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Bright Ideas

Leadership-as-Verb

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This drum major has positional authority, but is she necessarily a 'leader'? Photo by Flickr user e_cathedra.
The leadership question is as vexing as it is interesting and important. Rosetta Thurman relates the story of an older gentleman asking his version of the classic leader-follower question: “What happens if you have too many leaders and not enough followers?’ (although his version was more interesting, asking about increasing competition within an organization as the number of people trying to lead grows).

Rosetta rightly challenges that positional notion of leadership and instead suggests leadership might be a behavior, but she doesn’t entirely let go of the idea that some people might qualify as ‘leaders’ while others might not.

I want to go a step further. The idea of leadership becomes even more interesting and robust, and more useful as well, if we think of it as a verb rather than a noun (with acknowledgments to Marty Linksy and Linda Kaboolian). One isn’t ‘a leader’ but instead you can – at any given time – exercise leadership. The shift to leadership-as-verb much more sharply distinguishes between people in positions of authority and people exercising leadership, it avoids the thorny question of just how frequently you have to exercise leadership in order to earn that exalted status (is five minutes a day enough? an hour? every waking moment?), and it morphs the notion from being a status you earn to being a behavior you can elect to exercise or not at any given time. It also – importantly – allows for leadership to happen anywhere in an organization, in any direction (an idea Rosetta describes as well).

iPad 2 Faceoff: Best Buy and Apple Store Showdown

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[Cross-posted on the PlaceMatters blog.]

iPad 2 launch - Photo by Robert Scoble
iPad 2 launch. iPad 1 on left and iPad 2 on right. Photo by Robert Scoble.

Anticipating long lines and limited supply, and believing we’d increase our odds of both scoring a new iPad2 on Friday afternoon when Apple kicked off sales of its latest toy, we split up. Turns out we were wrong – the limit was only one device at Best Buy – but we both made it home that evening with the latest flagship Apple product. I’ve owned my iPad2 for just a few days now but adore it already. An hour-and-twenty minute movie on my flight to D.C. burned only 16% of the battery and was gorgeous to watch. It’s sleek, slick, powerful, and smooth. Scoble is right: it’s all about the apps, and the iPad app universe is nothing short of fantastic.

This morning’s post isn’t about the iPad itself, though, but about the folks who designed the buying experience at the two stores. And the punch is as predictable as it is important: design matters.

The Apple store experience, in typical Apple fashion, was all about the customer. Smiles and free water to everyone waiting in line, a welcoming handshake for every customer as they entered the store, a bunch of staff on the floor quickly helping everyone as they walked in, cashing folks out on the spot with their mobile cash registers (which are themselves pretty cool), staff willing and able to answer questions and help customers find accessory products, salespeople congratulating customers, free advice about using the new iPad2, mini-classes going on in the back, the Apple store itself with it’s so-cool-I-kinda-want-to-hang-out-here vibe.

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Punching Through the Noise Barrier

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Photo by Flickr user pablosanz.
Like most nonprofits, mine at times struggles with effective communication among staff, among multi-organization project teams, and across the larger community. What are the bottlenecks? I think there may be three key types:

1. The quality of the information or message. If what you have is a low-resolution photograph, you won’t be able to send a higher resolution image no matter what you do.

2. Bottlenecks in the communication infrastructure. If the constriction in your system is a 24K 28k modem, you can’t transmit at higher speeds, whatever the bandwidth elsewhere in the system.

3. Signal/noise limitations. However high the resolution, and however zippy the infrastructure, you are still limited by your ability to separate signal from noise. Some of this is about hardware and software (e.g., your spam filtering software. But a lot of this is about your heuristics and processes (e.g., how you decide which emails to read, and how you actually read them).

The first two are the most straight forward and the least interesting. If your images are all low-resolution, that’s what you are stuck with unless you can persuade the photographers to shoot at a higher-resolution. If your router is the bottleneck, buy a faster one, but if you are running into problems because your ISP’s maximum bandwidth is still too slow, there may not be much you can do.

But where your limitations are of the signal/noise flavor, you may have some more interesting options. You can do a lot on the input management side of things to better negotiate the information flow. If the data stream in question is email, you can improve your spam filter, better time management practices, or auto-filter your incoming emails into folders. You can experiment with different communication channels for sharing different kinds of information: email digests, RSS feeds, chat, and other tools may offer ways to more quickly filter out the less relevant information and highlight the most critical.

But you can also increase your signal/noise capacity (and thus the information flow across the entire system) if you can increase the capacity to see and unpack more value out of whatever data you’ve got. If you send an mp3 of Miles Davis’ Funky Tonk to my friend Melanie, she’ll think it sounds nice and might even play it a few times.  But send the same file in the same way to my friend Eryn, herself an accomplished musician, and she’ll hear and understand a great deal more valuable information. In other words, one way to increase the throughput of your system is to help the folks on the receiving end learn and understand more about the information itself. This isn’t necessarily simple or easy, but at least it’s not dependent on structural limitations in the communication system.

Praying for Filter Failure

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Nicholas Carr over at the Rough Type blog (really worthwhile blog, btw) argued yesterday that our information overload problem isn’t a filter failure problem (i.e., too much noise and not enough signal) but a signal problem (i.e., our filters are so good they are overloading us with signal).

Carr’s argument, in a nutshell: our filtering tools are good enough that finding a needle in a haystack, where there’s a body of information and we need something specific (“situational information overload”) isn’t a problem. The problem, he argues, is experiencing overload because we are surrounded by too much information we are immediately interested in (“ambient overload”), and that this is the result of the filters being so effective at eliminating noise that they overload us with signal.

I think he got some of it wrong and some of it right. His distinction between situational and ambient overload is pretty interesting and useful, and I think is analysis of situational overload is all right, but I disagree with his assessment of our filtering tools. I don’t think they are all that sophisticated, in fact. Our filtering tools work fine for simple searches, which is what he seems to be talking about. You can pretty easily find the relevant court cases on an issue or point of law, for example, find relevant web pages through Google or Bing for a specific set of search terms, watch a conversation on Twitter around specific hashtags, or track a specific group of people’s Facebook posts.

But complex filtering is another matter altogether. For instance, if you are working on community decision-making process design and want to use search and filter tools to track information and conversations from other design fields that bear on the challenge, good luck to you.  Within narrow, tightly defined universes, fine, but start crossing universes and the tools quickly get sloppy.

And I think he’s totally wrong about ambient overload.  It’s not that I think there isn’t a too-much-signal problem – I like that part of his analysis – but there is also a too-much-noise problem.  Ambient is almost the same as noise by definition, with plenty of signal but even more noise.  Most of what passes on my Facebook stream – ambient by his definition – is noise, with bits of signal mixed in.  Don’t care about that, don’t care about that, don’t care about that, not that either, oh wait that’s cool.  But it’s seductive, that stream, and I want to keep watching, waiting for a hit of something worthwhile.  For Facebook to be really useful to me, I do need better filters that can figure out what sorts of info I’m actually interested in and block out the rest.

Facebook actually just took a stab at this but with characteristically poor execution. Their approach (only show you wall posts by people you interact with on Facebook) created a self-reinforcing feedback loop that doesn’t distinguish on the basis of information quality at all, and in fact makes it really difficult to ever encounter the serendipitous surprises that make Facebook delightful at times. (You can turn this feature off, thankfully). Ditto on Twitter, RSS, actual news feeds, my email inbox, and so on. Maybe the signal:noise ratio is better with ambient, but it’s a mistake to presume that means the problem is one of too much signal.

I think one problem may be that his notion of filters is too simplistic, and those sorts of filters probably can’t solve the overload problem very well.  The very rich idea of curation is pretty helpful here . . . it’s not so much filtering that we need but information curation to help us see the stuff we most need to see and help us understand its relationship to other information. Better automated curation tools might help a lot, but in the meantime I don’t think there’s any way around the critical role of human curation. I don’t mind that at all, and finding and sharing the most important conversations and innovations on decision design and support is a growing part of what I do at PlaceMatters. It’s also part of why I so enjoy finding others who are particularly good at information curation, since that’s a critical tool for making sure we learn from ideas across sectors. But it’s solving a noise problem, not a signal problem.

Finally, his analysis entirely overlooks what I think is a particularly critical element in intelligently and joyfully managing information and content: mechanisms that facilitate serendipity, unexpected but high-value information you would not have found otherwise.  Curation can be a powerful strategy for embedding this, just as good design can.

Overload is obviously a problem, and incremental improvements in filtering tools probably can’t keep up with the exponential increase in information flows. But I suspect the answer really does lie in the evolution of filtering as a concept (and then the tools that follow) rather than in “prayi[ng] for filter failure.”

The Nimble Nonprofit: A Manifesto

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Among the many challenges nonprofits face is the weight and inertia of the conventional wisdom about being a nonprofit. But the world in which nonprofits labor today isn’t the same world where the professionalized Nonprofit 2.0 paradigm of the past several decades developed. Sometimes the conventional wisdom has the right idea, but the most important information is lost in the clutter. At other times, though, the conventional wisdom actually makes it more difficult for nonprofits to make great things happen. And sometimes the conventional wisdom is just simply wrong.

The result: nonprofits are too often guided by convention and inertia, and are too often unable to learn from their own experiences, from each other, and from unconventional sources.

And the result of all this: too many nonprofits don’t perform to their potential.

The good news is that a professional-but-nimble, technologically savvy, Millennial-driven Nonprofit 3.0 model is emerging. How are we contributing? Well, for starters, we figured we’d write a manifesto (natch).

So, with a crowdsourced, social networked, microblogged, mobile, and location aware drum roll, here’s our Nimble Nonprofit Manifesto v1.0:

  1. Shake the yoke of convention. Be skeptical about the received wisdom. Ask hard questions about everything you’ve been taught on running a nonprofit.
  2. Be agile and innovative. Experiment, take risks, fail fast and smart, adapt, deploy the best practices of high performance organizations regardless of sector, pivot to embrace opportunity, and foster a culture of openness.
  3. Build a great team. Hire smart, fire smarter, create a sustainable and supportive organizational culture, and grow and empower your crew.
  4. Sustain a Jedi focus. Maintain a sharp focus and tight discipline on the your goals and on the work that most needs doing.
  5. Build relationships and networks. Tell great stories, treat people well, ask them for support, rinse and repeat.

Your Four Percent Response Rate Sucks. So What.

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Response rate is a measure of how many people receiving a communication take the requested action. If your organization sends an email to 1,000 subscribers asking each to write their representative in Congress and 150 take that action then the response rate is 15%. A similar response rate for 100,000 emails sent might produce 15,000 emails to Congress.

What is a good response rate? I just made up 15% for the sake of example and it has no value as a good (or bad) response rate. So a good response rate may be higher or it may be lower and it will, almost certainly, vary from organization to organization. We may also expect the difficulty of the ask to make a difference. How hard is it for the reader to do what you have asked? Most online advocacy campaign asks involve two, maybe three steps:

  • Clicking a link in an email;
  • Looking at a form and pre-drafted letter text. The user needs to fill out the form or, more likely, review the form for accuracy because it already displays his or her personal information;
  • Clicking a submit button.

That’s it. Do that and you’ve “responded.” These days a user will be presented with screens asking for more information or, more commonly, ways to tell friends about the message through email and social media. Some users may be asked to make a donation or volunteer to get involved in other ways, too. But, that first submit button click is all that’s needed for a response.

Consider that, in theory anyway, everyone on your email list asked to be on the list. They opted into the list. They said, in effect: “hey, this looks interesting (or important) and I want to get your messages and be involved in efforts to help.”

These people have joined your club. They’re part of the group. They’re into it, man. Right? It follows that most would participate in the events. Heck, if it is something so simple (yet powerful!) as clicking a button to send a letter to Congress and make the world better then more than most.

Maybe 60% would act. Or 75%. We won’t expect everyone to respond. Heck, some people are out of town or their internet connection is down or their kid is sick and it’s been a really busy week. We’ll cut folks some slack.

The 4%

The benchmark advocacy response rate for nonprofits is about 4%. Yes. Four percent. Four (right there between three and five…it’s a number commonly discussed on Sesame Street).

This is not to say that your organization’s response rate is 4%. In fact it could be 6 or 7%. Maybe a bit more. If so, good on ya. By the way, has that rate been going up or down recently?

What is up with a 4% response rate across the sector? As we said, these lists are built with people that “want” to hear from you. They opted in. Many or most folks took a similar action – writing a letter to Congress or signing a petition – during that opt-in so it isn’t as though they don’t know what you want them to do.

We aren’t going to say what a good or great response rate should be but we do believe that 4% sucks for lists of interested and willing subscribers.

This rate says something about how we’re going about building and using these email lists. The people on the lists are mostly casual observers. If they are not responding then how do we know they are interested? What are advocacy organizations accomplishing when only one in 25 members does anything?

Okay, we’re going to admit that some may debate that this response rate is really a concern. After all, a good direct mail response rate is below one percent and these emails are cheaper and faster so email may be rockin’ it.

But we figure that most don’t like this 4% response rate.

So what’s the problem? Are we building these lists with “bad names?” Are we not communicating well after people sign up? Do subscribers have a lot less interest in your organization and cause than their opting into your list might indicate?

We think it is some of all of the above – and more or less and may depend from group to group. One thing we know, though, is that organizations need to take a hard look at their goals for email lists – and online community writ large. If email lists are simply headed to direct mail response rate territory then we need to understand that – and budget accordingly for a world in which very large lists are needed do get small results. This won’t be cheap and quantity is not necessarily a sin.

But perhaps resources could be better invested in finding more qualified subscribers, engaging people more directly on their own terms and simply cutting the dead wood out of lists. This last piece would be the simplest and cheapest though it should serve as a basic piece of the plan and not be anything particularly innovative or new.

Let’s figure out what to do about that 4%.

The Three Great Virtues of Social Change Advocates

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Photo by Flickr user nstop.
Larry Wall, a well-known computer programmer, famously said that the three great virtues of a programmer are laziness, impatience, and hubris. Perhaps these qualities apply to great nonprofit folks as well.

Laziness is the virtue, according to Wall, that leads folks to figure out how to be more effective and efficient, to “go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure.” Laziness, properly applied, means you do more with less effort, which is useful for those folks who aim to balance their nonprofit lives with, say, anything else at all.

Impatience is the virtue that leads people to anticipate future needs and opportunities instead of simply reacting to their current situation, and the quality that can lead folks to leap and ship instead of waiting for the perfect moment when everything is ready to go.

And hubris is the sort of pride that drives you to want to earn the respect of your colleagues by doing great work. Hubris is the virtue that enables the best advocates to believe they are capable of making great things happen, and that helps them be willing to take the risks that great things depend on.

Mobile Advertising: Jumping Off the Cliff

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Photo by Flickr user 4ELEVEN Images.
A few weeks back we made the case for having a mobile strategy: at a minimum, nonprofits need to make sure their web site is mobile-friendly (if not mobile-optimized), and mobile apps might actually be worth the effort. Mobile apps can be useful as part of an engagement strategy, and mobile apps can be useful tools for creating ongoing revenue-producing transactional relationships (e.g., the type of functionality that Urban Airship offers), content subscriptions being the most obvious. But mobile advertising is another strategy that might be useful, and Gigaom thoughtfully posted a great overview of mobile advertising ins and outs.

Mobile advertising may not be an obvious choice for many nonprofits, but if you’ve got an audience, you may be able to incorporate an advertising element that offers relevant ads to your mobile app visitors but remains consistent with the vibe and feel of the app. Whereas web sites tend to be a foundational part of a nonprofit’s brand and presence, you have more latitude with mobile apps and more opportunity to to experiment. Some nonprofits have also experimented with affiliate marketing, an option marketer Chris Brogan has thoughtfully explored quite a bit.

Mobile advertising may not make sense for a lot of nonprofits, and it seems unlikely to offer any more than one more modest revenue stream, but nonprofits really do need to grapple with the limitations of the conventional holy trinity of fundraising – members, donors, and foundations – and this may be one more tool to keep in the toolbox.

If you’ve tried mobile advertising (heck, if you’ve tried a mobile strategy of any kind), we’d love to hear about it . . . what worked, what didn’t, what you would do differently?  And if you’ve thought about it but decided not to, we’d love to hear about that, too.