I’m a day late for an official Earth Day post, but my brain’s still thinking green and it seems that I’m not the only one. Green is in. There’s a ton of buzz around “carbon footprints” - I think about it in my personal life constantly and it’s become an almost daily conversation within our organization.
We’re “greening” our offices, holding ourselves accountable for carbon expenditures by purchasing offsets, and exploring ways to cut back on daily commuting. We’re even poking around with ideas of how to relay the measures we’re taking to our supporters via the website and email messaging in the hopes to inspire more change.
A few weeks ago, The Wilderness Society released a new report on the huge carbon reserves held in forests. The report is great news. It’s exciting stuff! Yet, it’s also a scientific report and hence can be complicated in places, at least for this right-brained creature! So this got me thinking. What could we do to make the contents of this report a bit easier to digest for the average Jane like me? This is a question that I find myself asking on a very regular basis - one of the awesome challenges of working with a lot of brilliant people in a field that’s quite new to me!
I stumbled across an interesting website today that takes a bit of a different spin on this idea of an environmental footprint. It’s a subsite for Patagonia and it visualizes the footprint of several clothing products they sell. Now to be honest, this makes me - a bit of a shopaholic - a little depressed. Perhaps not what we’d like to go for…but the idea is solid - graphically showing the “footprint” makes an impact while keeping things pretty darn simple to understand.
There was also a little buzz about a map of the US carbon footprint that circulated last week, which, aside from the debates about its scientific merit, is pretty sweet to look at and evokes some interesting thoughts/questions/discussions.
This has gotten me thinking, are there things we could do within The Wilderness Society to make our good work stretch further, appeal to a larger audience, engage folks better and longer? Using some of these models to visually tell our story is definitely a potential solution.
There’s so much buzz out there about “social networking” that it’s easy to feel out of touch and overwhelmed. For those of us that are new to the world of online communities, getting familiar doesn’t have to be such a daunting task. You might even find that you’re further along than you thought. Ever posted a photo on Flickr, looked at DIGG, or watched a video on YouTube? If so, you’re not so new after all! If not, have no fear. It’s easy to get started. Interested in trying something new? The RAD Campaign has a list of social networking communities here (and this is just the start of possibilities), along with some tips on engaging in these networks. For those of you who like visuals, here’s a fun map.
If you’re interested in how TWS might use some of these networks to advance our programs and issues, this might also be handy.
The only way to truly understand how these applications might engage our audience is to try them out yourself, so get busy. Give it a shot.
Look me up on Facebook, LinkedIn, DIGG, del.icio.us, Flickr, Plaxo, or twitter.
We all come across one, ten or dozens of interesting websites over the course of a work week. But how do we store and share this found information? We might save the name in our head and forget it. Maybe we hope Google can help us pin it down later. Maybe we add it to our bookmarks file in the browser (so that it becomes entry number 245 in a random list of bookmarks). If we want to let others know about it maybe we send an email with the link (and cc our own address so we can find it later). But what if we leave out someone in the email chain? And who wants another email, anyway? They won’t read it. I don’t have time. I could send it to a bunch of email lists but that includes all kinds of people that don’t want to hear about this. Ah, why bother.
Such is the state of knowledge management when it comes to interesting online information. But a combination of your web browser, your finger clicking the mouse and buttons, and a site like Delicious make storing interesting website addresses and information in a group simple and quick. Using RSS or a quick visit to a site that stores these bookmarks and displays them makes sharing the information painless.
One way to do this is to use a “social bookmarking” tool like Delicious in your daily routine. I have been doing this for a while using an account (it’s free) for The Wilderness Society. I find an interesting site. Click a button at the top of my browser, enter a description, click submit and, voila… saved for all to see on The Wilderness Society’s delicious page, in the “Recently Found” sidebar of ecommarama.org or in an RSS reader.
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Why is it some people just can’t stand MS Outlook? I don’t know. It doesn’t filter spam well. It doesn’t adhere to any real standards for email or calendar sharing. It is a memory hog. Viruses kill the joy like wrinkles in your cotton shirts first thing in the morning. You can’t pull in external accounts (yahoo, gmail, other domains easily). No IMAP. RSS support is there, I guess, but still lousy. And if you’ve ever used a mac you just feel kinda dirty using it.
So last week I decided to abandon Outlook at work and run everything through Gmail. Sure, it means I get no support from tech support at the mothership. But it also means I don’t have to worry about my desktop Outlook failing to connect to a remote exchange server.
We’re still in the testing phase here but things are looking up. With Gmail open I have multiple email addresses that I use for work coming to one inbox. I have IM right there. I have instant access to RSS feeds (which sit in Firefox’s Live Feeds, not Google Reader) and one-click access to Google Calendars and docs. Oh, and nice clean integration with Gmail on the blackberry.
So far. So good…
What is RSS and why should you care? I could chat about this all day but folks at Democracy in Action did instead and did it better than I would have. So you should go take a look at this post on their blog titled…
Why Nonprofit Managers Must Use RSS … And How to Start
Using RSS is (really, I kid you not) quite simple. IE7 and Firefox browsers (use Firefox, use Firefox, use Firefox…) have RSS readers built in that work quite well.
Creating RSS content is sometimes simple. Sometimes not so simple. Blogs make it easy. All posts on ecommarama is automagically turned into RSS content. Our website at wilderness.org does NOT, unfortunately, make it easy.
But if you’re not using RSS to keep up with news, blog posts and content from useful website then you probably should look into it. Might also give you a sense of how we could use it on our own site.
Flickr is a photo sharing site owned by Yahoo but it is not the same as Yahoo Photos.
The Wilderness Society has a Flickr account. You (and anyone else) can see the photos that have been uploaded to it. Well, you can see the photos that have been tagged as being public.
Once uploaded, photos can be organized into sets (view all our current sets now), slideshows of sets are automatically generated (see a slideshow of National Wildlife Refgue System photos), photos can be geotagged and multiple sizes of each photo are generated.
What’s more, communities of interest can be built around photos. Friends, members and others can upload photos and tie them to wilderness or other public lands issues. Others could link to our photos. Might make it easier to manage photo contests or simple requests for folks to share photos. That’s a start.