Brainstorming for a workshop with 1%club

Yesterday I was at the 1%club (www.1procentclub.nl), we did a brainstorm for the workshop that will be held at “Congres Internationale Samenwerking 2.0″  in Amsterdam

More about the Congress (in Dutch):

http://www.elkaarsgelijke.nl/2009/03/aankondiging-internationale.html

The topic of the workshop will be small charity projects in under-developed countries. We discussed how we could let the group  learn from each other experiences in a sort of guided chaos format. It was the first brainstorm that led to nice first draft of how de workshop could go, and there will be one more.

It was nice meeting with the people at the 1%club, and I hope we will be working together more in the future .

Jakob Nielsen – Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/nonprofit-donations.html

A must read for non-profits and charities on good webdesign. This part might be especially interesting:

“The donation-killers:

• 47% were usability problems relating to page and site design, including unintuitive information architecture, cluttered pages, and confusing workflow.
  • Amazingly, on 17% of the sites, users couldn’t find where to make a donation. You’d imagine that donation-dependent sites would at least get that one design element right, but banner-blindness or over-formatting caused people to overlook some donation buttons.
• 53% were content issues related to writing for the Web, including unclear or missing information and confusing terms.”

Related ways to take action wordpress plug-in for Social Actions

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/related-ways-to-take-action/

“The Plugin identifies the top three keywords for each post and then searches for related campaigns from from Change.org, GlobalGiving.com, Idealist.org, DonorsChoose.org, Kiva, Care2 and over twenty other social change websites. It then automatically loads the top three campaigns for those keywords at the bottom of each of your posts.”

Helpalot is one of those ‘twenty other social change websites’

Update ‘My overview’ page

The my overview page has an updated righside column.

What I changed:

• I made everything darker, to make it easier to distinguish the different elements on the ‘my overview’ pages. Also, due to the unity of how they look, it is clearer the manage blocks have a comparable function.
• I relocated the explanation text and made it shorter. The texts also are more focused on helping users understand what is going on. Also I put it in a bit darker background and just made everything a bit cleaner.
• I made the name of the project/charity darker to make the interface prettier,  and added the ‘view’ for people who might otherwise be confused to as how to get there (not thinking of clicking a black link).
• Added a small icon for ‘edit profile’ to give a little bit of extra attention to this rather important manage link. I didn’t go for icons for every link, because it would create a very busy screen.
• I wanted to put ‘add project’ and ‘add news’, but that didn’t fit. I tried for 15 minutes to push pixels around and then settled for the ‘+news’ and ‘+project’. I set the alt and title text (the text you see when you mouse-over a link) to explain you can add new/a project to your charity by clicking that link.

The rest of the my view page is not yet where it should be, but I’m happy about this part of the interface.

I also started with changing the interface for the projectpage. I ran into some small technical problems and out of time, so it is now somewhat half-changed. By having this half-update I now created some inconsistency, because the charity page an personal profile page now have a somewhat different interface.

I’ll write more about the project page update in another post.

Homepage update

I updated the homepage:

Helpalot homepage, febr 14, '09

• More focus on searching, to bring more balance to the screen and to make it clear where the user should look at when first entering the site.
• I relocated the about text to go on top of the searchbar, to create a more natural flow for the user.

I Also did some other small updates, for instance the ‘why join’ text was added to the registration form.

I’m still not really happy with how everything looks and works, for instance, the ‘why join’ text must be set in a different background color or something like that to set it more apart from the user generated content. Still, it was a good update

Helpalot usage

On Helpalot.org we have:

• Projects: 124
• Charities: 118
• Users: 303

Most people who join Helpalot do this to promote their project.

We don’t have a lot of active regular users searching and evaluating projects. We think this has a number of reasons, most importantly:

• The projects on Helpalot are not clustered. Helpalot becomes far more relevant for users when there is a cluster of projects around a certain charity category or region (country/province/city).
• We haven’t put any energy and money in PR yet, we first focused on getting Helpalot up and running.
• A number of  details of the site needs to be improved. The site is up and running, but it’s a bit rough on the edges here and there.

What we plan to do about this:

• Add a large number of Dutch charities using (and paying) for (a part of) the CIGD database. We don’t want to just import the charities, we need them to consciously join Helpalot. Therefore we will send them an e-mail and create a seperate landingspage that makes it easier for them to join Helpalot. We hope to (at least) add 1000 Dutch charities this way, and by doing this, create a relevant regional cluster for people to search for.
• Lately a lot of energy went into starting a games company called FourceLabs. But as of  february 20th, I’ll quit with my job at Advance and I’ll work for 4 days a week at FourceLabs, leaving me with more time to invest in Helpalot.
• We will try to professionalize our organization so we know we have a fixed number of hours and people available for Helpalot to develop the website, manage the community and create PR opportunities. More about this in future blog posts.

New Helpalot Blog

We switched from makingthesite.com to this Helpalot.wordpress.com blog.

We had two reasons to switch:

• It is easier to manage a blog that is hosted on wordpress.com, because the admin interface is automatically updated.
• It makes more sence to have a blog about Helpalot with the name Helpalot in it. Makingthesite.com came from the time we didn’t yet know what the name of the site would be.