Check out the guide below or download a PDF here. A map of where the Woolly Mammoth Theater is located can be found here.

See you soon and use #gobiba for all social media tags!

ReThink Fundraising from iStrategyLabs on Vimeo.

1) AddThis by Clearspring: “The hands down easiest way to make your content social online”

2) Giv.to / Contribune: “The smart way to multiply your fundraiser power over social networks”

3) Razoo: “The free way to find, mobilize and connect with donors”

We have been having a lot of conversations recently with people who are looking to take their online fundraising to the next level with some fresh tools & tech.  So- we thought it would be fun to host a webinar showcasing some easy ways to build a cohesive strategy.  Each presentation will be a maximum of 10 minutes, with time for Q & A at the end.

1)  Giv.to / Contribune: “The smart way to multiply your fundraiser power over social networks”

2)  Razoo: “The free way to find, mobilize and connect with donors”

3)  AddThis by Clearspring: “The hands down easiest way to make your content social online”

Call it fundraising 2.0, or call it a good way to spend an hour this Friday – either way we hope you can join us!

THIS POST WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON OPENAMPLIFY.

I answered these questions many months ago and it looks like there still true today.

—
In this monthly column, “The Future of the Web,” OpenAmplify speaks to thought leaders, business luminaries, educators and more. Each feature in our series will highlight the thoughts, ideas and hurdles which accompany this future.

This month’s column features Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs.

Q. What trends and issues will 2009 see as we make the transition towards Web 3.0?

I don’t think most people will be transitioning to Web 3.0 – which is best defined as a phase of ‘intelligent data’. The bulk of businesses and individual users are rapidly adopting web 2.0 technologies and philosophies. Those on the forefront of web 3.0 technology development and deployment will struggle with finding funding for their nascent innovations as the credit crises and subsequent evisceration of the venture capital space has made funding new initiatives more challenging.

Q. What trends and issues will dominate the online advertising space in 2009?

The macro trend that will effect online advertising is a shift from brand oriented, CPM based online media, to a more metrics driven buying methodology focused on cost per acquisition (CPA). We saw this same shift in 2000 when the internet bubble bust and marketers pull their budgets back, but ad inventory continued to grow.

Q. How will web end user expectations evolve in 2009?

The bar continues to be set higher and higher everyday on the web. Web users expect glossy, simple to use interfaces and will continue to demand good design from the places they go to seek information on the web.

Q. Will privacy be a larger or smaller issue for online companies in 2009, and why?

Perhaps. To a certain extent however web users are accustomed to a certain lack of privacy and a I believe our expectations for privacy will continue to erode overtime.
Q. What are some of the major trends and challenges for social media networks in 2009?

The major trend for social networks in 2009 is the opening up of their data to extend user’s social graphs throughout the web. You can see this already with the launch of Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. The challenge social networks face is balancing privacy concerns with accessibility to user data by 3rd parties.

Q. What role will online communities play in 2009, and will their importance increase?

Online communities will continue to grow from now until the end of time. Their importance will continue to increase as adoption of these tool proliferates well beyond the mass adoption phase, and as the younger generations grow up increasing wired to their social networks by default. Online communities will become more prominent over the next 4 years as the Obama administration’s technology policy and outreach empowers them to act in the physical world.

Q. Who are going to be the big winners on the Web in 2009 and why?

The big winners in 2009 will be those who can figure out how to do things smarter, better, faster, and cheaper than their competition. This recessionary period is a great time for smaller businesses that are positioned to pickup business at the expense of larger, slow, more expensive competitors.

Q. Who are going to be the big losers on the Web in 2009 and why?

The big losers are going to be the dinosaurs – those with legacy models that have survived this long even through they’re not the most innovative providers in the market. They’re being crushed under the weight of the credit crisis, and their market shares are being eroded by smaller, nimble competition.

Q. 2008 saw an explosion in user generated content. In 2009, how will publishers, web site owners and advertisers look to harness UCG’s popularity?

I think 2009 will be less about harnessing UGC and more about connecting one to one with customer communities. Site owners that can facilitate deep, meaningful interactions between brands and their customers will win.

Q. How will online ad targeting change in 2009? Will we see one approach start to dominate over the others?

Ad targeting using the social graph is the most powerful advertising innovation in history and marketers will continue to focus on leveraging that data to target their messages. Using Facebook as a targeting platform will begin to dominate, especially once Facebook is able to serve advertising outside of their site to reach their audience as they travel the web.

When it came to the website, our goal was clear: we needed to create an inviting, easy-to-navigate site that reflected the CAFB’s brand and enabled visitors to find the information they needed.  We also sought to engage the DC-wide hunger community by incorporating some robust social media tools.  Finally, we needed a way to educate visitors and communicate the problem of hunger in the DC area with the most concise, emotionally resonant content possible.

I led the design / creative direction, working to find a look-and-feel that matched the CAFB’s warm, approachable, community-focused brand.  We employed oranges, browns and other colors of the harvest to suggest nourishment and warmth.  The ridiculously talented Zvi Band handled all development of the WordPress-based backend.  The choice of WordPress — a personal favorite of ours — means that in addition to looking great, the site is easily editable by the CAFB staff themselves.  If you click on the image below, it’ll take you to the Capital Area Food Bank’s new site.

While we are great believers in expertly crafted copy, we are always quick to evangelize about the power of video.  As we have for many clients in the past (check out our other animation work: Share Our Strength, FanGamb, and ShareMeme), we determined that a short animation was the surest way to communicate the CAFB’s mission in a powerful, easy-to-consume and easy-to-share fashion.  Along with the CAFB team, I wrote the script and handled visual design, while our animation wizard, Brock, tackled the formidable After Effects work.  Click below to play the new video.

Please take a moment and visit the CAFB’s new site, and be sure to let us know what you think!

Have a happy Thursday everyone,

Zach

Regardless of whether or not we win the Big Apps project, we’re committed to building our business in NYC, and adding tremendous value to the tech/social media/marketing communities in The City as we’ve done – and will continue to do – in DC.  iStrategyLabs is a strange bird – we feel much more like a community organizing entity than anything else, but we’re a for profit that does marketing/innovation work for brands both big and small.  In the end, what we’re passionate about is adding value to communities and solving problems – and The Big Apple’s got big problems to work on just as DC does.

This is an especially sweet moment for me personally, for a number of reasons:

1. I was born at the foot of the George Washington Bridge in Palisades Park, NJ – in the last great decade of the 20th century (the 80′s).
2. I grew up in Ridgewood, NJ and began my love affair with NYC as a 7-year old, heading to Yankees’ games with my late grandfather (my namesake), who classically called the Yankees “a bunch of bums” whenever they were losing, and “the greatest team in the world” when they were winning.
3. My 9th birthday included a trip to Yankee Stadium to meet the dominant closing pitcher Dave Righetti who, like many celebrities, sported a monkey on his shoulder when we met. I’m still not sure why the 80′s had so many monkeys in it.
4. By 12, my friends and I were riding our bikes 20 miles to get to the GW Bridge just to spit off of it and head back home.
5. At 15, my friends and I began hopping on the NJ Transit, and then grabbing the PATH from Hoboken to Christopher Street to explore Greenwich Village and Central Park. Yes, we were your classic Bridge and Tunnel (BnT) kids that New Yorkers despise – especially when they too were once BnT’s themselves.
6. At 23, I graduated from business school at Emory and lived out the first big dream of my young life – to live and work in NYC. I got my start as a TV Producer for VideoFashion Network… running around the world shooting fashion shows and learning how to tell stories using media. Our new office is a couple blocks from my old office, and I plan to frequent Cafe Angelique as I did back in 2003/2004 – it has the best coffee in NYC!

iStrategyLabs will celebrate its 2-year anniversary in about two weeks – and in that time, during a period of serious economic strife, we’ve grown from a team of one (me) to 4 full time iStrategists, along with a sea of talented collaborators who are helping us forge new paths in fields of interactive strategy, experiential marketing, content creation, civic engagement, and more.

If you’re in NYC, drop me a line – I’ll be splitting my time between DC and NYC from now on and would love to talk about what you’re up to, and see if we can find a way to work together.

I thought it might be interesting to use Google Insights for Search to try to uncover some empirical evidence to backup my reasoning. The following slides are surprising to a certain extent – and I welcome any recommendations on better methods for trying to figure out which cities are the most tech-savvy.

You can download the full PDF here.

Tech-savvy City Rankings July 2009

For over a month now, the iStrategyLabs team has been building a campaign designed to change that.  On behalf of our friends at Share Our Strength, a national non-profit that seeks to end childhood hunger, we set out to raise awareness about this very real problem.

To explain the scope, scale and devastating consequences of childhood hunger in America, Zach Goodwin, iStrategyLabs’s creative director, lead our team to build a two-minute HD animation that uses elegant typography and bold messaging to tell a story that connects on an intellectual and emotional level.  It’s a narrative that begins with the ugly facts of hunger in this country, but ends by celebrating the potential inherent in a healthy, well-fed child.  It drives home a simple message: every child should get a chance to simply be kid — to be free from a fear of hunger.

The video, “Strength in Numbers” can be seen below or at Share Our Strength’s dedicated page and here:

Please spread the word with us about this important issue and let us know what you think of the animation.

Zach Goodwin was responsible for art direction, design and story arc.  The exceptionally talented Brock Boyts handled all After Effects animation.  Richard Thies and Nick Ross (who moonlight as indie rockers, Project ULTRA) composed the original score.

So what do you think?

The Future of the Social Capital

1. Ignite DC
2. Twin Tech
3. BarCampDC
4. RefreshDC
5. LaunchboxDigital
6. TECH Cocktail
7. Social Matchbox
8. DC Media Makers
9. Apps for Democracy
10. AIGA
11. XinDC
12. ADCMW
13. Artomatic
14. CreativesDC
15. Pecha Kucha
16. DC Design Babes

You can always find an updated list of DC Tech Events here.

The first edition of Apps for Democracy yielded 47 web, iPhone and Facebook apps in 30 days – a $2,300,000 value to the city at a cost of $50,000 (all apps created are here). It has gone on to inspire the Apps for America contest by The Sunlight Foundation, INCA 09 in Belgium, Apps for Democracy Finland and planned initiatives in Toronto, Philadelphia, and New York.

We’re proud to announce the next iteration of Apps for Democracy. Our mission with “Community Edition” is two fold: to engage the populace of Washington, DC to ask for their input into the problems and ideas they have that can be addressed with technology and then to build the best community platform for submitting 311 service requests to the city.

Community Edition is broken up into two phases:

1) May: Collecting insights from DC’s citizens related to how technology can make living in DC a better experience (submit your insights, vote on and view others here). Sign up for Social Citizen Sunday to compete to win $1000 for the best field report – and help your neighbors while you’re at it.

2) June: An application development contest to build the best 311 service request app (API coming soon). Sign up to Build Apps for Democracy!

Armed with insights from all corners of DC, we’ll hold an innovation contest with $34,000 in potential prizes!

A full explanation of Community edition can be found on the Apps for Democracy blog and is explained in the following video:

]]> http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009/05/apps-for-democracy-community-edition-announced/feed/ 0 http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009/04/internships-for-bright-minds/ http://www.istrategylabs.com/2009/04/internships-for-bright-minds/#comments Fri, 10 Apr 2009 15:19:19 +0000 Peter Corbett http://www.istrategylabs.com/?p=936

We like to create new things together...

Applications for this internship are now CLOSED. Please don’t email us kthxbai!

We’re looking for a couple really smart, ultra-web savvy summer interns to have a bunch of fun with us this summer as we build digital experiential campaigns (pranks, stunts, buzz marketing stuff on the web and in the real world) for clients and for no reason other than to stir things up in DC and on the interwebs.

You will have the opportunity to define your own experience, and we’ll fund the fun. You’ll be given a place to work, brains to bounce ideas off of, and walls to write on. Oh and your compensation will be a shiny new mac book (white, 2.0ghz). If you already have one…we can get you something else at the Apple store or just give you cash.

If you have any 3 of the following characteristics please email DELETED to setup a time to come by our Dupont Circle lab (includes a pimp roof and other such cool places to hang all summer). Please tell Joe all of the items below that apply to you:

1)    WordPress, Ruby, Drupal, PHP, MYSQL, HTML/CSS etc. are things you use everyday. Your really comfortable cranking out websites and you’re planning to rule the world too because you’ve got #2 down as well.
2)    You’re an artist and Photoshop and Illustrator are tools you’re really good at building web designs with.
3)    You’ve been playing with web APIs and know how to mash-up some of them and want to spend the summer trying new things.
4)    You’re a marketing guy/girl and really understand why this whole social media thing is a big deal, but want some hands on experience with real clients to give you some practical expertise.
5)    You have ridiculously awesome ideas and people keep telling you you’re going to be a star! You’re also pretty sure they’re right.
6)    You know how to shoot and edit video (we’ve got cameras) and want to produce a web show and some shorts this summer.

Resumes: we don’t care what grades you’re getting…it’s irrelevant. We just want to know that you’re not sitting around getting wasted all day, so just come prepared to tell us what you’ve been doing with yourself. If you haven’t been doing anything that interesting, it could be a short conversation – tell us what kind of stuff you’ve been hacking together or what kind of projects and new programs you’ve been leading.

Interviews: we only wear suits to weddings and funerals so please come dressed causally (jeans, polo/t-shirt, whatever). You’ll be expected to come to work in flip-flops all summer anyway.

Researching Us: it would be cool if you knew a little about us before you come in, but for the most part it doesn’t matter. We’re more interested in hearing about you anyway.

Social Media: we don’t care if your Facebook profile is full of pictures of you doing keg stands – what we care about is that you understand the importance of social networks and social technology in general. So, if you’re ‘not on Facebook’ and ‘think twitter is stupid’, this probably isn’t the right internship for you.

Timeline: this could start mid to late May pending when your classes wrap up.

Future stuff: if this works out, more than likely we’ll want to work together throughout the school year next year. After that, there would probably be a full time gig waiting for you.

About iStrategyLabs

iStrategyLabs is a digital agency focused on providing clients with interactive strategy, experiential marketing and content creation services. Buzzwords aside, we’re focused on one thing – developing great ideas that sell your products and services or advance your cause.

About Peter Corbett

Peter Corbett is the founder and CEO of iStrategyLabs. Peter has won multiple industry awards, including 3 Addy’s in 2008 and the Great Washington DC Board of Trade’s “One To Watch” award for being “A rising entrepreneur who has a bright and sustainable future in Greater Washington”, and has been nominated for a United Nations Public Service Award for his Apps for Democracy campaign. He has also been name among DC’s most influential people under 40 by Washington Life Magazine and has been chosen by the city of Helsinki to be their liaison between technology communities there and in DC.