PICnet Blog

In 1998, the founders of Firefly Kids traveled to Russia to adopt a daughter. What they found when they arrived shocked them, as the orphanages in the country were simply unable to effectively support the neediest children, especially those with disabilities. Three years later Firefly Kids was created to help ensure that the children in Russia’s orphanages were better protected, and since have helped provide alternatives for these children.

Check out their new Non-Profit Soapbox site at: http://www.fireflykids.org.

Water. It’s something many of us take for granted in the United States, and thankfully we have people like those at the Virginia Water Environment Association who dutifully focus on the preservation and enhancement of Virginia’s water environment for today and future generations. We’re excited they decided to launch their new site with our Non-Profit Soapbox!

Check out their site: http://www.vwea.org.

When a Non-Profit Soapbox client gets an intro like this from a media outlet, it’s great:

When the subject is the environment, Diane MacEachern has long been ahead of the times. Thirty years ago, she earned a master’s degree in natural resources and the environment. And 20 years ago she helped design and build the energy-efficient house in the Washington, D.C., area where she and her family live.

Now she hopes to be in the vanguard again. Next week she is launching a national campaign and a website, BigGreenPurse.com, urging women to shift at least $1,000 of their annual household spending to green products. On average, people spend $18,000 a year on groceries and household goods.

When you wake up to find it lands on the homepage of the CS Monitor, it’s amazing!

A greener planet begins under the kitchen sink

Congrats to Diane MacEachern for all her hard work in helping women make this world a better place.

When you do great work, and put your full effort and heart into your clients’ projects, it’s nice to be recognized for those efforts. Today, the Congressional Management Foundation awarded Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney Web site the coveted Golden Mouse award, the highest honor a congressional office can receive for outstanding Web communications.

Incredible hard work went into the effort, especially by Congresswoman Maloney’s lead Web site manager Anna Cielinski, who provided countless days and long nights into making the site a success.

From the Congressional Management Foundation:

“Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney’s Web site exemplifies how to use advances in technology and the Internet to better serve the growing number of constituents that are online. The content is comprehensive and cross-referenced. The wealth of features provides users with a sense of the work the Representative does, her accomplishments, and the services she provides.”

In addition to this, another PICnet client, Congressman Ed Markey, won a Bronze Mouse award, placing it in the top 30 congressional Web sites.

Congratulations to both offices, and their PICnetters, on a job well done!

You can read the 2006 Gold Mouse Report: Recognizing the Best Web Sites on Capitol Hill (PDF - 5MB) in its entirety to learn more about best practices for offices on the Hill.

It’s always great to see good organizations get high praise for great work they’ve done in the online communications world. One of our clients, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America received props from e.politics for having an outstanding advocacy website.

While the polling was far from scientific, it nonetheless speaks volumes for the great work of IAVA’s staff who makes sure the content and the message come through loud and clear, Free Range Graphics (the design team), and our tireless PICnetters who keep the site up and running.

Earlier this year, PICnet Inc. started working on another exciting new project with Alan Rosenblatt, at Turner Strategies, to create an online infrastructure for 3,000 entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, patent lawyers and more! This network will serve as a platform for business owners and angel circles/venture capitalists to find each other, thus developing a network for innovators to simply “plug” into.

Using Community Builder and other inextensible Joomla! components, we are practically building another MySpace or Facebook to help fellow entpreneurs grow their companies. Cheers to the “Innovators Network“!

At PICnet, we love our clients. And here’s the thing: they deserve it.

This morning, I got to take a firsthand peek inside one: Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the country’s first and largest Iraq Veteran’s group. With the Congressional elections less than a week away, the group has been in overdrive on media appearances and exposure — and has been experiencing some growing pains with their site due to the unexpected but massive increase in traffic.

I was there today to deliver a dozen from Dunkin’ Donuts to soothe the pain.

And, trust me, we are talking about some smart, energetic, and driven people. Although the staff is relatively small, they have built a large presence in today’s political marketplace (click here for just one example.) The group’s Congressional Rating — which calculates a grade for every U.S. legislator based on the politician’s support for bills that matter to U.S. troops, veterans, and their families — has turned quite a few heads. Props to the creators of this resource for using web technology to create an important and innovative application that might change the course of this election.

Props to IAVA for getting the job done for our men and women in uniform.

We are happy to announce the launch of a new web site for Leadership Loudoun, a nonprofit dedicated to training new generations of civic leaders in Loudoun County, VA. Most exciting for us, the site is built on our new Nonprofit Soapbox system. Most exciting for LL, on the other hand, is that they have a new, slick site that is easy to administer and a great deal, to boot.

And for those of you too lazy to click over to their About Us page, the organization is dedicated to providing training to civil leaders to create “developing a pool of leadership talent from which organizations may draw upon to meet it community service needs.”

We thank Leadership Loudoun selecting Nonprofit Soapbox, and congratulate them on the new site.

Recently, our team here at PICnet launched a Joomla! website for a private Jewish high school in California’s Bay Area, named Kehillah Jewish High School. Consisting of a brilliant staff, the institution has reached out to many families to help educate their children in an environment that nurtures faith and tradition. The site can be viewed at www.kehillah.org.

A big thanks goes out to Marily at Kehillah, whose patience and foresight through the Web development process helped bridge the gaps and for whom without the project would not have been such a wonderful success.

As we consciously adopt the agenda of every client, be it a non-profit or political entity, our PICnet team is often treated with perks such as Indian desserts and free T-shirts. In this case, we proudly received the title “mensch” from our friends at Kehillah High School - [a] mensch is a someone to admire and emulate, someone of noble character. The key to being “a real mensch” is nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity, a sense of what is right, responsible, decorous. (Rosten, Leo. 1968. The Joys of Yiddish. New York: Pocket Books. 237)

We have been reminded that it’s not always about what we do, but who we are that matters.

The latest Non-Profit Soapbox site to launch is the Center for Public Integrity’s Takings Initiative Accountability Project. This site was built in conjunction with the fantastic design team at Free Range Studios.
To learn more about what’s at stake in at least 5 western states, and the power that one very wealthy individual can have on our society and politics, we highly recommend you check out this site (especially all you left coasters!).

More details on the project’s goals below, as quoted from their Web site.

(more…)