See What’s Out There

From Seth Godin via Fred Wilson, I learned today of a blog post from a woman who bought shoes at the online shoe giant Zappos.

This is a terrific customer service story and I think Seth is right that this was not about PR or anything but kindness and thoughtfulness. How are you as a nonprofit practicing this kind of caring with your stakeholders? How are we as a business practicing this kind of caring with our customers? People will go to the ends of the earth for you if they feel you are about them.

Autism Speaks & Cure Autism Now, the primary autism-related charities in the US, have demonstrated that online video is not only for fundraising and promotional purposes. They have launched an autism video glossary that helps educate parents about symptoms of autism. Showing real kids in real situations, they show parents behaviors that might indicate the child has autism. The goal is to encourage early detection and treatment.

From the AP

Several autism specialists who reviewed it at the request of The Associated Press called it an unusually helpful tool for parents and doctors.

“The moving pictures speak a million words,” said Dr. Edwin Cook, an autism researcher and educator at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

“Not only do I see this as useful for the general public and for parents who might be wondering … but I will frankly be using it for education” and training, Cook said. He has received research funding from Autism Speaks but has no connection to the new site.

Convio is announcing the launch of their API and open platform, called Open. They join Kintera and the gold standard of open API’s Salesforce.com in allowing outside developers to tap into their data and extend the functionality of their applications.

How is this useful?

Imagine you run one program for your main donor database and another program for your email and online data. Until recently, the main way to deal with this was cumbersome import and export of data from one system to another. With an API, you can write new software code that hooks one application into another. Or, more likely, you can use code developed by a third-party that does what you need.

Convio’s system is looking really cool. And in addition to the typical API, they also announced a Facebook application builder. This will let an organization create a Facebook application by tapping into the functionality and content they are already using with Convio. I will learn more about this this week when I attend the Convio user group meeting in Austin.

In the meantime, read the terrific write-up about this from Michelle Murrain at her blog Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology.

There is an entertaining article about Second Life in Good Magazine. The title is Get a Life: The Hollow Promise of the Internet’s Next Big Thing.

As I have written here in the past and as I tell audiences of nonprofit professionals on a regular basis, Second Life should be down (at the bottom) on the list of communications, fundraising and marketing priorities. There is no reason to be an early adopter in Second Life when I am certain you have what to do with your email program, your website, your use of video, and your activity on Facebook and other social networks. When you contrast the number of people engaging in online video — more than 80% of everyone online! — with the tiny community of active users on Second Life (peak time active users reach 40,000 in the whole virtual world), you can make an informed judgment about the likely return on your investment of time and money.

Here’s a quote from the article:

The paradox of a virtual world is that it adds human interaction to the online experience, while at the same time making sure you never have to actually interact with anyone. Now, instead of merely buying a book on a website, you can browse a virtual bookstore along side other virtual patrons, without ever leaving your home. This logic—that you’d want to give up both the speed of online shopping and the social experience of actually shopping, that you’d want to spend time in a bookstore but not actually go to one—is depressing, to say the least.

Fred Wilson points us to a Virgin America marketing piece. The content of the piece below is what got Fred, a frequent cross country traveler and busy venture capitalist, excited.

What is interesting to me is the marketing strategy. Do something different? Do something well? Do something that separates you from your peers? Then tell us about it. This is not a laundry list of why you should fly Virgin America. This is a piece that says, here’s one thing we do better. The power of the internet is that all the people who really care about that one thing will spread it around.

So what’s the one thing you do better? And where’s your video about it?

At See3, we have been building our capacity to support web projects running on Drupal. Drupal is an open-source content management system with lots of great functionality. One issue that comes up when we talk about Open Source software is a kind of fear of the unknown among people who were taught software by Microsoft.

The Nonprofit Open Source Initiative has just published an updated primer on choosing free and open source software for nonprofits. What do you need to know before choosing to move to Linux or use Drupal or any of the hundreds of popular FOSS products? Michelle Murrain, a great contributor to the NTEN community and the nonprofit tech community generally, has clearly worked hard to bring this out. It’s worth a look. You can see it live here or get a PDF version here.

From the conclusion:

FOSS is, on many levels, a good fit for nonprofits. FOSS can provide less expensive, easier to maintain, more extensible, more secure implementations of software than proprietary alternatives. FOSS development and FOSS communities often work in ways that are consonant with nonprofit mission (in fact, many FOSS projects are nonprofit organizations themselves.) The development of FOSS specifically for the nonprofit sector provides the possibility of freely available community-driven, community-owned software, that can change and grow with organizations as they grow and change.

Free and open source software still, after all these years, provides real promise for the nonprofit sector. Our challenge is to find ways to work together to further and more fully realize that promise.

Combine a video contest, nonprofits, prize money, Tom Cruise, Robert Redford, Meryl Streep and YouTube and what do you get? Hollywood movie promotion! “Lions for Lambs” a movie about the never-ending “war on terror” and public apathy is asking individuals to stand up for what they believe in on YouTube and win $25,000 for their favorite cause.

Got a nonprofit? Then you should be making a video. Because while you might not win this money, you will certainly get some folks to learn about your mission.

Check here to see more.

Of course you want your organization to be using all of those new technology tools you keep hearing about. RSS feeds and blogs, article comments, social networks… it’s all increasingly important.

Avenue A/Razorfish, the high-end web ad agency now owned by Microsoft, did a little study of these so called Web 2.0 technologies to see about rates of adoption. Some of what they found was on the low end — such as 17% of people using shared bookmarks (sites such as Del.icio.us). But we also have 60% personalizing their home pages and 85% using most-emailed articles links on news sites.

But guess what the largest number of all was? If you have been reading this blog, then you would not be surprised. Video. 95% reporting they had watched an online video over the previous three months. 95%! That’s HUGE.

Video is the most compelling content online. Video is the most popular content online. Video is what your nonprofit needs to be doing.

Thanks to OnPhilanthropy and Marc Andreessen for tip.

The talk of the nonprofit world — and the world more generally — is about Facebook. Are you on it? What can we do with it? Can we raise money with it?

Are we all taking this too seriously? From Alice Mathias, a recent college graduate and today’s Op Ed contributor in the Times:

Facebook did not become popular because it was a functional tool — after all, most college students live in close quarters with the majority of their Facebook friends and have no need for social networking. Instead, we log into the Web site because it’s entertaining to watch a constantly evolving narrative starring the other people in the library.

And…

It’s all comedy: making one another laugh matters more than providing useful updates about ourselves, which is why entirely phony profiles were all the rage before the grown-ups signed in. One friend announced her status as In a Relationship with Chinese Food, whose profile picture was a carry-out box and whose personal information personified the cuisine of China.

You can read more here.

You might know Marc Andreeseen. If you don’t, you should. He basically invented the web browser and founded Netscape and he just sold his company Opsware to HP for $1.6 billion (same amount YouTube sold for). And he recently started Ning, a company that lets you create your own social network in about 5 minutes — and more than 100,000 people have already done so.

Marc writes a super blog (though, without allowing comments, I am not sure we can call it a blog). He writes about internet business and business in general. He’s real smart.

And he just wrote a post called

12 questions for the producers of the new Bionic Woman

Here’s his first question:

Any organization that developed biomedical technology for instant healing and flawless body part replacement — technology 20 years ahead of its time — would be able to license it and generate hundreds of billions of dollars of income very quickly. Instead, they keep it secret and derive no real value from it. Why?

(On behalf of my childhood, I would also like to extend this same question to the producers of Knight Rider and Airwolf.)

He concludes with:

“Why do I know I’m going to keep watching this show?”