Head to Portland, Oregon and prepare to be amazed at the number of residents using a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation. The Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA) is a nonprofit membership organization working to promote bicycling and improve bicycling conditions in Oregon and SW Washington. The BTA creates healthy, sustainable communities by making bicycling safer, more convenient and more accessible. Using a combination of advocacy and education, the BTA works to make citizens voices heard on behalf of bicycling and gives cyclists the tools, confidence and knowledge they need to be safe and accepted on the road.
BTA was faced with a very common challenge, a database in FileMaker Pro that was only current for memberships and donations. Much of their important engagement history data lived outside of the FileMaker database. BTA used Mandate Mail for email outreach and while it provided them with full-featured blast email functionality, it was not linked to the database in any way. List segmentation took place outside of FileMaker Pro and subscriber responses (new sign-ups, bounces and unsubscribes) only came back into the database through time-consuming exports/imports. Aside from membership & donations, relationship tracking for events like the annual auction, volunteer tracking, and key advocacy efforts lived in Excel spreadsheets and email, and not in the primary database. Like many of our clients who come to us with a FileMaker Pro database, not all staff had access to the database resulting in a pattern of staff not totally trusting the data in the database and setting up their own systems for managing information.
Our database team customized a powerful Salesforce.com database to help BTA manage their 5000+ members, hundreds of community volunteers, individual gifts, corporate sponsorships, contract activities and government and foundation grants. Multiple staff now have access to the database so relationship history with each contact and organization is accurate and easy to maintain. We also set up Vertical Response email broadcasting that integrates with their Salesforce.com database, automatically managing new sign-ups, bounces, and unsubscribes.
]]>In 2008, the Bullitt Foundation launched an ambitious new strategic plan through which it will focus on urban issues, business and technology, ecosystem services and planning, and civic engagement, with the bulk of its activity centered in and around metropolitan Anchorage, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, and Boise.
ONE/Northwest helped Bullitt design and execute a beautiful, functional new website centered around iconic images of its new focus. Combined with Plone's legendary usability, Bullitt now has a web presence that captures its essence, impresses first-time visitors, and speeds grantseekers on their way to action.
]]>The Cascadia Center for Sustainable Design and Construction will be the greenest, most energy efficient commercial building in the world, firmly planting Seattle at the forefront of the green building movement.
This six-story, 50,000 square-foot building will be located at the intersection of Capitol Hill and the Central District in Seattle, Washington, and is being built by the Bullitt Foundation.
The Bullitt Foundation needed a beautiful, easy-to-maintain website to showcase this high-profile building as it proceeds through the design and construction process. The site needed to be clean, modern and above all, simple for the project team to update as new information becomes available throughout the project lifecycle.
We worked with Taylor Bachrach of Bachrach Communications to create a simple, elegant site that prominently features the building's architectural pre-visualizations and news updates. A simple resource library makes it easy for the project team to share their planning and research documents with the world. And, the Plone CMS makes the entire site easy to manage and search engine optimized.
]]>Dogwood had a solid Plone site that we built for them back in 2005. Since then, their work has grown and evolved, and their organization has become much more sophisticated about how it communicates and organizes online.
Dogwood wanted an updated site that would have a much more polished visual design. In addition, Plone had evolved a great deal, and Dogwood wanted to be able to harness all of the new capabilities of Plone 3.
Dogwood's vision was ambitious, so we worked through a short "discovery process" designed to help the Dogwood team clarify their objectives and translate them into clear requirements we could use to build a new site. This investment in lightweight, up-front planning paid huge dividends as we moved forward, by allowing us to accurately estimate the costs and to ensure that we were building a system that met Dogwood's communications and organizing needs.
With a plan in hand, we moved forward on design. Our frequent collaborator Taylor Bachrach of Bachrach Communications worked up a design, which we brought to life with some interactive javascript.
The centerpiece of the site is the new "storybox" user interface that allows Dogwood staff to surface up to four stories as interactive, image-rich "panels" on the homepage and each major section of the site. This helps visitors quickly find and engage with what's hot. It's easy for Dogwood staff to quickly create and promote new items across a diverse array of medium-term campaigns and long-term issues.
Dogwood Initiative staff are active bloggers, and the new design surfaces their blog content more prominently, and makes it easy to browse the blogs of various Dogwood staff.
Dogwood was able to take advantage of Plone 3's flexible new portlets system to build and manage many chunks of sidebar content, which change based on which section of the site you're in.
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This action alert is one of the main campaign tools the Coalition uses to engage with the almost 30,000 strong membership base.
]]>ONE/Northwest has been providing support to the EPC since 2004, hosting a coalition website, a handful of internal coalition discussion lists, and managing an action alert email list that ranged from 15,000 – 20,000 email addresses.
In 2008, ONE/Northwest did a major redesign and upgrade of the EPC website, and helped forge a partnership between EPC and Sightline Institute to create RSS news feeds customized for each priority issue. These feeds provide current, valuable content to organizers, lobbyists, activists, legislators and development staff both before and throughout the session.
On the database side, ONE/Northwest played a key role in outreach and follow-up to all coalition organizations to ensure submission of as many activist lists as possible, as well as performing quality control on the data submitted.
ONE/Northwest is also in the process of implementing a Salesforce database which will allow the EPC to track activist involvement in aggregate as well as by organization.
Finally, there is a plan in place for organizations who cannot submit activist data to encourage their members to opt-in to the EPC activist list.
During the 2008 legislative session, the EPC activist list consisted of 17,000 email addresses. For the 2009 legislation session, EPC will be communicating with more than 30,000 activists.
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