Good user guides are hard to come by. They take a lot of effort and skill to write in the users’ language. The best of them get tested and revised before they are released. Which takes time, and more effort.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, there are not many good ones out there.
I’ve just written one for a fundraisers’ database. And realised, belatedly, that one of the problems with user guides is that however good they are, many users just don’t read them. Enter youtube. OK, you’d all got there a while ago, but this time I’ve written the user guide as a series of videos. Maybe I’ll need to do a written version as well, but for now I’m going to run with the videos, and see whether they are more effective. I’ll report back.
In the last stages of building a supporter database for a fundraising client. The platform is internet-based software-as-a-service (SaaS), so the infrastructure cost is tiny, there’s no hardware. Almost all of the value is in the intellectual property – the way it’s built, the user guide, the thinking and experience that informs it, and the programming ability to make it work.
Another project for a financial servcies organisation provides an online collaboration tool for viewing and approving proofs. The cost of the software (again it’s SaaS) is just a few hundred dollars a year; for this client the real value lies in i) finding it for them and showing them how it works so much better than their current process, and ii) tailoring the implementation for their own situation.
It’s not long ago that the total cost for these projects would have been a multiple of the purchase cost of some expensive software. Now it’s the cost of some very specific intellectual property. For the client, the value is in those parts of the project that make it work in their own office, now, with as little risk as possible, and negligible long-term financial commitment.
It’s a very different mind-set, both for the client, and for the service provider.
Picture: James Cridland
A mailing arrives from a company that wants to sell me B2B data. Fair enough, except …
1. The design bears not the slightest resemblance to the company’s website
2. The imagery in the brochure is perfectly designed to cheapen and discredit the company’s business (see Wieden & Kennedy’s blog for more detail)
3. I get two copies, one for each of the Directors, which is fair enough; the second copy has someone else’s company name in the address. Brilliant.
Jane Holmes, if you really are the head of this company, honestly, I can help.
Just added a new case study to the Neon Nelly website. We’re working with SolarAid and their agency Whitewater on a new approach to donor retention. Our part of this has been to provide the personalised URLs and landing pages, and we’ve used this as the base for developing a whole new way of reporting that brings together online and offline responses at a personal level. Powerful stuff.
Picture: SolarAid blog
OK, so there might be a better name for this, but …
One of the big challenges for marketers who want to understand and drive integrated marketing activity, is how to join up offline and online response analysis. Both sets of reports can be detailed and illuminating. Generally though it’s incredibly difficult to work out where the overlap is. You know that 4.35% of your mailing responded, and you know who they are. You know that you had 47.3% more hits on your website in the days after the mailing landed, and you know an awful lot about what they did on your site. If only you could join the two sets of information …
… then you could really tell the incremental impact of your offline marketing; you could prove the difference it makes to use on- and off-line communications together in the same campaign; you could link directly to the call centre for more meaningful follow-up …
After a bit of thinking and a lot of testing, it turns out that you can do this. And you can do it without having to spend a lot of money for fancy tracking tools. In fact, the technology is all out there, open source, free. All you have to do is use it. I’m showing this to clients now, and it’s really exciting.
Now all I have to do is think of a clever name for it.
Picture: IBM events
Lots of conversations about QR codes.
That’s not so much a headline, it’s the content of the barcode image here (if you need a code reader for your desktop, you could try this one from QuickMark ).
As often seems to happen, most of the conversations are about technology, cost, or how to incentivise a print salesperson to sell them (really).
There are some more useful discussions about how relevant they might be to a particular market (in Japan most mobile phones have a QR code reader built-in; in the UK they are standard on iPhones, but you have to find and install the software for most other smartphones).
And just occasionally there’s talk about how to use QR codes to make a marketing campaign more effective.
Guess where the value is.
I’m following a particular development in direct mail which could be very important to its future. I’m talking to people about it, and trying to stay in touch with what’s happening. That means I’m talking to other stakeholders too, and some of them might be people I would work with, or recommend to others. One of those stakeholders has emailed me a few times in the last couple of months. The last email was from a ‘business development manager’, who asks me “by return”, to indicate “whether I would be interested in a quotation…or would like to be removed from the mailing list”.
It must be nice in your job sir, where the world breaks so clearly into ‘those who would like to buy from me now’ and ‘everyone else that I can wave goodbye to forever’.
Picture: Binary Birds on Wires by Third This
Been working with the nice people at Whitewater on a campaign that we’re getting really excited about. There’s more on their blog here. It’s about finding more powerful ways to connect donors with the work they help to fund. Meanwhile, here’s a more conventional ‘thank you’ to Steve, Richard, Brad and Celia at Whitewater for the opportunity. Good luck to Nick and colleagues at SolarAid too.
There are important parts of what we do, that do not have an end. When we talk about building a website for example, the implication is that the job is complete once it has been ‘built’. Except things change (see Bryony Thomas’s nice take on treating a website as an employee). Customer service isn’t a one-off project either, it’s an attitude, structure, and way of working. As someone who is instinctively a ‘destination’ rather than a ‘journey’ person, that can be a hard lesson. What’s made me think about this particularly? Well, actually, the household laundry. Not helpful to get frustrated that ‘it’s never finished’ or ‘I’m way behind’ – it never is and you always will be – maybe better to enjoy / tolerate / learn to live with the journey.
Photo: Trixibell
Amazing and beautiful mailing from Prada on my doorstep on return from holiday. Beautiful – naturally, that’s what the brand is all about. Amazing, because what you see in the picture here, is the whole contents of the pack. Four words, of which two are the brand name. A strip of gold ribbon on a textured white 3.5mm board. 6 more words on the reverse. That’s it. The outer envelope was equally simple, and they got my name and address right.
This seems to break most of the rules of direct marketing. I think it’s perfect. I have got the message.
I suppose you might be wondering how I get to be on their mailing list, but that is another story.