The universe tends toward entropy, toward ever-increasing complexity.  But you and I don’t need to be unindicted co-conspirators.  We can fight for simple.

Fighting for simple isn’t simple.  Complexity is a tricky bastard.  He will plead “it’s just one more” for every field in a form, every message in a communication, every step in a process, and every snowflake in an avalanche.  And he will tell you it is easier, faster, and/or cheaper to do things his way.

And the thing is that he will be right.  Gerry McGovern, the digital experience guru, put it well when he said “Invariably, the cheaper and faster option is the one that pushes the complexity onto the customer—the person who needs to use the thing.”

But a willingness to put in the hard work to make things easy pays off.  As Steve Jobs put it, “Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end, because once you get there, you can move mountains.”

Easy things make our brains happy, and happy brains do the things we want them to (like donate).  Easy things are more persuasive.  Simply named stocks go up; simply named people become president.

The value is there, but we must put our shoulder to the plow.  Here are some of my simplicity goals; I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments section:

Never take your constituent out of the means they’ve chosen for an interaction.  How does a donor who made their monthly gift online increase their donation amount?  If the answer is “they call us and we change it for them,” you are substituting their preferred way of doing business for yours. Methinks you are less likely to get that extra $5 a month.

Oh, it’s easier for you if the donor goes online to make a memorial gift?  Guess what – some people want to call it in or mail it in and get the same card to the family they could get online.

Someone complains on Facebook?  They probably want to deal with it on Facebook.  You don’t need to have a full knock-down-drag-out in front of Zuckerberg and everyone, but showing that you are willing to talk with people in their medium of choice unless they are making a virtual scene encourages others to engage you.

(Within reason: no donor expects the face-to-face canvasser to be standing there nine months later to keep talking about their monthly gift.)

Allow a similar experience across media. One reason channel is only a good in/our segmentation tactic, and not a full segmentation strategy, is you don’t want to change your message across media.  If you have a matching gift offer offline, you should be able to put in your credit card online to access it.  Same thing is (especially) true for membership renewal.  If you have membership or quasi-membership, you should make it clear that any donation anywhere renews their membership for another year.

Speak and write simply. No acronyms: you talk about your KPIs or LMICs; donors say WTF and STFU.

Are people malnourished and underprivileged? Or are they hungry and poor? Things aren’t challenging. Or suboptimal.  They are bad.

If you struggle with this, know I do too.  I was looking up the Albert Camus quote about Sisyphus being happy  (because it’s a great thing to struggle for an important goal) to put in this post, but had to slap myself across the face.

Design simply.  Your designer loves small fonts, gray text, white text on dark backgrounds, and anything without a serif.  Of course, your designer has a monitor larger than your first TV and the eyesight of a 20-something.

Your donors don’t.

Good design is actually simple design.  Here’s the Apple home page as I am writing this.

I’ve shrunk it.  You can still read it, right?

Insist on simplicity for yourself.  How often have you said “I’m really looking forward to that day-long meeting with my direct mail vendor.”?  OK, how many times have you said that without irony?

Our direct marketing world is a complex world and the devil indeed loves details.  But that doesn’t mean you should have to sit through 24 preliminary slides because their statistical package and presentation template has 24 preliminary slides.

How are you working to make things simpler for your donors?

Nick