The release currently begins:

The Political and Economic Research Council (PERC), the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), and the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) seek your support in helping to reduce financial exclusion in the US by endorsing efforts to permit the full inclusion of fully-reported non-financial payment data in Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) regulated consumer credit files.

Come again?

Try this. Move the alphabet soup to the end of the release. If you make readers care about the case, they’ll find out who you are. Then, explain the problem in plain English. Instead of “helping to reduce financial exclusion in the US,” why not say, “Because many poor people pay their bills in cash, they don’t build up a credit history. This means they can only borrow from payday lenders, who slam them with insanely high interest rates.” A blander version of that statement appears about halfway through the current release, but most readers won’t get that far.

Here’s the point: Before readers can become interested in helping your cause, they have to understand why the status quo is no good. Put the problem up front and only offer the solution after you’ve explained it.

(Note that this is the opposite of the advice we’d offer an organization sending out a press release announcing success. For that type of communication you’d want to mimic the classic newspaper “inverted pyramid” construction, where the most newsworthy information comes first.)

The rest of the release is generally clear and well-written. For instance:

Non-financial payment data, both positive and negative, would be provided by utilities and telecommunications firms to national credit bureaus. Currently, only negative data, or delinquent payments, are reported. We believe that consumers should be rewarded for timely and accurate payments, not simply punished for delinquencies and defaults as is currently the prevailing practice.

The release could make an even stronger case by saying, as in the sign-on letter that a better credit reporting system could have mitigated the credit crisis. Not everyone cares that much about low-income consumers, but the broader economy matters to us all.

The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint was written in 2003. Last week The Wall Street Journal brought us news that Tufte’s criticisms have caught on—with a few. For example, T.X. Hammes argues in the Armed Forces Journal that PowerPoint has undermined the military’s whole decision-making culture:

Before PowerPoint, staffs prepared succinct two- or three-page summaries of key issues. The decision-maker would read a paper, have time to think it over and then convene a meeting with either the full staff or just the experts involved to discuss the key points of the paper. Of course, the staff involved in the discussion would also have read the paper and had time to prepare to discuss the issues. In contrast, today, a decision-maker sits through a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation followed by five minutes of discussion and then is expected to make a decision.

Hammes also echoes Tufte’s criticism that PowerPoint slides are often packed with too much information for the audience to absorb in the minute or so each is onscreen. Tufte blamed this effect for the Columbia space shuttle disaster of 2003, claiming that superiors failed to understand engineers’ warnings before the launch in part because of it. According to the Journal article, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board officially agreed with him. One shudders to think of the damage that could be done in the military.

José Bowen, a dean at Southern Methodist University, is also identified by the Journal as an anti-PowerPoint crusader. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Bowen encourages teachers to put their presentations online as podcasts, test students to make sure they watch them, and then devote class time to discussions of the material.

These efforts point in the same direction: productive discussions of complex problems are only really possible when people have had time to absorb and digest information. If organizations fail to allow for that, it’s an indictment of their management culture much more than it is of a piece of software. After all, Tufte has persuasively argued that poor graphic design in a slide-based presentation was responsible for the Challenger disaster in 1986, too—well before PowerPoint was in widespread use.

As Hammes puts it:

[PowerPoint] can be useful in situations it was designed to support — primarily, information briefs rather than decision briefs. For instance, it is an excellent vehicle for instructors. It provides a simple, effective way to share high-impact photos, charts, graphs, film clips and humor that illustrate a lecturer’s points. … Yet even in a classroom setting, it is not appropriate for developing a deep understanding of most subjects. For that, additional reading is required. There is a reason students cannot submit a thesis in PowerPoint format.

Just as we all still use QWERTY keyboards even though proponents of Dvorak have been arguing since the 1930s that we could all type faster with that key layout (convincingly or not, depending on which studies you read), we may be stuck with the imperfect PowerPoint for a good long while. But that doesn’t mean we have to be stuck with poor presentations or poor decisions. We can bring you advice on the presentations. The decisions are up to you.

Frankly, though, Mercy Corps’ Website is so slick as to be almost intimidating, not to the user but to the publications manager hoping to emulate them. So we thought we’d show you another exemplary organization: the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, recognized by Charity Navigator as one of the 10 most consistently well-managed charities in the country.

Unlike Mercy Corps, the Dana-Farber site has a conventional, almost staid design. Still, it does what it needs to do. It puts its mission in simple terms right at the top left of the home page, the first place your eyes go, and puts a personal story right in the middle of the page, set off in a different color, making it the second place your eyes are drawn. It isn’t obvious unless you refresh the page, but each time you come back you are shown a different one of what seem to be about half a dozen rotating stories.

Not that Dana-Farber is perfect. As usability expert Jakob Nielsen pointed out in that study we discussed previously: “Most people probably agree that, for example, it’s good to help … patients suffering from nasty diseases. … The question in a potential donor’s mind is how the organization proposes to help.” It might be better, therefore, if they pushed down or shrank the news in their central column in favor of at least a shortened version of the selling points they offer about themselves on their “Why Dana-Farber?” page. But they do a lot of things right without flash.

There’s more. First, Pew’s studies document the speed with which the Internet is going mobile. In 2000, fewer than half of American adults owned a cell phone, and fewer than half used the Internet. Nobody had wireless connections. (Users made dial-up connections and stored data on their own computers. Remember?)

Today, 85 percent of American adults own cell phones, and 54 percent connect to the Internet wirelessly. More than half now use what is called the “cloud”: “fast, mobile connections built around outside servers and storage,” as Rainie puts it. Think Web-based email as opposed to email you pull down to your hard drive using Outlook.

It was one kind of revolution when we got high-speed Internet connections in our homes. It will be another when we all carry the Internet in our pockets.

Pew’s surveys reveal that not everyone feels the same about the change. More than half of American adults-61 percent-haven’t yet begun accessing the Internet with a mobile device. Of the 39 percent who have, not all are happy about it. Rainie studied both groups and came up with 10 categories, including tips for reaching each. No publication manager will likely need to reach all of these audiences, but it’s worth trying to figure out which ones are yours.

Digital collaborators (8 percent of the population) are married, well-educated, high-earning, mostly male technophiles, about half with children. These guys love their computers and iPhones and know how to use them. You don’t reach them so much as allow them to reach you. They’re the ones who want to collaborate on new projects using your stuff, and they love it if you ask them for advice about new technology you want to try in your website redesign process.

Ambivalent networkers (7 percent) are mostly male college students and recent graduates. The kids don’t use email anymore; they text and chat on Facebook. They have just as much tech savvy as the digital collaborators, but while they feel they must always keep their mobile devices with them, they aren’t necessarily happy about being chained to them. They’re likely to appreciate it if you encourage them not to be online for awhile. More than half also own video game consoles, so think about how to reach them through games.

Media movers (7 percent) are mostly male, reasonably well-educated, thirtysomething email forwarders and vacation-album posters (87 percent own a digital camera). They’re less interested in the Internet as a place to express themselves or find information than as a place to socialize. Entice them by giving them tidbits worth sharing and making those tidbits easy to share.

Roving nodes (9 percent) are highly educated soccer moms who use email or texting to organize their lives. They especially like “cloud” functions they can check anywhere, along with alerts and reminders to help keep them on schedule.

Mobile newbies (8 percent) are older, less-educated women who rarely use computers but have all the zeal of recent converts when it comes to the mobile phone they just got within the last year. Make it easy for them to take the leap to the Web by offering lots of coaching.

Desktop veterans (13 percent) are middle-aged, well-off guys who have been using their high-speed Internet connections for about ten years now, and are content to keep it that way. They have no interest in using their cell phones to do anything but make phone calls. They want self-directed Web-based content without a lot of hand-holding.

Drifting surfers (14 percent) are middle-aged, moderately educated women who have computers and cell phones, but don’t use them all that much. They want to keep using traditional services or content. When they do turn to the Internet it is to gather basic information, and when they have to use an Internet-based service they want tech support because things often go awry on them.

The information encumbered (10 percent) are older white guys who have cell phones and Internet connections but hate using them. To them, technology is an annoyance and one that’s getting worse all the time. They also want to consume older forms of media, and when they must go online they want information filtered and presented to them using classic methods of organization (like indexes, for example, rather than Digg).

The tech indifferent (10 percent) are older, less-educated women. They don’t use the Internet, and while they have cell phones, they don’t particularly like them. Not much different are those who are completely off the net (14 percent-the final group), also older, less-educated women who have neither Internet connections nor cell phones. You might be able to draw in some of these folks with ultra-basic computing or Internet courses, but for the most part they’re best reached offline, in person or on paper.

Lee Rainie spoke at Julie Perlmutter’s by-invitation-only Web Manager’s Roundtable.

Personally, I’m a desktop veteran. How about you?

Naturally, everyone wanted to know how to snag and hold visitors to their sites-and he told them.But first, he reminded them what a very big place the Web is. Internet users expend as much effort filtering out information they don’t want as finding what they do. One-half use a customizable information filter, like a Google News alert.

So how do you get visitors past their filter and onto your site? Rainie suggests a four-step approach to get in sync with today’s “new pattern of communication and influence”:

Attention. Find new visitors in out-of-the-ordinary places, which for many organizations means Facebook or Twitter. Seek out people who are trying to exert influence in your field, whether they are big names in online conversations or humble personal bloggers.

Acquisition. Make it easy to learn about you. Go past search engine optimization and converse about your work, online and in-person. Express collegiality with links or referrals to other entities in your field, some of whom are likely to reciprocate.

Assessment. Make it easy to assess the value of what you offer. Of course, the user ultimately decides whether your work is relevant, but you can demonstrate that you’re trustworthy. Link to all of your sources, archive everything, and when you make mistakes, apologize.

Action. It’s also up to the user to take action in the real world, but you can make it easier to take action online. Offer opportunities for meaningful comment, and be sure to respond.

Lee Rainie spoke at Julie Perlmutter’s invitation-only Web Manager’s Roundtable.

The Furrow’s history offers several important lessons to the modern marketer. First, The Furrow works as a marketing tool in large part because its articles don’t push John Deere products. They offer straight news on trends in agriculture, developments in crop science, and innovations in weed control. Check out, for example, “Cover Crop Craze”(PDF), which surveys what farmers are planting to retain nutrients in their soils after harvest; “Living with less water” (PDF), which explores how they’re adjusting to dwindling water supplies; or “Space-Aged War on Weeds” (PDF), which details how robots, lasers, and computerized maps may come to replace herbicides in the near future.

Second, John Deere uses potential customers’ interest in The Furrow to generate sales leads. You can’t subscribe to The Furrow through John Deere headquarters. The only way to get it is to put in a request with your local John Deere dealer, and people who want the latest news on farming trends and developments are likely to be excellent prospects for buying farm equipment.

Finally, John Deere launched The Furrow at just the right time to take advantage of a leap forward in communications: in 1896 the United States Postal Service (then the Post Office Department) started delivering mail to rural areas for free. (Before then farmers had to travel long distances to pick up their mail at a post office, or else pay a private delivery service.)

Today, of course, we’re experiencing leaps in communications technology every five years or so. The last leap brought marketers the ability to reach customers whenever they sat down to check their email or surf the Web; it appears the next leap will make it possible to reach them wherever they are at any time, on their iPhones or the equivalent. Mail delivery spawned junk mail, email brought spam, and surely portable technology will have marketing intrusions equally as unwanted and annoying. The marketers who stand out will be those who follow the example of The Furrow and draw in their customers with information they actually want and can’t get anywhere else.

To learn how well readers comprehend what they’re scanning, Nielsen and his colleagues tested links from 20 websites representing a wide range of sectors: business-to-business, e-commerce, financial institutions, government, health care, and technology. Users were shown the first 11 characters of each link and asked to predict what they’d find if they clicked on it. They were also shown each truncated link mixed into a list of ten and asked to pick the one that would get them some piece of requested information. For example, one of the ten links led to Ann Taylor’s e-commerce site and users were asked to “purchase an Ann Taylor gift certificate.”

The best links squeezed “user- and action-oriented terms” into those all-important first 11 characters. The Ann Taylor link scored the best in the study because its full link text was “Gift Cards & E-Gift Certificates”-making the first 11 characters “Gift Cards .” Successful links also:

• Used plain language
• Used specific terminology
• Followed conventions for naming common features

Unsuccessful links pushed their most important information to the end. The worst-scoring link, for example, was one from Chase Bank whose full text read “Introducing Chase Exclusive Special Benefits for Checking Customers.” The first 11 characters-”Introducing”-gave users no hint about where the link might lead. Unsuccessful links also used bland or generic words, or even worse, made-up terms.

Nielsen points out that, in reality, users don’t always stop after the first 11 characters. If the first 11 characters catch their eyes, they will go on to read the rest of the link, which should more fully-and accurately-inform them about what they’ll get if they click and how it will be different from anything else they might find. But if the first 11 characters don’t give them most of what they need, they’ll never read the rest.

Recently the organization launched Version 3 of their site, aimed at “making personal CaringBridge websites easier to use, visually streamlined and more customizable.” A new feature is a Spanish-language option.

We talked with founder and executive director Sona Mehring about the thinking behind the new features.

What did you learn from your users that helped you shape Version 3?

We have feedback elements available on our site, and through the years people have been very proactive about providing that. We also do surveys periodically to ask users what new features they’d like and what they’d like to see improved. In our most recent survey we collected over 4,000 responses.

Three themes emerged. Users wanted to be able to share photos and integrate them into their journals. They wanted additional control of their own privacy. And they wanted to be able to personalize the look and feel of their own sites more.

We keep abreast of trends in the industry: what are the bigger, more broadly public social networks doing? There we also saw a trend toward more privacy control. Since it’s important for us to continue to reach more people all the time, we also added the multilingual component as a way to serve Spanish-speaking families.

A lot of our feedback on the site also consists of users asking us not to change anything, so we have tried to be conservative, keeping the site as familiar as possible even as we add new enhancements.

How are you measuring the success of Version 3?

We are trying to make sure that people are still engaging with the service actively: that the number of new sites continues to grow at the same rate and that they are continuing to leave journal entries at the same rate.

For example, we now average around 180 new sites a day. That’s been growing at an average of 25 to 35 percent a month, so we’re looking to make sure that that growth rate is sustained.

Those are among the key findings of a recent study by usability guru Jakob Nielsen. If he is right, nonprofits leave a huge amount of money on the table. Today, they receive about 10 percent of their donations online, a figure destined to balloon to over 50 percent by 2020, by Nielsen’s estimate.

Nielsen paired similar nonprofits’ sites and observed how users interacted with each of them as they decided which should receive their donations.  Those observations revealed that by far the most important factor in users’ decisions was whether or not the organization offered a clear explanation of its mission, goals, objectives, and work prominently on its home page.

Nielsen cautions that this explanation needs to be specific to attract the potential donor’s interest:

Most people probably agree that, for example, it’s good to help impoverished residents of developing countries or patients suffering from nasty diseases. … The question in a potential donor’s mind is how the organization proposes to help.

Conversely, Nielsen found that the biggest donation-killers were about equally divided between poor design on the one hand (including cluttered pages and unintuitive site architecture), and writing badly suited for the Web on the other (including unclear or missing information and confusing terms).

So who does it right? We asked Kurt Hansen, founder of CharityWeb, which has processed over $150 million in donations to 100-plus clients since 1997. At the top of his list of fundraising superstars:

• CaringBridge®
• The Make-a-Wish Foundation®
• Mercy Corps

Check them out.

I took a stroll around the Web and inventoried some of the most frequently used methods for soliciting opt-in email addresses:

• Most common by far is simply to ask readers to sign up for “news and updates.”
• Many blogs require visitors to leave their email addresses in order to comment on posts.
• “Test” sites often invite visitors to take a quiz and then create an account to see the result. (For example, http://www.intelligencetest.com.)
• Lots of Flash game sites require registration either to play or to post a high score. Often these games are themselves created to promote some product or movie (For example, this game promoting the latest James Bond movie).
• News sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post often require free registration to read their content.
• Many sites ask for visitors’ email in exchange for a white paper or a podcast.
• Some sites have poll applets that require visitors to sign in to offer their opinions.
• Finally, some news sites and blogs invite readers to submit story ideas or links to their own work, or to pitch stories for payment (like Escapist, for example).

We’re about to try one or two of these techniques. Have you used any? How have they worked? Did we miss any?