Can you actually make mass emails popular? According to Ashley Budd from Cornell University’s alumni engagement and fundraising division, she’s done just that by fundamentally changing the university’s approach to newsletters and call to action emails.
Her strategies have boosted open and click through rates far above industry standards. In a recent member call, she shared samples of what makes her emails so popular.
Read moreThe subject line of the very first edition of the New Thinking newsletter by Gerry McGovern was ‘Massively parallel societies’ and opened like this:
Language is the invention of a co-operative society, and we wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t co-operated.
This was on June 24, 1996 and Gerry wrote about how multimedia and the Internet would hopefully help us realize again that we are nothing without each other.
Since then his monthly newsletter has gained traction and readers around the world, including yours truly and he’s kept doing it now with a weekly dose of provocative and thoughtful insights.
Besides his newsletter, Gerry is perhaps even more known as the inventor of the Top Task framework, the author of several books and his relentless focus on helping organizations become more customer centric on the Web.
Recently his focus has shifted to sustainability with his most recent book titled World Wide Waste. Gerry is based in Ireland and also our expert of the month.
Read moreWould you like flexible working hours, working from home when you want to, unlimited vacation and no more uncomfortable salary negotiations? Or perhaps it sounds too good to be true?
Our Frankfurt-based member byte5 has been living out these elements since before the pandemic with a specific no-pain focus. It has helped shape their company culture, but what is the secret and how has it really changed work?
byte5 works on business-critical web projects, in particular based on Laravel and also using other tools like Umbraco. Their radical approach to work has been featured by Handelsblatt, FAZ and other notable German news outlets.
Read moreThe voice story still has three leading roles: Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Bixby, but according to Jake DiMare at Voicify, the plot is quickly expanding to include so much more.
The early voice app wave laid the groundwork with relatively simple brand experiences deployed in walled-garden ecosystems. Now, brands imagine far more valuable conversational experiences driven by domain-trained AI, custom voices, deeper integration, and a familiar build once/deploy anywhere strategy.
In a recent member conference call, Jake DiMare shared a few examples demonstrating how yesterday's voice apps are becoming tomorrow's conversational custom assistants and unpack what's driving these changes.
Read moreChoosing an Intranet. The project that makes you feel as if you're on a five-year hamster wheel. Is there a better way?
Brian Tomlinson at Hamburg-based real estate firm Engel & Völkers has spent the last few years trying to find a modern, best in class intranet solution that avoids the cyclical hell that we all want to avoid - and has managed to learn a thing or two along the way.
In a recent member conference call, he went through his process for finding and selecting a solution. Everything from identifying the pain points to be fixed to ensuring it has all of the features that you need and finally selling it to the people who hold the purse strings.
Read moreHow do you best provide organisations with a no nonsense way to gather and organise content?
This was the original problem that Alice Deer and her co-founder Angus Edwardson set out to solve some 10 years, when they founded a software firm called Gather. Quickly it became GatherContent and their initial approach was to provide an easy way to collect and structure client content. Painlessly was the keyword back then, where many customers were profoundly loud about how their disliked working with content in their CMS.
Fast forward to today, and Alice has been the CEO in a small business with 20 employees for 10 years. In this function, Alice has been going through all the typical entrepreneurial roles of hiring, dealing with finance, marketing and naturally also speaking with customers.
Earlier this month another big milestone was achieved as GatherContent was acquired by Bynder, so now her role is shifting once again. Now she is General Manager in the GatherContent part of the bigger business based out of her home in Brighton, UK. She is also our expert of the month.
Read moreWhile we have been producing digital content for more than two decades, Content Operations (ContentOps) remains an emerging practice which many organisations haven’t yet fully taken to heart. There’s related terms like content strategy, there’s plenty of tools that look at topics like content marketing, but what about the actual operations of your digital content?
To address the challenges that come with content operations at scale, there’s a shift happening in the tech landscape, or more specifically in your content toolstack. Creating content on the web is far from the same as it used to be just a few years ago and the recent acquisition of GatherContent by Bynder, signals stronger future investments in this area and perhaps the arrival of next level content operations.
Read moreIf you want to make work better, you also need to look at how you do meetings. Meetings is a big part of work and hybrid meetings is still a fairly new trade. How do we create a good experience for both physical and remote attendance?
There’s also the technical subtleties, like finding the mute button, being too loud, decent sound quality, turning the camera on/off, background photos are much more.
As always, I find it really interesting to learn from how practitioners are approaching it. Thomas Dugaro, heads up IT Collaboration at Hamburg-based publishing giant Gruner + Jahr and at a recent peer group meeting, he generously shared some of their initial thinking on hybrid meetings.
Read moreMaterial extraction and the subsequent production of those materials into products is one of the leading causes of climate change, and product manufacturers are under increasing pressure to reduce this impact and close the loop on product manufacturing.
At circulist, founder & CEO Nick Gonios, is leading a mission driven venture and building a tomorrow where products are made to be used rather than thrown away. Where circular design and intelligent ecosystems will enable us to reuse and recycle natural resources, and where products can be good for people and the planet.
Nick is based in Sydney, Australia and focused on the current wicked problem of overconsumption and growing e-waste and systemic challenges. In a recent member call, Nick introduced us to Circular Economy version 2 which better drives positive impact.
Read moreIf you have been following privacy expert Tim Walters for the last couple of years, you might have noticed that he added ‘Trust Me’ to his Twitter name, so that the name on account today is: Tim "Trust Me" Walters.
Back in 2019 he famously said that “Trust Is A Prerequisite For Great Customer Experiences”. Today, as we’ve arrived in 2022, it is just a bit longer since the implementation of GDPR, the major privacy regulation by the EU.
Tim has carefully studied how privacy and trust is changing and how it impacts our work as digital leaders. In a recent member call, Tim shared what organizations must do in 2022 to create competitive experiences in today’s privacy-centric environment. According to Tim, businesses competing for consumer’s attention and loyalty, need to look at the evolving data privacy challenge as about far more than securing customer data and satisfying regulators.
Read more“I add full value to my organisation at my uttermost capacity”
After how many days post-first day into your current employment were you able to convey this statement with confidence? And how many days does it take a new colleague in your team/company to do the same?
These are good questions to make you think and to help us with some of the answers, we recently did our very first member call with insights from Southeast Asia. Tim Jessen, who is a Boye alumni and our previous Member Experience Manager relocated from Aarhus to Kuala Lumpur a few years ago. Now, he’s working as Senior Manager, Strategic Talent Management at SOCAR Mobility Malaysia, Malaysia’s No. 1 car-sharing company. Tim is busy hiring and has been working on how to better address employee onboarding issues
In the call he shared how he closes the time and money-sensitive gap for new employees from being a ‘new-joiner’ to becoming a fully assimilated, high-performing employee. Actually, as he said, it’s not just about closing the gap. The bigger picture is that a bad onboarding impacts both turnover and morale.
Read morePurchasing Bitcoin is not quite the same achievement as landing on Mars, even though the recent controversial Crypto.com ad with the famous actor Matt Damon might give you that impression.
At our annual member kick-off in Florida last month, one of the more engaging sessions was titled:
'State of the Blockchain - Autonomous Organizations, Distributed Finance, NFT's and the Role of CMS'
Hosted by Shawn Moore from Solodev, it sparked quite some reflection among the digital leaders. Interestingly, all crypto players have really nice websites and the entire field of crypto is clearly both fast-moving and loud.
Read moreHow do you make Google love your website? At a recent peer group meeting, Ture Alsvik gave his presentation a Valentine’s Day-theme and shared his insights on how you build a long term and good relationship between your website and the giant search engine.
Ture is SEO Manager at Lomax, a Danish business supplies and equipment firm with roots back to the 60’s, but today a modern e-commerce firm. As an SEO manager, his time is divided between the content, the technical dimension and naturally a fair bit of reporting. Previously he worked 12 years at travel firm Spies, where he also worked at the intersection of traffic, visibility and conversion.
He’s based north of wonderful Copenhagen and also our expert of the month.
Read moreEmergencies—landing a malfunctioning plane, resuscitating a heart attack victim, or avoiding a head-on car crash—all require split-second decisions that can mean life or death. Fortunately, designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts. In her new book called Life and Death Design, Katie Swindler brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely.
Katie works as is Innovation Design Strategist, Sr. Manager at insurance firm Allstate in Chicago, IL and recently hosted a member call introducing her book. She included some of the many insightful stories featured in the book and told us more about what she learned while researching on the topic. Below you’ll find my notes with some of the highlights from the call.
She opened with a true story on how famous astronaut Neil Armstrong once had a life and death experience and turned to reading the manual.
Read moreHow do you make design accessible for everyone in your organisation? One option is to build an internal design community of practice, drip feed your colleagues with inspiration, cultivate a sharing culture and at some point let it go.
When I first spoke to Grace de Athayde, back in circa mid 2020, I was preparing our first European conference during the pandemic and Grace wanted tell her story about building a UX Community at Danfoss which went from zero to 200 members in less than a year.
In the process, she made it quite clear, including on her opening slides at that time, that she was not an expert, but I think everyone who has met Grace in the past years, would say that she’s very knowledgeable about user experience and design.
These days she is wrapping up at Danfoss and getting ready to start a new job at the LEGO Group as Sr. Manager Digital Product Design as of 1 February.
She’s also our first expert of the month for 2022.
Read moreAbout | Blog | Contact | Impact | Newsletter