But the best session I was able to attend was Eric Peterson’s opening keynote. Aside from being a really engaging speaker, Peterson is also pretty much a guru in the art and science of web analytics (and do follow the link to his site, because he offers a ton of free resources there).

Peterson opened with the concept that satisfaction is a function of expectations. “Well, duh,” you’re probably thinking, but how many times do we disappoint our constituents not because what we’re offering is bad, but because we led them to expect something different than what they got?

Peterson also immediately disabused us of the notion that occasionally running a report out of Google Analytics is sufficient. While the tools themselves have improved in the past 15 years, he pointed out that the really important, useful advances have been made in taking that data and turning it into knowledge organizations can act on.

Peterson pointed out that organizations all make one of three errors in trying beneficially use information about their web traffic beneficially:

• An investment gap - because even free tools aren’t free.
• A staffing gap - because data without interpretation and application is just a big pile of numbers.
• A process gap - because unless you’re willing to change your business processes based on what you learn, you’ll never see a return on your investment.

These parallel the three factors that have to be in order so that organizations can effectively make sense of their web traffic: technology, people, and process. And, as you might guess, the last one is the hard one.

Peterson went on to describe an analysis ecosystem, made up of analytics tools, personalization, multivariate testing, and the voice/experience of the customer. Rather than trying to explain the full concept here, I’ll point out that he’s written a white paper that’s available for free download (from ForeSee Results) and that lays out how all these factors interact to provide both quantitative and qualitative data to give organizations a complete picture of how to improve their constituents’ experiences with them.

And finally, if this topic really interests you, be sure to check out the next Web Analytics Wednesday in your area.

Edited Friday, October 10 at 9:48 am to add:  The slides of all the presentations are now available for free download.

1. It’s immensely cool for a marketer, voter targeting guru, or demographics aficionado
2. It’s yet another example of how awesome Google is for giving us tools like this for free
3. It will make some privacy advocates likely go bonkers, as happened with some other Google innovations

Here’s the reader’s digest version: the Ad Planner leverages Google’s gigantic barrel o’ data to help users understand what sites people browse, based on a variety of demographic information and their other online behavior. It then helps you to build a list of sites to run advertising on, and even provides the ability to export your target list in MediaVisor (so that’s where that DoubleClick acquisition went).

The long version, as always, is a lot more complicated - the tool is very powerful, and not just for advertisers. Follow me below the fold to learn more…

First, let’s try an experiment to show how the Ad Planner works. I’ll include some screenshots for the benefit of anyone still waiting for their account to activate (if that doesn’t include you, just turn on AdBlock - I’m pretty sure that I’ve talked about ads enough in this post for the images to get hit). Let’s start with a hypothetical goal: we want to get young people to use Barack Obama’s Vote for Change site to register and early vote.

Let’s start by going to the research tab and entering in some criteria. We start out with an audience of 230 million potential visitors, 100% of the country (the Ad Planner currently only works in America. Fortunately for our hypothetical, so does voting for President of the United States). Ad Planner lets us pick from a variety of languages, and Vote for Change includes English and Spanish versions, so let’s start with those sites. This has virtually no effect on our reach, unsurprisingly, but if we’d chosen a less common selection of languages in the US, such as German, French, or Japanese, we’d be looking at a combined 2.8 million visitors, 1.3% of the total market. Unfortunately, there’s no state level targeting yet - we could cut out states that don’t require pre-registration to vote, like Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Next we start diving into the regular demographics - they include four core demos that marketers like to divide by: gender, age, education and household income. Since we’re running a campaign in 2008 and not 1908, we won’t touch the gender criteria, but let’s go ahead and segment by age. We just want to reach young people, but they have to be able to vote, so let’s check off the 18-24 box only. That cuts us down to 15 million hits already, so we’ll go ahead and add in the 25-34 group, bringing us up to 45 million visitors, 20% of the web browsing public.

For our next audience, we’ll go ahead and select just those individuals who are at least attending college, as well as those who’ve graduated. This brings us down to 28 million visitors, 1 in 8 Americans online. We’ll leave the household income demo filter alone - here’s one place that I wish that Google was more precise, as we might want to allow everyone with “some college” but segment only certain income levels of graduates, with the assumption that income levels of individuals currently in college are wildly off from the demographic they most resemble. So leaving this alone, we hold steady at our current levels. Here’s what our settings look like now.

Now we get to the really cool part: we ask what other sites people are visiting. For this campaign, we’re going to need to recruit people who are willing to give out some information about themselves on the internet. That means social networking sites: Facebook, Flickr, and (sigh…) MySpace are three of the most likely to pay off. We can keep putting in more sites - I’ve got the filter set to “or” at the moment, so every site we add will increase these numbers. With just these three, we get 13 Million visitors, which is probably a manageable number.

Now it’s time to start going through the actual sites. For each site, we see how much of their audience we’re likely to reach with each site. These range from about two-thirds, with Facebook or Yahoo, to around 23% with Amazon, to 9% with the New York Times, all the way down to 0.7% with Penny Arcade. There are some weird results in here (the Pirate Bay and Wordpress are more popular than Fox News… heh.), but since they’re backed by the power of Google, I’ve got to assume that they’re credible.

Beyond this, though, we can go through the sites on the list and see if they accept advertising, and, if so, what types we can place there. If we want to learn more about a given site on the list, we can just click on the tiny green icon () to learn more about that site. If we look into the Apple.com, for example, here’s what we see. This data comes from a variety of sources and given Google’s concern for privacy, I think they’ve done a good job of balancing the desire to have a useful tool with not revealing anything about individual browsers - most of the aggregate data is nothing that Compete couldn’t provide as well.

With all that said, Google did put some restrictions on the tool. A big one is that if the sample size gets too small, they won’t provide recommendations: this means that you won’t be able to pull data on very niche sites, or combine enough demographics to get a user pool smaller than about 10k or so. Sorry, folks, but you won’t be able to get any data on the traffic of Beaconfire.com, though I checked several large national non-profits and was able to get some recommendations. It’s definitely worth checking your own organization’s name to get some idea of where else your users are visiting - as they say, the results may surprise you.

I think that this is a fantastic tool for a variety of purposes - I’ll probably dedicate a separate post to describing a few. Sign up for the beta today to give it a try, and leave your thoughts on the tool in the comments, then stop by again in about a week to hear what some of the Beaconfire team found by using the Ad Planner when building campaigns.

Senators can now legally post YouTube videos on their Web sites, thanks to a long-awaited update to the chamber’s rules.

Until now, any Senator who embedded a YouTube video or linked to a Flickr album was in violation of outdated rules that required them to keep within the senate.gov domain. Some posted such links anyway, and few were reprimanded.

But last week, the Senate Rules and Administration Committee voted to allow Senators to use third-party sites.

This is pretty much indisputably a good thing. Not only does it allow Senators to bring their websites into the 21st century, but many of these tools foster interactions between citizens and their representatives in Washington. In addition, Congress’s ability to use technology is directly related to their ability to understand and regulate it wisely.

No movement yet on the House side, but hopefully we’ll see some changes there with the next Congress once they see how effectively their Senate colleagues make use of user-generated content tools.

In the meantime, I’d like to suggest that Senators celebrate their new freedom by embedding this video on their homepages:

This naturally annoyed me, since I have pretty much no use for these coupons, and I realized that the offers started changing right around the time that I began using my reward zone card and gave them my preferences. Now, since Best Buy knows what I’ll already go buy without help, they’re using the coupon packs as a way to upsell me into other areas of the store.

As irked as I was at Best Buy (and right when the previous seasons of House and Heroes are out on DVD!), I realized that this is the same thing that we do as email marketers with so many of our constituents: bring them in on the promise of something they want (”Sign up to help the environment!”) in order to bring them to somewhere we want (”Become a monthly donor”). So much of the time, we’re pulling the same tricks as retail outlets, but then we’re shocked, shocked! when unsubscribe rates go up, open rates go down, and people hesitate before giving us their email addresses.

Tips on how we can mitigate this, and why it’s still somewhat inevitable, below the fold…

Thinking about this always brings me back to something that happened at a previous job when one of my responsibilities was inbox management. Most of the stuff that came in the inbox was pretty standard fare, and I got pretty good at dispensing with it quickly, but one day we got a message that said “Please remove my name from petition alerts and fundraising emails, but keep me on for everything else.”

I wasn’t quite sure how to react here: from the perspective of the internal stakeholders, the purpose of the email list was advocacy and fundraising. Those were the two metrics we gauged our successes on, and pretty much everything else we did with the list was to work toward those two things.

But from the list member’s perspective, that wasn’t the case at all. For him, we had a mission he liked, and he wanted to receive information, he just wasn’t interested in being asked to do anything else. And when I went back and looked at how we brought him on the list, it made even more sense: he joined the list as part of a promotion, checking the box that said “I want to receive regular updates” which didn’t mention anything about hitting him up like an ATM every time we had a monthly goal to reach. He and we had completely different perspectives on the purpose of the list, but both were valid in a way.

Almost no one will ever join your list if you pitch it as “We’re going to be asking you for money and actions pretty frequently, and if you wouldn’t mind sending all our stuff to your friends as well, we’d appreciate it.” You have to put some flashy features on your list to build it: “Receive special alerts and updates!” “Help progressive candidates!” “Make a difference!” “Be the first to find out…”

But for most non-profits, particularly those for whom small donor fundraising or advocacy is important, the email list is one of your more important tools. While other online efforts be better at generating viral messaging or earned media, the email list remains the premier way to fundraise over the web, so it’s necessary to monotize it to a level that isn’t (yet?) the case with social networks or blogs.

So how does a savvy non-profit avoid the deflation users feel when they signed up for one list, and feel like they’ve joined another?

• First,, set realistic expectations. Make sure your opt-in mentions that people will receive a variety of communications about your mission. If you mail frequently, it might be good to mention that too so there are no surprises. You’ll probably get a few less subscribers, but those who do join up will know what they’re buying and be more loyal and more active.
• Second, use a welcome series to bring new people into your list gradually. Segment them out of standard communications until they’ve completed the series (unless it’s a critical time for your organization, like right before election day). The welcome series should transition subscribers from what they signed on with to the totality of your organization, so if you have a broad mission, or specific actions that you ask users to take a lot, make sure to take that into account.
• Third, try to tie the actions users are taking into your organization’s mission. While this should seem obvious, it’s surprising how often it’s forgotten. Rather than asking users to make a contribution to help your organization generically, figure out some specific goals that your members are contributing toward. This can be tough for some groups that raise the money to pay for things that aren’t particularly glamorous, like lobbyists or list-building, but if you can convince your finance team to let you raise restricted dollars it can be a big boost. MoveOn is a great example here: they never ask for money just to keep the lights on, it’s always for a new ad buy, field organizers or PAC contributions to good candidates.
• Fourth, throw some candy in there with the vegetables (not literally; that would taste terrible!). If you’re just coming out of a heavy fundraising period, consider a flash game, social networking pitch, or even just a quarterly progress report to cleanse the palette. Even the members who are good givers and advocates will appreciate a break from a constant stream of appeals, and skeptical new members will be reassured that that the reason they signed up is still relevant.
• Lastly, be ready to accept that some people will unsubscribe. You’re not going to please everyone - in the case of my guy up above, we set up a group for him to live in that was only mailed non-action and fundraising alerts. That wasn’t a lot of volume, and he ended up unsubscribing anyway. You need to balance keeping your list happy with concrete and tangible goals for your program; while members might be happy not to see another fundraising email again, they’d probably also be unhappy to hear that you’re scaling back operations for lack of funding. So don’t apologize for asking for money or action: this is a cause your members care about, and should want to support. And if they don’t, do you really mind if they unsub anyway?

Balancing your needs with those of your subscribers is tricky, and can lead to some tough choices; in the end, everyone has their own value calculations as to which organizations they’ll support and how. I’ve switched a lot of my DVD shopping to Amazon; without a good deal, the premium for not having to wait became just a little too high (plus I’m interested to see if they switch me back to relevant coupons once my spending goes down and I don’t end up buying a washer/dryer), but other subscribers may not. Your organization just needs to find the right balance of your needs and your list members to grow a healthy email marketing program.

This post is part of an evidentially continuing series, entitled “Stuff I found in my mailbox.” Next issue: “It cost me how much to send a text message last month?!?!”

As with all things Google, the possibilities are endless. You can put together variations of pie charts, Venn diagrams, bar graphs, maps, and meters. You can have an endless supply of colors. You can label and define your axes. There are dozens of variables.

To make a Google Chart, take you take the base URL http://chart.apis.google.com/chart and add variables to the end of it. These variables tell Google what the look of the chart will be.

So this URL:

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=225×125&cht=gom&chd=t:70&chl=Donation Goals

will show you a “Goole-o-meter” graph that is 225 pixels wide by 125 pixels tall, that shows 70% completion, with the label “Donation Goals”.

You could have quite a bit of fun with this one. I’d like to try creating script-based calculators to allow the user to input numbers to instantly create a new graph.

In what ways will you use (or have you used) Google Charts?

If you answered “yes” to one or more of these questions, it might be time to consider doing a Web site usability audit.

In an ideal world, usability testing should follow on the heels of the design process as part of any site launch, but in the excitement of the new design and the rush to get the site up and running, it’s often overlooked.  Even if your organization performed thorough usability testing at launch, you need to take a critical look at your site from the perspective of how it works as opposed to how it looks periodically to guarantee it’s still working as it should.  The more vital your Web site is to your organization’s business goals, the more frequently you need to do this (Amazon.com, for instance, does significant usability testing every single day).

I recently had the opportunity to talk with two of Beaconfire’s usability experts, functional analysts Amy Knox and Brad Lehman, to learn a little more about the usability testing process.

We sometimes see a problem I compare to ‘urban sprawl’,” said Brad.  “Initial site design usually packages organizational information and visuals neatly, but then you start adding more content, which the initial design may not accommodate well.  More and more information ends up getting put somewhere creative. And after several exceptions are made, the design often starts to get cluttered, too.  Result:  nobody can find anything.”

Brad and Amy concurred that they really enjoy doing usability audits for organizations.  “I really enjoy conducting audits,” remarked Amy.  “Not only do they provide a great opportunity for an organization to take a step back, assess the strong and weak points of their online programs, and perform a deliberate, systematic study of how to address them, but we usability experts get to learn about the goals and operations of the organization.  That’s the most interesting part of consulting – being exposed to whole new worlds through partnering with our clients.”

However, in order for an audit to be successful, the organization does need to bring an open mind.  “We sometimes end up recommending an organization conduct an audit, even thought we were originally hired to do something in one of our other service lines.  It’s the most efficient way to pinpoint key usability problems,” noted Amy.  Brad agreed, “Organizations need to set ego aside and be open to hearing usability recommendations.  Every site is somebody’s baby, but, like kids, sites change over time.  Decisions that made good sense two or three years ago may not still be the best approach today.”

Both usability experts pointed out that, when the Beaconfire audit team delivers those recommendations to a client, they’re designed to ensure that the organization will enjoy some quick successes.  “We try to categorize our recommendations by how easy or difficult they’ll be to implement and the level of impact they’ll have,” explained Amy.  “Many times, the client then asks us to help them implement the recommendations.  So we start with changes that will have a high impact and are easy and inexpensive to implement.  This lays the groundwork of trust and partnership that will allow us to work together as a unified team to attack some of more costly or difficult changes later on.”

What advice do Brad and Amy have for organizations that are considering usability audits?

“The right approach is key,” Brad pointed out.  “Before an organization starts a usability audit, they need to ask how well the site is currently performing and how they know.”  And, as Amy noted,” Recognizing that your site has problems is half the battle.  If an organization can identify the critical tasks or areas of their online program that are not performing up to their expectations ahead of time, it allows us to work far more efficiently and be far more effective than if we’re just asked to ‘look at everything.’”

Amy also advised, “An organization needs to be prepared to develop a long term relationship with their usability vendor (which we hope will be Beaconfire!).  Web usability is not a ‘one-and-done’ process – it needs to be ongoing.”

And finally, according to Brad, “Do it. Even thinking about usability means you’re going in the right direction.  Remember, every single site has at least one thing that can be improved, and a usability audit is how you find out what.  Your constituents will thank you for improving their online experience with your organization.”

Oh, and staying up all night to do it. Did I mention that?

The CreateAthon is a volunteer 24-hour marathon that provides high quality print and web design work for small local non profits, pro bono. Nationwide, in over 42 different local studios, this effort has benefited 1,008 nonprofit organizations with 2,143 projects valued at $8.4 million.

At 7:30am last Friday September 19th, a groggy but excited gang of 7 designers arrived at Basis Branding’s studio in Falls Church, VA ( the CreateAthon location in the DC metro area), set up our macbooks, reviewed the projects we’d been assigned, and started downing the first of many, many cups of coffee. During 90 minute discovery sessions with our new clients, we did what we usually do when we start a new project: defined scope, set deadlines and expectations, exchanged contact information and critical organization design assets, and planned the steps we would take to achieve our client’s goals. However, when we asked them “Will you be available for final approval around 2am?”, it became clear that we weren’t in Kansas anymore.

We worked tirelessly through the day and night, struggling with CSS cross-browser issues, blown deadlines, scope creep, creative blockages — all the things one usually encounters on a design project, only on a highly compressed time line without a second to spare. There was something electric in the air — an energy that made us push harder to solve every design challenge we came across, without settling for anything less than our best. By 5am on Saturday morning, the work was complete – be it brochure, web site, poster, marketing campaign, postcard – and the designers were giddy with exhaustion and ready to fall over. But like Christmas morning, we knew our clients had something wonderful to wake up to, and the pride and satisfaction of a job well done made every sleepless hour worthwhile.

This marked my 5th CreateAthon and I can honestly say this yearly event is one of the most intense, profound, challenging, exhausting and utterly soul-satisfying experiences in my professional life. Why? Because for brief period of time I am not only reminded why I love what I do for a living, but that with the right process, skill set and desire to change the world, if only a small corner of it, even the impossible is possible in 24 hours.

Did you know September is Prostate Cancer Awareness Month? In light of the occasion, the Prevent Cancer Foundation tapped Beaconfire to assist them in developing an online marketing campaign for the month. Soon after, Prostate Pete was born.

Pete is a friendly, helpful organ who leverages the power of internet marketing to provide education, help broach difficult conversations about health, and encourage regular exams. His ads - running across several blogs, news sites and health networks - lead users to a lighthearted quiz on prostate health and an e-card where they can forward Pete to friends and loved ones.

We’re excited to be working with the Prevent Cancer Foundation, an organization that has been working to fund cancer research and educate the public about ways to reduce cancer risk for over 20 years.

So, if you’re a little intrigued, go ahead and take the quiz. I promise it won’t hurt a bit!

Michael, Principal Consultant: What I want? A mobile browser for the palm phone that works like the iPhone or better.

Miro, Software Engineer: I’ve said it many times before and I’ll say it again: the browser cores need to support many more objects natively. This includes tabbing/panels (in-page versions, not tabbing the way it exists to switch between documents), trees, native dragging and dropping between web elements, contextual menus, just to name a few. Make them fully supported, cross-browser compatible from day one.

The web developers are wasting too much time writing javascript and performing magic hacks to get the browsers to behave more like the desktop applications. Instead, raise the browser capability: do it rapidly, across the board, and soon.

Erika, Operations Manager: I want stability and compatibility.  It seems to me that every time there’s a new browser something gets lost or something changes so drastically that Web sites which aren’t even really that old don’t work anymore.  Or the new browser isn’t compatible with all of the other browsers and suddenly you find yourself having to do a lot of extra work to make sure your site works in yet another browser.

With our nonprofit clients, this means more money spent just trying to get the site to work.  Everyone has to draw the line somewhere, and that often means leaving out a certain percentage of the population because you can’t afford to make your site work with the browser they’ve chosen to use.  Choice is a great thing, as is innovation.  But if someone gets frustrated enough with your new browser because none of the web sites they go to will work, they’ll go back to what they were using before.

Tim, Functional Consultant: Everything I want a browser to do,  Firefox (with addons) does.   The Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug are indispensible and add functionality to the browser that makes coding HTML much easier.  I like the lean speed of Chrome, especially how it works with Google online applications, but I see it more as a window into those applications than as a general purpose browser since it can’t to a 10^th of what Firefox can.  If IE eventually includes the ability to easily install addons like Firefox does, it would be a toss-up as to which I’d prefer.

Mark, Functional Consultant: Feature-wise, I want tools that make browsing quicker and easier like mouse gesturing, tabbing, quick bookmarking, built in searching and lookups against sites I’ve been to. I also want developer analysis tools so I can look at and test changes to the underlying code, and get extended error information when problems occur. Firefox 3 is meeting these features for me.

From a design standpoint, I want a quick, secure and light core that doesn’t crash, or gives me ways to mitigate crashing. And one that lets me bolt on just the features I want and need. I feel like Chrome is that quick, secure and light core (so far) but doesn’t yet have the additional features available.

John Brian, Marketing Consultant: As much as I’d like to say stability, given the frequency with which Netvibes crashes my browser, in the end, the most important feature for me is compatibility with most websites. I’d rather not have to have IE open to work in a CMS, then open Firefox to read Digg, and keep opening different browsers for different purposes. This is why I never use Opera: the strict HTML reading seems designed to break things, rather than make them work.

Beyond that, I like a browser that gives me plenty of ability to customize features - Firefox and Internet Explorer are good about this, and Chrome has made some promises in this direction as well.