Social media for social enterprise: How your non-profit can earn revenue with Web 2.0

Social Signal has worked with many different non-profit organizations, of varying size and means, to create a variety of social media sites, of varying scale and ambition. One thing that just about every non-profit client (and most for-profit clients) ask is about the return on investment. How can non-profits assess the financial value of their social media investments? And perhaps even more fundamentally, how can they find the money to pay for sites that can be costly to build, and just as costly to run?

When we work with non-profits to think about the financial model behind social media projects, we encourage them to think not only about the cost of building a site, but the costs of maintaining an active online community -- which can be a much more expensive endeavour than running a conventional site. A social media site thrives on active and ongoing user contribution. That typically demands ongoing infusions of content, skilled animation, participation incentives -- all of which cost money.

The great news is that social media sites offer at least as many opportunities for revenue generation as for spending. Over the years, we've worked with our clients to identify a range of revenue-generation options for social media sites. This is the first in a series of blog posts that will review options for non-profit revenue generation using Web 2.0. Over the coming weeks we'll review:

• Intellectual property
• Advertising
• Fee for service
• Product sales
• Indirect revenue
• Reflected glory marketing
• Danger zones

We'll conclude by helping you think about how to choose between these different options for revenue generation -- and how to consider whether revenue generation is even an appropriate part of your site's business model.

But first, let's talk about why you might want to earn revenue from your social media venture. Here are some of the reasons that our clients have looked at generating revenue on the web:

• To pay for the operating costs of social media (e.g. content creation, moderation)
• To fund a new online initiative
• To create employment opportunities for your clients (e.g. in product fulfillment)
• To fund upgrades to your site
• To pay for a special program, campaign or initiative
• To support your organization's general operating budget
• To create a model for sustainable, socially responsible enterprise

Of course, there are also some reasons to hesitate before looking to earn money from your online community. Bear in mind...

• Revenue-generating sites are perceived differently by users and the public, particularly for non-profits. Think about potential alignment (or conflict) between your organization's mission, and your sources of revenue.
• Tax laws in your jurisdiction may restrict the kinds of revenue a non-profit organization can generate. Be sure to get legal and/or accounting advice about how different revenue models could impact your non-profit status.
• There's no free lunch. Most options for generating online revenue carry a price -- even if it's just the price of making your site that much better and more compelling.

These are reasons to tread carefully, not reasons to foreclose the potential opportunity of revenue generation on your site. If your revenue targets bear a reasonable relationship to your site's development and operating costs, and your revenue model maintains a responsible relationship to your organization's mission, your site's revenue model can provide a great source of financial support for your online operations, and your revenue-generating activities may even enhance the value you provide to users.

If there are specific questions or issues you want us to tackle as we work our way through the different kinds of revenue options listed above, feel free to leave a comment below. And if you want to know when the next installment comes out, subscribe to the RSS feed for our Social Media for Social Enterprise series.

Reflected glory marketing: building brand with Web 2.0

Web marketing 1.0 taught companies one simple principle: brand big. Make your brand visible and consistent by spreading your logo and brand message across your site (ideally with a few demonstrations of your web team’s Flash prowess) and throughout the Internet (through the awesome power of banner ads).

That approach worked great – or at least ok – in the era of content push. But while a great Web 1.0 site was as good as the marketing and web team behind it, a good Web 2.0 site is only as good as the people who contribute to it. And that makes all the difference.

You can have the best web developers in the city and the smartest marketers in the country, but if your customers don’t want to play – if they don’t want to put their words, profiles, voices, photos or videos on your site – you’re going to have a hard time creating a Web 2.0 community.

The trick is creating a site where people want to play. For a few lucky brands – like media companies, Nike or Apple – customers care enough about the product or brand that they’re happy to come and talk about your products. For everybody else, the best way to tap the power of Web 2.0 is to create an online community that has intrinsic value, and let the activities of that community reflect positively on the parent company's brand.

We call this approach reflected glory marketing. A site creates reflected glory for its parent brand when it convenes a conversation about something that customers care passionately about, and nurtures the conversation first and the brand second.

You can see RGM at work in:

• Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. Unilever created the campaign because it recognized that women wanted to challenge media images of beauty, and the conversation that ensued has been gold for the Dove brand.
• ChangeEverything.ca, the site we created for Canada’s largest credit union, Vancity. By giving people a place to write publicly about changes they wanted to make in their own lives, their communities, or the world, Vancity gave birth to a lively community that has earned the company a flood of positive media coverage, all of it aligned with their brand.

If your company wants to create an online community, reflected glory marketing may be the best way to ensure that your community finds its audience – by creating a community that actively engages your customers, and trusting that community to reflect well on your brand.

When you create an online community you are becoming a web application provider: in a sense, you’re in the same business as YouTube, Flickr or Facebook. Just like those companies, you’re offering your customers a chance to find great content or meet new people. Just like those companies, you’re trying to get your customers to create their own content or participate actively on your site. And just like those companies, you need to offer customers a compelling reason to engage.

That compelling reason is your site’s core concept: the problem you’re offering to solve, the specific conversation you’re convening, or the kinds of people customers can meet on your site. Any great RGM community rests on a great concept: something that defines the bounds of the community and makes it different from – and in some way, more valuable than – the YouTubes or Facebooks of the world.

The great challenge in creating an RGM community is identifying the killer concept that will capture your customers’ imagination and make them genuinely excited about participating in a conversation that’s associated with your brand.

Here are five questions that can help you capture the benefits of reflected glory marketing:

• Do your customers care passionately about your brand? If your customers pay for the privilege of wearing your logo, or create independent fan sites to talk about your products, you don’t need RGM. Your customers will be happy (thrilled!) to participate in a brand-centric conversation, so give them that opportunity instead.
• What do your customers (or potential customers) have in common? Are your customers mostly drawn from a single demographic? A single region or town? Do they share a common set of values or a particular problem that brings them to your (virtual) door? That commonality defines the space in which you can create your online community.
• What do your customers love to talk about? Your community needs to generate significant enthusiasm – and active contribution – if it’s going to thrive. So focus on a topic or question that your customers are already talking about. If you don’t know what they’re talking about, use a blog search tool like Technorati to find people who have written about your brand (or about your general type of product or service) and then browse through their blogs to identify the topics they care (and write) about most.
• Which of your customers’ values and interests resonate with your brand or marketing message? Maybe most of your customers are young men, and maybe young men love talking about action movies. Sure, you could create a great site for uploading film clips and talking about different movies – but if your product is deodorant, there’s not a lot of resonance between the site concept and your brand. Unless…your site focuses on really stinky action movies. Now you’re moving in the right direction.
• What can you offer your customers: content, relationships, or a tool? People will discover and return to your site if it offers tangible value. The most frequent kind of value you can offer is content that either educates or entertains. An alternate approach is to give customers a tool that they need on a daily or weekly basis, like a way of organizing online photos or storing their favourite web sites on a particular topic. A third option is to foster relationships that will draw people back to the site – but you still need either great content or useful tools to get them there in the first place.

Once you’ve identified the niche that will bring your customers together in a passionate, consistently growing conversation, you’re ready to start building your site. Here are three rules to bear in mind:

• Brand as lightly as possible. People will be much more likely to participate in a community that feels like an end in itself – or a way of accomplishing something that is personally or socially valuable – than one that feels like one big ad. You definitely want a visible logo, but try to keep it relatively unobtrusive, and skip the massive banner ads promoting your latest product or intiative.
• Separate church and state. Your RGM site is where your customers connect, create and collaborate, while your organization’s primary web site is where your customers find out about (and perhaps buy) your products and services. Since nobody likes to share their feelings in the middle of a shopping mall, you’ll want to keep these sites separate. Don’t push products on your RGM site (though it’s fine to have a link to your main site or a products page) and make it clear that user profiles created on your RGM site will not be shared with your marketing department.
• Explain your motives. Your site needs an “about” page that explains why you’re sponsoring this site. Make it clear you share your customers’ interest in the topic or conversation that is the site’s focus. Be honest about your hope that the site will reflect well on your brand and help you connect with customers. And be clear that you plan to keep sales and marketing efforts in one corner of the site, or off the site altogether.

Every business dreams about having customers who care passionately about their brand. Reflected glory marketing helps to generate that passion: you’re the custodian of a community that has entered your customers’ lives and become home to their social relationships, heartfelt beliefs or creative enthusiasms.

The value of that passion isn’t just realized in clickthroughs or online purchases. It’s realized in every good word those customers say about you – not just on your own site, but across the blogging world and in their real-world communities.

NEW! Download the PDF version of this post to print and share with colleagues or to use in trainings and workshops.

Eight tips for fostering community with content

Organizations have discovered that community-driven web sites can engage supporters, stakeholders and members of the public. The most effective community sites build critical mass quickly -- and compelling content remains the easiest way to attract users. The good news is that a community-based approach gives you a wealth of options for effectively creating, shaping and organizing content.

Invest in content. Spend at least as much time and money on creating content as you do on technology. Remember, nearly every community contributor will begin as a viewer -- so even if you expect your community's content to be mainly user-created, you need to seed the ground with examples of the kind of compelling content you hope they'll offer.

Wag your long tail. The bad news: you probably can't compete head-on with MySpace or Facebook. The good news: you don't need to. Your community has distinct needs and interests; understand your niche and appeal to it. Give your community members the kind of information and material they can't find elsewhere, and they'll keep coming back.

Tear down the wall. Your community doesn't begin and end on your own domain. Bringing in tagged content, interacting with open APIs and aggregating news feeds allow you to move conversations onto and off of your site -- inviting people and content into your community and broadening your reach.

If you don't know, ask. You can probably make a good guess about much of what your users want -- but their guess is probably better. Keep a close eye on three separate indicators of user interests: most viewed pages, most commented-on blog posts, and most linked-to blog posts. Or ask for more direct input via surveys, quick polls and blog posts.

Vive la différence. Read what your users are saying and contributing, and build profiles for various segments that are emerging in your community (or that you'd like to see). Be sure there's something to appeal to each segment. And remember there's a lot of variation in technological skill and comfort.

Promote your users. Share editorial responsibilities -- like selecting front-page stories, moderating comments, and approving blog posts -- with your most loyal users. It increases their commitment and broadens the editorial perspective of your site.

Titles matter. Featured content will help build traffic to your site if you make it easy to find. Search engines like descriptive blog titles: "Top nonprofit podcasts". And people like titles that make a promise ("Raise money while your donors sleep" ) or include numbers ("Ten ways to save the rainforest with e-mail").

Let your hair down. Don't take the site or yourself too seriously; give staff, moderators and users plenty of opportunity to express their personalities. Relaxing your grip allows the community to flourish.

NEW! Download the PDF version of this post to print and share with colleagues or to use in trainings and workshops.

Tag your way to del.icio.us domination

I wrote this almost a year ago, as a relative del.icio.us newbie. Now that I’m a little more experienced, I’ve revised it to include some new tips to choosing effective del.icio.us bookmarks.

Step 1: Lie awake at night, wondering whether there isn’t something that can organize your favourite web links that will work better than your browser’s favourites collection.
Step 2: Lie awake at night, wondering whether you should use Furl or Spurl or del.icio.us.

Step 2a (optional): Lie awake at night, wishing you’d chosen del.icio.us.

Step 3: Lie awake at night, wondering which tags you should use for all the web pages you are now adding to del.icio.us.Once you make it to step 3, here are some things to keep in mind:

1. Be a lemming. Check how other people are tagging the kinds of sites you want to remember. Delicious Linkbacks makes this very easy. Bear in mind that different people will bookmark the same site for different reasons: I might bookmark Terminus 1525 as a great example of a Drupal site, while you are saving it as a link to young Canadian artists.
2. Follow the herd. When in doubt, pick the tag that seems to have the most links — this is the leading tag of the options you’re considering, so hopefully will emerge as the dominant focal point (so you don’t have to check open-source, opensource AND open_source to keep on top of the big world of open source). Del.icio.us deliberately obscures the question of how many links exist under any one tag, but you can get a rough sense by seeing how many pages exist for a given link by adding a number to the tag page you’re looking at, with the syntax http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/25. For example, http://del.icio.us/tag/opensource/75 pulls up a nice healthy-sized page of links, whereas http://del.icio.us/tag/open-source/75 gives you no links at all — demonstrating that opensource is the more popular tag of the two.
3. Avoid camels. Camel case (you know, CamelCase) doesn’t work — it just comes out as all lower case letters, with the words mushed together.
4. Like nature, del.icio.us abhors a vacuum. Blank spaces don’t work either. So if you tag something “camel case” it will show up on the tag page for “camel” and the tag page for “case”.
5. Punctuate with care. Underscores and dashes work ok. But before you create a tag with an underscore or a dash, ask yourself: Does this tag exist in a non-underscored form? For example, I don’t think the world is especially well-served by having three separate forks for open-source, open_source and opensource. Whatever you do, stay away from commas: while there are lots of tag-enabled web services that comma separate their tags, comma-separating your del.icio.us tags will add commas to your tags.
6. Independence is a virtue. If your underscore or dash serves to separate two words, could each of the two words be more useful as independent tags? For example, tagging the Drupal site with the tags “open” and “source” — so that it shows up on separate pages for open and source — is a lot less useful than giving it the opensource tag. But rather than using the tag canadianpolitics, try using two tags: Canada and politics. That way your resource will show up under resources about Canada and about politics.
7. Hang out at crossroads. If you’ve followed the guideline above to use two separate tags rather than smooshing two words into one tag, find the resources you’re interested in by using intersecting tags. For example, even if you use the tags politics, you can easily find all the del.icio.us links on Canadian politics by entering the URL http://del.icio.us/tag/Canada+politics into your browser’s address bar.
8. Co-ordinate your efforts. If you’re part of a professional community or community of practice, consider establishing a common set of standards for how to tag resources you want to share among yourselves. A wiki can help do the job.
9. Tags are written in pencil. Unlike a Tiffany engraving, a del.icio.us tag is not a permanent commitment. If you realize that you’ve used the wrong tag for a particular link, you can alway re-edit that link. Even more useful, del.icio.us will let you rename any of your tags — so if you tagged a bunch of stuff “food” that you later wish you’d tagged as “cooking”, you can re-tag them by visiting http://del.icio.us/settings/[yourdelicioususername]/tags. Bonus tip for Mac users: the Cocoalicious client (which offers another interface for accessing your del.icio.us bookmarks) is a really great tool for renaming tags. If you decide to do a major renovation of your tagging schema, Cocoalicious makes the job much faster and easier — you can just click on any tag to edit it, just the way you’d edit a file name in the finder.
10. On del.icio.us, everyone knows you’re a dog. Or at least, they will know — if you tag a photo of yourself with the word “dog”. That’s right, you’re tagging in public, so think twice before adopting the tag “enemies” for your business competitors, or “prospects” for all the folks you’re pitching.
11. Shh! This one’s for:you. There is one way to be discreet when you’re tagging on del.icio.us, which is to use the “for:” tag. (Thanks to Richard Eriksson for this tip.) If you know a friend or colleague’s del.icio.us username, you can send him or her a recommended link by tagging it “for:username”. So if you wanted to send me a link, for example, you’d tag it “for:awsamuel”.
12. Spread the word. The very best way to refine your del.icio.us tagging practice is to embed yourself in a community of del.icio.us users. If your colleagues, friends and collaborators are fellow del.icio.us-users, that is a powerful incentive to tag your links in a way that makes them discoverable to your community. So start building that community today by encouraging everyone you know to leave browser favorites behind, and get del.icio.us.

NEW! Download the PDF version of this post to print and share with colleagues or to use in trainings and workshops.

Make your nonprofit more effective with RSS aggregation

TechSoup invited me to be part of their online event on Web 2.0 this week. Since I was on call for a discussion about social bookmarking and aggregation, I put together a short overview of how aggregation can help nonprofits, and another on how social bookmarking can help nonprofits.

Here’s my quick take on three crucial ways that nonprofits can use RSS and aggregation to work more effectively:

1. Automatically populate websites with up-to-date content: It’s very expensive to create original content on a regular basis. If you set up a series of RSS feeds on a particular topic that can pump useful content onto your organization’s web site; you’re adding value to that content by selecting a particular combination of topics and sources. For example, an organization that advocates for women with HIV might create an RSS-driven news section on its web site that pulls relevant web resources from del.icio.us, photos from Flickr, and blog posts from Technorati (a bit tricky to set up as a RSS feed, but doable; the trick is to set up the search as a “watchlist”, and then subscribe to the RSS feed for the watchlist.)
2. Create a media monitoring site: You can create a media monitoring tool for internal use only. Something as simple as a Bloglines account can become a clearinghouse for information that helps with your work. That can include RSS feeds for Google or Yahoo news searches on particular search terms; del.icio.us feeds for resources related to your work; or news feeds for major publications in your field.

   I’d figure that most nonprofits would benefit from setting up a media monitoring site with RSS feeds that cover the following:

   • Search of major news feeds (try Google News or Yahoo News) for the name of your organization, acronym (if any), major sub-brands/projects, and/or name of your organization’s President/E.D.
   • Search of major news feeds for keywords on the issues you need to track. Play with the search terms until you get the right volume of news; if you’re an organization that works on a major policy area (e.g. healthcare) you may need to narrow down your search until it gives you a manageable amount of news [e.g. “healthcare policy (Congress or President)”].
   • Search of blogs (using Technorati or Feedster) for your organization and name of your organization’s President/E.D.
   • Search of blogs for your issue keywords.
   • del.icio.us, Furl & Flickr tag pages for your organization’s name and key issue areas. Don’t forget that del.icio.us lets you set up feeds that are narrowed down by using multiple tags (e.g. http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/healthcare+policy)
   • del.icio.us, Furl & blog (Technorati/Feedster) search on your chosen team tag (see below)
   • For a local organization, search feeds that search your issue keywords within the news feeds for all your major local papers and broadcast outlets (you can set up a Bloglines account that includes all your local media, then set up a keyword search that searches all the feeds in your account; then set up a second Bloglines account as your main media monitoring site, and subscribe to the keyword search from the first account).
3. Choose a team tag: Choose a tag that your staff, board and volunteers can use to share information and resources. Encourage your team to use del.icio.us, furl or another social bookmarking service to save web resources they find personally useful or want to share with the team. Encourage bloggers to use that tag on any post they want team members to read. And then make sure your team monitors the tag regularly by visiting your media monitoring site, or adding the RSS feed for the tag (from del.icio.us, Furl and Technorati) to their personal home pages in Google.

 

 

Project management and workflow with Basecamp

How can online collaboration tools like Basecamp support effective project management? That's one of the questions that came up at the values-based project management session I attended at Web of Change, led by Rob Purdie of Important Projects. I wanted to continue the conversation with Rob himself, and promised to blog our own project management workflow at Social Signal so that he could offer his comments and feedback on how to improve our approach.

Let me begin by saying this is very much a work in progress: we're still searching for the Holy Grail of optimized workflow, and feel like the tools we use now -- particularly Basecamp -- don't fully meet our needs. I'll address some of those limitations towards the end of this blog post, but let me begin with an overflow of what we use and how we use it.

Our main tools are:

• Basecamp: for project-related task management and client communications
• OmniPlan: for prospective project planning and gantt charting
• Remember the Milk: for internal task tracking
• iCal: for internal scheduling and time tracking
• Google spreadsheets: for capacity planning and docket review

This blog post will focus on how we use Basecamp, which is our main tool for managing the ongoing work of individual projects. The fact that we use so many other tools speaks to the issues we have with Basecamp -- which is one of the issues I'm particularly keen to hear Rob address. We're also fans of -- though not religious adherents to -- David Allen's Getting Things Done methodology, which has influenced our approach to task management.

Set up

We set up a Basecamp site at the beginning of each client engagement. Some of the best practices on Basecamp set up that we are trying to adopt as our standard include:

• posting a welcome message to Basecamp that explains how to use the site (see VentureMarketing's Basecamp Welcome PDF, and their Basecamp client jumpstart, for another approach)
• presenting an overview of Basecamp at an early client meeting
• when clients e-mail us outside of Basecamp, redirecting them back to the Basecamp site, often by copying-and-pasting their messages into Basecamp

I add all our subcontractors to Basecamp as members of Social Signal, so that we can cover any technical issues without dragging the client into the Drupal abyss. We recognize that our clients don't always benefit from seeing how the sausages are made, and when it gets into some of the intricacies of module development or permissions configuration, we like to keep the excruciating details private so that clients aren't drawn too deeply into technical issues. Unfortunately, Basecamp only allows private communications among members of the same company, so we choose to treat all our subcontractors as members of Social Signal.

Structure and usage

We use messages for communications that require an action or response. This includes:

• communications with clients and client updates
• client requests (bug tracking, questions, etc.)
• internal discussions of how to handle tasks (marking these discussions private so they aren't visible to client)

We use writeboards for communications that are FYI only (though we may use messages to notify each other of a new writeboard).

We use task lists for items that require a "next action" (in GTD terms).

Messages

We have recently refined our use of messages to keep better track of all open loops. We respond to urgent messages as they come in, and at least once a week (and ideally every 2-3 days) we review all the messages in a given project space, and update status. We find that updating message status on a real-time basis is excessively time consuming and leads to duplication of effort.

Our message categories vary a bit by project but mostly reflect major categories of project activities (see screenshot -- some items deleted to protect client privacy).

When we review a message we briefly note our response, action required, or action taken, even if it's already completed, for future reference.

We then edit the title of the original message to note the status of that message:

• QUEUED: the message requires an action or response. An item is only marked as "queued" when it has been added as a specific task or tasks in a to-do list. An item may be marked as "queued" even if we anticipate that it will prove too low-priority to address; however by adding it to our queue it can be reviewed with the client during our next review of outstanding tasks, and prioritized accordingly.
  
• CLOSED/RESOLVED: the message requested or required an action or response that has now been completed. We switched from marking items "resolved" to marking them "closed" because sometimes messages are closed because the team (including the client) decide that no further action is warranted, because the item is low priority or because the issue is not expected to recur. When an item is closed we ALWAYS leave a final comment noting the action or decision that led us to mark the message closed.
• NOTED: the message provided information that is needed by the team or client, but does not require direct action. When an item is noted it is usually placed in a writeboard we expect to refer to at a later date, e.g. a "think about for phase 2" writeboard or an "items to review before launch" writeboard.

Editing our message titles to reflect the status of each message gives us an at-a-glance view of which client issues have been addressed, and which need to be reviewed for action items.

To-dos

We have recently shifted from using fewer, generic to-do lists (which we were trying to standardize across projects) to using a lot more to-do lists, each one corresponding to a set of related tasks. This reflects the GTD notion of grouping tasks by "contexts" or as "projects" consisting of multiple tasks.

By grouping related tasks we ensure that:

• related tasks at the same time, and can therefore consider a solution that might address multiple requirements or bugs at once
• tasks can be ordered in sequence or priority, so that a team member can quickly see which tasks must be completed in which order
• a team member can see who else is working on related tasks
• tasks don't get lost in long (20+ items) lists

When we had fewer categories we found that the very long lists of tasks under each made it hard to identify relationships or priorities; the shorter list of tasks makes this much easier.

We keep our to-do lists organized alphabetically; when we decide to prioritize a specific set of tasks as the next focus for our work, we move that to-do list to the top of the page and mark it "P1: to-do list name" (as in "priority 1").

Writeboards

Writeboards are our long-term storage area and collaboration space. We use writeboards for:

• to-dos that we are considering (often for a future phase) but haven't prioritized/organized yet
• reference information (like a description of our e-mail configuration)
• meeting notes
• personal notes that we might want to share with other members of the team, but which don't require an action from anyone (we may still use messages to notify the rest of the team that we have created a writeboard for them to look at)

Assessment

Our experience with Basecamp has been shaped equally by the technology itself, and our diligence in using it. Of course, these aren't unrelated issues; if Basecamp really met all our needs, so that we could keep all our tasks organized in one place, I suspect we'd be much more consistent in using it.

We find that Basecamp works well for:

• collecting client and team correspondence in one place for future reference
• organizing project tasks, particularly site/softeware development tasks
• keeping track of our "someday" ideas in writeboards
• centralizing our project notes as writeboards

We find that Basecamp works poorly for:

• personal task management; we often transfer our basecamp tasks to Remember the Milk, where we each maintain an integrated personal "to do" list
• sensitive communications with other team members (due to lack of privacy settings)
• project planning (we use OmniPlan, then transfer milestones to Basecamp)

What we like about Basecamp:

• industry standard -- most of our partners and subcontractors, and a few of our clients, have extensive experience with Basecamp
• nice-looking user interface
• client-friendly/intuitive to use
• e-mail notifications include full text of the message
• availability of 3rd party add-ons

What we need that we're not getting from Basecamp:

• deadlines for specific tasks, not just milestones
• priorities for tasks
• ability to assign one task to multiple people (though I recognize that could be a mixed blessing)
• ability to comment on a task
• bug tracking (could be addressed by ability to comment on a task)
• ability to make messages/to dos private when communicating with people outside our own company

Nice-to-haves would include:

• spreadsheets (as well as writeboards)
• personal calendaring
• ability to store project templates so we don't have to recreate all our categories from scratch each time
• option to automatically alphabetize categories
• option to keep message categories and to-do lists in sync (i.e. creating a new to-do list would create a new message category with the same name)
• tags in addition to categories
• better RSS output and/or an iGoogle widget that lets us interact with our tasks from our Google homepages (as Remember the Milk does)

Basecamp alternatives

One of my favorite compulsive activities these days is looking into Basecamp alternatives. So far my conclusion has been -- to paraphrase Winston Churchill -- that Basecamp is the worst possible project management tool, except for all the others. Here are some of the "others" I have looked into, or mean to look into; I'll try to come back to this post and annotate the list with the reasons we haven't moved to any of these:

goplan

Lighthouse

Unfuddle -- intriguing because it includes subversion and bug tracking

Clocking IT -- a free basecamp alternative, but as far as I can see no built-in messaging. Time tracking, though.

Michael Silberman of EchoDitto put me onto Central Desktop as a somewhat pricier Basecamp alternative that includes many of our concerns about Basecamp. We're trying it out, and it looks promising, although I'm a bit disappointed in the look and feel (it's not nearly as pretty as Basecamp) and daunted by the prospect of moving our projects over. However the prospect of being able to assign deadlines to tasks (imagine that!!) probably outweighs every other issue.

Brian Benzinger's roundup of project management tools for developers provides quick takes on some of the above, plus many more.

Other Resources

In the course of my obsessing over Basecamp and project management workflow I've found a number of useful blog posts on other people's use of Basecamp and Basecamp alternatives. For some reason many of the blog posts I've come across are by friends in the non-profit tech sector; I'm not sure if that's because of Google's freaky habit of customizing search results, or because non-profit techies are somehow more obsessed with workflow (comments, anyone?) Here are some of the posts I've found helpful.

Sonny Cloward mapped his workflow, which hinges on Basecamp, Backpack and Mozilla Calendar.

Jon Stahl provided an overview of collaboration practices at ONE/Northwest, which includes using Basecamp. 

Ruby Sinreich blogged her thoughts on Basecamp plus GTD, which includes creating virtual "people" who represent different contexts, so she can assign her tasks to contexts.

LifeDev reports on using Basecamp with GTD, in this case using to-do LISTS as contexts.

Patrick Rhone blogs his GTD-with-Basecamp workflow. 

Next steps

I'm going to take Central Desktop for a serious spin. I'm going to continue praying to the 37Signals gods for true Basecamp-Backpack integration, or to the Remember the Milk guys for Basecamp-RTM integration as an answer to their "how can we start charging for RTM?" quest. I'm going to try out Omni's forthcoming OmniFocus task manager.

And I'm going to resist the temptation to engineer an in-house Drupal solution to our project management wishlist. After all, our needs aren't THAT exotic, and there are an awful lot of people chasing the same vision. I'm trusting that one of them will get us much closer to a solution before long.

Meanwhile, I'm eager to hear from Rob Purdie and others about how we can improve our current Basecamp usage. In particular I'm curious to hear:

• how people use Basecamp as part of GTD
• best practices for to-do list structures and message categories
• best practices for managing privacy and disclosure among staff, clients and contractors
• advice on how to manage personal to-do lists within/alongside Basecamp
• how people cope with Basecamp's lack of task due dates
• experiences with Basecamp alternatives
• advice on encouraging good Basecamp habits among staff, clients and contractors

And if you've blogged your own project management approach or workflow, please let me know by sending an e-mail to alex [at] socialsignal [dot] com, or posting a comment here.