2008 Bridge ConferenceWe just heard about an online scavenger hunt for the 2008 Bridge Conference, hosted by AFP and DMAW:

Play the Find the Clues to Your Success Game and win a Free Registration to the 2008 Bridge Conference!

Play the Find the Clues to Your Success contest by searching the Bridge Conference education tracks on the 2008 Bridge Conference website and identifying the 6 gold highlighted words that make up the clues to your success. Put the words together in the correct order to create the Secret Phrase and email the phrase to mystery@bridgeconf.org. The first entry submitted with the correct phrase will win a free, fully transferable registration to the 2008 Bridge Conference.

If you don't win the contest, don't worry: if you're a member of NTEN, you get to register at the lowest rate for the conference! Contact me to find out how to register with your NTEN rate.

Flickr Photo: joiseyshowaaI am slightly metrics obsessed. One of the first things I do each morning is skim through our database and check on open rates, registration rates, etc. I have been known to spend entire Wednesday evenings down the rabbit hole of Google Analytics (or at least until Top Chef comes on).

One thing I know from my obsessive stints is that it's easy to lose the forest for the trees -- to forget which metrics matter, in which contexts. It's easy to obsess over our overall bounce rate, when in fact, some pages probably should bounce, but we should REALLY worry about the bounce rate on certain pages.

The fact is, your site serves many goals, and you should frame your analysis of web metrics that way, too. Worry less about overall numbers, and more about what each section or page of your site is supposed to accomplish, and what metrics will help you measure that.

Flickr Photo: Michelle BreaA couple of weeks ago, I wrote about some new strategies I'm using to keep track of the nineteen million things I'm either supposed to know or do something about. It's been working really well for me, but I realized that my netvibes page was missing hard tech news.

At the same time, we've been thinking about starting a book club here at NTEN and I wondered what good old fashioned books folks were reading about social media.

I asked for recommendations for both on Twitter yesterday and got a great list of ideas that several people asked me to compile. Here it is:

You've been asking about recordings of NTC sessions. Now, we finally have some! You can thank Corey Pudhorodsky, of 501c3cast, for his work in creating podcasts of the following popular NTC sessions:

• Website Usability: Simple Steps for Making Your Site Perform Better, Mark Rovner, Sea Change Strategies

• We Need a New Web Site: Doing Your Redesign Right, Rob Rose, CrownPeak

• Intro to Google AdWords, Frederick Vallaeys, Google

501c3cast is a podcast for the nonprofit sector. You can check out some of their other shows and resources here.

Flickr Photo: RobjtakThe leadership gap: wherever I go in the nonprofit world these days, the leadership gap comes up in conversation. Lots of research by lots of smart people points in one direction -- nonprofit leaders are leaving the sector at an increasing rate, and their staff don't feel ready or aren't interested in replacing them. (Get the specifics from Bridgespan's "Leadership Deficit" report and "Ready to Lead" from the Meyer Foundation, Idealist and Compasspoint.)

At the same time, I've heard rumbling in the NTEN universe from those of you who play another role in your organizations: technology leadership. CIOs and CTOs -- and those who do the work without the official title -- are all talking about a vacuum of technology leadership at their organizations. But if you go, who will follow?

If that's how you've been feeling, you're not imagining things.

It had been awhile since I'd played with Google Earth, but Jim Prosser at Direct Relief International gave me a good reason this morning: DRI has used GE to map the official health clinics and hospitals in Myanmar.

When you first access their KML overlay, it looks like Myanmar is stuffed with health clinics, but zoom in a bit, particularly on the hard-hit Irrawaddy Delta region, and you'll get some small idea of the miles and miles an injured person might have to traverse to find adequate medical attention.

Direct Relief International's COO, Annie Maxwell, has written about the project on the Google Earth blog. For more on the aftermath of the cyclone, check out Beth Kanter's list of ways you can help -- even if it's just by writing a blog post.

I attended a free webinar last week on the new book, Groundswell: Winning in World Transformed by Technologies, presented by its authors, Josh Bernoff and Charlene Li of Forrester Research.

The book is geared toward the for-profit sector, but the strategies can be adopted by nonprofits in terms of building community, engaging activists, and even raising financial support around a cause or organization online.

I want to provide some of those applications and takeaways from the session:

Flickr Photo: alexander drachmannWe started the week off here at NTEN with a Q&A session with Chris Brogan, who answered questions from NTEN members about engaging people through social media. In case you missed it, you can see a transcript of the questions in the materials section (and if you're a member of NTEN, you can get the recording) here.

Chris commented a few times on how impressed he was by the questions you all asked him -- demonstrating yet again that, in many ways, the nonprofit sector is a leader in harnessing the power of social media to engage and energize communities and individuals online.

Here is a summary of take-aways from the session:

Flickr Photo: OzymanI gave a little talk on social media today to folks who publish print media (both non- and for profit). My big takeaway is that, nonprofit or for profit, we're all facing the same dilemmas regarding social media: we're nervous about the same issues of openness, and we all have trouble explaining it to our bosses.

Another big takeaway was that everyone has the same email marketing questions. How much should we send? Should we buy names? What kind of segmenting should we do?

The session after mine was presented by Alex Williams of eROI, and focused on emarketing tactics. Along the way, he shared some interesting stats (for those of you who are into that sort of thing):

1. In an average week, people receive 274 personal emails and 304 business emails.
2. More than one quarter of all email is marketing email.
3. 46% of Internet users say that email is not targeted enough to them.
4. Open rates for segmented campaigns are as much as 20% higher on average for the first 30 days.

All of this data, and the bulk of Alex's presentation, echoed many of the ideas and concepts we've been discussing in recent reports, at the NTC, and around the community for a while now.

Maybe we're not as far behind on the tech adoption curve as we thought?