Creating Thumb-Stopping Content in a (Formerly) Page-Turning World, Part 1

I was the keynote speaker at the Oct. 27-28 Anabaptist Communicators Conference at Bethel College Newton, Kansas. I was asked to speak about the challenges facing communicators today, and some ideas for going forward. Below find Part 1 of my address, about the challenges; click here for Part 2 about some ways forward.

Introduction

Before I begin this morning, you should know I almost didn’t come.

That’s right—I almost passed up an all-expenses paid opportunity to come to Newton, Kansas.

Hard to believe, isn’t it?

And why did I almost not come?

When the conference organizers first issued their invitation, they asked me to speak on the topic of how we, as communicators, could “overcome having to do more by having with Less.”

I said no.

Why did I say no?

I said no because I am tired of talking about how communicators are always expected to do more with less—and oh, by-the-way says the board, we are raising the fundraising target by 10% again this year.

I said no because I’m tired of seeing organizations find the money to add new programs to serve more people with new program staff—but not be willing to find more funds for those of us who raise the money and do the communicating so that all those new programs can keep going and those new staff can be paid.

I said no because I am tired of hearing boards and bosses say to communicators and fundraisers yes, we know you are over-worked and understaffed, but we can’t hire more people because we need to keep the overhead costs low.

I said no because it’s frustrating to see our work considered peripheral to the “real” work of the organization—helping people in need—something evidenced by how little time many boards spend on the communications and fundraising reports whenever they meet.

I said no because over my long career I grew tired of being treated like the children of Israel when they were slaves in Egypt—being told to make even more bricks, but with even less straw.

What I did say yes to was a chance to be part of an event where we, as communicators, can re-frame the conversation for and about ourselves. 

I said yes to an opportunity talk to you, my counterparts and colleagues, about how we could shake off old paradigms which see our work only as “overhead” and, instead, think about new ways to invite our boards, bosses and colleagues to see how vital our work is to the success of our organizations.

(More about that in my workshop, tomorrow.)

And I said yes to a chance to share with you about my experiences and observations as I reach the end of my 30-plus years career in non-profit communications, marketing and fundraising—about where we’ve come from, and where we could go, and why I am excited by the younger people in this profession who are dreaming new things I can’t even imagine.

Because the fact of the matter is many of our organizations are facing uncertain times.

The challenges include:

Aging memberships.

Declining attendance, in both Canada and the U.S. 

Waning denominational loyalty.

And fierce competition for time, attention and dollars.

In both Canada and the U.S., the fastest-growing “religion” to today is the unaffiliated, those who when asked to choose a religious group or denomination say “none of the above.”

Many of these newly unaffiliated people are younger; in both countries they are less religious than their parents and their grandparents by large margins.

But it’s not only the young. Older people are also dropping out of the church.

If the unaffiliated are known as the “nones,” these are “dones”—done with going to church every Sunday, done with listening to sermons, done with volunteering to keep church and denominational structures going.

Just plain done with all that church stuff.

For them, a walk in the park on a Sunday morning is a lovely break in the decades-old church-going routine.

All of this lack of connection and decline in membership, attendance and loyalty has got to the point where I like to say there are only two kinds of denominations or church-related non-profit organizations in the Mennonite and broader world today: 

Those that are in trouble, and those that will be.

I don’t know about you, but I marvel when I see the EDs and CEOs of church-related groups acting so calm.

Personally, I think they should be running around like their hair is one fire—but that’s just me.

And into this world, amidst these challenges, are we—the communicators, marketers and fundraisers.

It’s our job to somehow overcome the challenges, break through the noise, clamber over the clutter—and give people a reason to connect with the missions and visions of the organizations we work for.

It’s our job to tell the stories, create the new information channels, share the photos, make the videos.

Without us, our organizations would fail.

But I digress—in a good way, because I really, really want you to know that the work you do is beyond important for your organizations and the church as a whole.

Which makes you all the more important as you respond to the changing communications universe and find ways to create thumb-stopping content in a page-turning world.

But before we take a look at that, let’s take a deeper look at the changing world we inhabit today.

Part 1: The challenges we face

The world today is certainly very different from the one I started my career in over 30 years ago.

Back then, things were much simpler.

Almost everyone read a daily newspaper, a national magazine, listened to radio news, watched TV news or, if they were religious, read a denominational publication.

If I wanted to reach the most people, I just needed to catch the attention of a few media outlets and I was pretty much done.

That world is gone—fractured into thousands of pieces.

And it happened so quickly.

It was just 25 years ago, in 1991, that the World Wide Web was made available for public use.

We couldn’t imagine life without it today.

I made my first website in 1994. Back then, there were about 3,000 websites—in the world.

Today there are over 800 million.

Twelve years ago, nobody had ever heard of something called Facebook. Today over 1.6 billion people use it.

In 2007, the first iPhone was released. Today, almost 70% of people use one—that figure is over 90% for young people.

And since the early 2000s, newspaper circulation has been falling.

There’s no doubt the change from print to digital is one of the most significant changes we have encountered in, oh, say 500 years.

For centuries we have lived in world created by Gutenberg and his printing press.

It was a stable, predictable world. Entire industries rose to take advantage of it. 

Today, that world is disappearing fast. 

Most of the changes have happened in the last 20 years.

The number of journalism jobs at newspapers has shrunk by 20,000.

Since 2007, the number of newspapers in the U.S. has gone from 2,700 to 2,000.

According to Pew, in 2015 newspaper circulation experienced a decline not seen since the recession of 2008-09.  

Coupled with falling advertising, many newspapers are on the ropes.

As of this year, only 20% of U.S. adults gets their news in print from newspapers. That figure is just 5% for younger people.

In Canada, media expert Ken Goldstein predicts that by 2025 there will be no news in print in my country.

“Canada’s daily newspapers now are engaged in a 10-year race against time and technology to develop an online business model that will enable them to preserve their brands without print editions,” he stated a year ago.

Even the News Media Alliance—what used to be called the Newspaper Association of America—is acknowledging the changes.

In September the Association, founded in 1887, changed its name to News Media Alliance.

Why the change? 

According to David Chavern, the Association’s chief executive, the word “newspaper” has become meaningless in reference to many of its members which today reach many of its readers via the Web.

“Newspaper’ is not a big enough word to describe the industry anymore,” Mr. Chavern said. “The future of this industry is much broader.”

Meantime, church publications are struggling, too.

In Canada, two church publications closed in September. Since 2003 over 25 church publications have shut down.

And why is this happening? The Web, of course—and mobile in particular.

The conversation has moved online.

In particular, it is moving to our phones—a misnomer of a name if there ever was one.

The move is affecting us all, from the biggest media giants to the smallest organization.

Take ESPN for example. 

ESPN revolutionized the world of TV. Almost single-handedly, it made cable TV a must-have service for tens of millions of people.

But now ESPN's future is in doubt as more people cut the cable cord. And where are those people going? 

To their phones or other mobile devices. 56% of the TV and film viewing by Millennials today is on computer, smartphone, tablet, or a gaming device.

And that figure is growing.

To help it succeed in the future, ESPN is developing what it calls "a smartphone-first content effort that combines personalization, journalism, video and personality.”

According to Chad Millman, ESPN's new vice president and editorial director for domestic digital content, the broadcaster is going in this direction because "mobile is everything. We always have to be thinking about mobile first. If we’re thinking about anything else, we’re failing the audience."

His comments are backed up by a recent Pew survey, which found that 72% of Americans now get their news via mobile.

(Which is why Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, for short, is so popular. AMP pages load four times faster than regular pages, which means people are more likely to read them.)

It’s got to the point that I am hearing people describe the World Wide Web—that thing you open on your computer when you get to work in the morning—as “legacy” media, just like newspapers and the evening news. 

In other words, if it doesn’t fit on my phone, I won’t be reading it.

Whew! That’s a lot of challenges. But there’s more.

The decline of TV news. Supper hour or evening news is something only a shrinking number of mostly older people watch. 

This type of journalism is called curated appointment viewing—someone else decides what is news and gives it to you on their schedule. 

When information is available anywhere and anytime, fewer people have interest in that—especially younger people.

Or, as one commentator put it: “Tell a bunch of 19-year-olds that it should be up to the professionals to determine what news is most important, and they’ll laugh until their earbuds fall out.”

Changes in way people get information. Consuming information used to be linear. As the King said about reading stories to Alice in Wonderland: “You begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” 

Today, the way people get information is more episodic. We watch this show for a bit, then change the channel, then change it again. We open that web page, then hit a link and go to another page. 

One of the main ways this affects us is that home pages simply aren’t as important anymore.

When the Web started, we thought of it like a book or magazine.

The home page was the table of contents. It’s where we placed the information we wanted people to see—the information we thought was the most important.

Darned if people don’t follow our lead anymore. Through Google and Facebook they are apt to end up anywhere on our website, following all sorts of unique and circuitous paths.

The home page is much less important these days.

In other words, linear is out, and chance is in. You never know how people will find you, or where they will end up when they do.

Audience Fragmentation. The age of mass media is coming to an end. It is impossible to reach people through a few main channels. You need dozens or hundreds of ways to get the message out—mostly through social media.

Shorter attention spans. Studies of website use indicate that if visitors are not engaged within 10 seconds of landing on a web page, they will leave. 

     Those that stay will stay for about 60 seconds on a web page, and read about a quarter of the text on that page. (About half don’t read beneath the bottom of the screen on a computer monitor.)

As one author put it: “The more I write, the more of you tune out. And it’s not just me. It’s everywhere online. When people land on a story, they very rarely make it all the way down the page.”

If it sounds like people today have the attention spans of goldfish—you’re right. 

Research last year by Microsoft shows the average Canadian has an attention span of nine seconds online—about the same as a goldfish. That’s how long they can focus on one thing before being distracted. 

Media are responding to this new way of paying attention. In 2014 Associated Press and Reuters instructed their reporters to write articles of no longer than 500 words.

“Most readers give up by the 500-word mark," said an editor (although she qualified by adding that "if you have nothing original and compelling to say.")

•    Information Overload. Research indicates that people are exposed to about 600 ads or messages a day—that’s 219,000 a year or over 18 million in a lifetime (if you live to be 85 years old). 

Meanwhile, between 300 to 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, up from six hours a minute in 2007. Over 3 billion hours of video are watched on YouTube each month. 

Reflecting on all this, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said a few years ago that one day it will be “possible to have an iPod-like device that will have 85 years of video on it. So you will be dead before you watch the whole [thing].”

•    Attention Crash. The amount of information has increased exponentially, but one thing that has not increased is the amount of time we have to consume it. We still only get 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year—and you have to sleep some of that time.

Said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: “We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention.”

Looking over all the changes and challenges, I have come to describe it as the “great unbundling.”

The idea of unbundling comes from the world of Cable TV, which for decades—to the annoyance of subscribers—only sold “bundles” of TV channels.

A typical bundle contained channels you wanted—like CNN—bundled together with channels neither you or many others had any interest in.

In Canada, the CRTC, the body that regulates TV is beginning to force cable TV providers to unbundle their offerings—something they are reluctant to do.

In so doing, the CRTC is finally catching up to the great unbundling that has been going on in society for a while now.

iTunes unbundled music; no more buying a CD of ten songs to get the one you want.

Digital photography unbundled the connection between the photographer and the camera store, eliminating the need to transfer photos from film to prints.

Online shopping is unbundling the shopping mall. There’s now no need to go to a central location to find a collection of stores when you can visit thousands of retailers using the Internet.

Online courses threaten to unbundle universities. Why do I have to take a course in the place and time of the university’s choosing? Why can’t I take it when or where I want?

And, of course, the Web unbundled traditional journalism.

For centuries, the most economical way to share information was by bundling it into daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly or quarterly packages called issues.

It made no financial sense to publish individual articles and then mail them to subscribers. The costs were prohibitive. It would lead to financial ruin.

So publishers waited until they had enough articles, coupled them together with advertising, and bundled them into a daily, weekly or monthly issue.

In other words, publications were not set up for the convenience of the readers, but for the publisher—the people who ran the publication.

But the Internet has eliminated that financial constraint on distribution—and delivered the power to choose when to read an article to the customer.

Today, if an article is finished, it can be released to the public immediately—online. There is no financial penalty.

By making people wait a day, week or months to get information, publications—and organizations—risk a different kind of ruin—the ruin of irrelevance.

When people can Tweet or Facebook about events in real time, nobody needs a publication, or an organization, that promises to tell them tomorrow what happened yesterday.

For those of us who are accustomed to bundling material into packages—newsletters, magazines, even e-newsletters—this is a scary time. 

But there’s no going back.

No longer does it make any sense to make readers wait until we're ready to share information. 

Their universe is unbundled. They're ready now.

+++++++++++++++++

So: Where do we go from here? How do we respond to this changing communications universe? How do we create thumb-stopping content in a world that is used to turning pages?

What follows (in Part 2) are on person’s ideas—a few half-baked ideas, opinions and best-guesses. Which makes me just like everyone else in the room, I think.