Platitudinous

Goals

As we plan some updates to shophousingworks.com and housingworks.org i’ve spent a lot of time in the last month thinking about goals.  

What do we as a non-profit really want people to do on our website.  There are obvious answers such as making a donation, or buying something but is that all?  For some people those things arent really options, and it doesnt mean they arent interested in the organization.

Luckly Housing Works, unlike many non-profits, has a lot of ways for people to get involved, you can sign up to volunteer, rsvp to an upcoming event, request a truck to come to your house to pick up furniture, and on and on.  There are lots of ways to participate already but I think we can do even more.

I loaded up a new commenting engine called Disq.us today and it really got me thinking about what else we can track.  In addition to normal commenting features it has a simple “thumbs up or down” feature which is nice, and hopefully its a step toward people getting more involved in the writing we do.  I think to do it really well though you need to change the tone to be more conversational, ask questions.  One of my favorite things about tumblr is that it only allows people to comment on a post if the last character is a ?  How great is that?  it really focuses in on what comments should be, answers ideas, suggestions.  They think that you have to give your readers a reason to write something, not just post an empty text box.  

The two areas I think we can do more in are advocacy, and events.  For events I really want to add an “I’m attending” button to the pages…  maybe ours is a little more playful and it says “Count me in”

For advocacy we experimented with the idea of doing a “letter blast” which could be interesting but I’m more interested in twitter adn facebook protests.  Asking people to RT messages we post calling out specific @policitians and seeing the word spread.

I think even just a refinement of each of our existing goals and adding these two new ones puts us in a really good place, and hopefully really makes people feel like theres so much more they can do for Housing Works than just giving us their money.

Support

I spent the better part of the day today trying to set up our first run at real organized customer support, and it was harder than I expected it to be get it all cleaned up but now that it is I think it opens up the door to some pretty big things…

I’d like to see our shophw staff starting to use this to manage customer issues, not to mention membership, and even thrift donations. Customer support, internals and external is the foundation of what we are hoping to do in the next year and hopefully with Ankur and Nydia on my side this can be the platform to get this done.

Happy customers = repeat customers

Recovering Textiles: NYC & HW

So this morning I went with Erica to the New York Department of Sanitation for a meeting about a possible partnership in what they are calling the “Textile recovery program”

I had no idea what to expect, I have thought we’d be the only ones there but we arrived 20 minutes early and there was already more than 15 people there.  Not a lot but all the big players were there, both goodwill and salvation army had their entourages, the dude from the salvation army even came in full garb.

The meeting was short, they gave an overview of the proposal and then opened it up for questions.  The director was rather snarking, often responding to questions with “You should really have read the packet” But after some back and forth I think we walked away with a pretty clear idea of what was entailed in the program.

The city is looking for a dedicated non-profit partner to service a series of donation bins put in apartment building throughout the city.  The program would start with about 50 locations which they hope to grow rapidly year after year.  They get calls when bins are full and dispatch our guys to pick up.

The process of deciding who the city will partner with is based on a “Bid” put in by the non-profit.  The bid isnt an amount you pay the city, its a certain dollar amount that we would have to set aside per ton of clothing we collect.  That money is ours to keep but we can only spend it on “hard” assets to support and expand the program.  They are saying the amount of the bid is the only factor that matters and that the highest bid from all the qualifying organizations wins the contract which is for as little as ten years and as much as 25 years.

Whew..  so we’re talking about a lot of clothing here, a lot of man power, and potentially a lot of money.  Not to mention all the promotion we get from this program.  A direct relationship with the city and increasing our donations dropoff locations 500% overnight.  

But what exactly will come out of these bins, we get to design them and help decide where they go so hopefully that helps control what kinds of stuff ends up in them, but is anyone going to drop their gucci handbag in a “bin” no matter how nice it looks?

Its tough to say, in the right locations these could be a gold mine…

in the wrong ones you got nothing but a dead baby bin.

What do you think we should do?

Online Campaigns

Thanks to ray for posting our first real google adwords campaign for design on a dime and for logging a goal to track the results…

Look at this, really mother fucking marketing…

Aww yea!

Turning a corner

Maybe its just the high of an incredibly productive week talking but I feel like we’ve turned a corner at work.  For the first time in a while I feel like we are on top of the development work that needs to be done and we can really start thinking about what we want to do, and what we should do.

With the membership benefits up and running and the homepage now displaying a series of profiles the light at the end of the tunnel is approaching.  I am excited to have some space to really start looking at our analytics, and our google ads and putting some polish on this ever rushed site.  

The next few months will bring some pretty amazing things…

Eviting the world

So we finalized our evite for the Design on a Dime benefit today, scheduled to go out the world first thing in the morning, check it out

http://www.housingworks.org/newsletter/evite/design-on-a-dime-2010/

Earlier in the week our web developer realized we never fully copied over all of our registered users on shophousingworks.com to salesforce.com and onto the newsletter lists.  So he wrote a script to finish it and now we are at almost 50,000 addresses getting this evite first thing tomorrow.

We also sent out almost 6,000 printed invites all over the city.

The goal is to sell 500 hundred tickets, more than 150 of which are already sold.. so that only 350 more tickets so thats just over .5% response rate.   

Seems like if we dont, the problem isnt get the world out, its the product itself.

Maybe $150 is always going to be to high for most?, maybe what we need is not more saturation but better targeting, more personal asks.  1000 phone calls would probably more effective than 50,000 emails for something like this.