Given a choice, the harder something is to use the less people will use it. The more difficult something is to read the fewer people will read it.

Most organizations don’t bother measuring the difficulty donors have in using their online donate pages. Nor do they bother measuring the readability of what they write and stick in the mail.

Countless hours and dollars are spent in meetings and on designers creating ‘award winning’ web pages that glow in the dark. Virtually no time and effort is spent measuring the ease or difficulty of their use by donors.

Same with copy. Countless re-writes and debates over colors, adjectives, and copy length. All of this done without the foggiest idea of the ease or difficulty the donor has in reading it.

Our sector spends millions and millions on making things more complex and only a tiny amount understanding how these things are used. If ever there were a trade where the producer is disconnected from the consumer, ours certainly ranks near the top.

We spend so much time and effort waxing eloquently on fundraising trends. Or minutely analyzing campaigns and their transactional data to the point of paralysis. Yet we constantly turn a blind eye and deaf ear to the donor frustration and the consequent loss of response, retention and loyalty our complexity spawns.

As the AFP’s International Conference gets underway in Baltimore this weekend … as the philosophers start sermonizing … and consultants start consulting, it’s a good time to remind each other that the sophisticated and complex is seldom the friend of good fundraising.

Or, as John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, and Tom’s and my old boss, warned: ‘The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.”

Roger

P.S. It’s in this context of the importance of paying more attention to measuring donor usability that I’m preparing a series of posts – “The Hidden Leaks in Your Retention Bucket” — that will begin next week.

So, if you’d like to contribute some suggestions on donor usability problems or inordinate complexities that interfere with donor retention and loyalty, I’d sure welcome them.