See What’s Out There

Can $10 make a difference? You bet. In Cambodia $10 buys a required school uniform and can make the difference between whether a kid goes to school at all. In this case, $10 can make even more of a difference. If you give $10 before the end of the year, the Sharing Foundation, which is helping these kids in Cambodia, might be able to get a $50,000 matching grant from Yahoo. Give your $10 to the Sharing Foundation now.

There has been a lot written about how marketing is changing. You can no longer rely on advertising to convince people that what you are selling — whether it’s a car, a detergent or a charity — is any good. People are being turned-on and tuning-in to products, services and philanthropy because of what they are hearing from their friends. The web has accelerated this process dramatically, and fragmented traditional marketing sources. It is just so easy to forward that email that says this group is great, or to blog about why you gave money to this charity or to add to your MySpace page photos of your participation in the walk-a-thon.

The internet also allows you to aggregate an audience, no matter how narrow your focus. The “long tail” concept says that niches, put together, can rival the mainstream. Marc Sirkin, a nonprofit blogger, wrote a very interesting analysis about cancer organizations. What he found with a little research is that organizations that are smaller, with a more narrow disease focus, are growing much faster than the big cancer orgs. Together, they are beginning to take a significant overall market share in cancer giving. One of his take-aways is that the large organizations better personalize their focus so that they can seem relevant to individuals with particular interests. (They can do it now with the sophisticated web tools.) Read the whole post, The Long Tail of Cancer Organizations.

If there isn’t already enough evidence of the decline of mainstream media, this week’s announcement by John Edwards is further proof. Edwards announced that he is running for President of the United States, again. But he didn’t make his announcement on TV, he did it on YouTube.

In Edward’s video you see what can be done with not much — a backdrop of kids and an engaging speaker. Are you producing videos to get people to hear your pitch and see your good works? Not everything you do has to be highly produced. Thoughtful, yes. Big budget, not always. At See3 we are working with more and more organizations on video production training. There is only so much professional production that an organization can afford. With a few trained staff members, you can create more material, more frequently. You might still use us or other professionals to help you put pieces together in the editing room, but if you can get most of your own footage you will save a bundle. More than that, you will develop an internal culture that values documentation. It is through documenting your activities that you can narrow the gap between what you do everyday and what you can share with your stakeholders.

The other take-away here is about distribution. As much as we work on production, we think about how to get people to see your materials. The best video in the world is useless without the strategy behind it to get it out in the world. You can see here how they have integrated this video into a wider PR and web campaign with a text messaging component as well.

The Holy Grail for those making short web videos is for the video to go “viral.” And if you don’t know what that is, we are not talking about E. coli. We’re talking about a video that takes on a life of it’s own on the web, gets sent by email to thousands of people, gets to be the most popular on YouTube and other sites, and gets written about in the mainstream press. The hundreds of thousands or even millions of views is publicity you could never afford to buy.

But for nonprofits, making something viral is not so easy. In fact, trying to manufacture something to be viral is very difficult. At See3, we believe the best approach is to document the authentic moments that make your organization worthy, and then to creatively edit those into short pieces — and to do a lot of it over time. This way, you have good material for your website, for your events, and the chances that something you produce will find a broader audience is much more likely than taking a long shot with one piece. You should also have reasonable expectations. Will your video get as many hits as the kinds of teenage pranks, fights and embarrassing moments that make up most of this material? Not likely. But if you get 10,000 or 50,000 new people to be exposed to your work is that a victory? You bet.

I came across a funny spoof on this subject. Click here to see it… I had it embedded here, but it played automatically — which drove me crazy. (It is from Ziddio, which is Comcast’s version of YouTube. Their site doesn’t seem to have a search feature, and the automatic playing will drive people away in droves.)

It was two years ago today that a massive earthquake in the Indian Ocean created a tidal wave, a tsunami, that killed more than 230,000 people, left millions homeless and heartbroken, instantly created thousands of orphans and destroyed whole communities. Two years later, tens of thousands of people are still living in tents, communities that relied on tourism are fighting for their survival and many people are trying to live with emotional and physical scars that will never heal.

For all the outpouring of support after the tsunami, there is still a lot of work to do. Some of the money funneled to governments and large organizations was not efficiently used and local corruption has taken its toll on getting money where it is needed. And, there is just a huge amount of continuing need.

Consider making an end-of-the-year donation to the American Jewish World Service in support of those communities impacted by the tsunami. AJWS puts their money on the ground with small organizations working directly with the people. These organizations are not on the radar of big philanthropists or NGOs. AJWS also leverages their grants with volunteers. The combination of human and financial resources is the best possible strategy for making a difference.

As one tsunami survivor said, “The waves of compassion that followed are much more powerful than the waves of destruction.” Let’s hope so.

Yesterday, I wrote that email is dead. And, like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, email is still dead.

One reason email is dead is phishing – scams that entice people to give up their passwords so they can be robbed, by appearing as emails from legitimate merchants. There is an article in today’s Washington Post about this and the general issue of a major rise in cyber crime in 2006. We should expect that as online community becomes more important and robust, criminals will become more aggressive and engaged as well.

Email is dead.

Now that might seem like a very strong position to take. Maybe a better way to put it is that email is dying. Before I prove it to you, I want to tell you that the consequences of this are huge, especially for nonprofits and many nonprofit vendors.

While many nonprofits have been using email for donor stewardship, advocacy and communication for years, many others are just discovering tools such as GetActive (and their competitors), to manage sophisticated email campaigns. In many parts of the nonprofit sector we are just now getting to clear best-practices with email. Many organizations are discovering the potential of email newsletters, fundraising appeals and advocacy solicitations. These folks are spending lots of staff time and money to ramp up their email programs, just when the whole thing is starting to fall apart.

Nonprofits need to start, right now, thinking about how they can transition their electronic communication from an email-centered universe to one where email becomes one of many communications strategies. The vendors also need to be more aggressive in their release of new products and services that help organizations make the transition. From my conversations with a few people at some of the larger vendors, I think there are two things happening – two normal business things. On the one hand they are desperate to keep email alive, even if it’s on life-support. Email is their bread and butter and they are fighting tooth and nail to address the issues that are killing it. But their power in this regard is limited; the problems are bigger than they are. On the other hand, they are starting to develop new tools, and pushing additional services, such as full-blown content management systems that integrate their email management tools with website management tools. One problem they have is that most of their technical resources are not dedicated to R&D but rather to support of existing products and services. The pace will be slow. One thing to watch here is the movement of open-source systems and how they might provide an alternative, especially for smaller organizations.

Why is email dying? Here are the four main reasons:

1. Spam.

Yes, you could have guessed this one. I hate my in-box. It’s become the enemy. Someone told me yesterday that they have a client who has an assistant come in at 7am everyday and spend an hour and a half deleting spam before the boss gets in. That’s insane. The story in the New York Times on this subject reports that an estimated 9 out of 10 emails flowing through the Internet are Spam. 90%! For my email I would guess it’s been about 80%. We are installing Brightmail on our Exchange Server next week and I will let you know what happens. Obviously the system is terribly broken. The last thing I want is to sign up for another email newsletter and put something else in my inbox.

2. Our reactions to Spam.

As bad as Spam is, our reactions to it might be worse. What inspired me to write this post in the first place was that in the same day I got two anti-spam messages in response to emails I sent. Both of these required me to reply to the automated message BEFORE the my original message would end up in my target’s inbox. One of them used a captcha, the other simply a reply. Here’s an example of a company selling this product, which is a hardware solution that sits on your email server.

The first problem with these is that the messages end up in my inbox or more likely my Spam folder. If every email I send generates one back to me I am in big trouble! (Most of these systems only require you to do it once, but I send a lot of email to new people.) The second problem here is for organizations and legitimate mass mailers. How do you deal with this and not have open rates even more in the toilet than they already are? Even without these drastic measures the likelihood that the email newsletter – sent from a third-party vendor – gets caught in my spam filter is pretty great. I doubt many people add info@whatver to their address book, even when the organizations ask them to.

Another recent anti-Spam reaction was a logic puzzle implemented by Congress to limit the amount of emails generated from all these advocacy campaigns. The email vendor community reacted harshly to this, starting petitions, trying to get them to stop. But can we blame them? And more than that, we know already that these kind of emails are heavily discounted by Congressional offices. My (totally out of thin air) guess is that a handwritten (or typed) personal letter from a constituent is worth 7,345 emails in terms of influence in your average congressional office.

3. Email is reactive and puts others in control of our agenda

I think this is a big one, and one we don’t hear discussed very often. I read recently about a boss who turns off the email server one day a week. Why? He wants people to get work done! How often do you hear that alert or see that mini-preview pane of an email and stop whatever you are doing and react to it by firing off a response. Faster than you can say “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” Steven Covey’s management classic First Things First about time management says that to be productive you have to prioritize and block out time for things that are important. You can’t do that if you react to your email 50 times a day.

The inbox is not prioritized. It is a list that we usually keep in chronological order. Going down the list is like randomly assigning tasks with no thought to their importance. It is not a good way to manage information.

4. My kids don’t use email

My kids are online more and more. And while my 8-year old sends an occasional email to her grandparents (in response to their emails) my 11 year-old web addict never touches it. They IM! And they leave notes on little kids game websites. And they surf together while talking on the phone. Email? Nope.

Email won’t totally die, but it won’t work the communications magic it once did. What will replace email? Of course, a combination of things, deployed differently for different organizations. Here are some of the email alternatives that organizations should be considering now:

a. RSS

We techies love RSS but adoption has lagged. Still, I was impressed when I saw Techcrunch has 140+ thousand feed readers, even though its all techie. (I am assuming the 140,000 number from Feedburner refers to feed readers and not all readers.) As Google, Yahoo, Firefox and now IE7 continue to push feeds, adoption will increase. Bet on that.

b. Custom IM – Direct to Desktop communications

I have batted this idea around with Nick Allen from Donordigital for a while and now see it implemented around a few places. The idea is to have something similar to an Instant Messaging application – where it sits in your tray on a PC. But this is one-way IM. The organization can message you and a note pops up on your desktop. You can ignore it, and it goes away, or click it and go to a web page where you get more information. It’s like a feed reader/widget that delivers items one at a time, in their own branded desktop thingy. (Technical enough for you?) Here’s an example from folks supporting Israel called Megaphone.

c. Widgets

Widgets are the next big thing. A widget is a small application that can sit on your desktop on a web page. It is connected to a central server and delivers updated information. I am right now using the ChipIn widget on my blog so that my daughter can raise some money as part of her Bat Mitzvah tzedakah project. The idea of distributing content is a core of what people call Web 2.0. Organizations need to change their thinking for this to work. It is not, bring people “here” all the time. It’s put the information there. The “there” is MySpace, blogs, Google and Yahoo home pages, etc. This is the essence of Nonprofit Communication 2.0.

If you have your own email horror story or idea of what will replace email, blog about it and trackback or email me at michael-at-see3-dot-net.

The end of the year is a time for reflection. For the media it means lists - The Top Ten this or that, Best of the Year this or that… Man of the Year, Woman of the Year, Pet of the Year… as well as predictions for the year ahead.

There is a lot of reflection going on in the advertising industry this year. 2006 will come to be seen as a watershed year, a year of disruption and change. The old media model is disintegrating before our eyes. Advertisers are learning that a lot of their advertising just doesn’t work any more.

Here’s a quote on the subject of The Year in Advertising from the NY Times advertising writer Stuart Eliot.

Time flies, it seems, when you are frantically remaking an industry to stave off irrelevance and obsolescence.

The big story of the year has been the willingness of mainstream marketers to forgo a decades-long reliance on the traditional media and to embrace new technologies like podcasts, video-on-demand, blogs, social networking and video sharing.

Sometimes, those efforts were compelling and successful. In other instances, attempts to change old habits went over about as well as Grandma demonstrating how hip she is by leading the wedding party in the macarena.

My favorite recent article on this subject comes from Wired Magazine. Called “YouTube vs. Boob Tube“, the article explains the business model of online video developing as the old TV model disappears. Read the whole article, but here are my favorite quotes:

Until about five minutes ago, remember, almost all video-entertainment content was produced and distributed by Hollywood. Period. That time is over. There was a time when advertisers could count on mass audiences for what Hollywood thought we should be watching on TV. That time is all but over. There was a time when broadband penetration was too slight and bandwidth costs too prohibitive for video to be watched online. That time is sooooo over.

And, my most favorite one:

Without being overly simplistic or melodramatic, the state of the Old Commercial Broadcasting Model can be summarized like this: a spiraling vortex of ruin. Fragmentation has decimated audiences, viewers who do watch are skipping commercials, advertisers are therefore fleeing, the revenue for underwriting new content is therefore flatlining, program quality is therefore suffering (Dancing With the Stars. QED), which will lead to ever more viewer defection, which will lead to ever more advertiser defection, and so on.

What do you care? For nonprofits, this is a HUGE opportunity. For the first time in history your message can be on an equal playing field as commercial messages. You can’t do the Super Bowl ad, or even a 15-second spot on a re-run of Get Smart. But you can put your video on YouTube and on DoGooderTV and a lot of other places where it can compete in the marketplace of ideas for attention. If you are doing something important — and I am sure you are — and can tell your story, you can grow your support and educate the masses in ways nonprofit professionals have never dreamed possible.

This week’s New York Times Magazine has an interesting philosophical look at philanthropy. How much do you give? How much should you give?

I saw a really great article in the Times by the cookbook author Joan Nathan. Nathan writes about Jewish cooking and in this article, in preparation for the Hanukkah holiday that starts tonight, she writes about cooking with the Satmars in Kiryas Joel, New York. The story of the Satmars and of the founding of Kiryas Joel and its issues is fascinating. Her article brings you in and gives you a glimpse of these folk and how they live and their values. All of this in a story that is supposed to be about food.

Reading it, I thought about two things. First, (of course) wishing she had video of this experience. Second, I was thinking, what a great way for organizations (international ones in particular) to introduce us to the people they work with. Obviously, this would not be appropriate in every case, but I can imagine meeting Indian tsunami survivors or African village teachers through the lens of their cooking. And then seeing a published cookbook or other collateral material created around the cooking idea - as a fundraiser. We feel so different and distant from these people. And we often feel judgmental toward people who are different than us. What a dignified way cooking would be to connect!