The staff at Cook Inkeeper dreamed up this “engagement superpower” in the course of living and working in, on and around the waters of Cook Inlet.  In Alaska, the weather is big, just like everything else.  And so are the tides.  And while there’s a ton of information about the weather and tides available online, it’s pretty scattered across different sites, and there’s no “single source” that pulls together all of the “must have” information for Cook Inlet residents.  That’s where we came in.

Inletkeeper staffer Michael Sharp, himself an avid sailor and surfer (when he’s not rocking campaign & communications strategy), identified the various sources for terrestrial and marine weather forecasts and current conditions data, and showed us a really cool iPhone app for generating tide predictions.   We took a look at the data sources–yep, all easy-to-parse RSS and XML.  And even better, it turned out that the tide prediction software underneath the iPhone app was open-source!

A few hours of development time later, my colleagues Matt Yoder and Ryan Foster had a slick, open-source and open-data powered “Weather and Tides” page for the new inletkeeper.org.  Then Cook Inletkeeper asked “Hey, can you make it work great on the iPhone, too?”  Matt got his mobile-fu on, and managed to “mobilize” the page with a few clever bits of CSS and Javascript.  No custom app required, this is all straight-up HTML.  I particularly like the way you can “swipe” to move between panels.  It’s hard to tell this isn’t a native iPhone app.

A few other nice details we managed to work in:

• The tide graph also includes a perpetual tide table, formatted to look just like Cook Inletkeeeper’s popular print tide tables booklet.
• Cook Inletkeeper staff can point-and-click to edit the list of weather and tide stations shown.
• The page uses cookies to automatically remember your customized settings.
• Cook Inletkeeper staff can automatically “hot-link” to custom settings, great for customized email marketing outreach.
• “Recommend on Facebook” button

One of the things I will miss most about Groundwire is the thrill of being able to help conceive and create fun, effective tools like that help environmental groups engage their audiences.

Effective social change organizing creates relationships in order to build measurable power and wields that power to achieve specific, significant behavioral, policy or political outcomes.

How does that work for you?

We like that it is succinct and clearly connects relationships, power and tangible outcomes.  But it also raises questions of what we might mean by “measurable power” and “specific, significant outcomes.”

Any organizing campaign or organizer will need to figure out what measures of power are most meaningful for their context, but in general, we think that power is most often measurable in terms of “I can motivate X people to take action Y, which results in Z.”

“Specific and significant” outcomes will also vary greatly across campaigns, but again, we want to emphasize how important it is to be able to articulate these outcomes in specific and measurable terms.  Some examples could include:

• Winning an election
• Passing legislation or administrative policies
• Measure shifts in public opinion or behavior

If your “big hairy audacious” goal will take years to achieve, that’s OK, but you need to be able to define some specific shorter-term outcomes to let you know whether you’re on track.

Cascadia Center for Sustainable Design & Construction — the greenest commercial building in the world, currently in planning by our friends at the Bullitt Foundation.

Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust – leading and inspiring action to conserve and enhance the landscape from Seattle across the Cascade Mountains to Central Washington, ensuring a long-term balance between people and nature.

Harvesting Clean Energy –  a program of Climate Solutions, that helps accelerate rural economic development in the Northwest through clean energy development.

It’s great to be able to work with folks getting the good work done.

I’ll be starting a Masters in Public Administration at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Affairs this September.  I’ll wrap up my work at Groundwire in June and take the summer off to be a full-time dad to Everett and to enjoy summer in Seattle through the eyes of a fifteen-month-old.

I’ve been unbelievably fortunate to be a part of Groundwire over the past decade and a half.  I’ve learned a ton, worked for hundreds of amazing, inspiring environmental organizations and have been blessed with the most kick-ass colleagues and co-conspirators this side of anywhere.  I am more grateful to all of you (past and present) than I can ever adequately express.  Thank you.

I won’t be going too far away.  We’re staying here in Seattle.  I’ll continue to serve on the boards of the Plone Foundation and Green Media Toolshed.  It’s possible I’ll add a consulting gig or two to my plate once I get a handle on my academic workload.

While there’s no denying that this feels like the end of a huge chapter in my life, it also feels like a new beginning.  I’m really excited to plunge into the unknown and into what I hope will be a period of creative uncertainty.  While I don’t know what the next chapters looks like, I’m confident that they will remix familiar themes: public service, social change, openness, systems thinking, data-driven decision-making and smart use of technology.

Watch this space for further updates.  Be seeing you.

But less cool is how often “engagement” seems to be used as a synonym for “marketing.” That’s kind of sad. Nothing against marketing; lord knows the nonprofit sector could stand to get better at it. But I’d like to see more conversation about how to better structure the substance of our work to be more engaging and participatory and how to develop better processes for that kind of engagement.  Framing engagement as a marketing challenge reduces what could be transformational down to something more transactional.

Download me!

I’m very happy to have pushed the “launch” button on Groundwire’s 2010 Website Benchmarks Study, a first-of-its-kind-so-far-as-I-know report that takes an in-depth look at website statistics and online behaviors of 43 small-to-midsized environmental nonprofits.

There’s a ton of useful information, not only about groups’ “raw” website statistics, but also about how much time and energy groups are investing in their web presence.  Lots to chew on for nonprofits of any size, but I think it’s especially relevant for groups up to about 50 staff.

One thing I’m particularly proud of is the fact that I was able to develop a highly scalable and repeatable methodology for quickly gathering data, using a combination of a simple, open-source Python script (written by my awesome colleague Matt Yoder) for interacting with Google Analytics and a quick-and-dirty online survey instrument.

Just a thought.

If you’re not already familiar with collective.googleanalytics, that’s OK — it’s still in beta.   But it’s definitely worth checking out.  Collective.googleanalytics builds on the basic Google Analytics integration capabilities that are built into Plone already.  By taking advantage of Google Analytics’ web services API, collective.googleanalytics pulls selected snippets of your live Google Analytics data back into your Plone site so that site managers get “in their face” analytics data as they are managing content.  We find this really useful with our busy nonprofit clients, who might otherwise not be paying as much attention to their analytics as they ought to.

As we’ve been exploring the intersection of Plone and Google Analytics, we’ve realized that there is a bunch of interesting data that Google Analytics doesn’t automatically capture because they don’t generate full-fledged pageviews for the basic Google Analytics javascript to detect.  For example, “out of the box” Google Analytics doesn’t track PDF or other binary file downloads, people clicking on outbound links, or clicks on non-http links like “mailto:”.  (This isn’t Plone’s fault, it’s a consequence of Google Analytics’ fundamental design architecture.)

However, Google does provide a powerful, flexible (and fairly new) Events Tracking feature that you can call to track interesting non-page-view events like these.    And that’s what Matt is taking advantage of in his upcoming release of collective.googleanalytics to increase the amount of data that Plone sends to Google Analytics.

The collective.googleanalytics control panel has now grown a new set of configuration options:

As you can see, you now have the option to enable or disable tracking of email (mailto:) links, external outbound links, and file downloads.  Even better, these extensions are pluggable, so that if your site needs to track more kinds of events, you can easily write small plugins and have them appear in this menu!  Check here for samples of plugins, which should be easy to adapt for your own needs.  Matt would love contributions of additional useful tracking plugins!

Once configured, results will start showing up in Google Analytics under Content>Event Tracking, like so:

collective.googleanalytics is in beta right now; we’re using it on Groundwire.org and on a  few of our clients’ sites — to rave reviews thus far.   A “1.0 final” release should come sometime in the next few weeks. Matt’s new work on external link tracking is still in a branch, and will be merged soon.

Bonus points:

• Matt’s new branch also branch generates the basic Google Analytics tracking javascript for you automatically using the profile you select in the tracking section of the configlet.  (No need to copy-and-paste the javascript snippet from Google anymore, like you do in out-of-the-box Plone.  That’s a nice convenience feature.)
• All of these new features use the new asynchronous Analytics tracking API, which  should offer some performance benefits over the old blocking javascript, which could sometimes slow down your page loads.

If you’re a Plone developer or integrator, we’d love you to check out, kick the tires and offer feedback.   General comments here are great — we also have a bug tracker on Plone.org for bug reports or feature requests.