Blog
What we’re thinking about here at Raised Eyebrow these days. You can subscribe to our blog by RSS, or sign up for email updates.
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BC Candidate Lookup plugin for Citizens Connected
May, 10 2013 CommentsIn anticipation of the upcoming provincial election we were looking for ways to help organizations who want to target email campaigns at electoral candidates.
In parternship with OpenNorth we inputted candidate data which then became available to us as part of the fantastic opennorth API. From that point it was just a matter of tweaking our federal mp lookup plugin to consume it.
As you can see below the user is asked for a postal code and from this information a list of candidates is generated that the user can then add to the "To:" field of their email. In this way it becomes easy to quickly let your candidates know how you stand on an issue before an election.
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A Workplace that Cares
February, 17 2013 CommentsAn article with the title 3 Reasons to Treat Employees Like Family at Inc.com caught my eye last Sunday morning. I've naturally been thinking a lot about the workplace culture at Raised Eyebrow lately (and will probably be blogging about it a bit more) as we're one of five finalists for the Best Employer award at Small Business BC. But really, it's something that's never too far from my mind.
The article was ultimately a bit of a let down; I was hoping for some hard facts or research behind why valuing your employees as you would anyone who is close to you, makes good business sense. Nevertheless, the third point in the author's list, which is summarized simply as "care" really struck a chord with me.
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Changing perspectives on Phone calls and SMS
February, 14 2013 CommentsThere are around 6 billion active mobile phones worldwide which exceeds the world population. That's a staggering statistic. It's also a huge market. It should be noted that this number relates to all mobile phones, not smartphones specifically, so "dumb" phones as well. Most of these "dumb" phones allow you to perform two basic actions - make & receive voice calls and send & receive SMS messages. Until recently, it's been somewhat difficult, costly and time consuming to try to target these avenues as part of a marketing, fundraising or outreach campaign. We've all seen those ads for text donations to help send aid to Haiti not long after the massive earthquake. For a small organization, a similar campaign method would have been unfeasible until now. Enter Twilio!
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Best Employer in BC
February, 12 2013 Comments
Raised Eyebrow has made it to the finalist round in the Small Business BC Awards in the Best Employer Category, and I could not be more delighted.
Local and small business feel like buzz words these days, but I can safely say they have always been an integral part of my values system. Growing up in Victoria BC, I was really fortunate to live in a community of vibrant, dynamic small businesses. I grew up frequenting restaurants, clothing stores, bakeries, bookshops and the like owned by family friends or by people who became friends over our years of patronage. My first jobs were all working for small local businesses, where I felt like I was given a chance to learn and gain responsibility.
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Makers Gonna Make
February, 6 2013 CommentsWe've long talked about getting a couch or some kind of lounge area at the office. And now, as we're thirteen years into Raised Eyebrow (though admittedly not all at this location), we've finally done it.
The interior design was done by Mak Interiors (Amber Kingsnorth) and we're all in love with it.
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Announcing Hollyhock's SVI Women in Vancouver
January, 29 2013 CommentsI had the great pleasure of speaking at an event last night about Social Media for Social Good and realized when talking to someone over the evening, that there was no mention of this incredible conference on this site. So I'm here to rectify that.
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Big Love for Raised Eyebrow
January, 29 2013 Comments
Just a quick note to express how much I appreciate Emira and our team at Raised Eyebrow. Recently my wee bug, Azalea was sick with pneumonia. The support and well wishes that I received from our team was awesome. I was treated with so much kindness and consideration. Thanks Raised Eyebrow for being the best place to work. -
Date handling differences between PHP versions
December, 7 2012 CommentsAs part of an assignment in a Drupal course that I'm giving a UBC this fall, I asked the students to develop a small module that would create a block and output how many days there were until Christmas. This is a relatively simple task as it involves two Drupal hooks and a little bit of date manipulation.
As the students worked on the module it became clear to me that there were two ways in which to handle the date calculation part, that is it could be written in PHP version > 5.2 or in PHP version < 5.2.
DateTime class in PHP 5.2
PHP 5.2 introduced the DateTime class and with it an number of Date manipulation methods.
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Storify: Making Collections of Links Fun Again
November, 26 2012 CommentsI've been playing around with a new(ish) online tool called Storify as a way to curate web content and I'm increasingly impressed with it as a tool that non-profits might use for storytelling.
Storify is a tool that allows you to create "Stories" or pages of content that aggregate content from across the web. You can pull in links to articles, YouTube videos, individual Tweets or Facebook posts, Instagram or Flickr photos, or pretty much anything that lives at a public web address. You can see my sample below to see what the format looks like, it's pretty clean and allows you to put in comments on each piece of content. You're also given space to put in an intro/framing content at the top and a title.
How do I see non-profits using this? Well the possibilities are many, but here are a few that spring to mind:
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Paying to Promote Pages on Facebook: What's Changed?
October, 30 2012 CommentsHere are two great summaries of what's going on with Facebook Pages and the Sponsored (read paid) Posts options. If you're wondering why your reach on Facebook seems to be getting smaller, this will help you demystify the changes at Facebook.
From the New York Observer, Broken On Purpose: Why Getting it Wrong Pays More Than Getting It Right and from Dangerous Minds, Facebook: I want my friends back.
(Thanks @sublimestitch for the resources).
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