Meghan Keaney Anderson warns against personalizing content just because you can: “Personalization without a good reason breaks the cardinal inbound rule: Marketing should be driven by the prospective customer’s needs. At its core, marketing should be useful.”

¶

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.

¶