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Why A Video Background Is a Bad Idea
Michael Bay's filmography on Rotten Tomatoes is a long list of movies categorized as rotten by both critics and audiences. If you've watched one of his movies, you'll quickly realize that he substitutes spectacular visual effects for plot or character development. The thirty-second trailer looks amazing, but the movie length barrage of explosions and one-liners is boring. All the flash can't compensate for the weak story. This is the problem with video backgrounds and similar animated effects...
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2 Strategies to Make Your Website Intuitive
Most organizations we work with want their website to be intuitive and easy-to-use, but how do you actually accomplish that in a design? There are two strategies to make a tool intuitive: Match experience Remove choices Match Experience Imagine that you bought a new car and when you went to drive it off the lot you discovered that the gas pedal raised and lowered the windows. That was my experience when I first drove a swather. If you didn't grow up on a farm like I did, a swather is an...
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Creating Value That AI Can't Replicate
I have a friend, Mike, who is a part-time lawyer and part-time university professor. He loves teaching and he has often told me he would happily stop "lawyering" and teach full- time if he could. "Why don't you?" I asked him the first time he mentioned this. "Because I have a JD (jurors doctorate) and not a PhD. Everyone else in the department is a PhD. The school keeps me around because they can tell prospective students they have a practicing lawyer on staff," Mike told me. What does Mike...
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AI's Implications for Member Content
This Halloween, I'm heading down to New Orleans for a vampire themed costume ball. While I was doing research on where I might go and what I might attend, I realized that I could use ChatGPT to help. I quickly generated information on exactly what I was looking for. This poses a problem for many content creators, including your association. We've been trained to use search engines to interact with the Internet. Search has been a win-win game for users and content creators. If someone, like...
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Content, A Mystery House, and Priorities
There's a famous mansion in San Jose, California called the Winchester Mystery House. The legend is that Sarah Winchester, heiress to the Winchester Rifles fortune, was haunted by the ghosts of people killed by the rifles. She saw a psychic who told her that she had to build a house for the ghosts and she could never stop building it or they'd kill her. The mansion was under construction for thirty-two years and contains doors that go nowhere, stairs that vanish into the ceiling, and other...
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What Goes on Your Homepage
What belongs on an association website's homepage? It's the most important page on your site because it's the most visited page. The challenge is determining what you should say, how much information you should provide, and what the order that information should be displayed in. It's Tetris for experience design. Your organization is unique and has unique requirements, but in this article I'll provide some guidelines on how to approach these challenges in laying out your homepage.
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''How Do We Prove ROI'' is the Wrong Question
The 2019 Marketing General Membership Marketing & Benchmarking report has a section on internal challenges to membership. The #3 largest internal challenge is “Difficulty in proving ROI.” “How do we prove return on investment,” is not a great question for improving retention.
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What Bakers Can Teach You About Members Only Content
After a presentation, an executive approached me with an internal argument her staff was having. She said that they were going back and forth over whether they should make all of the content on their website freely available or whether they should put it behind a membership "wall" so that only members could access it? She wanted to know which option I advocated?
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Avoid the El Camino Trap of Targeting Your Members’ Customers
Should your association website have content speaking to your member’s customers? As an example, if you’re an association of landscape professionals, should you write articles on lawn management or have a big button, “Find a Landscape Professional?”
Engagement
John Hooley
President, Steward
John is a graduate of 10,000 Small Businesses, a certified Customer Acquisition Specialist, and a Zend Certified Engineer. He speaks and writes on connecting digital strategy to association goals. Outside of work he's an avid traveler, climber, diver, and a burgeoning sailor. He also volunteers with Rotary and Big Brothers Big Sisters.