Squidblog

Happy autumn! In September we had two new charity partners join us.

Golden Friends Rescue
We work as a go-between to help move Golden Retrievers and Golden Retriever mixes out of kill shelters and into reputable, established rescue organizations. We assist shelters and the larger established rescue organizations with their adoption processes.
 

Horses for Healing of NWA
The Horses for Healing is a nonprofit, therapeutic riding center that helps special needs children across Northwest Arkansas grow mentally, physically, and emotionally.
 

It’s easy to make a lens and set your royalties to a deserving charity, or two or ten. Learn how to edit your payment settings for charities.

Visit these and our other partner charities listed at Charity Central.

Congratulations, and welcome!
~Kimberly Dawn Wells
YOUR Charity Organizer on Squidoo

PS - not yet a partner charity? Learn about our criteria and apply here.

Today we launched a new project, Brands in Public.

Seth’s blog has a complete overview of what Brands in Public is all about.

From a Squidoo community perspective, it’s a satellite gig powered by Squidoo, sold by the smart people at BzzAgent, and created for your everyday consumer on the web who is looking for one easy spot to follow the latest conversations about her favorite brand.

It’s something different from our usual ‘front door to Squidoo’ projects like SquidWho and SquidBoo and SquidLit. If you were to think of Squidoo as a U2 album, our front door projects are each cool tracks on the same album. Whereas Brands in Public is more like what happens when Bono goes off and sings with Bob Geldof for a special event.

For lensmasters, a few things you might like to know about it are:

• It’s run on the Squidoo platform.
• We built it because we think it’s filling an important spot on the web and creating a simple social opportunity for brands.
• I invited a few dozen early Giant Squids to help build out the first Brands in Public (BIPs) and if those sell, we’re paying them a bounty.
• No, it’s not wide open for anyone to come and build a BIP, for free, like Squidoo is.
• Yes, they cost $400/month and BzzAgent is selling them to brand managers across the globe.
• Yes, you should tell your favorite brands about it.
• We’re offering free BIPs to chosen charities. If your non-profit organization is interested, please fill out this form.
• Lensmasters can (and should!) keep making regular lenses all about their favorite brands and products and services and debates; you don’t need a BIP page to do that. Not by a long shot.
• It’s very cool that when you Google “Molson” now, their BIP shows on the first page. (They’re one of our beta brands).
• Yes, Squidoo and our community is our main focus, always was and always is.

Last week we processed lensmaster payouts and included for the first time a partial month’s worth of additional payout from the InfoLinks text link ads, for those lenses that were opted in for it.

Unfortunately, in creating the new InfoLinks ad pool to share with opted-in lensmasters, we ran in to some complex bugs. As a result we wound up overpaying some lensmasters, whilst underpaying others who were owed a cut of the InfoLinks pie.

If you were one of the underpaid, we will make good on it in your favor in next month’s payout. (Which we’ll be processing earlier than usual, so you don’t have to wait).

If you were one of the overpaid, we aren’t asking you to send it back! We will just adjust your next month’s earnings.

We’re sorry again for the confusion this caused last week, and look forward to getting back on track with the trend of bigger and bigger payouts — especially as we race in to the holiday season, historically high for lensmaster royalties!

Thanks guys.

Step aside, Santa. Freddy and Jason and Jack the Ripper are showing you up.

We’ve discovered that tons of people come to Squidoo every year looking for Halloween stuff. Costumes, recipes, party ideas, jokes, scary movies, proton packs, DIY wizard wands…

So we put together the little SquidBOO project for you. It’s half party trick (and fun theme for your lenses), half serious way to aggregate great Halloween content for the hordes of people who go looking for it. The ultimate Halloween index, if you will.

What’s more: Your fearless fellow lensmaster Bonnie is running a neat blog and Twitter project to help promote great SquidBOO lenses, every day, from now all the way through Halloween. Check out her SquidBOO Blast Blog and Twitter profile and find out how to submit your SquidBOO lenses.

Ghoulish.

A fine looking chart:

And as usual, the Squidteam is laboring away.

We’re fixing a few bugs that cropped up, including a star rating issue and LensRank not updating (it will in a few hours).

As always, if you’re finding something weird happening on your lens, please document it with as many details (even a screengrab) and send in a bug report. It may be a holiday weekend, but we’ve got an eye on the homestead and looking out for your reports.

Thanks!

P.S. And hey, if you’re looking for something fun to do today….

We’re all in a hurry when we’re surfing the web. We’re looking for something, an answer to a question (”is gorilla hair ground covering toxic to my dog?”) or better yet, meaning. Usually you have to put in a little time to snap right to what you want. Search, poke, back, hunt, look, back again, and on and on. Or if you’re like me you have no fewer than 89 tabs open in Firefox when you’re on a research mission.

In an attempt to help searchers get where they ultimately want to go, a little faster, we’re trying a new series of ‘greetboxes’ on Squidoo. The first series of greetbox experiments will only be visible to searchers (as in, people Googling or Yahooing or Binging). And only if you, the lensmaster, have selected to keep the ‘Discovery Tool‘ on your lens turned on. If so, the searcher will see the greetbox at the top of a lens, spotlighting good lenses related to her search. She can easily dismiss it if she’s already happy with where she’s landed. (The challenge to you is to make the latter part of that sentence true).

Here’s a static example.

So if you haven’t already, try turning the Discovery Tool on and give the searcher greetbox a shot. It’s a good traffic play. Because once your lens is participating, that means other participating lenses will also point back to yours from their greetboxes.

We’ll run a few slightly different versions of these boxes over the next few days to see what works best. Maybe together we can convince some of the searchers who fly by in a hurry to stop and smell some roses.

We love to hear how partner charities are putting donations to good use. Here are a few updates from partner charities who share their newsletters with us:

“Thanks to you Squids for your generosity to many causes, including our own small one to help upgrade combat troops, especially in the troops now fighting in Afghanistan.”
~Operation Helmet

“Your donation will help us provide educational opportunity to millions of children in the developing world. Since 2000, we have published 333 local language children’s titles, established over 7,100 libraries, partnered with local villages to build 765 schools, funded 179 computer and language labs, and provided 7,132 girls with long-term scholarships through secondary school. At Room to Read, we believe that there is no more valuable investment than the gift of education and the life change it can provide.”
~Room to Read

“Caring individuals like you help us continue our relentless efforts to cure leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma, and improve the quality of life of patients and their families.”
~The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society

Aw…thanks for the warm fuzzies. You can easily make these fuzzies even warmer. Won’t you spend just 5 minutes to make a lens for one of our charity partners?

Do you have an official newsletter for your charity? Add us to the list! Use charitynewsletters at squidoo.com, or send us the sign-up link. We love to know what you’re up to. (Please don’t use payteam at squidoo.com, thanks!)

Hi charities! Time to dust off those bios and avatars of yours and see where you could use an update.

Your avatar and biography are important components of your lens, especially as a charity. The face you present needs to be polished, and a missing image or bio can be devastating to your reputation!

Does your bio look like this? Ick. Chances are slim a reader will donate. Time for an update. The best part is it will only take 5 minutes!

Once you’ve logged into your account, you’ll find all the info you need to update your bio on the My Profile tab of your dashboard. In that top Personal Info section you’ll see Default Photo and Default Bio. Let’s update the bio first. This will update your global biography, meaning it will show on all your lenses. You can also edit the biography on each lens individually, in the workshop.

Writing a biography.
Your biography doesn’t need to be long or extensive. In fact, you probably have the perfect elevator speech for your organization on your own website, or neatly tucked in a mission statement. Here are some of my favorite short biographies from our partner charities:

Paws Animal Kingdom is a Non profit charity dedicated to helping animals all over the world. We are dedicated to building a NO KILL animal sanctuary on 100+ acres of land in the Maryland area. You can help by visiting http://www.pawsanimalkingdom.org and clicking the donate button!
~Paws Animal Kingdom
 

Wildlife Forever is a 22 year old multi-species conservation organization. Our mission is to conserve America’s wildlife heritage through conservation education, preservation of habitat, and management of fish and wildlife. Become a member and support wildlife in America.
~Wildlife Forever
 

The Freeplay Foundation has helped more than 8 million poor and vulnerable people improve the quality of their daily lives through the distribution of sustainable, self-powered and environmentally friendly technologies. We strive to provide the poorest of the poor with access to education, information and energy.
~Freeplay Foundation
 

See how easy it is? From these bios, it’s easy to tell what each charity does and how they do it. If you’re having a hard time writing your bio, ask yourself, “What problem do we solve?” Keep it simple, so anyone can easily understand it.

Go ahead and enter yours, and be sure to click “save.”

Next, upload a photo.
The easiest way to add an image quickly and build brand recognition is to use your logo. The best logos are simple, have few colors, and aren’t intricate. If your logo is a combination of text and graphics, for instance, consider removing the text and using just the graphic. If you don’t have access to a good graphic designer, ask for help on our peer-driven forum. We bet a tech savvy lensmaster would be happy to lend a hand.

Remember to use a small image (2″x2″ on your monitor is good), and .gif or .jpg files are best.

That’s it! Now your bio is beautiful.

Bonus: after you’ve updated your bio, send an email to kimberly at squidoo.com with a link to your official charity Squidoo lens. You’ll get credit for updating your lens!

Welcome to these four new charity partners! Starting immediately, you can create lenses and send your royalties to these hard-working organizations. Soon, you can add the Donations Module to your lens and encourage readers to give even more.

New Identity Magazine
New Identity Magazine is a publication created to help people find their new identity in Christ by presenting interesting topics, issues and ideas from multiple Christian perspectives and showcasing the cultural and world aspects of life and following God.
 

Freeplay Foundation
The Freeplay Foundation has helped more than 8 million poor and vulnerable people improve the quality of their daily lives through the distribution of sustainable, self-powered and environmentally friendly technologies.
 

Global Sports Alliance USA
Global Sports Alliance USA is a nonprofit organization focused on making sporting events more sustainable and encouraging people to adopt a green lifestyle. We promote sustainable living to sports players and fans of any age from all sports backgrounds.
 

Cecil County Pregnancy Center
The Cecil County Pregnancy Center is a Christian, prolife organization which provides emotional support and practical assistance to pregnant women and to families with young children.
 

Visit these and our other partner charities listed at Charity Central.

Congratulations, and welcome!
~Kimberly Dawn Wells
YOUR Charity Organizer on Squidoo

PS - not yet a partner charity? Learn about our criteria and apply here.