble Social Icon Set

Scribble Social Icon Set

WG Social Media Icons

WG Social Media Icons

Double J Social Media Balloons

Social Media Balloons

Buddycons

Buddycons

Health and Human Services

Fruit/Food Bank Icons

Paradise Cherry Icons

Education Icons

Bitty Education Icons

Jana free baby icon set

Parenting/baby icons

People & Disability Icons

People and Disability Icons

Medical Toolbar Icons

Medical Toolbar Icons

Environment

Environment Icons

Environment Icons

Ecology Icons

Ecology Icons

Recycling Icons

Recycling Icons

Weather Icons

Weather Icons

Water Icons

Water Icons

Activism

Endangered Animal Icons

Endangered Animals Icons

Sign Up Petition Icon

Sign the Petition Icon

World Flag Icons

World Flag Icons

Military and War Icons

War Icons

Multi-ethnic People Icons

Multi-ethnic People Icons

We never expected to spend as much time as we do building widgets. Increasingly more often, our clients come to us for Twitter stream sidebars, custom Facebook pages and Facebook Like buttons. We’ve known anecdotally that there’s a growing demand for these social media hooks, and now there’s justification.

Lijit, a provider of search, content delivery, and analytics tools for online publishers and networks, has just released a report that reflects how many publishing organizations rely on social tools blended into their sites. Many, many sites have widgets installed, implying that websites are not stand-alone and serve as a hub for more wide-reaching campaigns. Over the past two years, they found:

• 2010: 735,834 sites surveyed, 84.8% with widgets installed (13,541,022 widgets)
• 2009: 744,848 sites surveyed, 84.7% with widgets installed (13,826,562 widgets)

Why the huge numbers?

“To either make their sites better, or to give them more understanding about the readers that visit their site, or to make money,” says Lijit CEO Walter Knapp in an article in EContent Magazine, which featured the study.

The article outlines the wealth of social tools available for augmenting the site and also extracts key date from the study. A helpful benchmark in case you’re deciding whether you want to add a widget to your site.

Check out the top 50.

Top 50 widgets and tools implemented on publisher websites

There’s a prejudice in the non-profit world against marketers. They’re often thought of as “slick” (not my word – a direct quote), slimy and very, very expensive.

The truth is, a marketer should look just like you, whether you’re slick or a slob. If you’ve decided you want a website, you’ve got to tap into your inner marketer to make it a success. Suppress your shudders when you hear words like “strategy” and “metrics” and “target audience” – instead learn what it means to be your own website marketer, and your site will be better.

You don’t have to enroll in classes at Sloan to apply a few elementary marketing skills (although it can’t hurt, if you have the time and budget). Bone up on these few areas, and you’ll be in a much better position to be using your website as a tool that works for you rather than an annoying necessity.

1. SEO

Have a basic understanding of how SEO (Search Engine Optimization) works. The good news is as long as you apply a little common sense, your search engine standing will improve. Write in natural language, make sure you use sensible page titles and include the words that best describe what you do, otherwise known as “keywords.”

This is a great article on understanding the basics of SEO.

2. Social Media Basics

Even if you’re not on board with compulsive Twitter updates, realize that social media is a useful tool for reaching a target audience. Spend some time looking for the social networks that your audience uses. Participate often, and give your fans and followers ample opportunities to communicate with you.

Check out this list for how to get started with social networking.

3. Copywriting

Think about how much time you spend reading when you’re on a website (pretty much all of it, right), and then think about how much thought you give to the copy. With most non-profits, there’s a discord.

Learn about writing for the web, and pepper your site with calls to action. The care you take will pay off when it comes to communicating a clear message.

Copyblogger gives loads of good advice with content-based marketing.

Pace Yourself

Marketing is a job that never ends. The best way to accomplish it is to nibble away bit by bit on a regular basis. Make a schedule for yourself, and devote yourself regularly to different marketing tasks.

If want a little help, try out 52 Website Marketing and Promotion Tips, which gives you one easy thing to do per week.

It’s easy to think in extremes with websites. Your website might be looking a little tired, and you might think, “Time for an overhaul!” Often all you need is a little freshening up, and you’ll notice a big payoff. As long as you’re reasonably happy with your content and you don’t have any technical problems, you can execute a few tweaks that are far cheaper than an overhaul, and that pay off big time.

Contra Costa Midrasha just went through what I’d classify as a “refresh” rather than a “relaunch.” CCM is a program for Jewish high school kids in Walnut Creek, Calif., and every year they start a big registration push to recruit more students.They were already planning a “Put Yourself in the Picture” direct mail campaign and had designed a postcard.

It seemed like the perfect time to breathe new life into the website while using it as the hub for registrations, donations and news about events. After a few discussions with Devra Aarons, the program’s executive director, we came up with a plan of attack that would be budget-friendly but still achieve her goals of getting new recruits and collecting information. We decided to also align the site with the “Put Yourself in the Picture” campaign.

Here’s the plan:

• Design a new header to match the campaign.
• Add punchy noticeable buttons to encourage donations and registrations.
• Create motion and interest through an interactive slide show.
• Use an expanded online registration tool.
• Promote their new social media campaign.
• Use analytics accounts to track usage.

New header

The old website header was designed to match a brochure. It was eye-catching, but this was probably the most impactful way to update the look of the site. We used an existing postcard for the upcoming campaign and extended the movie metaphor with CCM’s color palette and some layered textures. Here’s the old banner:

And the new banner:

Donate and Register buttons

For a long time, Devra knew she wanted to add call-to-action buttons to encourage donations and registrations. There was a blank area above the banner that was the perfect spot. We created a couple buttons that matched the new header and that stood out.

Slideshow

The biggest wow factor on the page comes from the slideshow. It cycles through a series of pictures with text, and each image links to a corresponding page. Since Devra wanted to ramp up registrations, we made them all lead – for now – to the registration page.

Registration tool

Devra decided to largely scrap the paper registration and put it all online. The form was long, to be sure, but we streamlined as much as possible and used fieldsets to group like information with like. We also used collapsible fields, which open with a click and reveal more information. This is helpful for information that might not be relevant for everyone. The end result for the user is a friendly flow of information that’s a little easier on the eyes.

The payoff here was clear and nearly immediate. Registrations started coming in right away, and the feedback was good: “I got a lovely e-mail from a parent saying how user friendly our registration form was!” Devra said.

Promote social media

CCM just started using Twitter, so we added this and a link to their Facebook Group to the homepage, where it’s easy to click through.

Analytics

Finally, Devra set up accounts on Google Analytics and Clicky, both helpful tools to show the who, what, where and when of people visiting the site. After making these kinds of changes, tracking usage becomes a helpful benchmarking tool to know what decisions are resonating and identifying possible issues. The data that comes in over the following weeks and months will help plan for the future, as needs and responses change through the course of the program.

Here’s the whole site, but make sure you visit so you can see it all in action.

What we’re reading this week:

10 Examples of E-newsletter Footers and Headers with Social Links
While working on a redesign of his newsletter, Ben, a blogger for e-newsletter service MailChimp, collected standards and best practices. Here’s what he found.

How To Split Up the US
A very cool visualization that represents how relationships develop across geographical boundaries in 210 million public Facebook profiles. It helps understand how your social network forms and travels.

Measuring Type
“A selection of the most commonly used typefaces were compared for how economical they are with the amount of ink which they use at the same point size. Large scale renditions of the typefaces were drawn out with ballpoint pens, allowing the remaining ink levels to display the ink efficiency of each typeface.”

Articles on Nonprofit Marketing and Communications
Long list of helpful articles on how non-profiters can market. Via kylacromer on Twitter.