Ranked Choice Voting Maryland

In late 2023, I started volunteering for this organization, RCV MD whose mission is to bring ranked choice voting to the great state of Maryland. As Technology team lead, I've had the opportunity to do a lot of different things for this organization, and it's allowed me to stretch my wings a little and expand my knowledge into parts of the web I wasn't familiar with before, like Nation Builder.

SEO

This is an ongoing process, as we just got control of our domain, but this was a mix of programmatic SEO, structural SEO (HTML structure), as well as taking advantage of the SEO options that are native to Nation Builder. This platform allows you to set the slug, title, excerpt and author for every single page, although they don't allow bulk edits, which can be a bit of a pain. We are going to redesign the site soon, and I'm pushing for it to be a WordPress site, so we'll see how that goes! A lot of aspects of this project would be easier to do on WordPress in my opinion.

Email Administration

As I said above, we recently migrated our domain from our parent organization into our control. I was leading the way on our end, and through careful coordination with my counterpart in the other org, we were able to transfer control of our domain's Google Admin Console to us. That's when the real work started. If you plan to send out mass email blasts, as most nonprofits do, you will need to add some layers of protection and authentication to your email. Google Workspace allows you to do some of this, and some has to be done through the DNS options that GoDaddy offers. After setting up a few TXT records and running some tests, we have everything working and under our control. This solves a problem we were having with the bounce rate on our newsletter, meaning the percentage of emails that were undeliverable. I made those changes, and the bounce rate cleared up!