In This Edition:

• Facebook: Where 5 million equals 50,000
  
  
• Building A Custom System With An Online Platform
  
  
• Five Ways To Find New Constituents Online

Facebook: Where 5 million equals 50,000

By Mark Hrywna

Michelle Miles isn’t all that much different than most teenagers. The 19-year-old from Little Rock, Ark., attends Pulaski Technical College, plans to pursue a nursing degree, and works at PetSmart.

She also can email 5.2 million people -- nearly twice the 2.8-million population of Arkansas -- through the Facebook Cause she created called The Race to End Cancer to aid the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Foundation (ACHF).

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Building A Custom System With An Online Platform

By Rob Jordan and Laura Quinn

In the old days, many organizations used tools like Access or FileMaker to create their own custom databases. While you can customize these systems exactly to meet your needs, you’ll also have to build every feature you want yourself, and handle all your own infrastructure, backup and security issues. These limitations mean they’re unlikely to be ideal as a foundation for growth.

More recently, online hosted systems have become a useful option. These systems offer nearly the opposite set of strengths and weaknesses. Many provide a huge feature set out of the box, and take care of all of your security, network, upgrades and backup demands, but it can be difficult to configure many of them to meet precise and unusual needs.

These days, there’s a third option. Online platforms like Salesforce.com, NetSuite or CiviCRM provide online sets of tools that can be highly customized. You start with useful common functionality -- for instance, to track constituents’ contact information or send email -- and then tailor the processes and information.

These platforms can be a bit of a blank slate when you first get started, and might require a fair amount of configuration time to get them up and running -- especially to adapt them to unique processes.  But the result is a tailored, customized application in a hosted environment. For some groups it is the best of worlds. 

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Rob Jordan is the executive director of Idealist Consulting. Laura Quinn is the executive director of Idealware.

Five Ways To Find New Constituents Online

By Michael Cervino

Is your neck stiff from staring too long at the same source of constituents? The cure is to stretch and strengthen your skills for finding new online destinations related to your cause. Such Web sites and communities can be great sources of new constituents if targeted with tailored marketing.

• Look behind you. Your Web traffic statistics report what Web sites your visitors were on before they came to yours. Look beyond the top 10. The next 11 to 200 might be richer sources.
• Look under. Dig deeper into those statistics. What keywords are used to find you? What other places do you find when you search those words?
• Look left, then right. Use Google’s “linkto:” search and see who links to you. Then use this search on each of the resulting sites. Who is linking to these places that should be talking about and linking to you?
• Look up. Search beyond your lexicon. There are conversations about what you care about that may be using a different set of terms. Get involved in those dialogues.
• Look ahead. Schedule time every month to exercise your “looking” muscles.

And every so often, remember to reach around and pat yourself on the back for your progress.

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Michael Cervino is vice president and co-founder of Beaconfire Consulting.

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