Author Archives: David

How's that value proposition?

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Kevin Holland point to an article recently that ended with the following quote about a publishing trade association membership:

Henry Donahue, CEO-publisher of Discover Magazine, said his magazine is still a member of the MPA. “We are,” he confirmed via e-mail, “though it’s an ongoing source of discussion given the expense.”

A quote sure to strike fear into the heart of any association executive.

Be sure you are proactively communicating and delivering the value of your association. You almost can’t do it enough. Ideally it’s self-evident but even the highest of value services need to do some self promotion.

Last Call for NPO Exec 2009 Web Goal Survey

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This week is your last chance to get a response in to the survey I am fielding on NPO top web goals for 2009.

The survey is to support a book I am writing on web strategy for non-profit organizations. Respondents will receive an executive summary and an invite to a free teleconference where I will report on the results.

Here is the link to the survey and a link to my original post with the full details.

Join the 50+ executives who have already responded! Survey closes on Saturday morning.

Are Your Web and IT Teams Fixing or Improving?

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On a global consulting forum I belong to, Alan Weiss suggested that one thing to explore on a regular basis with direct reports is whether they are spending their time mostly fixing things or improving them. This is a great question for your Web and IT teams as well.

For teams that involve technology such as the Web and IT, it’s critical that they have a primary focus on improving the value of what others in the organization can achieve. IT and Web technology are pre-requisites for almost any endeavor these days. Teams that focus on improving and creating new value will increase the ROI of your technology investments and create an organization that constantly increases the value you offer to your constituents.

If your teams spend most of their time simply putting out fires, then they are leaving a lot of value on the table.

Don’t get me wrong, being able to troubleshoot, debug, and investigate the weird glitches and problems that technology entails is an important activity and skillset. However, it’s not why your teams exist.

Very Brief Survey on Your Top Web Site Goal for 2009

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I am writing a book on web strategy that ASAE & the Center is going to publish later this year. The working title is: Bringing Your Mission to Life Online: A Practical Guide to Web Strategy for Associations, Foundations and Charities.

As part of my research, I am fielding a survey for non-profit executives to state their most important goal for their web site this year. If you give me permission in the survey, I may quote you by name in the book. If you do not give that permission, I may paraphrase your entry but it will not be associated with your name or organization in any way and I will edit out anything in the submission that might inadvertently identify you.

That said, if you are secretly planning world domination for evil purposes via your web site, I suggest you skip the survey. 🙂

In return for your participation (the survey takes no longer than 5 minutes to complete), I am offering the following to all who complete the survey:

  • An executive summary of the results, discussing trends, commonalities and my recommendations for achieving those outcomes online.
  • Invitation to attend a one-hour teleconference, at no charge, where I will go into the results and my recommendations in much more detail.
  • A signed and personally dedicated copy of the final book to anyone I quote by name from the survey.

Below is the link to the survey. Please do me the favor of completing it today. (It really is very short!)

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=RHA_2f9_2fwKQgXKir_2fY208Gcg_3d_3d

Please forward this to your NPO colleagues and friends.

Thanks for your assistance!

Do You Need a Partner or a Vendor?

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With the extent of outsourcing and software-as-a-service models, executives are focused on creating strong partnerships with their technology vendors more than ever before.

However, make sure you really need a partnership before investing in creating one.

True partnerships between the people of separate organizations require a lot of effort and dedication to create and maintain. This can create powerful results. You must make sure those results are worthy of the relationship investment, however.

How can you know? Here are a few criteria:

  • The service or technology is a significant investment for your organization.
  • The service or technology enables you to achieve highly valuable outcomes.
  • You, as a customer, are of significant importance to the vendor. If you are a small fry client, you will typically get small fry attention.
  • The technology or service is not a commodity, easily interchangeable with others.

If you and your vendor don’t fit the criteria above then you are both possibly wasting your time and effort on a partnership when one isn’t required.

Related Resource: Creating High Value Partnerships with Technology Providers

Session Summary on Super-charging Web Teams

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Mark Athitakis, senior editor with ASAE & the Center for Association Leadership, posted a great summary of my presentation last week at the ASAE Technology Conference.

In the session, titled Super-charging Your Web Team: Recruiting, Training, and Managing Your In-house Web Talent, I shared my top tips and secrets on how to maximize the value that your web staff can contribute to your organization. You can read Mark’s notes here on ASAE’s wiki.

Consumers and Association Web Sites

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I’ve dealt with the question of how to address consumers online with association web sites for much of my career. In this context consumers typically means the customers/clients/patients of the association’s members.

I’m going to provide a few thoughts below on how to approach it but there is an important question to be answered first.

Your senior leadership and Board must define what your association hopes to achieve overall with the consumers in your members’ market. Buy more products or services? Support legislative changes? Appreciate your members’ contribution to society? (That last one is a tough one if they don’t on their own!)

If that high level strategy isn’t clear than you are going to spin your wheels online until it is. I often recommend not to bother with anything significant if you don’t have a solid organizational strategy for that audience.

Some other key questions to consider:

What outcomes do you want to achieve with consumer visitors?
What specific actions can consumers take on your web site that will support your overall goals for them? This can include everything from learning via content to taking a specific next action such as contacting one of your members.

How will you know that you have achieved them?
Identify specific measures for success in these efforts. What will let you know you are achieving your goals? Demand creation and branding efforts are notoriously hard to measure but many outcomes can have hard numbers to back them up. The example above of helping consumers to contact one of your members is easily measurable via their path through your site.

What is the value of achieving those outcomes?
The value of the outcomes should determine the budget for your online efforts. Assessing the value will help to avoid over or under investing. A simple concept but rarely done, in my experience.

Should we have one site for members and consumers or two?
This is the last thing to consider although it is often the first question people start with. My patented consultant answer is: it depends.

A key question is which brand you want the consumers to pick up on, the association’s or the members’? If the effort should be closely associated with the organization’s identity, then going with a single site for all with the consumer content wrapped in the association’s look and feel. If the brand of the organization is irrelevant or harmful to the effort, then a separate site and design may best support your goals. The ‘Got Milk’ campaign is a great example of the latter.

Answering these key questions can be a challenging task for even highly focused organizations. A large part of the value I provide to my clients is helping (and forcing, sometimes!) them to answer these and then plan an approach aligned with those strategic goals. Drop me a note if you would like to discuss your specific situation.

David Gammel's Web Strategy Report, Volume 2, Issue 1

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Thoughts On Strategy: E-commerce Performance

Everyone is focused on revenue these days. How can we grow it, how can we protect it, how can we slow down a decline? Your online revenue flows offer many opportunities to address these highly relevant questions. If online revenue is a key focus of your site, here are three things to consider:

  • Make it insanely easy to give you money.
    All too many online stores that I review have multiple unpleasant bits of interface that get in the way of the customer completing her transaction. This can include collecting data beyond what is required for the transaction, poorly designed interfaces, unclear error messages and many other factors. If your customers or members are hesitant to spend, don’t give them time to think better of it while wallowing through your e-commerce process!
  • Accept all reasonable payments.
    Accept all major credit cards. Don’t be penny wise and pound foolish by refusing to accept American Express because the transactions fees are a bit higher. Enough said on that.
  • Test, test, test. Then test a bit more.
    Make sure your web analytics package is tracking progress through your e-commerce system and look for where you are losing people. Fix those points, measure, assess improvement and repeat. You will be shocked at how much improvement this simple process can create. I know of one association that had a six-figure improvement in revenue from removing one step in an e-commerce process.

I work with many association executives on improving their e-commerce performance. The beauty of this kind of effort is that the results are immediate! You don’t have to wait for a full campaign to conclude to measure impact. You know right away and reap the benefits from day one.

If you would like to explore how you can best protect and grow your online revenue, contact me to schedule a call.

Case Study: Giving a Lifeline

I want to show you two examples of providing a lifeline to site visitors going through a critical web site process. Both of these are e-commerce related.

First up, the AARP online membership application. The application has three steps, which are clearly identified at the top of the page. To the right of this is box with a heading of “Having Trouble?” This box offers a tollfree phone number to call for assistance in joining. They are happy to take your membership online but make it very easy to call them to complete the transaction over the phone instead. We’ve all experienced sites where they make calling them the hardest thing in the world. Not AARP!

Second, we look at Zappos.com, the online shoe retailer. Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh describes his company as a customer-service organization that just happens to sell shoes. This is evident on the Zappos web site as well. Almost every page (and every step of the shopping cart check out) has prominent contact information plus a button with which to start a live online chat with a customer service representative. Studies have shown that live chat support on e-commerce sites can dramatically increase your conversion rate. It is also highly customer friendly. This is not a coincidence.

What are you doing to give your members, customers and others a helping hand online for key processes?

High Geekery: A Lesson from Flash Photography

What one factor, more than any other, differentiates most professional photography from the billions of snapshots taken by regular people? You might be tempted to say the composition of the image or inate talent for seeing what other don’t.

The answer to why the pro work looks better, in many cases, is simply because the flash used to light the subject is positioned anywhere other than on top of the camera. The subject being lit from a direction other than the forehead of the photographer creates an image that subconsciously tells us, “this is different and must be of higher quality.”

This same thing holds true across many endeavors. Very simple changes can have a profound impact on how a design, product or service is perceived. How can you light the value you offer to your members, clients or customers so that it appears slightly different from the usual fare, making it stand out from all the others?

Offerings from David

Creating High-value Partnerships with Technology Providers
The key to successful technology implementations often comes down to the quality of your partnership with your vendors and service providers.

This teleconference recording discusses how to create and nurture these critical relationships. I also share what to do when things go wrong, based on my years of experience as an executive and consultant.

This one program could save your organization hundreds of thousands of dollars. None of us can afford key relationships with our technology providers to go sour in this economy.

The recording is available for immediate download after purchase.

Learn More

Should You Have a Web Committee?

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An association executive on a list I belong to asked this week if organizations should have a web committee to determine the content, design and functionality of their site.

My answer? No.

The problem I have had with most web committees is that they often pursue solutions via consensus. Each individual comes to the committee with their agenda and the group then works out some compromise where no one gets everything and everyone gets something. This results in web sites where no one can find anything and that produce relatively low value for their organizations.

Every site must have defined, focused, outcomes that it is intended to create if it will generate significant value. Committees just can’t do this because of their structure.

What does work? Teams.

This isn’t just semantics. A team is a group of people who are pursuing a common goal. They will succeed or fail together and therefore have incentive to collaborate and endeavor toward common goals. This requires some extra effort and thought by senior management but, hey, that’s why they have that job!

Web committees, as they are usually constituted and governed, fail to produce value at the level that a focused team can achieve.