Nonprofit Expressions

We needed a place for all of our sister companies to live! Check out our newest endeavors at www.expressions-lab.com!

One of the most common challenges that nonprofit organizations face is being able to clearly define what they DO.

Can I get an Amen?

Please don’t misunderstand, I do not mean that what they do is not important, but simply that they do so many important things that it is difficult to distinguish a purpose.

I used to coordinate grant writing trainings for SAMHSA, and the trainer (now director of Compassion by Design) used to ask “the million dollar” question: “If you had to compete for 1 million dollars in one sentence, what would that one sentence be?”

How does this have anything to do with branding?

It has EVERYTHING to do with branding! A brand is much more than a logo (although images is a huge part of it). A brand is the overall impression that an organization’s audiences have about that organization.

Just stop a second… what do you think about when you hear your organizations name?

It should be clearly defined, distinguished and one-sentence worth!

We can relate

Nonprofit Expressions is currently undergoing a lot of change. A LOT of change. We moved into a new office (Amen!), are starting a PC repair business, digging into the local web design market, and are having to re-define our purpose!

Our passion is still churches and nonprofits, but we have branched out to small businesses and individuals. So now what? “Nonprofit Expressions” isn’t going to cut it anymore. And when asked… “what do you do?”… it is hard to even know how to respond without spouting out a thousand verbs at once.

But with launching our new sister businesses this May, this is the perfect time to begin defining our brand.

Check out our new all-encompassing website: www.expressions-lab.com

So how can we begin clarifying our brand?

Start with a communications audit. Have a professional look at all of your communications materials: print, online, broadcast, etc. This will help evaluate your organization’s current capacity or performance of essential communications practices. It will tell you what is working well, what’s not and give you some important recommendations for next steps.

Next, define your publics: who has influence on your organization, and who does your organization influence (staff, members, customers, stakeholders, etc).

Then, do a survey (something simple). You can use surveymonkey.com for free, for example. Send the survey to a variety of key publics and ask them to define your organization. You will get to see your organization through the eyes of the people who matter. They might even have some great suggestions on improvement!

Other steps in this process can be a full situation analysis and SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) and even some strategies you can implement to improve your brand.

For more information on a communications audit or survey, contact Jennifer!

Internet Explorer version 8 just went into Beta, and in a stunning announcement from Microsoft it’s time to get your website up to standards.

As a web designer I already urge people to use a standards compliant browser like Firefox. By doing so not only will you get to see the web the way it is meant to be, but you will help push companies like Microsoft (who up until now ignored standards almost completely) into using standards in new browsers.

Standards compliance has been an issue on the web for a long time. For the most part, the design and development community comes up with standards we would like to see the browser creators, like Mozilla, Safari, and Microsoft, use in new releases. The reason is to create an internet that does not require 3 or 4 versions of websites to work on all the different browsers. Many of us who have been working on the web for the last decade can remember the days when we had to have two versions of websites. One version for Netscape and another for Internet Explorer. Having two different website versions is a very expensive concept, and it is for this reason many companies pushed for a standard all browsers could use.

Until now, Microsoft has had most of the browser market, and has had no reason to even care about standards. This has made every web designer’s job harder. We have to create pages that are standards-compliant, and then come up with hacks to make the sites work right in Internet Explorer (what a dumb way of doing things…it’s reasons like this that many tech-savvy people hate Microsoft).

Microsoft is feeling the pressure as 28% of the internet choosing to see the web the way it was meant to be (in Firefox). So in Internet Explorer 8 they are going to implement standards compliance (at least to some degree). This is a great time to be in web design, as this will allow for a better internet as a whole. The problem was that Microsoft was going to make the new version 8 browser behave in the same way as version 7 unless designers use special code to tell the browser to behave the right standards-compliant way. So what then is the point of having a standards-compliant browser if it will not read websites that way naturally? This has been the complaint of designers the globe over.

That is why it is so great to see they reversed their decision. The new browser will indeed be more standards-compliant!

What this means to your site

If you have a highly non-standards compliant website (and a designer you should fire) that website might break in Internet Explorer 8. Yes you read that right, if your code is not up to snuff, your site might not work right in the new browser. This can be a big problem for those with older sites, or newer ones that were not built well.

So if you are considering a re-design you should keep standards in mind. It will not be long before standards-compliant browsers are the norm, and badly designed code won’t work. If you know for a fact that your site is not standards compliant, you don’t have to get a re-design going tomorrow. Internet Explorer 8 is only in Beta and it will be months or years before it becomes the norm on the Internet. But that day is coming, and its just one more good reason to get your standards up to snuff.

If you are not sure if your website is standards complaint you can contact me, and our staff will do a “site report card” on your website. Part of our analysis includes standards compliance!

When you are a web designer (like me) you are always on the lookout for websites that are cutting edge, and ones that make life easy. This week I would like to examine two websites that are both cutting edge, and have the potential to make life easier.

The first Web 2.0 site is blist.com

Blist is a database for the everyday person. When I say database don’t get scared! Database is usually a term used by very techie people to refer to a means of storing and sorting information. The truth is just about everyone uses databases all the time. We just don’t know the high tech ways of doing it, and we try to fit everything into Microsoft’s Access. Access can be great for rows of sales data, or a list of names and addresses, but it doesn’t even come close to the usefulness of Blist.

I urge you to watch the demo on the blist Blog. This website is currently in beta, but you can sign up and begin using it now.

About web 2.0 Beta websites

The new buzzword for web 2.0 is beta. Beta means there are known problems with the application that are being fixed, and people need to use the application so those problems or potential problems can be ironed out.

The funny truth about “beta” websites is that they usually function just fine. I have been using Pownce, Grand Central, and Blist with no problems and all are or were recently “beta” websites. Beta is becoming the buzzword for “cool new features” on the internet. So next time you see a beta website don’t be intimidated-it might actually be amazing.

The second website to make life easy

The second web 2.o application I have fallen in love with is the next generation of personal organizers called Scrybe.

Scrybe is like your personal organizer mixed with a web scrapbook that you can use on the web wherever you are, as well as offline when your laptop is not connected!

Scrybe is also a beta application, accept in this case iscrybe.com is not offering public sign-up. It is a private beta (that means cool new features you want but can’t have yet). I researched and pan handled to get an invitation to scrybe.

In the spirit of sharing, I would like to give away 15 free invitations! All you need to do is comment on this blog or email me at aaron@nonprofit-expressions.com, and I will send you a free scrybe invite.

If you want to see all the amazing features of scrybe and be convinced as to why you want it, you should check out the video on the website!

Best Regards,

Aaron

We have officially launched a new web 2.0 product for church websites.

Church-Box.com now offers an advanced pay as you go Content Management System. This is not just any CMS. It uses technology from one of our partner companies Agency Fusion.

This product has been a great fit with our new small-medium sized church packages. With this software we can make a website affordable to even a church planter by way of monthly rental and minimal setup fees.

The greatest strength of the Church Box CMS is the use of standards-compliant code. Because the templates the CMS uses are built on genuinely good coding practices, we can import nearly any design concept into the CMS. This allows us to use Cascading Style Sheets to layout our CMS based sites and finally delivers a CMS that breaks completely away from the table based layouts. This is the first CMS for less than $80,000 on the market that is truly search engine friendly. With content editing as powerful as RedDot systems and the use of other enterprise level systems, this product is jaw dropping in its functionality.

The other great feature is the light weight of the CMS. Most content management systems are database driven. While our application makes great use of databases in the editing phase of using the CMS, all the operational aspects of the CMS exist in a third location.

Without technical jargon: This new CMS delivers content faster and more accurately than any other CMS on the market. Period! The site that is delivered to the visitor is simple clean code. There is no heavy machinery creating pages on the fly. The site file structure looks just like a normal website. If a third party web designer examined the file structure on the back end, they would never know a content management system had been used. This is technology light years beyond what is currently in use by 99% of churches who have a content management system.

Our staff is very excited about his project. Not only is this product the best CMS we have ever seen, but Church Box is an affordable alternative to a full custom design solution that is out of reach for a small church or a tight budget.

When we approached the marketplace with this product we investigated the pricing structure of other sites trying to offer similar services. We found that not only did the other sites offer a far less impressive product to the consumer, they were also charging too much. In essence, we are now offering the best, most reasonably priced content management system for churches on the market!

Now we are looking at other markets we can port this product to, such as small business and the non-profit arena.

A new project called Yahoo Live just launched. The new service from Yahoo allows you to create a live video stream from your webcam and then embed the streaming video in your website or blog. The project has an API that will let programmers make applications using the streaming video from the site. This project could lead to some very interesting applications…