Category Archives: Thinks

Posted in Non-Profit, Thinks, Uncategorized, Work /By ksprague /Leave comment

The Nimble Web

For those of us who have been developing web sites since the very first days, it has been an exciting ride of ever-evolving technologies, languages and expectations. I remember my palpable excitement way back in the late ’90′s when the first “designed” HTML sites came up and we all rushed in to see what we could do with tables, frames and other tricks. Next came MySQL and the interesting promise of data-driven sites, then .PHP and blogging began to rise. Now we are all about WordPress and its peers like Drupal, Joomla, and whatever is next – like Koken.

I’m not a programmer – I can do some light programming and I grew up hacking around in Basic and its peers, but my abilities are limited to tweaking and cutting bits of code from one place to another. Throughout the development of the web I have tried to think as a designer and as a user – and I always have looked for places where I can get to the results I want as quickly and independently as possible. At Studio Two, we moved to WordPress starting about 2-3 years ago as our primary development platform because it hits that sweet spot between über-geeky and super-user-friendly that just works for us. I can build whole sites from scratch without having to harass Jason, our in-house programmer, or Christine, our super-talented web designer – but if we need to make something really look special or jump through hoops or solve a particular problem, the underlying technical fabric of WordPress’s PHP structure lets us do whatever we want.

With HTML5 coming on full-tilt now, we also have access to a whole new range of fun interactive actions that used to be reserved for flash. HTML5 has also infiltrated the developers who build commercially available themes for wordpress, and those themes are rethinking the basic platform in really exciting and creative ways.

Which leads me to the topic of this post – what I call “The Nimble Web”. My premise is this – we are now entering the 4th or 5th generation of web development and the users are coming along with us – and users ultimately are the reason we create sites. In this iteration, we find ourselves paying close attention to actual user behavior – by really looking closely at the analytics of the sites we build we can see what users are doing and interpret how their interaction should define our content and UX (user-interface) design. My premise is also about “speed to market” – that the new tools of web development allow us to act far more quickly (if we choose to) in creating and deploying sites. The Nimble Web is about creating sites today that provide users with the experience and information that they most want.

If you are reading this post there is a good chance that you are involved, at some level, in the question of “what should we do about our website” or “we need to build/rebuild our website, how should we go about it?”. I receive, on average, 1-2 RFP’s for web development every week. These RFP’s are often very thorough – well-intentioned documents created by committee to define a complex project and solicit accurate bids. What I see in the RFP’s is that they generally describe a website that we would have been building 3-4 years ago – a large, monolithic document with 100′s of pages of content, complex navigational structure, and very rigid design needs. These sites take 6-12 months to build, cost between $10k-$50k and consume significant resources in time and personnel during the development. They are anything but nimble, and they generally have been defined without any reference to actual user behavior.

I want to talk about an alternative. Here’s the story. We manage over 200 websites for a very wide variety of clients – retailers, restaurants, museums, theaters, designers, architects, real estate, and so on. For each of these sites we have access to their google analytics – the statistical report of user behavior on the sites – pages visited, time on site, demographic data, etc. Recently, as I was browsing through the analytics of a number of clients I noticed an interesting phenomenon – despite the diversity of the sites and their content, the same numbers kept popping up – visitors, on average, for EVERY site I looked at, visited between 3-4 pages and stayed for exactly 2:40. On EVERY site I looked at this was true. And if I dug down into the site content, visitors were spending that 2:40 looking for very specific, actionable information – directions, contact, event dates/times, and actionable events like buying tickets. They weren’t lingering or browsing around – they came looking, they found what they were looking for, and they left. I realized that for the majority of the sites we manage, visitors were treating them like convenience stores. You go to the 7-11 not to wander around aimlessly shopping – you go there specifically to buy a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, and a Hershey bar. In and out in 2:40.

What does this mean? It means two things. One, if you are an organization considering developing a new web presence, consider carefully how much time and effort you want to put into using your site as more than a basic information and connection portal. Make sure that you study your current user analytics and consider the scope of investment you will be making in providing services that users don’t seem to be looking for or engaging in. Also, consider breaking your large project into a set of small sub-projects. We have been working with a number of organizations on this approach with great success. By breaking away from the premise that you can only have a single site for your organization you free up significant opportunity for creating richer and more dynamic experiences for discrete projects. An example of this is what we are doing with Hancock Shaker Village. During 2012 and 2013 so far we have rebuilt the core institutional website and concurrently developed a number of sub-sites for specific programs that had enough scope and content to suggest that a seperate site would be warranted. Thus today you can visit a sub-site for Baby Animals, The CSA Program, and others to come that are still being developed. In this diversity, the organization is finding that it is able to more quickly deploy program-specific content, is able to direct traffic directly to a more compelling experience, and that there are opportunities for creative expression that don’t threaten the function of aesthetic rigor of the main site.

The web can be a rich, engaging medium but it can also be a confusing, resource-consuming landscape. The Nimble Web would indicate that even large organizations can rethink their presence by taking a close look at the data created by user activity. If you would like to talk about how this might apply to your business or institution, let me know!

22Apr

Posted in Internet Fluency, Thinks /By ksprague /3 comments

Google Surveys

Here’s the newest thing that just came across my radar – Google Surveys – wow – this has a lot of potential. Basically, you figure out what you want surveyed and Google does the rest – for a price (.10 per respondent – not cheap but probably much cheaper than comparables – and it’s GOOGLE!). So interesting…. so what should we ask?

This is another amazing powerful tool for you to use in understanding your customers – along with google analytics – and if you do paid google advertising with adwords, those results as well.

Of course a survey is only as good as the questions you ask – and one has to be aware of the potential for bias in the answers based on the syntax of the question. I just made my first survey and am awaiting response! Google sent me a $75 coupon, which helps – let’s see what happens – stay tuned!

To write it, it took three months;
to conceive it three minutes;
to collect the data in it; all my life.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald

Screen grab of the results from my survey into what it should cost to build a custom website…

14Feb

Posted in Listens, Non-Profit, Thinks, Uncategorized /By ksprague /Leave comment

Investors or Donors?

In the course of running my branding agency, Studio Two, we’ve worked with for-profit and non-profit clients alike. Many of our clients are startups, or entrepreneurial businesses that come to us for assistance in defining their message and identity. This is true for both sectors – there are entrepreneurs in the non-profit world, though we tend to not call them that. Which gets me thinking about semantics.

Entrepreneurs start up new businesses based on creativity, new technologies and new ideas. In the non-profit world, these same people are called “innovators” or a “visionaries” or (usually behind their backs) “crazy”…. But seriously, why is it any less entrepreneurial to start up a new theater company or research organization than a dot-com business? And what’s in a name anyway – why would someone “want” to be called an Entrepreneur?

I think that it is a question worth asking. In the United States, where government support for the arts and for most non-profit business sectors is very limited or non-existant, the act of choosing to spend one’s energies on a challenging venture for the social good requires significant motivation – which is good. Not every idea will be successful and the Darwinian aspects of the free market has a role to play here. The word “entrepreneur” offers some clues to how one might choose to act in the process:

Entrepreneurs seek out investors and venture capital to pursue their vision
Entrepreneurs are compelled to draft business plans and budget projections
Entrepreneurs work diligently to hone their “pitch” and define their message and product
Entrepreneurs have to focus on defining and reaching their target markets quickly and efficiently
Entrepreneurs often have the idea of scalability built into their business model
Entrepreneurs will “pivot” their plan if one idea becomes more successful than another.

If you look around at your non-profit organization, whether well-established or very new, do the above concepts apply? Should they? I think they should – but with a twist. Let’s look at some of the differences and possibilities in the way we use language in the non-profit sector.

Non-Profits seek out grants and donors to pursue their vision
Non-Profits are compelled to draft strategic plans and budget projections
Non-Profits work diligently to hone their mission
Non-Profits have to focus on defining and reaching their target markets efficiently and repeatedly
Non-Profits often are constrained by the focus of their mission or context
Non-Profits generally stay tightly focused on their core “product” despite performance

So here’s the idea. What if you called your donors “investors”? What if you prepared a business plan instead of a strategic plan? What if you considered ways your organization could “pivot” based on its programming strengths and weaknesses?

I’m sure that many of you reading this already do – there are many innovative, nimble minds at work in the world’s great cultural and social organizations. Just for a moment, though, consider switching up the language. Call yourself an entrepreneur. Consider talking to your lead donor about her investment in your organization. Hone your elevator pitch.

Something interesting might happen. If you’d like to talk about it some more – contact me. I’m really interested in how it changes my thinking to simply change a few words and see how they feel.

31Jan

Posted in Internet Fluency, Non-Profit, Thinks /By ksprague /3 comments

Google Grants

Do you want to know what the single best thing you can do right now to help your non-profit get some visibility in 2013? Sign up with Google Grants and follow through. Here’s the skinny – Google has a non-profit arm here at http://www.google.com/giving/ - check it out as there are some amazing things going on here. But the one you are interested in (assuming dear reader that you are involved in a leadership role with a legitimate 501-C3 US based non-profit) is the Google Grants – AdWords for nonprofits program. As they put it very clearly on their home page”

Google Grants empowers nonprofit organizations, through $10,000 per month in in-kind AdWords™ advertising, to promote their missions and initiatives on Google.com..

$10,000/month is $330/day in Google adwords credit – if you have had any experience managing or running an adwords campaign, you know that is a substantial sum. If you are a qualifying non-profit – you could be connecting with $120,000/year in free online advertising NOW.

How this Works

Here’s the primer. Adwords is the system that delivers text-based ads to the side and sometimes top and bottom of the Google search page you use a 1,000 times a day. These ads are part of “campaigns” that you set up in adwords and which consist of the text ads themselves (you can make as many as you like), the keywords or phrases that people will enter and that you want to show up against, and a daily budget. There are additional settings you can use to optimize your ad delivery, including regionalization by zip code or radius, and demographic elements, including gender, age and other parameters. The images here show some of this for a campaign we are running to promote Studio Two as a branding agency in the Miami area:

: Search Results

: Google Ad Variety

: Keywords Sample

: Region Targeting

Google Grants

The Google Grants program – if you apply and then setup the associated adwords account correctly (that’s the tricky part) – gives your non-profit $330/day in credit towards running ads for your organization. There are some significant caveats – the ads must correspond to your mission and purpose (no selling tchotkes) and your CPC (Cost per Click) is maximum $2 (as of January 28th, 2013). This is an important element that is designed to keep your campaign from competing with paying customers who will be willing to bid higher for important and popular keywords and phrases. For instance, the keyword “museum” is going to pretty popular – you can include it in your keywords but other organizations are likely to be running paying campaigns and willing to pay more for the CPC. You wouldn’t really want to focus on such a generic keyword in any case as the goal of running any campaign is to capture the attention of people who actually ARE interested in what you have to offer – in other words, don’t sell ice to Eskimos. Setting up keywords is both an art and a science and worthy of many more blog posts but suffice it to say that you want to use keywords that help people get to YOU – i.e. the keyphrase “Norman Rockwell Museum” is going to be much more effective it you are actually NRM.org.

But consider this – what other program is out there that you potentially qualify for and which gives you the scope and flexibility of the Adwords program. Every organization we work with can benefit from $120,000 in annual online marketing – most of them are doing little to none and we all know where we go looking for information when we are planning trips or activities – online.

Next Steps

Follow the links at the top of this page and apply – if you qualify you’ll find out very quickly. Then, if you have the savvy to dive into setting up the adwords account and taking the next steps to getting approved (which can take 4-8 weeks at present) then by all means, dive in. If not, drop us a note or give us a call. We’d be happy to work with you on this and other ways to get your organization the visibility it needs. Thanks – Kevin.

24Jan

Looking for solutions to non-profit ecommerce!

Posted in Consults, Internet Fluency, Thinks /By ksprague /2 comments

Ecommerce options for Non-Profits

We work with many non-profit organizations including theaters, libraries, museums and so on. Over the last year we developed new websites for many of our clients and migrated some of our older institutional clients from sites built 6-9 years ago to new wordpress-powered sites. In the course of doing this we encountered a diversity of ecommerce requirements and put together some good solutions. In this post I am going to share those solutions with you.

Key to our strategy in 2012-2013 is a core belief that very smart developers out in the world have solved almost any problem we can dream up – and implementing their solutions is a better strategy than trying to code our own. I think this is key to any institution seeking a new web functionality – go looking for someone who has already fixed your problem – it’s out there.

The needs of non-profits are often much more complex than a standard for-profit ecommerce solution…

For-profit companies typically are seeking to sell hard goods and services on the web – like our client Luis and Clark, who sell a line of carbon-fiber instruments via a woocommerce powered store and a traditional authorize.net gateway. Our non-profit clients on the other hand need a suite of functions – membership, event registration, donations, product sales, licensing, recurring transaction, member management, and in-line donations on checkout.

I recently received a call from an organization we work with seeking to build a recurring membership system into their site. Like many organizations, they have a minimal budget to achieve this task yet very lofty goals. They were looking at Network for Good as a possible solution but were afraid of the monthly carrying costs – $49.95/month. Currently they use a simple paypal “Donate Now” button to accomplish the task of capturing online donations.

And thus the recurring dilemma for the small non-profit – take on the additional carrying costs, even if some months you might see no donations to your organization via this gateway – or give up the desired functionality of customer management, recurring donations, and other bells and whistles for the “free” paypal option…. what to do?

So here’s the breakdown of options we have implemented for our clients:

Paypal basic – the ubiquitous “buy now” or “Donate Now” button – easy to implement, no carrying costs, a variable percentage taken on checkout – users are passed over to the standard paypal window for checkout. We use this extensively on the BIFFMA.org site.

Woocommerce – well-built and well-supported plugin for wordpress-powered websites. Fully-featured product management, shipping and tax tables, and a variety of checkout options including basic paypal all the way through full authorize.net>merchant account>your bank pathway. The latter requires the purchasing of an SSL certificate ($100+ annually). The plugin is a flat one-time fee ($50).

Woocommerce extensions – there are a variety of plugins, some free, some paid, for woocommerce that add functionality. We are using the WooCommerce Product Add-ons and the WooCommerce Dynamic Pricing modules to allow customers to add donations to their shopping cart “in line” with adding products (see here) and to allow variable pricing according to customer status.

Wufoo forms are a great way to quickly deploy some fairly complex ecommerce scenarios. Wufoo does the heavy lifting – ecommerce happens through them so you might be able to get away without an SSL if you have the transaction take place on their servers, and you can create some really interesting forms with many pricing options and variables. There is a subscription fee with Wufoo (pricing here) but it is very reasonable. We use these with Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich, MA – if you click on one of the membership levels you can see the form hand-off to Wufoo’s servers – in this case the client elected to allow Wufoo to handle the SSL compliance. But you can also have an SSL and have the transaction embed on your site page seamlessly. Heritage is using the forms extensively for class registrations as well, particularly when there are variables in fees, ages, and options.

Gravity Forms – this is a powerful tool for building forms, which can be ecommerce enabled but unlike Wufoo, you have to have an ecommerce system in place that you can tie into. We use this on the donation page for Charleys Fund.

Magento – We’ve built a couple of stores and additional components with this open-source ecommerce platform. It has proven somewhat fragile and difficult to manage so we are trending away from this one at present. Hancock Shaker Village uses this and with additional plugins has modified it to allow for a variety of transaction types, but it is not proving as stable as we would like.

Square - Not so much an online tool but a great way to be able to take credit cards quickly, easily and anywhere you can get a cell signal. Combine this with eventbrite and you can be a mobile Point of Sale (POS) very easily - potentially also taking donations right at the table at a gala event. A great app.

Eventbrite – the leading event management and ticketing system in the world (at least the one I inhabit) – Eventbrite is brilliantly designed and gives the event manager everything he or she needs, including mobile ticketing, an app to “check in” ticket holders, a whole user-management system, etc. They charge a variety of fees but the basic deal is $.99+2.5% per ticket – and you can choose to have the client pay the fees of absorb them depending on your needs.

For really robust integrated membership, event and donation integration, there are a couple of sites to look at…

WildApricot.com is one – we haven’t built out anything with them but we have one client (an arts school with a really complex set of needs) looking at them seriously. The afore-mentioned Network for Good is another. This is where things get fuzzy – some of these services can effectively run a complete website for an organization, but it is important to look at what the costs are, the flexibility, and the issues of data management, etc that you encounter with these systems. Can you export your membership or donors into a .CSV file? Are you giving up future flexibility for a closed-source solution? Things to consider.

The plan…

In the end, if you are running an institution and wondering what you should do, I would sharpen up the pencil and create a matrix that first lists your “needs” for ecommerce and then the options above and the pricing that would be on the table (we can help you do this – just ask….!). Do you need an SSL? Is there something in your list that “breaks” one of the off-the-shelf solutions? Do you actually “need” that item? Compromise is a word to keep in mind here – you can actually get some remarkable power out of these systems today for very little investment in time, training, or money, but it requires you to make choices – and I would encourage you to consider trying some of these out – Eventbrite, for instance, has a simple account setup and you can be selling tickets to your event in mere minutes – give it a shot. One last thing to keep in mind – giving your customers these tools WILL increase your revenue – if you are hesitating you are likely leaving more on the table than you will lose paying the monthly fees or percentages.

If you can think of something I left out or are looking for clarification, please leave a comment or email me. If you know of an additional resource, please also let me know via the form so I can add it to the thread. Thanks for reading!

- Kevin

08Jan

Posted in Consults, Internet Fluency, Photography, Thinks /By ksprague /1 comment

Open Source Instagram

So it looks like the Instagram/Facebook mashup is about to kick copyright law squarely in the teeth : read this excellent post on http://mashable.com/2012/12/17/instagram-signs-your-life-away/ : but the meat on the bone is this language in the terms of use about to be foisted on all instagram users (here’s the link to the policy): “You agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.”

Nothing new here except that a couple of over-valued dot.com land sharks are going for the jugular. I believe in copyright as stated by the U.S. Copyright office in particular this statement: “Copyright protection subsists from the time the work is created in fixed form. The copyright in the work of authorship immediately becomes the property of the author who created the work. Only the author or those deriving their rights through the author can rightfully claim copyright”. In fact, as a photographer I have worked under this precept my entire career – if I push the button, I own the picture. Done deal. Even if you are paying me good money for me to push the button, I still own the picture and I am licensing its use to you. Done deal.

So I’m not going to fight Instagram and Facebook – it’s likely a losing proposition as they have all the money in the world. And I likely won’t stop using them, though I may be adjusting my use significantly. Both sites are good tools for telling stories with photos and for promoting one’s self as an image-maker. They are also fun – I enjoy the social response to a good instagram photo – the likes, comments, and shares.

What I am more interested in now is an idea – the idea behind the promise of open source and creative commons. At Studio Two, my design agency, we build websites using wordpress – the .org version which is open source and free to use. We like wordpress because a vast community of programmers, users, hackers and technologist out there in the cloud are constantly working, battling, and fiddling with the source code and each other and generally making it better – the wordpress we use today looks like the one we used 5 years ago but now has so many more functions, enhancements, and qualities. What I also like is that it continues to evolve – all the time – and the evolutionary traits get passed on to websites I have designed through routine updates. Technically speaking, a wordpress site I build today, with the necessary updates applied, will still be a fully-functional website in 10 or 20 years – assuming that we still use something like the web!

So open source community – lets build a new Instagram – one that isn’t owned by anyone, one that distributes the load in intelligent ways to our own personal storage in the cloud, and one that allows us all the richness of community, of sharing, or communicating – but also one that honors the rights of the creators – us – to own the fruits of our labors.

Where do we start? Oh – guess what – it’s already out there: Anypic.org

I think I’ll be switching. Join me there?

UPDATE – Instagram changes some of their language…..

18Dec

Posted in Creativity, Thinks /By ksprague /Leave comment

Design Miami 2012

We attended Design Miami yesterday and truly enjoyed the exhibits – which span galleries highlighting historic collections of design gold-standard pieces to innovative new technologies, furnishings and experimental pieces. Its a great combination of these factors actually – to see both where we have come from and to experience where we are going in the same place. The pavilion, unlike so many of the Art Basel spin-off fairs, is a manageable size, easily navigated in a couple of hours. The highlights for me were the pieces that were on display that showed the integration of technology in unexpected ways. An installation with black-and-white flat screens that interacted in innovative ways with the user at a distance (I assume an xbox/kinect hack was at work here) but it was inspiring – new ways of making music, art, visuals – the possibilities are really phenomenal. Another booth from a gallery in Paris showed an innovative temporary printer – a large flat white panel mounted on the wall that would expose an image captured right in front of it using a combination of LEDs and some kind of UV sensitive surface – the temporary image would start to fade out almost immediately – a kind of poetic commentary on the ubiquitous aspects of photography around us. Audi had a great installation showing off the steps they followed in developing a new, carbon-fiber chair. It’s a bit Darth Vader in appearance but the process steps and thinking were great to see illustrated and the final product has an amazing combination of light weight, flexibility and strength that is almost disconcerting to engage in – we are so used to the weaker traditional materials that it takes a conscious leap of faith to understand that the chair has the strength to bear you. Fascinating. We’re taking a lot of inspiration from this event and hope that it informs our work going forward in innovative ways.

07Dec

Posted in Creativity, Thinks, Uncategorized /By ksprague /Leave comment

The Art Superbowl

Scope Art Fair Tent in Midtown Miami

Art Basel and the multitudinous spin-off art fairs are all set to open next week here in Miami. The whole city feels like it is on deadline. Up here in Midtown where Studio Two has based itself, 10 (ten!) huge tents have been erected in the last month to host the many satellite fairs – artmiami, scope, context, red-dot, etc. It has been stupendous to watch these massive temporary structures go up for essentially a 5 day run.

This is the superbowl of art and in an interesting way, despite the gloomy view of the entire art world by some, I’m reveling in the parallels. Think about it. Do you really care about football? Maybe yes, likely no – but has the NFL managed to infiltrate your brain to such a degree that despite having zero interest in the sport you maintain an underlying awareness of the event itself and potentially even who the teams are or some other salient detail? Imagine – they took an obscure game played by college boys and transformed it into an industrial mega-brand with influence far and wide. Why? Because there was money to be made.

Bake House Art Complex, Miami.

I like art – I like the idea that people have the right and the desire to create something from nothing, to imagine what isn’t and make it. I’ve been an artist at times in my life and enjoyed the mysterious flow of creativity in the middle of a project that might or might not resolve itself into something interesting, different and beautiful. I agree that sometimes the modern art machine turns out negligible or questionable product defined as art mostly because it is a: expensive to make, b: difficult to move, and c: someone likely got hurt in the process. Nevertheless, to carry my football metaphor a bit too far, much like when one watches a game of football only to see an extraordinary play – some kind of feat of physical prowess and magic that transcends the game and speaks to the human condition in all of us – there are discoveries to be made in the art world. Last night we went to the BakeHouse Art Complex here in Miami where professional artists have studios in residence. It was an open-house and we went from one studio two another and made wonderful discoveries along the way, particularly the outstanding work of Marcia Ramos-Perelló with whom we had a lovely conversation about how her work connects her to stages in her life and in the moment how she has been connecting to her mother’s hand-labor making clothes. You could see the intense dedication, focus and emotion in both the artist and the work. This is why art matters.

The work of Marcia Ramos-Perelló

To be in Miami right now and to be even 2 or 3 degrees of separation from the art world means that much like the superbowl, you just “know” that Art Basel is happening. Much like that over-hyped ball game, the best way to enjoy it is do dive in and take part. Yes, they’ve made a major industry out of what is really a personal and private matter – art – and in the course a world economy in jobs, money, media and all the ancillary spin-offs of the creation of a major market where one didn’t previously exist at this scale occurs. Like it or hate it, you cannot but be amazed that art has created this kind of gigantic happening and if it means the transfer of wealth between hedge-fund managers and artists, gallerist, critics and others, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. What do you think?

30Nov

Posted in Consults, Thinks, Uncategorized /By ksprague /Leave comment

Rethinking the RFP

Have you ever had to respond to an RFP (A Request for Proposal)? Chances are you have – if you are in any kind of business providing goods and services to institutions and business. I don’t know that I have ever met anyone on the receiving end of the RFP process who is fundamentally happy about it – and that give me pause. I’ve certainly been on boards and committees where we needed to solicit bids from vendors and the RFP seems like the best way to bring definition to the project, but I think there is a better way.

In my business we primarily receive RFPs for building new websites for institutions The RFPs generally lay out the scope of the project, the needs of the institution, some background, qualifications and requirements of the vendor, and that kind of thing. They can be extremely time-consuming to respond to as each and every element needs to be accurately addressed or your bid will be disqualified for being incomplete. The RFPs vary widely from institution to institution – some include forms that need to be filled out and attached, some require an exact structure to the document you are preparing. All of them have a major, fundamental flaw – they assume that the requestor knows more about what is being asked than the vendor.

This is a key point – the RFP frequently presents a set of requirements that is so well thought-through from the client end that there is very little, if any, room for the vendor to add value to the discussion. Actually, its not a discussion – its a request for a unilateral response. Oftentimes any conversation, questions, or discussion is strictly off the table in an effort to create a perfectly level playing field. And this is where the RFP fails completely for me.

Servers on the web 1995-2012

In my business we design and develop websites. The manner by which we provide this service has changed and continues to change at an accelerating rate as a consequence of the rate of change in the underlying technology of the web itself. The web itself is only a bit more than a decade old – go back to 1995 and that was about when things started to take off. In the intervening 15+ years the rate of change – the growth of the web and its dominance on so many aspects of our daily life and how the world works – has been phenomal and continues to increase exponentially.

Ok, so we know all this. What’s the issue? As an example, the aviation industry took 70 years to traverse the distance between the Wright Brothers and the Concorde. If you were an organization that needed an airplane in say, 1950, you could have written a specification for the airplane based on your present understanding of aviation, submitted it to manufacturers, and received something in 2 years time that was quite relevant to the progress of the rest of the industry – perhaps engines had improved in that period, or wing design, but it would still be recognizable as a contemporary expression of aviation design. Of course this scenario (unless you are the US Govt.) doesn’t happen – you would go to the industry leaders in aviation and describe your requirements (“I need to transport 30 people 2,000 miles safely”) and you would listen to what they had to say.

Unlike airplanes, most people who use the web everyday feel they have a good understanding of what works and what doesn’t. They feel qualified to write the RFP based on their experience using their own existing sites, surfing the sites of their peers or competitors, and researching trends and technologies on the web. Generally the specification they write is a good one – it outlines clearly the requirements as a snapshot in time and this becomes the goal. Here’s the problem – in the time that it takes to create the requirement, draft it, submit the RFP to vendors, collect responses and engage in the project, the underlying systems that the requirements are based on have moved forward. The playing field has changed.

It knows where it is. Does your desktop?

The web is an organic entity. As a dynamic meme, it evolves and mutates rapidly. For those of us who are engaged in that evolution on a daily basis, it’s exciting – challenges you had yesterday are easily solved tomorrow. New tools, technologies, code and whole environments spring up every day. Back 5-6 years ago, we struggled to write original code to solve challenges on a daily basis – today we rarely need to do fundamental programming because the solution is “off the shelf” somewhere out there for us to download and plug-in. My mantra as a web developer is to always assume that someone else has already built what I am seeking, and done a good job of it – my job is to find that tool and bring it to the task. The rise of open-source software and the whole underlying ethos of open-source has created a situation where I can participate in an ever-evolving, ever-updating core architecture (like wordpress) for the sites I build. Imagine if you will, an office building that is constantly changing, twisting, morphing, adding, subtracting and growing as you live in it – that’s what the web is today and what open-source creates. One aspect of participating in this world – even as an expert – is humility. Neither I nor anyone else really knows where it is going to go. Take the rise of the mobile device – as web designers we weren’t even thinking about delivery to phones 6 years ago – now it is a requirement to consider, and I suspect it will become the primary delivery modality in the next 3 years. What a change that is! A complete re-articulation of the whole user experience, interface, design and technologies. I know I am not the only person frustrated by the fact that my state-of-the-art desktop iMac is essentially “dumber” about its place in the physical world than my iphone – which knows where it is at all times and gives me data based on the geolocation.

So back to the RFP. In trying to create a level playing field, institutions are actually trying to freeze in time this rapidly developing architecture. Instead of saying “The website must do this and that” they should be asking “Who is our audience? What do they want to know? How can we best reach them today and tomorrow?” and they should sit down with vendors like myself and have a conversation. What I would dearly love to do would be to take the RFP, set it to the side as part of the overall definition of the project, and have a chance to tell the client my views on contemporary web design and the future of the medium. One conversation I have been having with clients in the last year goes like this:

“We can build the site you have defined in the RFP – it will take 3-6 months, cost $xx,000 and go through a traditional design process. Or we can launch a new site for you in a couple of weeks.”

This is a statement designed to create a conversation about the contemporary web, the design process that we prefer, and a completely new way of looking at the web as less of an edifice and more as an evolving, organic medium. The RFP process precludes this conversation – freezing the specification in time – and relegates my perspective to the boundaries where it can’t be heard.

I can understand the challenge that any organization faces in this process – how do you create conditions for success? You don’t want to hire the wrong vendor and be left with no budget and a site that doesn’t work. To that end I suggest that the client invest significantly more time in vetting the portfolio of the designers they are interviewing, and following up in detail with provided references, and stepping outside of those references and contacting people at all the organizations that the vendor has worked with in the past. I believe that good businesses are made on succesful long-term relationships involving trust and performance. If the vendor can’t display those qualities, they need to prove otherwise, in person, how they can guarantee the success of the project.

Let’s set aside the RFP and have a conversation. I think it will be fascinating.

23Nov

Stanford University. Photo by Kevin Sprague ©2008

Posted in Thinks, Uncategorized /By ksprague /6 comments

Maybe our kids won’t go to college…

Technology and the internet are changing everything – we all know this – and we experience it in our lives every day. It’s nothing to be in constant communication through our mobile devices 24/7 now. It’s taken for granted that crowd-sourced tools like Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Twitter, etc. can bring clarity to chaotic information streams (or not – still a lot of work to be done here). So why is it that we go to college like 19th century scholars at Oxford – bearing our books into rooms with chalkboards? And why is it taken for granted that we should mortgage our futures to pay for this?

I believe in education – I had an excellent one with a succession of carefully chosen private schools and 4 years at Cornell. My parents had the means to make that possible and I thank them for it – but since becoming a parent to two boys, now young teenagers, I’ve been aware of the powerful marketing forces working on me, and them, to convince us that we must, without fail, save every possible dollar to pay for the astronomical tuitions of the future. You can’t turn on the television or browse the web without having Merril Lynch or T.RowePrice remind you that college will cost upwards of $500,000 for your newborn so you better start saving. Inflation in the USA has been moderate to negligible in the past decade -around 3% per year -

but in the meantime college costs (tuition, fees, etc) have increased 6%-9% annually in the same period with an aggregate national average growth of just over 30% for the past decade.

Every parent knows this – and yet the universal response is to toe the line and concede that a 4-year degree is “worth it” and we will “figure it out” when the time comes. Well, lets imagine different. There’s an exploding new movement in higher education pairing online classes, crowd sourcing and real-time feedback going on: massive open online courses, or MOOCs. MOOCs have been written about extensively but I haven’t gotten the sense that we are seeing the forest for the trees here. A recent article in the New York Times gives a good picture of the revolutionary nature of this new idea.

What’s going on here is education embracing technology for communication and feedback like never before – and people love it. What’s unsaid in all this is some pretty powerful stuff – namely, the internet is about to kill college. Think about it – the internet has transformed whole industries completely – we all participated in the transformation of music, the complete revolution in publishing, the accelerating demise of the post office, the transformation of private capital investment that is being currently foretold by Kickstarter and others… But College? The sacrosanct temple of learning? The grassy Quadrangle the hearkens back to Socrates holding forth in the public forum? Could these places, their bricks and mortar, their entire institutional construct, truly be threatened by a bunch of people using google hangout to share ideas?

Yes. I think the internet will kill College as we know it – it may take a long time and it portends to be an ugly, protracted fight. The institutions are embracing new ideas like MOOCs today because they want to explore this space – they are mission-driven to do so. But these institutions are also businesses – massive businesses with trillions of dollars of hard assets – real estate, intellectual property, cash, and the best human-capital on the planet. The facts don’t lie though – the charts above are clear indications that something in the system is fundamentally broken – if the cost of higher education is out of reach for 99% of the people then it is fundamentally irrelevant and requires replacement or revolution. In 2008 teh New York Times wrote about this with the headline “Higher education may become unaffordable for most in the U.S.” - Well, here we are in 2012 and it is. So now the revolution starts.

Lets look at the pattern of events that will unfold.

1) The recession that started in 2007 struck many colleges where it matters most – in their investment funds. Headlines around the nation called this out at the time and the repercussions on the institutions were significant and deep – suspended capital projects, hiring freezes – all the usual effects that industry feels in an economic downturn. The recession illuminated the degree to which these institutions have become focused on amassing massive hoards of cash – endowment funds are safety nets that hopefully never get deployed – but they have become an industry all by themselves. So what happens when an institution is faced with the fact that they have to subsidize tuition for every student on an increasing percentage scale year over year as tuition become impossibly high? This is already happening throughout most of the USA where tuition fails to cover the costs of the product – and endowments are being tapped to pay that subsidy. Its a broken system that is highly volatile and tied to the risk/reward matrix of the international stock market – and we know how stable and predictable that has been for the last decade or more.

2) Technology accelerates. Moore’s law still applies and its echoes are felt everyday as we experience the arrival of the future on an exponential curve. I’m referring to the unpredictable and transformational change that is occurring for all of us in our communications, our ability to interact with the data-sets that are our world, and the speed by which we connect and share ideas. This is not slowing down – its speeding up and nobody really knows what the world will look like in ten years as a consequence. I hope that it looks beautiful – more connected, intelligent, educated, aware (if you’ll forgive the geeky reference – more Star Trek than Blade Runner….).

3) Traditional models for jobs and career are transforming. Its accepted now that you may have multiple overlapping careers in your life – not just one. Our current crop of business heroes tend to be college dropouts who found the rigid 19th century model unworkable for their nimble, technology-focused minds. They went to work building facebook, microsoft, apple, twitter, and just about everything else while the rest of us were writing papers about Chaucer (that would be me….). I grew up a geek but I put it aside for the sake of my piece of parchment, and having a good GPA and I wish today that my parents had just set up a small venture capital fund with the money they spent on tuition. The rigid rules are breaking down for what it means to live and learn and work.

4) We no longer need to physically convene to share ideas. The college campus is a beautiful thing – but it will increasingly play second fiddle to people who are connected globally and seamlessly. Bricks and Mortar will become increasingly less relevant.

5) Traditional models are ripe for exploitation by disruptive ones. I think that the higher education system and the healthcare industry are the two remaining systems in our world that have not been forced into full revolution yet. Healthcare is there – in the midst of some really rough waters without a clear direction. Higher education still sits in ivory-tower glory on the hill but its turn is coming next and I think we are going to see a massive and traumatic change here in the coming decade or two as the old system resists the new and deploys its resources aggressively to fight it. Perhaps not – perhaps it is in the DNA of education to respond to the over-arching mission at its core which is to enlighten, educate and elevate the people – but I see a large, embedded and static industry with lots to lose. This is Detroit in 1970 making fun of Toyota’s first imports….and we all know how that worked out.

So what can we learn here? What is the opportunity we have as individuals, as institutions, and as a nation? Here’s what I think:

1) As individuals we need to create a new system for tracking, assessing, and reporting educational progress. Jobs in the future will be about what you know and can do, and the technical and creative skills you bring to the table. We need to find accredidation and tracking for these online courses like MOOCs immediately – not in 5 years time. There needs to be a unified view of achievement and progress that is socially-networked and aware – something of a collision between the resume function of linkedin, the timeline aspect of facebook, and the reputation management of a Kred or Klout – but stripped down to be a vivid, professional representation of your individual education, skills, portfolio and ideas.

2) As institutions we need to rapidly embrace the future and shed the past – campuses need to be completely re-thought as places of convening and conversation – students need to be liberated from the schedule, the classroom, and space and time constraints. Administration needs to find ways to fairly compensate and oversee educators and stimulate on-going education and a more competitive model for career evolution than tenure. In many ways the post-graduate research-model of higher education is a much better and more evolved one than the undergraduate experience – lets break down the barriers and allow people to move into place as their ideas accelerate. Ditch the 4 year schedule of requirements. Today.

3) As a nation we need to build bridges for all people to participate in education regardless of age or economic status. Learning should be a cultural norm – we need to talk about learning as something everyone takes part in. Curiosity and creativity is not just for children or young adults. Today, if you have a question you are often only moments away from starting to find the answers online, and engaging in a community of ideas and opinions. the TED conference has shown vividly how much hunger there is in the world for transformative ideas and kudos to TED for opening up their archives, the conference and every idea to the public for free.

In conclusion – the 4-year undergraduate system is broken – we can’t afford it and it has ceased to be relevant to how we are and will learn in the future. It needs to change radically and it can either fight change tooth and nail or embrace it.

This is kind of a long post – apologies – but it’s been on my mind and I hadn’t really seen it out there. What are your thoughts on this? I can’t wait to see it happen.

21Nov

Posted in Consults, Thinks, Work /By ksprague

SCRAMBLS hits top gear

It’s not every day that one of your brands really “gets in gear” but today we’re proud to bring attention to the partnership of Studio Two branding client and cutting-edge social media tool SCRAMBLS with KleenSpeed Technologies and their revolutionary electric CAN-AM racing car. SCRAMBLS is a technology (www.scrambls.com) that allows users of all types of social media and the web in general to encrypt and manage private communications on public networks – you might have seen it in use on your facebook page. We’ve written about them previously here and here. The official press release is here.

A strong, well-crafted brand is one that has a flexible foundation – the ability to adapt and integrate well with a changing media landscape without losing its impact and clarity. A shout out to SCRAMBLS lead designer Simon Tidnam for the excellent deployment of the brand onto the car’s skin. Now here’s to hoping that they win their series!

28Jun

Posted in Thinks /By ksprague

The Pace of Change

By Kevin Sprague – I’ve been having a conversation with a number of clients in recent months about the internet and the pace of change. It goes something like this:

Client – “Should we be focusing on facebook or twitter or our SEO? It’s all moving so fast – it’s hard to keep up. What’s Instagram? Do I need to know about it?”
Me – “Yes”

That’s a glib answer to a complex question – the heart of the question is the anxiety that we all feel about the speed of change that technology has created. This is nothing new – you can go back to read about this same anxiety during the Victorian era when trains hit the scene like the dot.com bubble of the millenium. Change is hard, change is good. We want all the great new connections and possibilities but we’re challenged by the choices and the learning curve.

So…. here’s the problem. It’s getting worse. Or Better – depending on your perspective. The Internet is subject in many ways to Moore’s Law
- the observation that processing power on modern semiconductors doubles every two years – which results in a logarithmic, accelerating curve into the stratosphere. This law is what is behind the amazing computing power in your iphone – more computing power in your pocket than the entire world enjoyed a few decades ago. Guess what – that curve continues to accelerate and with it comes an explosion of possibility. Wearable computers, contact lenses that will overlay an augemented reality pulled from the internet onto your world, ubiquitous smart devices thinking ahead for you. A GPS with artificial intelligence and likely some fresh attitude.

If you are a business you don’t really get to ignore this accelerating pace of change. But you can manage it by focusing more effort on what you can do NOW as opposed to what you think you should do to be ready for the future. What do I mean by this? Simply put – make the best use of the most solid, popular and functional tools that are in the present and stop worrying about the cutting edge.

My mantra of late on web development is this – build the site today that you can launch tomorrow – not the site that takes 12 months of planning, design, coding and creation that will launch next year. That cycle is too long for most organizations and implies that the world you are building for will wait around for you. It won’t. A couple of years ago we weren’t talking about delivery to mobile devices or what would happen to your site when someone turned it sideways on their ipad. It’s only been a year or two that those issues have become standard design constraints. Facebook is the new blog – and blogs are dead (long live the blog!). Photo sharing has evolved from smugmug to flickr to pinterest to instagram to ??? – you get the idea. Use the tools in front of you today to the best of their ability. Stay nimble and flexible that the tool you love today might get changed, replaced or augmented in the next few months. Experiment with these new platforms, ideas and channels – there is little harm in doing so.

I’ve often written about the concept of internet fluency – that the internet is no longer a technology but a language and that fluency is a core competency of the 21st century. Fluency is easily obtained through experimentation and play, as well as a healthy does of curiosity and google searches. Don’t be afraid. Dive in. You haven’t missed the train – it’s just changing before your eyes.

13May

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Category Archives: Thinks

The needs of non-profits are often much more complex than a standard for-profit ecommerce solution…

So here’s the breakdown of options we have implemented for our clients:

For really robust integrated membership, event and donation integration, there are a couple of sites to look at…

The plan…

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