Our thoughts from our unique blend of philosophers, artists, educators, musicians, scientists and poets

How Long Will Drupal 7 Be Supported? The Answer Just Changed.

On Feb. 23, 2022, the Drupal Security Team announced Drupal 7’s end-of-life would be extended from Nov. 1, 2022, to Nov. 1, 2023. The Security Team also said they would revisit the end-of-life date for Drupal 7 once again in July 2023, meaning Drupal 7 community support could be extended as far as Nov. 1, 2024.

You’re a Drupal 7 Site Owner. What Do You Do Now?

First, if you’re a Drupal 7 site owner that was staring at that November 2022 end-of-life date in fear, breathe a sigh of relief. Your timeline is no longer crunched – at least not by the end-of-life date.

For the past three years, site owners have been preparing for Drupal 7’s end-of-life.

1. Some site owners have opted to use the Drupal 7 end-of-life as a reason to complete a long-awaited website overhaul.
2. Others – more satisfied with their sites – have sought to migrate their sites “as-is” from Drupal 7 to another platform.
3. And then there’s a third group – site owners that may have felt rushed to complete a new website build.

When your timeline is crunched, you may look to cut corners. But now, if you’re a Drupal 7 site owner, you can slow down and turn your attention back to quality.

UX Research: Key to the Discovery Process

When faced with a hard deadline, site owners may choose to shorten the research and discovery phase. This is understandable – organizations need secure, functional websites first and foremost.

But UX research is a critical part of any website project. A complete discovery process informs…

• The “who” – the expectations and needs of the users who visit the website.
• The “what” – the content that needs to be included and the functionality that is essential.
• The “where” – the locations in which the website will meet the user, from the type of device to where they are in their customer journey.
• The “why” – the ways in which the website fits into an organization’s larger strategy.
• The “how” – the tactics employed that will enable the website to drive business goals, whether that means sales, requests for information, or engagement.

Now that the Drupal 7 end-of-life date has been extended, site owners can complete a comprehensive research and discovery phase. You may be surprised by what your users really need from your organization’s web presence.

A Stretched Version of Minimally Viable

We always advocate for prioritizing new enhancements to a website to ensure the delivery of a minimum viable product at launch. But when faced with a hard deadline, the definition of “minimally viable” can be stretched to the point where the website cannot realistically meet user needs. You’ll end up with a lot of the “minimal” and little to none of the “viable.”

If you’re a Drupal 7 site owner, take a look at your research notes or post-launch backlog to pull out items that can now be completed. Then, compare those items against any reports or strategy documents you may have produced during the project’s lifecycle.

If a new website feature meets user expectations, drives business goals, and positions your organization to compete now and in the future, add it to your definition of a minimally viable product.

To Craft the Website You Want, First Get Rid of Everything You Don't

“Migrate all of it.”

This can be the gut reaction to the question of “what content should and should not come over to your new website?” It is the easiest answer when facing a tight timeline – instead of completing a content inventory and auditing all content on the site, site owners bring everything over. That way, nothing gets missed.

However, this can create a number of problems for the long-term maintenance of the website. An older site’s content could:

• Not fit one-to-one within a new website’s design.
• Be no longer relevant to users.
• Be no longer on-brand.

Additionally, it’s always easier to create new content than to retire old content. A website’s sitemap can start to feel like the junk drawer of a dresser, filled with items long past their use from years or even decades ago.

A website redesign provides a great opportunity to audit existing content and delete non-essential items. A timeline extension can give your organization the time it needs to make the right content choices.

Time Is Back On Your Side. So Is Sandstorm.

Now that time is on your side once more, we encourage you to add more best-practice steps into your website overhaul project:

• Talk to your users – and understand their needs.
• Explore exciting new features – and add functionality that drives business goals.
• Audit your content – and cut what’s no longer needed.
• Schedule a new launch date – one that relieves the pressure on you and your team.

Since 1998, Sandstorm has helped clients across industries do just that. Whether you’re just starting to evaluate your website needs or want to ensure you’re adhering to required accessibility standards, we’re here to help. Connect with us today.

Adding alternative text (“alt text”) to images seems like a no-brainer when managing your website. But ensuring image alt text is implemented properly and follows ADA and WCAG accessibility compliance is a little trickier than you think.

What is Alternative Text and Why Is It Important?

Alt text is a tenet of inclusive and accessible web experiences for all users and provides users with visual disabilities access to key visual non-text content including photos, infographics, logos, icons, and other images.

Alt text lives in HTML code inside the alt attribute, which is embedded in an image element. It’s important to code this correctly to ensure a smooth, accessible, and delightful experience for users with access needs.

So how do you write good alternative text? Here are 5 best practices to improve your skills.

1. Identify and convey the purpose of non-text content

   When you have a lot of images on your site to write alt text for, it’s easy to go on auto-pilot and just describe the image. However, this is not going to create an accessible experience for users with visual disabilities (like blindness, deaf-blindness, or low vision), who may be using assistive technologies, like screen readers, to access the information conveyed by images.

   An example is the magnifying glass icon. Good, accessible alt text would be “search” not “magnifying glass” - the aim is to convey the purpose of the text, rather than just a literal description.

   If the image acts as a button or a link, you will need to add the action keyword to initiate, like an icon of a cart. Instead of “add to cart” as the alt text, try “ Click add to cart.” Having the action as part of conveying the purpose makes it easier for users to identify a button or link and is crucial for those that need to speak the action aloud to get the button or link to open.

2. Remember that screen readers read the alt text aloud

   Screen reader users can program them to translate the text to other outputs, Braille, or voice command devices.

   A quick way to test alt text is to read it aloud to a user that does not know what the image is. If they can identify what the image is trying to convey based on your alt text alone, great!

   However, for optimal results, conduct testing and collaborate with screen reader users and users with disabilities to improve your site’s accessibility and overall user experience. They know how they interact with web content better than anyone else.

3. Complex images require a long description with alt text

   When the alt text alone is too short to describe your image, you should add a long description (also called an image description). In these cases, alt text is still required and is used as “directions” to point to and access the long description.

   Long descriptions are needed for complex images like graphs, charts, medical illustrations, infographics, detailed photographs, etc. to fully describe the more complex purpose of that image. For example, bar graphs present data that will need to be fully described, as well as the intended conclusion to draw from the data presented.

   You can hide these long descriptions using the appropriate ARIA labels, however, it’s best practice to make them available to everyone. For example, if there is a bar graph on a webpage, users with dyscalculia may have difficulty interpreting the graph and may not use a screen reader to access the text alternatives. A great solution is to have the long description available to all users in the surrounding text near the graph image. So for this, your alt text can look like “Annual Revenue per Quarter, see long description in next paragraph.”

4. The rules are different for decorative images

   How do you know if an image is considered decorative? If the visual content provides no information, then it is considered decorative.

   Because alt text is required, in this case, you would leave the alt attribute blank, like alt= “ ”. This tells screen readers to “skip over” the image. If you don’t include the empty alt attribute, the screen reader will read the image file name instead. Remember, screen readers, render the alt text into speech or Braille outputs for users who can’t see the content. If just the image file name is being conveyed, rather than the purpose of the image, the experience will be inaccessible and frustrating for users with disabilities.

   When images are identified and described fully by the surrounding text, like an icon that supports surrounding link text, the rules for decorative images apply. When the link text or surrounding text is the same as alt text, it will create a repetitive experience for screen reader users.

5. People count too! Photos of people should be described fully

   And to the best of your ability! This is because otherwise low vision and blind users are denied important contextual information that sighted users have available to them. When a photo including people is chosen for your website, it was probably selected to show diversity and/or target audiences. It’s important to provide this information to low vision and blind users as well. By describing people in images, you can provide a fully accessible and more inclusive experience for users in the disability community!

   When you’re describing images of individual people, you can either use alt text and a long description or use an informal short description embedded in the alt attribute (or in other words, in place of the alt text). Short descriptions are more common for alt text for images of people and are generally about two sentences long.

   When you are describing people in an image, it’s a best practice to ask the person in the image how they would like to be described. If you can’t ask, you can follow some general guidelines.

   Characteristics you should include are:

   • Descriptions of skin color, not necessarily race or ethnicity. Use descriptions like light-skinned, medium-skinned, medium-light skinned, medium-dark skinned, or dark-skinned.
   • Descriptions of gender presentation instead of assuming someone’s gender. Use descriptions like female-presenting instead of woman, female-presenting child instead of girl, or male-presenting instead of man. There are many different words used for gender expression!
   • You can also use non-binary for folks that do not identify with female or male genders and provide this identity information publicly. Again, it’s best to ask the person directly if you’re able to do so!

   
   If it’s helpful to understand the context of the image, you can describe additional features of individuals, like hair color and style, height, clothing, age, etc.

Remember, screen readers and other assistive technologies translate alt text through speech and braille outputs, so consider the context in which the image is being used.

Get into the practice of asking yourself….

• What is the text content talking about?
• Why was this image chosen?
• What is it trying to communicate or show?

Keep in mind, the CDC reports that 1 in 5 Americans live with a disability. The result of proactively choosing accessibility will open your website up to reaching a bigger audience while saving you time and money over the long term. Added bonus! Your hard work will also increase SEO while improving the perception of your company and brand.

Are you unsure if your website meets the current requirements for accessibility standards?
Contact us today to schedule an accessibility audit of your site or discuss your accessibility challenges!

Including content managers in these 5 stages of a website redesign is the key to success for any launch.

A top-line goal we hear consistently with every new website design project is: “Content management and workflow must be easier for our staff.” But often content admins are the forgotten user group.

It sounds simple right? A no-brainer? Any CMS (Content Management System) implemented properly should ease this burden for staff, making it easy for them to manage the content. We're often told, “this new CMS will be an improvement over what we have in place today...”

But it’s easy to get swept up in the excitement of discovery, uncovering the key insights from user research and UX testing, the creation of UX wireframes and beautiful UI design -- resulting from our hyper-focus on the needs of our users. And before we know it, we’re in the midst of the development process, content migration, QA and accessibility validation, and getting the site to a launch state.

But how do we keep that primary content management goal for staff top of mind throughout the project and ensure we’re meeting staff’s expectations?

As a Product Owner, one of our primary responsibilities is to consider our clients as users too, and look at it from their perspective. The discovery phase of a project is the perfect opportunity to understand the team’s pain points when managing content on their current website.

• Are content blocks too hard to find?
• Do content admins have to update the same content in multiple locations?
• Are there missed opportunities to showcase critical content because there’s no logical place for it?
• Is it difficult to classify content with the proper tags/taxonomy to drive continued SEO improvements?

Every subsequent phase of the project gives a Product Owner a checkpoint for ensuring efficiency in content management, including:

1. Content Audit and Information Architecture
   Allowing the client the opportunity to see a list of all of the active pages on their site gives them the chance to clean house. Much like the clean-out before physically moving to a new home, the content audit prompts clients to toss what they don’t need and what’s just taking up space, and optimize content for their end-users. This "housecleaning" (along with user research) drives the development of the new sitemap and a site structure that better reflects the priority of the content that users are trying to find on the site.
    
2. UX and UI
   If a content audit is akin to housecleaning before a move, UX design equates to looking at a listing on Redfin and envisioning how your belongings will fit. And UI is painting the rooms to match your furniture. (Is this analogy incredibly reductive of these important processes? Admittedly so.)
   
   UX design helps prioritize the content and calls to action on each page and sketches out how that content might be presented to the end-user. At this stage, the Product Owner considers how that content will be entered onto that page and the workflow for publishing. For example, if we’re looking at an article or post, is there related content (i.e., articles, resources, products) also showcased on the page? Do those appear because we plan to include a list of articles from the same category? Or can they be curated for each new post and manually selected by the content manager? What is most effective for the client's content and workflow processes?
   
   The UI design phase will refine these priorities and give both teams the opportunity to think through the use of brand assets, the client’s image library, editing of headers and subheads...the list goes on.
    
3. Sprint Planning & Development
   As the Product Owner or Scrum Master begins grooming the backlog and planning the first sprint and design handoff, the user stories and acceptance criteria need to take both the end-users and the content managers into account. To continue the metaphor, the development phase helps get ready for move-in: making sure that we know how the furniture will get to its final spot in the new house. (Insert Ross from Friends “PIVOT!” joke here.)
    
4. Training & Content Entry
   Once we’re ready to train the client on how to enter, approve, and publish their content as part of our sprint delivery, we’re in the home stretch - the final walk-through, if you will. And then: it’s move-in day! We’ve set up the client with an intuitive content entry experience - one that improves their team’s efficiency and allows them to keep content fresh, targeted, and relevant on their new site.
    
5. Refinement & Optimization
   Post-launch provides opportunities for optimizing the experience, both for our end-users and our staff. If we’ve done our job of considering the needs of our content admins throughout the design and build process, then the CMS configuration should have a sound foundation. As content admins are continuing to work within the system publishing content and using workflows to support the content lifecycle, we have opportunities to fine-tune the administrative experience. Rather than making significant changes after the fact, we consider optimization for both sides of the “house.” (See what I did there?)

Thoughtful content management design is one of the best ways to ensure that an organization’s website will continue to scale as the needs of the business evolve. Anticipating the future state of a business, continually revisiting a client’s long-term business goals, and building flexibility into the content management system all ensure that we’re satisfying the needs of the users visiting the site and optimizing the workflow of those maintaining it.

As we partner with clients to reimagine how to drive their businesses forward, one request we’re often asked is how to use Artificial Intelligence (AI). As AI continues to evolve, so does the practicality of how and when to use it.

In the midst of rapidly changing customer demands, it’s more important than ever to make websites and digital channels more beneficial and highly relevant for users while improving the overall customer experience. Through the use of AI-enabled web analytics, brands now have access to the insights they need to inform more relevant and targeted content delivery.

Here are 3 examples to leverage AI on your website:

1. Intelligent Chatbots
One of the most common applications of AI on websites are intelligent chatbots that have a “conversation” with the visitor, acting as a customer support specialist to direct them toward relevant content and offerings, then verify that it achieved the desired outcome. The chatbot can direct users to self-service tools, human support staff, or alternative methods of contact as needed.

Sandstorm implements solutions that support chat functionality directly in content management systems (CMS) like Drupal with its Chatbot module, but can also integrate third-party chatbot tools like Botsify and others.

2. ‘Look-a-Like’ Models
AI can also include tracking a visitors’ activity for common patterns of search, navigation, and conversion events – identifying “look-a-like” models that can guide similar visitors to content of improved relevance. This often adds a recommendation engine like on Amazon. Artificial intelligence and machine learning relies on the quality and quantity of useful data, including indexed content of the site and applying taxonomy and relationships, utilizing the CRM database, incorporated community platform data, and tracking visitor activity.

3. Personalization
Highly relevant, personalized experiences can be created using platforms like Kentico or Acquia Personalization with its built-in personalization features, but can also integrate third-party marketing automation platforms that leverage AI like Hubspot or Marketo.

In addition to information on the website and data about activity on the website, Sandstorm leverages tools that provide omnichannel tracking including social media and targeted email to drive personalization that informs and improves user experience on the website.

Artificial Intelligence is also baked into analytics platforms like Google Analytics to highlight insights on visitor behavior and trends that can be leveraged to prioritize content creation and identify where to make changes to the website to best support your visitors.

Sandstorm implements Google Analytics on all of our website development projects, or in conjunction with additional native analytics platforms like Adobe Analytics or other platforms. Supplementing the automated insights of these platforms, Sandstorm also provides advanced data research and reporting services, leveraging tools like Google Data Studio and Tableau.

In How AI can shape the future of UX, Sandstorm CEO Sandy Marsico shared “AI and predictive analytics help to determine what the user wants, needs, or does next. AI assists in adding insights, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.”

And while not a replacement for human analysis, AI does play an important and evolving role. “We’re all trying to predict the future,” she says. “AI won’t figure out the problems we need to solve — AI helps us have a deeper understanding of our user so we can tailor our content and messaging to anticipate motivations and behaviors.”

Looking to use AI to drive your business forward? Contact us today to schedule a time to connect!

The Agile Process

Scrum? Agile? Waterfall? Kaban? You likely have heard of these concepts and maybe adopted some version to your software, application or website development projects.

In its simplest form, Agile methodology is a project management process.

Scrum comes from the sport of rugby, where in a scrum formation everyone plays a specific role working towards a quick adoption of strategies. In complex projects just like on the rugby field, scrum facilitates team collaboration and iterative progress towards a goal. Teams practicing Scrum use Agile methodology.

As a Scrum Master, I make sure the team lives agile values and principles and follows team processes and practices. The responsibilities include establishing an environment where the team can be effective and clearing obstacles along the way.

For a look into how we put all this into practice, here is work we did recently in partnership with the nation’s leading trade association representing boat, marine engine, and accessory manufacturers, the National Marine Manufacturers Association.

The Challenge

The National Marine Manufacturers Association (NMMA) has an expansive ecosystem of websites across multiple business units and the boat, marine engine, and accessory manufacturer audiences it serves. Primary among these websites are more than 15 websites that serve the Boat Shows happening across the country, like the Chicago Boat Show (www.chicagoboatshow.com), which hosts hundreds of thousands of attendees.

Over the past two years, NMMA made significant investments in Acquia (Drupal’s Platform as a Service, PaaS) and moved its websites to the Acquia Cloud and Digital Experience Platform (DXP), with the goal of centralized site and application management and reducing the time required for labor-intensive infrastructure management.

Following the transition to Acquia, NMMA asked for Sandstorm’s support against clear goals for the project of providing centralized management of the multisite environment, uniform content blocks and streamlining code as well as fully optimizing the site for performance, SEO, user flow and content administration.

The Solution

The highest priority for NMMA was tackling the Boat Show sites, as there were UI updates and improvements that needed to be implemented. We also needed to re-architect the multi-site management so the collection of roughly 15+ sites used consistent theming, features and components along with the set-up of continuous integration. This meant creating a deployment structure to support clear data management of the different sites, including content blocks and forms and controlling the changes to be tested through one branch.

Given the time-sensitivity and breadth of the work needing to be done, Sandstorm and NMMA collaborated through an Agile development methodology, using the Scrum framework. This supported a combined Sandstorm & NMMA team with clear roles, an ability to prioritize what stakeholders needed the most, and the ability to adhere to a tight timeline with productive, incremental sprints.

Each sprint was prioritized by NMMA to include enhancements, structural updates, and process improvements while keeping close management of the backlog, so we could reprioritize as the needs of the business shifted. Sandstorm led a daily scrum where the full team communicated tasks, updates, challenges, etc., which provided a continuous cycle of teamwork-led solutions each day.

The Results

There were several successes from an agile-led partnership for both NMMA and Sandstorm, including:

• Improved administrative user experience and streamlined management of the NMMA Boat Shows websites within the multi-site framework.
  
  • Allowing for one branch update to affect multiple sites and changes to be adapted faster with no rework for the individual sites.
• Improved technical documentation. By managing development features and notes via Jira cards, we were able to instantly improve technical documentation and help structure the deployment processes.
• Stronger NMMA ownership. With an integrated approach and stronger team-wide knowledge and documentation of the systems and processes, NMMA was able to take more ownership of the product and had the tools in place to support current and future team members.
  
  • This was key for the multi-site deployment process and management of the separate databases per show site.
  • The development and deployment process can be controlled by the NMMA team and not one single team holds the keys to that process alone.
  • The NMMA team became sufficiently knowledgeable in managing their improved Acquia & Drupal 8 website’s structure and can stand on their own.
  • This allows NMMA to leverage Sandstorm’s expertise for future code enhancement implementations instead of spending budget resources on day-to-day management.

With this implemented Scrum framework, the combined Sandstorm and NMMA teams were able to build features efficiently, easily prioritize work and progress through the project quickly and successfully.

Want to learn how our integrated Agile and Scrum methodology can help move your development efforts forward? Contact us today to learn more!

Earlier this year a German court ruled that Amazon’s ‘dash’ buttons violated that country’s consumer protection laws. These super convenient networked devices stick on your fridge or washing machine to order things like laundry detergent and pet food with the simple push of a button. German law requires shoppers to have price information at the time of their transaction. Amazon’s buttons, designed to be convenient, only provided a product logo and a button so users wouldn’t know if a price had increased, decreased or how it differed from competitors.

At Sandstorm, our core eCommerce UX principles include:

• Transparency in pricing
• Giving users the ability to quickly and clearly modify or cancel an order
• Providing ways to quickly decline cross-sells and up-sells

While users have come to expect a standard ‘exit through the gift shop’ process, they are also savvy enough to know that eCommerce sites like Amazon and Expedia may not be showing them the cheapest options first.

Our user research has shown that the current eCommerce shopper is one who will prioritize convenience as much as cost. We refer to this persona as the ‘Energy Manager’. She has little time, is often multi-tasking, desperately craves convenience, and expects competitive pricing. From a saving money standpoint, the Energy Manager will apply all of the coupons and promotional codes she can find and will split orders to use more coupons.

She is also very wary of sites that engage in deceptive practices or make her jump through hoops to complete a transaction. Often these are the sites that do not get return visits.

There Is A Cost For Bad Behavior

While you may be able to frustrate users with complicated interfaces or processes to try and get them to do what you want, ultimately the only thing you’ll achieve is user frustration and brand denigration. Even worse, you’ll probably just earn yourself more customer service calls and brand-eroding, sometimes viral, dreadful complaints across social media channels without achieving the business outcome you desired.

But We Really Want To Sell You That Beer

For example, a Chicago neighborhood movie theater uses its own non-responsive website to sell tickets. The theater uses a drop down for the type of ticket the user would like to purchase.

While lots of folks enjoy a good beer with their movie, it’s apparent that not everyone does because the theater added a note to try and prevent users from making the wrong selection.

So here you have a situation where the theater is defaulting a choice that will make them more money by upselling a beer but have clearly run into the issue of users making the default selection by mistake and then complaining. The resolution to these complaints? Add more copy (i.e. noise) to try and avoid the error.

A transparent, ethical, best practice eCommerce UX solution would be:

This way the user has to intentionally make the selection that applies to them with the most common selection listed first. The business still gets to offer the beer upsell but doesn’t have to deal with as many complaints and no copy is required to work around the error case.

Being Good Pays Off

Users understand that eCommerce sites are businesses and are intended to make money. At Sandstorm, we have discovered that when a businesses’ profit model is clear, it tends to engender more confidence from the user as the best digital experiences are centered around a value exchange (i.e. “I give you my email and you give me a deal”). eCommerce sites that follow UX best practices provide clear pricing information along with relevant up-sells and cross-sells and easy ways for the users to get what they want quickly and easily are the ones who will earn their users’ loyalty. Good UX and good eCommerce will pay off in smoother transactions, less customer support and more repeat business.

Does your eCommerce site provide the pricing transparency and easy shopping experience that users want and good business demands? A great way to find out is with a standardized heuristic evaluation that grades your site on 10 common usability metrics. Contact us to get started.

We do a lot of branding and rebranding for clients here at Sandstorm. Naming is a fundamental piece of any organization’s identity, and we do not embark on this process lightly. It requires clients to do a lot of reflection about where they are today and where they want to be 5, 10, 20 years from now.

In order to ensure the company name resonates with clients, customers or members, we conduct thorough discovery to unearth who the organization is at its core. The research does not end there; we then look at competitors and like-minded organizations outside of our client’s industry to see where the opportunity, or “white space,” is. It is fundamental that a company name honestly represents the organization. It also needs to differentiate itself, but not stray too far from the core identity.

Here are tips for success when embarking on the business renaming process:

Tip #1: Easy to Say and Spell

Make sure the name is easy to say and spell. In the age of Google, you want to make sure that you are easily found when someone is searching for you. The name also needs to be easy for someone to spell while they are talking on the phone or writing out an email address.

Tip #2: URL Availability

Don’t forget to make sure there is an appropriate .com URL available that has some iteration of your name. You may have a great company name, but if there is no intuitive URL available, or if it’s ridiculously expensive to secure, then you are going to make things very difficult from a digital marketing perspective.

Tip #3: Rename for a Good Reason

If you are renaming, be absolutely sure you have solid reasons for doing so.

• Has there been any bad press about your organization with the current name?
• Have you moved your organization in a direction that no longer aligns with your name?
• Do you offer different things then you did when you initially named your organization?
• Will a new company name help better articulate the new offerings?

Do not rename just because you acquired another organization unless this acquisition redefines how you’re positioned in the marketplace. You should not choose a new company name because you are launching a new product, either. That is, unless the product will fundamentally redefine your target and competitive arena.

Tip #4: Your Name Must Mean Something

Your new company name should reflect your organizational values and purpose. Don’t go chasing shiny objects, buzzwords or “the zeitgeist” and hope that the organization will follow. You will be setting up an expectation that will be hard to meet if your name, mission, and people do not fundamentally align. Get your organization aligned for this change before trying to rename. Once your team is all on board, that’s the perfect time to announce your newly minted organization to the world.

Tip #5: Can the name cover your long-term goals?

Your company name needs to have longevity. What you call your company today needs to be big enough to account for changes and growth for years in the future. Renaming a company is time-consuming and is a considerable investment in your organization's future. The name itself seems small, but what it represents is immense. Naming and renaming should be approached thoughtfully, in order to garner the most ROI from the change.

Naming and renaming are fun projects. There is so much potential in a new name. Follow these five tips and you will be well on your way to a solid name.

[If you need some help with renaming, contact us, and we can put these considerations into action with you.]

As part of our annual review process we use the start, stop, continue retrospective technique. We've found it's a great way to recognize successes and opportunities for growth for individuals, teams and organizations. Thinking about the digital transformations we've seen with associations lately, below are some retrospectives on what we see trending with membership organizations. 

START
Creating a culture of data. Using data to inform your decisions and weaving that into everything you do is critical to success. We are working with an association today where we're collecting and analyzing data to identify educational gaps and drive new products (and revenue). We're also utilizing data to drive content and functional requirements on new website builds to improve the member experience. By taking a fresh look at member data for a global membership organization, we were able to re-interpret the data and create new marketing campaign messaging to increase membership and product sales. The combination of qualitative and quantitative data helps associations turn subjective decisions into objective ones. Even when we're talking creative and UX – data science for us plays a huge role.

STOP
Stop building websites in proprietary technologies on a web dev shop's server as you are trapping yourself and it’s completely unnecessary now. Many leading associations are utilizing off-the-shelf content managements systems like Drupal, Kentico, etc. to integrate with their AMS and LMS systems, provide personalized member experiences, and track analytics and KPIs. Then you have options when it comes to supporting your chosen system. You can choose to have the original digital agency maintain and support your site, you can select a new partner for support, or bring it in house. We also recommend you own the hosting relationship with a 3rd party provider such as Rackspace, Azure, or AWS so you are never "stuck". We have taken over the maintenance and support for so many association websites that didn't get the service, attention to detail, nor strategic thinking to drive their association forward, and it was all possible because of the CMS they selected (and it's always a smoother transition when a 3rd party hosting provider is involved but not necessary). 

CONTINUE
Continue focusing on member engagement, member value and the overall member experience. This is what we love most about associations. It doesn't matter if you're a trade association or medical, large or niche, everyone shares a common mission to help your members become more than they can on their own. One of the most common challenges and motivations we've seen for launching into a new website overhaul was to improve their members' online experience and increase online member engagement. And we get it – we, too, are all about the user. When you look into the member journey, continue at all touchpoints to remember we're all just people trying to be the best version of ourselves. Keep the humanity alive in your organization that you have already mastered.

Dr. Karen Bartuch, Sandstorm's Director of Data Science, presented 10 practical innovation tips at the Association Forum Holiday Showcase. 

For most organizations, innovation is table stakes for long-term growth and a competitive advantage. Yet, according to McKinsey, 94% of managers surveyed were dissatisfied with their organization's innovation performance. So why are some organizations better at it than others? Google employees are encouraged to spend 20% of their time, in addition to their regular projects, to work on what they think will most benefit Google. Both AdSense and Google News were created this way. But I know what you're thinking, we're not Google. 

Innovation is a deliberate choice, and in most organizations, it doesn't accidentally happen as your people need permission to explore and create. And everybody has the capacity to create according to the Componential Theory of Creativity, "..all humans with normal capacities are able to produce at least moderately creative work in some domain, some of the time—and that the social environment (the work environment) can influence both the level and the frequency of creative behavior."

Below are 10 practical tips to unlock your inner innovator and incorporate it into your daily life:

1. Don't worry about critiques
2. Forget the need to be 100% original
3. Go from specific to abstract
4. Be aware of shortcuts and biases
5. Practice diversity
6. Get hands on
7. Spend a day in the life
8. Carry a sketchbook
9. Work during your “peak time”
10. Inject humor into the workplace (check out Karen's TEDx Talk)

During this session, attendees got the opportunity to synthesize what research is telling us about the need and desire for innovation, and understand key strategies to infuse creativity and innovation in your organization. Contact us if you want to discuss any upcoming innovation initiatives you'd like help with.