Clients

If you know me, you know I am a junkie for three things: interacting with young people, the many aspects of sustainability, and my job. From my work in the

Aaron recently shared The Non Profit Tagline Report from GettingAttention.org with me and I immediately though this is a report that more people need to see.  The report offers up a series of really great recommendations for crafting a tagline, as well as a checklist for evaluating exiting taglines.  To top it off, the report includes a list of 2500 non profit organization taglines.

(I'm planning on migrating a lot of the content I/we generate for our team newsletter to the blog, so for the CivicActions team, you'll be getting more information about what we're up to on the blog than in our internal newsletter.  For the rest of the world, it'll mean a more transparent view into what we're doing at CivicActions and how we do it.  We were founded on, and value, the principles of openness and we intend to dive even deeper into expressing the values of transparency, collaboration and participation.)

This past year, CivicActions has undergone a transformation in the way that we organize project teams.  We've moved from a "matrix" model (people contributing to several projects) to what we call "Pods" (dedicated teams focused on one or two projects at a time). This transformation has yielded incredible results for clients and project team members. This model also means that we can more easily scale, which we are preparing to do in 2010.

Idealist.org just hatched a campaign to create a decentralized and adaptable network of idealists. Within the first few days of launch, people from over 140 countries have signed up. For what? Well, I'm not quite sure, and Idealist.org isn't either. This is a network experiment and, as they explain on their site, it will transparently evolve with feedback from the participants.

In addition to its activist merit, the campaign is an example of an ingenious brand-building strategy. Idealist.org's website offers the standard features for sharing the idealist logo on social networking sites and forwarding to friends. More significantly, however, participants conflate a personal attribute and the organization's name as one and the same. Strong brand names offer that kind of potential. I'm an idealist, are you?

I'm part of another decentralized network of idealists: CivicActions. Decentralization provides CivicActions with strategic advantages; the organization can quickly tap local technological and cultural trends, work with the best talent in the world, and communicate with a global audience. I'm a CivicActioner, are you? We love to partner with smart, idealistic organizations and individuals. Contact us and let's get the conversation started.

Miley Cyrus closed her account and quit Twitter with an apparent DIY Youtube rap video called "Goodbye Twitter," wherein she oh-so-eloquently extolls the value of quality in-person time over endlessly updating a stream of personal trivia as the reason for leaving the service. Does Miley's move foreshadow the complete abandonment of social media for tweens and teens?

I attended a CiviCRM Developers Training on the 9th and 10th of September in New York City along with about 20 others including four members of the CiviCRM core team (Donald Lobo, Kurand Jalmi, David Greenberg and Yashodha Chaku).  The sessions were a mix of existing site presentations, new CiviCRM v3.0 feature demonstrations, and hands on configuration and coding.

In Seattle, our local Drupal User Group is organizing a Drupal conference called the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit.  This event includes technical and business oriented talks.  It's going to be a great time, and I recommend signing up now before it fills up. 

We are limited to 150 people, and we already have about 50 people signed up. 

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." Anonymous, often attributed to Dan Quayle

Determining if your website project will be a success or failure is tricky. It's like trying to decide if the pizza you're about to eat will be good or bad (which can be a trick question- when is pizza ever that bad?). 

"An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows." -Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969)

I've blogged about the importance of personas as they generally relate to the development process (see "How to Create Effective Personas for Your Projects, Part 1", "How to Create Effective Personas for Your Projects, Part 2", and "How to Use Personas in Your Projects, Part 3").