By Adrian Porter, Head of Strategic Research

I am currently researching Precedent’s next sector report which will identify and offer solutions to some of the challenges that professional and trade membership organisations currently face in the contemporary digital environment. Its working title is ‘Membership Organisations – Big Questions – Digital Answers?’ My initial fact finding has involved a lot of surfing in order to identify key themes that describe the problems that organisations are facing.

One of the major issues seems to be a membership base that is getting older, and the fact that it is more often than not these older members who are most active in the management, direction and administration of the organisation.

Professional organisations are struggling to attract younger members. Sure they have the full attention of the youngsters when they are training, or they are aiming for some letters after their names, but after this engagement levels drop off considerably, if not entirely.

There are a number of reasons for this, some of which I will feature here in the run up to the release of our report (eta February). However, I was reminded of one of the reasons on my commute home earlier this week. I was reading the Evening Standard, and my eye was taken by Sir Clive Woodward describing the RFU as ‘a laughing stock around the world’. Woodward was criticising the RFU’s structure and decision making processes, particularly with respect to the appointment of Martin Johnson as England team coach by Rob Andrew. Despite the resignation of Johnson following the world cup debacle, Andrew has taken no responsibility for England’s failure in the tournament and is likely to be in charge of appointing the next England coach too!

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By , Head of Research

It is with a sense of relief, and not a little gratitude to my colleagues, that I can formally announce the launch of our latest sector report: Integration or isolation? – The digital landscape for UK financial services.

I have been producing big reports into various sector websites for over ten years and the title of this one had me reflecting on the process that we undertake to get these reports ‘to press’.

As always the research and data collection is really the easy bit. It can be done in isolation. Just put me in front of a computer, leave me alone for a few weeks with a spreadsheet and ‘the job’s a good ‘un’!

It’s the concept, design, proofing and coordination of the people who help me bring the reports together that presents the biggest challenge – the integration.

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By , Consultant

At our recent #UsabilityFail seminar Mark Russell and I spoke about why you should stop wasting your marketing budgets on bad usability, covering the functional and organisation barriers that inhibit organisations from providing good online customer experience.

According to a recent report by e-Marketer by 2015 an estimated $51b will be being spent on online marketing each year.

So much money is spent and so much hard work is involved in getting people to your site which is fundamentally wasted if the experiences customers have on your site are poor. You should also be concerned that bad user experiences hurt your brand.

It’s easy to look at sales figures (or whatever success means for you) to quantify how well you are doing. With pride these figures get marched (well, sent) off to the senior management team where everyone pats themselves on the back for a job well done and left with the impression everything is going to plan.

But while this tells a usability story of sorts does this really indicate anything about the usability of the site and how satisfied your customers are with their experience on it?
For many years I worked for a website that failed to address the usability flaws in one of the most popular areas of the site because it provided the “least profit”. Investment was instead piled into those areas that were on paper the “most profitable” even though they were less visited.

This lack of investment where a larger percentage of visitors were most engaged ultimately turned people away from the profitable areas of the site. Why? Does a bad experience resonate with users much more than a good one? You can be certain of it!
We as website users take good usability and experiences for granted and so we should if you want your business to succeed online. Poor usability resonates with us and makes us more likely therefore to leave, complain and never return.

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By Rob van Tol, Senior Consultant

Do you spend more on marketing your website than you do on ensuring that it is a high quality, engaging experience that lets your audience do what they want to do easily? I’m guessing yes. Most organisations do. To me, that’s a bit baffling.

Say you wanted to increase the number of conversions on your site, whatever that was: more bookings, more enquiries, or more downloads, etc. You could increase your marketing spend to throw more people at your site – double the number of people who come and you can expect to double the number of conversions. Job done. But there’s a cost here beyond the pay per click cost, a reputational cost.

Double the number of people coming to your site and you double the number of people NOT converting as well. Why aren’t they converting? Maybe they just have a different agenda – say maybe they are just “window shopping” or doing some background research and not ready to convert.

Or maybe the usability of your site let you down? Does it not only waste the leads that your marketing effort has brought to the site, but actually give them a bad, off putting user experience? Worse, will they complain about it. Follow tags like #usabilityfail and #customerservicefail on Twitter and you’ll quickly get a sense of how very annoyed people can get.

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By Emily Cootes and Tony Perry, Precedent Cardiff

Welcome to our quick-fire guide to creative success!

Do you watch The Apprentice? If you’re anything like us lot, you probably sit in front of your TV every week thinking: ‘I could do this so much better’. Well at Precedent’s recent annual forum, it was time to put our skills to the test and prove it!

As avid Apprentice fans and inspired by some of this series’ digital tasks, our commercial director, Mark Sherwin, challenged us to create a web app in just 24 hours: 24 long hours, 2 pitches and many beers later, we had the results.

Our chairman Paul Hoskins and board advisor Phil Jones picked the winners which ranged from an Olympic torch ‘bumping’ app, the crowd-sourcing ‘Social Eyes’ student safety app through to ‘NatNav’, a social wildlife navigator tool (keep your eyes peeled – it could be coming to a woodland near you!).

Now unlike the ‘real’ apprentices, our expert development team weren’t primed to work through the night building each of the 8 app concepts we’d prepared, so we focussed on creating full blueprints for each app; everything from user journey flows and paper prototypes, through to full designs, costing models and business cases for investment.

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In this, the second of a six part column contributed by Precedent to PSMG magazine, looks at the best way of learning from you users and their needs.

You know that Friday afternoon feeling, when the To do’ list has been completed (or moved to Monday) but there are still a couple of hours left in the day? Do you get the guilty temptation to nosey on Facebook, Twitter etc? Well go right ahead – in fact make this part of your weekly routine! When your boss asks what you are doing, it’s ‘Digital Ethnography’; the art of hanging out with your customers and prospects online.

Many professional service firms obsess about the design of their site without building any real understanding of their users. Firms expend disproportionate energy on their home page, ignoring the fact that only 25% of users who arrive at their site see this, whilst the rest deep-link to content direct from search. In fact, a user may be making decisions about whether to hire you or your competitor without ever reaching your website.

So how do you better acquaint yourself with your users? Monitor the ‘buzz’; at its simplest this means visiting key forums and social communities regularly and seeing what’s being talked about. Ideally, it means structured review. Free tools such as Social Mention, Social Seek , Boardreader and Klout allow you to monitor keywords across a wide range of social networks and measure your current influence, or deploy one of the heavy hitting enterprise tools such as Sentimetrics or Radian6.

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In this, the first of a six part column contributed by Precedent to PSMG magazine, considers just where to start when creating that perfect digital strategy.

As strategic guru Michael Porter once said, “The essence of strategy is that you must set limits on what you’re trying to accomplish.”

How many of us have asked or been asked, ‘should we have a blog?’, ‘why aren’t we on Twitter?’ or indeed, ‘why do we need a website at all?’ All these questions are impossible to answer if a firm fails to take a strategic approach to their online presence; what are you trying to achieve? Who are you trying to reach? Why would they visit your website? Where can you most effectively influence them?
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By Adrian Porter, Head of Research

When I arrived at the British Council offices in a South-East Asian capital for my first meeting with the team that would be helping me with a client project to understand the market there, my interpreter, the brilliant Yu Yu Wu, asked me this question: ‘So if these are the questions you want the answers to, why didn’t you just send them to a research house over here and get the answers sent back to you? Surely that would have been cheaper?’ (more…)

By Sedef Gavaz, Senior Consultant

Centrally written, standardised patient information leaflets across the NHS are the way forward. After all, where is the merit in each hospital trust writing and producing essentially the same document? (more…)