When creating software, it’s often worthwhile to prepare a quick-​​and-​​dirty demo to see if the concept holds promise, argues Jason Fried of 37 Signals.

But bureaucracy and a need to “get it right the first time” can stifle this sort of innovation, he writes:

I suspect we’re not the only company dealing with this problem. In fact, I bet that obsessing about quality too early in the creative process prevents a lot of good ideas from taking shape. As businesses grow, all sorts of things that once were done on the fly–including creating new products–have a way of becoming bureaucratized. As a result, the wrong sets of pressures are brought to bear. Doubts, deadlines, resource planning…all of this stuff is essential. But only later on. Fretting about such matters at the outset only gets in the way.

This lesson doesn’t apply only to software. In marketing, our desire to launch the perfect product or the perfect campaign can keep good ideas from seeing the light of day. And since perfection in marketing is measured by results, we won’t know what works until we try it. Our instincts are probably wrong, so we have to remain open to new ideas and to running tests to find out if they’ll work.

How do you keep the marketing juices flowing in your organization?

UNICEF is aggressively pushing back against “slacktivists” who show their support for a cause on social media but don’t take real-​​world action, Olga Khazan reports in the Atlantic.

Watch their video:

What do you think? Does encouraging Facebook likes add value to non-​​profits? Can this value be effectively measured?

New York Magazine explores what makes sites like Buzzfeed successful, including Jonah Peretti’s “mullet strategy”:

The Huffington Post produced an enormous amount of junky but well-​​trafficked content, most of which never appeared on the site’s front page. Peretti called it the “mullet strategy”—business in front, party in the back—a metaphor that grated on some of his colleagues. …

It turns out Peretti’s vaunted algorithm revealed an obvious truth: People like upbeat, even childlike content. That’s why BuzzFeed practices its own version of the Huffington Post’s mullet strategy—though now the party is all up front.

What’s holding back your online fundraising? It may be your donation pages.

Elements of the design and copy on your page can combine to create “friction”—a psychological resistance to continuing the donation process.

A donation process with too many steps or unnecessary questions adds friction. So does a process that confuses your donors, like a page with two different and equally-​​weighted calls-​​to-​​action.

I spoke earlier this month on this topic to the Association of Fundraising Professionals annual conference in San Diego. The presentation I gave with Tim Kachuriak and Dan Gillett, below, explains what friction is and offers tips on how to avoid it.

How do you combat friction in your pages?

In a great TED talk, Dan Pallotta explains that the way we think about non-​​profit effectiveness is wrong. We should focus on the results an organization achieves, not on the percentage it spends on “overhead,” he says:

We’ve all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overhead is morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead, but we’re missing the most important piece of information, which is, what is the actual size of these pies? Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it’s tiny? What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did? Now which pie would we prefer, and which pie do we think people who are hungry would prefer?

This is very similar to Jim Collins’ argument in Good to Great and the Social Sectors, which is a must-​​read for those who work at non-​​profits.

Using only a laptop and readily-​​available online tools, Nate Anderson managed to expose 8,059 encrypted passwords in a matter of minutes:

I was at least in a position now to crack thousands of passwords in mere minutes. I could get everything from common passwords (iloveyou1, iloveyou13, iloveyou19, iloveyou81) to odd passwords (hahapoop3) to long passwords (rangefinder12) to passwords incorporating mixed case characters, numbers, and symbols (Jordan2!). Had I been the one who “liberated” this particular set of hashes, I would have been well-​​placed to wreak havoc on thousands of accounts—more than enough for some real mischief.

So if you use one password for everything, and it’s compromised on just one site through an attack like Anderson demonstrated, every online account you have could be compromised. Scary.

Some links to start your work week:

• Focus your copy on what your customers need. Nathan Berry walks us through his landing page copywriting process and reminds us that our copy should speak to our visitors’ needs and address a pain they have. His suggestion: “First write out the pains, then write out the reversal of those pains (dreams).”
• No unsupervised thinking on checkout pages. Graham Charleton explains why you should “enclose the checkout process” and limit the distractions that may keep your users from completing a transaction. That means cutting off the navigation links and other ways your customers can abandon the checkout. This is a great example of eliminating friction.
• Content is independent of medium. David Sleight argues that publishers should stop distinguishing between “real” and online content. An online newspaper is just as much a newspaper as one made of ink and paper.
• Small changes can have big effects. In a recent test, swapping out a single word on a signup button had a huge effect, David Kirkpatrick explains. The original button said “begin your free 30-​​day trial.” Amazingly, “changing ‘your’ to ‘my’ resulted in a 90% lift in sign-​​ups.

It has become almost a mantra among fundraisers: integrating your online and offline fundraising yields higher returns.

In my experience at Heritage, coördinating our direct mail and e-​​mail appeals brings in more money from both the online and the offline channels. This tracks with what Convio has found in its nonprofit benchmark reports (link in PDF).

But the Obama campaign, famous for testing every element of its work, did very little to integrate its online and offline efforts. That’s according to Steve Diagneault, who reports that “they hardly integrated with snail mail”:

The online program was mostly a separate entity from the direct mail stream. They used some of the same basic branding and content, but, by and large the channels were optimized to raise the most revenue possible, and that meant not integrating the details.

Does this mean the campaign didn’t even try to integrate its direct mail and online channels? Or that they tested it and found integration not to be worth the trouble?

If you have any insights, please let me know in the comments.

Harsh words for Google Reader aside, Aldo Cortesi offers an interesting analysis of the competitive landscape of the RSS reader market.

Nathanael Yellis asks an important question: “why not make your organization’s emails more like the emails you send to your friends and colleagues?”

He’s right. There’s really no good reason not to do that.

Here are a few ways you can strengthen your organization’s e-​​mails to make them livelier, more interesting, and more personal: Continue reading »