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:

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.

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.

On a Friday my wife Julie and older son attended a rally to save a favorite church in Malaga, Gloucester County, New Jersey threatened with closure by the Diocese of Camden. By Sunday we launched Savestmarys.net. It was a weekend where I was already swamped with deadlines, so it's standard Movable Type but with all the tricks of mashed-up Web 2.0 sites to let Julie pour content in: Flickr, Youtube and Google Calendars.

Web Designer, Content Editor, SEO Specialist

See also: Print Resume, LinkedIn profile.

SKILLS

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Consulting: Fifteen years of experience in nonprofit world. Much of this work consists of educating staff and leadership on effective use of online communication technologies. Current focus is on analytics, integrating social media, and helping nonprofits adopt content management systems.

Web Development: Proficiency in HTML, XHTML, PHP, CSS, PERL (CGI), MYSQL, Adobe Dreamweaver, Six Apart's Movable Type, Drupal, WordPress, t and related content management systems, along with Search Engine Optimization techniques and analytic tracking methods. Experience with various shopping cart backends for E-Commerce applications. Comfortable with Quark Xpress, Adobe Pagemaker, Adobe Photoshop, Joomla, and Javascript. Close follower of Web 2.0 developments.

Editing: Experience as Acquiring Editor for nonprofit publishing house; proficient at negotiations, copy editing, marketing.

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

MartinKelley.com, 364 North Street, Hammonton NJ 08037
Email: martink@martinkelley.com
Phone: (609) 365-0123
Instant Messaging: martinjkelley (Google, Yahoo, Skype, AOL, Live/MSN)

Profiles Twitter Facebook LinkedIn Google

Sites MartinKelley QuakerQuaker QuakerRanter Tumblr

Media Flickr Del.icio.us Vimeo Youtube

Free Initial Consultation:

Initial phone/email consultations are free: I'll work with you to figure just what kind of website you want and what sort of features you need. I take this information and pull it into a proposal with price quotes. I only start charging after we agree on the general outlines. I cover my pricing philosophy in some detail over on my design blog.

If you need an on-site visit, you can set up a consulting house call. If you subsequently decide to use my services, half of this charge will be credited toward your project deposit.

Rates

Projects are billed at $75/hour.

House Calls

Need help with your website? Want to meet before committing to a project?

Local House Calls: $100 first hour, $75/hr additional.
Philly Metro House Calls: $150 first hour, $75/hr additional.
My Kitchen Table: Just the $75/hr.

Local is South Jersey within about a half hour's drive of Hammonton, NJ. Both rates: one hour minimum. Additional time charged by the half hour.

Typical costs:

• Basic blog set-up: $600
• Analysis of a commercial site's SEO: $1200
• Small business or nonprofit web redesign: $2000
• Customized social media networking or news aggregator site: $3500

Client Services:

Existing clients can log-in to their accounts to check invoices and make payments from the Client Login page. You can also pay directly by credit card via Paypal.

Martin has given workshops and panel presentations on tech issues and on renewal movements in the Religious Society of Friends.

Biographies

TECH:
Martin Kelley is a Philadelphia area web designer who has been building online communities since 1995. An early adopter of user-created media, he was blogging in 1997 and picks up every social media service. In 2008 O'Reilly Media published "Web 2.0 Mashups and Niche Aggregators," his first published tech publication. A professional web developer and consultant, he builds sites and writes about tech issues on MartinKelley.com.

QUAKER:
Martin Kelley is a South Jersey Friend with a love out of outreach and ministry and a passion for looking afresh at Friends' testimonies, language and practices. Before becoming an independent web developer, Martin Kelley worked for Friends General Conference and Friends Journal. He is the publisher of QuakerQuaker.org, a community site for the Convergent Friends movement. He thinks the Quaker message is more relevant than ever but worries we're not being bold enough to gather George Fox's and Isaiah's "great people."

Past Workshops and Presentations

Associate Teacher, Pendle Hill, for a weekend workshop "Convergent Friends and the New Monastics." Pendle Hill Conference Center Wallingford, PA. May 2010.

Speaker, "An Introduction to Convergent Friends." Salem Quarter Meeting. Greenwich, NJ. September 13, 2009.

Facilitator, "Friends Testimonies, What Canst Thou Say?" Two-part session. Young Friends Summer Gathering (Philadelphia Yearly Meeting). Camp Onas, Ottsville, PA. August 25, 2009.

Co-leader, "Reclaiming the Power of Primitive Quakerism." Weekend workshop. Ben Lomond Friends Center. Ben Lomond, California. February 2009.

Presenter, "Friends Schools and Web 2.0" (video). Panel discussion for Friends Council on Education. At Germantown Friends School, Philadelphia, PA. January 2009.

Presenter, Religion and Technology Teachers Peer Network (Friends Council on Education). December 2007. Center City Philadelphia, PA. Also available as Google Slideshow Presentation

Teacher, "Quakerism 101". four-session course for Moorestown Friends Meeting. Moorestown NJ. October -November 8, 2006.

Co-faciliator, On Fire: Renewing Quakerism Through a Covergence of Friends. Interest group, FGC Gathering. July 2006.

Invited Guest, Quakerism classes, William Penn Charter School. East Falls, Philadelphia PA. April 2006.

Leader, Food for Fire weekend workshop, New York Yearly Meeting's Powell House. Old Chatham, NY. February 2006.

Co-leader, Strangers to the Covenant (five sessions), workshop for high-school Friends, FGC Gathering. July 2005.

Teacher, Quakerism 101 (six sessions), Medford Friends Meeting. Medford, NJ. September-November, 2004.

Teacher, "Living in the Light" Quakerism 101 course (one session), Central Philadelphia Friends Meeting. Center City Philadelphia, PA. March 2003.

Contact

Email: martink@martinkelley.com
Phone: (609) 365-0123

See also: Publications and Media List

It's not necessary to develop your own Web 2.0 software infrastructure to create an independent Web 2.0-powered community online. It's far simpler to set a standard for your community to use on exisiting networks and then to use Yahoo Pipes to pull it together.

A few weeks ago, Yahoo unveiled a new mash-up service called Pipes. It's sophisticated AJAX-powered graphical interface lets you pull in XML feeds, combine them, filter them and output the result as a customized RSS feed. I've recently used it to create specialized events pages for my blog aggregator. In this series of posts I'll show you how it's done. Each post will be one part of the puzzle.

Whenever I talk with fellow web designers, the issue of "SEO" invariably comes up. That's techie slang for "search engine optimization," of course, that black science of making sure Google lists your site higher than your competitors. Over the years a small army of shady characters have tried to game the search engine results.

Just Give Google the Content It Loves

In theory it's easy to make Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other big search engines happy: give potential visitors site they'll want to visit. Forget the tricks and spend your time putting together an amazing site. Search engines like text, so write, write, write.

I'm looking to join a web design house, which means I've been interviewing with slick web developers lately and whenever they ask me the best way to increase SEO for their clients, I tell them to start a blog. They look at me like I'm an idiot but it's absolutely true: two blog posts a week will end up being over 100 pages of pure content. All of these sites full of Flash animation get you nowhere with Google.

Just a note that any kind of text-rich web system can achieve many of the same results--blogs are just the easiest way yet to get content on your site.

Presenting What You Already Have: Blog your Water Cooler Chat

When I talk to people about starting a corporate blog they quickly start telling me how much work it will be. Bah and Humbug--your company's life is probably already filled with bloggable material!

I used to work in a bookstore where I did most of the customer service, much of it by email. About two or three times a week I'd get a particularly intriguing query and would spend a little time researching an answer (mostly by looking through the indexes of our books and searching the arcane sites of our niche). This research didn't always pan out to a book sale, but it marked our bookstore as a place to get answers and gave us a competitive advantage over Amazon and its ilk. Each of my email answers could have easily been reformatted to become a blog post. By the end of a year, I'm sure the volume coming from these obscure searches would be quite high (see yesterday's Long Tail Strategy post on the HitTail blog for an account of how attention to search engine's one-hit-wonders helped achieve a widespread keyword dominance).

Whenever something new happens that breaks you out of your routine, think about whether it's bloggable. At the bookstore, a new book would come in and we'd spend ten minutes talking about it. That conversation reached half-a-dozen people at most. In that same ten minutes we could have written up a blog post saying much the same thing.

Last Spring a controversial article appeared in the local newspaper that tangentially involved my employer. That morning my workmates gathered together in the reception area for the better part of an hour trading opinions and wisecracks. After about five minutes of this, I slipped back to my office and wrote my opinions and wisecracks down into my blog. I hit post and came back to the reception area--to find my workmates still blathering on, natch. My post reached hundreds and took no more time out of the work day than the reception pontifications.

Humans are social animals. We're always blogging. It's just that most of the time we're doing it verbally around the water cooler with three other people. Learn to type it in and you've got yourself a high-volume blog that will add invaluable content and SEO magic to your site.

Mix up your content: Tag Your Site

Lastly, a point to webmasters: it usually pays to think about ways to re-package your content. My most recently experience of this was tagifying my personal blog over at "QuakerRanter.org." Every time I post there a Movable Type plugin fishes out the key words in the article and lists them afterwards as tags. These tags are all linked in such a way that results send the term through the site's search engine to give back an on-the-fly index page of all the posts where I've used that term.

Tags are like categories except they pick up everything we talk about (when we use them aggressively at least, and especially when we automate them). We don't necessarily know the categories that our potential audience might be searching for and tagifying our sites increases our keyword outreach exponentially. My personal blog has 239 entries but 3,860 pages according to Google. It's the parsed out and re-packaged content that accounts for all of this extra volume. This doesn't increase traffic by that nearly that much, but last month about 30% of my Google visits came from these tag indexes. More on the mechanics of this on my post about the tagging.

RSS feeds are the lingua franca of the modern internet, the glue that binds together the hundreds of services that make up "Web 2.0." The term stands for "Really Simple Syndication" and can be thought of as a machine-code table of contents to a website. An RSS feed for a blog will typically list the last dozen-or-so articles, with the title, date, summary and content all laid out in special fields. Once you have a website's RSS feed you can syndicate, or re-publish, its contents by email, RSS reader or as a sidebar on another website. This post will show you a ridiculously easy way to "roll your own" RSS feed without having to worry about your website's content platform.

Over on the New York Times, an article about a new Nickolodeon-created website for parents