Offline and Online Spending

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I'm going to talking about a case study for a major worldwide charity. It doesn't matter who the charity is, what matters is that what they've done happens in so many different organisations. It's a typical scenario and in today's times, with people having less money to spend, the important thing is to think about where you're going to spend it. That's why what I want to talk about today is offline and online spending and the division between the two.

I've done a little slide here with different circles and the challenge that I'm going to talk about is when I was brought into this charity in the beginning of the year to coordinate seven different offline user journeys to one single homepage on the website. I was really excited. I thought this is a really cool project, there's going to be a lot of TV, brand awareness and ask for money, specifically. There's going to be a lot of direct mail, some mobile text and events. They're going to use the shops they have throughout the UK, there's going to be transvision – stuff in train stations and when you're on the move – and there's going to be inserts in newspapers, there's going to be press involved and celebrities going to down to locations throughout the world.

I thought 'wow, what a great project – I'm going to be in charge of actually helping this organisation figure out what their home page should look like to support all of these activities'. Well, I get there and I'm finding out about all these aspects, I'm feeling really cool meeting with all the ad agencies and all these people and trying to be the big person on campus. And I find out, going to each team within the organisation and each different agency supporting each activity (three different ad agencies supporting this) I find out that the budget they've allocated for the website is non-existent. They spend all their money doing TV commercials, print, posters, events, train station things, giving out activity booklets at theme parks. All this is great, but they're directing every single message, every single ask to the home page. Where is the first place everybody goes today to look for information about an organisation? They might get something in the post or at a train station, or see something in the newspaper or in a shop, but where do they have to go to give money? To the website. What did they forget to do? To allocate money to the website.

How common is this? The website is like the bastard step-child of many organisations. Why is that? Why is that? It's been how many years since web has become an accepted and premiere medium for communicating your message, your brand – all of the information you want to communicate? And they forget to allocate the right funding. Why? Because 'you can just put that on the website'. How many times have you heard that? How many people here are in charge of your website? 'Oh just go ahead and stick that on there – it shouldn't take long', right? It's crazy.

So my case study is very short. Because it didn't work! The story is that when I got there and realised that they hadn't allocated any money for the website and we were supposed to just make it work, there were seven different things coming into this. Basically, the decision was made by someone other than me to go ahead and stick something on the homepage that was completely irrelevant to any of those seven activities. The campaign was actually fairly successful. The commercials are on TV all the time, I've seen things at train stations. It has been a very successful awareness-raising campaign, but once the users have gotten to the homepage - we've started monitoring all this – there's an 81% bounce rate. They get there and they leave immediately because they're completely confused about what to do. What they've seen on the television, what they've seen on the train station, what they've gotten in their Sunday Times, has had nothing to do with the content on the website. And why? Because they thought of changing the website a month before the campaign launched and they didn't think of allocating any money because ‘oh, it's easy to just stick stuff online; we have a content management system, what's the problem?’

So I think the important lessons to be learned are, well, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink. You can get all the horses down to the choral but if you don't have a really good strategy that integrates your online and your offline, that continues the user journey, you're just wasting all of your money. Because when they hear the name of this thing on the TV, they may not catch the URL. How many people here watch TV with a pen and paper to write down URLs? Nobody does that! The image sticks in your head, the brand sticks in your head, you go to the site expecting to continue your journey. What happens? You don't.

So there's no point in creating a huge campaign or huge awareness or huge push offline when you aren't continuing your user's experience online. And something that FourSquareMedia uses as a methodology is something we call 'findability' and anyone who has talked to me or seen me speak or worked with me knows this is a critical part of all the things we do. The website is your first point of call and, really, it has got to be essential that you understand what your users are seeking. You're out there communicating all of these messages offline and they're going to come seeking you out online to understand more about those, and then what do you need them to find? What do they need to find out about you? What do you want them to find out? Do you want them to give money, do you want them to support a cause, do you want them to blog about something? Whatever the situation is, what you need to do is to make sure they understand what to do. Don't make them think. Tell them 'you've come here looking for something, we're going to help you find it'. And then what is the key call to action? And the third point is, contextualisation is key. Obviously with seven different activities in this campaign, there are lots of different messages, lots of different things going on. Once you get a user on to the site, once you try to continue that journey, you should plant different things around that journey so they can discover other things that they may not have known or come for but are relevant or related to their first initial seeking out your website, seeking out that content.

Sorry I couldn't say who it was or show you any screenshots, but, again, it doesn't matter who this is. The point is a lot of organisations still prioritise offline spending because it's sexy, it's fun, it's flashy – ‘ooh, we're doing TV, ooh, we're doing press, ooh, we're doing celebrity’. It doesn't really make any difference, because people are now thinking today they're going to come first to you online no matter what. Unless you're somebody huge like Tesco, for most organisations the website is the first port of call.