Software/Technology

Emails released based on real-time behavioral data have been shown to increase open rates by 50 percent and conversion rates by 350 percent. Last week, I wrote about the Great Reformation, which is the impending destruction of your organization’s org chart due to the advent of new technology that delivers the statistics above. First, online fundraising platforms put traditional marketing tools into fundraisers’ hands, and now automated marketing platforms are dissolving the line between lead generation and closed deals, also called donations. Our world is changing...

In 1995, Todd Wagner and his business partner Mark Cuban pioneered streaming audio and then video over the internet. AudioNet, which they eventually renamed to Broadcast.com, went public in 1998 and was sold to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999. It made Wagner and Cuban billionaires. In the wake of the sale, Wagner was twice…

I cleaned up my personal email and I am shocked at how many companies do not easily allow you to unsubscribe. Please note, this is not a best practice. Here's what I learned from the experience...

A group of tech titans, including Amazon.com and Microsoft, has created a nonprofit that will ponder the impact of artificial intelligence on the world—and perhaps make it seem less threatening to worried observers. The group, dubbed Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society, also includes Facebook, IBM and Alphabet divisions DeepMind and Google.…

Cloud software giant Salesforce is well-known for baking corporate philanthropy into its financial model and workplace culture at its founding way back in 1999—pledging 1 percent of its equity, 1 percent of its employees’ work hours and 1 percent of its products to charitable causes. That strategy has inspired many tech companies born since that…

When you imagine a typical nonprofit, you may picture a soup kitchen, a community center or a homeless shelter. While such services still exist, many nonprofits now design apps, build websites and design digital tools that help deliver social programs and services to those in need. "A lot of organizations that were previously not integrating…

Technology companies tend to couch their products not as businesses for profit, but as gifts to humanity. The HBO comedy "Silicon Valley" so thoroughly mocked this impulse that I heard companies in the valley ordered their spokespeople to stop using the phrase "making the world a better place." For the biggest tech giants, faux philanthropy…

MarTech. AdTech. Analytics platforms. Big data. They are all part of the modern day marketer’s vocabulary. Why? Because today, we find ourselves in an environment more complex than ever before, due to a highly intelligent, technologically savvy and more social and interactive consumer...

Some say life's a gamble. But gambling can be very random, as in the rolling of a die, or very scientific, as in the calculation of odds and percentages. Investing in technology should not be a gamble, inasmuch as you can predict what it will do for you. In the standard business lingo, we call…

With more than 1 billion websites across the digital landscape, we know there are some elements that are mandatory for effective web experiences...