by gregoryheller | Apr 11, 2011 | Uncategorized
I think all of us at CivicActions were disgusted by Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons’ vacation video featuring him murdering an elephant in Zimbabwe (and the subsequent butchering of that elephant by local villagers wearing Go Daddy hats overdubbed with the song Hells Bells). Bob Parsons has exhibited some pretty questionable behavior before, and made distateful comments. Go Daddy’s website and advertising objectify women, yet they control something like 32% of the domain registration and hosting market. I’ve registered plenty of domains with Go Daddy in the past because it was easy, and it was cheap. But the elephantacide changed all that. I will never register another domain with Go Daddy, neither will CivicActions (and we will be transfering any domains that are registered there) and to help others make that same decision, I’ve polled our team to find out alternative domain registrars. I switched to Namecheap, a Los Angeles Based company that picked up those twenty thousand domain registrations (8 of them mine) by running a promo deal for a few days. Namecheap donated $1 from each registration to elephant protection and conservation organization SaveTheElephants.org (they raised $20k in donations!). Added bonus: their user interface is straight forward, and far less cluttered than Go Daddy’s. It is worth stating: Transfering domains is not particularly hard. if you are hosted someplace other than Go Daddy, the process is relatively easy. You find a new registrar, tell them you want to transfer a domain, they put in a request with the current registrar, and then you get emailed a code from the current registar to give to the new registrar. The...
by gregoryheller | Apr 7, 2011 | Uncategorized
<p>Seems like ages ago that I got my ScrumMaster Certification and joined the ranks of Certified ScrumMasters everywhere. I sometimes like to say "I Choose Not To Scrum!" to paraphrase Seinfeld. Well, My membership in the Scrum Alliance was about to expire, but I renewed it today, so I am still a Certified ScrumMaster!</p> <p><img src="/sites/gregoryheller.com/files/ScrumMaster_Logo_Horiz_0_0.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="101"...
by gregoryheller | Apr 6, 2011 | Uncategorized
<p>Last week I wrote up some research we conducted at CivicActions. The <a href="http://civicactions.com/blog/2011/apr/01/foundations_using_twitter">research and blog post took a look at the largest 36 foundations using Twitter</a> (based on the size of their endowment). What I found was a wide variance in the twitter metrics: follower and followign counts, tweeting frequence, etc… check out the post for the details.</p> <p>This week I wrote a short <a href="http://civicactions.com/blog/2011/apr/06/tips_for_foundations_using_twitter">guide with tips and advice designed to help foundations and nonprofit organizations jump start their use of Twitter</a>. Esentially the idea is to provide a very short roadmap to get these organizations out of the gate and using Twitter regularly to advance their mission and serve their strategic...
by gregoryheller | Apr 6, 2011 | Uncategorized
Last week I wrote about some research we conducted regarding Foundations and their use of Twitter. One thing I noticed in our research is that many Foundations are primarily using the Twitter website to interface with the service. In this post I will highlight a few tips for Foundations that want to make better use of Twitter, or improve their management of the social media tool. Not every Foundation should be using Twitter, just like not every person or organization should be using Twitter. Twitter, or any tool or service, should first be evaluated for how it will serve the mission, or strategic goals. (To learn more about this topic, watch the video of my Ignite talk at #10NTC “You Don’t Need A Website, You Need A Web Strategy”.) The remainder of this post will assume that the organization has determined that using Twitter may serve some strategic goals, or the organization’s mission. Tips For Managing Twitter These tips will serve any organization, Foundations, nonprofits, NGOs, or even for-profit companies using Twitter. Ditch The Web Stop using the Twitter website to read and post tweets. Once you follow more than 50 other users, the Twitter web interface makes it much more challenging to manage the stream of information, as well as post your own tweets, find and follow users, and manage Twitter lists. Instead, use either a desktop client like TweetDeck (my favorite), or a web-based, online service like HootSuite or CoTweet. For many reasons, I prefer a desktop client like TweetDeck for every-day Twitter use: It supports multiple accounts It has seperate columns for accounts, mentions, direct messages, lists...
by gregoryheller | Apr 1, 2011 | Uncategorized
Back in November 2010 we used the Glass Pockets database to identify 38 of the top 100 Foundations (by endowment site) using Twitter. By “using Twitter” we mean Foundations with official Twitter accounts. This does not include Foundation staff using Twitter, and we did not look at multiple Twitter accounts per Foundation, only the primary official Twitter account for each of the 38 Foundations. The Numbers We looked at some basic metrics for how these Foundations were using Twitter, such as the follower/following ratio, tweeting frequency, age of account, etc… There is tremendous variability in the data, which is not surprising. The numbers suggest that some Foundations have done little more than sign up for a Twitter account while others are making regular use of the service. The oldest account in the data set was started in December of 2007 and belongs to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates Foundation is the largest Foundation in the set (by assets), and has the most followers, over 400,000, and is “listed” nearly 7,000 times. The newest account is that of the Oregon Community Foundation, which joined Twitter in May of 2010 and has only 150 followers. The table below shows some aggregate statistics about the number of followers these Foundations have, and the number of accounts they are following in return. It would almost make more sense to remove the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation from the dataset because they are such an outler. They have nearly 40 times the number of followers as the next Foundation, the Open Society Institute with 11,643. Followers Following Median 1,139 119 Mean...
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