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How Failure Breeds Success

How many foundation executives stand up before their board and say "You will see some failures. As we take more risks, this is something we must accept as part of the regeneration process." But that's exactly what Coca Cola (not a company I otherwise admire) CEO Neville Isdell told his shareholders, as he described multi-million dollar soft drink flops the company had attempted. Business week takes a close look at How Failure Breeds Success, presenting critical lessons that should be learned by nonprofits and funders alike. Posted: 7/3/06; 1:00:28 PM #

Do Images Help or Hurt?
	Hat tip to Ms Finn for pointing out this email related research paper from M + R Strategic Services asking: Do Images Help or Hurt? (for some reason, a 4 page PDF rather than a web page). The conclusion is quite interesting. Images appear to have no statistically significant impact on email results. I am reassured in my abstemious ways. Posted: 7/3/06; 12:55:38 PM #

Calculating the Cost of Increased E-Mail Frequency

I've been warning for several years now that, the moment nonprofits caught on about email, they would start treating it like any other medium with which to deluge their stakeholders. (Recall last week's image of the statement: "We don't need another call to action. We need a call to stillness.") Now there is interesting research Calculating the Cost of Increased E-Mail Frequency. This really starts to add weight to the idea that we need to back off on "scaling up talking" and start focusing on "scaling up listening". Posted: 7/3/06; 12:50:56 PM #

The Ten Most-Ignored Best Practices

As you have heard me say before, "best practice" is a meaningless term unless you present criteria where you compare those practices against others. Nevertheless, I am recommending EmailLab's article on The Ten Most-Ignored Best Practices, by Loren McDonald and Stefan Pollard. We ignore some of these at Nonprofit Online News as well and they may be worth considering. The ten practices are: 1. Provide a subscription-administration center in each message. 2. Provide a site search function. 3. Provide a forward-to-a-friend link. 4. Provide a subscription link. 5. Add-to-safe-senders-list request. 6. Link to a Web version. 7. Provide a telephone contact number. 8. Display the recipient's email address. 9. Provide navigation links within the email and to the Web site. 10. Provide an email address for feedback or sender contact. Posted: 7/3/06; 12:47:33 PM #