Squidblog

Sometimes, it’s worth saying and repeating things out loud, even if you think everyone already knows them.

Squidoo has changed the way people donate to charity online. Squidoo gives everyone a voice, and the opportunity to make (free) donations big and small, month in and month out, to organizations that matter. Always have, always will. That’s one of our founding principles, one of the cornerstones of the company and the community.

For members and onlookers new and seasoned alike, here’s a quick cheatsheet about how it all works.

• Squidoo is a publishing platform that lets real people make real pages about topics, ideas, people, and products that matter to them.
• The best pages (”lenses”) have unique, useful, updated content on them, full of pictures and videos and links and articles and opinions and recommendations and conversations. The best lenses are extremely focused and interactive pages on a particular topic or slice of life and the web.
• There are Google and display ads on each page, and the opportunity for you to sell products via Amazon, eBay, CafePress and other partner sites. That’s how each page earns money.
• We as a company (that us, the SquidooTeam) donate 5% of our revenue straight to charity.
• We also give 50% of our revenue to our community, to the people who make our pages, distributed according to an algorithm that pays the highest quality lenses, the most.
• Then our lensmasters decide what they want to do with the royalties they’ve earned.
• They have the choice to keep the cash, or donate their royalties to any of our 100 (and growing) supported nonprofits.
• As a group, the Squidoo community donates about $10,000 a month to a bunch of different charities, from the Acumen Fund to A Day of Hope to JDRF.
• It’s easy and free for any certified 501c3 organization to apply to become a Squidoo supported nonprofit. Supported nonprofits get the privilege of our community’s attention and choice, and it’s up to every individual lensmaster if and where she wants to donate her royalties every month.
• It’s also easy and free (and amazing powerful and woefully overlooked) for organizations to invite their volunteers, donors and friends to make pages, about anything, that automatically donate monthly royalties to their cause. The ASPCA once had thousands of their supporters make lenses about their pets, and those lenses are still donating royalties, every single month, for free.
• Our Community Organizer, Kimberly, is in charge of our charity signup process. She’s kind and quick and likes going above and beyond for the all-too-rare nonprofit groups that are eager to do more than the status quo.
• Here is the official application page you should send to your favorite nonprofit organization if you want them to start exploring the benefits of being a Squidoo-supported org.
• And yes, it’s all free.

Over the past month, we’ve put the spotlight on some of our newest charities to give them a little boost in our Squidoo community. Going forward, if you’d love to be our next spotlight charity, we’re going to make you work for it!

With dozens of awesome charities already being sponsored through Squidoo, and a handful of applications coming in each week, it’s important to do what you can to make your charity stand out. For those charities who are willing to put their best foot (or photo) forward, we’re offering a week in the spotlight.

If you’d love to become the next Spotlight Charity, just follow the simple rules below:

1. Make sure your “about us” lens is up to snuff.
Here are a few tips to make it shine: creating your “about our charity” lens, build a better lens

2. Find a digital photo of a recent event.
And include a caption so we know what it’s for.

3. Write a short story about what you’ve been doing over the past month.
Be specific. How many people did you help? How much food did you donate? How many volunteers were in the walk-a-thon?

3.5 Send it all to kimberly@squidoo.com
If your charity is selected as the spotlight charity, it will be featured on Charity Central, the Non-Profit Nook, our Twitter feed, and this blog. Who knows where that kind of fame could take you!

We’ll be featuring one charity a week. If yours isn’t selected, never fear. You can always check the steps above and reapply. I can’t wait to see all those great photos and stories!

PS: March is a special month for charity newsletters, so you’ll really want to make sure you read them. Starting next week, keep your eye out for Nine Things Successful Charities Do on Squidoo!

Coming very soon to a lens near you: The new module showcase.

The old module picker has been overhauled, tested by dozens of Giant Squids, and is now packed with some cool tools for newbies and pros alike. Our goal was to make it easier for you to find and add modules to your lenses. After all, modules are the building blocks for great content!

Read more about the new Showcase and see an early peek some some screenshots.

As soon as it’s live, you can find the Showcase by editing lenses as you normally would. Click the “Add Modules” button at the top of your Workshop and you’ll see the new Showcase slide down.

Try adding a bunch of modules, click on a bunch of tabs in the module picker. If anything seems buggy or broken, send it in to us here and title your report “Module Showcase.” If you have general feedback, we love that too.

And if you would rather switch back to the old Module Picker, there will be a link for you to do that, for a little while at least.

Here are 3 posts from the SquidU forum today that you should read. If you are a lensmaster who cares about the quality of her lenses, the goodness of the community, and the respect of your fellow lensmasters.

On junk.
On email etiquette.
On word scrambles. (Okay, this one is just for fun!)

Thanks.

What do Santa, Dobby and Frankenstein have in common?

Apparently that they all work here at Squidoo!

ChefKeem’s Lensrank Update cartoon was a smile for the day.

Gotta love algorithms.

Click to embiggen.

A Thursday rollup of fun things worth knowing and stuff worth reading…

• The Giant Squids are currently in secret beta testing of a brand new Module Picker. Releasing to a lens near you some time next week.
• Fluffanutta over at SquidUtils has cooked up a terrific browser toolbar for lensmasters.
• Did you know the text module is used more than 1,204,485 times? That’s some good writing, people.
• The hot hot hot module that made Twttrstrm rock and roll is now available as a standalone module, to add to any of your hot topic or debate lenses. Ask a question in the Twitterstorm module, and invite your Twitter followers to answer.
• Lots of chat lately about multiple Squidoo accounts. Captain Squid has level-headed insights as always. If you don’t use multiple accounts to fake anyone out, and if you remember to stake your reputation on your work, all’s good.
• 2 new modules: The Giant Squid Community Showcase module, and the Want to Be A Giant Squid module. Featuring the popular blogs run by lensmasters RMS and BDKZ. Look for the modules and consider adding them as a P.S. to your lenses, if you’re of a mentoring mind.
• Kimberly has a thoughtful and great SquidU Review writeup about Work-in-Progress lenses (WIP). When should they stay, when should they go?

There. 7 things you didn’t know five minutes ago. Doesn’t that feel good.

Looks like it’s a good day for reminders!

Here’s one more.

If you have a problem or a bug or an idea, the quickest way to get it in front of the SquidTeam is, believe it or not, by submitting it here. We don’t always reply right away, especially if there’s an anomalous or one-time case that isn’t widespread, but we do always look at the reports every single day.

Reaching out to the SquidTeam via their personal blogs or on Twitter or Facebook or even personal email isn’t easy for us to track or investigate or respond to, alas.

And yes, we do occasionally take a look at the SquidU forums, and that’s a fair place for you to chat with other lensmasters about problems you might be having, but please be sure to send in that bug report if you want us to look in to something specific.

Thanks for the help, everyone! Your lenses are looking better than ever these days!

A Monday smorgasbord of reminders about living in the day to day Squidworld. Of course, 99% of you won’t even need to read this. But for the sake of clarity, give it a scan. Thanks. You’re good eggs.

• If you ask for ratings swaps or participate in traffic exchanges, your account will probably get locked.
• If you make a junky page, chances are people won’t like it, will feel scammed by it, and will report it. Is “junk” subjective? Yes. Sometimes it has to do with empty modules or thin content. Sometimes it has to do with sales lenses that scream buy buy buy in flashing green lights. But it’s pretty easy to know when something isn’t junk, don’t you think?
• If you actively, aggressively, selfishly spam someone, you don’t stand much of a chance here (or anywhere) at all.
• If you create multiple accounts, making good lenses in one but spammy lenses in the other, remember that your reputation is only worth as much as your worst lenses.
• Anonymity only makes things harder for everyone. Wouldn’t you like to stockpile all your goodwill into one, real, identity, and capitalize on the respect you earn over time? It certainly earns you the benefit of the doubt when something goes wonky.
• Yes, we actually can tell if you’ve gone on a 1-star rating run, or if you’ve been boosting your own accounts with lots of 5 star ratings. And if we find it, we’ll remove the ratings, and perhaps lock your account.
• Take a second to read (or re-read) our public SquidDon’t policies. Some topics just aren’t kosher on Squidoo, because the majority of lenses that get created about them are spambait and typically up to no good. Pharmaceutical lenses, lots of weight loss lenses, gambling and credit card debt lenses, stuff like that (just for example). If writing about those topics is your entire gig, chances are good you’ll run up against a few sticking points on Squidoo. Sorry.
• Be careful what you buy online. Squidoo is free. All our official resources are free. If you’re buying an ebook, or buying a lens someone built, that transaction is entirely between you and that person.
• We love giving people the benefit of the doubt. Do you, too?
• Online is made up of real people. That’s all. Just worth remembering. Would you say something mean to someone’s face? Then maybe you don’t want to say it online, either.
• Create content you’re really proud of, stand for something, and probably, none of this matters.

I received this email from a friend:

“Today is National Wear Red Day. Go Red for Women is dedicated to building awareness of heart disease among women. Heart Disease is the No. 1 killer of women age 20 and over, but it is largely preventable. 1 in 3 women has some form of cardiovascular disease. More women die of cardiovascular disease than the next five causes of death combined, including all forms of cancer. However, only 1 in 5 women believes that heart disease is her greatest health threat.”

My real motivation isn’t to talk about heart disease, although its research is a great cause! How many of you know heart disease is a problem, but after reading this particular note you’re thinking about it more than before? Statistics have a powerful way of putting needs into perspective. It’s hard to imagine 350,000 people a year needing bypass surgery, but you can visualize three of your friends, and one of them being ill.

Statistics help make needs personal. They bring issues down to a level the average donor can understand. If you serve 4000 people a year, is that 1 out of 16 people in your county? If you save 300 animals a year, is that like rescuing 27 from every square mile in your city? If it takes $80 to put a kid through your program, how big of a difference can $10 or $20 make?

What statistics can you share about your organization?

While the groundhog was busy looking for his shadow, another famous holiday animal icon stole the show. This morning, a previously published Thanksgiving newsletter made its way out of the archives and into your email inbox. Oops.

We’re not sure how or why it did that, and we apologize. We know that as a newsletter subscriber you expect to get only newsletters you ask for, and definitely only when they are supposed to go out.

We now return to your regularly scheduled newsletters (about things that are way more relevant!)