Marketing Social Good

Transforming an arts organization with a new website

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:20:00 GMT

This is a case study of the creative process at Socient in building the Valley Cultural Coalition website. We are writing this because we would like to share how we do our work as well as to show how a great online presence could transform an organization.

Well, here goes. This is going to be a long one...

But first, I've got to start this case study with a BIG thank you to the Valley Cultural Coalition board of directors and its website committee, headed by Board Chair Karen Bosch Cobb, for their confidence on our team to build their dream website.

So, who's the Valley Cultural Coalition?

The Valley Cultural Coalition (VCC) is the arts, science, and history-focused association formerly known as Fresno Coalition of Arts, Science and History (FCASH). VCC is dedicated to ensuring the health of the arts and cultural community through advocacy, communication, cooperation and collaboration in the Central Valley. VCC serves the four contiguous counties of Fresno, Kings, Madera, and Tulare counties.

From FCASH to VCC

Our engagement to this project started with FCASH last year with possibility of brand change and a larger scope of their services. Early this year, the VCC brand will be adopted as soon as we release the new website before the annual conference this October.

So we got to work...

First with domain name registration and e-mail provisioning.

We registered the domain name valleyculturalcoalition.org (and its other TLD: valleyculturalcoalition.com and valleyculturalcoalition.net). We then configured the domain name to use the free e-mail services of Google, called Google Apps. This will allow VCC to have an e-mail with the valleyculturalcoalition.org domain name and services that are independent of their hosting platform. We usually recommend this approach so that e-mail services keeps on running even if hosting services are offline for some reason.

Then we architect and perform user stories scenarios

VCC would like to use their website to serve their members, board members, volunteers, donors, sponsors, and the arts industry. With this in mind, the information architecture has to flow so that the user segments that VCC serves are all happy-campers. That means we have to have:

nicely presented informative data about VCC;
intuitive primary/second-level navigation to find information;
exclusive, secure areas for the VCC members and board of directors;
logical categorization of documents (PDF, MS Word, HTML);
ad-friendly layout to incentivize sponsorships;
automated self-service of membership registration and access to benefits;
seamless e-commerce capability for donations, membership dues, and conference sign-ups;
subscription sign-up form that is evident throughout the website;
ability to share contents through social media networks and e-mail;
web applications (ie. profile and announcement) to entice potential members to join;
announcements and blog system to update website readers; and finally
an integrated content management system to control all the features that was just listed above.

Ok, that's a long list . . . which means heavy production hours on making sure that everything works together seamlessly. (Pause: we had to remind ourselves why we do this sort of thing, and our answer remains "for the benefit of common good"; so that took us about half a second...).

Moving along...

Then we asked our friends at Hundred10 to do some design work.

Hundred10 is awesome at what they do and that is designing for interactive media. Art Director/Partner John Milly produced a couple of look and feel for the project based on the wireframe and architecture we provided. After a month or so, boom!, the master design templates are done for the home page and secondary pages.

Then we got to slicing the Photoshop file and develop them into XHTML code.

Now that we have our master codes (XHTML/CSS/JS) on 1 column, 2 column, and 3 column layouts, we went back to our master plan of feature sets we need to build and integrate. We developed user and internal workflows within the system based on the user stories drafted on the early stages of planning.

Then we get all of our digital assets --- code, images, documents, data sets; and integrate them into Controlcamp, our content manager of choice.

Yes, I did skip on appropriate CMS research for VCC, but we pitch the Adobe Business Catalyst platform, Controlcamp, on all of our projects. We are very confident on implementing websites on Controlcamp and Socient has been a proud partner of Adobe for more than a couple of years. The platform is a great fit for membership organizations such as VCC.

Once all digital assets are integrated, then we worked on the website features via the modules that are pre-existing within Controlcamp.

The Navigation Menu

The menu system could be found everywhere within the site, and from top to bottom, they are as follows:

Main Navigation (top nav with drop-down interface for subsections)
Call to Action Box (right area boxed in gray)
Sub Pages Left Side Navigation, and
The Footer Navigation (used to show the big picture)

The menu system implementation is pretty straight-forward. One trick that we like was changing the membership sub-navigation when one is logged-in so that members could use the web applications we've created for them, such as Profiles and Announcements.

Ad Rotators

A built-in ad rotator is a big convenience to web masters because it allows for easy management of ad sponsorships of the website through banner/text ad display. A built-in basic click trackers also comes with the ad-rotator so that basic analytics such as click-throughs are available for reporting. We use the ad rotator for the Member Spotlight area and the Sponsor area on the right side bar.

Announcements and Bookings

We've categorized announcements into two types: one used by VCC as an organization, and another used by its Members. Announcements module is a way to "announce and publish" press releases, events, personnel changes, and awards --- activities that communicates to the website visitors that things are happening inside the organization. And when announcements such as events require an RSVP, then we complement that with the Booking module, which allows the webmaster to track RSVPs and create e-mails that are automatically sent on a pre-designated date (pre- or post- event). This comes in handy if you would like to send out e-mail reminders before the event and a thank you message after the event.

To be continued . . .

Sales Consideration Cycle

Sun, 04 Sep 2011 17:50:00 GMT

I am a voracious reader of all things that's entrepreneurship, interactive marketing, and personal development. So when my wife bought me a Kindle as my belated Christmas gift, I immediately filled them up with books I could read anywhere --- one of which is The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott.

Being that my memory gets clogged everyday by many information I come across (I'm in the business of knowing and sharing), I naturally scan the digital pages and go to the topic I love to read (I call it the "topic of the moment"). Anyway, to cut the story short, I am sharing with you what I learned, or at least what I mentally registered, during my reading:

The illustration above is the marketing funnel. If your organization is thinking of doing inbound marketing tactics such as blogs; tweets; wiki entries; pr; search engine marketing; podcast; facebook fan pages/ads; and video blogs, you have to ALWAYS do them with the sales consideration cycle in mind. Each of the tactics you do (such as a blog entry), should conclude with a way for your captive audience to engage your organization --- by downloading a white paper or a case study, buying your product, or donating to help your organization's cause.

By doing so, actions performed by anyone in the organization, whether they are tweeting or blogging, are justified because they all contribute into generating revenues, even if they are not immediate.

Fresno Arts Council: A Case Study

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 01:06:00 GMT

I am writing today to share with you some of the thought process and implementation that went through during the development of the Fresno Arts Council's (FAC) technology and marketing infrastructure, in the hope that if you are an organization of the same size (or a local arts council), you'd learn and potentially implement some of the successes we've had so far.

I got involved with the Fresno Arts Council 3 years ago (2007) when they needed a volunteer webmaster. The Fresno Arts Council was at that time directed by Joyce Aiken (volunteer ED) and assisted by Maria Franco (still with the FAC). Like many arts organizations, FAC has budget challenges when it comes to technology and marketing. With no financial support from both City and County (although the City provides the office space), FAC's annual budget is very tight and does not have much room to allocate additional money to technology and marketing buildout. My goal then was to put in place solutions that will work long term and is somewhat reasonably affordable.

To get to the point, I'll just mention that from 2007-2009, we'd taken a stab on open source software such as Plone, Drupal, Wordpress, and Joomla to use as the content management system for the FAC website. During that time, Maria was also using Outlook in sending out mass e-mail to promote events and to communicate what's happening in the arts community and using Paypal to take donations and membership payments online.

Online Marketing and Membership Fulfillment
(plus Arts Database)

Last year, Socient became a technology partner to Adobe Business Catalyst, an integrated platform that powers online communications. We created our own brand Controlcamp, to give clients access to the Adobe BC platform. Controlcamp provides many tools that allows membership-based organizations to manage online communications in an easy, integrated format. For FAC, this would mean a web-based, hosted platform that has:

e-Commerce for membership, donations, and ticket sales
E-mail marketing for mass mailing of e-Newsletters
Search engine friendly URLs, including ability to host multiple domain names, for search engine marketing
Unlimited web forms with easy to create custom fields, for online submission of queries
Secure zone or extranet, an area for board members to login and access board minutes/agendas and other documents
Easy to use photo galleries, FAQs, announcement of news and events, and literature management
Workflow creation, a system to have e-mail notifications to specific staff members when forms are submitted online
Ad rotation, to track the display of sponsor logos on the website
Unlimited Blogging and Forum
Web-based online database through the Web Apps module, to create a self-service, customizable online arts registry

Wow, having an integrated platform such as Controlcamp was like the best thing since sliced bread. After implementing all the features mentioned above, we then gave the Fresno Arts Council a special pricing of $39 per month for 1 user account (FYI, that alone is the cost of e-mail marketing systems out there such as Mail Chimp or iContact).

In addition, with a technical assistance grant from the California Arts Council (~$3,800), we created a self-service, online arts registry (ARTS DATABASE) using the built-in web application creator in Controlcamp, to provide artists and arts organizations a way to list themselves on the arts registry. This feature frees the staff from having to manage and enter the information themselves. The FAC released the Arts Database for FREE to the public.

The beauty of this web application was that it is integrated with the FAC website and any information that's captured into the arts database is also available to use somewhere else. As an example, if the marketing person of a museum registers under Museum, but they would also host ArtHop, then they would show up on both categories. The data is entered only once, but could be re-purposed multiple times. Sweet.

Multiple domain names for search marketing

FAC also has an active program called ArtHop. Since ArtHop has been growing in size, we thought of giving them a vanity URL called fresnoarthop.org. This would create a website asset for the Fresno Arts Council and also help them gain high search engine rankings for keywords "fresno arthop". Using Controlcamp's domain management feature, we are able to point fresnoarthop.org into a special landing page that's hosted on the current FAC website.

For membership fulfillment, Controlcamp has it's own mini-CRM (customer relationship management) and seamlessly ties into Paypal and Authorize.net eCommerce payment systems. For FAC, we used the Paypal Website Payment Pro, so that the website visitor has a seamless experience during the membership sign up (or for donation and ticket sales process).

For e-mail, we highly recommend Google Apps as it provides the stability of Google's servers as far as e-mail services are concerned. They also have one of the best spam filtering feature as well as IMAP and POP for desktop and mobile clients like Outlook or iPhone/iPad Mail.

Artists Marketing and Promotion of the Arts

Are you in a community where the Arts are constantly struggling to be heard in the midst of the many "more important issues" that your local government keeps on bringing up each time you ask for funding? I do not want to sound political, but that seems to be the case for the City and County of Fresno when it's time to ask for funding the Fresno Arts Council (by the way, these are my views alone, and not representative of the FAC, their staff and board members).

Anyway, my point is that there's not much resources to lean on (read: budget) when it comes to arts promotion. So, we turned to social media (read: user generated content - UGC) to empower artists and arts organizations to promote themselves. In the words of Jerry McGuire: help me help you. We looked at available platforms and we fell in love with Ning. Since FAC did not have the resource to build a social network from scratch, we created a public-private partnership where Socient builds and manage the platform, while FAC provides the monthly cost for the network. The result of the collaboration: Fresno Arts (my.fresnoarts.net).

FresnoArts.net was created on June 2008, during the advent of social media (pre-Twitter and before Facebook was popular). We thought that if we gave artists and arts organizations the ability to promote themselves (through a profile system, photos, videos, music, and events --- with the ability to invite friends via e-mail built into the system), they will take the opportunity. And so they did.

Today, FresnoArts.net has over 8,000 unique visitors and over 30,000 page views per month, and an active community of artists, arts organizations, promoters, and arts enthusiasts. The feedback on FresnoArts.net has been overwhelmingly positive right from the start.

So why did we choose Ning as our social network platform? At that time, we looked at some of the open source software that is available to power a social network. While Drupal and Wordpress MU came close, we did not want to deal with the headache of maintaining the software (security patches, modules, etc...). Plus, Ning provided the core of the functionality we needed and it's a hosted solution, which means that Ning engineers will fix anything that's broken with the system.

One of the feature that was "mission critical" was an event calendar. Previously, artists and Arthop venues would send their event information to FAC to post on their website. Well, resources are very scarce when it comes to web marketing. So we thought that having a self-service marketing platform was the best way to go. Ning had a robust event calendar system. While far from being perfect, it served the core purpose of self-service marketing. Obviously, there are other solutions out there, but with the calendar being integrated on the social network, members do not have to deal with another platform and they are accountable for their own promotion: the more they use social media, the more exposure and publicity they get.

Document management

With only a couple of workstations used on-site, FAC was maintaining a Windows-based file server using File Sharing Services. We thought that it was an overkill and that they don't really need to deal with server maintenance especially if the staff do not have any IT background. So we implemented Dropbox, a cloud-based file storage service that syncs all workstations to allow seamless collaboration between staff members. With this service, FAC eliminated the need for file server, and the staff have access to their files on their workstations, over the web, and on any desktop where Dropbox is installed. And since the accountant and ED are mostly off-site, they are able to access files at home through a folder sharing mechanism on Dropbox.

Take aways

So this has been long and if you skipped to this section, that's ok. Here's a summary of what we have implemented at the Fresno Arts Council so far (with links for your perusal).

Marketing

Controlcamp ($39 per month): Online Communications (eNewsletter, Blog, FAC webpages, multiple domains, CRM, document management, arts database, secure zone for members)
Paypal Website Payment Pro ($30 per month + 1-3% transaction fees): eCommerce fulfillment that works with Controlcamp (membership payments, donations, ticket sales)
Ning for FresnoArts.net ($49.95 per month): social network and self-service events calendar for artists and arts organizations.

Technology

AT&T: Internet services (DSL + wifi on premises)
Dropbox ($99 per year): Document syncing across workstations
Google Apps (free to nonprofits): E-mail services

So I hope this has been a bit helpful. You might not agree with me or might not follow the same path that we took, and that's ok. You might say that FAC could save about $100 per month if they go with open source... we would counter that argument that open source does not necessarily mean FREE as there are cost involved with maintaining software and hosting as well.

But if you do agree and would like to start a conversation with us, PLEASE contact us because we love working with non-profits, especially arts-based organizations.

Until then...

Nonprofit Fundraising Strategies

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 02:11:00 GMT

I am currently blogging in the Fresno State's University Business Center while attending the webinar from the folks at "The Chronicle of Philanthrophy". I am tweeting too (follow @socient). Here's a quick list from the webinar:

List of Fund-raising strategies for a bad economy:

Ask your donors to expand their giving.
Hold onto your donors; pay special attention to older people who gives regularly.
Reassess all of your fund raising approaches
Provide creative, meaningful feedback and engage donors in new ways
Make sure your cause fits into efforts to meet social needs
Ask donors how the economy affects their charitable plans
Seek monthly gifts
Improve donor records
Collaborate with similar organizations on fund raising and marketing

Welcome to Socient

Sun, 28 Aug 2011 02:23:00 GMT

I'm excited to finally introduce a more engaged website for Socient. I look forward to sharing useful information here which will mainly focus on social entrepreneurship and web marketing as it pertains to individuals, companies, and organizations doing social good.