Many Friends will know me from my active involvement in the Quaker world. I've been dubbed the "Quaker Blogfather" for my Quaker Ranter (site) blog and my work in pulling together QuakerQuaker (site), an online magazine and blogging community with over five hundred members and 10,000 visitors a month. I am also a frequent Quaker workshop leader and published writer.

I started building websites in 1995 with an award-winning Nonviolence.org hub site and was a social media pioneer when I redesigned its homepage to a blog format three years later. Before going independent as MartinKelley.com in 2006, I served on the staff of Friends General Conference (site) for eight years, where I worked in the FGC Quaker bookstore and built the Quakerfinder, FGC Gathering and youth ministry sites. I also worked for Friends Journal (site) for two years, putting select articles from their Quaker magazine online every month. Since then I've been privileged to work with Quaker organizations such as Friends World Committee for Consultation (site), Friends Council on Education (site) and Haverford Friends Meeting (site). I've done some exciting media work with the Philadelphia Penn Charter School (site) and built personal sites for well known Friends. I bring our testimony of integrity to every business transaction and when I address topics such as search engine optimization or pricing philosophy, I try to do so from a Friends perspective.

Web Design Specialties:

Collected from LinkedIn:

Tom Ferrick, Journalist/Publisher, Phlmetropolis.com

Hired Martin as a Graphic/Web Designer in 2009

Top Qualities: Great Results, Personable, Good Value.

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I'd like to talk today about social media and nonprofits. I've had a couple of interesting projects lately helping nonprofits put together Facebook Pages, LinkedIn Groups and Twitter sites. I think this is an exciting way to reach out to audience members.

Today: Email Lists

Over the last few years we've focused on email lists. We all have big email lists--tens of thousands of users, segmented all sorts of different ways. We send out dozens of emails a week and they end up seeming not spam.

Facebook Pages

A new era is coming with social media. A big change is Facebook Pages. These are geared toward advertisers although you don't need to have a Facebook advertising campaign to use them. In March 2009, Facebook redesigned Pages to act much more like typical user profiles: there's a wall, there's an activity stream, and you can associate different applications with them.

Two things about Pages are exciting. One is the activity stream. People who sign up as "fans" of your Page see what you're putting out in their individual stream. They'll log into Facebook and see that messages like "Jen just got engaged!" or "Joe is having a bad hair day" and that your organization is having some great event coming up this weekend. You're seen in the association of happy news from their friends. It's different from a spammish email because it's coming in with the context of their friends, which is very powerful for publicity.

The other nice thing about Facebook Pages is that they're public. A lot of portions of Facebook aren't but making Pages public means you can point to them from your website or other social media campaigns.

I think Facebook fan groups are going to be the new email list. They are the way we'll be able to reach out to people. I'm very excited about this because there's all sorts of easy multimedia possibilities. You can integrate with Youtube, with Twitter, with podcasts, etc., embedded for fans of your Facebook page to see as it's happening. This is much more exciting than some of the emails that we send out. They are also more interactive because fans can post things on your fan walls so you can have conversations on your sites.

Intimate, immediate, engaging

What the smart nonprofits are going to be doing is a lot of posting in a style that's authentic and intimate and less worried about being slick than we've typically been.

What I would love to see nonprofits doing is to get serious about video. I'm not talking about fancy video, hauling in videographers for six months shooting a three minute slick commercial. Get an inexpensitve video recorder and start doing five minute interviews with the people your organization serves. This will differ depending on your organization's focus. One advantage to simple videos is that you can convince even the busiest of your interviewees to take out a few minutes. You make these videos and post them to Youtube, Vimeo or directly to Facebook video. It doesn't matter where they hosted but you'll have to make sure they're embedded on your Facebook fan page.

Building our Facebook Fan Page

How to direct? You can direct in the emails you're sending out or through other sources. Twitter is a great way of directing people to what's happening: you send out a 140-character "tweet" with an interesting tease about the video you've produced and a link to the Facebook fan page.

The whole goal is to get Facebook fans. Once you're in as a fan, you show up in their activity streams. All the fans get to see the events you're organizing, the videos. If you have extra tickets to an upcoming event, post about it because people will see it immediately. It's a wonderful way to reach people quickly in a way that's not as intrusive as email (I suspect a lot of younger users are actually checking their Facebook homepage more often than their emails!).

The New Nonprofit Outreach

I'd love to see a lot more of these intimate, almost home-made videos going up on Facebook fan pages and using fan pages as a way of connecting with people. We can think of these as the new email list.

I would strongly encourage nonprofits to use all of these these media to reinforce their message and to find new ways to reach their audiences in a much more engaging, intimate way.

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Martin Kelley is a web developer and social media consultant specializing in nonprofits. This post is a loose transcription of his video, Nonprofits and Social Media. This essay is also available on the MartinKelley.com Facebook fan page.

Over on my O'Reilly Media blog, I've written "Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?," a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here's a taste:

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.

This will change company's interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms--status updates, calendars, videos--but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media's evolving role.

I usually describe myself as a "Web Developer," but often the technical aspects of my job are the least valuable service I provide. Above it I would rank what you might call my experience as a web citizen and online publicist. I put my first website together years before upstart sites like "Google" and "Myspace" came along and I published what I later realized was a "blog" the same month the word "weblog" was coined. I help clients connect with their audiences with a mix of print content, podcasts, pictures and videos, whether delivered through the open web or specialized services like Twitter or Facebook. A better job description might be Technology Lifestyle Guru.

So it was neat to be quoted last week in ReadWriteWeb, a top-twenty blog with hundreds of thousands of readers and a syndication deal with the New York Times Technology section. The article was "Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live?" by Sarah Perez. In a section called "When Should You Disconnect?" she wrote:

The fine line between what's worth documenting and what's not is a hard one to define. We immediately assume that the most important, the biggest, the most incredible moments are those that should be recorded. But it's these very moments that are best to experience live, with our full focus. As religious-focused blogger Martin Kelley notes, "there are times where our presence is much more important than any documentation." (He had just surprised himself by reviewing the grainy, blurry photos he felt it necessary to take while watching a bride walk down the aisle. In retrospect, this was exactly the kind of moment that could have gone unrecorded.)

It's a bit ironic that for all of the tech writing I do I was cited for my personal blog, but this blurring of the line between identities is becoming more common with the web. Thanks to Sarah and ReadWriteWeb for the mention!

This comes from a presentation I made a few weeks ago where I addressed public relations staff for Quaker Schools. The main points about media openness and the need for public relations to embrace Web 2.0 are applicable to many scenarios, not just schools.

My Twitter followers will know I've been slightly obsessed by Google's new browser, Chrome, since word leaked that it was going to be released today (Tues, Sept 2). I've been hitting reload on the download site fairly obsessively. A few minutes ago my persistence was rewarded and I'm writing to you all from the new browser (here's the official release announcement).

Web 2.0 tools have changed the boundary lines between techies and program staff in many nonprofits over the past few years. At least, they should have, though I know of various organizations that haven't made the conceptual leap to the new roles.

OLD SCHOOL: Webmaster

Let me explain by talking about my own changing work role. Even a few years ago, I was a paid staff webmaster. You could divide my work into two large categories. The first was techie: I managed server accounts, set up required databases, designed sites. I got into the HTML code, the PHP, the Javascript, CSS, etc.

The other was content: when program-oriented staff had new material they wanted on the website they would email it to me or walk it over. I would put in my work queue, where it might sit for weeks if it wasn't an organizational priority. When it came time to add the material I would boot up Dreamweaver, a relatively expensive program that was only accessible from my laptop and I would put the material onto the website. Needless to say, with a process like this some parts of the website never got very much attention.

At some point I start sneaking in a content management system for frequently-changed pages. This seemed very hackish and not good at first but over time I realized it greatly speeded up my turn-around time for basic text content. But the organizations I worked for still relied on the old model, where staff give the webmaster content to put up.

NEW SCHOOL: Web Developer

Nowadays I'm a web developer, a freelancer with an ever changing list of clients. I typically spend about a month putting together a site based on a content management (like this) or automatic feed system (like I did for Philadelphia's William Penn Charter School). I do a certain amount of training and while I might add a little content for testing purposes, I step back at the end of the process to let the client put the material up themselves. I'm available for questions but I'm surprised about how rarely I'm called.

Here's two examples. Steadyfootsteps is a blog by an American physical therapist in Vietnam. When we started, she didn't even have a digital camera! I gave her advice on cameras, started her on a Flickr account, set up a fairly generic Movable Type blog with some custom design elements and answered all the questions she had along the way. She went to town. She's put tons of pictures and embedded Youtube videos right in posts. Here's a non-techie who has contributed a lot to the web's content!

Penn Charter is a school that was already on Flickr and Youtube but wanted to display the content on their website in an attractive way. I pulled together all the magic of feeds and javascripts to have a media page that showcases the newest material.

They're very different sites, but in neither instance does the client contact me to add content. They rely on easy-to-use Web 2.0 services: no specialized HTML knowledge required.

NEW TOOLS, OLD MODEL

I got an email not so long ago from an old boss who manages a monthly magazine. Her site has been radically rebuilt over the years. Dreamweaver is out and content management is in. They use Drupal, which my friend Thomas T. of the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance tells me won the recent popularity contest among nonprofit techies. This is great, a definite step forward, but what confused me is that my old boss was asking me whether I would be interested in returning to my old job (the successor who oversaw the Drupal upgrade is leaving).

They still have a webmaster? They still want to funnel website material through a single person? Every staffperson there is adept at computers. If a physical therapist can figure out Flickr and Movable Type and Youtube, why can't professional print designers and editors?

My hourly rate ranges from two to five times what she'd be likely to pay, so I turned her down. But I did ask why she wanted a webmaster. Now that they're on Drupal it seems to me that they'd be better off switching from the webmaster to the web developer staffing model: hire me as a freelance consultant to do troubleshooting, staff training and the occassional special project but have the regular fulltime staff do the bulk of the content management. I'd think you'd end up with a site that's more lively and updated and that the cost would about the same, despite my higher hourly rates.

I've heard enough stories of places where secretaries have come out of the shadows to embrace content management and have helped transform websites. I'm the son of a former secretary so I know that they're often the smartest employees at any firm (if you walk into an office looking for the expert on advanced Excel features you'll surely find them sitting right there behind the receptionist desk).


FINALLY: WHAT'S UP WITH DRUPAL?

I'm trying to join the bandwagon and use Drupal for a upcoming site that will have about a dozen editors. But there's no built-in WYSIWYG editor, no little formatting icons. Sure, I myself could easily hand-code the HTML and make it look nice. But I don't want to do that. And it's unrealistic to think I'm going to teach a dozen overworked secretaries how to write in HTML. The interface needs to work more or less like Microsoft Word (as it does in Movable Type, CushyCMS, Google Docs, etc.)

Most Drupal sites I see seems from the outside like they're still old school: staff webmaster through whom most content funnels. Is this right? Because if so, this is really just an institutionalization of the content hack I did six years ago. Can anyone point me to lively, active Drupal sites whose content is being directly added by non-techie office staff? If so, how is it set up?

One element of a general social media consultancy project I've undertaken with Philadelphia's William Penn Charter school is a dynamic media page. They had collected a large number of photos, movies and podcast interviews, but the media page on their site was static and without pictures. I worked with them to come up with media policies and then built a media site that automatically displays the latest Flickr sets and Youtube videos, all laid out attractively with CSS. The Flickr part was complicated by the fact that Flickr doesn't produce feeds of sets and this required access to it's API and fairly extensive Yahoo Pipes manipulation. The original podcasts were just uploaded MP3 files and I worked to collect them together via Odeo (hosting) and Feedburner (feed publishing), which then provides RSS and iTunes support. The actual content for the page is collected together on the Martinkelley.com server and embedded into the Penn Charter media pages via javascript. Other work with Penn Charter includes Google Analytics and Dreamweaver support.

Update: PennCharter redesigned their website in August 2009 and the Media Page is unavailable.

Client Testimonial:

"Martin has worked for our school to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into our communication materials. Martin is highly-personable and his is an expert in current technological approaches. This is a hard match to find in consultants." April 30, 2009

Michael Moulton, Technology Director, William Penn Charter School.
Hired Martin as a IT Consultant in 2007, and hired Martin more than once.
Top qualities: Personable, Expert, High Integrity.

Martin has worked with over two dozen nonprofit organizations, often serving as webmaster and internet evangelist:

A.J. Muste Memorial Institute
American Friends Service Committee
Center on Conscience and War
Cornerstone Fellowship, Galloway NJ
Council of Parishes of Southern New Jersey
Episcopal Peace Fellowship
Fellowship of Reconciliation
Friends Council on Education
Friends General Conference
Friends Institute
Friends Journal
Haverford (PA) Friends Meeting
Haddonfield Foundation
Global Network for Nonviolence
Indymedia.org
International Nanny Association
Jewish Peace Fellowship
Lutheran Peace Fellowship
National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund
Nepal Foundation
New Society Educational Foundation
New Society Publishers
Nonviolence.org
O'Reilly Media
Pax Christi USA
Pendle Hill Conference Center
Pennsylvania Ballet
Philadelphia Nanny Network
Philadelphia Yearly Meeting
Raphael Webscapes, LLC
QuakerQuaker.org
Salem County Special Services School District
Skipping Stones Magazine
Slim Goodbody Productions
Steady Footsteps
Syracuse Cultural Workers
Training for Change
United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO
Urban Land Institute / Philadelphia
Veterans for Peace
War Resisters League
William Penn Charter School
World Game Institute
Young Friends North America

Martin Kelley's work has been featured by top newspapers and tech blogs. He has given workshops and presentations on educational and Web 2.0 themes. He is available for speaking engagements and freelance writing.

Publications/Media

ReadWriteWeb (republished on NYTimes.com), Technology is Great but Are We Forgetting to Live?, January 22, 2009. Quote and citation. Read more.

Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators, published by the O'Reilly Media Shortcuts Series. Commissioned author.

Quakers in the Blogosphere (PDF), Western Friend/Friends Bulletin, February-March 2006, editorial features Quakerquaker.org.

FGConnections, The Witness of Our Lost Twenty-Somethings, Spring 2005. Author.

Friends Journal, "The World Is Hungry for What We've Tasted," October 2006. Author.

Beliefnet.com, "Best Spiritual Blogs," August 2006. Cited QuakerQuaker.org.

Waging War on War, Washington Post, profile of a number of peace groups including Nonviolence.org.

Not Your Father's Antiwar Movement (subscription required), Atlantic Monthly, cited Nonviolence.org.

USAToday, Missiles Aren't the Answer, featured Op-Ed, November 16th, 1998. Author.

Iraqi Crisis Increases Activity on Peace Network, a major New York Times profile of Nonviolence.org, February 21, 1998.

Fellowships

Friends Institute Fellowship, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, for work on Nonviolence.org (1996).

Pickett Endowment for Quaker Leadership, helped support 2005-2006 activities that led to the creation of QuakerQuaker.org.

A multimedia website displaying the very colorful aquarium out near Norristown Pennsylvania. The Flickr photos are cached and display with Lightbox (a Slimbox clone) when clicked. Movies are included both as optimized-for-download WMV files and on a independent Youtube account. View Site.

Martin Kelley is a web designer in the Philadelphia area. Here's the story of his evolution from activist book editor to social media marketer to a magazine editor!

MartinKelley.com, Hammonton NJ 08037
Email: martink@martinkelley.com

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