PTP Blog

Here’s the story.  A colleague posted a note on Twitter about an organization that got a really low response rate when they sent out a subscribe request to people who had done a paper sign-up for their announcement email list.  Their webhost requires that list recipients opt-in via email, and so the organization sent their subscribe request to 586 people and 94 chose to opt-in to the list for the second time.  My colleague was disheartened for obvious reasons – a 16% (did I do my math right?) response rate, while not bad, isn’t really something to shout from the rooftops either.  I started to respond via twitter, but decided to move from the twitter-verse to the broader internets because I think there’s something here that’s worth unpacking.

First, some assumptions I make when it comes to communications – these are based my experiences working with community organizing groups, and while somewhat critical, are said with love:

• most people don’t read
• there is a strong tendency in community organizing groups toward verbosity
• additionally, groups tend to under-analyze their audience
  • the clearest manifestation of this is evidenced by a difficulty in articulating the value of a particular communication to the recipient not the organization

Now, I’m not suggesting that the second and third assumptions are at work in this case.  Still, in the case of this organization, they can view their responses as 492 people who don’t see any value in their communications and feel bad.  Or they can see that they have 94 people (almost 100!) who do see value in receiving their updates and use that as their base to build on.

Fundamentally, it comes down to goals – at PTP, we call this the BIG WHY.  Why does the organization want an email announcement list?  What do those goals suggest about what they send via the list and who they target with it?  Maybe a survey of the 94 is in order to see how those folks would like the organization to improve their communication so it better meets the needs of the people that want to hear from them.  And for the 492 that don’t want email, what about blast faxing them with the urgent/one-page flyers as necessary?  I suspect that a combination of approaches would accomplish the organization’s goals while at the same time making their different audiences much happier with the communication they are receiving.

Finally, I think is a great reminder that no matter what we’re doing and who we’re communicating with, it is really unlikely that a significant portion of any list is going to opt-in to receive more email.  As email has become more and more spam filled and overused, many people just aren’t going to agree to yet one more message in their inbox.  It demands that groups look to other mechanisms for contact including blogs, RSS feeds, and text messages while also reexamining older technologies like faxing, paper mail, and phone trees.  It also demands that groups answer the BIG WHY and use that answer to target their efforts.  In the end, while these approaches may take more work at the front end, if more people hear and act on your messages, it’s a clear win.

Web Worker Daily  has a “Look Inside Virtual Company MoveOn.org” it isn’t much of a look that you don’t already know if you know about MoveOn, but vaguely interesting - the virtual retreat sounds torturous, but I suppose if you’ve got a good headset, then it might be okay.

More interesting would have been a review of the headsets, phone systems, and other hardware and software they use.  I mean, they can’t really run everything on Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, and other online technologies - certainly not with their membership databases and other member related information, right?

Twitter’s had quite a bit of buzz lately. If you haven’t heard of it, maybe its because you’ve got better things to do with your time than subscribe to a service that enables you and other twitter users you know to update each other on the minutiae of your lives via the web, cell phone text message, or rss.

But wait, maybe, just maybe there’s something else here. Stay with me for a moment here:

Take twitter, not as potentially annoying social phenomena likened to the latest form of cat blogging, but instead as a communications platform that does a few things really well and really easily:

1. enables short text posting through a web form, from your cell phone, or through an instant messenger account
2. publishes that short message on the web
3. pushes that short message out to your network of subscribers via: web site, rss or cell phone text message

Do you see it yet? How about some scenarios:

• GOTV work? GOTV staff posts a “remember to vote” message on twitter 1 week, 3 days, 1 day, on the day, and then every hour for the last 5 hours of election day. Could this get annoying? Maybe, maybe not depending on constituency. Include a link or phone number to find out where to vote/get a ride/or for election protection info for extra points.
• do you do lobby days? spend a chunk of your state’s legislative session at the capitol? Twitter just became your best bet for super fast updates to supporters and to your website.

Those are just two examples. There are many many more, and I hope that you’re thinking about and planning to use some of them. Twitter’s not perfect - far from it. Currently, the site can be painfully slow as the number of users outweighs the resources of the server twitter.com is sitting on, but I’d be surprised if that didn’t change soon.

What is really cool about twitter is that it is totally permission based - you can’t just collect someone’s cell phone and and spam them with sms text messages - they have to register at twitter and ask to receive your updates. It may add a layer of complexity, but it means that folks that do subscribe to your updates probably really want to hear from you.

From an organizing perspective, it would be very cool if twitter supported groups, but given how many people are clamoring for this functionality, I hope to see it soon.

What are your thoughts about where and how twitter could be used in community organizing?

the latest version of Skype includes an option Firefox extension that automatically transforms phone numbers in webpage into buttons that you can click to initiate a Skype call.

Here’s an example of what it looks like in action:
(Click for a larger image)

This example is taken from PTP’s database - Salesforce - but would work the same with any other online database out there.

As you can see, the possibilities are pretty intriguing - imagine setting up a phone list with entry fields - a caller could sit at a computer, clicking and calling their way down the list, entering in response directly on the page and therefore directly into the database. This could be pretty darn cool.

We all know that spam’s a problem. But a recent post on gigaom.com had a stat that caught my eye: quoting a NY times article that said spam “accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages.”

I knew that it was bad, but since we’ve set up with Mailfoundry, the number of spam messages that actually make it to my inbox have dropped to fewer than 10 a week - yes, a week.

I’m not suggesting that Mailfoundry is the answer to spam filtering - running mail through Gmail, using SpamAssassin, and any of the many other tools out there are probably equally good.

What I do think is that as the number of spam increase relative to actual mail, we’re going to see three things happen:

1. spam filtering that happens away from your inbox is going to increase in popularity due to its greater efficiency for the end user (you).
2. spam filtering that aggregates the spam reporting of its userbase is going to become ever more effective - think about something like Gmail or Mailfoundry, where many users are marking messages as spam thereby training the filters for everyone. It just makes sense that this sort of approach is going to always be more effective than what you or I can do invididually by training our own anti-spam system.
3. some form of verified sender and “pay to send” email is going to arise out of the competing proposals. Making spam unprofitable is the only realistic way I can see to shift this trend. The concept has problems, but spammers are spamming to make money. A serious reduction in the profits would go a long way towards reducing the allure of spamming.

The trick is going to be coming up with a solution that retains the utility of email while signifcantly reducing the spam problem in a manner that doesn’t restrict control of who can send email.

I read about OpenDNS a few weeks back and decided to give it a try.

OpenDNS is a company that provides free DNS lookup service for your computer. Since you all have DNS service already - you get it when you buy an internet connection, you might wonder why you’d want to look at OpenDNS.

I wondered the same thing, but after reviewing what they offer, and actually using it, I think they’ve got two really great features that make them worth a look.

The first, and probably most useful is their spelling correction - have you ever typed in a URL incorrectly? www.progressivetech.og for example? OpenDNS will correct that to www.progressivetech.org for you - super useful since we all sometimes forget that we’re not perfect typists, but also nice because at least on small laptop screens, the address bar in my browser isn’t always quite as clear as it could be (I probably do need to get another eye exam too, but that’s besides the point). I haven’t used the service for all that long, so I don’t know how extensively the spell correcting works - for example, typing www.progresivetech.org doesn’t trigger auto-correction, but instead takes you a google-esq search page. Still, most of the URL mistakes I make are in the extension - .co or .cm instead of .com.

The second feature that makes OpenDNS interesting is their anti-phishing protection. From what I can tell, they maintain a database of phishing sites, and block your computer for reaching those sites. If you try to access a site in their anti-phishing database, you get a page that tells you that the site was blocked because of phishing, and gives you the option of submitting a form to contest the phishing block. Again, I don’t know how extensive their database is, partially because I haven’t used the service that long, but also because I don’t think I’ve ever had the pleasure of accidentally hitting a phishing site. Still, even a little protection from phishing is nice.

If you’ve ever thought about finding a different set of DNS servers, I think OpenDNS is worth a look.

about a month ago, I was having a conversation with a colleague where we puzzling over what it would take for YouTube or similar services to be a tool for community organizers.

One of my thoughts was that YouTube needed some organizing related content before it would be of much interest to organizers or members of community organizing groups.

Well, the folks over at Kentuckians for the Commonwealth may have started the ball rolling by posting this video called “Why We Vote” check it out and forward it on:

I’ve been running version 2 of Firefox since it was released, and I’m really less than impressed.

lately, I’ve found that it crashes/freezes A LOT.  I had to kill and restart it 3 times in less than an hour this morning, in each case starting a new session, not visiting any pages from the last session that could have cause the browser to freeze, etc.  Nothing seems to make a difference.

I’m now typing this from Opera - so far the only browser that I can stand given that I won’t use IE, and Firefox keeps crashing.

Anyone else seeing issues with it?  Makes me think about going back a version until the kinks are worked out with version 2.

last week, PTP moved over to a hosted anti-spam solution with Mailfoundry.

The first week, we were very happy with the service - it reduced spam to almost zero messages over pretty much the whole week.

Today has been a different story - in the last two hours, I’ve seen 10 spam messages.  Granted, 10 isn’t a lot given the volume I was getting prior to move to Mailfoundry, but its still more than I want to see.

I know that some days, you’ll be on the positive side of aggregated spam filtering, and other days you’ll be on the negative side, so things will probably go back to a nice low level of spam in the next few hours.  Still, I’d started to hope that the rest of my life would be close to spam free, and even with Mailfoundry, it seems that won’t be the case.

Amanda’s got a question about interesting use of Google Maps by community organizing groups.

I started to respond over there, but think elevating the conversation out of a comment thread is probably worthwhile since I think there are some folks reading here that aren’t reading over there, and I’d really like them (if you’re not sure if you’re included in that them, you are) to weigh in on this.

So this is what little I know on the subject: mapping mashups just haven’t reached into the organizations we know doing anything with GIS.

I think there are a few reasons for that.

1. online mapping tools have only very recently reached a point where you can do interesting things with them.
2. Organizations that do mapping a lot already have a great deal invested in their present toolset and workflow.
3. The advantages of online mapping “mashups” are unclear versus more traditional GIS mapping software.

I’ll expand a bit on each of these points: continue reading…