According to the blog Frogloop, “It was recently reported that one in three Americans owns a smartphone.  Some sources are indicating that more people will own smartphones than traditional cellphones by 2012. Add tablets into the mix and its clear that people are quickly adopting mobile computing.”

And as smartphone and tablet use rises, your email follows. Email reading on mobile devices rose 81% from October, 2010, to April, 2011. It stands to continue rising. Today, 16% of email is read on mobile devices while desktops get 36% of messages and webmail 48%.

Here are some of Frogloops tips on how to craft your emails to make them compatible with smart phones:

• Clear, short and actionable subject lines followed by quick easy to read text with a link (to whatever your action or conversion might be) early on. This is a good argument for minimalistic header images in email. As you know, more and more desktop and webmail email clients default to hiding images from readers. In mobile, images are vigorously suppressed.
• Remember that messages received on iPhones with lots of images can become awkward when email is viewed on a small mobile device.
• Include a mobile stylesheet. This is something that can be worked into most email templates but is still not often seen. Check with your provider for assistance or just try it out yourself but if you have any sort of CSS in a template or “wrapper” now then chances are you can add a mobile stylesheet.
• Call to action up front and very clear. People need to see it/read it/have chance to click it without scrolling up/down or left/right. Don’t rely on image-based links as images may not appear on mobile messages. Try to work a call to action text link into the first few lines of your message.
• Make sure you have a “view this message on the web” link clearly visible in the preheader (the area at the top just above the message). You may not be able to fully optimize your message for mobile but the web browser version may be easier for mobile users to read and navigate because images and style sheets are better supported.
• Take Google design principles to heart: speed and simplicity matter even more on mobile.

Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism has conducted a study examining the top 25 news websites in popularity in the United States, looking into four main areas of audience behavior: how users get to the top news sites; how long they stay during each visit; how deep they go into a site; and where they go when they leave. The findings show that “while search aggregators remain the most popular way users find news, the universe of referring sites is diverse. Social media is rapidly becoming a competing driver of traffic.”  Here are a few of the key findings:

• Even among the top nationally recognized news site brands, Google remains the primary entry point. The search engine accounts on average for 30% of the traffic to these sites.

• Social media, however, and Facebook in particular, are emerging as a powerful news referring source. At five of the top sites, Facebook is the second or third most important driver of traffic. Twitter, on the other hand, barely registers as a referring source. In the same vein, when users leave a site, “share” tools that appear alongside most news stories rank among the most clicked-on links.

• When it comes to the age, news consumers to the top news websites are on par with Internet users overall. This stands apart from news consumption on traditional platforms, which tends to skew older, and may bode well for the industry.

• Even the top brand news sites depend greatly on “casual users,” people who visit just a few times per month and spend only a few minutes at a site over that time span.  USAToday.com was typical of most of these popular news sites: 85% of its users visited USAToday.com between one and three times per month. Three quarters came only once or twice. Time spent was even more daunting: When all the visits were added together, fully a third of users, 34%, spent between one and five minutes on the paper’s Website each month.

• There is, however, a smaller core of loyal and frequent visitors to news sites, who might be called “power users.” These people return more than 10 times per month to a given site and spend more than an hour there over that time. Among the top 25 sites, power users visiting at least 10 times make up an average of just 7% of total users, but that number ranged markedly, from as high as 18% (at CNN.com) to as low as 1% (at BingNews.com).

Trying to boost your Google rankings?  Well the folks over at Echoditto recently posted a helpful piece laying out the mysterious workings of the google search.  Here are a few of the most helpful points:

How do URL shortners like bit.ly affect search engine results? Most shorteners resolve to the full long URL and are treated as a 301 or Permanent Redirect. Therefore this does not hinder spider crawls, change/reduce PageRank, or otherwise negatively affect the site and where it shows up in organic search results.

Do Google’s search algorithms leave out diverse communities such as local mom and pop shops? Google tries to accurately represent what the web is. Well known sites tend to attract links from other places and therefore small local organizations can easily get to the top of organic search results. Google also employs a “Crowding” algorithm which means that it limits the number of results that can come up from one host for a particular search. For example, eBay may be one of the only places where a user can purchase antique green glass. However, Google limits the number of eBay-only antique glass results that show up for that search input so that there is greater diversity in a user’s search results. The additional eBay results are still available, they are just grouped together after the first 2 or 3 results.

What type of content is the easiest to crawl? The answer here is still text. While there have been advancements in technology and Google for example can now crawl vetted captions for videos (that contain them), the majority of information is gathered from analyzed text. This means that adding those alternate titles for your images and video files, and making your site primarily text based is still critical to SEO. If you have content duplicated on two sites, for example if you are both a 501c3 and a 501c4 and have a different website for each, will that hurt you? Yes. Duplicate content can split your PageRank. Google may also only show one or the other site in its provided search results since it views the content as identical. That may mean your users may not find both the 501c3 and the 501c4 focused sites. His suggestion is that if you have to have two sites, try to re-purpose or refresh the content so that it is unique or supplemental.

Funding for Change has another very helpful set of tips for how to generate better newsletters. They argue that “Reading is optional. The people who look at your newsletter are virtually all going to start by skimming it. So, how do you get your point across when most people are just going to spend 10 seconds skimming what you send them anyway?”  Here are some of their useful tips:

Write compelling headlines that tell the whole story: Headlines are the most important part of your newsletter.  But they are usually thrown on as an afterthought, once everyone has spent hours and hours tinkering with text that most people aren’t ever going to read anyway. This is the exact opposite of how it should be.  For every ten people who read your headlines, one person might go on to read the article. It’s not uncommon to spend as much time writing the headlines as it takes to write the articles, especially at first.

Use photo captions, pull quotes, and other tricks to visually tell your story: Your eyes are drawn to anything that is different from the standard columns of text.  Make that work to your advantage.

Make it easy on the eyes: The easier it is to read your newsletter, the longer people will stick around.  The name of the game is making it effortless.  And that’s your goal when you hit the design phase — presenting your content in the most readable way. After you spend all this time writing, you don’t want people to have to work to read it.  Studies have been done on different fonts and colors. We know what is statistically proven to be easier to read.  So, to make it easy for your readers…

• Use serif fonts like Times or Garamond for print publications.  Use sans serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica for e-newsletters.  (The “feet” of the serif font that make letters easier to identify in print blur on screen.)
• Use black ink on white paper — not colored ink, not white ink on black (also known as reverse or knockout type), not colored paper or colored background.
• Indent your paragraphs.
• Leave “white space” — don’t cram text all the way to the margins.
• Format your text in 2-3 columns; don’t run your text all the way across the page.

Make it easy on the brain: Once reading your newsletter becomes time consuming and laborious, your brilliant supporters will move on to the other ways they’d prefer to spend their precious time.   To say it another way, the easier you can make it for people to read your newsletter, the longer they’ll spend with it. Write for a 7-8^th grade reading level.  Newspaper articles are around the 8th-grade level. Microsoft Word has a built-in tool to help — the Flesch-Kincaid scale.

• Flesch-Kincaid grades your writing based on the length of your words, sentences, and paragraphs.  It’s a feature that usually has to be enabled.  But once set up, whenever you do a spelling or grammar check, you’ll get a quick readability report at the end that includes a Reading Ease Score and a Grade Level Score.

Aim for a Reading Ease Score of 60-70 (the higher, the better).  And, go for a Grade Level Score of 7-8. Check your score regularly when you write.  To lower your scores, write shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs.

Many grassroots are still struggling with how to transfer their long-standing offline newsletters and newspapers into the online universe.  Many still have a dedicated readership — often their older members — who look forward to getting a printed publication every month.  But printed material doesn’t translate well online. Some groups simply post a PDF version — but that’s cumbersome. Others split up the content into blogs, email letters, etc.  — but this often fails to show the breadth of an organization’s work.

One possible solution is Issuu, a digital publishing platform that allows uploaded print material to be viewed through a web browser and is made to look like a printed publication with an animated page flip options.   While the documents are meant to be viewed online, they can be downloaded and saved as well. There’s a free version on Issuu’s website and the full, customizable version is $19 a month.  You can also use the service to publish books, reports, etc. The service is used by some of the largest publishing houses in the country, including Random House, Cambridge University Press.

According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, the great majority of actual reporting still comes from newspapers, but even those outlets are driven largely by reporting on government statements, not journalists own investigative reporting.  Here’s a quick summary of a few of the report’s findings:

• Looking at six major story lines that developed over one week last July, 83 percent of the reports in local news media “were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information.”

• Despite shrinking resources of established news outlets, “of the stories that did contain new information, nearly all, 95 percent, came from old media — most of them newspapers…These stories then tended to set the narrative agenda for most other media outlets.”

• Even the reporting done by traditional media was driven mostly by government statements rather than journalists’ own digging, the study found.

• There are some markets, like San Diego and Minneapolis, where the online news start-ups have become significant sources of original reporting.

We often get questions about when and whether groups can use copyrighted material in their videos without permission or payment.  American University, Washington College of Law, and Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project, have just released a new video explaining how online video creators can make remixes, mashups, and other common online video genres with the knowledge that they are staying within copyright law.

The video, titled Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend, explains the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video. The video identifies six kinds of unlicensed uses of copyrighted material that may be considered fair, under certain limitations:

• Commenting or critiquing of copyrighted material
• Use for illustration or example
• Incidental or accidental capture of copyrighted material
• Memorializing or rescuing of an experience or event
• Use to launch a discussion
• Recombining to make a new work, such as a mashup or a  remix, whose elements depend on relationships between existing works

With the climate change debate heating up in Congress and environmental issues often ranking near bottom of public worry, some in the environmental movement are struggling to reframe the debate. EcoAmerica, a nonprofit environmental marketing and messaging firm in Washington, has been conducting research for several years on new ways to talk to the public about climate change and other environmental issues.  There’s remains a fine line between reframing and DC-centered spin.  Here are a few of EcoAmerica’s findings; you bee the judge.

• The problem with global warming is saying “global warming.” The term turns people off, fostering images of shaggy-haired liberals, economic sacrifice and complex scientific disputes.
• Instead reframe the issue using different language. Talk about “our deteriorating atmosphere.” Drop discussions of carbon dioxide and bring up “moving away from the dirty fuels of the past.” Don’t confuse people with cap and trade; use terms like “cap and cash back” or “pollution reduction refund.” “Energy efficiency” makes people think of shivering in the dark. Instead, it is more effective to speak of “saving money for a more prosperous future.”
• The group’s surveys and focus groups found, it is time to drop the term “the environment” and talk about “the air we breathe, the water our children drink.”
• The firm advises groups talk in “Talking Points”, aspirational language about shared American ideals, like freedom, prosperity, independence and self-sufficiency while avoiding jargon and details about policy, science, economics or technology

These suggestions replicate the contra-framing of much of corporate America. As Robert J. Brulle of Drexel University, an expert on environmental communications, told the NYT: ecoAmerica’s campaign is a mirror image of what industry and political conservatives is doing. “The form is the same; the message is just flipped.  You want to sell toothpaste, we’ll sell it. You want to sell global warming, we’ll sell that. It’s the use of advertising techniques to manipulate public opinion.”

For those of you blogging for your organization, you’re not alone. Almost as many Americans now make their living as bloggers as there are lawyers; more now make their primary income from blogging than those working as computer programmers or firefighters.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the US has “over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income.” Here’s a comparison of U.S. job numbers:

That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click.  The WSJ sees these numbers making “us the most noisily opinionated nation on earth. The Information Age has spawned many new professions, but blogging could well be the one with the most profound effect on our culture.”

Here’s some more Blogosphere trivia:

• Demographically, bloggers are extremely well educated: three out of every four are college graduates.
• Most are white males reporting above-average incomes.
• One out of three young people reports blogging, but bloggers who do it for a living successfully are 2% of bloggers overall.
• It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year. Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post, and some even serve as “spokesbloggers” — paid by advertisers to blog about products.
• As bloggers have increased in numbers, the number of journalists has significantly declined. In Washington alone, there are now 79% fewer DC-based employees of major newspapers than there were just few years ago.

According to Thomas Gensemer, one of President Obama’s key online strategists, it’s time for NGO’s to stop sending out email newsletters. He believes that short, personalized emails to supporters giving clear instructions for participation work much better.

“Email newsletters don’t get read, yet they take more effort to prepare than a 250-word email,” he said. “Email is still a killer application, but only when used properly.”

For the Obama campaign, fundraising and participation tactics included sending regular, short emails to supporters asking recipients to do one thing that day. Each email also told the supporter what their action would accomplish and what would happen next.  These emails gave supporters a “steady narrative of actions, feedback and milestones”, Gensemer said.

But Vinay Bhagat, founder of Convio, believes that online newsletters still play an important function for NGO’s.  In a blog response to Gensemer, he wrote: “Political campaigns are short lived and maximizing participation during the campaign cycle is critical.  In contrast, nonprofits rely on building long-term donor relationships. As such, they should adopt a much more stewardship centered email strategy, regularly sharing stories about the impact of their work, interspersed with calls to action/ fundraising asks at the appropriate frequency.”