Using the Whole Whale Podcast

 Sarah Durham, the president of the nonprofit digital branding agency Big Duck, discusses the results of a rebranding survey of over 350 nonprofits. If your nonprofit is considering a rebrand of the logo, website, or communication materials it is important to understand the key ingredients that can make the difference for success. andnbsp; Download the full report at Big Duck. Learn whether rebranding can help a nonprofit increase revenue from individuals and other supporters. Find out if it creates a boost to fundraising, recruitment, activism, or media attention. andnbsp;

Giving Tuesday raised $45.7 million for non-profits on the December 2nd, 2014 day of giving meant to follow the commercial wave of Black Friday and Cyber Monday. This was the third year of Giving Tuesday and Givkwik.com undertook the daunting challenge of creating a live online event on the day. In this interview Jason Rosado (GivKwik.com Founder) and Jorge Fontanez (Advisory Council Member) discuss the importance of visual story telling and developing your organizations baseball card that can quickly tell the story of impact to supporters on giving platforms. Giving Tuesday Statistics and Fact list This section is for the numbers geeks, so feel free to skip over. 2014 #GivingTuesday +20,000 partners (15,000 ngos) Total amount donated: $45.7M - $3,046 per NGO Est. GDP:17,229.2 billion (+2.75% growth World Bank ) Est. U.S. giving:344.58 (Est. 2% rate) 2013 #GivingTuesday 8,500 partners (7,000 ngos) Total amount donated: $27M - $3857 per NGO Avg individual gift:143 (Blackbaud) GDP:16,768.1B US individuals gave:335.17B (1.99% of GDP) 2012 #GivingTuesday 2,500 NGOs involved $4,800 per NGO Total amount donated:12M Avg individual gift:101 (Blackbaud) GDP:15,533.8 billion US gave228.93 billion (1.5 percent of GDP) More Resources GivKwik.com - corporate giving platform IndieGoGo.com - crowd fundraising platform Giving Tuesday fundraising ideas Video training guide with Giving Tuesday tips

Recording of the Wake Up Your Fundraising Breakfast: Maximizing Your Return on Big Data hosted by Joe Boland from FundraisingSuccessMag.com. An interesting panel discussion about using data inside nonprofits to boost fundraising with: Emily Moyer, VP, Marketing and Digital Strategies at The Michael J. Fox Foundation John Mix, Director, Digital Fundraising and Marketing at The IRC George Weiner, Chief Whaler, WholeWhale.com

Workplace giving enables companies to setup reoccurring donation systems for their employees and support a culture of corporate giving and purpose. Steve Delfin, the CEO of Americas Charities discusses the importance of unrestricted funds for nonprofits and how a change to an all online system will harm giving in the federal campaigns.

Charity Miles is an amazing fitness app that is also raising money for non-profits through ads. We learn about what it takes to create an app for social change from Gene Gurkoff. Resources Charity Miles - great fitness app that supports charities Phone Gap - open source mobile app framework Google Analytics Mobile Dashboard - understand your mobile traffic

Democracy Works and TurboVote, Co-founder Seth Flaxman talks about using data and technology to help people vote via mail. Their main product, TurboVote has had great success due to their teams ability to gather the most accurate list of election locations in the country. They have made voting via absentee ballot as easy as getting a movie from Netflix, which is the first step of their larger plan to make voting easier in the US. Resources Mechanical Turk - you can use this service for large, repetitive tasks that require a human eye. Odesk.com and screen scrapers - you can hire developers to create simple Python screen scrapers to aggregate data from the web. TurboVote.org - great tool for setting up a voter registration and absentee ballots on your site.

Learn how Teach For America has been able to use Yammer to increase communication, knowledge sharing, and deepen relationships across the country. Aaron French, who runs internal communications at TFA shares his insight on what worked in rolling out this platform. We focus on the people, process and products that went into adoption of this technology. Resources Yammer - private social network used by TFA View Do Labs - Yammer analytics tool. Trust Agents Book - great book about how trust is built on social networks Musical Thanks to... The Freak Fandango Orchestra, a hilarious and just plain fun gypsy alt rock band from Barcelona.

Pagespeed is an important metric to DoSomething.org because it impacts usability, SEO and the overall health of the code. We talk with Matt Holford, the CTO of DoSomething.org about how they are working to reduce page load time. Learn which tricks they have for launching a new Drupal site and optimizing for speed. Resources Find Matt on twitter and ask him questions. New Relic - best pagespeed monitoring Test your load time with Pingdom - see how you compare with DoSomething.org Pagespeed suggestions and ranking direct from Google pagespeed insights Google Analytics pagespeed insights Content Delivery Networks: Akamai, Fastly, cloudflare Tools to help you optimize your website Musical Thanks to The Freak Fandango Orchestra Hilarious and just plain fun gypsy alt rock band.

George talks with Matt Holford, the new CTO of DoSomething.org about how he approached his role and improved their tech development process. Matt discusses his three step approach of learn - plan - execute, using a faceted feature analysis (FFA) process at DoSomething.org to manage and prioritize products. Resources from the podcast Github Issues Trello project management tool Drupal.org Agile project management

This week we talk with Andy Aczel the CTO of the SpecialistGuild.org about how they use quality assurance (QA) testing to change the lives of people on the Autism Spectrum. The Specialist Guild is able to train, place, and employ people on the spectrum while also doing great work to improve how websites and applications work for organizations. [alert_blue] Web QA testing involves checking a site against the defined project scope with the goal of identifying and documenting bugs. The tests span across major devices, browsers, and operating systems to make sure functionality is consistent. This bug hunting process is a critical step in software development and helps produce polished websites that provide users with a better experience. [/alert_blue] [alert_blue] Usability testing is a methodology where users are asked to perform certain tasks based on the original product design to test ease-of-use, task time, and the user experience. Testing can be done in a lab with cameras/screen recorders or informally with someone watching a user use the product. [/alert_blue] Additional Resources Specialistguild.org Great usability testing firm Screenfly - screen grabs and usability across browsers (free) Browser Stack - test your site across devices (free tests) Selenium - automatic browser testing scripts Jira - mentioned in the cast used for bug tracking and project management FogBugz - simple web bug tracking tool. Virtual Box by Oracle - Local virtual machine software that lets you render full OS versions locally. Dont Make Me Think - great book and resource for understanding usability testing.

We talk with Jason Wilson from No Kid Hungry about their unique text messaging program and how it is connecting families with free lunches for their children over the summer. A fun story that goes beyond text-to-donate campaigns and thinks about programmatic impact. Additional Resources According to Pew Internet Research - 90% of Americans have a cell phone, 60% of those have access to the internet. Many nonprofits hear these numbers and glaze over or feel that they are too resource constrained to do much about it. This is evident when you consider that only 16% of nonprofits have a mobile optimized donation page (Nonprofit Scorecard 2013). If a donate page, a page that literally drives revenue, isnt inspiring a shift to mobile then were in trouble. I think we sell mobile short when we stop at mobile web/apps and dont consider the power of that other handy thing that phones do, which is text messaging! Try out No Kid Hungrys text messaging system - Text Food to the number 877877. The No Kid Hungry Text program Pew Internet Research on Mobile usage in 2013 Mobile Commons - text provider of No Kid Hungry

Interview with Stefan Heeke the CEO of the Sumall Foundation. How can we think about using big data and analysis to predict homelessness and other amazing projects? Big data is term that continues to increase and for us it can be misleading because it may not focus on the right data. It is easy to think about using data just to analyze our donors (tech tends to follow the money), so we love hearing about stories that drive impact from big data. Trend of Big Data It doesnt seem to be stopping... Additional Resources Explore great open data sets TIBCO Spotfire Data visualization tool Predicting Homelessness with Sumall Foundation Tableau Visualization software

We talk with Roland Legiardi-Laura the ED of PowerPoetry.org about how they became the largest teen poetry site in the US. Find out what the literacy gap has to do with incarceration in the US and how we can use algorithms to begin to quantify poetry. To Be Heard - Documentary that inspired PowerPoetry.org Please check out the full documentary of To Be Heard - its incredible. Additional resources Poetry Wars - Twitter App that rates tweets Blog covering Power Poetry Data Sumall Foundation details about the poetry algorithm

The Miracle Machine turns water into wine in just three days! The only hiccup, its a hoax, a hoax that garnered over 500m impressions for the non-profit Winetowater.org. We talk with Chris Noble of Cause Media and Studio Good, about what we can learn from creating the press wave and how to gather usable data. Video of Wine To Water Product The True Miracle from The Miracle Machine on Vimeo. World Water Day Trend Example of Google.com/trends showing searches for World Water Day.

We talk to Kevin Conroy, Chief Product Officer of Global Giving about A/B testing with Optimizely and discuss how to think about testing your site. Then discuss how the Obama digital team used A/B testing to drive an extra $60 Million in donations. More about the Behavior Model from Dr. BJ Fogg Show notes Story of Obama A/B testing Optimizely.org - non-profit discount for A/B testing Unbounce.com - A/B testing http://www.behaviormodel.org/ - Dr. BJ Fogg Globalgiving.org - great crowd funding platform