Innovation

There’s a lot of chatter amongst the digerati about Spock, the beta people search engine that aggregates things online and tries to tag and describe people without human intervention.  Note that I said "beta".  This thing is clearly not fully baked yet. As computers often do, it has made plenty of mistakes in it’s descriptions,…

Harris Interactive (a polling firm) and Mindshare Interactive (us!) are about to release data about Americans’ attitudes towards giving and nonprofits.  The survey, which comprised hundreds of questions about prospective and existing donor’s patterns and beliefs about nonprofits should be useful information for any organization crafting a fundraising strategy over the next twelve to eighteen…

In a recent non-profit case study published by Marketing Sherpa, the National Philanthropic Trust’s Breast Cancer Day compiled two lists, one for direct mail and one for e-mail, sent both similar creative, and then measured the results.  The results? The Trust sent three e-mails to each person on the e-prospect list, and two direct mail…

AdAge, sensing that there are still a few people who’ve never heard of Facebook but don’t feel like trying it, recently put up a Facebook video introduction.  The speaker rambles a bit but it’s a good enough introduction that if you’re curious it will quickly tell you if you should go try it or forget…

For a long time now, the non-profit technology marketplace has been primed for consolidation.  Lots of little vendors splintered the customer community.  The normal confusion of a world of increasing technology complexity was made worse by competing vendors’ "walled gardens".  Then the consolidation started. Convio, a leader in online fundraising, bought it’s nearest competitor GetActive. …

Ok, so I don’t have to tell you that social networking is popular.  You’d have to be pretty much dead to not know that MySpace, Facebook, and other social networks are all the rage.  But let’s say you’re a brand of tequila, for argument’s sake, let’s say you’re a premium brand.  Should you have your…

As of August 5, 2007, Second Life has 8.6 million residents who have logged in in the last 60 days.  Facebook on the other hand, has 30 million solid users. Whatever time you’re spending thinking, planning, hanging out in Second Life, as a marketer you should clearly be focusing at least twice as much on…

The formula seems easy enough to the lay person: announce a contest encouraging people to make their own commercials about your cause or product and submit them via YouTube.  Offer a modest prize ($5,000) and sit back and wait for the great ideas to roll in. For the right organization or cause it’s a brilliant…

If you’ve ever wanted to know this, use the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine. I was at the CA Farm Bureau’s site (http://www.cfbf.com/) and noticed they had redesigned.  But when?  I went to archive.org and found the archive of all snapshots of their website at: California Farm Bureau index at Archive.org Then I stepped backwards a…

So this is the week of the young voter and video.  CNN and YouTube are congratulating themselves for getting the usually uninvolved 18-24 year old demographic for paying attention to the Presidential debates.  There is no doubt, this is an accomplishment and has traditionally been a hard nut to crack. Also this week, the Pew…