Jeff Brooks critiques a new “guerrilla” awareness campaign by The Salvation Army of Northern New England.
Donor Power Blog: Brag about your donors, not about yourself
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Autoscopia
Charity web sites: what donors want
April 16, 2009 – 10:48 am
What donors want to know most:
- The organization’s mission, goals, objectives, and work. (43% of sites put this info on the home page)
- How it uses donations and contributions. (Only 4% of charity sites put this info on the home page.)
What kills donations:
- 47% of donations killed by usability problems relating to page and site design, including unintuitive information architecture, cluttered pages, and confusing workflow.
- 17% of users couldn’t find where to make a donation. Banner blindness and formatting that looked like marketing made it difficult for users to see donation buttons. (Users ignore advertising. Nothing should ever look like an ad.)
- 53% of donations were killed by content issues related to writing for the Web, including unclear or missing information and confusing terms.
From Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, Donation Usability: Increasing Online Giving to Non-Profits and Charities
Clay Shirky’s Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
March 24, 2009 – 1:10 pm
GEISHA READING A NEWSPAPER by Okinawa Soba
“When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.”
Read Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable « Clay Shirky
Boomers and social media
February 23, 2009 – 1:38 am
From ReadWriteWeb,
A new report from Forrester Research revealed some surprising information: apparently Baby Boomers aren’t exactly the technology Luddites that people think they are. In fact, more than 60 percent of those in this generational group actively consume socially created content like blogs, videos, podcasts, and forums. What’s more, the percentage of those participating is on the rise. Read more
Polls
January 30, 2009 – 11:57 am
I saw this on Improbable Research.
Take the poll at metrolyrics.com
Nearly 20% of people polled do not notice polls.
Twitter me another coffee, will ya?
January 29, 2009 – 5:59 pm
Can you guess how a local coffee shop used Twitter to double their clientele?
I was guessing it had something to do with marketing. Wrong. It was from providing better service. A regular at CoffeeGroundz was in a rush and used Twitter to text the cafe owner to ask whether he could pre-order breakfast for the drive through. Why not?
Now the cafe will even let you text orders from your table by phone or laptop via Twitter.
Often people characterize Twitter as ‘micro-blogging.’ This seems somewhat misleading. It’s an umbilical cord between the web and mobile phones.
Web Spend To Grow despite everything
January 28, 2009 – 2:14 pm
James Cherkoff posts on global internet advertising forecasts.
The phrase “opting for the ‘value-and-certainty’ of paid search” sends me off on a tangent about Google and SEO, which I include below:
I’ve become increasingly bedazzled by the lack of certainty with AdWords. In part, this is due to the hugely complex factors Google juggles in ad placement ranking. ‘Does the ad link to a site where any intelligent or insightful information has appeared lately? Do the site authors have the cognitive potential to say anything intelligent in the future? Are the site authors or their agents sleazeballs?’
The other part of the bedazzling is realizing just how ‘personalized’ search results pages are. Log into Google, you see one thing. Logged out you see another. Use the site from a different building, you get different results again. And of course, now there’s SearchWiki, which adds another layer of liveliness to the affair.
I am beginning to suspect that Google is protecting it’s stock price by messing with the emerging SEO industry, ‘So you think you can control search results and ad placement to promote less valuable content, do you? Take that ye olde worlde media worms!’
Google is not the yellow pages. AdWords are not the want ads.
Russell Davies’ uncanny valley of advertising
January 23, 2009 – 12:02 am
“It seems like we’re about to enter a period where our digital lives will be full of the online equivalents of those messages you find on your television when you check into a hotel; always welcoming someone who’s got a name a bit like yours. Never actually your name. And you wish they just hadn’t bothered, you wish they’d just issued a general, warm welcome and not tried to connect at a level they just didn’t really feel (because if they’d have really felt it they’d have made sure they’d have gotten your name right.)”
Food is not a luxury
January 16, 2009 – 11:28 am
Jeff Brooks on Donor Power Blog posts another example of a nonprofit – Greater Chicago Food Depository – falling victim to ad agency abstraction of their message.
“…these ad guys (or maybe their interns) jump through hoops to create abstractions and philosophical conundrums. In this case, it’s all built around the notion that for some people, food is an unattainable “luxury,” and that’s just wrong. And they use the conventions of luxury advertising, applied to food.
Okay. It’s a thought. But in what way does that motivate anyone to take action?”
Read Jeff’s insightful commentary. Part of the always enjoyable Stupid Nonprofit Ads series.
Make the Baby Dance!
October 21, 2008 – 11:26 am
Finally – a video with a donation button that travels!
This is a crude mockup of a video donation widget built with SproutBuilder that utilizes ChipIn and PayPal to process donations. While this is intended as a demo, the donation processing is live, so if you decide to give to the fictional Foundation for Children Whose Legs Don’t Work So Good, please don’t cry fraud. And don’t expect to get your money back either. This thing isn’t idiot-proof ;-)
The reason this kind of widget is a big deal is that you can add the video to your own blog or social networking site – and the donate button travels. If a video becomes popular, the donate button will end up scattered all over the internet.
