In 2008 Charlotte began helping charities, first in the Caribbean and then in New York, to gain exposure and raise funds through various multimedia techniques. She combines video, editing and photography to represent and promote charitable activity in a moving, accessible way that perfectly suits modern digital delivery methods.

These experiences have led to Cora Media establishing teams in London and the UK, within non-profit communication.

Yara is a trained Jungle Survival expert and has worked on numerous projects in South-East Asia. A regular campaigner for global human rights and environmental issues, Yara also leads workshops at universities on topics such as the tar sands and deforestation. She brings a unique perspective to campaigns and a wealth of international experience to Cora Media’s not-for-profit division. 

Cora Media combine media tools to creatively tell a charity’s story: its purpose, past triumphs and aims, as well as emphasising how urgently it needs further awareness and funding.

They are pioneers of digital technology for media delivery formats such as podcasts and webcasting, and using these methods their campaigns have been able to reach international audiences.

Some of Cora Media’s projects include:

*The BBC World Service Trust
*Street Games (The Co-operative)
*The Jason Roberts Foundation
*The Chris Samba Foundation
*REACH Grenada
*Reach and Teach (Midnight Madness)
*Don’t Lose the Music (RNID)
*Race for Life (Funny Women)
*The Liverpool Legends charity activity.

With more competition and – arguably – shorter attention spans, it’s essential to be heard in innovative new ways. Hearing about Charlotte and Yara’s experiences with different charities, and their advice on how best to deploy video digitally, should prove extremely helpful for a charity striving to make work that stands out.

Join us on the 22nd of November at 6:30 pm at The Hospital Club in Covent Garden. As usual the drinks and food are on Ultraspeed – just bring yourself and your questions (and your Movember Mustaches). Please RSVP as spaces are limited to our LinkedIn group. 

Well, number 1: I am a nerd, so tough it out, and number 2: speed is important and yes, some people might have sexier lives but give me a new online tool and I am officially the happiest girl in the world. So when Google released Page Speed from Google Labs and into my bumbling hands, I was very occupied with testing everything in sight for days. Much to the amusement of my web developer of course who ended up with an itemised list of need-to-haves and nice-to-haves (we’re friends, honest).

Now there are numerous development-based reasons for a website loading slowly. However, during particularly ‘load-heavy’ periods a site often slows down quite substantially. Excellent coding can create a robust site that will withstand heavy traffic surges and ensure you maximize revenue in the boom, BUT a solid infrastructure behind it is equally important.

Like Yin & Yang, having both can enable a ‘perfect’ (or close to) web experience for each web user. Working at a managed hosting company but in marketing I get to see how both contribute. Why is this important?

Well according to the Kissmetrics:

47% of consumers expect a web page to load in 2 seconds or less.
40% abandon a website that takes more than 30 seconds to load.
44% of online shoppers will tell their friends about a bad experience online.

*For the full infographic please visit the Kissmetrics blog.

So basically, not only are people impatient, but they will then go on to tell their friends how irritating your website is because it was *gasp* “like SO long to go through checkout!?”

This shock-horror reaction costs you money, and this is where investing initially on proper infrastructure and coding really pays off.

So a marketer’s checklist:

1. Do you know the numbers? Have you shared them with your team?

There’s a reason for the saying: ‘Poor planning leads to piss poor performance’ (pardon mon francais) – basically, you need to make sure you have an idea of what kind of load to expect: are you launching a campaign? When are you emailing people? Do you want them to access loads of video? If your systems engineer and website developer know this then they can plan and develop accordingly!

2. Start from the back:

Is the server environment flexible? Can you scale up and down quickly and in the event of an emergency is it quickly recoverable?
Is it secure? Does it follow all the data protection and privacy laws needed to ensure your clients can transact safely and securely?

3. Get a coding ninja:

Love these guys. I come in and say I want it purple and sparkly and they build me something purple and sparkly (unfortunately). So make sure that they’re up to par with what you need and they don’t code things to be large and unwieldy. Steer clear of Flash champions (that is so 90′s) – it’s all about the HTML5 people!

4. Test, test, test: Google Page Speed performance testing is awesome for the front end.

Additionally, make sure your engineers are load testing the environment (and this needs to occur WELL in advance of any super-important campaign that’s going to make you loads of money – because it will make you nothing if it fails testing and can’t be launched in time).

Happy Testing! I know it’s not the most scintillating part of campaign management but it’s the part that will save you from launching an amazing creative campaign that bombs due to operational problems.

As for the Sexy part of ‘Fast and Sexy Online Campaigns’. Well that’s all on you isn’t it? I’ve put the word sexy in a blog post. That’s all the sexy sorted for the month…

That is why Pam is my friend: because we both love stories most of all.

We read stories written in all kinds of styles but have a soft spot for sci-fi and magic realism. For imaginative stories, is how I usually put it.

Once upon a time the book was the snazziest communication technology used to tell stories, and authors crafted them on paper. They invented and deconstructed ways of writing stories, and they themselves were authors, working in the age of the book, so they were writers.

But now, means Pam, we are in the digital age – and our equivalents of those old magic realists (such as Borges – Pam’s and lots of folks’ favourite) are not necessarily writers. Nowadays they are either developers or they work with developers.

Lots of people are out there in the real world are developing gamestories for the Internet world. On the one hand there are small, influential companies like FailBetter, who create independent text-y games and advise mainstream gaming Cyclops’ like BioWare (who are the second hand). Then on the third hand there are a hundred thousand bedroom developers coming up with God knows what, and on the fourth hand are interactive fiction writers like Emily Short.

Kindles and other eReaders are very popular, but they are only the beginning of a whole host of rich-texture storybooks that will surely emerge, with animated GIFs as illustrations, like photographs out of Harry Potter (which like Star Trek is a story that was so popular it came true).

"Cinemagraphs" by Keving Burg and Jamie Beck

So I would recommend anyone who takes even a passing interest in stories, technology, people, or interesting things to investigate stories being independently developed because you will find stories told in ways you have not seen before.

>You might like to also try:
>Varytale / Undum/

Dreaming Methods
>There is a world of this out there.

You can’t confidently say that this new ‘department’ will be as mindful of the company’s concerns as you are. Can they do a better job? Really? How do you monitor them effectively? What are they doing when you can’t see them?

I realise this is heading into OCD territory, but for a perfectionist like me life often goes that way. Relinquishing control of anything can be a drawn out, controversial process. Even so, there are many reasons to outsource.

Economies of scale, for example.

It’s more efficient for a dedicated team to perform a duty for multiple clients; they have a high level of expertise (hopefully) in that one area you may not have been able to develop internally. You can also offload activities that aren’t essential to your core actions, thereby, freeing you up to focus on the essentials and driving your main business forward.

So how do we reconcile these concerns with the benefits? There are numerous ways of managing outsourcing and a method that works for one firm may not suit another – I’m just going to share a few points that work for me:

1. How essential is the function to you?

I’m not about to outsource my core marketing strategy (thereby essentially outsourcing myself) but I can outsource components such as PR and SEO. The swing factors for me are:

• Is it a function that merits it’s own dedicated, expert team? Would this serve to create a greater benefit for the company?
• Is it something that I know enough about that I can set goals, monitor progress, and evaluate performance in a fair and accurate manner?
• Would it create greater time efficiencies for me?
• The bottom line: can I make it cost effective?

2. Make sure your outsourcing partners know your business.

This one is a hard one – because when people pitch they are skilled at brushing up on surface information – and when you are simply selling t-shirts that might be ok. However, the greater the complexity of your product and industry the more problematic that outsourcing can become. If they don’t have a good understanding of what your company does, you may end up spending even more time bringing them up to scratch than if you were doing it yourself.

An easy check is to research whether they’ve worked with people similar to you before. If they are a client-facing supplier this factor is even more important. Here I am speaking from a marketing perspective: in the case of backend systems you don’t necessarily need to make consideration, as overall expertise is the singular factor.

3. Micromanage from a distance:

Weird I know. Basically, no one likes a backseat driver. However, I don’t like not knowing exactly what’s going on. I had to reconcile the two – which resulted in my asking for weekly or monthly digests of what’s occurred. So now I have the reassurance of having all the details and can still give people space to function.

I try to communicate as clearly as possible precisely what I want at the outset, and then step back and remind myself why I’ve hired them:
because they are experts.
It’s a struggle and I have yet to perfect it, but I would rather I did not give in to my tendency to micromanage at the expense of crushing someone else’s capabilities.

4. The Pub Factor

Yes this sounds a bit silly. But I feel it’s the most telling. If you don’t feel comfortable enough to go to the pub with someone you are not going to feel comfortable asking them a load of stupid questions to make sure you get the result you want. You are certainly not going to be able to call them out on something in a constructive manner.

If there are already partnership barriers, correcting behavior can be extremely difficult. If you feel comfortable with your suppliers than you can develop a rapport whereby corrective action does not instead serve to break down the relationship. Also, you will seek to go above and beyond for someone you feel as a friend.

Notice I said – feel comfortable – not ‘hire your mates’. That comes with it’s own inherent set of dangers and difficulties.

>Yes, outsourcing can be a pain, if you choose a bad partner. But when you outsource correctly you will find it a pleasure to work with experts, as well as convenient and time-effective for both you and the company.

The Problem

However there are issues which the Third Sector needs to sort before it can fully migrate online. Firstly, as the National Council of Voluntary Organisations (NCVO) point out, the charity sector has a huge gap in the necessary ICT skills. Secondly, when running a campaign, traffic to a charity’s website can dramatically fluctuate. For example, Beatbullying had an online campaign in 2010 which raised over £175,000 but it also increased traffic to their website by 3,264%. This requires a level of scalability that the expertise of a managed host and a managed cloud platform can enable whilst ensuring that the full benefit of all that traffic is realised in online donations with no site crashes.

Solutions and the Recession

With managed cloud hosting, clients have assigned engineers monitoring their environment 24/7. Meaning charities can sit back and focus on their fundraising efforts instead. With regards to site traffic fluctuations, having managed hosting can help in two ways. First to ensure that prior to a campaign the capabilities to scale the number of servers up as needed. Second to enable charities to reduce the number of servers back down once the campaign is over, giving a cost-effective solution. With other ICT support for charities, the Survive and Thrive booklet outlines a number of low-cost or free support and development organisations which are extremely useful.

Yet managed cloud hosting is not the answer to all of the not for profit organisation’s internet problems – one of the main issues facing all of us is the poor implementation of internet infrastructure in the UK. While the infrastructure itself is fine, poor environment implementations lead to degradation of service. Slow internet connection could be a huge issue if the charity is based solely online. A day’s work could grind to a halt just because someone further up the line is downloading a film. As internet use in society increases this problem is going to be exacerbated unless the situation is improved. Unfortunately the only answer is for the government to install the next generation of broadband.

This is where the recession hits home, for the government to upgrade the networks to 80% of UK homes, it would need to find £16bn. So the recession is forcing charities to seek the benefits of the internet to survive, but it’s also holding back the internet’s full potential to grant those benefits…

>Article written with the help of:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7440246.stm

http://raceonline2012.org/surviveandthrive

http://media.ofcom.org.uk/2010/08/19/consumers-spend-almost-half-of-their-waking-hours-using-media-and-communications/

We are happy to say that today we will be moving into some shiny new offices. Not to worry, pictures will be soon to follow. However, in the meantime it will still be business as usual of course and we still have all our old phone numbers.

Our new address is:

Ultraspeed

118 Commercial Street

London

E1 6NF

As usual you are all more than welcome to visit and have a pot of tea in our new kitchen!

Marketing-in-a-Box anyone?

Phones packed? Check! Marketing? Check!

To that end, attention is being turned to how to ensure that E-Commerce platforms are going to be able to reach the new business goals that are now available to them, as well as consistently providing a new, unique, amazing user experience to all and sundry. I in fact, read a great article recently geared exactly towards this but warning of the pitfalls of not managing your platform expansion project without due care.

This post from Get Elastic goes through the ten most common mistakes that teams can make when trying to undertake a rapid re-platforming project before accurately identifying existing or potential problems, requirements and goals. In response to this list, I thought I would offer some nuggets of advice with regards to making sure that the E-Commerce infrastructure is also up to scratch when avoiding such mistakes:

1) Split out Various Applications for Optimum Functionality

This does what it says on the tin really. The point is that if you are moving towards a more complex platform where you are expecting your different tools to work harder for you, you need to leave them room to do so. Therefore, giving them their own resources from which to work from on separate virtual servers (always remember efficiency kids!) will allow them that space. Make sure at this point also that you have put together appropriate and realistic migration plans or upgrade plans for any and all applications. Whilst the management of this project is in your hands, a good managed hosting provider should be able to advise and consult with you on the best way to implement any changes without impacting on your live environments and ensuring that the end results meet your expectations.

2) Proper Technical Implementation=Successful Attainment of User Experience Goals

May be a no brainer but it’s oh so easy to fall in to the trap of thinking of a super cool, super hip, super swish way of moving customers through your website with high visuals, amazing vids and high res images… And then remember that this could seriously slow down the load up of even your initial pages, or worse possibly crash your site if too many hear about this kick-ass online shopping (you get the gist by now) site and decide to all use your portal at the same time. You can avoid such situations by simply assuring that the infrastructure that supports your platform is built to deal with such peaks, do some load testing with your hosting provider and a recognised third party load-testing consultancy, and make sure you take advantage of the benefits of cloud scaling in your solution. It’s also important to ensure that your applications are as scalable as the solution that you choose and this can be proven through thorough testing plans. You may not be able to predict future requirements, but your hosting provider should be able to at the very least build an infrastructure that will be able to react and adapt to changes in your environment and demand for your services.

3) Constant Communication between all Relevant Parties

It’s amazing how many times I’ve heard people wax lyrical on how important communication is to the success of their projects and then when taking on such a feat as redesigning their platforms, fail to disseminate basic schedules, migration plans, goals etc to ALL parties. Don’t just send your project details to the accounting department to get budget sign off, not just to the CEO to get business sign off. Make sure that you involve the Marketing department so that they can think early on how to position their messaging, make sure that you include those within your company that will have to respond to queries on the site maintenance to your end-users so that they are best equipped to understand how to answer them, and definitely make sure that you discuss your plans with your hosting provider so that they can also re-design your solution to best meet the end targets.

>I’m going to stop myself here as I could honestly go on for a long time about how integral the correct technical solution is to the successful avoidance of the stumbling blocks illustrated in the Get Elastic Ecommerce Blog article but hopefully my musings have given you some food for thought. Good luck out there, and onwards with the E-Commerce revolution!

Originally this blogpost started like this, ‘At the heart of an infographic there needs to be pure data. The rest is its fancy robes that make the data look sexy. We even need our data to be sexy these days.’

But I was wrong – data has always been sexy. Look online (or below this sentence) and you will find the Victorians, with their fetish for geology and the natural world, used many of the same methods as we do to show information.

This one shows the world’s longest rivers and tallest mountains. The hand drawn graphics are nice.

This one is French! And ambitious. It shows the history of the world. Note the ‘best of’ columns down the sides.

Here is another one about the world’s mountains and rivers, only this time some of the mountains are belching flames!

Another line I was going to use was: ‘Unless it is jazzed up or presented as statistics, data slides off the brain like water off a duck. It is difficult to get a handle on data unless you can put it into perspective. That is the job of an infographic.’

An infographic is a type of map.
When you are making a map you do not have to pay any attention to standard page sizes or whatnot. Maps can be as large and oddly shaped as they need/want to be.
You can use a magnifying glass (or click the zoom button) to get up close and wallow about in its data. And get lost, then use the key to find your way out again.

Every detail represents relevant detail. There should not be a single point of irrelevance in sight. Each part of a map represents a part of the real world – even those Here Be Monsters warnings are a record of something, even if it is ‘just’ sailor tales. (And who is to say there aren’t monsters? Haven’t you seen Loch Ness?)

The one distinction I notice between infographics and maps is that they have clear arguments. Infographics are actually micro-dissertations. The data is presented in some kind of order that guides you from the start of the argument to its conclusion, with sources often listed in small print at the bottom. I would embed an example of one of these dissertation-graphs, but they are usually vast. Here is a link to one.

Below is a neat example of an infographic that shows a specific behaviour, albeit one that people are generally aware of. The first one shows words used to describe toys for girls, and the next refers to toys for boys.

As far as I can tell humans are a little unimpressed with straight data. The Victorians showed us the world as they saw it. A lot of the time they showed us the world as it really is – people still seem to agree that Mount Everest is the world’s tallest mountain, even if their world maps try to convince us that Britain is the biggest country in the universe.

In the 21st Century there seems to be more of an interest in society and behaviour. Our maps nowadays are of relationships, interconnections, and how to use sun-cream.

>Having said all that, look at these old 1902 infographics by students of W. E. Dubois

>And this post comparing infographics old and new!

Victorian Infographics are courtesy of Bibliodyssey.
Kids Toys Infographics are courtesy of Achilles Effect.

One of the new toys the office is currently playing with is Microsoft’s Photosynth – so here’s the before photo in all it’s glory…and see how many Richards you can spot? It’s our own version of Where’s Wally.

Moving date is set for early August and we’re only down the road from our original home so please do come and drop by for a cup of tea.

You can expect an ‘After’ photo this August!

The fact is that to most people I meet Canada is a wispy concept involving the scent of trees, cold, snow and the odd bear/beaver chucked in (with a sprinkling of hockey obsession of course).

So when I announced that it was going to be Canada Day on Friday – the tumbleweed that blew through the office convinced me that people needed a little guide to help them cope with the Red & White madness that will soon be occurring in Trafalgar Square.

##Step 1:

Remember….we are not American. Canadians are very definite on this, it defines our very Canadianess.

##Step 2:

Find something red & white & wear it. Doesn’t matter what it is, clothes, blanket, tea cosy – just wear it – it will help you blend in. If you paint your face to look like a Maple Leaf you get bonus points.

##Step 3:

Go to Trafalgar Square, join the madness, be far more friendly than your ‘stiff upper lip’ English upbringing ever prepared you for. Eat random things covered in maple syrup and drink Moosehead lager (it’s Canadian so it’s about half the strength of English stuff). Hug a stuffed bear in The Maple Leaf bar and wax lyrical about ‘how large a moose is’ or ‘that time I saw a cougar’. Try out saying eh? after each sentence even though it’s not a question. Get someone to teach you the finer points of hockey…it’ll make you instant friends.

Above all, have fun. Canadians won’t care about your attempt at blending in, they’re just happy to have more people at the party. Because, while our reputations may be a bit staid, they are correct in that we’re a friendly bunch and will happily adopt just about anyone into our hodgepodge of a culture.

P.S. If you see a short half-filipina girl leading a conga line and waving a beer, say hi, that’s me!