Make It Easy For Me.....

    Yet another simple concept......You need to make the thing you want people to do, the easiest thing for them to do. I got a piece of paper from my childen's school that said: "Go Green, Go Paperless". The school was asking me to opt out of receiving the paper copy of the school's monthly newsletter.I was initially interested as I thought they were finally going to start e-mail communication. However that wasn't the case. They were suggesting that I could go every month to the website and look at the monthly newsletter. Asking me to move from having the newsletter pushed to me to having to pull the newsletter from the website is not going to entice many people. It isn't that difficult to create an e-mail group or even better to have me go to the website and sign up to receive the newsletter. Then there was a deadline I had to respond by if I wanted to do it. If you're committed to doing this to "save paper" (and the school money) you can probably deal with the few people that will submit their form after the artificial deadline.
     The point is......walk a mile in your customer's shoes. Yes I am a customer of the school. I pay for a service. In this situation you are trying to change my behavior to suit your needs. Fair enough but it needs to be a win/win. Think about what would make it easiest for me and offer me a compromise. Expecting me to embrace a concept that adds work to my side of the equation is not going to be widely accepted and probably will not result in you meeting your target, unless you set it very low.