How to make a magnificent mini-impression

People decide very quickly whether something appeals to them - usually in a matter of seconds.  If you work in communications, marketing or fundraising, it’s wise to remember to focus on that mini-impression formed in the first few instants of engagement.

You can be sure the Super Bowl advertisers knew that - heck, they were spending $116,667 a second to make a good impression.  They didn’t always do a good job, but there is a lot to learn from their successes and failures.

In the Harvard Business Review blog this week, Ron Ashkenas shares reflections on the three things needed for the best possible mini-impression, drawing on lessons from the Super Bowl.  He says to think about your favorite commercial and three things that might have made it great.  Did it:

1. Capture attention. Which part of that commercial stays with you? What technique did the advertiser use to draw you in?

2. Convey a clear message. Consider the key message for the target audience. What did the company try to convey, and how did the advertiser use that to connect with viewers? How did they frame the message to make this point?

3. Differentiate.  Think about what distinguishes your advertiser from the rest. How did the company use the commercial to portray its unique brand?

Now think about how this applies to your work.  What attention-grabbing technique can you incorporate into your next important conversation?  How can you ensure your audience walks away with your most critical takeaway? Are you making clear what sets you apart from others?

Good advice.  You don’t have to have an insanely large marketing budget to master the mini-impression - you just need to remember these basics.  In fact, if you have a small budget, these tenets are even more critical.  You want to leave a big impression right away, every time you get the chance.

 

  • Comment: (2)

Two things it’s easy to forget with social media

In the reactive, fast-moving, turbulent world of social media, it’s easy to be swept up with a sense of false urgency.  Yet two of the most valuable things you can do involve slowing down:

1. Pausing to think.  Before you run off to spend time on a channel, you want to figure out WHO you’re trying to reach online, WHERE they are, and HOW to best communicate with them.  A little intentionality now saves oodles of lost time later. 

2 Stopping to listen.  Really listen.  It’s so tempting to fire off a response or jump into a conversation.  But before you do, pay close attention to what’s being said and the emotional tenor involved.  Acknowledge it, respect it and then join the conversation.  You can learn far more in consciously listening to your constituency than you ever will in reading the pronouncements of gurus.  We must see and hear others with the same energy we exert on seeking recognition of ourselves. 

When it comes to connection, which social media is all about, we need the ears and eyes of others paired with our own to be complete. 

  • Comment: (2)

Venn Heaven: How to map your champions online

Tom Webster of BrandSavant Blog had a fascinating post this past week on the overlap - or lack thereof - of 1) your base of supporters and 2) social media mavens.  It’s important you understand how much overlap you have, so you know how to use social media effectively to build your brand.

He drew a series of Venn Diagrams, which I am showing here:

So which is ideal?

The first looks good, because you have some overlap between supporters and social media champions.  That overlapping area is a great start to a core of online enthusiasts - and it can grow as that group reaches out to their circles of influence.

The second is obviously bad, because you almost no overlap between people who love you and people who spread messages.  And if you pay attention on social media only to the people who are talking about your issue but aren’t supporters, you’ll alienate your base because the two aren’t intersecting.

The third one is interesting.  It looks great until you think about it as an echo chamber.  You just have the same champions zealously supporting your cause to each other, over and over, online.  That’s no way to grow a community.  Also, if you keep catering to this group, more and more narrowly, you’ll end up with a shrinking echo chamber, pleasing a more and more select group of people.

The trick, as Tom points out, is knowing which Venn diagram you have so you know where you have problems and where you have opportunities.  That’s the hard part.  You have to listen and engage very carefully to gain this understanding.  As he notes:

Two of these Venn diagrams could kill your business – if you make decisions based upon social data and don’t know what your diagram looks like. Luckily for you, it isn’t rocket science to draw your brand’s diagram – if you do the work. This is the kind of work I do for clients every day, but the most important thing you can do to determine these things about your customers is simply to ask them. Only when you calibrate your social data mining with other online or offline research can you know the nature of your two circles. Figuring out the size of these circles – and the extent to which they overlap – is the key to making social media data useful.

Ask you donors and champions if they are online and where - and see how they react to opportunities to spread the word online.  Do a little homework so you know where to focus your efforts.

I recommend reading and subscribing to BrandSavant for more on how to draw a picture of your online brand - and how to act accordingly.

It’s good advice.

  • Comment: (0)

Jobs at Network for Good

  • Fri, February 03 2012
  • Filed under: Personal

Network for Good, where I work, is hiring.  Among the positions is a business development position for those interested in cultivating corporate cause partnerships.  Next week, we’ll be posting an additional position in marketing.

Check out our job listings here.

  • Comment: (0)

Brick wall redux: Practical tips for leading change

Today, I finished reading John Kotter’s book, A Sense of Urgency*.  It’s full of good advice on how to spark a burning desire for your agenda.  If you are frustrated, you should buy this book and read it right away.

What I learned was complacency and “false urgency” are the biggest barriers to getting things done.  Complacency is comfort with the status quo, generated by past success or perceived success.  False urgency by contrast comes from failure.  It’s essentially unproductive panic and activity.

True urgency, on the other hand, is a very good thing.  It is the visceral, highly motivated urge to do something important, day in and day out.

So how do you create that?

The single most important thing you can do is to appeal to the heart not just the head of your colleagues.  (This reminds me of the elephant in Switch.)  As Kotter says, “Excellent information, by itself, with the best data and logic, can win over minds and thoughts but rarely increases needed urgency… A logical case that is part of a heart-engaging experience can win over hearts and minds and increase needed urgency.”

He then told the story of a corporation spending months on strategy and consultants and committees to make his point in terms both vivid and scary.

He offers four key tactics.  Here they are with my commentary:

1. Bring the outside in: Don’t just navel gaze!  Reconnect internal reality with external opportunities and risks.  Bring in emotionally compelling data, people, videos, sites and sounds.  Put front and center stories of your customers, competitors, donors and beneficiaries.  Send out scouts to experience front-line, real world circumstances.

2. Behave with urgency every day: Don’t be content - or anxious.  Show the real sense of urgency - fire in the belly for a worthy and clear aim.  Free up time in your day to think straight - because clutter and fatigue undermine urgency.

3. Find opportunity in crisis: Handled right and with caution, a crisis can destroy complacency and inspire sound action.  But remember: Crises alone don’t create urgency - in fact, they can create paralysis.  And manufactured crises create resentment.  If you have a crisis, use it as a rallying point.  If you don’t have one, don’t stand around waiting for one!  Create urgency through other means.

4. Deal with the Nonos: Remove or neutralize those who are complacent or creating destructive, false urgency.  The NoNo is ready with ten reasons why the current situation is fine, why your problems don’t exist or why you need more data before you do anything.  A skeptic is fine - even good.  But NoNos aren’t about healthy questioning.  They’re about automatically shooting down change.  Kotter says not to bother co-opting a NoNo - it won’t work.  Nor will ignoring them, because they are good at creating mischief, not to mention organizational civil war.  So what do you do?  He offers three options:

NoNo Option A: Distraction.  Send the NoNo on a special assignment suited to her skills or give them lots of other work.  Or get them riled up about something else.
NoNo Option B: Removal.  Fire the NoNo.
NoNo Option C: Immobilization.  Kotter says “lightweight” NoNos can be exposed in public and social pressures can be used to neutralize their behavior.  But calling out someone only works if they aren’t powerful or hard core.

Of course, if you do all of this, you will be successful - and generate a new round of complacency, Kotter points out.  So you have to keep working the tactics, again and again.  Urgency is needed all along the way.  Sigh.  The work of a change agent is never done, my friends!

A Sense of Urgency by John P. Kotter - Free videos are just a click away

*Hat tip to birthday girl Jocelyn Harmon for giving me a copy of this excellent book!

  • Comment: (1)

When you hit the brick wall before you leave your own building

I get a lot of email from people who are trying to better connect with their supporters, but they encounter resistance to new approaches from within themselves or, more often, from within their own organizations.  If you’re hitting a brick wall, this post is for you.

It’s not easy to turn the focus from your own perspective to that of your audiences, but turn it, you must.

When you hit a brick wall before you even leave your own building, don’t give up.  Don’t stop pressing for taking the perspective of those you must reach.  Don’t abandon the quest to do things differently and better.  Because it’s the only way forward.

No one ever built a great organization by navel-gazing and never changing.  Ever. 

Advocate for meeting the needs of your donors and your beneficiaries and your customers above all else.  It will lead to success, I swear.  As a wise CSO recently put it to me: “Meeting the needs of the customer is always the winning hand.  Always.”  The best companies in the world get that.  And their stock prices show there is positive payback.

If you do right by your donors, the money will come.

If you do right by those you serve, the mission will come.

If you do right by the status quo, nothing will come.  And that has to be more scary than trying to make things happen.

Don’t turn back at the brick wall.  Find a way around it, over it or under it.  There’s usually a secret passageway - in the form of a different messenger, a different message, or different positioning.  And if you can’t find that, there’s always the fallback: Do it right and then seek forgiveness, not permission.  More likely, you’ll get more than forgiveness.  Perhaps even applause - because the results will be something to celebrate.

  • Comment: (4)

Impact - not ideas - should be the star of your story

While I was living in Ukraine, the government tax authority launched a campaign to motivate taxpayers to stay honest and continue paying their taxes. The tax authority developed several ads. One was a cartoon illustration of a bee in front of a hive with a slogan celebrating the fruits of a collective contribution to the government. It looked like an ad for Honey Nut Cheerios with worker bees starring as the cereal mascot.  Another was a photograph of a new well and water pump where city residents could fill containers with fresh water from the well. An accompanying slogan thanked taxpayers for making the well and other city improvements possible. In one of my trainings, I placed the ads side by side and asked a roomful of Ukrainians which was more effective given the tax authority’s marketing goals. Not surprisingly, they were unanimous in their judgment that access to fresh water was far more personally relevant, and therefore motivating, than a role in building a metaphorical hive.

This example seems obvious, yet in our communication we often focus more on hives than on wells. We talk about saving the earth, ending poverty, or creating a great society. Every day, we have to remind ourselves that the hive is what we’re building; the well is what our audience needs to see.

At this week’s Social Media for Nonprofits conference, Paull Young of charity:water shared what he’s learned about digital engagement in his work over the past two years, and it reminded me of my story of the hive and the well.  Charity:water has done 6,165 water projects over the years - which is a lot of wells - and the exceptional job they do in talking about their work holds lessons for us all.

Paul shared five keys to success:

1. Be positive: Inspire and create sense of collective impact.  Don’t lead with guilt and sadness—it is not the stuff of a long-term relationship, nor the kind of content people will want to share with others.

2. Focus on stories not money: You do better as a fundraiser telling great stories about your work rather than spotlighting the dollars.  (Charity:water never asks for money on social media or in their emails.  I wouldn’t go that far but agree with the overall principle that you should focus on the good you do rather than what you get.

3. Do it wrong quickly: Try a lot of things - with the Internet economy, it’s quick and affordable to test.

4. Be personal - and that doesn’t just mean using a donor’s name.  Charity:water made videos singling out and thanking 250 supporters - each staff member participated.

5. Focus on impact - wells, not hives!  This is where charity:water shines.  They have great photos from the field, GPS coordinates for donor projects and an overall amazing donor experience.

No doubt about it - charity:water is well worth emulating.  Think about them when you’re gravitating toward the hive.

  • Comment: (0)
Page 2 of 2 pages  < 1 2