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.