• Recession? Online Giving is Great in Portland.

  Posted By: David Martin

  Now that 2009 is just underway, substantial doubts linger about the ongoing impacts of the U.S. recession, and what it will mean for businesses and nonprofits. Common sense dictates that shrinking assets in the world of affluence will eventually affect large and small businesses alike, as well as the nonprofit sector. But if all the recent gloom and doom has you down, we suggest you consider the Willamette Week’s 2008 Give!Guide as a glimmer of hope in an otherwise stormy outlook.
  
  The Give!Guide, the brainchild of Richard Meeker, Publisher of Willamette Week, has steadily grown in attention and dollars donated since its inception in 2004—and 2008 was no exception. The Give!Guide aggregates some of the most innovative and worthy nonprofits in the Portland area, particularly those with leadership and influence in the under 35-year old demographic. This year, the Give!Guide included 55 such nonprofits—across categories like Arts, Social Action and the Environment.
  
  Since 2006, OakTree Digital has joined Willamette Week and its other partner, Momentum Market Intelligence, to design and develop the online Give!Guide. OakTree’s contribution has resulted in a sleek and sophisticated charitable online giving engine that’s attractive, informative and easy to use. Since 2006, the Give!Guide has experienced the sort of annual growth that would make Wall Street salivate. Consider the last three years:
  

  • 2006 Give!Guide raised $228,000
  • 2007 Give!Guide raised $518,000
  • 2008 Give!Guide raised over $800,000 (not including all final offline contributions not yet added)

  This year, despite the worst recessionary period since the Great Depression and this being an election year, the 2008 Give!Guide raised more than +54% in donations compared to 2007. It’s a remarkable achievement for the Give!Guide partners, but it speaks volumes about the Portland community—and, we hope, the national community as a whole.
  
  As we ring in the New Year, here’s to the 2008 Give!Guide, to all the good that it has done and will do. And here’s looking ahead to the 2009 Give!Guide; with the success of these last three years, what a year 2009 should be!

• "IM" is a verb

  Posted By: Lawrence W. Gallick

  I searched ["im" is a verb] in Google and didn't get anything substantial in terms of results, but I think it is time we all face it that "i.m." has become a verb.  It is actually a very commonly used word in techno-babble.

   

  Also, and I am not a lawyer so I don't know how this works but, I would also like to declare my intention to patent an eyetracking device that will sense when I look at an IM window and auto-magically make the window stop blinking.  I just have to actually invent it first.

  
  

• Recession? Been there, done that!

  Posted By: John Schmitt

  Being in business almost sixteen years gives one a perspective that hopefully can be used to guide us and our clients into the unknown ahead.

  I vividly remember the “tech recession” of 2001-2003 and how it affected our clients. So, assuming you are not in banking or real estate, what did we learn that may help us all get through to 2010?

  Back then, once a business had built their brochure site it was left to just exist on the “internet super-highway.” MARCOM folks cut or lost their budgets because they couldn’t quantitatively justify additional expenditures on the web.

  Planning for a recession is totally different today. Internet usage has not only exploded, it has become indispensable. Customer’s expectations for the kinds of instant information, “touch points” and ease of use are embedded in everyone’s buying process.

  Now is when you need to keep your internet presence active and responsive. Demonstrate how your products save time and money. Give prospects examples of successes they can model. Help them in their buying decisions.

  What OakTree Digital learned back then was to sharply focus our services to what our clients’ needed to keep their businesses thriving. And, we're still doing it.

  Look for my “Seven Ways to Recession Proof Your Business On-Line”, coming soon.

• President 2.0: Best Internet Strategy Wins

  Posted By: David Martin

  I'm fully aware that political punditry in America these days is about as overabundant as corn in Iowa, but from a web developer's perspective, this year's Presidential campaign has been remarkable. It's not a stretch to say that a key advantage to the Obama camp has been its superior Internet Strategy, which has included microblogging with Twitter, RSS feeds, wiki pages, video game advertising and of course, a Facebook page:

   

  
  

  

   

  Viewed as Internet Marketing--which, of course, this is--Obama's online strategy has rewarded him with approximately $1B online allowing him to steamroll his opponents along the way. Viewed as an organization, or even a corporation, the Obama campaign appears to be top to bottom one of the most successful marketing machines in US history.

   

  From a political perspective, the implications of this strategy are a game changer going forward. The superior online strategy wins elections, or more modestly, is a key factor in winning elections.

   

  For the rest of us, we can correctly extrapolate that  for a marketing program to be successful, its Internet Strategy must be core, if not the marketing program. Marketers have to consider not only the marketing message, but SEO, user-contributed content and implementing tools that allow for simple publishing to a wide network of motivated end users. Gone are the days where a one-dimensional campaign will do. We're about to put our first President 2.0 in office, and folks, you can bet that change won't be far behind.

• Direct Mail - doomed to fail?

  Posted By: Lawrence W. Gallick

  I don't know about you, but I rarely get a solicitation in the mail that I pay any attention to.  Especially if it seems too good to be true - because it is.  I find it interesting therefore how much money companies seem to pour into it.  I don't know the conversion rates that are deemed to be 'good' offhand, but they are extremely low.  I think this stems from the fact that folks are usually in a flustered mood when opening these things up - we are so flooded with them these days that the simple chore of disposing of all them in a safe and somewhat environmentally sound way is time consuming and ensures you focus on their absurdities.

   

  There's probably another component as well however:  we have become so efficient at using digital filters and textual cues to discard irrelevant or spam email.  We have also simultaneously become conditioned to the impermanence of digital bytes.  We can discard at will, understanding that the utter rapidity of the destruction process allows us to shed the intrusion like a minor distraction, rather than a physical and time consuming burden.

   

  Yes, I did finally go through the giant pile of mail on my desk.

  
  

• Business Process Integrated Training Courses

  Posted By: OakTree Digital

  From Brandon Hall Research eLearning conference in San Jose: Very interesting session on merging actual data intensive business processes with eLearning implementations. Idea is that most training courses are developed separately from the actual business process. You could say “divorced from”.

   

  What’s required is for the eLearning environment to have access to actual product, marketing or sales training information via database access or timely XML exports.

   

  BTW, most business’s data happens to reside in Excel spreadsheets.

   

  One example shown was of the how New Balance Shoes integrated new product data from normal development and marketing processes from database so it could be used by the product research teams, production, sliced for sales team training and consumer marketing messages.  “Chunks” of text descriptions are then fed into the training materials more or less dynamically.

   

  Since they come out with 50-80 new products a quarter it’s the only way to organize and execute on the volume of sales and marketing’s training needs. Thought provoking.

• OakTree Gets the Brandon Hall Hardware

  Posted By: John Schmitt

  Talk about "taking one for the team". Last night I had the pleasure of receiving a 2008 Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Award for Best Custom Content for the “Alcohol Server Education” course. As a recipient of an award at the Conference we got to demo the course during the day in the conference hall which generated a lot of interest and comments from the attendees.

  Cool side note: the online course is attracting more students every month AND the test scores are averaging higher than the in-person classes. This is a testament to the thoughtful instructional design elements and edgy user interface our team developed.

  Pictures to follow.

• Some Portland Trivia

  Posted By: OakTree Digital

  Guess when the Portland MAX train started the Red Line service to the airport?

  Answer: September 10, 2001.
  
  That’s right. The day before 9/11.
  
  I know because I took one of the first Red Line trains to the airport that day for a two day trip to see clients in Santa Clara and San Francisco. Well, you know the rest. A two day trip turned into five days. I ended up flying home from Sacramento and, taking the Red Line again, arrived back at Pioneer Square (bags in hand) in time for the candle light vigil.
  
  Small lesson learned: always pack the laptop charger. Had to rely on a clunky modem attached to a Palm for email. Never again.
  
  Right.
  
  Never again.

   

• Creepily good customer service

  Posted By: Lawrence W Gallick

  This morning the woman who watches our 2.5 year old son was putting him into the car to go to the post office.  She set down the keys on the front seat, and then shut the door to go around to the other side - at which point my son 'cleverly' pressed the door lock, causing all the doors to lock.  We immediately called AAA - they sent someone within 10 minutes, and he promptly opened the door.  When I stepped back into my office (11minutes), I already had an email (they must have my email on file from a prior transaction and have it associated with my member number that way) thanking me and giving me follow up options.

  The 2 impressive things about this are a) they already had my email address and b) they followed up so quickly.  Why?  Because the simple ideal of a central customer file to pull data from is usually so elusive in modern business, where multiple legacy systems are inevitably cobbled together into an overall network of data.  Lookup tables and complex integration logic rule the landscape, and often businesses would rather ask for your personal information multiple times than bother making the customer experience painless through painFULly rearchitecting their backend CRM systems.

  I didn't have to sign anything or fill anything out - just showed the driver my card and driver's license, and that was that.  They actually did the thinking for me - whereas my typical experience is one of endless proactive requests from me, the consumer, to make sure everything is handled the way I like it.  Now they just need to get to work on their travel reservations systems....

• Alternate Format Ballot Ready for Election

  Posted By: John Schmitt

  Earlier this year OakTree Digital delivered an Alternate Format Ballot (TM) product and process to the Oregon Secretary of State’s office. It was used successfully for the 2008 May Oregon Primary and is in place to be used for the national election on November 4th.

  The Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 included provisions to ensure that voters with disabilities are provided the opportunity to vote privately and independently and have equal access to the process.

  The AFB works alongside Oregon’s vote by mail process to enable individuals with disabilities, including non-visual accessibility for the blind and visually impaired to vote in much the same manner as all Oregon Voters: independently and privately from home, or another place of the voters’ choosing.

  OakTree Digital’s AFB application converts election data from Saber Software’s Oregon Centralized Voter Registration (OCVR*) system into a W3C compliant HTML coded ballot.

  OakTree Digital is planning to market the AFB product it owns to other states looking to meet the spirit of the HAVA requirements. More details see OakTree Digital AFB Product Brief.

   

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