I’ve attended a few presentations on “Web 2.0” or “social networking” and the like and are usually disappointed. I’ve even blogged about how awful these things are. Tonight I attended a meeting titled “Social Networking – Using Technology and the Web as a Highly Effective and Low-Cost Ways to Recruit Volunteers” presented by Laura Briere, CEO and Founder of Vision Advertising.
Laura stressed the importance of updating your status on sites like Linked-In, Facebook, and Twitter on a daily basis. This is a good way to stay top-of-mind with your network and reinforce your reputation as someone who is active, fun, and up to something important. You can even use it to invite people to events or to check out your website. But, who has time to update all those different sites? The solution is my favorite new tip from Laura – Ping.fm. This site allows you to update all those other sites in one place. Of course, it doesn’t tell you what to say. You still have to figure that out on your own.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Friday, February 13, 2009
Sometimes, It's Better to Take Your Best Guess
In my last blog post (which was an embarrassingly long time ago) I talked about the importance of market research to nonprofits. So, you can imagine my excitement when the
It started by showing me various pieces of mail and asking me to rate my likeliness to open each one. It then asked me to rate how appealing I found one particular envelope. (There was no option for I couldn’t care less about your stupid envelope.) Then the fancy software program asked me to highlight in green the parts of the envelope I liked and highlight in red the parts I didn’t like and then explain each one. It didn’t get any better from there. It was only my researcher’s curiosity that kept me going to the end of the survey.
They didn’t really care what I thought about my alumni association, they just wanted to know the best way to sell to me. From having implemented direct mail programs myself, I know that expert direct mailers experiment and test every possible detail from the color of the envelope to the stamp to the greeting and more. By sending a slightly different package to different segments of the mail list they learn what works and what doesn’t. It’s an expensive, laborious process that is hard to get right. So I can sympathize with anyone wanting to short cut the process. But this project was ill conceived from the beginning for two key reasons:
1. While it’s true, for example, that a blue envelope may get you more donations than a yellow one, it’s not because people have well thought out opinions about the color of envelopes. It seems to me that these decisions operate on an irrational, sub-conscious level. There’s plenty of research that shows people are not good at accurately predicting their own behavior.
2. More importantly, every communication you have with your constituents, including surveys, influences their opinion of you. If you tell me that you care about my opinion and ask me to spend my precious time answering your questions, you'd better be asking me about something that I care about or I’m going to wonder why you’re wasting my time.
Yesterday, I attended a workshop on “Fund Development” with a consultant named Simone Joyaux that I really enjoyed. She talked about a lot of things but the theme that came up time and again was that most development efforts do things backwards. They are focused on themselves and not on the donors. It seems that “donor-centered” organizations are as rare in the nonprofit world as “customer-centered” companies are in the corporate world. This acutely myopic project shows that my alma mater is no exception. (Simone would not be surprised; she’s a rabid
The next time I get a survey from U of M, I’m still likely to take it because I am a freak who collects surveys as a hobby. But I wonder how many other alums will be less likely to open their U of M emails after this experience.
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