May 2007

It’s a constituent management extravaganza! This month, our new articles offer two different lenses on the issues of constituent tracking. First up, with have the first of a two part series from the ever insightful Paul Hagen: In Search of CRM Part 1: Understanding Constituents and Processes. This article summarizes how you can get a good handle on the constituents and processes you’ll need to support with a Constituent Relationship Management system. In the second part, coming next month, he’ll talk about how to use this information to look for a CRM technology solution that will work for you.

We’ve also got a great constituent tracking article for small organizations: Tales of River Databases: Tracking Constituents in Small and Mid-Sized Organizations. This was a fun article to write. Working with the River Network, who generously funded the article, we spoke to a series of organizations that work for the protection and conservation of US lakes and rivers about their constituent database situation and needs, and wrote up a summary of the best practices and a few case studies that speak to the needs of these smaller organizations.

Well, wouldn't you know it: pretty much as soon as we publish a Few Good Tools article about web analytics packages, Google launches their complete interface redesign of Google Analytics. A Google staffer offers a comprehensive overview of the redesign on his blog.

Not that it changes much about what I would have said about Analytics. I'd just be even more glowing. I have to admit that the old Analytics was pretty and shiny and seemed like it *ought* to be telling you a lot of stuff, but I always found it hard to drill down to exactly what I was hoping to see. I've just started to play around with the new Analytics, but it feels amazingly more intuitive. In fact, it feels like it has much more information than it used to.... though perhaps it's just easier to access that information.

The interface design was led by Jeffrey Venn, one of the founding fathers of website interface design. You can tell. The interface is a fantastic example of giving people a high level view (with substance but not overwhelming) and allowing them to drill down where needed. You can customize your view if you want, but you don't have to customize to get something pretty useful. It really shows the difference between useful and the merely nifty.

And how's this for intuitive: I had tried to setup conversion goals in the old Analytics, to measure eNews signup and donations. I didn't have a lot of time to play around with them, and I never got them to show me anything at all. But magically, with this new release, they've just started working by themselves. So that's a huge plus for the new Analytics: a number of people have mentioned trouble with that feature, but now it appears to be within the reach of mere mortals.