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Scott McKay is a Toronto strategist, writer, creative director, patient manager, half-baked photographer and forcibly retired playwright.

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    "They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket."

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    Entries in Digital Leap Conference (1)

    Friday
    Apr232010

    "the fall with probably kill you!"

    DateFriday, April 23, 2010 at 10:01PM

    Spent the day at the Digital Leap Conference, a joint venture of Ted Hart and Stephen Thomas Ltd., along with the Royal Conservatory of Music. Basically, how the hell do you fundraise in a world where everything you know about your donor is wrong, or out of date, or just changing hourly?

    No one had a lot of answers, but a few people seemed to have a pretty good map for taking the next steps into the dark.

    Scott Stratten from Unmarketing didn't say anything really revolutionary about social capital and social marketing – but hammered home the essential point that you have to actually talk with people to have a relationship with them, in a very funny and impassioned way. His constant mockery of clients who just want to "get on the Facebook" because their current marketing is failing, without having a clue what they're actually going to do, was particularly cutting.

    Mark Banbury, CIO of Plan Canada, gave a very straightforward and strong overview about what Plan is doing – starting with integrating all their systems so they can get real-time reporting of everything: donors, sponsored children, revenues, the works. It's a huge accomplishment and a vital first step to a lot of good work.

    Finally, Alan Clayton (of The Good Agency and others) in his oddly frenetic Scottish accent and mannerisms (or is that Scottish mannerisms and accent?) talked about marketing in 2020, ending on the point that radical transparency – the total availability of all your organization's data, research, info and numbers to the public – is already here and is only going to get even bigger. This means that consumers will be making decisions based not on your marketing or PR, but on what your leadership team actually knows. They will evaluate whether you are worthy of their donation based purely on whether you deliver the services and impacts that you say you deliver. Any problems, any hiccups, and they're gone and they're pulling a lot of friends with them.

    Ultimately technology and marketing are only going to get more closely intertwined in the years ahead. (Gee! What an insight, McKay!) To paraphrase Clayton in his finale, we're all going to have to know everything about everything, be incredibly curious about everything else, and be impassioned about it all.

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