Kathy Santos, Mass Audubon

[Ed. note: This article is part of NTEN's Member Appreciation Month spectacular. The most popular pieces will be featured in our newsletter. You can read all the details here.]

I've been trying to explain online marketing to non-techies for eons… or at least since 1992, when an executive told me the web was “a geek toy that would never catch on.” But I may have finally have had a breakthrough.

I love analogies. I love food. Turned out to be a winning combination.

It came to me when I was trying to explain why all the fluff and blah-blah text on our website was useless at best and probably counterproductive. The concept of scanning rather than reading all that verbiage just wasn't getting through.

So I told a story. The story was about finding a bag of zucchini on my porch – a present from an anonymous neighbor. I had no idea what you did with zucchini. And this being twenty-some years ago, I had no web to turn to.

So I got out a bunch of cookbooks. In each one, I flipped to the index and looked under Z. I passed by things like zucchini, identifying – I had that one down – and zucchini, growing – obviously I had no need to grow my own. I kept looking until I chanced upon zucchini, chocolate fudge cake. Now that's my kind of recipe! So I flipped to the recipe, read through it, and eventually went on to make 14 delicious chocolate fudge zucchini cakes (they freeze well).

At that point, I went back over the story to point out what I'd actually done:

• I started with a task – I needed a recipe.
• I pulled out several cookbooks.
• But I didn't read the prefaces about how the chef started making crepes at the age of 3, or the introduction to measuring cups. I went straight to the list of recipes in the index.
• I scanned the indexes until I found a likely recipe.
• Then I went to that recipe and read it – and fulfilled my task.

At this point, some of my audience was getting it, some of them were puzzled, and a few of them were still wondering what chocolate fudge zucchini cake tasted like.

I segued into another story, with another task – finding something to do with the kids over April vacation. The difference with this task - we now had the web. So I surfed to several likely websites and scanned for the words “school vacation”. If I found them, I read a little context, and if it looked like it might be something for the kids to do, I clicked on it. I glanced at the resultant page, and if it wasn't immediately apparent that it was what I wanted, I went on to the next website.

Eventually I found a website with a page titled Activities for Kids – and on it was a link to a page called Vacation Week Day Camp. That page I read in detail, since I would have to answer to the kids if the camp turned out to be booooo-ring.

Now I go back over the story, pointing out that I didn't read the paragraphs at the top of the Activities for Kids page. I had no idea that there was a whole section that talked about the importance of environmental education for children, or a photo and welcome message from the Director of Environmental Programs. None of that information had anything to do with accomplishing my task.

And the light finally dawned for almost everyone in the audience. They got it! They finally understood that users start with something they want to accomplish, and quickly winnow out anything that isn't on target - and only when they reach their goal will they actually begin to read content.

This was a major breakthrough.

And even better, I now had a jumping-off point for talking about user-centered content. I could point out that the stuff at the top of the Activities for Kids page was what the organization wanted to tell me, not what I wanted to know. All it did was push the content I wanted further down the page and make it less likely that I'd find it.

I finally had my audience looking at webpages from an entirely new point of view. I had reached what the academics call “the teachable moment”. I was one happy web techie. Plus, I still had some chocolate fudge zucchini cake in the freezer at home.

And in case you're still wondering what Chocolate Fudge Zucchini Cake tastes like, here's my recipe:

Chocolate Fudge Zucchini Cake

Preheat oven to 350° Grease a 10” tube or Bundt pan and sprinkle with cocoa.

Stir together dry ingredients. Beat the eggs until thick and light, gradually adding the sugar. Then mix in oil and chocolate. Stir in zucchini and nuts. Pour batter in pan and bake for about 1 ¼ hours.