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. 

FontAwesome is awesome for everyone, right? Well, not so much if you are a screen reader user… We took on a mission to make FontAwesome even more awesome for a client. 

As a mission-focused organization, we want to make browsing the internet an experience that is available to everyone regardless of ability. So when our friends at Pantheon referred Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business to us to help resolve issues their internal accessibility audit had flagged, we were more than happy to take on the project. 

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.

When is it time to panic?

“God help us, we're in the hands of engineers.” – Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park

With support for Drupal 7 soon to be extinct, many Drupal 7 website owners are anxious to migrate quickly to the next generation of the CMS, Drupal 8. With phrases like “end of life” and “sunsetting” now almost ubiquitously attached to Drupal 7, some are feeling chills of terror sweep over, as if the surface of the water in the glass resting on the dashboard has begun to ripple from the impact tremors.

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:

We’ve recently had the opportunity to streamline the donation page and form UX for a client. There’s a good amount of information out there on how to do it well, but a lot of it is scattered, and one often has to sleuth up chains of citations to get to the source material. As is to be expected, applying general UX best practices and basic heuristics to any user flow gets us a good part of the way there, but the donation process—an important conversion for any organization looking to receive funds online— has some unique particulars, some of which might even be counter-intuitive. 

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.

Like many of you, we are appalled by the inhumane cruelty leveled against migrants and refugees, and are especially heartbroken by the state-sponsored abuses enacted against children. BADCamp gave us an opportunity to utilize our sponsorship booth to create space to talk about this humanitarian crisis. We invited attendees at our booth to help us allocate $1,000 between three nonprofits advancing legal aid, humanitarian aid, or policy change on this issue.