The UAPA Web Site

1. The UAPA Web Site April 29, 2007

2. History • Dave Harding was primary driver for UAPA’s current web site • chose the site's foundational content manager/blog software, MovableType, and hosting provider • built the site's content templates, into which all content is placed • provided a sizable portion of the site's content over it's history (1184 posts to date) • trained UAPA members on • Pete Lytle’s Grassroots Mgmt System • August 2006: Pat Hadler spearheaded the creation of a web site redesign document.

3. Metrics from Dave Harding

4. Lessons Learned • Dave burned out after 3-5 posts per day for an extended period. • Dave: "If you don't have multiple people posting, burn-out is inevitable. The past has shown that if the web site work is laid on one guy's shoulders...“ • Dave's web site critical success factors: • Exec Cmte buy-in and commitment • UAPA membership buy-in (you need writers for very local stories) • Technical ease of use. • Pete's ideas for getting others to post: • "sign up for a day of the week you will be a poster" or • "featured post one day per week by exec cmte member".

5. Observations • Ease of use have been a barrier to other's updating the site. Updating anything except posting a blog entry requires significant technical knowledge, including specifics about how the current templates are used. Creates the "neck of the funnel" problem • The current site is designed for public consumption, not so much as a social networking capabilities or use internally by UAPA. • Control of content and control of technology is different. • UAPA is a volunteer organization and will be for the foreseeable future. The web site design decisions should take this into consideration: periodic turnover and the "hit-by-a-bus" problem, • The current UAPA site is primarily a blog. • Posting articles on the current site requires knowledge of how to use HTML. • When Dave stopped posting, the site went stale. Why?

6. Hosting History • Start -> 2006: livingdot.com ISP ($12.90/mo) • 2006 -> current: Changed to Pete's home server • Automatic nightly backups • We've made numerous support requests over the past couple years • Several times have requested that livingdot.com restore our database and content from the nightly backup

7. Minutes (April 10, 2007) • Shift focus/emphasis from blog-centric to include static articles, pages and social networking features, such as event calendaring, membership mgmt, CRM, petition signings, RSVPs, surveys, volunteer sign-ups, etc. • Distribute the workload for content creation, editing and posting. A couple benefits would be improved web site buy-in and appreciation from the membership and helping to prevent burn-out/over-commitment. • Assemble a web site working group. UAPA top priorities. Two we all agreed on were: 1) changing the outcome of elections --- effecting votes, and 2) building a sense of community and a sustainable social connections among UA progressives. • Web site pages, db and logic will be split off onto a separate ISP server. To aid in migration and joint development of the new site, Pete built a test Linux server loaded with the UAPA site's blog engine and database.

8. Guiding Principles • Easy to add content and update existing • Address “neck of the funnel” problem • Owners of content manage own content • Self-sufficiency • Secure • Leverage and reuse: the progressive advocacy community has put its efforts behind a few free, open source software projects. There is significant benefit to UAPA leveraging this work. All volunteer organizations have limited resources and technology skills are especially scarce. • Single contact database

9. High-level goals • Readiness for 2008 election cycle • Ease of use • Self-sufficiency. Proof points include blog post with image, creating and managing an event, send an email blast to a subset of contacts. Training video view, then usage proficiency • Ability for content owners to update their own content. • Should the content be organized by UAPA committee?

10. Assessing our Needs • Purpose • Why are we doing this? • What would success look like? • Audience • Who are we trying to engage? How? Why? • General Public, Precinct Captains and Canvassers, Committees, Members • Strategy • What is the basic plan to achieve the goals? • Budget • What are we willing to spend?

11. Value Matrix High GOTV Functions Event Management Canvassing Support Petitions Email Management Value Low Hard To Do Easy To Do Degree of Difficulty

12. Metric Examples • Amount of press coverage • Amount of circulation that the press coverage generates • Number of hits on the web site • Amount of money raised • Number of people registered to become members of UAPA • Number of people commenting on posts • Number of people volunteering or signing petitions

13. Events • Invite • Mailing address, email, allow invitees to invite others, show/hide attendee list, RSVP, show location of attendees • Register • Registration profile, activity history, notifications for each registration, update CRM DB, (yes, no, maybe), invite others, reminders, volunteer signup w/timeslots, • Search • Calendar date, proximity, • Attend • Activity history, rescheduling repeating events, track event attendance, update CRM • Follow-up

14. Event Management Options • Use ProgressOhio's event management system • Use the event management system in Drupal and CiviCRM • Roll your own

15. Email • Email addresses are the gold standard in advocacy groups today. • Effective use of email is very powerful. • Basic Broadcast • Periodic Updates • Action Oriented

16. Current Architecture

17. Target Architecture

18. Web Site Technology • LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP • Content Management: Drupal • Constituent Relationship Mgmt: CiviCRM • All free and open source • Bluehost.com as Internet Service Provider

19. Drupal Framework • Drupal provides an extensible, community support framework which offers stability, a large resource pool, and long term development and support. • Drupal is one of the largest and most successful open source content management systems and its wide adoption among progressive and activist organizations increases its attractiveness. • Currently, a foundation is being created to provide Drupal with organizational backing, legitimacy, and financial support. This is consistent with other large scale open source projects (for example Debian Linux and Apache), and is a positive step forward for the Drupal community to have institutional support. • Started its life in the Dean campaign as DeanSpace • Social networking features • Used by many Progressive advocacy groups • Extensible

20. Timeline

21. CivicRM • CiviCRM is a powerful contact, fundraising and eCRM system that allows you to record and manage information about your various constituents including volunteers, activists, donors, employees, clients, vendors, etc. • Tracks and executes donations, transactions, conversations, events or any type of correspondence with each constituent and store it all in one, easily accessible and manageable source.

22. Advokit • AdvoKit is free software for organizing and running grassroots campaigns. • Combines the power of voter files, membership data and social networking to identify and communicate with supporters. • An online hub for a campaign’s voter registration, voterid, get-out-the-vote, door-to-door canvassing and phone bank operations. • Advokit is a Voter ID/GOTV Web application available for free to any organization doing community organizing. • The Web, with its ability to facilitate efficient collaboration among large numbers of people, enables, for the first time, volunteer recruitment and Voter ID/GOTV to be performed by thousands, or even tens of thousands of individual political supporters. • Friend to friend outreach has been shown to be five to ten times more effective at identifying supporters, per contact, than targeted phone banking, and twice as effective as neighbor to neighbor outreach. • The secret to AdvoKit is its ability to recruit, manage and effectively utilize large numbers of volunteers - all performing high-yield friend to friend outreach within their communities.

23. CiviMember • Tracks and manages memberships. You can: • Configure any number of membership types or levels for one or more organizations and/or chapters of an organization. • Customize membership statuses and rules. • Create customized web pages for self-service membership signup and renewal. • Search and list memberships by date, type, status, contact info including name and address.

24. CiviMail • CiviMail is a robust mass-mailing component which allows you to engage your constituents with personalized email blasts and newsletters. • Target mailings by including or excluding any number of CiviCRM group(s), or previous mailing recipients • Personalize your messages using mail-merge tokens. • Track when recipients open your message. • Track click-throughs. • Manage bounces and unsubscribe requests.

25. CiviContribute • CiviContribute is an online fundraising and donor management component which enables you to track and manage contributions to your organization. It also allows you to quickly and easily create customized web pages to accept online donations. • Define your own contribution types for the different contributions your organization receives: in-kind, cash, and volunteer time, for example. • Add custom fields to track extra information about a contribution or contributor (for example, specific information required by the FEC for campaign contributions). • Create as many different Online Contribution pages as you need - for different campaigns, chapters, etc. • Automatically generate receipts, and track thank-you notes. • Easily import and export contribution data to/from other systems like an accounting package. • Search for contributions by type, amount, date, etc. • Offer a selection of premiums (thank-you gifts) to your contributors. • View past contributions when viewing any contact record.

26. CiviVoter and Canvasser • CiviVoter is a new subsystem, in development, for CiviCRM. Its purpose is to manage a voter file (the kind you get from the your county registrar of voters or your national elections authority). Since CiviCRM is a rich and rapidly improving system for managing contacts, a lot of what you'd want to do with a voter file is already a part of CiviCRM. CiviVoter adds tools for running phone banks (for calling voters) or foot canvasses (going door to door and meeting voters face to face). • Canvasser is a Drupal module, in development, for running phone banks and foot canvasses. It uses CiviVoter to manage the voter file, but uses Drupal modules like Events, CCK or Location to help manage volunteers and to add additional UI.

27. CiviEvent • Event "wizard" to create events and online event information and registration pages. Events can be "public" or "private". • Upcoming "public" events can be published as an iCal formatted feed. • Online event registration forms for both free and paid events. • Events can be copied • Define one or multiple fee levels with "labels" for paid events (e.g. "Student Admission", "Tier One Seating", etc.). • Event location mapping. • Define and track participant statuses (e.g. Registered, Attended, No-show, Cancelled). • Define and assign participant roles (e.g. Attendee, Volunteer, Host, Speaker, etc.). • Customizable email confirmation for online registrations (with optional cc: or bcc: to host). • Option to enforce maximum number of participants - with a customized message to be presented when event is full. • Dashboard to display current event registration status to end-users. • Record an Activity History record for event registration, cancellation (and participation, if tracked). This data is then available in the consolidated contact "view". (Activity History display includes drill-down to Event details.) • Access control for private event registration pages.