Blog | Brian Barela | Meaningful Customer Experiences

Have You Thought About the Donor’s Experience?

Philanthropy is alive and well, it’s fundraising that needs to evolve.

With the amount of charitable giving options multiplying it’s easier than ever to see your fundraising efforts become lost in the pile.

Donors expect more than an anonymous communication every once in a while, or the same information shared on Facebook, Twitter, email, direct mail, etc.

The Donor Experience Newsletter will feature interviews, case studies, and insights to help fundraisers provide a better experience to the people that invest in them, and to help impact investors find causes that will allow them to co-create value around their interests.

How Does Facebook Mobile Make You Feel When You Use it?

“We started looking at how people would understand the interactions if we changed the gestures. Certain gestures were preferable to others, because they were easier to understand, or because they were more effective in navigating the content. Our focus is not necessarily on the performance of the gestures, but more on the experience they provide whether they’re clear or not–whether people felt comfortable using them, whether they conveyed the right action or whether they were associated to the right action, and whether words were used in general or not.”–via FastCo.Labs

This insights reminds me that while individual features or services can be powerful, the total experience of all the pieces determines a lasting impression.

Facebook Moves Beyond an App

A recent NY Times article described and reacted to Facebook Home:

For example, for most people, the entire purpose of a Home screen is displaying app icons. But there are no icons on Facebook’s Home screens; Facebook thinks you’d rather use that space for reading Facebook updates.

The only icon that appears is your own profile photo. You can drag it to the left to open the Facebook Messaging app, to the right to open the last open app — or upward to open a grid of app icons on a gray background. Ah, here are the apps. But it’s awfully sparse; where are the rest?

In removing the app-launching function from the Home screen, Facebook has wound up having to reinvent the way you open programs on your phone, and the result feels like a hack.

The evolution of Facebook from an application to an operating system mirrors the evolution happening in social or connected organizations. Progressive organizations make “social” part of every department while integrating as much data as possible from channels, apps, and sites.

Your Increasingly Social Smartphone

Social media is no longer restricted to an application. Facebook Home and Google Now demonstrate the socialization of information.

Facebook Home “Puts Your Friends at the Heart of Your Phone”

Google Now “Gets You Just the Right Information at the Right Time”

Online Learning That Disrupts Universities and Education Systems

“But there is a different business model that is disrupting us, and that’s online learning. On-the-job education. So Intel University, GE Crotonville. This model of learning is: You come in, we’ll spend a week teaching you about strategy, and then you go off and develop the strategy. You come back for two weeks in product development, and we send you – you know. You use it and you learn it and you do it while you’re employed. It a very different business model, and that’s what’s killing us. And it’s truly what’s going to kill us”.–Clayton Christensen

Crossing Into the Postnormal

“We’re no longer living in the old economy, based on industrial-era principles. That’s over. We’ve crossed into the Postnormal, and most leaders are either unaware of that transition, or are seeing only disconnected parts of it.”–Stowe Boyd

Digital and social media create a new infrastructure to build relationships, create products and services, and share resources in a fundamentally different way than before. There is literally a gaping chasm between the industrial mindset and the digital/social one.

“The most critical attributes of leaders today will not look like those we associate with leadership of even a few years ago. The patience to let things develop, the ability to operate in ambiguity. And lastly, the courage to try things that make you uncomfortable.”–Stowe Boyd

How does a leader know for certain that they have crossed into the postnormal? When they understand at a heart level that power and control are an illusion, and spend the majority of their time facilitating connections, identifying emerging trends, and co-creating the direction of their department or organization with employees, customers, and interested stakeholders.

Social Media Builds Meaningful Relationships

The emotional impact on your customers will be in direct proportion to the social impact of your purpose.”–Simon Mainwaring

Social media that communicates the impact of the organization, generates interactions from customers, and allows customers to co-create products or services effectively utilizes the channels, applications, and platforms that have proliferated in recent years.

The entire slide deck from Simon Mainwaring on How To Use Social Technology to Powerfully Grow Your Reputation, Customer Community, and Profits is worth checking out too.

Vulnerability and Innovation

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change.” –Brene Brown

The most disruptive character trait may be vulnerability. I become excited when thinking about how digital media can be used to amplify vulnerability among people and brands.