Penguin Day, NTC09 and Policy Day Nuggets

The last week of April I attended and presented at Penguin Day, NTC and Policy Day. Along the way I did some sessions, found out about some interesting projects, tools and websites. Here is a random collection:

Penguin Day

CiviCRM vs. Salesforce for Nonprofits

Thomas Groden and I had a great session that outlined some of the major differences in the systems. It was a very well attended session and attendees had some great questions and shared valuable experiences. 

TOR Project: Imagine you are in a country like Turkey where YouTube is banned. How might you get access to it? Or you are in China wanting to access wikipedia and know that Yahoo will hand over your information on demand to the government, possibly resulting in jail time? Or you are a victim of domestic violence who knows your internet activity is being monitored by your abuser? The TOR Project can help.

TOR uses various tactics to help people use the internet anonymously and send encrypted/anaonymous messages, like updates to wikipedia. Using the TOR projects plug-in for Firefox, you can re-route and anonymize your online activity. The TOR browser bundle can be used to circumvent filters (like a school who does not allow students to look at sites with the word "gay" in them).

I am testing out the Firefox client and while there is a speed hit, it has been reliable. 

Wikileaks.org - Assists "peoples of all countries who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and institutions".

SustainableWebsites.com - 100% carbon-neutral web hosting

NTC 2009

Beth Kanter's Session: Mapping Social Media Strategy To Metrics: Listen, Learn, Adapt

Red Cross: "We are mentioned in various social media platforms over 400 times a day, so LISTENING is the foundation of what we do in social media"

A well-known internet domain registration service conducted a "conversation analysis" to see how many comments/mentions of their brand on blogs were positive and how many were negative. When they first looked, 85% of comments were negative. They made a concerted effort to counter some of the mis-information that had been spread, engaged more effectively with social media - including dropping the time it took them to respond to blog posts from 48 hours to 4 hours. The result was that negative posts dropped to 18% of all mentions.

Check out Feed.informer.com and www.NetVibes.com to help manage feeds from various sources to assist with listening.

Check out Hashtags.org to see trends in what people are tagging/talking about on Twitter.

Check out www.Radian6.com as a social media monitoring solution


My Session: Website Usability Testing for Smaller Orgs

My guest speakers, Johanna Bates from Community Partners and Maryann Osmond from Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur did an excellent job sharing stories of their experiences revising their websites based on their audiences, including testing the usability. Thanks to them both.

My Session: Effective Online Communications

Jennie Anderson of Aids.gov and William Neuheisel of DC Central Kitchen shared valuable experience and advice about how they communcate effectively online. Jennie's colleague Michelle Samplin-Salgado did a blog post mentioning the sesssion: Click here to read the post. 

Thanks to Jennie and William for adding their valuable real-world experiences. 

CBO Policy Day

I did a presentation on using Web 2.0/Social Media tools for Advocacy. A few good examples of advocacy/policy websites:

www.350.org - International Day of Climate Action

www.1sky.org - 1 Climate, 1 Future, 1 Chance (great "Get Local" section)

Comments

[David Alston]

Hey there John,

Thanks for recommending folks check out Radian6 as a social media monitoring solution. We've certainly enjoyed working with folks like Wendy Harman and Beth Kanter.

Cheers.

David