Millennial Ticks, Non-Profit Shticks, and the Future of Mobile Giving

It’s been harder for me to skip around Salvation Army kettles this year because where I roam this non-profit seems to have brought out the dancers, the tuba players, and the occasional therapy dog to encourage me to part with my cash.  And it has worked.

I advise a number of nonprofits on the art and science of fundraising and think a lot about the subject.  Given the effects of Hurricane Sandy on my immediate and extended family and friends, the subject has become much more personal.  Over Christmas, I listened to some family and friends complain about what they considered the virtual absence of the Red Cross in their neighborhoods.  That most media outlets in the Greater New York area encouraged viewers to text $10 to the Red Cross for Sandy victims seemed to add salt to the wounds.

The Red Cross has been very public about its charter, contribution to Sandy victims, and how funds have been expended.   Consumers are understandably nosey about how donated fund are used.  I stopped contributing to United Way some years ago when I learned executives were flying first-class.  Other charities felt donor backlash when they misappropriated 9/11 funds, using them to buy computers and cover various unrelated overhead costs.

The New York media seemed to pay considerable attention to college students and young adults who were very supportive of Sandy victims.  These young adults would represent the Millennial generation, aged 20-35 years.  I became interested in how and to what degree this smartphone generation engages with nonprofits.

“The Millennial Impact Report” prepared by the JCA Group served as a useful introduction. The study, which is based on online surveys, focus groups, as well as input from non-profit professionals, examined how to engage Millennials from a nonprofit perspective.  The researchers caution that it is dangerous to overgeneralize about this demographic.  They are not necessarily favorably predisposed to nonprofit brands that they have grown up with.  The research suggests that Millennials tend to make decisions about charitable donations “in the moment” but are still keen to know about results.  Early research citing the narcissism of this generation and its lacks of civic-mindedness does not seem to be supported by this study.

Sixty-five percent of the more than 6,000 surveyed preferred a website for receiving information about a charity, followed by social media and enewsletters.  Respondents said that they looked for a strong call to action on websites and don’t like layers of descriptive content.  They want to act quickly and connect easily.

Millennials are heavy users of mobile apps but don’t think apps are particularly useful for nonprofits.  Sixty-seven percent of those surveyed had interacted with nonprofits on Facebook, largely through “liking” and “sharing” functions.  However, this generation donates negligible amounts through social media.  Use of video did not receive high marks except if it showed the organization at work.  Only 28% had interacted with nonprofits via Twitter.

Researchers note that Millennials prefer to make donations online, in person or by mail, in that order.  The study finds that the future for mobile giving faces an uncertain future. Only 15% of those surveyed report donating by smartphone.  Participants indicated that the $10 limit for smartphone donations was problematic.  Security is also an issue with mobile as it is with social media.  Therefore, a website optimized for mobile is essential.

Seventy-five percent of those surveyed said they made a financial gift to charity in 2011.  Forty-two percent gave to what inspired them in the moment.  Their biggest Pet Peeve: “I don’t know how my gift will make a difference.”

Help is on the way.  The Salvation Army, realizing that Millennials conduct business in a manner different than earlier generations, has added a Millennial position.

No news about the tuba players.

Hockey Sticks, Mobile Licks and Measuring Arousal

If I had a hockey stick for the fistful of grandiose mobile predictions I have heard (and made) over the last decade, I would be able to start a National Hockey League franchise.  Unfortunately, the NHL is currently on strike, so I will leave this dead metaphor hanging in mid-air begging for icy mercy.

My brother-in–law just got a mobile phone and based on the Eternal Law of Device Penetration, this man is a Laggard.  Sorry Steve, but the family has done its best to convert you over the years, and you have only yourself to blame for coming so late to the party.  That said, this is about market segmentation, brother, and decidedly not about your character, per se.  But we will have plenty of time to discuss your behavior over the holidays.  But can it be that the smartphone celebration is already winding down?

It is hard not to embrace the hockey-stick metaphor.  PC sales have flattened as sales of mobile phones and tablets have soared.  The disruption of old media and old portals and old attitudes continues at a ripe pace and this can only be good news for mobile.  Henry Blodget, CEO of the Business Insider, reminds us that what is holding the business of mobile back is the business of mobile where we are still exchanging analog dollars for digital dimes.  Simply put, the effective CPM for the desktop is $3.50; for mobile. $0.75.  Certainly targeted, location-based and video ads are already changing these percentages and the increased interest on the part of marketers in “native” advertising is bound to move the mobile needle.  But as Blodget notes, the smartphone screen is still really small.

Folks at the IPG Media Lab have raised the right question at the right time:  “Are All Screens Created Equal?”  This research examines whether a device and or screen have an impact on the effectiveness of video ads.  Do other variables, including ad clutter, creative quality, type of video content, and location of consumption, play a role in video ad effectiveness?  The Lab looked at connected TV, linear TV, mobile and the PC at the IPG Media Lab in San Francisco.  Attention was measured by eye-tracking hardware, excitement by biometric bracelets; and ad recall in the traditional manner.

Screen type played a role in ad recall but the differences were not marked: PC (43%); Connected TV (38%); Mobile (35%); and Linear TV (27%). Arousal levels, measured by distinct moments of excitement in each record, were also fairly similar among screens: Connected TV (8%); Mobile (4%); Linear TV (7%); and the PC (7%). The researchers found that “attention levels are high particularly for screens consumers are most familiar with—TV and PC.”

The Media Lab reports that females tend to be more attentive while males show a higher level of excitement.  While TV performs well on attention and excitement measures, this does not translate into strong recall.  Not surprisingly, researchers have found that ad clutter undermines the ad effectiveness of TV.

In summarizing their findings, researchers suggest that, overall, “the much-hyped screen size did not play a role in ad effectiveness.”   But controllable facts such as ad clutter and perceived lack of creativity did.  Similarly, the most engaging content attracted the most attention.  And locations matters: “lean-back environments with less distraction, such as at home in bed, enhance attentiveness.”

This research is certainly not the final word on screen size.  But it might place a little more emphasis on clutter-free environments and encourage advertising agencies to conduct more creative testing, rather than dismiss mobile out-of-hand.

And one wonders what the “always on” smartphone metric might have to contribute to this conversation.

I don’t wear biometric bracelets, but am still very excited.

Hospital Health, Digital Stealth and When Software Isn’t the Solution

During the last month I have spent a fair bit of time in hospitals, but not as a patient.  The first occasion was to visit a friend from Italy who was stricken while in San Francisco and hospitalized.  This true Gentleman from Verona is now home in one piece, having left a part of his colon on the West Coast.  The second occasion was with a family member in New York, stricken with a similar complaint, but recovering nicely.

After  I was sure both friend and loved one would be alright, I paid more attention to my surroundings and how important digital had become healthcare, from electronically monitoring medications and potential interactions to bringing technology, such as X-ray equipment, to bedside for quick results.  In both instances, digital initiatives seemed to have compressed healthcare into a shorter time span and the long wait for tests and additional opinions was almost immediate.  The family member had to go to another floor for a CT-scan, but within minutes the doctor had the results on a computer terminal outside her room for immediate analysis.  And this was not a secret confab in some dark ante-room; I could actually ask questions.  In this instance, surgery was necessary but the run-up allowed the patient to be much more of a participant and I know this lowered her level of stress.

Most noticeable was the absence of paper, especially in New York.  Each nurse had a mobile computer terminal that he or she wheeled into hospital rooms and recorded on-site vital signs, anecdotal observations, and concerns from patient and family.  A software program translated the data into a content framework common to the hospital.

This effort to digitize medical records is the result of $4 billion in funding to 83,000 professionals and 1,500 hospitals that was a little known part of the 2009 Stimulus Bill designed to jumpstart the transition to Electronic Health Records (EHR).  So far, so good.  However, the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Health and Human Services reports, anecdotal evidence aside, that this program is based on self-reporting and participants do not as of yet collect supporting documents that verify the actual shift to EHR.  So every new technology has a shadow side and this example might be the least of it.

Through September 2012, more than one billion dollars has been invested in digital health initiatives, primarily involving the smartphone, with apps that can check heart rate, pregnancy, suspicious moles, questionable pills, saliva, flu symptoms and so on.  Theoretically, smartphone apps can be used as a tool in everyday health care and for more exotic application.  The Washington Post reports that AliveCor is seeking FDA approval for an app that will provide an EKG by simply pressing an iPhone to the chest.

After my friend and loved one were in the hospital more than a few days, I began to worry about opportunistic infections.   While I was very satisfied with the hospitals in San Francisco and Nyack, New York, I’m well aware that the more digitized hospital services become, the more opportunity for abuse.  Professor Amitai Etzioni, George Washington University, writes in the Huffington Post about the digital fraud in the system, using the Health Management Associates (HMA) as an example (60 Minutes looked at this issue in its December 2, 2012, broadcast).

“According to its own ER doctors, HMA requires that 20 percent of people who step into the ER are admitted to one of HMA’s hospitals—and 50% of seniors.  When a person visits an HMA Emergency Room, company software loaded onto the ER computer automatically orders a bunch of tests, whether they are needed or not, before the person is even seen by a doctor.  When doctors try to discharge a patient from the ER, the computer intervenes, presenting them with a warning that a patient is a candidate for admission.”

My friend from Verona, an Englishman who speaks fluent Italian, was lucky enough to have a doctor in San Francisco who also spoke Italian.  At Nyack Hospital we happened to have a doctor who was a friend of our extended family.  That made all the difference.

The Institute of Medicine estimates that Medicare fraud and abuse range from $75 billion to $98 billion annually.  This number is not surprising because Medicare is required by law to issue payment within 15 to 30 days and there is little time to scrutinize invoices.

This is a problem crying out for a technology solution.

Dictionary Cops, Literary Snobs, and Twitter Wrestles with Hercules

Not far from where I write this blog rests like a sturdy door stop Webster’s Third International Dictionary published in 1971 in the Philippines and given to me when I received a PhD in Philosophy a few years later.  Over the decades, I have opened this thirty-pounder usually when I wanted to get deep into etymology and learn whether a particular verb appeared in the subjunctive mood on Anglo Saxon riotous tongues.  These days such excursions over to the wild side of linguistic subtlety are few and far between, but I did pull out this old, respected and heavy beast during Hurricane Sandy, when we were reminded of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and what it really meant to be pinned down at the safety level.  Reading Webster under a hurricane lamp is no laughing matter.

Webster is already halfway out the door because all its utility, history and girth are available in a variety of apps.  This dictionary technology has always been something of a useful fiction, suggesting in its sheer tonnage that there is something exhaustive and final about the creation.  We know dictionaries also serve cultural and nationalistic ambitions.  The Guardian newspaper recently reported that the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in the 1970s and 1980s intentionally omitted some words with foreign origins, a curious, petty and racist stance from the man sitting in the high chair overseeing a language that has remained globally vibrant by embracing, at least since 1066 when the French came calling, all manner of words from the global language tree.

Over the last five years, I have given to charities and libraries at least five hundred books, many of them novels I had used in high school and university teaching as well as for academic research.  The sting is less than I thought.  William J. Lynch Jr., CEO of Barnes & Noble, has said he doesn’t really read physical books anymore, an odd thing for an executive to say when his company still generates most of its revenues from physical books.  But it is far more compelling to embrace the Nook in public rather than be seen flipping through a copy of The Old Man and the Sea.

I think it was the NPR program “On the Media” that suggested that the second disruption in the book business will be about entire book categories disappearing or shrinking badly, with literary fiction perhaps the most vulnerable.  The argument goes something like this.  Before America had universal education that would be in place, more or less, by the 1880s, Americans used the poetry and fiction of Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman and others to forge a national identity.   I think there is truth to that.   I would add that it is in the language of Twain, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and H.L. Mencken, among others, that America found its voice, vernacular, humor, and language appropriate to the psychic terrain, the new geography, and national habits.

Not surprisingly, by the mid-20^th century these writers and others had become enshrined in English departments across the country and literary criticism had become a teachable science with an army of adherents who decided to publish rather than perish.  I was a member of that brigade and that tribe.

Catch-22, The Naked and the Dead, Herzog, Rabbit, Run, Sophie’s Choice, Invisible Man and other favorites had a relationship to American culture that is hard to replicate.  This doesn’t mean current writers have less talent; I simply suggest that literary fiction early in the 21st century is a less important part of our culture and national psyche.  And that trend is likely to continue no matter what screen we are using.

This doesn’t mean fiction is going away, though literary agents will feel the squeeze.  Publishers will focus on their constituencies.  HarperCollins just announced its Harper Teen Imprint, which will publish short stories and novellas, priced from $0.99 to $2.99.  With books and increasingly with magazines, we can expect more unbundling of content that will be distributed in information chunks depending on the desires of the customer.   Atavist, fueled by investment from Barry Diller and Scot Rudin, tells stories through digital apps, ebooks, and magazines with subscription offers.  Ebooks, such as Deborah Blum’s Angel Killer, are under 20,000 words, have audio, video and social features, and are available on all platforms.

Simon & Schuster has teamed with Author Solutions, a self-publishing firm, and created Archway Publishing in part to keep an eye on which self-published authors are rising to the top.  Changes in media, culture, technology and attention span will make it increasingly difficult for writers of literary fiction to find a publisher.  This is a situation that I’m presently facing with “Bunker Kills: A Sea Story,” based on Vietnam experiences.  Since traditional publishers offer relatively little marketing help for literary fiction, it’s tempting to self-publish, particularly if the category is a vertical with an identifiable audience.  And a sailor never leaves the sea.

And a favorable wind helps.  America needs to take a more jaundiced viewing of its military.  General Petraeus has been an absolutely godsend.  We now have permission to say in public that the emperor has no clothes.

We know from our cultural and political history that what begins in tragedy often ends in farce.  For this reason, I’m pleased to learn that a British group aims to revive the classics, retelling one-hundred Greek myths in one-hundred tweets.  The group will also have a go at Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw.”

There’s a good chance Cliffs Notes will be disrupted.

Vertigo, Approval Whores and Mencken’s Sahara

A timely touch of vertigo spared me much of the eleventh-hour political electioneering and played nicely into my plan to avoid all political coverage for the final month.  Although it wasn’t Lent, I decided at the same time to uncouple from Twitter and start all over again by following only the Khan Academy.  At least once a day, my account manager at Twitter offers regular advice on how to grow my social universe.  I really do like Steve Martin but I just don’t want to follow him on Twitter.  After prayer and reflection, I did add Esther Dyson.

My Twitter-reboot task is not helped by the delicious piece by Jeff Bercovici at Forbes about how social media makes us all approval whores.  So beware the “humblebrag” who fishes for compliments but indemnifies himself against charges of fishing.  Or the “virtuebrag,” who seems to have come out in force after Hurricane Sandy.   I am getting hammered this morning, Veteran’s Day, for not reposting praises for our military on Facebook.  I guess my six years in the Navy wasn’t enough.

To get straight with the world again during this uncertain time, I decided to complete a novel, “Saturn Gets his Peter Back.”  The character is something of a phony esthete, a Baby Boomer, who thinks his life is literature and his abundant dreams provide a big data point for living.  Poor lad, he thinks a stint in Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital in New York is quite consistent with his internal compass.  Saturn, who floats somewhat out of orbit, suffers from a very common psychiatric malady: mistaking the Map for the Territory.   Saturn is a semanticist’s delight.  He confuses levels of abstractions, keeps discovering the “little man who wasn’t there,” and delights in over-verbalization or succumbing to the hypnotic effect of one’s own words.  My character has created a fantasyland with defined borders, rules of engagement, and secret handshakes.  Facts sit uneasily with this celestial body.

The first political piece I read after my novel sojourn was “Fantasyland” by Frank Rich, published in New York magazine, about the post-fact, post-science, and post-reality Republican Party living in a gated community.  “Freud couldn’t have imagined a clearer case of projection,” writes Rich.  Why is Rich writing my fiction?

Thanks to my growing Twitter universe, I discovered the Jezebel site and Floating Sheep, an online demographic firm that tracks the geography of racist tweets after the election.  According to the map posted by Jezebel, the bulk of these come from the South and really the Deep South, including Louisiana and Mississippi.  A lot of high school students were up late ranting. 

It is a hundred years between Frank Rich and H.L. Menken, the Baltimore essayist who wrote a scathing piece on the post-Civil War South in 1917 entitled “The Sahara of the Bozart,” but the descriptions of this region by these two writers are only different by degree.  Rich uses a scapel; Mencken a hammer. Example: “A Washington or a Jefferson dropped there by some act of God would be denounced as a scoundrel or jailed overnight.”  And: “It was in Virginia that they invented the device of searching for contraband whiskey in woman’s underwear.”

Mencken’s pen drips yellow journalism and reads today like a hyperbolic screed, containing enough racial rant to attract warning signs.  But he put his finger on the cultural, political, and religious forces that concocted a post-Civil War Southern fantasy that is alive and well and amplified by social media.

Soon after Mencken’s tirade, we saw the beginning of a remarkable Southern literature movement led by John Crowe Ransom, Alan Tate, Robert Penn Warren and, of course, William Faulkner. The original effort was termed ‘The Fugitive Movement,” an effort to find identity in the New South.  This has been the most important literary development in American history.  I explored the theme of religious sensibilities in some of these writers in a thesis and a dissertation.  One gets the sense that the South has lost touch with its own literature, where many of the present day demons have been visited and slayed.

Time Magazine blogger Joe Klein is more polite: “The South, though a more complex region than ever before, won’t rise again until it resolves the issues that have marked its differences with the rest of the country since the land was colonized.”

And that ain’t just whistling Dixie.  

The William Shatner App, Channeling Celebrity & the Future of Political Discourse

I can’t tell you how relieved I am to learn that on the day after the election William Shatner has introduced a new iPhone app, “Shatoetry” that lets users compose text and play it back in Shatner’s voice.  The options are endless.  It could be a bugger-off message to your ex-boss/lover/dog-sitter.  He told Fox Entertainment News that “I can say anything.  I can even break up with your boyfriend.  I’d be delighted to.”

Time Magazine’s Techland notes that for “dramatic pauses, users select ‘Space Bubbles.’  Different colored portraits of the celebrity can be chosen for the background of each ‘shatism.’  And to listen to the final product, users press ‘shat that!’ and then can trade messages with one another via the Create and Friends option.”

Shatner’s fingerprints and excremental whimsy are all over this offering created by Blindlight Apps, a company that brings Hollywood talent and celebrity to the gaming and app worlds.  Shatner, his launch claims to the contrary, might have been told about the urban belief that his fecal matter is said to possess mystical powers and businesses have been built around that fantasy.  The Urban Dictionary offers a full range of Shat Mugs and Shat shirts.  Nothing yet, as far as I know, for the original Old English “bescatan,” meaning “befowled,” but that word isn’t exactly duck soup.

There was a time when everybody knew that “shat” is the past tense and past participle of the much more current and popular “shit.”  Our political discourse would be so such better if the understanding of grammar and linguistics was more, say, 18^th century.  I will acknowledge that there is no easy transition from this messy grammatical chatter to the long, tedious ordeal called a presidential campaign, except to add that a Shatner- inspired “shat that” button on all political discourse might have added some earthiness and brevity to the conversations.

In the press release, Shatner says that “People all over the world have been listening to my voice for so long, but they only heard what I wanted to say.  I wanted to give people a means to express their thoughts and ideas using my voice.”

Both political parties have become much more adept in using social media.  As the two camps raise their game, perhaps they should consider licensing this product from Shatner Enterprises.  Such a move would not only allow constituents to put a representative’s words in their individual mouths, but it would add a much needed degree of authenticity.

Shatner refers to his disciples as “Shatoetists” and I expect his site will do more to advance modern American poetry than all Ivy League English Departments put together.

The Shatoetry App provides a Word Tray of inspiring words that users select to compose a message. Captain Kirk knows something about speaking in tongues.  The religious implications are profound.

After a twelve month political campaign and $6 billion price tag, the Political Word Tray must be full of words, fitting, brief, and beautiful, worthy in every way to be on the lips of politicians of every stripe. 

Digital Churns: Zynga, Spotify & the Downward Dog

My boss told me some years ago that, if you hang around long enough, every business model will come back either as a bang or a whimper.  His bone of contention was whether a company should be centralized or decentralized.  He gave each type of organization a half-life of about six years until the dreaded consultant came to town and recommended, with great sobriety and cost, the other thing, whatever it happened to be.

I read recently that those launching new businesses should focus much more on the vision and less on the business plan.  I think this advice had its genesis in the Harvard Business Review and was retweeted until it became established wisdom.  It might be time to bring the consultant back to town.

I served as the business development guy at Hachette during the dot com run-up.  Since there were few rules during this prairie fire, I tended to meet with everyone who had invented the next big digital thing.  I soon learned that pets, used clothing, supermarket coupons, and death were the subjects that were getting a lot of attention from the newly formed digital elite.  I had worked at a boutique private equity firm and thought I had enough of a “cunning nose” for new business opportunities, but this was a brand new toy.  I finally decided that for these entrepreneurs to get through the front door, they would have to convince me before a meeting that their Cost of Sales (COS) did not equal or exceed their total revenues by year three.  The foot traffic slowed down to a crawl.  I never got to ask about Average Revenue Per User because it was always somewhere down the road.

The WSJ ran a piece a month ago about Spotify’s plans to launch in Canada (August 22, 2012, “Spotify to Launch in Canada”).   CNET’s Greg Sandoval dug a little deeper into the numbers and asked in his piece, “Is Spotify’s Business Model Broken?”  I have blogged in the past that I thought magazine publishers can learn something from Spotify and still do.  But I was struck by some of the key financial ratios Sandoval focused on with his keen eye and cunning journalistic nose.

Spotify’s Total Revenue for 2011 was $244,539,608; its Cost of Sales for the same period, $238,913,983, or 98% of revenue.  Unlike most of the pet sock folks I met over ten years ago, Spotify has real revenue and plenty of new markets to exploit. But at the end of the day, so to speak, the Cost of Sales and specifically the cost of acquiring new members and, conversely, the Average Revenue Per User (for 2011 at about 5.73 Euros) will tell the tale.  As Sandoval observes, the fly-in-the-ointment might be the royalty payment due even when the offer is free.

Money continues to pour into the venture game; $24.4 billion in 2011.  And at the same time we hear the diurnal lament or prediction that the disruptors of a few years ago will now start taking their place on the disruption stage.  This was certainly the talk, even in the mainstream media, about Facebook after its post-IPO stock price fell.  Forget about Facebook’s one billion users.

Equally interesting was Josh Constine’s October 5, 2012, piece in TechCrunch about “Why Zynga Failed,” a title delivered emphatically in the past tense.  As a kid, I spent enough time on a dairy farm and had no desire to relive my cow-milking blunders with the Farmville fantasy, though I have been tempted to invest my virtual wallet in Emus as a specialty crop.

Constine reminds us that in 2008-2009 Zynga was on top of the world with Facebook as a game portal, CPCs low ($0.27), and hockey-stick growth on the office wall.  He ticks off four reasons for this “failure”: games got too complicated; too many developers, not enough software gamers; CPCs have increased more than 3X since 2009; Facebook got sick of game spam; with Facebook taking a 30% cut, margins got smaller.  Whatever we might think about this prediction, Zynga’s stock has dropped to $2.48 as of this writing from $10 ten months ago.

A writer on the TechCrunch comments page even suggested an official Constine’s Law: “Internet advertising margins are proportional to the size of the user’s screen.”  As these things go, this is high praise, especially for a site that has received criticism by those who think it is too uncritical about tech startups.  Zynga executives might want to read some of these informed comments that charge the company is beginning to look a lot like AOL, MySpace and Blackberry, has based the empire too much on Flash, needs to develop more advanced games, and should bring back the original talent pool.  They might want to ignore those who suggest Zynga’s time had come and gone and management has “screwed the pooch.”

Pets, especially dogs, seem to have a deserved place in digital hierarchy.