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George Floyd’s murder has deservedly sparked the flame of social unrest. Rodney King, Oscar Grant, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor,  and countless more cases known and unknown continue to highlight the systemic and institutional racism that American capitalism depends upon.

Our very participation in the systems that breed oppression make us complicit. Society must change. Lives are at stake.

As the world navigates through a public health crisis, and we are all responding to unprecedented conditions, it is a good time to evaluate how well your website is working to communicate urgent information, and how it might be improved going forward. 

The team at Kalamuna has helped many organizations prepare and respond to emergencies, and in this series of posts, we are sharing research and lessons from our previous projects and the best practices we are now recommending to our clients.

For many organizations, it becomes imperative to communicate with your stakeholders in the event of an emergency. However, many common website components are not well-suited for presenting urgent information under adverse circumstances. Pop-ups may be blocked or dismissed accidentally, slideshows may fail to load under low-bandwidth conditions, and any text contained within images is inaccessible to screen readers used by blind and low-vision users.

Therefore, alert banners are often the best design pattern for presenting an urgent message or call to action to stakeholders who visit your website. A properly implemented alert banner can quickly and reliably catch the attention of your audience, let them know that an emergency is in progress, provide actionable instructions with the most relevant facts, and direct them to additional resources or updates as needed. 

Working from home (aka telecommuting) can be great for productivity and employee happiness. But not everyone is used to it – or prepared to do it (and many have been forced to recently because of COVID-19). At Kalamuna, we work on a distributed team, which means that most of us already work from home – and some of us are also used to setting up temporary workstations while travelling. It’s not always easy (or ideal), but a few small adjustments can make a big difference. Here are some of our team’s top tips for working effectively from the homefront.

Let’s take a trip back to 1996. Bill Clinton was elected to his second term as president, and the Nintendo 64 was released in North America. People called the internet the World Wide Web and logged into AOL to check their email while tying up their phone line. There was not much else to do online, as Google, Twitter, and Facebook were not around yet (thanks Slate and Wikipedia for the time capsule info).

Continuing our long history of spending our swag budget for good, we planned to partner with the Baltimore Hunger Project (BHP) at The Nonprofit Technology Conference (NTC) in Baltimore later this month. BHP provides 698 non-perishable bundles of food every Friday to combat the weekend “hunger gap” felt by food-insecure children in Baltimore.

As more and more companies liberate themselves from finding talent in a single geographical  location, the traditional office party could become a thing of the past. While I have had my fair share of awkward moments at office parties, they can also be critical components of building and maintaining company culture. 

Despite the political theatre and resulting uncertainty 2019 has brought us, I am overcome with gratitude for the relationships fostered by Kalamuna’s existence, and proud of the impact we have made together.

It’s easy to love nonprofits. They bridge the gap that exists between government and business, where the needs of our most vulnerable citizens are often met. They do the things that business and government cannot, or will not do. They’re a critical part of the infrastructure that meets our most pressing challenges and provide a home where our better angels can take action. 

Kalamuna team members Kristin Sartain and Sean Quigley took a moment to consider how nonprofits have impacted them personally:

Accessibility is really important to the team at Kalamuna. We strive to ensure that every website we work on is as accessible as possible, and that what we design and implement can be used, understood, and appreciated by people of all abilities. But keeping up with all the tools, techniques, and best practices, not to mention the latest WCAG guidelines, can be challenging. Fortunately, there’s a conference that takes place every year where we can do just that.