In May 2021, I produced a fundraising event for the Francophone School of Oakland. We successfully raised them cash in their first ever Zoom auction and online day.
They originally were thinking of having an online gala to match their previous in-person galas, but I came back with the idea of an entertaining Portal Day so families could celebrate together and be reminded of why they love the school.
I created teasers for them, made fliers, helped with email communication, built an event website, ran ticketing, produced the zoom show and even made appearances at their online school assemblies to tempt the students!
Here are some examples of consumer website platforms
WordPress
Wix
Squarespace
Weebly
Google Sites
Godaddy Website Builder
I know there are many professional sites built on these platforms, but I don’t believe they’re the best solution for most uses.
Strategy First
The most common problem with these sites built on WordPress or whatever is that the strategy is low priority.
Imagine you have a closet with lots of little shelves and nooks in it. You just moved in to this place, so you start trying to find items that fit these shelves. I guess the dustpan can go above the cereal, even though I don’t want dust falling on the food. I guess I need to buy a new vacuum because my current one doesn’t fit quite right. My one toaster fits so well here, but there are three identical spots. Maybe I gotta buy two more toasters.
The shelves are supposed to support your stuff. You’re not supposed to serve the shelves.
When we’re using website templates, we get tempted to have more pages because their available or pushing the crucial content to a backburner because the template dictates it. There are buttons for all my social networks, but what if my instagram has 20 followers and makes me look terrible? Obey wordpress and add that button.
Responsiveness
Most templates for the consumer platforms are mobile responsive – they work on phones and computers, but the response is not necessarily great. A hand-coded website can adjust intentionally and predictably on multiple devices. When I build a site, i’m particular about getting each one to look right. WordPress doesn’t care. Things will be cropped weird and certain things might be invisible.
Cobwebs
I wrote a little about how people make dead sites and this is an issue. People get really into the updateability of these platforms and their site is dependent on constant updates. Problem with that: we might not want to always be updating.
Inspiration
We get inspired to change something on our site and these platforms make it easy. Easy is great, right? Well, maybe it’s not that easy after all. If we start with a strategy that took a lot of thinking and we build a great site that conveys our message to our people, the web building platform can’t redo all that work for us. Our brains and our time and our advisors have to do that redoing. Doing quick updates can break the tons of work that we put into the original. Starting with a new brand and strategy and message is probably not going to be something we have bandwidth to do.
The Effort
This stuff can all be corrected with more effort. These are not dead end problems with the platforms. They can be fixed with more work and creative problem solving. It’s just not really that cool.
You want a car that is huge for cruising around smoothly and a car you can take on quick trips and park easily. You get two cars, or you get a car that’s a compromise. You don’t get a custom built car that can be size-adjusted at a whim. That car’s gonna be expensive, you’re gonna have grease under your nails everywhere you go, and it would probably not even work very well in the first place.
If people like us and talk about us we can use those positive blurbs as kudos. We wanna change our subjective statements objective ones.
Saying “I’m a great yo-yo performer” is subjective, but saying “Jojo Siwa said ‘She’s a great yo-yo performer’” is objective.
Kudos from experts are best, kudos from clones of our prospective buyers are second best, kudos from strangers on the internet is third best.
Experts include…
People with a good credit in the wheelhouse of the comment eg “Nearly impossible” Jeff Tuck – Harvard Astrophysicist
Famous people usually
Press
The purpose of kudos is to prove value. So, if my value is that I provide the ultimate cocktail experience with friends… a better quote
“My gimlet shot out my nose” – Jane Doe
…is better than…
“The kids loved it!” – Tom Cruise
We only need kudos when we need them to fill a gap. It saves a lot of energy if we’re not chasing down every testimonial from every client. If i have 10 perfect kudos, I definitely don’t need one more.
☝️ we had four points we wanted to make. He had two of these quotes. He requested the two others.
☝️ he had worked on a project with David Copperfield
I’m blogging because I have to. Seth Godin told me to do something regularly as a practice, so I’m doing what he said. He’s right. Taking the magic out of the creative work is really how to make more creative work. Being consistent is good for my sanity, and has really pushed me to make something up that I would have maybe never done. I took a break for a little while, but I’m back baby ( famous last blog post phrase )
It seems like some non-profit membership organizations are trying to avoid money. They spend a lot of time trying to wrangle volunteers and continuously lower or maintain membership fees in the face of inflation. What if the non-profit’s goal was not to avoid money, but to do something great for society? I’m being weird — of course it’s trying to do something great for society. Getting more members, getting more money, and being able to hire qualified pros seem like things that would help.
Much of the erroneous thinking in these groups comes from the kindheartedness that attracts leaders to participate in the non-profits. The moves may be associated with being gentle and thoughtful, but really they’re not being kind and sweet to the mission.
It’s like when men wonder why they don’t get girls and they call themselves a “nice guy.” I’ll call it nice guy syndrome (NGS). Dude, you’re not rejected because you’re a nice guy. You’re rejected because you’re not attractive.
Solidness is attractive.
Power is attractive.
Personality is attractive.
Honesty is attractive.
Generosity is attractive.
Benevolence is attractive.
The flitch comes down to *Something*
The org has to be SOMETHING. It has to be substantial. It needs a brand, a personality, a direction, and a momentum.
Price
If price of membership is $20 / year, that’s not really a group I need to be a part of. It barely exists. Sure I might throw them two tens, but what about next year? I don’t care and I don’t know why they’d care if I’m a member for 20 bucks. NGS says lower the price and more people can join.
Lowering the price isn’t a technique for getting more members. It’s a technique for getting fewer.
Exclusion
We think when we’re losing membership it’s because we’re excluding people. No, those people are excluding the org. If I have a chess club, I need to exclude people who don’t like chess. If I want members, I need to exclude people that don’t LOVE chess too. Otherwise, what are the chess lovers joining? Nothing. Gotta be something. Gotta stand for things. Gotta stand against things. NGS opens the doors to everyone so that maybe we can inspire someone to eventually love chess.
Benefits
The members pay for things all the time like food and cars. Those things have value to them. We don’t want to lower prices, we want to increase value. Using the network effect, hive minds, herd action, systemizing, and pooling resources (like money) orgs can provide more services year after year to members. If the services have value that members can’t find anywhere else, they will stick around and participate. NGS keeps us feeling good about what we’re already doing and wonder why people don’t like us.
Benevolence
Related to exclusion, members want to have a badge to wear of goodness. Not just outwardly to get status, but to feel good about what they’re doing in the world. Members want to know they’re joining a group that’s doing something good. We have have to do good things and tell the members about it. NGS makes us assume that we’re doing good just by volunteering or working too hard or whatever and we assume everyone knows it.
Back Patting
Strong growing organizations remind their members over and over again what the name of the organization is and the good things they’re doing for the members and the world. Over and over. Say our name. Say it again. Think of AA, each member says they’re an alcoholic at least once per meeting. They need extreme buy-in if their erratic, undisciplined members are going to tear apart their entire way of life in order to get recovery. NGS thinks that humbleness is purity, but when an organization enforces or models humbleness, it’s really forcing its members to diminish themselves.
Barrier to Entry
If someone needs to climb over a wall to get in, they have to climb over a wall to get out. NGS rolls out a million red carpets and opens up all the doors and nobody really wants to come in because they can see what’s inside — nothing… or should I say not SOMETHING.
I will not divulge the secret identity of the man behind Billy The Mime, but this dude is good! You might have seen Billy in his successful Hollywood shows or at Edinburgh Fringe or opening for Penn & Teller or in the movie The Aristocrats. He’s hilarious, awesome, and precise.
Recently, he got a new workspace that has as much room as a stage, but he didn’t need it to gain the success he has. I visited his home and he showed me where he created his performances. His home isn’t tiny, but the space he worked was about 7′ by 3′. He didn’t get a perfect setup before starting. He didn’t even get a perfect setup before continuing. He worked for years (maybe a decade) on this little rectangle between a couch and a piano and he took those creations to tens of thousands of people.
No matter how much we refine our process, environment, tools, mission, etc. the creation process will still be very imperfect and messy and limiting in some way.
When we tell people our intentions, it changes the context of how they see our actions. Not just does it make us possibly more sympathetic, it also may make us more dependable.
Even Free Shoes
Even when things are free, they can be a difficult sell. Think about these three possible first sentences. A stranger approaches with shoes in hand and says one of these three things…
“Here are some free shoes”
“These are great, top of the line shoes brand new”
“The way I spread joy in the world is I try to find someone every day who I think is perfect for a new pair of shoes”
The same person could say all three of them, but when they let their heart shine, or whatever, the shoe fits. We hear that person’s ethos and it changes the shoes for us. Hearing about the heart of the giver means that we know a lot of background of the product.
If we believe them, we know that the giver wants us to have something nice, they believe that the shoe is actually right for us, and that the stakes are high for them to get it right — as well as other positive assumptions.
For creative work that’s generous, we need fuel. We can’t be generous if we don’t have anything to give. More clearly, we can’t feel and act generously if we feel we have nothing to give. Fuel prices are going up. Validation from strangers is freaking expensive. Validation from loved ones is hard to accept.
We can fuel up for free with a small time and energy commitment. My family makes two lists. We try to do it every day.
A gratitude list
A level up list
Gratitude
Make it easy. Make it ludicrous. If I can’t think of anything… “air.” Who cares? This is a list for us. “coffee” usually makes the list. Stupid positivity is better than genius negativity.
Level Up
Leveling up is important in treating life like a game. These are kinda tricky to think of at first, but you get better at it. What’s a thing that happened today that will make tomorrow easier, better, more fun, etc. “got a new shelf” “figured out a new way to respond to email” “finally found a dependable plumber”
The opposite
The opposite of these lists is wishing and playing a narrative of being stuck. This is not about wanting. This is about having. That’s how we get power. We also get power by being able. The level up list shows us that we are moving forward by our own volition. Let’s get listing so we can give more to the world.
We have a big gap from what we see in ourselves to what our business is to what our service of our business is to what the result of the service is to the experience of our end-user/ fan / customer is. It really helps to get an outside eye on our stuff. But that outside opinion is not useful if the opinionator doesn’t know what the heck problem we’re trying to solve. So, when we ask friends questions like…
These questions are subjective and really don’t get us what we need.
We start by being candid about what we’re trying to be for our people, then we ask the real question of a friend…
Does this communicate my value to the right people?
If my friend knows what’s important in what i do to my people, my friend won’t be a genius marketer all of a sudden, but we can at least flitch our way to better promo.
People like putting contact forms on their sites. Some people have no way of contacting them except thru the form. It seems to be a way to get visitors to comply and give us the exact data that we want. Then, the hope is we can automate the relationship so we can work with a million clients at once… or at least quickly eliminate people who aren’t gonna be clients. Or, maybe they’re afraid of giving out their email address? I don’t understand the threat there, really.
We need to figure out the balance of what serves us and what serves our visitor.
ONE: Users are seeking a relationship,
so the more we seek to streamline the interaction — make it mechanical and assembly line — the more everyone suffers. The relationship and the conversation give us value as service providers. Humanity is worth something.
TWO: wasting time
Many people have autofill in their browsers now, so if a form is set up correctly (I’d say less than 20% are) the browser will fill in the user’s details for the really repetitive stuff. But there are often additional form fields that take some thinking and typing and I don’t want that as a user.
No matter how normal a form is, acclimating to a new interface takes mental power and commitment from a user.
THREE: something’s gonna break
Imagine this: you fill out a form, you submit it, nobody receives it, you have no idea. This happens all the time. This is not a nightmare. This is very common.
Contact forms are another layer of dependency for communication. They are another part that can break. They can break on the backend or the frontend, or there could be user error (eg: I thought I hit the ‘send’ button). Email is already not totally dependable. There are spam filters on sending and receiving ends, black lists, weird things and whatnot like email server downtime. These things break in just pure email sending from my gmail inbox to yours. If someone thinks they sent me a message and I don’t get it we’re all screwed.
FOUR: taking away tools
When I fill out a form on a website instead of using my email app,
I can’t CC or BCC anyone else who’s important.
I don’t have it in my email history.
I don’t have formatting options or other tools I might have in my email app that I use regularly.
FIVE: asking too much / wrong
So many forms ask for stuff that might not matter. I might just need a person to call me, but I am suddenly required to fill in the date of the gig I want to book them for? I don’t want to book them. I want to talk to them and I don’t know the dates of my very high-budget project. Again a waste of time and headaches trying to fill out the form most honestly and least confusingly.
The solution is skip the form
The solution is just don’t have them. Have an email address visible on a site, have it clickable to open up the user’s mail app or selectable so they can copy and paste. Have a phone number too, if possible. Start a real conversation. Figure out how to make it easy and be responsive. This is the answer.
As a new father on Father’s Day, I’m seeing how insecure I feel about how I’m showing up. This insecurity is more limiting than any of my other limitations. I see that when my dad was feeling insecure he was mean because he wanted control. He wanted to make good happen and he couldn’t wait. The self-hatred he felt held him back from being the gentle, sweet, compassionate person that he was inside.
This parallels to exactly what I have seen over the past few years in having so many candid conversations with circus and variety entertainers. When we are looking at ourselves and not sure how we’re doing, or afraid of fucking up, we are extremely limited. We put out bad work or no work or work in some weird direction that doesn’t serve anyone.
Proof of our good is out there. My wife is constantly telling me how awesome I’m doing. I have trouble absorbing it. Today, she gave me a Father’s Day card with so much encouragement and just objective truth written in it. I read it three times. I’ll probably read it more before I go to bed. Each time I could absorb it and accept it a little more, but it was hard.
As creators, we often buy the hype and “compare our insides to others’ outsides.” We forget about our own outsides. We forget about how inspiring, successful, genius, whatever others think we are. There is a lot of truth in the views of others.
What’s the hype about me? What does that look like?
I encourage people to go look at what they really look like to others. I get a confidence boost by looking at my online reviews. I get a confidence boost by looking at my resume. It is not bad to have confidence. It will not make me lethargic. It will give me the fuel to give more to the world. It will give me the energy to give more to my son. It will give me the security to offer vulnerability and true heart to the things I do. It will make my world a little less distorted.
Happy Father’s Day. Believe your own hype. Be a strong dad for yourself. Be a hype daddy.
We don’t have bandwidth to do everything and sometimes we’re most helped by doing a part of something that has a big effect, but doesn’t finish the job.
Here’s a question I posted on facebook and nobody had the answer. What’s the word for doing that big first chunk?
In lumber, a flitch is a rough cut of wood. It gets you a chunk of wood that you can stack and start working with.
Let’s say I want to write a book at a table, but my chair broke. I could cut a few flitches out of a log, nail them together and have chair.
I did not
I didn’t create a haven for writing, but I made something that works. It’s ugly. It’s rough. I might get splinters. I might not be comfy, but I can sit and write and that was my goal in the first place. I didn’t work for a week making a drawing, measuring, getting all the tools together, cutting, sanding, painting and whatnot. I’m a writer (in this scenario) not a carpenter.
I did not skip it completely and sit on the floor crying about how I’ll never write again.
Find the flitch
As freelancers, we are helped by finding the flitch. We can take big chunks out of our projects. We can be aware of our desire to create elegance from the start, or our feeling of futility.
Next up
Part of effective flitching is knowing what’s next. We can…
Leave it as it is. We have a rough chair that we’ll use forever.
Iterate with another flitch. The chair’s giving me splinters and it’s hard on my butt. hard on my butt is the worst part, because my writing is cut short, so maybe I cut out an indent in the chair so it fits my tush better. That might take care of most of my splinters too
I become a carpenter writer. I explore improving my chair making skills or maybe I just really enjoy making this one chair.
The important part of this stuff is that we do it all deliberately.
