March 13, 2012

Getting Ready for Timeline

Not too long ago, those of us working on National Priorities Project’s facebook page got an alert letting us know we should prepare to switch to the Timeline layout. Since we always want to make the best opportunity out of any change, we called a meeting to make sure we hit the ground running with the best Timeline page possible. In order to help out staff members that may not work as closely with Facebook, I put together a presentation on what exactly will be changing and what we should do.

We don't have a cover picture yet, but when we do it's going to be awesome.

The first change people notice is the cover picture. We’re still creating ours, but all that space above where it says National Priorities Project will be a large picture. While this is a great opportunity for nonprofits to create a memorable visual impression of their work, it is important to note Facebook’s guidelines for cover picture content.

Pay attention to this! Screenshot from the Facebook Help Center, click on the picture to check it out in depth.

Other nonprofits that have been switching to timeline have been making some very cool cover pictures. As a federal budget research organization, National Priorities Project’s work isn’t quite as visually dynamic as a tiger pouncing on a pumpkin. However, we have some beautiful charts from our spiffy new website that I’d like to work into the design, I’ll certainly put them up here when it’s done.

Lowest calorie app menu in history.

Also on the top of the page are our app icons, which are basically the different pages that used to be in the toolbar on the left hand side of the page. When looking at the preview, they’re not too exciting, but have great potential with some work. Each app can have a customized image as its icon, and you can have up to twelve total. Photos will always be the first one displayed, and then you can pick three to be the default apps displayed on the top of the page. The rest of the apps are accessible through the drop down menu on the right, and all of those get icons as well. Different types of organizations will want to feature different apps, or even the same organization may feature different apps depending on what they’re currently working on. We’re going to try out a few different configurations to see if we get noticeably different responses, I’ll be sure to post about the results of that experiment.

I think one of the coolest features of the new layout is the timeline itself. The timeline gives organizations the opportunity to go back in time and feature their milestones in a very public way. This is a great opportunity to show off achievements and display what makes your organization unique and valuable, I’m definitely looking forward to putting this together. I like to think of it as putting together a museum exhibit, the best ones I’ve seen combine descriptive text with great visuals, and give context about what was going on in the world that a given organization was responding to. National Priorities Project has an incredibly inspiring history, I love that it will be easier for the world to get a look at it.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Work

Tagged as , , , , ,

February 10, 2012

On Gremlins and Saving Time on Twitter

As much as I enjoy scheduling tweets for National Priorities Project, it’s very easy to spend too much time on that and I do have a lot of other things to do. I’ve been working on various ways to cut down on the time spent Tweeting, and I’ve found a tool that I think will help me out a lot.

While shopping around for a new Twitter scheduler, I found Gremln. I was looking through its features, and when I saw “recurring scheduled messages,” I knew I had to sign up and try it out. The recurring message feature is even better than I thought it would be, the scheduling system is actually very sophisticated. Instead of a blunt tool just repeating a tweet at the same time every day, you can design Tweet schedules as complicated as you want. Depending on how often you want your messages to go out, your schedule options can be daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly.

So many options!

For the past two days, I’ve been putting together a schedule of recurring tweets in Gremln. This is not meant to replace tweeting each day about current events, but to reduce the time I spend tweeting about NPP’s resources that are always relevant. For example, starting now I never have to worry about scheduling a tweet about our Database Tutorial series. I’ll send out the new ones each Wednesday when they come out, but each week at a different time a tweet will be sent with a link to their archive. It’s taking a good time investment up front to create a schedule of Tweets that is both evergreen and varied, but I think it’s definitely worth it. Since I’m only in the office half the day, anything I can do to increase efficiency is worth a shot.

2 Comments

Filed under Work

Tagged as , ,

January 20, 2012

Getting Better at Delegating

Now that I’ve been at National Priorities Project for a little while, one thing I am getting better at is having well-organized intern projects, both for interns actually assigned to outreach and for other interns that just need something to do for an hour. Since most interns have been gone for winter break, I’ve been using this time to create a library of projects that people can pull from, even if I’m not around. This is pretty important since our interns are awesome and finish work in much less time than we think it’ll take, it’s hard keeping the busy!

I find making the “Budget Word of the Day” posts very enjoyable, but it’s definitely a prime candidate for outsourcing. Most of the hard work has already been done, since we use definitions from the Federal Budget 101 glossary. The fun part is in finding a real world example of the term that does a good job of illustrating what it means. Some of the wonkier terms can be difficult to find a good example of; Chairman’s Mark took a bit of digging where Sequestration did not.

This project is actually completed for the moment, one of the interns finished the list of terms we have right now. Today was actually a perfect test of this project, we had someone in who needed something to do, and it took all of two minutes to get him started on this. The only hiccup was that he doesn’t have Gmail so he couldn’t actually put things directly into the master list… However, a little copying and pasting fixes that! We’ll have many more glossary terms to turn into words of the day after our book comes out and the glossary gets updated.

Another project I’m putting together is to have interns go through news websites and find the journalists that would be interested in what NPP has to offer.  I like maintaining and targeting our journalist lists, but it is extremely time consuming. Instead of just piling everyone into one big list and spamming a ton of reporters each time we have something, we try to put together small, well-focused lists of people that are most likely to find our information useful. The search function in our journalist contact info service is great, but there’s nothing like having someone go through and read a few articles by someone to get a feel for their interests.

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what the interns turn up, this will be a great way to make sure our information is going to the people who will find it most useful.  The other staff members have been sending me names of journalists they think we should add to our press release lists, now I’ve asked them to send me names of websites they want the interns to search. I think this will be a big help in getting our information out in the world!

This is pretty much the goal here.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Work

Tagged as , , ,

November 9, 2011

Tumblin

A few weeks ago, I had set up a Tumblr account for National Priorities Project. I started it partly because I thought it was a good place to keep pictures that just didn’t seem to fit on our Facebook page, and partly because I had never actually had a Tumblr account and wanted to check it out. Now that I’ve started using it, I like the idea of having a more casual side to NPP’s internet presence. We deal with a lot of very serious federal budget stuff, but it’s a team full of really fun people and this seems like a more appropriate place for that to come through.

Example: The donation envelope that caught on fire during our fundraising event. Funny, but not quite ready for prime time.

I’ve recently come across a more practical use for our Tumblr account beyond cute pictures of life around the NPP office. At NPP we believe that the federal budget process is supposed to be open and participatory, and that people informed on how the process works will be more able to hold their representatives accountable. While creating a People’s Guide to the Federal Budget, one of my co-workers had put together a really great glossary of federal budget terms, and I was thinking about how to get more people to see it.  I decided to incorporate a “word of the day” into our daily Twitter output, but the 140 character limit doesn’t cut it for many of the terms. Our Tumblr seemed like a good place to keep these definitions, as we can link to them and include images without cluttering up our actual blog.

When we get to sequestration I'm using a picture of a guillotine.

I hope that our new word of the day series is able to help people dissect budget news more effectively, it’s difficult to tell what a politician is saying when you get lost in the vocabulary around budgeting. Learning the difference between mandatory and discretionary spending might not seem like the most exciting way to spend an evening, but it’s important stuff. The federal budget is made up of our money, we need to keep track of it!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Work

Tagged as , , ,

October 7, 2011

Boooooks

About a month and a half ago, I began working as a part-time bookseller at the Odyssey Bookshop. Since then, I’ve sold many textbooks and am now beginning to sell normal books! The staff at the Odyssey contributes to a blog, (which you can find here) and tonight I wrote my first post. The post was basically to introduce myself, and to give people a little idea of who I am and what I read. I’ve spared you the introduction on this blog, but I thought I’d post the body of it here as well!

As far as reading goes, it was my favorite pastime when I was a kid, and I’ve been a huge book lover ever since. I love a good novel, but mostly tend to read non-fiction. If a gun were pointed at my head and I had to pick three favorite books, they would be Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, Silence by John Cage, and The Rest is Noise by Alex Ross. 

Invisible Cities is built around imagined conversations between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, with Marco’s descriptions of fantastic cities in the Khan’s empire in between their discussions. It’s a great book to keep in your bag to read in little spurts while you’re waiting for the bus or the doctor simply because the divisions are so short, most of the cities are only a page or two. Each description of a city plays with something that we take for granted, for example the fact that cities stay in one place and that we breathe air and not dirt. The world Invisible Cities lives in has no restrictions from the laws of physics, and it’s just so much fun imagining life in these mysterious places.

Seriously. Go buy it.

Silence is a collection of writings by John Cage, a still-controversial 20th century composer. You can walk into any university music department in the country and start an argument about his music and philosophies, with some people passionately defending his value and some saying that his music is not music at all. My tent has been firmly staked in the pro-John Cage camp ever since I read this book, and would love to discuss him with you any time! I firmly believe that people should read this book with an open mind before making up their mind either way about him and his music. I would go so far as to say that it is almost essential for appreciating his music, as he was as just as much a composer as a philosopher.
This book changed how I listen to the world, and the people that I’ve recommended it to have reported back the same result. This is definitely something to be read slowly, digested, and then read again, as some of the pieces can be hard to follow structurally if you’re trying to read too fast. The most charming part of this book is definitely the little personal stories thrown in on different pages as footnotes. Whether they’re about zen teachings and thoughtful or about wild mushroom hunting and hilarious, they’re all wonderful and give beautiful little impressions of Cage’s personality.

This is what causes most of those arguments.

Alex Ross is the classical music critic for The New Yorker, and is a fabulous music writer. Whether it’s his reviews and essays or either of his two books, his writing just makes you need to go listen to whatever he’s talking about. Reading The Rest is Noise introduced me to more great music than I could possibly list, and his second book Listen to This has had the same effect. The Rest is Noise takes you through the music of the 20th century in a way that is completely accessible for everybody, not just those with a degree in music history or theory.

The book gives insight into some of the most interesting stories from the last century of classical music, and puts it into context with the general history of each time period. One of the most gripping sections of the book deals with World War II, telling the stories both of Richard Strauss, who led the Reich Music Chamber for the Nazis to protect Jewish family members, and Olivier Messiaen, who wrote his most famous piece from inside a German prisoner of war camp. The entire book is wonderful, but I have to admit a special soft spot for the chapter on minimalism.  I would suggest this book to anyone, and especially to music and history lovers.

The best picture in The Rest is Noise: John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen in a drawing of a plane.

I have to thank Lidia Chang, Eduardo Leandro, and Miriam K. Whaples respectively for bringing these books into my life. If you ever read them I hope they enrich your life as much as they have mine!

Leave a Comment

Filed under Fun, Work

September 28, 2011

Pretending to be the data visualization intern

First off, if you happen to be a budding computer artist and need some great resume fodder, National Priorities Project is looking for data visualization interns. Talk to me. However, until you send us your resume and portfolio, I’m doing my best to make it look like we have a design team.

About two weeks ago, I read this piece about the impact that clear, convincing graphs have on people that are not inclined to listen to what you’re saying. This confirmed something we had been talking about around the office, that we needed to start producing more images to share our message. Since then, whenever there’s an opportunity to create a relevant visual to share through Twitter and Facebook, I try to whip something up.

I’ve always been a devoted fan of MS Paint, but since the computers at work run on Linux that’s not a possibility. This has been a great learning opportunity for me though, as it’s forced me out of my comfort zone and into a new level of technical ability. The program I’ve started using is GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP. I had never used anything more complicated than Paint, so it took me a few minutes to figure out what was going on with all the layers, but once I understood that everything got a lot easier.

The first few images I created took a while, but now that I know my way around the software better and have logos and watermarks saved, creating a new image for NPP doesn’t take long at all. If I had to create things from scratch each time that might not be the case, but usually I’m just taking an image we already have and editing it so it can be posted online. Most of what I’ve edited falls into two categories, pre-existing graphs from NPP publications or data maps generated by the Federal Priorities Database. Graphs are pretty easy because they’re already clear and understandable. The one thing I have to do is throw our logo and url on there, our goal is to have people share them with friends that may not know about NPP, so we want to make sure that it’s obvious who created the image.

The Fall of the House of Usher 2: Corporate Tax Rates

Data maps are a little more fun because I have to decide what information to present. If you haven’t visited the database, it takes data available from the U.S. Census Bureau and other government agencies, and puts it all in easy-to-see map form. When you’re looking at a dataset, the information for each state pops up when you put your cursor over it. Unfortunately, this cannot be embedded on Facebook, so I have to make a static image and pick a few states to highlight. While the database includes both social indicators (poverty level, unemployment, etc.) and government expenditures (Pell Grants, Head Start, etc.), since NPP focuses on federal budget issues I’ve only done expenditure images so far. The first few I just showed the states with the highest and lowest expenditures, but the other day I made a “top five” image that had some pretty crazy numbers.

Chump change.

This afternoon I remembered that we’re going to start releasing regular videos very soon, and that our YouTube account hadn’t been touched in a while. I had some time left at the end of the day that wasn’t quite enough to really get started on my next project, so I decided to update our YouTube channel. The user photo for the NationalPriorities account was a random screenshot from one of our videos, so we definitely at least needed to get our logo in there. After doing that, I decided to make sure we had something for the “branding space” banner we can have at the top. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out, and am definitely looking forward to creating some great videos to upload to our spiffy new channel!

I very much regret not taking a "before" screenshot. Just trust me that this is way prettier.

Leave a Comment

Filed under Work

Tagged as , , , , ,

August 29, 2011

AdWords- Part 2

Before I get to my second round of thoughts about Google AdWords, I have to record my favorite accomplishment so far this summer. There’s been a story going around lately about a school in Pennsylvania that has started using sheep to cut their grass because of budget cuts. While not the heaviest-hitting budget cut story out there, it’s certainly memorable because of the absurdity. Rachel Maddow had picked up on it on Twitter, and someone sent her blog a video of the “austerity sheep.” In the news article about the situation, I had noticed that they were the funniest possible breed of sheep, which got NPP a retweet from the @MaddowBlog account.

#WINNING

And now back to your regularly scheduled AdWords.

One of the coolest things about Google AdWords is how helpful the program is for improving your ads. The system picks up on what ads are getting the best response from people and puts them out more than the others. I’ve got five ads in each ad group, and at the end of each week I look at how they’ve performed so I can tweak them. AdWords also finds ways that you can improve performance by adjusting other settings, which is great. Because NPP uses AdWords on a Google for Nonprofits grant, we have a limit for how much we can bid for each keyword so I don’t use the bidding suggestions much. However, the keyword suggestions are always helpful. A huge part of using AdWords well is simply figuring out what people are searching for, and who better to know that than Google? It can also estimate how many clicks per day adding a keyword will get you based on past searches, which is pretty neat.

What DOES happen next, Google?

The latest ad group that I’ve started is one directing people to our coverage of the whole debt ceiling debacle. (Side note- I do have to give Congress credit for our best AdWords days so far, we got 729 clicks August 1st and 2nd. Thanks guys!) I took over the AdWords account well after the deal had gone through, but there are still a lot of people out there that are wondering what just happened. Because it’s just getting off the ground, the debt deal ad group doesn’t have as many keywords as the ones that have been in the system for several months. I’ve gotten some great suggestions from AdWords, but I wanted to be more proactive about adding good keywords that people are searching for. What I did was use Google suggested searches to see what people had looked for previously. I typed “debt ceiling” or “debt deal” into the search bar on the normal homepage, and let Google tell me what other terms people had put in after it. After putting the top searches in as keywords, I went through the alphabet to see what else people were looking for. This was extremely helpful, and I added a lot of great keywords that I wouldn’t have thought of myself this way.

B is for "brace for spending cuts."

After trying it out for a few weeks, I’m definitely having fun with AdWords. While it’s not the main way people find us, it’s bringing us some respectable traffic now and it would be silly not to use the advertising we’re getting for free! I’ve also learned some very interesting things in the process, such as the fact that there are a LOT of people out there that can’t spell Eric Cantor’s name right.

I wonder if they also think that he's an Erik...

 

Leave a Comment

Filed under Work

Tagged as , , , , ,