Web Development Posts
Make Your Data Big with Code
Many of our digital audience engagement platforms provide excellent APIs (application programming interfaces), which make their data usable and changeable and even allow you to connect different services together with a bit of code. Here, we explain a sync we wrote for MailChimp and Eventbrite. We've also made the code freely available for you to use for your own projects.
Children’s Health Care Spending Driven by Rising Costs
With child visits to the emergency room declining and the overall use of prescription drugs by children at its lowest in years, it only makes sense that spending on health care for kids would be down. Right? Not quite.
CollegeTracks Paves the Way for More Kids in Need
A small Maryland-based nonprofit, CollegeTracks, is helping low-income students in Montgomery County tackle the college admissions and financial aid process. This week CollegeTracks announced the expansion of its program to a third high school in the area. The move will provide hundreds more students with support.
Expanding the Pipeline of Skilled Workers
The White House hosted a summit focused on the need to “upskill” America’s workforce. More than 100 leading employers, who employ five million workers, made commitments to "upskill" their workers by expanding access to apprenticeships and on-the-job training in partnership with thirty national and local labor unions and non-profit groups.
Writing for the Web in Ethiopia
Over the past two years, we have had the honor of working with the Ethiopian Ministry of Health’s Public Relations and Communication Directorate (PRCD). One project we worked on together, after redesigning their website—was a workshop on writing effectively for the web.
Where You Live Matters to Your Health
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of Wisconsin’s Population Health Institute released the 2015 County Health Rankings, which shows that where you live influences how well and how long you live. It compares 30 factors that communities have the ability to do something about – including education, jobs, violent crime, housing, diet and exercise.
When the White House Calls…
Last week, President Obama announced the launch of UpSkill America—a coalition of business, education, and workforce training organizations leading a movement to expand economic opportunity for American workers. As the economy continues to improve, many employers are struggling to find skilled workers to fill the jobs they have available.
Behind the Scenes: Building a New Burness.com
This week we launched a new website after months of work with a demanding, challenging, and occasionally cranky client: ourselves. Let me back up. During the Polar Vortex of early 2014, we came to a conclusion: for all of the dynamic websites we had built, all the principles of simple user experience and responsive design we had encouraged for our partners, our own digital presence was not walking our talk. The website had long dropdown menus, performed poorly on mobile, and didn’t convey the breadth of our work. “It's time,” we agreed. “And we have to build the new site for ourselves.”
Welcome to Burness!
Twenty-nine years after our founding, we continue to receive a lot of positive feedback. Above all, the most consistent compliment is that we’re consistent: people know that we’re genuine and passionate, that we deliver excellent work, and that the nonprofits we represent see real impact as a result of partnering with us.
Well, in a small way, we’re about to change that—sort of.
We’re changing something that’s been perfectly consistent for 29 years—our name! Exit Burness Communications. Enter Burness.
Three Lessons for Building a Strong Website When Time Is Tight
When our friends at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (FRBSF) asked us to help build a website for their latest book, What Counts: Harnessing Data for America’s Communities, we saw three things: ambitious goals, a tight timeline, and a challenge that we couldn’t pass up.
