going with the flow

User flow — the pathway one creates online for list-building and fundraising — is hard to do well and incredibly easy to screw up. [My former colleague Sue Citro is the only bulletproof user flow planner I’ve ever met.]

Direct mail folks are used to stuffing a bunch of different crap into the envelope — the letter, the lift note, the address labels, the petition (known as the “action device”) and the order card. The recipient can then respond to each piece one at a time and re-aggregate the response devices into the reply envelopes.

Online, it’s more complicated. People can only execute one transaction at a time. If you ask them to do three things in the same email, the likelihood is that they will only do one of them — or they may in fact do nothing at all.

Here’s a campaign with really well-done user flow — executed by Donordigital for HSUS.

Play with it. Learn from it. Enjoy.