The Speech

I had to give a speech in church last weekend, asking the congregation for volunteers for service in three-year terms on the board of trustees. I laid out the challenges that face us in the year and years ahead. I spoke of the problems with our building and how we would need to update much of it, soon. And I told how serving on the board had enriched my own life, and how it might be a good thing for others, too. After the service, during the social "Coffee Hour" more than a dozen people came up to me to say how much they had enjoyed my speech. Backs were slapped. Elbows were squeezed. I made it a point to ask each of them if they might consider volunteering their own time to serve on the board. And in every case, I was turned down.

This kind of thing can easily be a recurring theme in our lives.

We have all run up against overly-designed or unnecessarily-designed Web sites in our travels, I'm sure. You know the situation, where all you want is a new printer driver, or a .pdf of your local bike trails network or the office hours of the place you get a dog license. And instead of a simple page with high-contrast text and colors, lots of white space, headings and an eye toward what you really want or need, you are met with more than half a dozen fonts, usually in at least that many colors, and text of all sizes. Layout will be either constrained into a corner of your wide-screen monitor, or it will be stretched horizontally so wide that the entire page's content is only two or three lines deep on the page, the page header and footer only an inch or two apart because you don't have your browser sized in the same proportions as the original Web developer/designer did.

I tried to explain to a woman once that Web pages serve a purpose. They exist to pass along information. But some information really cries out to be passed along with a minimum of small-f flash and fancy. Imagine two small businesses in your town, a used musical instrument store and… a funeral home. Of the two, which site should present high-contrast acid-colored obscure fonts, animated imagery and even music that starts automatically when the page loads? If you said "The Funeral Store!" give yourself minus-twenty points. If you said "The used-guitar store!" give yourself five points. If you said "Animated graphics? Really? Like it was still 1998?", give yourself one hundred points.

Business folk refer to the Conversion Factor. How many impressions do you have to send out, to get how many sales? That fraction tells you how hard you have to work, to make a skillion dollars. If you only convince two people out of every hundred to do something, you're at two percent. If you want to make more money, all you have to do is see more people. That really is it. If you see a hundred in a day, you need to find a way to see two hundred people and, with no work on your technique, with no improvement in your rap, you will on average make twice as much as before. You can of course work on the other side of the equation, too. People who use prospect's names in their conversation close 25% more sales. People who are good listeners close 25% more sales. People with good grooming and hygiene close 25% more sales. People who hand-write follow-up letters close 25% more sales… at some point, you raise yourself from closing two out of a hundred, to closing three out of a hundred. Now, even without seeing any more people, you're making half-again as much. And if you can manage to do both, you end up making not twice as much, but three times as much.

I was very effective as an entertainer, as a comedian, maybe. But I wasn't very effective as a speaker. My task was not to show people how clever I was, or give them inspiring things to think about for the week ahead. My job was to shake the trees and scare up candidates for the board of trustees, and at that job I feel like I failed, that day.

You may have Web pages that are not as effective as you'd like. The task before you is similar to my own. You can either get more people to view your page, or you can make your page better.

We'll talk about this in the next couple of weeks. If you have any questions, this would be a good time to get them in.