This weekend, I was reminded of my love for and hate of Flash.

Our business partner, Higher Logic, produced a great looking Flash animation that shows the benefits of using an online community.  It is really well designed (see it at: http://hug.higherlogic.com/HUG/HUG/Home/Default.aspx), and more importantly, the progressive thinkers at Higher Logic made the animation, including the source file, available to all partners.  I love this idea of building and then sharing assets for everyone's benefit.

Now, here's my problem.  As we design and deploy new association sites, we are specifically staying away from using Flash.  My rationale is simple (if not, perhaps a little flawed); I don't want to use Flash in a dominant area of any site since Flash does not play on iPhones.  And with the number of iPhone users growing at such a frantic clip, I don't want to have a growing number of users unable to view a key part of one of our sites. 

So when will Apple fix this obvious (and only real) shortcoming of the iPhone? Only Steve Jobs knows that answer... and we all know how hard getting secrets out of him is.

So for now, I will continue to stay away from using Flash but always appreciate a well executed animation (by viewing it on my PC).

Brett

We are in the process of launching a new collaboration center for a confederation of non-profit organizations. The key ingredient to this new collaboration center is that it must be easy to navigate (yet have tons of features and functionality).

So, knowing that site navigation and the site's information architecture are keys to success, we have spent a fair amount of time building wireframes of the site, making sure that we get the site well organized and easy to navigate BEFORE moving to the "pretty pictures" and "rounded corners" design phase.  In the past, we would have used PowerPoint to construct these wireframes.  But while I love PowerPoint for most things, this is a task it is not specifically designed for.  So a month ago, I did a quick search for "wireframe tools" and to my delight, found that there is a whole set of providers of this type of functionality.

Long story short, I began using iPlotz (http://iplotz.com/) and I am here to tell you... it is absolutely worth the $15 a month service fee.  I won't bore you with all the product details (since their demo does a good job of that), but I will tell you that this solution has saved me a ton of aggravation using tools not built for this activity, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has to design a site and collaborate with others online about the design.

Brett

Had the great pleasure of meeting with many AMC owners and we engaged in a variety of discussions about the best practices we all use to help drive growth within our clients and our companies.

Here were a few that stood out:

• Lock in domain names for your clients on Facebook, LinkedIN and Twitter even if your client is not currently on these platforms.
• Sometimes, as AMCs, we need to fire a client.  Not profitable. Lost of harmony between us and the client.  Many reasons.  But the big idea is that we need to be in control of our company's future.

Staff Development

• Encourage employees to take leadership positions in volunteer orgs
• Support the CAE process
• Create a reading group that educates eomployees on a specific association related topic
• Participate in ASAE's Circle Club
• Develop cross functional teams to create greater efficiencies
• Have team members understand how actions of one staff member affects other team members

Client Management

• Give as much personal attention as possible
• Use a Report Card process to report all activities and outcomes you've produced for your association client.  Tie all strategic initiatives to this Report Card
  

Operations

• Renegotiate contracts with suppliers (like leases/rent) and show savings to client

We chose Plone several years ago as our standard Content Management System for our association clients.  I can honestly say that we have never regretted that decision.

For us, Plone has been a virtual Swiss Army knife... capable of serving up small, content-only association sites or handling complex workflows and permissioning requirements often found within larger associations.

I put a presentation together that highlighted the versatility we have found within Plone.  Please contact me if you have any specific questions.

Click here to view the presentation on Slideshare.

One of the challenges we face with the launch of OPENAssociations is how to integrate multiple applications into one solution. At the heart of this challenge is the need to make all of these applications look the same so that the end user (an association member) never knows that they are moving from one application to another.

Traditionally we do this by creating a design and then "skinning" each application to conform to the design. Usually we do a pretty good job of this and only the more observant folks can notice when they are moving from one app to another. 

But we have been looking for a better way to attack this problem.  A way that will provide a seamless user experience and less "skinning" effort.  While still early in its development, we like what we see in the new Deliverance project from the Plone community (and Nate Aune at Jazkarta).

To learn more, take a look at this presentation at a recent Plone conference:

I have always been a fan of the folks at Idealware.org.

They consistently produce high quality reports that are very helpful when trying to make sense of the overwhelming number of technologies that non-profits and associations use.

In there most recent newsletter, they included a simple overview of "Comparing Options for Collaboration Software".  It's this type of report that is perfect to share with volunteer leaders of associations to help educate them to the various options that exist.

Idealware... keep up the good work!

Brett

This is my first blog post on our new TCAG website and I am proud to say that we are using several Plone add-on modules to run this blog.  It features Quills and Scrawl.

I point this out because I think it is important.  Since we run most of our client sites on Plone, it is important that we too try to use it whenever and wherever we can.  This way we can figure out what works, what doesn't and what needs improvement.  All of which can be used to improve our client's experience.

So here goes...

Brett