Blue Mouse Monkey Blog

The McKenzie River Gathering Foundation is a wonderful Oregon funder that focuses on racial and economic justice, peace, environmental protection, and LGBTQ rights. Each year they have a fundraiser party, and it’s always quite a shindig. This year performers include Spoken Word artist Toni Hill and Afro-Cuban musician Virginia Lopez. More info here.

This year Blue Mouse Monkey is sponsoring a table of ten. The party’s at the Ambridge this Saturday April 21st, starting at 7:00. Get your ticket here and support an amazing local foundation. See you there!

This study, by M&R Research Labs and NTEN, is beautifully organized and elegantly laid out. It’s packed with the latest trends in online messaging, fundraising, advocacy, mobile communications, and social media. AND, IT’S FREE! Download the 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study.

Some of the most interesting results include:

• There was a 19% increase in online revenue from 2010 to 2011, driven almost entirely by a 20% increase in the number of gifts (average gifts held steady).
• Advocacy response rates increased by a whopping 28% in the same time period.
• Although one-time gifts are still the mainstay of nonprofit fundraising, monthly giving grew faster than one-time giving.
• Facebook fan pages grew by 70% in 2011!

The Northwest Health Foundation wanted a new website to support their work in public policy advocacy. Built on the concept of a video magazine, each issue of Points of View covers a topic germane to the work of the foundation, with a short introduction and a collection of videos that reflect the point of view of the NWHF, along with the many points of view represented by their diverse community partners.

Formerly the Community Health Priorities project, this site has been given a fresh new look as it has morphed into The Conversation, the blog of the Northwest Health Foundation. The blog encourages Oregonians to participate in surveys, share feedback, read news, peruse resources, and apply for grants. Since its inception 2008, participation has climbed steadily, and the site returns data that the Northwest Health Foundation can bring to the state legislature.

Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, by Hieronymus Bosch

Suzy Vitello and I are distantly “related” in the literary world by virtue of our involvement in separate writing groups that sprang from the ur-group, Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writing. While we’ve never sat at the same writing table, we’ve chatted at parties now and again, and we’ve worked together in our other lives — in the world of communications, branding, and websites. Suzy is an editor and copywriter, and I’m a web designer, and we have delightfully collaborated on many projects together over the years.

And she edited the text on my Parts Per Million website!

And I got to redesign her new author website!

And she interviewed me on her blog! Check out Writers and branding: an interview with Julia Stoops for our discussion on the importance of author websites, the effect of DIY technologies, and the impact of art, teaching, and creative writing on my branding and web design practice.

Geometry’s answer to the atom: shapes that can’t be broken down into smaller shapes. These “edgeless” shapes are described rather as “flow”, and a unique flow pattern makes a shape an atom.

“Mathematicians are creating their own version of the periodic table that will provide a vast directory of all the possible shapes in the universe across three, four and five dimensions, linking shapes together in the same way as the periodic table links groups of chemical elements.

The researchers, from Imperial College London and institutions in Australia, Japan and Russia, are aiming to identify all the shapes across three, four and five dimensions that cannot be divided into other shapes.”

Calabi Yau

“The scientists will be analyzing shapes that involve dimensions that cannot be ‘seen’ in a conventional sense in the physical world. For example, the space-time described by Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has four dimensions – the three spatial dimensions, plus time.

String theorists believe that the universe is made up of many additional hidden dimensions that cannot be seen. They have already figured out how to turn flowing, higher dimensional shapes into differential equations. The Calabi-Yau manifold represents the 10 dimensions of string theory. A similar mathematical method is being used to search for unique shape “atoms”. There are hundreds of millions of potential shapes to examine, but researchers expect to find a few thousand atoms amongst them.”

They’re quite beautiful, but the static images are only part of the story. There are a few animations on the web of these shapes in motion. For shapes that are defined as “flow” the motion seems important. Yet no matter how we view these shapes, for our eyes they’re always going to be merely the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional plane. We aren’t going to experience them in five dimensions.*

* Bucket list:

1. Experience the Calabi Yau in all ten dimensions.

Data-visualization virtuosos Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg create a hybrid “artform” (for lack of a more inclusive term) out of data sets. Straddling the realms of science, design, art, and exploration, these graphics reveal interesting patterns in data.

“Data visualization has historically been accessible only to the elite in academia, business, and government. But in recent years web-based visualizations–ranging from political art projects to news stories–have reached audiences of millions. Unfortunately, while lay users can view many sophisticated visualizations, they have few ways to create them.

To “democratize” visualization, and experiment with new collaborative techniques, we built Many Eyes, a web site where people may upload their own data, create interactive visualizations, and carry on conversations. The goal is to foster a social style of data analysis in which visualizations serve not only as a discovery tool for individuals but also as a means to spur discussion and collaboration.”

Carbon footprint of a Big Mac, by Tim Fiddaman

Visualizing data that isn’t normally visualized, or is presented in a new way, tells us different stories about the world. From a kid counting all the socks in his household, to trends in editing wikipedia, to a “social network” of the characters in the bible, Many Eyes shows us new patterns that hadn’t been noticed before.

Wattenberg and Viegas now work with Google on a project called the Big Picture Visualization Group in Cambridge, MA, with the goal of making visualizations available to regular  people via Google.

It’s difficult to share the work we do behind the scenes of organizations, but at least we can show a screenshot. The Northwest Health Foundation needed an internal portal. They were tired of communicating via long email strings, and tired of piecemeal distribution of information. They needed an easy archive-and-retrieval system for their meeting materials from their multiple committees. Plus they wanted a central space for announcements, and an internal blog. Additionally, they needed to control granular access to this material: it was important to allow some committee members full access, and others access only to the minutes, materials, and blog posts relevant to their specific area of work.

We created an interface design based on NWHF’s public website, to make the new portal familiar and friendly to the staff who use it. We also used Expression Engine’s membership tools to allow granular access at different levels of membership. Named “B0utros” after a staff-member’s dog, the new portal has become the lively, always-accessible home to the foundation’s communications and record-keeping.

The Urban Mamas redesign project has been rolling out incrementally for a while now, so it seems odd to announce it as a “launch”. But looking back at how much has changed on this dynamic online community for mamas who want to share tips, advice, reviews, ideas, fun, and challenges, I see it’s time to put out the announcement. The UrbanMamas team came to us with an already successful multi-page blog that needed its content restructured and a design facelift. A combination of owner- and user-generated content made for some interesting challenges as we shuffled the information around in this heavily-trafficked site. The new design reflects the hip mamas style of the site owners.

The Tobacco Free Coalition of Oregon (TOFCO) is revitalizing anti-tobacco advocacy in Oregon through a grassroots movement and outreach to communities most impacted by the harmful effects of tobacco use. Blue Mouse Monkey is proud to have worked with TOFCO to create a website that acts like a virtual staff member. The site provides relevant information to community advocates and decision makers, builds the tobacco-free movement support base, increases efficiency, and elevates TOFCO’s presence in the community at large.