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Don’t Just Study, Practice

In my work on marketing operations for the Institute for Humane Studies, I am working with our fundraising team on an online advertising campaign. We have posted ads on websites where potential IHS donors might visit. When people click on our ads, they are taken to landing pages on IHS’ Learn Liberty website.

Landing pages are web pages designed to drive visitors to action. In this case, we want folks to sign up for email updates from Learn Liberty and make a donation to the project.

We are disappointed in the results so far, so we got on the phone with an agency helping us with the project. It turns out a decent number of people are clicking on our ads and checking out our landing pages, but they are not signing up for emails or making donations.

Why?

Our representatives at the agency went through our landing pages with us and pointed out a few changes we could make to possibly improve performance. These were pretty simple changes such as moving the email signup form towards the top and putting our calls to action in an eye-catching gold font.

I should have known better. In fact, I did know better.

As part of getting up to speed for this job I have been researching and studying digital marketing, including building landing pages. Having your calls to action easy to find and “above the fold” is basic advice I already learned.

But I hadn’t put it into practice. I hadn’t built a landing page for a real fundraising project before.

As I continue to do this work and build my skills, I expect I’ll make mistakes in building landing pages and other areas. At some point, the basics of building effective landing pages might become automatic so I can focus on testing more elements for best performance.

Studying will help you try but mastery will only come from practice.

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Start of State Policy Network Annual Meeting 2015

I am on my way to the State Policy Network’s (SPN) Annual Meeting today. SPN is the network of state-based free market think tanks in the United States. I have previously attended this event in Amelia Island, FL and Oklahoma City. This year the event is being hosted by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Grand Rapids, MI. I spent the summer of 2012 as an intern at the Mackinac Center working on their Michigan Capitol Confidential publication. My work from that time, a series of investigative journalism pieces of government investments in green energy projects, is available online here.

I attended my first SPN Annual Meeting through their Generation Liberty Fellowship for young people interested in free market think tank work. I hosted a session on student outreach for think tanks on behalf of SFL. I think it was a moderately successful session. The next year I attended entirely on behalf of SFL, again running the student outreach session.

This year I have four primary areas of focus. The first is professional development through sessions on management and fundraising. The second is fundraising through meeting with new, potential, and current SFL donors. Third is maintaining SFL’s presence at our exhibitor booth. My final focus is networking with existing and new contacts, updating them on SFL’s work and my current role as well as learning of new projects from other organizations.

I am very excited for this conference and hope to gain a lot from my participation. This is my first non-SFL libertarian event in months. Following the conference, Kelly and I will meet up and head to Michigan State to attend the football game against Purdue with my old roommates and their significant others: Nick, Jay, Kara, Kyle, and Kate. On Sunday, we will celebrate my 24th birthday with my family. This should be a great week!