Will Marlow

I was recently invited to Boston to give a talk at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Honor Societies about opportunities to engage members using the Internet.  My friends at The National Society of Collegiate Scholars invited me, and I'm very excited.

I love talking to groups of people who work in industries that are undergoing intense voluntary change.  Change is frequently unpleasant, and for that reason it's generally avoided.  Once an organization or an industry realizes that changes are necessary, and embraces the changes, it means that the opportunities presenting themselves must be enormous.  And that's an exciting time.  Right now, it's a very exciting time to help people modernize their fundraising

We've all seen newspaper stories that talk about the disappointing results of online fundraising, but those stories are all about aggregate results. And we're still at the stage of social media fundraising where lots and lots of people aren't doing it well, which means aggregate results don't tell the story.  The individual successes, like the way Charity: Water uses Twitter, or the way ActBlue uses fundraising pages, or even in the private sector when Dell sells $6.5 million in merchandise via Twitter -- all of these successes show that there are tremendous opportunities to accomplish your goals using online tools, which makes it a very exciting time to be in this business.

I'm looking forward to speaking in Boston, and seeing what I learn from the audience

PS - Even though I stand by my statement that we're still at the stage where aggregate numbers don't tell the full story, the aggregate numbers are beginning to tell a positive story.  For example, in four days, more money was donated to help the Haiti via text message than was donated in all of 2009 by that medium.

Will Marlow co-founded AlumniFidelity to help his clients reposition their fundraising to benefit from Web 2.0 technology and marketing techniques. He’s working with clients such as UVA, the College of William & Mary, the University of Oklahoma, Bowling Green State University, Randolph Macon College, and he loves nothing better than a thorny marketing challenge.  Email him at will@alumnifidelity.com. 

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Here is the most helpful advice I've received so far on blogging.  Some points seem to contradict other points, but I've found it all helpful when taken together.

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A reader pointed out that I referred to something in a recent post called “A/B testing,” but I did not define it.  Essentially, A/B testing is something you do when you are re-designing a web site or building new software, in order to find out if a new change will be popular among your users.  You set up an A/B test in which one visitor to your web site (visitor "A") sees the original feature, and another visitor to your web site (visitor "B") sees the new feature, and then you compare the behavior of Group A and Group B.  The results of this type of test frequently are among the strongest factors in determining which features become a part of a web site.  (When it comes to building a company like AlumniFidelity, which has products that live exclusively on the web, A/B testing should be done as often as possible to help you make sure the product fits the market the way you want it to.)

It used to be that A/B testing was the type of thing that only major companies like Google did.  But now it takes know-how more than money to make A/B testing a part of your operation.  The cost is really the time it takes you to learn how to use the free tools (or the fees you pay to the consultant you hire to do the work for you).  You can begin with two free tools in Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer, and you can get started with A/B testing on your web site.

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