ecomm-a-rama

I’m a big fan of working for The Wilderness Society - great cause, great people. What’s not to like? Well…there’s one pesky task that’s downright painful - the dreaded Action mailbox! This is the one location where all of our WildAlert subscribers send their questions, gripes, and love letters. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the Action mailbox, it’s that you really can’t make everyone happy.  Or at least, you can’t make everyone happy in one shot.

In the very same alert, one person might say the content was too long or specific. Someone else wishes we would have included more details or graphics. An activist wants to know how she can get involved on the ground locally? And another supporter disagrees with some portion of the topic or stance. So what in the world is the fix?

It seems the only real fix is allowing our subscribers to navigate through our issues and actions on their own terms. We keep our WildAlerts brief and interesting. We allow plenty of opportunities to drill down into meaty, engaging content on our website. And the real kicker - we tell our story and then allow opportunities for our supporters to jump in, add to it, talk amongst themselves, voice concerns, ask questions, truly feel a part of the community that surrounds them.

Through the action mailbox, I’ve been cursed at more than once. I’ve felt a little beat up after a day of responding to messages from frustrated folks. But you know what? For every really brutal message I’ve responded to, I’ve gotten several messages back from surprised supporters thanking me for my attention. Today I even had a man apologize for his admittedly harsh words and explain that he never expected to hear back from another human being.

I think we all get it. We want to be a part of something bigger. What better way to do that than to weave all our stories together, to talk to one another, to have a conversation. We’ve been talking a lot about telling TWS’ story and Betsy just passed around a great blog post with some suggestions on the what/why/how of telling organizational stories. That’s half of the battle. Once we learn to tell our stories really well, we can brush up on our listening skills and find out what our supporters have to add.

There are a couple lessons I’ve learned over and over in the short time I’ve been with The Wilderness Society.

1. We have about a billion stories to tell - stories about current issues; stories about our history; stories about our staff, our supporters, and our eco-enemies; stories about how things are and how we want them to be. You get the picture.
2. We’re in a bit of a rut about how to share these stories in a compelling way.

We’ve got a bit of a challenge on our hands. But what’s really awesome is that most of us realize there’s room for improvement and we’re pretty pumped about the possibilities. There’s been a lot of internal buzz about videos, blogs, and interactive maps (all of which are great storytelling tools). But a new tool does not a good story make - or however that saying goes. Basically, without a good story, it doesn’t matter how cutting edge or interactive the tool is.

Let me guess? There are a few of you out there thinking our communication is on the verge of turning into a whole lot of fluff. We’re thinkers, scientists, strategists, and dang good communicators. We don’t need no stinkin’ stories to be effective. If this is you, let me point you to an interesting article that Betsy starting sending around in conjunction with the branding efforts. It should ease some of your fears. There’s a lot of of good stuff, but here are a few highlights:

• Stories aren’t purely about entertainment.
• We don’t have to lose our authenticity - a story can be authentic and compelling!
• A good story is about truth to the teller, the audience, the moment, and the mission (yes, lots of buzzword, but read the article if you’re curious and it’ll make more sense). Basically, if any element is missing, it’s just not that great of a story.
• And a story comes in many forms. You can tell a story in person, on paper, online, over the phone…the story can be oral or written…it can be based on words or images. There aren’t many limits.

So let’s hear it/see it/design it/read it/draw it/map it/film it. What’s your story?

Why is it some people just can’t stand MS Outlook? I don’t know. It doesn’t filter spam well. It doesn’t adhere to any real standards for email or calendar sharing. It is a memory hog. Viruses kill the joy like wrinkles in your cotton shirts first thing in the morning. You can’t pull in external accounts (yahoo, gmail, other domains easily). No IMAP. RSS support is there, I guess, but still lousy. And if you’ve ever used a mac you just feel kinda dirty using it.

So last week I decided to abandon Outlook at work and run everything through Gmail. Sure, it means I get no support from tech support at the mothership. But it also means I don’t have to worry about my desktop Outlook failing to connect to a remote exchange server.

We’re still in the testing phase here but things are looking up. With Gmail open I have multiple email addresses that I use for work coming to one inbox. I have IM right there. I have instant access to RSS feeds (which sit in Firefox’s Live Feeds, not Google Reader) and one-click access to Google Calendars and docs. Oh, and nice clean integration with Gmail on the blackberry.

So far. So good…

On day 3 of my work with The Wilderness Society, I was already treading dangerous ground. Luckily I was too clueless to know it.

I was sitting in a communication workshop in the DC office with upbeat moderator Justin Perkins of Care2 and a welcoming communications staff. Justin asked each of us to rate marketing tools by importance. We then publicly announced our ratings and compiled a group rating. I was too new to know which of these tools were already being used (and I certainly didn’t know how or how well). I had gone about numbering my tools with a specific strategy – specifically by prioritizing primary tools like press releases, research, direct mail, e-mail alerts, and the website and ranking secondary tools like videos and contests much further down the line. I figured without news and research at the backbone of our organization, what the world would we message about in our marketing. This was not the only approach – some ranked based on the current landscape at TWS while others focused on a vision toward the future. What was interesting, though, is despite the range of individual responses, it took no time at all to come to agreement once discussion fired up. The group was refreshingly aware of the need to use different communication tools for different messages and audiences.

The averaged group rankings (from most important to least) were:

1. Direct Mail
2. Action Alerts
3. Website
4. Search Engines
5. Press Releases
6. Newsletters
7. Research Reports
8. Videos
9. Social Networks
10. Organizational Blog
11. Bloggers
12. Discussion Forums
13. Events
14. Paid Advertising
15. Contests

I didn’t miss the few concerned glances from the forward-thinking group seeming to say “Wow. The new e-comm girl isn’t exactly a champion of all things technical.” But in my defense, I’m just not much of a fan of using a tool for the tool’s sake. Finally, something I think we’d all agree on!

Justin went on to talk about the sales cycle (or for those of you who prefer, the process of convincing people to support TWS). During that conversation it became even more clear that no one item in our handy, dandy toolbox is going to get us where we want to be. It takes the whole collection to make the biggest, best impact possible - a lesson that we’ll surely be drawing upon often throughout the web revamp process.

Welcome to the ’soft launch’ of a blog about electronic communications at The Wilderness Society…

http://www.ecommarama.org

The goal here is to explore communications tools, systems, networks, applications, etc. used by The Wilderness Society (and/or others) and better inform staff about what they are, best practices, strategies, etc. Much of this information simply gets lost when sent to email inboxes and email doesn’t provide much of a forum for discussion. Some other topics that may come up soon could be…

• interpreting and learning from stats collected by the website and WildAlerts
• what is this thing called MySpace (or YouTube) and could/should we care? What are other groups doing with it?
• is writing content for the web really any different than writing for print?
• case studies of using email advocacy to affect issues in Alaska, California or wherever
• you haven’t seen TWS’ online video about Moosehead Lake yet?

And it is a gentle introduction to the use of blogs in general at TWS.

Hoping that others amongst you will post entries and comments. I can quickly and easily set up an author login for you and using WordPress (the underlying publishing tool) is pretty simple, really. We just ask that posts pertain to online communications and keep in mind that these pages are public.

Chris Mehl recently sent around a copy of the Christian Science Monitor’s review of Made to Stick. Oh no… another story about the magical powers of duct tape.

Nah. Made to Stick takes a look at why some great ideas fail and others (even the not so great) prosper. This is a big deal to advocates who toil in the world of good ideas that could benefit people, communities, wildlife and the environment.

“Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. [It] becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.”

This quote seems particularly relevant to online communications - where you have little time to make your case and are battling countless distractions. But we have the opportunity to present imagery and links to related ideas that help make our case. But we perhaps need to recall the perspective of the reader.