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The Chronicle of Philanthropy has a great article about what prevents people from giving online (Confusing Web Sites Discourage Donors From Online Giving). What does it come down to? Bad design. Nielsen Norman Group, which conducted the research and wrote it into this report. A summary of the biggest problems, which I can testify are […]

Set up a questionnaire survey to find out what your audience thinks is most important. Take their comments into consideration for your needs assessment process.

Many people will take the time to set a simple auto-response to go out when someone writes them an e-mail. It’s usually something like “I will be out of the office until Tuesday, 4/14. If necessary, I can be reached at …” Talk about a missed opportunity! Why not get a little fancy with this

Number crunching is the kind of art you don’t appreciate fully until you have to do it. As we were analyzing the data from the social media report, one of the biggest challenges we had was finding the right kind of chart to represent the trends we were seeing. A big help would have been

When I first started paying careful attention to the people who visit my website, I was surprised at how many went to our contact page. Sure, some people would send messages or look up a phone number, but not everybody. Many people look at your contact page so they can learn something about you. They

I adore my Sony e-book reader, and it’s perfect for novels. But one of its big drawbacks is its size, which makes it difficult for reading technical books or any document that benefits from a large format. That’s why I was happy to see the Plastic Logic reader in production. What the Plastic Logic reader

[[{“type”:”media”,”view_mode”:”media_large”,”fid”:”714″,”attributes”:{“class”:”media-image”,”typeof”:”foaf:Image”,”style”:””,”width”:”500″,”height”:”333″,”alt”:”We \u2665 blog”}}]] [Image: Flickr user tarop] If you’re anything like me, Fridays, especially rainy ones, are big days to look around other people’s blogs. I use it as a time to keep an eye on the industry, see what kinds of thoughts are out there and spend some thoughtful time learning. Not that I’m

A publisher asked me the other day for advice on how to pare down the number of programs, software and tools his company uses. He is using a graphics program, a workflow program, a listserv and websites – that’s just what I know about. There’s probably more, including programs that handle subscriber databases, mailing lists,

I wish the acronym “RSS” had never been invented. It’s confusing, hard to describe and something everyone wants to understand. I much prefer the term “news feed” for this technology that helps you get blog and podcast updates on your computer. Nevertheless, I was glad to see that Unclutterer wrote up a handy primer on

Recently, someone from a UK firm putting together a glossary of social media jargon asked me to contribute. The world of social media jargon is immense, but I realized I’ve been hearing the word “ping” in a sense that didn’t really make sense to me. Ping, v. This is something you send to a computer