Kevin Sprague, Branding and Marketing Consultant

Posted in Consults, Internet Fluency, Work /By ksprague /Leave comment

The Online MythBuster

You know MythBusters – the guys who debunk or prove common “myths” like “does my car get better gas mileage if I draft behind an 18-wheeler? (yes – but don’t)…” – well, I think we need to have them come and bust some myths about the online world – in particular the myth of “if you build it, they will come.”

It used to be back in the early days of the web that if you put up a site about a particular interest (say, selling shoes) you could count on instant traffic and interest. The web was a small village back then and you were the first and only shoe store. Well, all that has changed. As of 2012 there were 650 million websites up, and in time that will be billions. Some of these websites are monsters – Zappos.com for instance pretty much has the online shoe sales thing locked up.

At Studio Two we work with many Brick-and-Mortar clients. We use the web as a tool to connect potential customers to those retailers and convert them into physical and online customers. In recent years, we have worked with several of our clients on creating successful online e-commerce presences. We have also, unfortunately, worked with clients who were not successful. Looking back, I am afraid that we should have been much more agressive about our “myth-busting” then we were. Namely – if you intend to build a successful online business, you should be prepared to spend the same amount of time, energy and money on creating your online location as you did on your offline one. For instance, lets say you are a single-location clothing retail store in a town of 10,000 people. You pay $4,000 month in rent, you spent $25,000 on building out the space, fixtures, lighting, etc., and you carry $100,000 of inventory. You have a full time staff of 3 (so payroll around $120,000 say…) and you spend about $15,000/year on marketing and advertising in your region. All told, you have a tidy little business that costs about $300,000 a year to run and makes about $400,000 for a $100,000 profit (I know these numbers are a little off but this is just to illustrate my point…).

If this business wants to expand online – to have a robust ecommerce website with an attractive and current display of available inventory, secure checkout and cart functions, shipping and tax calculators, a nice design, a blog, good visual drivers to product, lifestyle and story – how much should they spend?

They should consider spending as much as they would on developing, staffing and running a new bricks-and-mortar location.

It used to be that the construction of the website itself was the expensive part. This is no longer the case – robust ecommerce tools like woocommerce and others have really streamlined the development of a solid online store. So lets say it takes $10,000 – $15,000 to design, build and populate a nice site. What you have when you are done though is a very nice store in the middle of nowhere. You might as well have built it in the center of the Sahara desert. Consider, if you will, that in the physical world you would choose “where” to locate your new retail store carefully – on the corner of 5th Avenue and 57th st in NYC? Nice – but pricey… Down a dark alley in a burned out section of Detroit? Cheap! But you will obviously fail to build a viable business.

Mere presence on the web is essentially irrelevant. Getting found is what matters. And unlike the promises of the SEO spammers who promise you “first page ranking on google for $29/month” getting found is not cheap, easy or quick. It’s expensive, complicated and needs to be constantly sustained. If we built the nice $15,000 ecommerce website above, according to my model, that leaves us with about $285,000 to spend in the next 12 months running, promoting and marketing our business. If we want it to even come close to matching the performance of our Bricks-and-Mortar location.

So far, we’re all still stuck in the myth of the web circa 2001 – put up a web store, turn it on, ship products. That time is over. Today it takes significant, strategic investments into online advertising – facebook, google, bing, yahoo – as well as agressive brand building via social media, blogging, youtube and other tools. There is no free lunch but unlike your corner store, you have the POTENTIAL to reach a national if not global market for your products and your brand. If you are willing to make the investment that you have to.

01May

Posted in Non-Profit, Thinks, Uncategorized, Work /By ksprague /Leave comment

The Nimble Web

For those of us who have been developing web sites since the very first days, it has been an exciting ride of ever-evolving technologies, languages and expectations. I remember my palpable excitement way back in the late ’90′s when the first “designed” HTML sites came up and we all rushed in to see what we could do with tables, frames and other tricks. Next came MySQL and the interesting promise of data-driven sites, then .PHP and blogging began to rise. Now we are all about WordPress and its peers like Drupal, Joomla, and whatever is next – like Koken.

I’m not a programmer – I can do some light programming and I grew up hacking around in Basic and its peers, but my abilities are limited to tweaking and cutting bits of code from one place to another. Throughout the development of the web I have tried to think as a designer and as a user – and I always have looked for places where I can get to the results I want as quickly and independently as possible. At Studio Two, we moved to WordPress starting about 2-3 years ago as our primary development platform because it hits that sweet spot between über-geeky and super-user-friendly that just works for us. I can build whole sites from scratch without having to harass Jason, our in-house programmer, or Christine, our super-talented web designer – but if we need to make something really look special or jump through hoops or solve a particular problem, the underlying technical fabric of WordPress’s PHP structure lets us do whatever we want.

With HTML5 coming on full-tilt now, we also have access to a whole new range of fun interactive actions that used to be reserved for flash. HTML5 has also infiltrated the developers who build commercially available themes for wordpress, and those themes are rethinking the basic platform in really exciting and creative ways.

Which leads me to the topic of this post – what I call “The Nimble Web”. My premise is this – we are now entering the 4th or 5th generation of web development and the users are coming along with us – and users ultimately are the reason we create sites. In this iteration, we find ourselves paying close attention to actual user behavior – by really looking closely at the analytics of the sites we build we can see what users are doing and interpret how their interaction should define our content and UX (user-interface) design. My premise is also about “speed to market” – that the new tools of web development allow us to act far more quickly (if we choose to) in creating and deploying sites. The Nimble Web is about creating sites today that provide users with the experience and information that they most want.

If you are reading this post there is a good chance that you are involved, at some level, in the question of “what should we do about our website” or “we need to build/rebuild our website, how should we go about it?”. I receive, on average, 1-2 RFP’s for web development every week. These RFP’s are often very thorough – well-intentioned documents created by committee to define a complex project and solicit accurate bids. What I see in the RFP’s is that they generally describe a website that we would have been building 3-4 years ago – a large, monolithic document with 100′s of pages of content, complex navigational structure, and very rigid design needs. These sites take 6-12 months to build, cost between $10k-$50k and consume significant resources in time and personnel during the development. They are anything but nimble, and they generally have been defined without any reference to actual user behavior.

I want to talk about an alternative. Here’s the story. We manage over 200 websites for a very wide variety of clients – retailers, restaurants, museums, theaters, designers, architects, real estate, and so on. For each of these sites we have access to their google analytics – the statistical report of user behavior on the sites – pages visited, time on site, demographic data, etc. Recently, as I was browsing through the analytics of a number of clients I noticed an interesting phenomenon – despite the diversity of the sites and their content, the same numbers kept popping up – visitors, on average, for EVERY site I looked at, visited between 3-4 pages and stayed for exactly 2:40. On EVERY site I looked at this was true. And if I dug down into the site content, visitors were spending that 2:40 looking for very specific, actionable information – directions, contact, event dates/times, and actionable events like buying tickets. They weren’t lingering or browsing around – they came looking, they found what they were looking for, and they left. I realized that for the majority of the sites we manage, visitors were treating them like convenience stores. You go to the 7-11 not to wander around aimlessly shopping – you go there specifically to buy a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and a Hershey bar. In and out in 2:40.

What does this mean? It means two things. One, if you are an organization considering developing a new web presence, consider carefully how much time and effort you want to put into using your site as more than a basic information and connection portal. Make sure that you study your current user analytics and consider the scope of investment you will be making in providing services that users don’t seem to be looking for or engaging in. Also, consider breaking your large project into a set of small sub-projects. We have been working with a number of organizations on this approach with great success. By breaking away from the premise that you can only have a single site for your organization you free up significant opportunity for creating richer and more dynamic experiences for discrete projects. An example of this is what we are doing with Hancock Shaker Village. During 2012 and 2013 so far we have rebuilt the core institutional website and concurrently developed a number of sub-sites for specific programs that had enough scope and content to suggest that a seperate site would be warranted. Thus today you can visit a sub-site for Baby Animals, The CSA Program, and others to come that are still being developed. In this diversity, the organization is finding that it is able to more quickly deploy program-specific content, is able to direct traffic directly to a more compelling experience, and that there are opportunities for creative expression that don’t threaten the function of aesthetic rigor of the main site.

The web can be a rich, engaging medium but it can also be a confusing, resource-consuming landscape. The Nimble Web would indicate that even large organizations can rethink their presence by taking a close look at the data created by user activity. If you would like to talk about how this might apply to your business or institution, let me know!

22Apr

Posted in Internet Fluency, Thinks /By ksprague /3 comments

Google Surveys

Here’s the newest thing that just came across my radar – Google Surveys – wow – this has a lot of potential. Basically, you figure out what you want surveyed and Google does the rest – for a price (.10 per respondent – not cheap but probably much cheaper than comparables – and it’s GOOGLE!). So interesting…. so what should we ask?

This is another amazing powerful tool for you to use in understanding your customers – along with google analytics – and if you do paid google advertising with adwords, those results as well.

Of course a survey is only as good as the questions you ask – and one has to be aware of the potential for bias in the answers based on the syntax of the question. I just made my first survey and am awaiting response! Google sent me a $75 coupon, which helps – let’s see what happens – stay tuned!

To write it, it took three months;
to conceive it three minutes;
to collect the data in it; all my life.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Screen grab of the results from my survey into what it should cost to build a custom website…

14Feb

Posted in Internet Fluency, Non-Profit, Photography, Work /By ksprague /5 comments

Image Overload

If you are like everyone else on the planet you have a hard drive full of digital photos – and like everyone else you look at that drive and cringe in the way that you normally reserve for a really messy house and the thought that goes through your head is “I really have to get these organized… but how? Ugh. Later…”

I’m here to tell you 2 things – A) IT’S OK. and B) Actually, you can get this fixed up.

Here’s the two main ideas of this premise – A) you just need some sensible way to know where/when/what these photos are and B) portable 1 Terabyte (1TB) hard drives only cost about $89.00.

And guess what – you may have this organization issue with your personal photos – you also likely have it with your photos at work. You may even be the official digital archivist at your institution or business and you still have this issue. I’m here to tell you that ANY logical system of naming and organizing these assets is better than what you have going with endless folders names 20121104 and images named DSC_3456.jpg filling up your life.

What do I know about this? In the course of being a professional photographer and managing my design business Studio Two I have amassed an archive of over 500,000 images filling over 16TB of storage. I never delete any photos, and I manage thousands of historical photo assets for clients. I can generally find any image I need in less than a couple of minutes, usually in a few seconds.

The most important thing to remember is this – STORAGE IS FREE. Now, that’s not entirely true, but the repercussions of Moore’s Law have generally applied to digital storage as well – it gets cheaper, bigger and faster. At this point, considering the sub $100 cost of a terabyte USB drive, the price of storage is essentially irrelevant. You can use this to your advantage by allowing for redundancy and duplication in your archive.

So here’s what I do – adapt this to your scenario. The first thing I do is download the shoot from my camera to a temporary folder on my hard drive. I use PhotoMechanic by Camera Bits to manage my photo assets – it is the fastest photo browser I have ever found, hands down. You can drag the folder of new photos onto the PhotoMechanic icon in your application dock (on a mac – you can figure it out if you are PC user) – and it will instantly open up a contact sheet view of all the photos. Then I select the photos in a range (lets say you are a photographer working at a museum and you photographed 3 different subjects in one day – “moving a painting”, “construction progress on the West wing”, and “Children’s art workshop”) – select the range of photos (click on the first photo in the sequence and shift-click on the last and it will select all the intervening photos). Then hit command-M and you will get a window that says “rename photos” – this is the key step. What I do varies, and you can find your own system, but the most important thing is to use words in the photo name that will help you find it in the future. If date is a factor in sorting and managing the photos, I’ll do something like this as a name thread: “011213CLARKMonet_MoveKSPRA.” – what this tells me is that the photo was shot on January 12, 2013 for the Clark Art Institute, that it was about moving the Monet, and that I (kevin sprague:KSPRA) shot the photo. IN the dialog box there is an additional element that says “sequence” and below it “set {SEQN}variable – click on this and set it to “001″ – now, when you hit the “rename” button, it will name the images in the sequence “011213CLARKMonet_MoveKSPRA.001.jpg, 011213CLARKMonet_MoveKSPRA.002.jpg,” etc…

Renaming your files is key – at the end of the day until Google gets smart enough to do image-contextual search for us, words remain the fastest search elements on our systems – and words you can remember are the most useful. Also, keywording generally doesn’t work very well – if you can’t see it I find that your system can’t either. Skip keywording (for now) in favor of getting as many of your files named. Here’s another tip – yes, find a system for naming but don’t worry about it – do you have a folder full of pictures of a tree? Just name them something like “lenox_tree.001.jpg” – it will still be better than “DSC_1234.jpg”.

Once you name the sequences, then move them by batch (select all in the named range) and put them into folders in a hierarchical tree according to your needs. In my case, we sort by CLIENT>YEAR>DEPARTMENT>PROJECT>DATE or some variation like that. If you work for an institution you might sort by YEAR>DEPARTMENT>PROJECT>DATE. So if we look at our previous example you might have a folder system for the museum that shows 2013>Curatorial>West Wing>021213 Monet Move. I go one step further and create a new folder at the last phase called “raw” or “unedited” into which I stick my unedited shoot files. Once I edit the best ones and clean them up, they go into a folder at the same level called “selects” – I can go back years later into the selects folder and know that I am pulling from the best shots from the shoot – but if for some reason I am looking for a different angle I can still go look in the raw folder. Like I said, I never throw anything out.

Pixels are cheap – life is expensive. – Sprague

The date shorthand I use saves a TON of time – 021512 if february 15, 2012. So much easier. In my file names I usually use an underscore between words if needed as it makes them more web and cross platform friendly – avoid weird characters like “$,&,#” and blank spaces in file names.

Ok – and here’s the last thing. It is OK to make copies of your photos based on content. For instance, lets say you were shooting a portrait of the Executive Director and at one point you notice that the sky is looking fantastic – so you shoot a few photos of the sky, and then back to the portrait. What do you do with these when you get back to your desk? What I do is rename the sky photos something like “050113sky.001.jpg” and I copy them into a folder I have strictly for “sky” photos. In this case date or year is mostly irrelevant – I include it in the file name so I can remember the context of when I shot it – but I can throw 500 different sky photo into a general folder called “sky” and forget about them till I need one. If I wanted to I could copy some of them to another folder called “clouds” or “birds” depending on my interests. I have folders on my system for “trees”, “water”, “sky”, “flowers” – they become catch-alls for these kind of things. If I am shooting for an institution, I might have similar folders for “groups”, “tours”, “audience” – where I can throw the outtakes that might prove super-useful in next year’s annual report.

So – here is what you should do:

Buy some big hard drives. Do NOT let budget get in the way of this.
Download and license a copy of Photo Mechanic
Start renaming your files. Now.
Start sorting them redundantly into a hierarchy of folders
Repeat.

04Feb

Posted in Listens, Non-Profit, Thinks, Uncategorized /By ksprague /Leave comment

Investors or Donors?

In the course of running my branding agency, Studio Two, we’ve worked with for-profit and non-profit clients alike. Many of our clients are startups, or entrepreneurial businesses that come to us for assistance in defining their message and identity. This is true for both sectors – there are entrepreneurs in the non-profit world, though we tend to not call them that. Which gets me thinking about semantics.

Entrepreneurs start up new businesses based on creativity, new technologies and new ideas. In the non-profit world, these same people are called “innovators” or a “visionaries” or (usually behind their backs) “crazy”…. But seriously, why is it any less entrepreneurial to start up a new theater company or research organization than a dot-com business? And what’s in a name anyway – why would someone “want” to be called an Entrepreneur?

I think that it is a question worth asking. In the United States, where government support for the arts and for most non-profit business sectors is very limited or non-existant, the act of choosing to spend one’s energies on a challenging venture for the social good requires significant motivation – which is good. Not every idea will be successful and the Darwinian aspects of the free market has a role to play here. The word “entrepreneur” offers some clues to how one might choose to act in the process:

Entrepreneurs seek out investors and venture capital to pursue their vision
Entrepreneurs are compelled to draft business plans and budget projections
Entrepreneurs work diligently to hone their “pitch” and define their message and product
Entrepreneurs have to focus on defining and reaching their target markets quickly and efficiently
Entrepreneurs often have the idea of scalability built into their business model
Entrepreneurs will “pivot” their plan if one idea becomes more successful than another.

If you look around at your non-profit organization, whether well-established or very new, do the above concepts apply? Should they? I think they should – but with a twist. Let’s look at some of the differences and possibilities in the way we use language in the non-profit sector.

Non-Profits seek out grants and donors to pursue their vision
Non-Profits are compelled to draft strategic plans and budget projections
Non-Profits work diligently to hone their mission
Non-Profits have to focus on defining and reaching their target markets efficiently and repeatedly
Non-Profits often are constrained by the focus of their mission or context
Non-Profits generally stay tightly focused on their core “product” despite performance

So here’s the idea. What if you called your donors “investors”? What if you prepared a business plan instead of a strategic plan? What if you considered ways your organization could “pivot” based on its programming strengths and weaknesses?

I’m sure that many of you reading this already do – there are many innovative, nimble minds at work in the world’s great cultural and social organizations. Just for a moment, though, consider switching up the language. Call yourself an entrepreneur. Consider talking to your lead donor about her investment in your organization. Hone your elevator pitch.

Something interesting might happen. If you’d like to talk about it some more – contact me. I’m really interested in how it changes my thinking to simply change a few words and see how they feel.

31Jan

Posted in Film and Video, Internet Fluency, Non-Profit /By ksprague /Leave comment

Vine is Cool

So there’s a brand new app from Twitter called “Vine” that is really fun – you can make 6-second long videos with your phone (iphone for now I think) and post to twitter, facebook and Vine’s own site. Here’s one I made about 2 minutes after downloading the app: Welcome to Studio Two. There’s some interesting examples of this in use on their blog. Also, a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to save a few $$ on NOT registering the various alternatives to your domain name – notice that this is vine.co which is NOT owned by vine.com… I wonder how they are feeling about saving $29.00 a year on not securing all the domain variants that they possibly could for their valuable 4-letter domain….!

So what do we do with this? I would say the jury will be out for a while, but if I was running communications at one of my client businesses or institutions, I’d sign up and start playing with it now. Remember how we all scratched our heads at Twitter when it first started? “What can you say in 140 characters?”…. History proved them right. Here’s some ideas:

Make a video of your mission statement – one word at a time.
Moving something in your museum? 6 seconds should make it look exciting!
World’s shortest virtual tour
Upcoming event? 6-seconds to let me know how fun it is going to be
Something beautiful going on in the greenhouse? Maybe 6-seconds of Zenn is what we need shared
And of course …. whatever is popular today for the office coffee break.

What fun!

6 Seconds at Studio Two

30Jan

Posted in Internet Fluency, Non-Profit, Thinks /By ksprague /3 comments

Google Grants

Do you want to know what the single best thing you can do right now to help your non-profit get some visibility in 2013? Sign up with Google Grants and follow through. Here’s the skinny – Google has a non-profit arm here at http://www.google.com/giving/ - check it out as there are some amazing things going on here. But the one you are interested in (assuming dear reader that you are involved in a leadership role with a legitimate 501-C3 US based non-profit) is the Google Grants – AdWords for nonprofits program. As they put it very clearly on their home page”

Google Grants empowers nonprofit organizations, through $10,000 per month in in-kind AdWords™ advertising, to promote their missions and initiatives on Google.com..

$10,000/month is $330/day in Google adwords credit – if you have had any experience managing or running an adwords campaign, you know that is a substantial sum. If you are a qualifying non-profit – you could be connecting with $120,000/year in free online advertising NOW.

How this Works

Here’s the primer. Adwords is the system that delivers text-based ads to the side and sometimes top and bottom of the Google search page you use a 1,000 times a day. These ads are part of “campaigns” that you set up in adwords and which consist of the text ads themselves (you can make as many as you like), the keywords or phrases that people will enter and that you want to show up against, and a daily budget. There are additional settings you can use to optimize your ad delivery, including regionalization by zip code or radius, and demographic elements, including gender, age and other parameters. The images here show some of this for a campaign we are running to promote Studio Two as a branding agency in the Miami area:

: Search Results

: Google Ad Variety

: Keywords Sample

: Region Targeting

Google Grants

The Google Grants program – if you apply and then setup the associated adwords account correctly (that’s the tricky part) – gives your non-profit $330/day in credit towards running ads for your organization. There are some significant caveats – the ads must correspond to your mission and purpose (no selling tchotkes) and your CPC (Cost per Click) is maximum $2 (as of January 28th, 2013). This is an important element that is designed to keep your campaign from competing with paying customers who will be willing to bid higher for important and popular keywords and phrases. For instance, the keyword “museum” is going to pretty popular – you can include it in your keywords but other organizations are likely to be running paying campaigns and willing to pay more for the CPC. You wouldn’t really want to focus on such a generic keyword in any case as the goal of running any campaign is to capture the attention of people who actually ARE interested in what you have to offer – in other words, don’t sell ice to Eskimos. Setting up keywords is both an art and a science and worthy of many more blog posts but suffice it to say that you want to use keywords that help people get to YOU – i.e. the keyphrase “Norman Rockwell Museum” is going to be much more effective it you are actually NRM.org.

But consider this – what other program is out there that you potentially qualify for and which gives you the scope and flexibility of the Adwords program. Every organization we work with can benefit from $120,000 in annual online marketing – most of them are doing little to none and we all know where we go looking for information when we are planning trips or activities – online.

Next Steps

Follow the links at the top of this page and apply – if you qualify you’ll find out very quickly. Then, if you have the savvy to dive into setting up the adwords account and taking the next steps to getting approved (which can take 4-8 weeks at present) then by all means, dive in. If not, drop us a note or give us a call. We’d be happy to work with you on this and other ways to get your organization the visibility it needs. Thanks – Kevin.

24Jan

Posted in Internet Fluency, Listens, Work /By ksprague /Leave comment

Form Follows Function

Money is tight – I don’t know of any organization or business that isn’t approaching cash flow like the hot-potato it is for all of us. The recession may be “over” but it doesn’t mean all that much has changed – if it has for you, let me know! Which brings me to the topic on my mind today – form follows function.

Building “smart” websites

We’ve been building websites for more than 13 years – since the very first days of the web. During that span, we (by “we” I mean myself and all of the good people past and present at Studio Two) have continually approached the challenges of the space with an open mind. The underlying technologies and languages that define the web are continuously evolving – and mostly for the good – better functions, greater flexibility, more choices. From the very first we sought to build “smart” sites – sites that had their content in a database of some kind that would allow the content to be separate from the frame it was presented with . This approach has allowed us to migrate and evolve many of the sites we manage through multiple “looks” over the years without a significant need to re-organize the underlying content.

For cash-strapped non-profits this meant a break from the “tear down and rebuild” approach that many other web designers were employing and provided us with stability and long-term functional relationships with our clients that continue to this day. Case in point – the original website we built for Shakespeare & Company in 1999 on a MySQL database was just migrated to wordpress after a good 13-year run – with multiple facelifts over that period but without having to significantly redo the content. The migration to wordpress was done in a matter of a month or so and because the site has a good, tested and well-designed architecture we were able to bring the client essentially a brand-new site for a very minimal budget.

So what is a “smart” site?

It’s a site that puts the goals and actions of the user first. For instance, on a theater site the goal is to sell tickets – so we want to make sure from the very beginning that the process of finding the show you want, seeing the schedule, purchasing a ticket and getting notification is smooth and seamless. In this way the form of the site must follow the function – buttons need to be logically placed, navigation needs to be familiar and sensible, the checkout process needs to feel conventional. In addition, there is any underlying logic to the site flow – a logic which as users we interact with and occasionally appreciate but which should be seamless. We don’t want to be dumped on blank pages, to be surprised by complex and unfamiliar ecommerce options, and we want the flow of our decision process to be honored.

So what does this have to do with money?

Here it is – function follows logic while form follows emotion. What I am referring to is the aesthetic qualities of websites – the graphic design. Logic is predictable and scalable. Emotion is not – and where emotion and opinion live can be messy, unpredictable and expensive if not approached correctly. We’re graphic designers by trade and by choice – design matters to us but design generally is done best when it serves the function that it enhances – a chair is made to be sat in – if your aesthetic choice was to remove 2 of the 4 legs because they “looked ugly” you would still have a chair but it would be useless.

So – if you are a business or non-profit organization seeking to preserve capital while undertaking a new website design, I’d ask you to consider carefully the primary and secondary goals of your website. My guess is that you either want to sell a particular product, connect customers with events or classes, or communicate a particular idea. Think this through carefully, write it down, and consider the simplest path to achieving that goal. Then give us a call. We’d be happy to help make it happen, make it look good in the process, and achieve the results you seek together.

22Jan

Posted in Artwork, Postmarks /By ksprague

Pinecrest

A recent visit to Pinecrest Gardens in South FL was a nice excursion – great plantings, a rain forest, giant banyan trees – and a great assortment of Angel’s Trumpets (Brugmansia aurea) which I have included in this postmark – the postmarks in this case is contemporary – an attractive triangle of $5 stamps on an overnight package from a friend containing a message of inspiration.

If you like these please share with a friend and encourage them to join my list!

Archival inkjet print available! shipping in USA included! Thanks.

11Jan

Looking for solutions to non-profit ecommerce!

Posted in Consults, Internet Fluency, Thinks /By ksprague /2 comments

Ecommerce options for Non-Profits

We work with many non-profit organizations including theaters, libraries, museums and so on. Over the last year we developed new websites for many of our clients and migrated some of our older institutional clients from sites built 6-9 years ago to new wordpress-powered sites. In the course of doing this we encountered a diversity of ecommerce requirements and put together some good solutions. In this post I am going to share those solutions with you.

Key to our strategy in 2012-2013 is a core belief that very smart developers out in the world have solved almost any problem we can dream up – and implementing their solutions is a better strategy than trying to code our own. I think this is key to any institution seeking a new web functionality – go looking for someone who has already fixed your problem – it’s out there.

The needs of non-profits are often much more complex than a standard for-profit ecommerce solution…

For-profit companies typically are seeking to sell hard goods and services on the web – like our client Luis and Clark, who sell a line of carbon-fiber instruments via a woocommerce powered store and a traditional authorize.net gateway. Our non-profit clients on the other hand need a suite of functions – membership, event registration, donations, product sales, licensing, recurring transaction, member management, and in-line donations on checkout.

I recently received a call from an organization we work with seeking to build a recurring membership system into their site. Like many organizations, they have a minimal budget to achieve this task yet very lofty goals. They were looking at Network for Good as a possible solution but were afraid of the monthly carrying costs – $49.95/month. Currently they use a simple paypal “Donate Now” button to accomplish the task of capturing online donations.

And thus the recurring dilemma for the small non-profit – take on the additional carrying costs, even if some months you might see no donations to your organization via this gateway – or give up the desired functionality of customer management, recurring donations, and other bells and whistles for the “free” paypal option…. what to do?

So here’s the breakdown of options we have implemented for our clients:

Paypal basic – the ubiquitous “buy now” or “Donate Now” button – easy to implement, no carrying costs, a variable percentage taken on checkout – users are passed over to the standard paypal window for checkout. We use this extensively on the BIFFMA.org site.

Woocommerce – well-built and well-supported plugin for wordpress-powered websites. Fully-featured product management, shipping and tax tables, and a variety of checkout options including basic paypal all the way through full authorize.net>merchant account>your bank pathway. The latter requires the purchasing of an SSL certificate ($100+ annually). The plugin is a flat one-time fee ($50).

Woocommerce extensions – there are a variety of plugins, some free, some paid, for woocommerce that add functionality. We are using the WooCommerce Product Add-ons and the WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing modules to allow customers to add donations to their shopping cart “in line” with adding products (see here) and to allow variable pricing according to customer status.

Wufoo forms are a great way to quickly deploy some fairly complex ecommerce scenarios. Wufoo does the heavy lifting – ecommerce happens through them so you might be able to get away without an SSL if you have the transaction take place on their servers, and you can create some really interesting forms with many pricing options and variables. There is a subscription fee with Wufoo (pricing here) but it is very reasonable. We use these with Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich, MA – if you click on one of the membership levels you can see the form hand-off to Wufoo’s servers – in this case the client elected to allow Wufoo to handle the SSL compliance. But you can also have an SSL and have the transaction embed on your site page seamlessly. Heritage is using the forms extensively for class registrations as well, particularly when there are variables in fees, ages, and options.

Gravity Forms – this is a powerful tool for building forms, which can be ecommerce enabled but unlike Wufoo, you have to have an ecommerce system in place that you can tie into. We use this on the donation page for Charleys Fund.

Magento – We’ve built a couple of stores and additional components with this open-source ecommerce platform. It has proven somewhat fragile and difficult to manage so we are trending away from this one at present. Hancock Shaker Village uses this and with additional plugins has modified it to allow for a variety of transaction types, but it is not proving as stable as we would like.

Square - Not so much an online tool but a great way to be able to take credit cards quickly, easily and anywhere you can get a cell signal. Combine this with eventbrite and you can be a mobile Point of Sale (POS) very easily - potentially also taking donations right at the table at a gala event. A great app.

Eventbrite – the leading event management and ticketing system in the world (at least the one I inhabit) – Eventbrite is brilliantly designed and gives the event manager everything he or she needs, including mobile ticketing, an app to “check in” ticket holders, a whole user-management system, etc. They charge a variety of fees but the basic deal is $.99+2.5% per ticket – and you can choose to have the client pay the fees of absorb them depending on your needs.

For really robust integrated membership, event and donation integration, there are a couple of sites to look at…

WildApricot.com is one – we haven’t built out anything with them but we have one client (an arts school with a really complex set of needs) looking at them seriously. The afore-mentioned Network for Good is another. This is where things get fuzzy – some of these services can effectively run a complete website for an organization, but it is important to look at what the costs are, the flexibility, and the issues of data management, etc that you encounter with these systems. Can you export your membership or donors into a .CSV file? Are you giving up future flexibility for a closed-source solution? Things to consider.

The plan…

In the end, if you are running an institution and wondering what you should do, I would sharpen up the pencil and create a matrix that first lists your “needs” for ecommerce and then the options above and the pricing that would be on the table (we can help you do this – just ask….!). Do you need an SSL? Is there something in your list that “breaks” one of the off-the-shelf solutions? Do you actually “need” that item? Compromise is a word to keep in mind here – you can actually get some remarkable power out of these systems today for very little investment in time, training, or money, but it requires you to make choices – and I would encourage you to consider trying some of these out – Eventbrite, for instance, has a simple account setup and you can be selling tickets to your event in mere minutes – give it a shot. One last thing to keep in mind – giving your customers these tools WILL increase your revenue – if you are hesitating you are likely leaving more on the table than you will lose paying the monthly fees or percentages.

If you can think of something I left out or are looking for clarification, please leave a comment or email me. If you know of an additional resource, please also let me know via the form so I can add it to the thread. Thanks for reading!

- Kevin

08Jan

Posted in Artwork, Photography, Photoshop, Postmarks /By ksprague /Leave comment

Savannah

When we reach out into our hopes and dreams there’s always a chance you’ll get burned. Travelling, meeting new people, trying new things – taking risks and exploring the world is among the best parts of living. Then why do we hesitate? Why don’t we jump in with both feet? Fear. Fear of the unknown. Maybe this little image will inspire you to reach out and touch the future – to take a risk on your own behalf. I hope it does.

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Archival inkjet print available! shipping in USA included! Thanks.

05Jan

Posted in Artwork, Photoshop, Postmarks /By ksprague /Leave comment

Then Someday

New Year, new goals, new hopes – travel, adventure, ambition. Seen on a wall of a sandwich shop in Savannah, GA – “if you do the things you need to do when you need to do them – then someday – you can do the things you want to do when you want to do them” – How do you feel about that? Seems like a true statement that we all struggle with! Onward into 2013 – to do the things that need doing. Happy New Year!

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Archival inkjet print available! shipping in USA included! Thanks.

31Dec

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Building “smart” websites

So what is a “smart” site?

So what does this have to do with money?

The needs of non-profits are often much more complex than a standard for-profit ecommerce solution…

So here’s the breakdown of options we have implemented for our clients:

For really robust integrated membership, event and donation integration, there are a couple of sites to look at…

The plan…

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