Net Effect I logged on late to the live-streamed event, Internet Advocacy Roundtable: The Future of Emailing Congress - New Solutions Offered and Old Myths Busted, hosted by the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

I caught up on 40Brown's Live Blog where Daniel Bennett, co-author of the Net Effect and consultant for elected representatives and non-profit organizations, started off by quoting,

Software and laws are like sausages- they're good, but you shouldn't see them being made!

(Personally, I like to know what my sausage is made of.)

Daniel cleared up some misunderstandings and myths in Internet Communications between Congress and constituents.

The blog post Holly wrote recently on the leadership gap in Nonprofit IT departments has been gaining traction -- along with quite a few comments. It seems she's touched a nerve, and that's a good thing. As she says, "More nonprofit EDs need to understand technology's strategic importance."

Nonprofit technology leadership is one of the issues we care about the most here at NTEN. For the sector to work as efficiently as possible, Executive Directors and other nonprofit leaders need to feel comfortable making technology decisions without formal technology training. Equally as important, IT Staff need leadership skills to bring technology out of the back office and into the strategies of their nonprofit organizations.

We're doing what we can to address the issue with our Technology Leadership Series of webinars.

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.