Nonprofit Tech

Medium, tagline "A better place to read and write things that matter", is the latest project of Ev Williams of Blogger and Twitter fame. It's a platform, currently in select user  beta, that allows those selected users to write content and publish it to the web. So what? There are lots of tools that allow for that, some of them created by Ev in fact. Here's what makes Medium different (and what I happen to love about it):

In 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.

We've recently started implementing 3 month follow-up meetings post a site/app/project launch with our clients as a formal part of our process (meaning it actually goes on the task list then turns into a meeting). I'm writing this post at a coffee shop, just a few minutes after completing one such review and reflecting on why we didn't implement this formally much sooner.

Last month I flew to DC to present at HOW Interactive on the topic of Enagaging Multiple Stakeholders in an Interactive Design Project. I had a great time presenting in Washington and in particular enjoyed the feedback and questions from the attendees. The topic is one that is near and dear to our hearts here at Raised Eyebrow, working as we do most of the time with non-profit organizations, which means also working with multiple stakeholders. 

This week we launched a very exciting project for our beloved friends and longterm clients at Covenant House Vancouver. While there's no doubt that their new site is beautiful, the really exciting part for our team was that with this project we got to help Covenant House become a leader in providing a truly mobile responsive website to help serve their own clients, as well as for easy use by supporters and donors.

Working as we do with primarily non-profit organizations, we have a lot of clients who are concerned about data hosting on US based (or non-Canadian based) servers. Finding reliable and affordable Canadian Hosting isn't such a challenge, as we've mentioned before we love EZP, but a number of the third party tools that we use to help with reporting and efficiencies for our clients are US based. In particular, we run into this issue for Web Statistics and for Email Newsletter services. 

While it's not quite the same as the honour of being inducted, we were pretty thrilled earlier this year when The Internet Society asked our team to build the online home of the Internet Hall of Fame.

Since we pushed the DataPublic distribution to Drupal.org a few weeks ago, a number people have asked the question, "Why did you not use the OpenPublic Drupal distribution as a base?".

There are many reasons we followed the path that we did. I hope to outline a few of them here: