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?
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.
**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.