Tom Belford:
Direct response fundraising is seriously broken. And incrementalism won’t fix it … indeed, might get in the way of fixing it.
We think fundraisers need to lift their sights above the weeds.
This is exactly right. Focus your fundraising strategy on long-term successes, not incremental improvements and minutiae.
If you have to provide step-by-step instructions on how to navigate your web site, including a whole section devoted to your home page, perhaps you need to rethink how your site is designed.
Some interesting anecdotes about how young people use social media and e-mail (via Tyler Cowen).
Pilot programs and other trials can often lead us to the wrong conclusions, Megan McArdle warns:
This is one more installment in a continuing series, brought to you by the universe, entitled “promising pilot projects often don’t scale”. They don’t scale for corporations, and they don’t scale for government agencies. They don’t scale even when you put super smart people with expert credentials in charge of them. They don’t scale even when you make sure to provide ample budget resources. Rolling something out across an existing system is substantially different from even a well run test, and often, it simply doesn’t translate.
Tommi Kaikkonen explains why so many websites have light-colored backgrounds:
The whole Google network of websites and applications is based primarily on white. They aren’t very exciting or arousing to our senses. But what if they switched the background color to a different one, such as red? My guess is that while the sites might look more exciting, you wouldn’t be as comfortable using them. The color red causes a non-conditional physiological reaction, increasing your heart and respiratory rate. This reaction is something we humans are born with.