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There’s a great scene from Shawshank Redemption, a great movie filled with great scenes, which has been on my mind recently. It’s where Red, played by Morgan Freeman, comes up for his parole hearing and, rather than give the same canned answer he thinks the parole board wants to hear, he drops on them the honest truth about how he feels, fully believing that it will do no good because he’s destined to stay locked up forever.
The truth of what he feels is that he wants to go back into the past and lay some wisdom on his earlier self:
It’s a moving scene: bare honesty from a man whose life has been defined by a single act that landed him in jail. It’s moving because it touches on a powerful and uniquely human wish: to relive our earlier lives with the benefit of wisdom we gain later in life. Quite frankly, it’s a wish that brought me to PICnet. I spent more than a decade in the nonprofit world with much of that time as accidental techie, struggling to do more with less, cobbling together ad hoc knowledge and tools to maximum effect. I’m proud of the work I did. I made a strong, honest effort and did some real good for the organizations I worked for. But I felt like a man on an deserted island setting up a lean to and calling it home. What brought me to PICnet several years ago was the desire to help nonprofits do more than just cobble together solutions. Nonprofits have missions worthy of more than just makeshift solutions. They deserve to house their efforts in something better than a lean to. I wanted to lend a hand in providing informed and elegant strategies and tools that addressed their technology needs so they could spend time focusing on their mission and less time reinventing the wheel with spare parts. That’s why it gives me such satisfaction to have launched the new Port Jobs website. Port Jobs is a fantastic organization increasing access to living wage jobs in Seattle and King County. It also happens to be a place I worked for several years as Web Manager / Bookkeeper / Database Administrator / Communications Manager / Whatever-else-needed-doing-that-day Guy. I had a long business card. Congrats to the good folks at Port Jobs! May your website treat you well and give you great delight in the ease and efficiency with which you can update it so you can focus on the great work you’re doing! What can we say? We’re a sucker for a little penguin humor – especially being fresh off the 2010 Nonprofit Technology Conference packed with our 75 3 and 1/2-foot tall inflatable penguins that filled the grand ballroom and achieved a bit of music video star status (2:14, 2:33). So when Paul Wessel with CT Parent Power passed along today’s comic strip from Mother Goose and Grimm by Mike Peters , we just had to share:
Want your organization’s website to do more than dream? Learn how we make penguins fly, enabling our non-profits’ sites to take wing and soar to meet their needs. Thanks for keeping us smiling, Paul! We look forward to your new site taking flight with us in the near future! Does your organization currently use Salesforce? Are you looking to get the most from your Salesforce application through innovative customization or integration with your website? If so, read on for important news that could supercharge your CRM! Connect your website with Salesforce through J!SalesforcePICnet offers J!Salesforce, an elegant and powerful tool that integrates your Soapbox/Joomla! website with your Salesforce install. This tool provides:
Interested in implementing this on your site? Contact us today about tapping into the power of J!Salesforce. Salesforce.com Foundation Grant Program: Technology Innovation 2010 GrantsLooking to expand your use of Salesforce? The Salesforce.com Foundation is seeking to fund innovative proposals through its 2010 Grant Program. Through this program, they are soliciting applications that meet the following:
Strength in numbers: Collaborative applications for a common solutionAt PICnet, we’re huge fans of Salesforce and the power it has to transform an organization’s relationship with its clients, donors, and partners. This is why we created J!Salesforce. This is why we plan to expand its feature set in the future. This is also why we are doing more than simply passing on the good news about the Salesforce.com Foundation grant program. PICnet is currently reaching out to interested clients and other potential partners to facilitate a joint application that will center around expanding connectivity between Soapbox/Joomla! sites and Salesforce. Our intention is to provide technical guidance to translate individual organizational goals into common coding tools in order to produce maximum benefit for multiple clients and an increased ability for the collaborators to submit a successful application that provides a “realistic plan for replication to the global nonprofit community.” If you are interested in participating in this collaborative effort, please contact us today! Not a Salesforce user but curious about becoming one?Salesforce is the world’s most popular CRM. What’s more, it is free to non-profit organizations through the Salesforce.com Foundation. Check out their program today to learn more about how this robust CRM can enhance your organization’s work.
We love it when new tools we drop into Soapbox get picked up and put to good use by our clients. We love it so much that we think specific examples are worth a mention every now and then. Take Museum Without Walls, for example. They recently used a few tools that were added to Soapbox in February and March to do a little spring clean up of their site – all in just a few minutes. What did they do, exactly? First off, they added a brand new slide show to highlight the various programs they offer to educate and engage students in the fight against racism and intolerance. Second, they took a moment to add a customized page title to feature their tagline – Living History One Voice at a Time – in the address bar across their site and in search engine results. Third, they upgraded their site statistics by implementing the Google Analytics plugin so they can collect data not just on page views but file downloads and off-site links. And for a little bonus, they followed some advice shared at the latest Soapbox Salon and added a Facebook Fanbox to better integrate their site with their Facebook page. All in less than an afternoon. All following step-by-step instructions. All with Soapbox. Spring cleaning was never so easy.
We focus on the following concrete steps to make Soapbox sites as green as an envious tree frog in a rainforest: Carbon OffsettingOur data center has partnered with Green Mountain Energy, the leading provider of cleaner energy and carbon offsetting solutions, to purchase carbon credits to offset the emissions of our hosting operations. On behalf of our data center, Green Mountain will invest in renewable energy sources like wind and solar power as well as biomass facilities – many of which have been setup as a result of their initiatives. Funding will also provide support for reforestation projects through Green Mountain’s relationship with the Pacific Forest Trust. Emissions levels are reviewed annually and carbon credits adjusted accordingly. Reduced Energy ConsumptionWhile overall emissions may rise as business grows, the long-term game plan is to actually reduce our data center’s emissions on a per client basis across all operations. This means that the carbon emissions generated by delivering service to a client today are less than they were a year ago and going into the future we hope to reduce them further. Many steps have already been taken on the technology front to achieve this such as investing in more expensive but far more power efficient computer processors, like Intel’s latest Nehalem line of CPUs. Likewise, where in the past the data center would install sixteen 1GB RAM sticks in a server they will now install four 4GB RAM sticks instead, giving the same computing power but reducing power usage by around 30 watts per server. This adds up to a lot of savings across an entire data center. With the rising cost of electricity, reducing our energy consumption makes both business and environmental sense for our data center. Data Center Cooling ImprovementsIt is a little known fact in hosting that for every amp of power used to run a server in a data center it takes on average another amp of power to run the climate control systems that cool it. Our data center has been working to reduce the amount of power consumed in cooling operations in several different ways. Firstly, they have installed filler panels in all cabinet slots that are not actually filled by servers. This means all of the cold air is forced through the servers instead of passing through gaps above or below. It takes lot of energy to cool the air in a data center, especially in the summer months, so not passing all of the cool air through the servers is wasteful which is what the filler panels help to prevent. Secondly, the data center’s exclusive server hardware vendor, Supermicro, designs the best rackmount system chassis available in terms of air flow design. By deploying servers with the best possible air flow it actually raises the ambient air temperature of data center floor by around two degrees Fahrenheit without compromising service in any way at all. By raising the floor temperature slightly, the load on the climate control systems is reduced. Lastly, our data center also invests heavily in other technologies to improve airflow and cooling like raised flooring with perforated tiles throughout the facility and efficient hot / cold isle cabinet layouts on the data center floor. Recycling and Reducing WastefulnessWhere possible all of the packaging our data center receives with new servers, switches and other items in is fully recycled. Vendors like Supermicro are also working to reduce the amount of packaging their servers require as well. Our data center works to reduce wastefulness by keeping printing to a minimum.
What I like best on this site is the humanistic feel the homepage design presents. Lisa Mattei-McDonald, my client contact at BI, was introduced into this project midway. After her predecessor left, Lisa did an extraordinary job catching up quickly to all things web related. I applaud her success at keeping the project cool and calm even during her own discovery of her role and the unforeseen requirements that the project took on. It was a full blown effort with four vendors involved! Boston Interactive hired PICnet to implement their design. Strategy and communications firm M+R was also involved. And Democracy in Action came in at the very end to help The Smart Campaign’s constituents active on the site. The Government Accountability Project (GAP) wanted an update to their outdated website – for being the greatest representative of whistleblowers in our nation’s capital, they wanted to have a site that demonstrated their force when reckoning with the bullies. Dylan Blaylock, my point of contact at GAP, was a very proactive client. He was so prepared that he delivered the site’s wireframes to me instead of the other way around! While these provided a great starting point on which to consider layout, we worked extensively on the site navigation. I once again was confronted with a communications challenge – I didn’t initially present the solution in a visual way. (This is becoming to be a common thread among my clients. I can’t help it- I’m not visual! I see things logically. Forgive me, people!) In addition to the common website hurdles, Dylan and I had to reckon with DC Snowmaggedon RIGHT. BEFORE. DEADLINE. And this deadline was extremely important: “On February 17, 2010, GAP teamed up with Participant Media and the Paley Center for Media for a fantastic and unique event – the first-ever televised, long-format special that details and analyzes what whistleblowers are, the six stages of whistleblowing they typically experience, and their lack of legal protections.” Read more about this event on GAP’s Blog. So while all of Dylan’s coworkers were at home trying to organize the event when all DC offices were closed, Dylan trudged into work amidst the horrible weather to make this site complete — all by himself! He really did a great job. Between his iPhone and my ski vacation breaks over President’s Weekend, we worked hard to troubleshoot and resolve all outstanding issues before the big event. Dylan gave us some props himself: “Thanks for everything with the Web site again. You and Ryan did an amazing job.” Through the new website, advocates and constituents alike can contact congress on initiatives, using an advocacy platform through DemocracyInAction (DIA). Online donations are processed through Network for Good. About GAP GAP is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization with an operating budget of around $2.5 million. Gifts to GAP are tax-deductible. The vast majority of our funds come from over 10,000 individual donors and foundations such as the Carnegie Foundation, CS Fund, Ford Foundation, the Open Society Institute and Rockefeller Family Fund. Additional support comes from legal fees, settlement awards, and services provided. GAP is compliant with standards set by the Better Business Bureau, and we enjoy that organization’s stamp of approval. Founded in 1977, GAP is the nation’s leading whistleblower protection and advocacy organization. Located in Washington, D.C., GAP is a nonpartisan, public interest group. In addition to focusing on whistleblower support in our stated program areas, we lead campaigns to enact whistleblower protection laws both domestically and internationally. GAP also conducts an accredited legal clinic for law students, and offers an internship program year-round. The Prevention Institute wanted to overhaul their website, which was a combination of a few different sites, but all had different site architectures. Working with our design partner and neighbor, FreeRange Graphics, PICnet streamlined the site’s navigation, making it more SEO and user friendly. Prevention Institute was founded in 1997 to serve as a focal point for primary prevention practice—promoting policies, organizational practices, and collaborative efforts that improve health and quality of life. As a national non-profit organization, the Institute is committed to preventing illness and injury, to fostering health and social equity, and to building momentum for community prevention as an integral component of a quality health system. Prevention Institute synthesizes research and practice; develops prevention tools and frameworks; helps design and guide interdisciplinary partnerships; and conducts training and strategic consultation with government, foundations, and community-based organizations nationwide and internationally. The entire staff at Prevention was super during the development process. I especially worked well with Annie Lyles, my main point of contact on the project. Annie is much more of a visual person than I am, so in order to communicate effectively, we even set up our own language to refer to the tools on the website. Because the timeline of the project was quite long, I definitely was able to establish a fun relationship with the team at Prevention.
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! These days you can’t roam far in our non-profit world without hearing the buzz about “social networking” or “social media”. Wherever you go, you can’t help but overhear people talking about Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking tools. These services provide organizations a great way to connect with supporters and provide new channels for fund raising, but how can you best integrate these tools into your Web site for the maximum impact? What are the best practices in tying your social networking strategy with your Web site communications strategy? We’ll answer these question and more at the next Soapbox Salon! PICnet’s Soapbox Salon When: Thursday, March 18, 2010 Please RSVP by Wednesday, March 17 by clicking the link below and registering for the event. Questions? Contact Julie Dennis at julie@picnet.net or by calling (202) 585-0273. **************************** UPDATE! Thanks to all who attended the Soapbox Salon today to learn about successful strategies for connecting Soapbox with Twitter and Facebook. We’re happy to share the slides for the presentation here: Our next Soapbox Salon is scheduled for May 13th. We’ll share more information here as the time approaches! |
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Hosting means much more to us than providing powerful and reliable servers to run Soapbox sites. It’s an opportunity to make real our 
Earlier in March, PICnet launched a new site for ACCION and their new program called 
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