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Here are a few highlights from the project and the website:
And now a word from Free Range Studios designer Kathi Bahr: “It was truly a pleasure collaborating with an organization that’s doing positive (and tangible!) work for the DC community. We were given complete creative freedom in order to build the new WeatherizeDC brand from start to finish, beginning with a logo design and then website design. It’s rewarding to know we were part of a team that established a creative tool that community members will see and interact with directly.” In summary – great project, great partner, a great success. Excellent job, team!
The new site is informative and engaging, with aggressive integration through Democracy In Action for events, campaigns, and eNewsletter sign-up and templates. It also includes liberal use of WuFoo custom forms for robust online grant and fellowship applications. One final cool feature is a Google Map integration displaying more than 100 charter schools in New York that links to more details and content within the site and to the individual schools’ websites.
Thanks to Roshani for her hard work to make these OneWorld Peer Learning Exchanges occur, and to my co-presenters Alan Rosenblatt and Guy Stevens for their contributions.
We haven’t taken this issue lightly, and as we discussed two weeks ago, we’re heavily involved in building bridges between Soapbox and the leading CRM systems for non-profits, starting with Democracy in Action. What makes Soapbox a success for non-profits is that it goes beyond the core of just being a Web site manager, and allows organizations to connect more seamlessly to their CRM systems. That ability to present data from the database, and choosing the presentation of that data in the Web site is what will be the main differentiator between CMS choices for non-profits. As CRM vendors are feeling the pressure from clients to provide open APIs, PICnet is stepping up quickly to act on this new opportunity for our clients. Although we’re weary of the all talk and no walk, we’re willing to take vendors on at their word. We’re building the bridges between Soapbox and the following CRM systems: Our goals are simple when building these bridges:
Over the next few weeks, we will be releasing J!DIA to the community as an open source component for Joomla. Soon thereafter, we will begin working with GetActive and Salesforce.com to build similar functionalities for building bridges between Web sites and databases. Stay tuned, we’re empowering non-profits with choice.
Imagine the following situations that could make your members and supporters lives easier when interacting with your organization through your Joomla-based Web site:
One of our fearless Joomla developers, Chris Garvis, is very close to putting together what we call J!DIA. This component will provide never before seen access to the Democracy in Action system directly through an organization’s Web site. Before J!DIA was developed, most of the display of data in DIA, for most organizations, would need to be presented in the DIA headquarters via wrappers. We’ve changed this paradigm for Joomla users, enabling the Joomla CMS and your Web site’s stylesheets control the output, look, and feel of the DIA data in a format you completely control. We’re eager to get this out to the community as soon as possible, and once we have a proof of concept, we’ll let you know. But right now, know this: we’re about to make life much easier for Joomla administrators that are also using DIA. And Non-Profit Soapbox users, you’ll be happy to know this will be included in all our Non-Profit Soapbox sites in the near future. More details coming soon. |
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In an effort to help spread the word of open source content management systems (CMS) and constituent relationship management systems (CRM), I was asked to give a talk at OneWorld on March 28, 2007 to the 
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One of our most interesting projects in the PICnet Labs is J!DIA, which brings together 
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