How important is the moment where a constituent decides to engage?

There comes a moment where a potential constituent makes a decision to engage. They may be just “testing the waters” so to speak. In the digital world, we can see this happen in real time or near real time. Unfortunately for many nonprofits, this is seen in a linear and transactional way. Please be aware that to your connected constituent, this is not a transaction. In being intentional about our design leads to a journey, we can get ahead of the experience to make sure this first encounter leads to a continued journey.

If the first experience was “Okay”, you may get a second shot. If the second experience is exactly the same as the first, you have lost the battle. If the first experience was just “Okay”, you may not get a second shot. This is why it is urgent that the design of the first experience to be stunning and that that experience continues consistently across the many mission opportunities.

It is important to note that your competition is not other nonprofits. Your competition for volunteer time may be the blockbuster movie that just came out on Netflix. Your competition for the $50 donation may be the great sushi meal on Friday night or the book from Amazon. How does your digital experience compare to Netflix or Amazon or Foursquare or Facebook? That experience is your competition. It is urgent that you rethink the design (or lack of design) of the experiences your constituents have. 

Now is the time. Today is the day.

Why can't Amazon make a profit?

Why can't Amazon make a profit? The answer is, they choose not to. Now to some extent this defies logic on several levels. First, they are a publicly traded for profit corporation. Second, you would think the stockholders would demand it. Yet, Amazon has been one of Wall Street’s darlings in the past decade. Amazon’s stock price jumped 234 percent in the past five years alone, giving the company a valuation of around $120 billion.

In those five years, Amazon’s sales have tripled to more than $60 billion a year, while its profits stayed remarkably flat. The reason for Amazon’s stagnant profit is its founder’s notorious commitment to long term growth. Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon in 1994 and has lead the company ever since, has a track record of investing everything his company earns right back into it. Defending his investment strategy in his latest letter to shareholders, Bezos wrote:

  “Proactively delighting customers earns trust, which earns more business from those customers, even in new business arenas.”

This way, Amazon became the largest online retailer in the world and in the same way the company is now striving to become a dominant force in the distribution of digital media.  So far, investors seem to believe in Amazon’s long term success, but some day the company is going to have to proof it can turn a sizeable profit.

It is as Bezos recently noted:

“In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run, it is a weighing machine. We’re always working to build a heavier company.”

Microsoft may be down but are they out?

The new mobile wars are about an ecosystem across devices.  Microsoft is obviously not in a great position. I have casually looked at Windows 8 devices the last few days. I am encouraged by what I see. That said, in my house we have 2 iPads, 3 iPhones and 2 Android phones. I will buy a Windows 8 device soon. Probably a laptop/tablet combo. Here are the contenders from a recent Forrester report.

• Amazon puts content — and commerce — first. Amazon's strongest asset is its ability to deliver a rich assortment of content seamlessly to its customers, who are very comfortable with buying from the big retailer on any device, not just those from Amazon. In addition, the company is a powerhouse in cloud computing and provides seamless access to purchased and personal content across any device. Yet Amazon's device offerings are limited, and its use of a modified variant of the Android platform requires a devoted effort to entice developers to create application versions tuned to that variant. While Amazon has global ambitions, its reach today is much more limited than its competitors; additionally, its method of working with mobile operators challenges its expansion rate.


• Apple exerts by far the strongest loyalty gravitational pull. Apple's collective offerings are demonstrably attractive to its customers, anchored most firmly by its most popular product, the iPhone. Consider that, compared with the total US online population, iPhone owners are 156% more likely to own an iPad, 188% more likely to own a Mac, and 235% more likely to own both. Apple has succeeded in providing digital distribution for nearly every major owner of music, video, books, newspapers, and magazines; additionally, while some media companies have publicly complained about Apple's perceived stranglehold on the market, by and large Apple has helped those companies benefit from digital disruption. Apple customers have warmly embraced the company's personal cloud services — but these services still have gaps to fill versus, for example, Google Docs.


• Google touches the greatest number of mobile customers, but its loyalty force is less strong. The company's Android software has skyrocketed to become the leading smartphone platform, but Android phone owners are not as strongly drawn to other Android devices as is the case for Apple. Online adults in the US who own an Android phone are twice as likely to own an Android tablet than the total US online population — but also 13% more likely to own an iPad.  Google's range of content partnerships has grown rapidly in the past year. However, its library still falls short of both Apple's and Amazon's, and some media companies have shown reluctance to embrace Google as a partner given past collisions such as that between YouTube and Viacom. The company's greatest strength is in its broad reach via cloud services and its Chrome browser, which is now available on the vast majority of connected devices.


• Microsoft has the steepest mountain to climb. Microsoft has been singularly unsuccessful in translating its dominance in PCs to the mobile market, in fact suffering from a loss of smartphone market share since the introduction of its revamped Windows Phone 7 OS. The company has no presence so far in the vital tablet market and, as a result, has struggled to attract developers to its mobile platforms. While Microsoft has released a wide range of personal cloud services such as SkyDrive, it has not effectively communicated the value of those services to its customers. Microsoft's greatest strength in content and media resides on the Xbox, whose connections to other devices powered by the company's software is nearly invisible. With the release of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8, Microsoft hopes to translate a common user experience into loyalty across multiple devices — a tall order given its competitors' positions.


• Others face a daunting task in building from (almost) scratch. It's clear that many companies seek to establish a competitive ecosystem. RIM promises that its upcoming OS revamp, BlackBerry 10, and associated devices will revitalize the once-dominant smartphone maker. Samsung, the world leader in phone shipments, has invested in its own bada OS, has a range of content partnerships and its own media store, and has also hedged its bets by joining Intel's Tizen development effort. Companies like HP, with strong ties to the enterprise, recognize the importance of having a diverse mobile offering, including smartphones. But we consider it highly unlikely that any of these companies can craft and unite all of the requisite components and then lure customers who have already placed their significant investments. Therefore their hope lies in those customers whose assets remain on the table — and there are billions of them.