Beaconfire’s New Year’s Resolutions: Know Yourself and Your Audience

The New Year is almost here.  You may wish it were farther away as you scramble to finish up 2010.  But soon enough, the year-end fundraising frenzy will die down, and you might just have room to breathe again.

That breathing space is a good place for a little reflection.  After the ball drops, and before a slew of new projects start up, you might take some time to step back, and think about where you are, and where you’re going.

In business, as in personal life, having too many resolutions makes it hard to keep any of them.  At Beaconfire, we thought of plenty of ideas for our own resolutions: areas where we’d like to help our clients do better. But when we boiled down all our ideas, we found that we had two core resolutions to keep: Know Yourself. Know Your Audience.

Each of these is a tall order. But there are many small things you can do to achieve them, no matter what area you’re working in. After the jump, see what Beaconfire staff had to say.

Project Management

Know yourself: Plan for the new year

January is a time that many organizations hold strategy and planning session for the new year. Kesah noted that it’s easy for these meetings to get unfocused; but there are ways to keep them productive and meaningful:

• Plan ahead: Create an agenda and set goals prior to meeting, share documentation and have stakeholders review them ahead of time
• Keep the team focused: There can be a lot of material to cover along with much excitement, so make sure someone is to watching the time and keeping the discussion on track
• Reflect back: Concentrate on what did and did not work well and use these lessons in shaping your conversations for the new year. Refer to your analytics and other key data for measures of past success.
• Look ahead: Don’t be afraid to think big, but establish realistic goals and priorities for the new year
• Establish next steps: A lot of great ideas can come out of these meetings. In order for them to not get lost, it’s important to take careful notes and set aside some time to discuss the next steps. At the very least, establish who will determine the action items from the meeting and follow up with the rest of the team.
• Don’t lose sight of the big picture: Once the new year is in full swing, it can be easy to get caught up in day-to-day operations and neglect the larger objectives. Revisit the established goals on a quarterly basis and assess progress to make sure nothing falls to the wayside.

Know your audience: Meet your constituents, online and offline

You rely on your constituents to act on your behalf. But, when you’re deep in the weeds in your online marketing efforts, it’s easy to get disconnected from them.  Michael had a suggestion for keeping your constituents close in mind.

Resolve to spend 1 hour a month talking directly with your constituents about their interests and what they think of your marketing efforts. This can be a live phone call, an email exchange, a focus group, tweeting or whatever other method puts you directly in touch with them. Getting to know your audience means stepping into their shoes, seeing past the quantitative numbers and into the values, thoughts and emotions that drive them. It is these intangibles that will most inform how to shape your future efforts.

Know yourself: Make decisions that work

Making decisions is hard, and the bigger the group of stakeholders, the more difficult it can be to find solutions that work for everyone.  Changing your plans repeatedly can endanger your timeline and budget.

Amanda finds that knowing what you’re trying to accomplish, and focusing on shared goals, can help simplify the decision-making process. Core teams in non-profits should make sure to communicate with each other about their goals for a project – before communicating your goals to a consultant.

It also helps to identify key decision makers who will have the final say.  Project goals should be a continuing theme, so that when decisions need to be made in groups or feedback is required, members of the team are less likely to contradict each other.  Feedback is most useful when it is in line with the overall project goals, rather than individual or departmental preference.

Design

Know yourself: Tell your designers what you really need

As our Creative Director, Eve helps clients face the challenge of “know thyself” every day.  Too often the design process is seen as something foreign & mystical, with designers wielding special mind-reading powers & creating magical visuals out of thin air. Logically, everyone knows that’s not true. Practically, designers realize how hard it can be to articulate what you envision when you don’t speak their language.

In the new year, expect designers to ask you more questions, dig deeper into your unique story, and push you (gently) to unearth the core of your organization’s authentic self. In return, be honest with yourself, and be prepared to reflect hard on what your organization really needs from a design.

Social Media

Know yourself: Give your social program a strong start

Maybe your organization hasn’t jumped on the social media bandwagon yet.  If you’re still not committed to social media, Ashleigh says that 2011 is the time to figure out a strategy that works for you.

Your staff have limited time and resources to experiment with social media. As a result, it’s best to start by evaluating how you’ll use it, including:

• the goals you’ll be pursuing
• the number of sites you’ll be using
• how many internal staff hours you have to manage these properties
• who’s managing it all
• how you’ll measure success

It’s important to dedicate at least one employee to be in charge of managing these marketing channels (though they need not focus on it full-time). Don’t plan to use social media and then give minimal effort. You can get great results from social media, but only if you put in the necessary energy.

If you don’t have the internal or external resources to dedicate much time to social media marketing, consider starting small, using just one social network like Twitter or Facebook. Research the site you’re using and determine what types of messages may work best, then plan out your messaging. Consider using a tool to manage and schedule posts, which frees up time for other work.

Know your audience: Get insights from Twitter and Facebook

If your organization is already active on social media, Rob suggests that you can learn a lot about your audience from watching how they interact on social networks you’re using.

On Twitter, keep on top of your new follower email notifications. Instead of just noting the number of new followers, click through to each follower’s account, and see what they’re tweeting about. If you notice themes, perhaps you can incorporate that into your future tweeting strategy. If you see active tweeters with lots of followers, you may want to consider them influencers, and try to develop a relationship with them.

Facebook lets you learn more about your fans on a demographic level. In addition to the data that Facebook Insights provides about your fans (i.e. ages, cities, etc), you can also analyze your potential supporters on a more granular level through their advertising system, if you create an ad that is targeted to your existing fans. For example, if you’re a locally based educational organization, you could track which colleges are providing you with the most fans. This technique can provide unexpected insights into your constituencies.

Analytics

Know Yourself: Getting the big picture from your data

How can you improve if you don’t know where you’re starting from?  When you start planning, Jo thinks it’s helpful to have a foundation of solid data… but chances are good that you don’t have just one system that can tell you clearly how you’re doing. Instead, you probably have several databases, each with pieces of information you need:

• web traffic from your analytics package
• online donation and constituent information from your eCRM
• email responses from your ESP
• your direct mail database

…and maybe others as well. To get the big picture, you need to bring together these diverse sources of data, and make sense of them in relation to each other.

Make a dashboard that lets you compare the most important numbers at a glance, and check it every month.  If donations are on the decline, does that correspond with a drop in web traffic? Is it because you sent out fewer emails? In the new year, we’ll be pushing our clients to put this picture together and start asking bigger questions than they can ask of any one tool on its own.

Know your audience: Do more segmentation

For Marissa’s New Year’s Resolution, she’ll make an effort to approach web analytics from a more audience-centric perspective – and you should, too.

In analytics, “audience” doesn’t just mean segmenting new and return visitors. It means thinking about web personas – donors, advocates, media, interested newcomers, etc. -  and translating those personas into analytics segments. The best overall success is one where each segment of your population feels they’ve accomplished something, whether it’s a new visitor wanting to make a donation or a member of the media looking for your press releases.

Your web visitors aren’t all the same – and you should strive to recognize that in your analytics.

Mobile

Know yourself: Build the right mobile experience

Creating a mobile program may be in your plans for 2011 – it’s one of the fastest-growing areas of new media. Tim notes that there are lots of ways to engage with mobile users, but not all may be right for your needs.  Perhaps your mobile experience should be something users browse on the web (a website, or a more condensed “app” experience), or maybe it should be an app that users download and install on their mobile device, is a question that nearly always comes up at some point in “The Mobile Discussion.”

“Native apps” are very popular and the idea seems, on its face, quite simple: users download it and it’s there on your device to use any time you want. Unfortunately, the truth is a bit more blurred than that. Web based experiences can look, and act, a lot like a native app. And a native app could depend on a data connection, similar to web-based apps. Native apps are able to use all the hardware features of the device (GPS, accelerometer, etc.) that web-based apps are (sometimes) barred from accessing, but which of those features do you really need?

Figuring out the best way to present your mobile experience – in an optimized version of your regular site, a special mobile site, or an app – means figuring out first what you want to accomplish, and the best format to do that.  Mobile is an exciting, tempting world – but don’t dive in without first considering how it will work for you.

Know your audience: Mobile content

Rebecca stresses the importance of picking the right content to emphasize on the mobile version of your site – the content that your visitors need most.  You’ve got limited real estate, so identify the tasks that your mobile visitors are most likely to be doing on your site through their phones. For example:

• Get contact information
• Make a donation
• Get the location of an event

What is the most critical content to help them accomplish those tasks? Display that content up front, and keep it short and sweet. Other content should be removed completely or linked less prominently, so that it doesn’t get in the way of those high-priority tasks.

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There are a lot of possibilities here – but if you pick just one or two to really focus on, you’re sure to see better results in the new year.

Are you making your own resolutions to use and manage technology better in 2011?  We’d love to hear what you’re planning!