Facebook Impact Challenge Redesigned and Improved

We’re happy to announce today that we’ve done a significant rework of our Facebook application, Impact Challenge. The application was working well, but we felt it wasn’t working well enough. The main goal of this update was to make it more user friendly, to give you a better sense of what is going on in your community (your friends, your challenges, etc), and to let you create any kind of challenge you want to improve our world..

Rather than try to explain it all in depth, here’s a few screenshots highlighting some of the changes.

On the Your Challenges tab you can see your total impact, and quickly access your current challenges:

Also on the Your Challenges tab, you can get a quick view of what your friends are up to, something which was hard to find in the previous version:

Wondering what other people will see when they click on your name? Click “View your Impact Profile” on the Your Challenges tab, and you’ll see this. It shows your latest impact, as well as your total impact and photograph:

In the Find a Challenge tab, you can now find challenges based on a category, and sorted by popularity. In the near future there will be more options here to help you find something interesting to get involved in:

Perhaps the biggest rework was in creating your own challenges. You can choose a metric from our ever-growing list of metrics, upload a photogragh, and generally work to make your challenge compelling:

If you don’t find the thing you want to track on our existing list of metrics, well now you can create your own!

And that about sums this new release up! We’re really looking forward to seeing the kinds of challenges that people create on Impact Challenge. Lets see if we can make a difference! And please send us all your feedback, suggestions, or bug reports.

Posted in Site Updates, Zazengo | 1 Comment »

A challenge to everybody, send us your feedback!

It may have been a new year for a while now by the western calendar, but it was the Chinese new year yesterday and what better time than that to start something new. This is just a quick post to let you know that we want your feedback! We want to know what you love about Zazengo, what you hate about it, and everything in between.

We have an long internal list of stuff we want to change/add/remove on the site, and of course it has been based on feedback we’ve received from many members and organizations, but we’ve never really formalized our feedback system, until now.

We’ve integrated in a feedback system using UserVoice.com, (another Santa Cruz company by the way!) on every page in our site. You’ll see the tab on the right side of your page. Just click it, and let us know your wildest dreams about how what you would love to see on Zazengo. Big ideas, or small ones, we’re open to hearing all of them.

The smart thing about UserVoice is that you can enter as many ideas as you wish, but you can only vote up a limited number of them, and the ideas that have the highest votes will for sure be the ones we look at first. So use your votes judiciously!

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MLK Day is coming up and you can make a difference

Exciting times are upon us these days. President-elect Obama is calling on all Americans to make an ongoing commitment to serve our community and our country. Martin Luther King Day is on January 19th. Obama will be serving that day along with millions of other Americans. What will you be doing to help?

We’re honored to announce that we’ve been working with the Corporation for National and Community Service and its partners on the MLK Day of Service using our freshly minted Impact Challenge application on Facebook. On the Impact Challenge you can pledge to take action, and challenge your friends to do so as well.

The MLK Day of Service is a featured campaign. When you are taking action on Martin Luther King Day, report what you did on the MLK Day organization on Facebook or right on Zazengo and invite your friends to join you.

But that’s not all, you can get your community involved by:

1. Inviting your friends to join Impact Challenge directly.
2. Adding the MLK Day widget on the right to your own site or blog or social network profile.
3. Pasting the MLK Day banner anywhere you think people might see it.

We’re looking forward to seeing what all of us can do to make a difference in our communities!

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Impact Challenge, our Facebook Game goes live!

We’re happy to announce today that we recently launched a new game on Facebook called Impact Challenge.

Impact Challenge is a game you play with your friends that has real world, positive, visible impact. Challenge your friends, and yourself, to take the daily action you choose (volunteering, recycling, conserving…), all the while building up your Impact and Inspiration scores.

We’re off to a good start, right now, Tracy Weiss is leading the pack with 35 actions taken from recycling bottles to reusing bags to carrying her own coffee mug, but perhaps you can do better!

If you have a Zazengo.com profile already, your Impact Challenge can be easily linked with it, keeping all your actions synchronized between the two places. You’ll see a link on your dashboard to the add Impact Challenge application ensuring it is sync’ed.

Or, you can synchronize your account after from within the Impact Challenge:

Please check it out, and feel free to send your feedback our way, we’re always looking for ways to improve the experience.

Posted in Site Updates, Zazengo | 2 Comments »

Zazengo to present at Astia Conference

Hi there,

We were selected as an Astia-company in early September. Astia is an organization committed to funding and supporting women-led businesses. We’ve been busy with our coaches in preparation for the Astia Conference which takes place 19-20 November in San Francisco.

Check out the conference if you are in the area and come and see us present!

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Our DEMO Presentation

We presented at DEMOfall 08 this morning.  It’s been a wonderful couple of days, meeting so many interesting people.  We’re looking forward to the coming months, which we hope will bring you even more ways to share your social impact.

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Zazengo Live at DEMOfall 08 Conference

We are thrilled to announce that we are presenting at DEMOfall 08

in San Diego!

If you are a DEMO attendee, be sure to stop by our booth and say hello.

We are located at Station #4, right next to the entrance.

Our Demo presentation will be Tuesday at 10:30 am PST.

We will add a video of the presentation once it’s live.

Thanks for all of the incredible support!

What is DEMO?

http://www.demo.com/community/?q=node/188178

72 companies to launch disruptive innovations at DEMOfall 08

Seventy-two new digital technology products from 11 countries will be introduced at DEMOfall 08 in San Diego starting Monday. A “record crowd of more than 800 people have registered as of today,” said Mike Garity, DEMO’s vice president of marketing and business development.

“Every DEMO we strive to identify the companies that will defy all the odds and have significant impact in the technology markets,” said Chris Shipley, product analyst and executive producer of the DEMO conferences. “Ours is a year-long process that culminates in 72 hours of products that are more than disruptive; they change the rules of the game as we know it. They are innovative, they are important, they are fun, and they represent the future products and solutions we all will be using soon.”

We are proud to be part of this exciting event!

Read more in our press release.

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Exciting News: Zazengo 2.0 Launched!

I’m proud to say that we have released Zazengo 2.0.

It was a huge endeavor. We’ve been working around the clock to make this happen, but we are more than excited with the results. We have given the site a complete new redesign, coupled with improved functionality.

What can I show you? Well the list is long, and we will soon be adding videos that will walk you through each site feature, but for now here are the big changes:

• An overall site redesign.
• A highly customizable personal dashboard.
• A flash visualization of your Impact.

A Stylin’ New Look

Michael Kroll, our amazing designer, has been working hard on giving Zazengo a new look. It’s reminiscent of the old design, but overall is cleaner, hip, and of course - has better usability.

Here are a couple of my favorite pages:

Friends Page
Dashboard
Search Interface
Organization Profile
User Profile

Dashboard - Your Zazengo World at a Glance

Instead of trying to be a “one-size-fits-all” type site, we decided to let our users customize their Zazengo experience - particularly their Dashboard area.

After logging into Zazengo, you will land on your dashboard. This dashboard is completely customizable. You can add and / or remove widgets. You can also move them around to best fit your need.

The Dashboard area has been designed to keep you informed on the latest happenings. Think of it as a window into the rest of the site. Stay current on messages, invitations, site updates, projects, newsfeeds and more!

Visualize your impact

The final big piece of the 2.0 puzzle is our Flash impact visualizer:

We’ve worked closely with Teknision, a Flash development house based out of my hometown, Ottawa, Canada. They’ve put together an incredibly engaging way to visualize your impact, viewing other people’s impact, comparing your impact to others, and see how your impact rolls up to the greater good.

Here are a couple different views to demonstrate what we have created. You can click the image to be taken to that page.

We hope that you enjoy our changes and please let us know what you think. This is your product and we are here to listen.

Have fun and let’s make an impact!

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Release: Create, Edit and Delete Impact, Improved Events and More

Wow…time sure flies when you’re having fun, and in our case, working hard too! Over the weekend we released a few changes, which we’re excited to announce.

First off, creating impact is core to what we do here on Zazengo. Now, it’s easier than ever to enter an impact. We’ve added a Create an Impact link to every page.

But nobody’s perfect, so we’ve added the ability to edit and delete an impact you’ve already entered on your My Impact page.

And finally, we’ve improved the Events interface making it easier for you to enter and find the latest happenings on your projects.

But to say that was all we’ve done wouldn’t be fair. We fixed over 60 reported bugs (thanks for all the great feedback), and countless other bugs we noticed along the way.

Here’s a short list:

• Improved the titles on each page for better search engine optimization.
• Fixed countless javascript and styling errors in Internet Explorer.
• Adjusted the project search results; pushing the most relevant projects to the top.
• Improved the reporting functionality for organizations.
• Fixed a few bugs that were causing incorrect impact totals.

While we still have lots to do, we are very excited about what’s to come in the next couple months. Stay tuned for some exciting new announcements. Our goal is to make Zazengo the best place to track and manage impact!

Posted in Site Updates, Zazengo | 1 Comment »

My First Experience - Using Reusable Bags

I did it. I made the big change.

Instead of using brown paper bags and especially those flimsy, clog the ocean, plastic bags - I’m now using reusable bags. While in Atlanta at the 2008 National Conference on Volunteering and Service I picked up a four “Brown bag it” bags from UPS. These bags are awesome. They are a bit larger than a brown paper bag and best of all - they don’t fall apart!

It was an interesting experience. I decided for my “first time” I’d go to a local market where it’s a bit slower and it’s common for people to bring their own bags. I took one bag. I first realized that it was a bit awkward carrying it in. Do I put the groceries inside the bag or use a basket? I chose a basket.

I then realized that I was limited in how much I could carry. How much can one bag hold? I found I was more mindful in selecting which items I needed versus which items I wanted. I also had a few blocks to walk, so I needed to be aware of the weight of my items.

After filling my basket, I went to check out. All my groceries were on top of the bag. I felt a bit self-conscious with a large line behind me and wished I didn’t put my bag on the bottom. The cashier was more than appreciative that I was using a reusable bag. She was also aware that I had to walk a couple blocks so she made sure she packed it extra careful. Very nice person. I felt the people behind me were a bit annoyed because it was taking a bit longer than throwing it quickly in a plastic or paper bag - but that very well could have been me feeling a little nervous.

After leaving - I felt GREAT! I did it!! I know it sounds strange -  it’s just a reusable bag - but it’s an important pivotal step for me. I’ve learned that it takes a little effort to make change. It may feel a bit uncomfortable at first, but change is FUN and it feels GOOD in the end.

Since this experience, I’ve used two bags at Trader Joe’s and it went smoothly. I also used a bag at a local Farmer’s Market. It was incredibly handy and best of all - I’m doing my part to make the world a better place.

I’d like to challenge each of you to take the “big leap” and use reusable bags. I’ve started a project called Use Reusable Bags!

Join in and together we can make a difference.

Posted in Projects, Zazengo | 11 Comments »