OpenSourcery

When a person visits your non-profit's website they need to be instantly reassured about a few things:

1. This is the right website for your non-profit organization.
2. The organization is currently active and has it's act together.
3. The website behaves as expected.

In my experience non-profits usually get #1 right just by stating their name and their service region. Keeping your website up-to-date in terms of appearance and fresh content usually takes care of #2. There are many ways a website can fail to behave as expected, automatically making sound is just one way. The Code of Website Silence is the most basic rule The Internet has, and nonprofit organizations frequently violate this rule as they strive get visitors engaged about their charitable cause.

Websites should not make any sound, except in response to a clear choice on the part of the visitor to play the multimedia on your website. If I can hear your website, and I didn't tell it to make a sound, then your website is misbehaving. When music, videos, or sound recordings start playing all of a sudden, it throws your visitor into a panic. They will frantically try to stop the sound from happening. Your website shouldn't beep or make little user-feedback blips, clicks, or fizzles in response to mouse interactions; while these brief sound effects aren't as bad as, say, playing music or recorded speech, they are still an intrusion into the quiet enjoyment your website promises each visitor.

I have been amazed at how many nonprofit website breach The Code of Website Silence, since it's an easy rule to follow and it was established in the early days common web development practice. Just when I think I'll never come across a non-profit website that automatically plays sound, I run across an opera company website, where I am treated to an excerpt of Cosi Fan Tutte; or a hunger relief agency website, where an advocacy video plays each time I return to the homepage; or an animal shelter, where the menu items bark and mew. Thankfully I have yet to encounter a victims of domestic violence assistance website which makes noise, because that would be dangerous (e.g. “Welcome to our website, brave surviver. Be careful not to seek help on this website from your home computer, now, y'hear ?”).

Opera Company: I can tell by the name of your website, and the beautiful images of costumed singers, that you guys really know how to deliver some World-class Opera. I don't need to hear the singing when I visit your page. If I'm an opera fan, I might already be listening to Opera using my computer, or a nearby phonograph, when I visit your website, which would make for some very confusing listening. I might be using your website to look up your phone number so I can order tickets by phone, I don't have time for the ring cycle when I'm trying to ring you up. Your website should remain tacet while I conduct this business. I'll press the play button if I want to hear a sample.

Hunger Relief Agency: I often have several websites open in tabs, and might not even be looking at your page at the moment. I might have decided, “Oh, I'll read about these 10 worthy nonprofits mentioned in this newspaper article about hunger, which I'm still not quite finished reading”, only to be surprised that one or two of those pages started emitting sounds. My response is to frantically close pages until the sound stops. Trust me, more people will look at the video if you let them play it when they are ready to watch it.

Animal Shelter: Great, now my dog is awake and barking at my laptop.

Today OpenSourcery announces the release of Donor Rally, an open source Drupal distribution that nonprofit organizations can use to raise money on the web. This is a developer release, and Drupal geeks can begin the tire-kicking process by downloading the project's source code on GitHub now.

This project has allowed OpenSourcery another chance to follow through on one of our central goals as a company: to share open source software developed for one nonprofit organization with the rest of the nonprofit community. Today, on the day of Donor Rally's birth as a public open source project, I'd like to take a moment a moment to relate the story about how it came to be.

In early 2009 we were contacted by the San Francisco Food Bank to discuss the possibility of attempting something truly radical: using Drupal to move a mission-critical fundraising campaign completely to the web.

The Food From the Bar campaign website was launched in February of 2010. It allowed the San Francisco Food Bank to utilize their social networks, both physical and virtual, to spread the word about their mission. And by June of this year, it had collected over $300,000.00 in web-based donations.

OpenSourcery licenses all of our client projects under the terms of the GPL, and it wasn't long before we started contemplating how this software could be used to benefit other organizations. Then a personal connection at one of our favorite organizations, 826 Seattle, gave us our first chance to spread the Donor Rally love. (Huge thanks to Sarah B., who was instrumental in this leg of the project.) 826 Seattle is a division of a parent organization co-founded by Dave Eggers to give underprivileged youths access to creative writing programs of the sort that had been previously reserved for only the most privileged private academies.

826 Seattle was planning an ambitious, grassroots fundraising campaign called Dance Your Cash Off that invited participants to raise money for the organization on the condition that they would enter a dance marathon hosted by 826. This proved to be a perfect opportunity to re-tool the codebase originally developed for the San Francisco Food Bank to help 826 Seattle bring their efforts to the social web. Because we developed the original codebase using Features, abstracting out functionality unique to the food bank (such as food donation) was a nearly trivial task. After less than 20 hours of labor, we launched DanceYourCashOff.org.

Staff members and fans of 826 Seattle were then able to use the website to raise $17,000, more than 70% of their original fundraising goal. And thanks to Drupal's administration capabilities, they spent only a few hours of staff time to co-ordinate the entire campaign.

Since then, employees of OpenSourcery have spent every Thursday afternoon sitting around a table out in the sun over a company-subsidized pitcher (or 2) of beer, working together to improve the Donor Rally codebase. Which brings us to today's developer release. Donor Rally has now been packaged into a free, general-purpose application to help any nonprofit organize a social fundraising campaign of their own. The theme is a subtheme of Zen, and hasn't yet been given a polish coat. But this should be a good starting place for a developer to use to help out his or her favorite nonprofit. To learn more, visit the Donor Rally project page on OpenSourcery.

Fresh off our Drupal for Nonprofit Decision-makers series with NTEN (the Nonprofit Technology Network), we're proud to announce that OpenSourcery is a Gold Sponsor of the upcoming Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in San Francisco.

The NTC is NTEN's annual technology conference. It brings together over 1,000 nonprofit staff and providers who will attend breakout sessions, participate in workshops, and generally network to their hearts' content. We're huge fans (and members) of NTEN, so it goes without saying that we look forward to participating in the 2009 NTC.

The conference takes place in San Francisco from April 26-28. It's the place to be for nonprofit staff and managers, especially with sessions like these. We're particularly fond of their easy-to-understand schedule and track tags. So visit the site and register today.

Oregon Trout, a nonprofit dedicated to "return[ing] health to every stream in the state, while inviting every student in Oregon to act as stewards of their home waters," has pegged OpenSourcery to develop an interactive, multi-disciplinary Drupal site that will foster and sustain stewardship among young people.

Oregon Trout came to OpenSourcery because they needed a professional development shop capable of rapidly and successfully implementing a feature-rich website. They were also encouraged by our long-standing involvement in the national watershed conservation movement, lead by Sales Engineer Will Illingworth, who has presented on Internet technologies at two National River Rallies, and Project Manager Sean Larkin, who has worked with national and regional watershed conservation organizations since 2001. Sean has presented at the last seven River Rallies.

OpenSourcery is excited to undertake the project, which involves the implementation of many key Drupal functions: in-browser content editing; image upload; a custom workflow to tie together locations, results (data), images, video, and users; Google Maps integration with user added content; 3rd-party video embedding; and multiple search options.

We're humbled and proud to work with an organization of Oregon Trout's caliber. They join a wide range of national, regional, and local conservation organizations that have worked with OpenSourcery – including River Network (OR), the Lower Columbia River Estuary Partnership (OR, WA), RiverSource (NM), and the Molokai Community Service Council (HI).