Listen: Your Clients Need to Hear You
June 2nd, 2010
I just returned from an extended trip to Peru where I had the opportunity to offer my expertise to a self-sustaining, community organization that provides kids in Cusco with an after-school learning program free of charge. It was an enlightening experience and gave me a renewed perception of time and productivity. Meetings were often chaotic with stuffed agendas and multiple people vying for a chance to be heard. I’d sit for hours listening and, just when I thought website discussions would commence, the vitreous taskmaster would be off in yet another direction.
One of the hurdles that the director is in the midst of trying to clear involves increasing revenue in order to provide a cultural center that would allow the group to extend services to older children and young adults who are currently unable to participate in the program due to scheduling conflicts with the local public and parochial schools. The list of possibilities for this, to me, seems endless. There is a database of former volunteers and their connections that is virtually unused (folks regularly stay in touch asking how they can keep up to date and/or make a contribution), an extensive Facebook network that is relatively unmaintained, a flux of international volunteers that is increasing rapidly thanks to a concerted international online marketing campaign this year. It’s an online marketer’s dream – a plentiful, self-generated, and virtually unused network of highly qualified, interested parties. And that’s truly just a start – the possibility for corporate sponsorship and grant funding is also quite lucrative for organizations of this variety at the moment.
Which brings me to the point of this article: my voice went virtually unnoticed during meetings. It is customary in this particular organization for all revenue to be “self-generated.” It took me several weeks to determine that what the director actually meant was, “under my direct control.” There is a restaurant and hostel that have historically provided the funds off of which the non-profit component of the organization operates; a brilliant, ambitious, and successful tactic – to date. These bricks-and-mortar operations are very traditional and very easy for the director to oversee. Standing on the brink of enacting loftier goals, there is a resistance toward implementing new tactics. The existing website, overstuffed with data and hyper-colored, is difficult for users to use and difficult for the team to maintain – so they don’t. The director is in the practice of enlisting the help of close friends for website needs and not particularly fond of granting security to qualified volunteers. Email campaigns have never been optimized or tracked. There were seven or eight different Facebook pages in various stages of maintenance because that seemed to be the one area that interested volunteers could participate in the online presence. Online marketing efforts, though organized and moderately effective in Europe and Australia, were slow to enact, un-tracked, and virtually non-existent in the U.S. There were cultural differences to consider, of course; time & scheduling is wildly different in Peru than in the U.S., cultural attitudes about approaching a member-base for funds are much more reserved. I also learned the hard way that distinguishing yourself as an expert, as a woman, is done with a great deal of delicacy and subversive language.
As online marketers, we have insight into trends, methods, and analytics. Our blessing is also our curse. It can feel like banging your head against a wall when you’re trying to explain the value of informed user experience (UX) design to the general client population. Media buzzwords seem, on most days, to be my biggest enemy. Much of my value to my clients is that I can listen to them. They don’t NEED to know all about UX, Information Mapping, or SEO best-practices because that’s my job. It’s also my job to realize that, going into each project, my clients have a pre-formed expectation about what a website is and what it does based on the obvious context that they are members of the information age. If I don’t listen to them, I can never bridge the gap. If I can’t bridge the gap, then I either lose the client or I build a website to standards that are beneath my experience and capabilities. Fair or not, we need to explain and defend our expertise every time.
I like analogies. When I bring my car to the mechanic, someone with whom I have a long-standing relationship with and trust, he tells me what needs to be done, what it will cost, and then he does it. For my part, I believe him, pay my bill, and keep coming back. Sure, I might ask a few questions about basic mechanics or long-term maintenance but, for the most part, I pay him to keep my life as an automobile-owner simple. This is because I’m not rolling up my sleeves and puttering around under the hood.
It’s different with my own clients because they are rolling up their sleeves and puttering around – they are online every day, experiencing the internet, comparing and contrasting how things work and which is best. This is how they can have so many ideas and challenge me on every point. It is my philosophy that this is a part of how the world of UX advances so fast. We are being pushed on a daily basis by our clients to be better than what is already out there – not because we’ve seen it, but because they have. If I were, as an automobile owner, out there every day test-driving every car on the market and asking my mechanic to mix-and-match my favorite observed specs, I’d probably have the tightest (and most expensive) vehicle on public roads.
Because I have informed clients that aren’t experts, I also have to be good at communicating. This means I have to know my stuff; keep up-to-date with trends, be ready with responses to media criticisms of what I know to be best-practices, explain in plain-english very complicated and technical terminologies. David Sherwin did a wonderful UX research cheat sheet for A List Apart that I have been referring to in recent months.
Getting back to listening; while in Peru, it occurred to me that a part of my listening was going to have to be patiently waiting. It can be frustrating when you know what you could do for an organization and they’re simply not ready. My response to this is always to keep it in my peripheral; offer insight and information where I think it will be valuable without being pushy. I know that by keeping it in my radar, even if I never use relevant information that I collect for this client, allows me to learn more and gain greater depth in my own repertoire of online marketing. Heaven knows I’m going to need it.
