I could only attend Non Profit Bar Camp Austin in the morning, but it was quite enjoyable. Bar Camp is definitely one of those meetings where the conversations had between the sessions can as informative as the actual sessions.

I arrived and signed in and was standing in front of the board right when the orientation ended – and suddenly was surrounded by bar campers looking at the board with me. There was a good variety of topics – updated to add a link to the Flickr photo set with pictures of all the Post-it notes on the board and screenshot of the set.

Austin – experiencing community in the Open City

I decided to first attend a session called “Plug into Austin’s Web/Interactive Scene” with Austinites Steve Golab and Marcus Mateus. They had a presentation talking about the connections we can make in Austin that may not be available in other cities. Austin has a unique vibe, with slogans like “Keep Austin Weird” and events like SXSW Interactive. We support the creative class as described by Richard Florida quite nicely. In Austin it’s cool to be smart, and we are the chosen location for over 6,000 non profits. They’re active in the Bootstrap Austin community. I learned that “Experiences make us happier than possessions” from a CNN article, after they introduced the concept of an Experience Economy. We talked about some of the experience-centered businesses in Austin, from Alamo Drafthouse, a movie theater that serves food and drinks during the flick, to Groovy Lube, an automotive shop with a groovy vibe, After another person’s comment that where you’re sure to be serviced by a hippy-type mechanic at Groovy Lube, about I wondered aloud if the employee experiences is just as important and part of the branding as much as the customer or participants experience. I think Zappo’s is a good example of an employee’s experience mattering as much to the brand as the customer. So, can nonprofits offer experiences? The speakers suggest you could aggregate communities to make a “scene.”

Google Analytics demonstration

For the next session, I ended up offering to demonstrate Google Analytics – someone had put up a Post-it with “Want: Google Analytics Overview” on it for an 11:15 slot, and at 11:14 I decided to volunteer. At first it was just me and one other person, but then at least a dozen people joined us. One woman from Settlement Home, was able to demonstrate their Google Analytics implementation. She worked with Trademark Media to get their tracking codes set up. She was able to pull up her Dashboard and show the last month’s worth of visitors and so on. We walked through the various areas of Google Analytics – Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, and Goals – with stories from many of the participants about what has worked well for them. I especially liked the funnel visualization for tracking the completion of a volunteer application. Our Internet connection was flaky for the first 10-15 minutes, but Chris Boyd, who works at Midas Networks, the ISP for my site, by the way, got us up and running.

One of our discussions was about trying to find out what to measure. One non profit had just started using Google Analytics. With non profits, I believe the goals aren’t always about conversions into sales. The prospects turn into clients or donors or volunteers, instead of customers who make a purchase. So after the session was over, I gathered these thoughts about persona-based goals for websites and tracking.

Personas are profiles of people who connect with your organization. They can be highly detailed, are profiles of imaginary people who mimic real-life people that you know, and are captured in a short report typically. I think that personas would make sense for figuring out the goals you have with web analytics and tracking. Based on looking at Any Baby Can, for example, you may have three personas: donors, volunteers, and clients. They’re going to know way more than I do about their goals, naturally , but here are some ideas:

Donor persona – some donors want to remain anonymous, is your pathway through your web content giving them that ability? Or if they are the opposite donor type, and want recognition for their contributions, can you track goals on your website that help with that?

Volunteer persona – What are some other goals that a volunteer wants to complete when they come to your website? Do they have a certain day of the week free and want to find opportunities for that day? Did they attend another event and want to find related opportunities?

Client persona – She may be using a public computer, are there particular pathways or goals you can outline and measure? Is the website useful not just for finding information as a potential client, but how is it serving current clients?

These are likely simplistic, but I wanted to share – I had one of those “oh, shoot, I could have described personas” moments after I left bar camp.

At the very end of the session, I mentioned that I just learned about negative keywords. These are keywords that you use in Adwords campaigns to make sure that your ads don’t show for search queries containing that a certain phrase. That way, people only click through on specific keywords, not related keywords that may not be a good match. A good negative keyword example for Settlement Home (if they started an AdWords Campaign or a pay-per-click campaign), for example, would be “foster dogs” to make sure people looking to foster dogs rather than children not see their ads about foster homes. One non profit was going to apply for an AdWords grant, so hopefully she’ll learn about negative keywords through their strong education program.

Keynote speaker – Holly Ross from NTEN

While I didn’t get to stay for the keynote, the Twitter feed for #npocamp during Holly Ross’s remote keynote was great to follow. One of the more interesting points to me that she made that was tweeted about is that there’s a huge increase (like 600%?) in unstructured data. These are the scattered conversations and communications happening all over the Internet, apparently. How can non profits analyze or monitor unstructured data? Two suggestions came from the person I sat next to in the first session, Gregory Foster: Scout Labs and Radian6.

Summary

What a great way to spend a Saturday morning with energetic, positive people making a difference for people especially using technology and communities. A bar camp, with its unstructured format, was a perfect match for this group.

I found this image on the new lolnptech site, and the site gave me a good chuckle. The cat is saying “Oh noes! Manual waz written 4 geekz not social workerz!”

This particular image hit home since I help write the manuals for iMIS. Typically our audience isn’t doing social work, necessarily, though. More likely we are writing for associations, professional organizations, or church offices where data entry for contacts and events is high on their list of to-dos.

In case you haven’t be exposed to such an image before, it is a new trend or Internet fad that even Time magazine has covered in the recent article, Creating a Cute Cat Frenzy. The images are often called cat macros or LOLcats, and I Can Has Cheeseburger is the original collecting site for such images. Apparently cats can’t do subject-verb agreement, cats like to use texting shortcuts, and prefer to use l33t 5p34k (elite speak).

Keep up the good work, kittiez.

I have gathered several questions recently related to social media and non-profits using technology to further their causes. Many other people are writing about this with much more authority than I, but I would like to share my perspective and link like crazy to the experts.

What sites or tools are defined as social media? Blogs, wikis, Second Life?

Scoble has an excellent article, What is social media?, explaining how social or new media is different from old media. This article gives me a gold standard to compare all tools with traditional media like newspapers, television, and so on.

How have non-profits and professional organizations found ways to use social media to further their causes or to serve their members?

There are plenty of examples, especially now that Facebook has introduced the new Causes application. This blog post “The Long, Long Tail of Facebook Causes” describes it with links: The very cool Causes application by Project Agape enables anyone with a Facebook account to support and engage their Facebook networks to support a “Cause” – be it “Save the Seals!,” “End Global Warming!,” or “Fight Hate.” All of the Causes have to be attached to a Guidestar-verified 501(c)(3).” The quoted blog post also has tips for promoting a cause on Facebook. Plus it has number to back up its claim of the Long Tail at work – the total donations ranged from ran from $5 to $22,871. There’s another blog post that gives you steps for promoting your cause on Facebook.

The Red Cross created a visual in Second Life to raise awareness about disaster recovery. Often this type of display is too costly for most non-profits, and it’s difficult to measure the effect and return on investment. There also is a subculture of “griefers” on Second Life that makes any investment in presence risky.

This blog entry says “As I mentioned in my blog post on the Red Cross entry at Second Life, depicting a disaster zone, one way is to create awareness, convey a mood or show people the challenges in such areas. This awareness is much more valuable than the lousy linden bucks it brings in tips.There is a thin line though; It is great to raise awareness but the cost is a consideration. The presence should be sponsored, not funded with sponsorship money.”
Good analysis and commentary. Linden bucks are the currency in Second Life and there’s a direct exchange rate between Linden bucks and US Dollars (300 to 1 USD I believe?).

What are mashups and are they automatically part of social media and web 2.0?

Mashups combine and layer information on top of another item to bring more information to the reader. Layered maps are an excellent example of a mashup. Microsoft’s latest CRM offering shows a mashup of layering an aerial photo of the event location or venue in order to offer additional information to event planners. I believe mashups are directly related to social media because it is putting extra data together to form a more user-centered picture of the user’s goals.

But what if I’m not in my twenties?

My former coworker Michael Cote is now an industry analyst and he has this great post about how different websites like facebook and myspace are actually “colonies” where you are gathering with like folk. It starts with this great quote about how difficult it is for
30-somethings to get 20-somethings to read their blog. I cracked up because I realized it’s so true for me. Read his post here:
Cote talks about the “web I know” and it’s different for all of us, based on age, based on experience, based on education level, based on professional achievements, and so on. I feel like I too need to constantly be on the lookout for what “teh kidz” are doing, as a parent, as a blogger, as a writer.

There is some research on the average age of people on Facebook and I would guess it is moving upward.

Actual usage may go down as users age, though, so they need to continue to get people to sign up and join their “colony.” And Danah Boyd has written a wonderful essay about class and MySpace and Facebook. She’s truly a pioneer in this research and writes so well that you want to finish every essay right away.

Anyway, besides the nagging detail that I’m in my 30s, and have a job, house, spouse, kids, pets, and other responsibilities, there’s another reason why I had been hesitant to sign up for facebook, and that’s the little feminist voice in me that dislikes the term facebook because for me, it has the connotation of that book that all the first year college students get where they’d look up incoming students and rate them on looks. (Am I the only one who had that type of incoming book in college?) I think that perception is melting away rapidly, though. Facebook only opened to non-current-college-students in September 2006, so it hasn’t even passed the one year mark as an open area.

How can I keep up with social media and the technology?

You don’t have to feel like you’re telling the kids to “get off your lawn” but you should be aware of the social media push and also recognize (and throw off) the hype when needed.

I have discovered the new tag “nptech” for non-profit technology, and will keep an eye on that tag in del.icio.us, in blogs, and other areas of the web. There’s a lot to keep up with, and constantly analyze.

I’d also encourage everyone to try out the sites to gain familiarity with the site’s look and feel and implementation, and find ways to use them for your everyday pursuits.