Author Archives: David

Quoted in Workplace Column on Saving a Failing Project

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Mildred Culp interviewed me for her regular column that appears in numerous papers across the country. I appear in the most recent column in which she takes on how to rescue failing projects. Here is a link to a copy of the piece in The Hartford Courant: Recognize Signs That A Project Is Failing.

When you’re working on a team, even if you’re not the leader, you’re investing in the success of the project. You don’t want it to slide into a ditch. What are the warning signs? What can you do before it’s too late?

I have two or three quotes in the piece. Much of what I discussed with Mildred is covered in a blog post I made a four years* ago: On Killing Projects.

* Wow! Hard to believe I have been writing this blog since 2002. Time flies!

Social Network Fundraising ROI Calculator

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Here is a nifty tool: Is It Worth It? An ROI Calculator for Social Network Campaigns:

You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.

This web-based spreadsheet (you edit the variable values right on the page and then click the ‘Update’ button to recalculate) might help you to understand the cost of investing time and effort into social networking compared to what you might realize from it. This tool is designed specifically for fundraising but you could probably use it for membership recruitment as well.

Public Relations and Social Media

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A question about sample PR policies for social media came across a list I am on. I responded by saying that before writing policies, it’s important to know how you want to engage online and to what purpose. Without that, any policy is going to be irrelevant, at best, or more likely harmful.

I have written a framing device that you can use for yourself, team, or even your Board to discuss at what level your organization wants to and should be engaged in online conversations: Four Levels of Engagement in the Blogosphere.

Here are some questions you can use with the device:

  • At what level are we currently?
  • What level would best serve our goals and mission?
  • What level will our current organizational culture support?

The answers to those questions should get you on solid footing for identifying how you want to engage online.

For more on PR and social media, see this post by Steve Rubel on why the future of PR is participation rather than pitching.

Vista/IE7 Support Lagging in Content Management Systems

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The good folks over at CMSWatch report that many content management systems still do not fully support authoring on Vista/IE7.

As they point out in the post, this will be a growing problem for telecommuters as new PCs with Vista are purchased. Most corporations are sticking with XP for now (with good reason) but the home market is another story.

If your staff work on web content from home, you should do some testing with your system on Vista so that you can anticipate any problems and lean on your vendor to get a fix into place if needed.

Web Analytics Definitions or A Page View by Any Other Name Is Not Allowed!

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The Web Analytics Associations has released an expanded set of 26 standard definitions for measuring web traffic and usage (PDF). This is a useful document for providing consensus definitions of common terms used in the web industry.

However, I find it rather ironic that they released this document only as a PDF. Come on folks! You should know better, being an association of web professionals.

(Via Shawn Zehnder Lea.)

Update: What would I recommend in addition to a PDF? A sub-site on the WAA site for the definitions, providing an index and a separate web page for each definition. Having a page for each definition would allow people to link to them directly as references. This would improve the usability of the content and enhance search engine results for those definitions (ahem).

Cover Letters Matter

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Guy Kawasaki shares his experience posting an announcement on craigslist. He point out how important a good cover letter is:

Write a cover email that addresses the position. Two people simply attached their resume to their response. I pushed back on one and suggested that he write a cover email. He copied and pasted my job description to, I guess, let me know which job he was applying for. Needless to say, both candidates didn’t get serious consideration. I don’t know about other employers, but the thing I can’t stand the most is laziness. Although, to be fair, the ad was for a position at the worst website in the world.

I hired a lot of people when I used to lead web teams at ASHA and I reviewed more resumes than I care to remember. A good cover letter that showed the applicant actually read the position description and thought about how they could contribute stood out like a shining beacon of hope. My usual vetting process on applications was something like this:

  • Rapid sort of those who obviously didn’t fit the job. Anyone who included a tailored cover letter would make this cut. I could usually cut out a third to a half of applicants at this stage. Each one got about 5 seconds of my attention.
  • More careful review of cover letters and resumes to cull more applicants who clearly did not meet what we were looking for.
  • Send what was left to the team for review and comment and then pick four or five to come in for interviews.

As you can see, a good cover letter got you past summary review and into a more in depth look at your merits. A cover letter is well worth your investment of time and effort.

A final note on the hiring process for applicants:

  • The purpose of a cover letter is to get the employer to look at your resume.
  • The purpose of a resume is to convince the employer that they should interview you (the cover can help with this as well).
  • The purpose of the interview is to convince the employer that you are the best person for the job.

If you design each stage with those goals in mind you’ll do better than 99% of the job seekers out there.

How would you rate your experience with our coat hangers?

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I just got an e-mail survey from Starwood Hotels, who wanted to know, in excruciating detail, about my experience at the Annapolis Sheraton two weeks ago.

The survey had over 60 questions. Sixty! I skipped most of them. The only feedback I wanted to give was that the A/C was out in the entire building except for the guest rooms and that the elevator almost stalled out on the way up to my floor. You know, big important items.

Instead, this survey asked 10-point likert scale questions on every possible facet of the room and hotel. They may as well have asked about the coat hangers too. This survey probably has a response rate of less than 1 percent and would generate data only from their guests who are willing to invest an hour filling it out. These people are probably not their desired customers.

Paging Fred Reichheld…

Getting Out of The Way

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I made a short screencast on Friday showing how Panic does a great job with the shopping cart for their products. In We Have Always Done It That Way, I write about getting out of the way when someone is ready to invest in your product or service:

When a member has made the decision to invest more money in the association by purchasing a product or paying dues online, get out of their way and make it as easy as possible for them to complete the transaction.

Panic does a great job of this with their site. They collect the bare minimum of information for completing the transaction. They don’t even ask for you to subscribe to a newsletter! Watch the video below to see a demo with my commentary.

Deep Thoughts from Peter on Associations and Participation

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I was at ASAE’s Annual meeting earlier this week in Chicago and did not blog a single thing about it. Lots of others did, though. (An aside: seems like a blog tipping point was reached at this meeting. Very active and diverse blogging going on all over the place.)

Peter Turner has posted an interesting idea based on the Decision to Join report and Jeff De Cagna’s Ungovernance session:

The longer your association waits to implement governance and product development changes that are more “open and inclusive” to the rank and file member, the more likely you can expect to generate lower retention rates or product sales.

Closed ended models of governance and product development in an era of open innovation and product co-creation is THE CANCER in association management today.

Rings true to me. I think that all the excitement about social media in the association space is a direct response to the subconscious feeling that the time tested models aren’t going to work for much longer.

Beat by a Four Year Old

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This would have been quite embarrassing when I was a kid, since I played a bunch of video games then, but I couldn’t be prouder now. I was quoted by Hitched magazine in an article about the Wii game platform: Top Family-Friendly Wii Games.

It’s one of the best family-friendly games because it’s easy for everyone to play. “Wii Sports has been great for my 4-year-old daughter and me to play together,” says C. David Gammel. “Within a week, she was beating me at boxing and bowling pretty regularly.”

Ella has a lot of excess kinetic energy, which is a great asset for the Wii. That’s my girl!