The email came from Lydia Watts, co-founder of WEAVE and friend since I first started working with WEAVE nearly 8 years ago. She asked if I could please create a simple micro-website for saveWEAVE.org—the last-ditch fundraising effort she wanted to launch the next day. Her challenge: raise $85,000 in 10 days which, if successful, could help WEAVE stay open and continue its vital, lifesaving services to DC-area survivors of relationship violence.

I quickly set up a simple Wordpress-based website Lydia could update herself. I also included a Chip-In widget, a neat little tool for accepting donations and displaying progress toward a specific fundraising goal. Another volunteer generously created a Facebook group and Twitter account, which we integrated with the website. He actively updated saveWEAVE’s presence on Facebook and Twitter day and night throughout the week while I fielded questions about donation processing and helped keep the website updated. Lydia, along with other volunteers, board members and friends, worked tirelessly to promote saveWEAVE and reach out to their contacts with requests for donations.

What followed was an intense yet fascinating week during which saveWEAVE.org supporters leveraged social media, networking, blog exposure and traditional media to raise over $85k in FIVE days, not ten. Over 700 supporters came forward, many of whom had never heard of WEAVE before. While there were several donations over $1,000, the vast majority of this total was achieved with donations of $100 or less.

Beyond the obvious joy of (hopefully) helping WEAVE continue, the incredible outpouring of support is groundbreaking in terms of WEAVE’s fundraising strategy. Like many other non-profits, WEAVE’s fundraising until now has mostly relied on traditional methods—e.g., board member fundraising, development department outreach, an annual fundraising event, direct mail appeals and e-mail outreach. In an emergency push over just one short week, WEAVE saw for itself the dramatic results a great organization can achieve when they redefine their approach and jump into Web 2.0 and social media fundraising with both feet.

What are some take-away nuggets from WEAVE’s experience? Here’s a start:

1. It’s a fact: your supporters are Web 2.0 and media-savvy. They read blogs, news articles, share information on Facebook, and yes — they tweet, too. You need get very active in that world, reach supporters online where they are and find creative ways to stay in front of them — both directly via social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, and through media channels such as community blogs and local news outlets. This is a basic “fundraising in a Web 2.0 world” concept, but a very significant starting point.
2. If your website doesn’t already have a content management system (CMS), you need one. Developing and maintaining relationships with supporters requires dialog and fresh content on your website to keep them coming back to continue the conversation. A CMS makes it so much easier to update your site frequently and bring in other interactive features to engage your visitors. Creating CMS-based websites like this and planning social media outreach is my specialty, so please drop me a line if you’d like help making it happen for your website.
3. If you’re going to invest the resources into this kind of relationship-building as an ongoing effort, you need a plan. For many organizations, “our intern created a Facebook page” is the extent of their social media outreach plan. (Really, I hear this all the time.) Although WEAVE’s initial push took place without the luxury of time or formal planning, start by thinking about what social media tools will be most effective for you (not all of them! pick a few), what your goals are, how you’ll measure those goals, and what staff support you’ll need to maintain these tools. Remember, this is about building relationships with supporters over time — not “fix it and forget it.”
4. If your staff is already overwhelmed (more than likely), consider asking a dedicated volunteer or three to keep up with posting new content and responding to comments on your website and social media properties. Appoint a staff person to oversee and coordinate these efforts so you can make sure you’re projecting a consistent message.
5. Give supporters multiple ways to engage with your cause by mixing together different conversational threads. This can include daily / weekly postings to Twitter and Facebook, monthly emails, regular online / offline fundraising events (e.g., informal happy hours, Tweetups) and frequent posts on your website with news updates, stories, links to external media articles about your org, etc.
6. Build relationships with bloggers and reporters and encourage them to write about your organization. Monitor, publicize and respond to news articles and blog posts about your organization. Show that you’re listening and want to hear more!
7. Think about how your internal processes will support direct relationships with the donors that come to you via your new fundraising techniques. Prepare your workflow and line up (wo)manpower so you’re ready to manage the these new relationships–not just as names and addresses, but real people who want to engage with your mission.

Whether WEAVE manages to continue or not, I’m truly in awe of the hard work and determination of everyone associated with WEAVE, from friends and supporters to the staff and clients who have made WEAVE the gem that it is. Even with this heroic effort, they’ve only just scratched the surface of bringing WEAVE’s fundraising into the Web 2.0 world. I’m looking forward to helping them build a new plan to leverage this momentum moving forward.

Has your organization had a similar experience? What would you add to this conversation?

Client

Rachel Simmons

URL

http://www.rachelsimmons.com

Scope

Rachel Simmons is an author, educator and coach helping girls and young women grow into authentic, emotionally intelligent and assertive adults. Our goal for this project was to expand on the identity and vision developed earlier in this project to design and develop a completely new online presence for Rachel Simmons. She wanted a bold, modern look with a strong yet approachable feminine edge but without being too “girly.”

Rachel’s previous site was a static “brochure” website that was difficult for her to update and offered little opportunity for interaction with her audience. We developed this new website using Wordpress as a CMS (Content Management System) with significantly expanded features. Rachel’s new site has 2 blogs, custom feeds for videos, GirlTips and news, event listings, a Twitter feed, photo gallery and more. Commenting is enabled throughout to allow visitors to interact with Rachel directly about her content.

This website was coordinated to launch alongside the release of her new book and related book tour, so we included features such as a book tour section, “buy this book now” links and book advertising throughout the site. We’re pleased that the launch of this website has garnered such a positive response from Rachel’s audience.

Client

Rosalind Wiseman

Scope

Design letterhead, business cards and #10 envelopes to extend the brand we created for Rosalind. The letterhead was designed as a digital template Rosalind and her staff can use in Microsoft Word. For the business cards, we changed the color of each card according the individual’s preference to add variety to their look. Each staff person’s basic contact information and Twitter handle were printed on the front with Rosalind’s full logo and website URL on the back.

Client

Rachel Simmons

Scope

Our goal was to create a simple yet striking typographically-based logo for Rachel Simmons. She wanted her new look to reference feminine strength with immediate visual impact and modernist flair. We designed this logo to function like a label, with or without her tagline “Leadership for Life.”

I’ve designed and produced many print annual reports over the years. But with everyone looking to reduce cost and waste, I’ve been exploring online annual reports to see how it can help my clients get through these difficult times. While some organizations really do need a printed annual report, others can do quite well moving the information online.

When I say “online annual report,” I don’t mean simply posting a PDF online. This method is unfriendly to users and search engines. I mean adjusting and reorganizing your annual report into a simple micro-website that makes your information convenient and easy to digest while eliminating printing and distribution costs and the need to recycle all those boxes of unused annual reports.

This all sounds great, but as usual I’ve been thinking about how we can take it further. If you’re going to take your annual report online, don’t just convert it and stop there. Take advantage of your CMS and Web 2.0 to bring depth to the conversation and inspire supporters take action based on what they’ve read in your annual report.

In the printed world, we’ve mostly relied on the good ol’ remittance envelope tucked into the booklet spine. On the web, though, you can do much more. Here are some ideas:

Enhance the conversation:

• encourage visitors to post comments and kudos related to your programs
• “read more” links visitors can follow to more in-depth information on your main website
• rotating or animated quotes from individuals you serve
• a simple slideshow or photo gallery with photos of your programs and events
• when listing donors, offer higher-end supporters links to their websites

Inspire action:

• Prominent “donate now” link on every page
• Share This links
• Links to your organization’s presence on social media tools (e.g., Facebook, Twitter)

Annual reports are generally considered a snapshot in time, so you need to consider these features from that perspective. You’re not trying to duplicate your main website; you want to give depth to your story from the previous year and translate that into more active supporters. Also, since one objective of going online is to reduce costs, you don’t want to get too carried away with features (thereby increasing programming costs).

Like any solution, balancing the trade-offs and qualifiers keeps things interesting. But if it makes sense for you to move this piece online, enjoy the process of exploring how you can use the web to make your online annual report more than just a document that lives online. We’re working on a few online annual reports this summer and fall, so check back for updates when they’re finished!

The basics of RSS

RSS is short for “really simple syndication.” In a nutshell, RSS feeds are a way to have the updated information you want pushed directly to you rather than your having to remember / take the time to check all of your bookmarks for updates.

Feed readers like GoogleReader make it incredibly easy to have all of your RSS feed subscriptions in one place. When content you’ve subscribed to is updated, it automatically pushes that new content to your feed reader. Instead of visiting each of your selected blogs or media outlets to see if they’ve posted anything new, you can sit back with your cup of coffee and let the updates come to you. Really, it will change your life.

There are a great many articles and videos out there explaining the basics of RSS feeds, so I don’t have to reiterate here. There’s a good one by Darren Rowse at ProBlogger if you’re interested, which also contains a nice little video by CommonCraft:

So what else can we do with this?

The meatier conversation comes when we’re working on a website together. Creating RSS feeds for your own site is standard these days, and it’s a great way to help your audience stay connected with you. So it really helps to be comfortable with RSS feeds already when we have the discussion about dynamic content and how to push YOUR information out to YOUR audience.

When setting up RSS feeds on your site, visitors can sign up for one single feed covering all of your content updates or sub-feeds for one or more specific areas. RSS feeds for your comments are also a great community-builder. When someone posts a comment on a blog post, they can sign up to receive an RSS feed of any other comments on that post, which encourages conversation not just with you but also between your site visitors. This is a very effective way to develop community on your site, keep yourself in front of your audience and provide useful information that encourages repeat visitors, links and search engine attention.

Now, single feeds are useful, but we can also tie them together to create aggregated feeds. This sounds complicated but really just means a group of feeds tied together into one single stream. You can create simple aggregated feed streams directly on your site, or enlist any of the user-friendly tools such as Yahoo! Pipes to combine different feeds from multiple sources related to a particular topic. You can then create a new feed that you can filter, sort, map, manipulate and post on your site for others to enjoy.

How could you use this on your site? Say, for example, that you’re an international research organization and you want to provide your audience with a collection of current resources, updates, training, tools, etc. to help them do their jobs better. Your audience could really benefit from a consolidated source of news and updates from a group of sources you’ve tailored to their specific interests. Or you could get fancier with a feed pipe that “mashes” together layers of textual and mapping data to show a dynamic map of, say, HIV/AIDs infection rates by country. More complicated feed pipes can take time to build, but they can be very powerful and useful to your audience.

Using RSS feeds for your internal workflow and on your site are fantastic ways to increase the flow of useful information into and out of your organization. Although you do need to generate some of your own updated content, aggregated feeds let you attract visitors with fresh, useful content you don’t necessarily have to generate yourself. The result? More efficient information sharing, an engaged audience of repeat visitors, better traffic, more incoming links and better search engine rankings. Nice.

How do you use RSS feeds in your organization? Leave a comment!

Client

Rosalind Wiseman

URL:

http://rosalindwiseman.com

Scope

Rosalind and her team approached us last year to redesign her identity and help rethink her business and website strategy. We worked with her team to evaluate their business goals and options, and then figure out a plan for her positioning and marketing efforts.

Our goal for this website was to create a fresh, new look that leverages her established name recognition and build an interactive website community around her blog and video content while highlighting her publications, training institute and speaking engagements. We redesigned and restructured her website using Wordpress as a CMS to include multiple blog channels, video Q&A, event and publication information, upcoming events lists, subscription options for email and RSS feeds and an educator forum. We incorporated Adsense and other advertising into the site for future expansion. In the coming months, we will also be redeveloping her resources lists for added functionality.

The first thing to do is to frame the discussion in a positive way while figuring out where your limits are. Decide how low you can afford to go before a project isn’t worth it for you. The answer will be different for everyone, depending on your overhead costs, level of experience, how busy you are, etc. This post isn’t about those times when someone asks for a fully-featured custom-designed website with $500 in their pocket. Those are the obvious cases where most professionals would walk the other way.

More often, the budget in question falls into the gray area of being somewhat workable but really too tight for you to give the client everything they initially request. In these situations, I try to look at the budget as a glass half-full, thinking about what we can do for that amount of money and approaching negotiation from there. Remember that you and the client both have the common goal of creating a site you can be proud of. This post is about figuring out how to trim, adjust and compromise to help tight budgets go further.

When faced with a budget that’s really too tight for comfort, I suggest focusing your adjustment efforts on the following 3 areas:

• Scope of work and requirements (e.g., tasks, features, user needs)
• Your internal process and workflow (e.g., tools, processes, work habits and policies)
• Financial management (e.g., payment methods, terms, timing and policies)

Scope of Work

• Teach your client to fish. Clients can save a lot of money if there are parts of the project they can do themselves, e.g., basic photo research or content entry (if their site is built with a CMS).
• Break the project up into smaller chunks and prioritize.
• Ask if you can you drop some tasks or postpone certain features, maybe until the next fiscal year or after the site gains traction / advertising revenue.
• If you originally budgeted for three different design directions for your first round of comps, see if the client would be willing to reduce it to two or maybe even one if it’s a smaller project and you’re very clear on what they want.
• Work with scope creep productively. When your client asks for something you know isn’t in the budget, instead of saying no outright or eating the cost unfairly, ask whether they’d like to drop a feature/requirement to make room for it or accept the additional cost.

Your Process and Workflow

• Review your tools and process often. It’s easy to get into habitual “we’ve always done it this way” thinking, but new timesaving tools come out all the time so it’s a good idea to step back occasionally and see if you’re being as efficient as you could be.
• See if you can create reusable foundations for recurring projects that will save you time on future projects.
• Ask your client to do their part to streamline the review and approval process as much as possible. Make sure it’s clear who the decision makers are and limit them to 2-3 people if you can. When you’re trying to pack as much value into a budget as you can, excessive back-and-forth and “design-by-committee” situations are notorious budget-wasters that leave you less room to do the actual work they’re hiring you to do.
• Whenever possible, use the phone instead of your feet. Unless there’s a specific reason to meet in person during the project, I visit most of my clients in person at the start of our relationship, and then we use email or the phone the rest of the time. This means less time spent in transit and more time doing productive work.

Financial Management

• Decide whether you can accept smaller payments over a longer period of time. If you typically take a 50% deposit upfront with the rest payable on completion, maybe you can accept a smaller initial deposit and spread the payments out more.
• Consider any possibilities for non-cash payment for all or part of the project. This might work if your client offers professional services you could actually use. (e.g., legal services, office organization) Barter situations can be tricky if your hourly rate is significantly higher or lower than your client’s, but sometimes you can take the edge off of the budget squeeze by accepting at least some of your payment in trade.
• If the project is an unusual learning opportunity, can you absorb some of it under your own training budget? (You do have a training budget, right?)
• Consider offering your client a discount or partial fee waiver in exchange for active exposure or promotion. Ask them to tweet nice things about you, blog about how you helped them create their great new site, or send you a certain number of referral contacts. (One client had the great idea to do a video testimonial for me! I can’t wait.) See if they’d be willing to let you post a small ad or link to your site in their website footer. If the project involves a sponsored event, maybe you could waive some of your fees as an in-kind donation and be listed as a sponsor.
• Some foundations provide capacity-building grants to qualified non-profits to help them develop professional communications materials. (I’ve done several of these kinds of projects) If your client does good work for the community and clearly needs professional materials but can’t afford them, encourage them to research and apply for grants like these.

These are only a few of the many possible ways to stretch a tight budget further. Do you have others? I’d love to see them in the comments area below. The art in making all of this work is keeping one eye on the big picture and the other on the details. If you try to be flexible but fair to both sides, you can do more with less while still making your own ends meet.

Client

CAIR Coalition

URL:

http://www.caircoalition.org

Scope

As part of a package to overhaul their communications materials, Serendipity Creative planned, designed and developed this new website for CAIR (Capitol Area Immigrants’ Rights) Coalition. Basing the look and feel we had established with their printed materials, we aimed for a simple, modern look while greatly expanding their website’s functionality. We rebuilt the site using Wordpress as a CMS, enabling CAIR Coalition to update content, maintain their calendar, accept online donations, present video and display RSS feeds from other sources. We also created trackable document download areas for pro bono attorneys and individuals. Visitors can keep in touch by signing up for CAIR Coalition email newsletters and RSS feeds.

Over the next year, we look forward to helping CAIR Coalition develop and implement a social media strategy to expand on its growing relationships with supporters.

Nathan Associates

URL:

http://www.country-compass.com

Scope

Serendipity Creative planned the sitemap and information architecture, created the wireframes and designed the user interface. This Web site is an interactive reference and analysis tool enabling USAID staff, policy makers and NGOs to view, compare, graph and map detailed international economic data. Our goal was to develop the site architecture and visual design to present this information in a clean, organized, friendly and engaging way that encourages users to take advantage of the site’s advanced interactive tools.

Because this is a USAID-funded project, we designed this site to comply with USAID graphic standards section 508 guidelines for accessibility. In particular, we tested the color choices to ensure they could be distinguishable by color blind individuals and when printed in black and white. Many members of the target audience would be accessing the site on small monitor screens under low-bandwidth conditions, so we designed the site to work with minimal graphics and a narrower screen width.

We then collaborated with web development firm WebFirst, who coded the site and developed the interactive mapping and graphing features.