‎Beaconfire Consulting‎

‎These days, writing effective and efficient specifications for web sites should involve less narrative description and more visual depiction. It used to be that in conveying client desires to the engineers, we felt more of a need to write everything out, to be sure nothing was lost in translation...‎

‎I’m going to let you in on a little-known web marketing secret. Ready? Email is not a webpage. It’s true: your emails are actually different than your website. Ok, maybe that’s not a big secret… actually, it’s not a secret at all. It seems pretty obvious. And yet,...‎

‎Periodically, we do a survey of Beaconfire staff to get impressions on a variety of non-profit technology issues. All opinions expressed here are solely those of their authors. Twitter is an increasingly important player in social media – even Congress is tweeting. ...‎

‎Beautiful fonts are one of the holy grails of Web Design...‎

‎As some of you may remember, last March Beaconfire created “The Beacon: Lounge with a Conscience”, a gathering place at south by southwest interactive for tech social do-gooders and the nonprofit geekeratti (like you!) to find one another, share ideas and decompress between sessions. Wi...‎

‎As the New Year begins and resolutions to quit smoking proliferate, Beaconfire is pleased to be working with the The American Legacy Foundation and their smoking cessation program – BecomeAnEX.org. ...‎

‎Each year about this time, nonprofit marketeers sit hunched over monitors, anxiously awaiting year end returns. The current economy has not helped ease fundraisers’ sleepless nights, though overall donors still give generously this time of year. ...‎

‎As web sites get bigger and more sophisticated, it seems like more and more of our build work involves working and collaborating with multiple parties, rather than just working directly with a few folks on the client team...‎

‎Fundraising is all about impact. You want your message to convince donors that your cause is important, that their donation is necessary, and that you will do something worthwhile with their money...‎

‎Google has been slowly rolling out new features in Google Analytics over the past couple weeks – some more visible than others, but all of them pretty powerful. If you haven’t seen them appear yet, you likely will soon. I’...‎

‎The future is here, and its name is Wave. Not really… but the much anticipated Google Wave has arrived in “preview” mode. When...‎

‎For as long as I can remember, our PM team has debated internally the value of the PMP certification for project managers. For many big corporations and the government, it is a key qualification for project managers. As a comparatively small company, this is not a prerequisite for our PMs...‎

‎Testing a Web site is a pretty big, and not often inexpensive, task. Cara already posted about some inexpensive tools for user-testing wireframes. But for your design, there’s an opportunity to go even lower-budget than that. ...‎

‎We hear it all the time. “Yeah, there’s an app for that.” It seems that, for every task you want to do, there’s a digital application that goes along with it, from organizing your recipes to promoting world peace. If you...‎