You really haven’t heard about mid-century modern icons Charles and Raye Eames until you’ve heard about them from Ice Cube. I have to say, Cube knows his stuff and uses the Eames in this two minute video to shed some light on their philosophy as well as the overall virtues of Los Angeles architecture.
Plus, you get the opportunity to hear him say things you never, ever thought you’d hear Ice Cube say. Such as:
“Before I did rap music, I studied architectural drafting.”
“They was doin’ mashups before mashups even existed.”
“The Eames made structure and nature one. This is goin’ green 1949 style, bitch. Believe dat!”
Keeping a conscious eye on what the point of a test or iteration is, not just to itself, but to your overall plan and mission how building a certain number of tutors in a given area influences student activity and community creation, in my case, rather than just the number of tutors removes the halfsies quality of a test. Rather than continually shifting a business strategy to reflect the results of a single test, aggregating data across a set of them, and altering your strategy accordingly creates consistent momentum for your company where the success or failure are equally useful.
Within that framework, there needs to be set decision points – moments where you predetermine that, based on given sets of data, you will make a decision.
The London Transport Museum has put up a collection of 7,000 posters dating back to the 1930′s for users to browse, allowing them to search by artist, theme, date and color (or colour, as the case may be). The collection includes a fair share of inforgraphics from the 1920s and beyond demonstrating the advantages and widespread use of mass transit at the time. As Treeugger notes, the use (or overuse) of infographics today is clearly nothing new.
Via this isn’t happiness: Charles Bukowski outlines his modest terms for a poetry reading. If you hire Bukowski, I’d imagine you wouldn’t know what to expect. However, as he notes, “Auden gets 2,000 a reading, Ginsberg 1,000, so you see I’m cheap. A real whore.”
Flickr user Chris Spurgeon has some great pre-lunar presentation slides from NASA, including this chart on the destructive power of weapons through time. His collection also includes several artist renditions of various stages of a mission to the moon — from lift off, to landing, to return — including this stunner of the Apollo booster before lift-off:
The lifeblood of non-profit marketing — in fact, it’s only reason for being — is bringing new constituents to the cause and getting them committed and engaged in the work that the cause is doing. Generally, we look to do this with a mix of content, calls-to-action, sign-up forms and social media.
However, many non-profits, especially those that have a long, pre-internet history, are stuck in a legacy model that was born out of success in direct mail, but does not necessarily translate to success online. In fact, many of the tactics used in direct mail are directly counter to what we should be doing online. Non-profits who see this model as a failure and have turned to web-specific tactics are growing their online giving exponentially. Organizations that haven’t realized their failure, or are still trying to make the turn are seeing growth primarily from current donors leaving direct mail for the convenience of online giving. This is especially true as older donors get more comfortable with the online and mobile world.
To modernize our online acquisition and giving efforts, non-profits should look to the internet start-ups of Silicon Valley as a model. These companies rely on the same model we do for growth, namely:
Acquiring new users;
Getting them to take an action (using the service or software);
Keeping users engaged, i.e. they’re still using the software or service;
Getting them to share the service with their network, and
Converting them. In this case from free users to paid users — or the “freemium” model.
Of course, the startups are doing this exponentially better than non-profits, mostly because they’re native to the web and have staked their lives on knowing what it takes to get people engaged online. Many non-profits talk a good game when it comes to online fundraising, but are still feeding from the trough of direct mail.
I was struck by this fact last weekend as I signed up for the new large file sending service, Kicksend, and noticed how easy and sticky they made the experience. Here, in a series of screenshots is what that sign-up process looks like:
This video recreates some of the more memorable Calvin and Hobbes snowmen massacres Bill Watterson graced us with over the years. In addition, someone’s created a best of gallery of these cartoons over on AngelFire.
i am
Director of Digital Marketing for Ocean Conservancy -- husband and father of 2. You can read more about me here and find me at the following locations: Tr | Fb | Li | G+
