Congratulations, Austin Pets Alive!

We love our clients at Convio, and we love to hear their success stories. This year, we're happy to congratulate one of our (HQ local) clients, Austin Pets Alive!, for winning the ASPCA's nationally run $100K Challenge!

For those of you unfamiliar with the challenge which is now in its second year, it's not for the faint of heart. Participating organizations are tasked with saving at least 300 more cats and dogs between August and October 2011 than they did during the same period last year. It doesn't take a lot to know that this challenge meant really mobilizing in the community to get awareness and adoption up!

Austin Pets Alive! rose to the challenge though - and at the end of the contest, they didn't just meet their goals, they blew them out of the water. Overall, the organization saved the lives of an additional 850 pets in that three-month window.

Overall, the $100K Challenge was also wildly successful, saving 52,484 dogs and cats nationally - an increase of 8,977 lives saved over the same three months last year.

Austin Pets Alive! attests that creative events and promotions really added to the success of the organization. But also, check out how creative they are online. If you look to adopt a pet, they not only have a write up about the animals, but also pictures and my favorite feature - video. And that goes for dogs AND cats. It's such a creative use of the medium, and really allows visitors to connect not only with the mission, but also with the pets and the people who benefit.

Check out this video from the ASPCA's site to see more about the mission of the challenge and learn about the organizations that participated. And once again, congratulations to Austin Pets Alive!

Bringing home the bacn

For years, the bane of every email marketer's existence has been staying off of the dreaded spam filter and staying in good graces with readers. But now, it seems there is another challenge facing email marketers, and it's worth your time to keep it in mind. Call it bacn, bacon, or graymail, it's that "other" kind of email - not personal, not spam - that's making it harder and harder to get noticed in an overflowing inbox.

Microsoft has recently announced that they are increasing their efforts to help filter out the cacophony in Hotmail. Not too long ago, Google also introduced a feature in Gmail called Priority Inbox, which has automatic classification of the importance of an email based on their criteria, but also allows users of the service to train the Gmail filter what is and is not "important", and higher prioritized, email. From Apple Mail to a half a dozen inbox monitoring services, there are all kinds of hurdles out there for email marketers to jump in order to stay not only off of the spam list but also on the radar.

The Only Constant is Change

There's not much any of us can do to stop the filtering systems and bacn overload that plagues email inboxes. Unlike spam filters, which seemed to have more specific rules to protect against malicious behavior, this is really about helping readers from being overloaded by the noise and missing the signals. Usable, consumable emails are more important now than ever. So what is an email marketer to do - especially one who is busy and stretched too thin already? To help facilitate the conversation about what you can do to get your email noticed, I've compiled a short list here of suggestions we offer all of our clients (with a few brief explanations of each), but would love to hear from you what you've found to be successful for your organization.

Mobile Matters

In the U.S alone, it's estimated that 35% of American adults use a smartphone. And, 87% of them are accessing the internet and email with these phones. If you look at your email on a smart phone, and there is any moment that you need to pinch, zoom, re-orient, or squint, it'd be wise to do a little tweaking to make it more consumable on the go.

Segment

It's not polite to categorize people based on just a little information that you know about them in person. But when it comes to email, there's nothing wrong with boxing people up. Segmenting your audience by using data you already have (or data that they likely will volunteer to you) is a great way to make sure you're sending the right information to the right people. You would never solicit major gifts from the $15 donor. Yet with email, it seems there's often a lack of clarity on the audience that results in blanket emails. This can be a turn-off to the over-emailed masses who don't want to guess whether the content in your email will have anything to do with their interests.

Increase your subscription options

Obfuscating unsubscribe opportunities won't get you in anyone's good graces. But, adding options for contact frequency can be a great way to help get readers to stay on your list and get the information that they want. Not everyone wants every alert that you send out, but giving readers an option to only receive one email a month, or only receive important action alerts, helps to encourage subscribers that you're listening, and you want to do something that's convenient for both of you.

Cut to the chase

The time users spend looking at email is getting shorter all of the time. Studies show that users are spending less than a minute on average glancing at newsletters, and that's assuming they open them to begin with. I don't expect everyone to pour through the 586 page study on email newsletter usability, but understanding a very small time frame for capturing a reader's attention is worth a thought. If you have an action you want users to take, make it clear. If you want to inform your constituency about an event, a disaster, or an injustice, it's best to get to it, and quickly. Sometimes you only have the 3 minutes before the waitress gets to the table.

These are a just a few things to consider. What else are you doing to help ensure that your email gets seen?

Spring Cleaning Your Website

Like any other technophile out there, I'm constantly finding new ways to clutter up my virtual space with gadgets, feeds, and bookmarks. But recently, after a weekend of spring cleaning at home, I decided that maybe it was time to do some geeky spring cleaning as well.

With an approach similar to cleaning out a closet, I began sorting through the clutter around me in my virtual space. Asking myself questions like, "I know you like the author, but do you ever really read this?" or "Can you even remember the last time you used this application?", I may as well have been standing in my closet pulling tattered jeans off of the hangers. After a while, I finally had widdled away a large chunk of hard drive space, and I reveled in my new freedom to focus.

I realized in doing this that there are a lot of analogies between the closet content and website content. For example, news websites like BBC.com are the little black dress of the web world; the styles may vary, but every woman needs a good one that she can turn to. Conversely, websites like The Hampster Dance are the Zubaz of the web world. We all loved them at some point, but their relevance was short-lived. (Wait, we ALL loved them, right?)

There's nothing wrong with the difference - in fact, people often underestimate the value of the quick, topical website. As consumers, we generally understand our responsibility to sort through these different types of information consumption and figure out which one matters the most to us. But as producers, do we always understand our responsibility to figure out what our sites' purposes are and to create that experience for our consumers? The answer in a lot of cases is no.

How does this apply to your organization? Do you think visitors can tell what type of website you are trying to be? If you think you have a handle on this with your organization's website, give it the friend-link test.

First, take a few minutes to really think about what the primary goal you want people to achieve is on your site, and how you want your site to be perceived. Now, go to your site and click around it the way you would if your friend sent you a link to a site you'd never been to before. Ask yourself a few questions as you click around, approaching the content like any clutter-cleaning project: Is there a consistent theme in what you have on your site, or does it seem slightly frenetic? Are you trying to be too trendy in some sections? Has the content evolved with your organization? Are there areas of the site that never get updated? If so, is this because you simply have neglected them, or is it because they are no longer useful? These are basic questions, but their answers can reveal a lot about your site.

Like keeping a closet orderly, keeping your website clutter-free is not effortless. But neither is finding information on a site that's in disarray. As a producer, the greater responsibility of creating the order, theme, and consistency falls on you. And the final product - a neat, organized, website where everyone can find what they are looking for - is well worth the effort. 

Crowd Control

My team here at Convio has started getting more and more invested in content strategy, and to be honest, I’m totally geeking out. As a technical communications major, I’ve always had a particular propensity for all things regimented about writing. I can’t help it.

I already was following RSS and Twitter feeds associated with grammar and writing, but I’m always on the hunt for more. Recently, I’ve become a big fan of the Word Spy site, or, more accurately the Word Spy twitter feed, which highlights new words and phrases (e.g., email apnea and nontroversy). As such am constantly on the prowl for new words and phrases.

So, you can imagine my utter delight when I stumbled across this phrase as I was reading an entry on Wikipedia: “This paragraph may contain unsourced peacock terms that merely promote the subject without imparting verifiable information.”

I can’t say I know the root origin for the word “unsourced”, but I was more immediately intrigued by the concept of peacock terms. Essentially these are adjectives or prepositional phrases that don’t really have any facts associated with them, but are added simply to be promotional. Examples of these include phrases like among the greatest, the most influential, and the most important.

Certainly there are some times when these are necessary or warranted (something can be the longest, the largest, or the finest), but this guideline is telling Wikipedia content contributors to focus on two core principles of content creation: know your audience and focus on your message. The point of adding information to Wikipedia is to give information seekers more information. Adding irrelevant words and phrases disregards these two characteristics, thereby weakening the information and defeating the purpose of Wikipedia.

Without arguing the merits of all Wikipedia articles as fact (see wikiality), I have to applaud a guideline that says that even though anyone can be a content contributor, there have to be rules in place in order to maintain the effectiveness of the site.

How many organizations and businesses can say that they have guidelines like this? I could rattle off a long list of websites that use a lot of words but don’t offer lot of content.  These organizations have lost sight of who they are writing for and what they are trying to convey, and their websites are weaker for it.

Maintaining focus when you write content can be difficult, but losing focus on who the audience is for the content and why they are coming to your site can be detrimental to your mission. Take a cue from Wikipedia on this one, and check out your content. If you notice more conjecture than fact, it may be time to implement the peacock term rule and start trimming away some of the showy feathers.

The Perfect Solution

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.” - Thomas Alva Edison

It’s been one of those days. I came up with what I would call a perfect solution to a design problem. I thought it over, I sketched it out, and it’s pretty darn good if I do say so myself. And then, there it was, looming in the distance - I found a problem; It’s not sustainable. Not even sort of. The person who will be managing this issue doesn’t have the time, the skill, or the technology they need to maintain this “perfect solution” I came up with. It’s not their fault, it’s mine. So, I’m frustrated. My solution is no longer a solution. It’s just another way that won’t work. So it’s back to the drawing board…again.

I can’t imagine I’m alone in this experience. Whether you’re limited by skills, by resources, or by technology, being forced to change directions to solve a problem you feel like you’ve already solved can be disheartening. We start playing the blame game. “Why can’t they just learn this?” or “Why can’t the software just DO that?” “It was the PERFECT solution,” we tell ourselves. But the fact is that we’re wrong. If it was the perfect solution, it would work.

I find that the hardest thing to do when this happens, as hard as it seems, is to let the solution go. I give myself a small window of time to kick around all of the woulda-coulda-shoulda’s. As best as I can, I remove it from my memory. I no longer allow for “if only” or “I just wish”. Instead of reflecting on how I feel about my failed solution, I try to remember what the problem was to begin with. I break it down to the simplest parts. And then, I think of every way I could solve it, no matter how extreme**. No idea is too dumb or too small or too outlandish. They all COULD happen.
**Note: You’d be amazed how many times “win the lottery” fits in as a possible solution.

And you know what? Nearly every time, a new solution arises that is simpler, more reasonable, and actually WORKS. I don’t know how it happens, or why I didn’t think of this solution before, but it works all around. The answer was there all the time.

There will always be software limitations, tight timeframes, and a minimal amount of resources. Especially in an economy that has us watching every penny and counting every dime, it’s become so important to figure out these creative solutions. Figure out how you best work to solve these, and you’ll be amazed at what you can do, regardless of the limiting factors. And until you actually DO hit the lottery, it’ll be a nice skill to fall back on whenever you, like me, have one of those days.