Recent posts about Nonprofit Tech
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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Why I'm Loving Medium
May, 21 2013 CommentsMedium, 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):
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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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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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3 Month Check-ups for Your Website
October, 11 2012 CommentsWe'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.
Don't get me wrong, one of the things I love about Raised Eyebrow and our relationship with our clients is that we aim to have a very open door policy with regards to feedback, and we've been very fortunate to cultivate ongoing relationships with the vast majority of our clients. As a result, post-launch follow-ups tend to happen kind of organically in the form of on-going conversations, but it's amazing what happens when you build time in to really engage with a process, instead of just coming across something by happenstance.
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Why Working With Multiple Stakeholders Is Awesome
October, 7 2012 CommentsLast 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.
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Covenant House Vancouver Now Mobile Responsive
October, 2 2012 Comments
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.
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An Alternative to Google Analytics
June, 12 2012 CommentsWorking 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.
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We Built the Internet Hall of Fame
April, 23 2012 CommentsWhile 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. The Hall of Fame site was built to honour some of our greatest heros, the people whose work has literally made our jobs possible like Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. Also in this year's round of inductees, Mitchell Baker, Open Source advocate and founding chairperson of the Mozilla Foundation, and a woman we have much respect and admiration for here at Raised Eyebrow.
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Why we created a new Drupal distribution
April, 4 2012 CommentsSince 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:
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Should Your Nonprofit Use Pinterest?
January, 25 2012 CommentsHow can nonprofits use Pinterest (and other visually-driven social networking sites) effectively?
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