enlightened orgs: inspiration

A NEW BLACK GOLD

In the debt-free province of Alberta, where the black gold that first gushed from the ground in the 1950’s, has resulted in a Heritage Trust fund worth of billions of dollars being set aside for a “rainy day” – getting anyone to think about alternative energy sources is not an easy sell. But two framers from the tiny farming community of Vegreville have risen to the challenge.

Their innovation to create Biogas from cattle manure seems a perfect fit for a province that has ranching as it second largest industry. It is also timely for a province aware of the implications of the depleting sources of non-renewable oil and gas, and the challenges of a reliance on an industry with a Boom/Bust economic cycle.

“Inventing a new technology is a pure Alberta story… a great example that building a knowledge economy can happen on the farm, not just in ivory towers” – Evan Chapko, CEO, Highmark Renewables (Edmonton Journal, 02/08/09)

FROM POOP TO PROFIT…Alberta’s new Black Gold…

ALBERTA’S FIRST GREEN ENERGY MEGA-PROJECT

Shane and Evan Chrapko are taking the cattle manure from a 30,000 cow feedlot, owned by partners Mike and Bert Kotelko, and turning it into Biogas, something their company Highmark Renewables, markets as “renewable natural gas.”

They have just tapped into what is probably Alberta’s most abundant and renewable resource…cattle poop.

The greenist electrical generating plant in the province is now producing one megawatt of power which is enough to meet the electrical demand of the feedlot and 700 homes in the tiny communities of Vegreville and Two Hills. When the construction on this plant is completed, it will also produce ethanol to be added to gasoline without the current problem of having to take away from farmland to produce ethanol from crops like corn. Together, with the help of Xiaomei Li, a scientist from China, they have developed more than 40 recipes for turning waste, including slaughter house waste and municipal sewage, into biogas. Patents are pending.

Their motto: “Where there is waste…there is opportunity.”
Chrapko calls it a “virtuous loop – producing power, cattle feed, fuel and fertilizer .”

The goal is to have a string of plants across the prairies at sites where manure is plentiful. When you consider each cow produces the manure equivalent of six humans, the idea of continuing to spread this volume of waste and its resultant methane gas, over the land forever, without negative consequences, is to ignore a looming environmental problem.

Travis Nickel who heads up the company, Growing Power, responsible for the electrical side of this innovation, sees a time when every feedlot in the country will have such a plant to provide fuel for nearby towns and will deliver ethanol to the big refineries for production of gasoline.

Shane and Evan Chrapko are no strangers to successful ventures. They launched, built and sold The DocSpace Company for 811 Million (538 Million USD) in just 30 months from inception to final sale. Both are graduates of the University of Alberta. Shane is the recipient of the rare Early Career Achievement award awarded to one graduate from a pool of 100,00, who has achieved remarkable success in business within ten years of graduation.

ANOTHER LOCAL, HOME-GROWN SOLUTION…a company to watch in the future!

BLESS BLESS
JUDY BERG
If you know a company that is making a Mindshift towards serving humanity while still turning a profit, we would like to know about them. Let us know by contacting::
attractingsuccess@soulabundant.com... or leave the information in the comments section of this post.

Organizational Behaviour Consultant
author: Imagine Your Soul Abundant: Attracting Success, Fulfillment and True Happiness
more about: www.soulabundant.com
Judy’s book can be ordered from her website www.soulabundant.com.  Special prices for bulk orders upon request. Seminars and retreats customized to the needs of your group or organization.

research: validity

LOOKING FOR REALITY

One of the biggest challenges in business is understanding our markets. We often choose to conduct research to get a better handle on market trends, demand, expectations, satisfaction, etc.

There are multiple types of errors in the data we gather. The easiest to quantify and the one most often discussed is sampling error.

Let’s assume we can draw a random sample from your population. But how big a sample do we need to have confidence in our results?

A SIMPLE EXAMPLE

An easy example of how to approach survey sampling is ownership of Ford cars among a population of 100,000 households.

We could pay the state department of transportation for a database, or if we had all the time in the world, we could knock on every door in the county and survey the entire population. Perhaps we would find that 30% of the households own a Ford.

Since we don’t want to spend $1 to $5 a record for 100,000 records, or $5 to $25 each to phone every household, it makes more sense to survey a sample.

But how big a sample do we need, and how small a sample can we get away with?

THE TABLE TELLS A LOT

• The sweet spot is 95% confidence level with a sampling error of 5%. So the sample size required would be 383. This means that  95% of the time we did a random sample of 383, we would find that between 25% and 35% of respondents own a Ford.
• But please don’t let someone divide your sample into small sub-groups and try to draw conclusions from within them. For example, a sample size of 100 gives a sampling error of 9.8%. This means that we could get a result that either 21% or 39% own a Ford. This is a very wide range, and we should hesitate to make business critical decisions based on such a small sample.

YOUR FREE STATISTICS CALCULATOR

When we build real-time customer satisfaction system for clients, they get to see the statistical validity of every report they request on the screen.

We’ve reproduced that code for you in a free calculator.

• Click here to the access article (in the Research section of the navigation bar – above left, then in the Tools section on the right).

• Or click here to go directly to the calculator.

We hope you use it often and tell your friends about it.

Please share this free tool with your friends by clicking Share This below, then Send/Email.

research: crowd-sourcing prediction software

CUSTOMERS TALK. DO YOU LISTEN?

One of my favorite themes in life has become the critical need and great value of letting your customers TRULY communicate with you.

So I was going to write a simple post today about online prediction software used for crowd-sourcing [Wikipedia] (leveraging mass collaboration) But, like most of my thoughts, it twisted and turned a bit. So I tried to unravel it for you here.

RHEINGOLD’S MIND

I first fell in love with Howard Rheingold’s mind [Wikipedia] when he took his turn editing the Whole Earth Review. He was one of so many thinkers and doers who interacted with the great works of Steward Brand. [Wikipedia]

Periodically, I check Howard’s site to see what he’s focusing on. He bumped his fame with his 2003 book Smartmobs: The Next Social Revolution. Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution parallels much of our early work at MutualGravity creating functional online platforms. Howard has been trying to build his own social network platform for years.

Related to that, I’ve embedded his current video about web videos on his vlog. It a simple, visual overview of video on the web.

LETTING THE CROWD TELL YOU YOUR BUSINESS

Predictify is one of many open social networks built on the idea that the crowd can predict the future, participants can build a reputation based on their accuracy, and marketers can post questions to collect actionable data.

It’s one of many twists on traditional marketing research approach being tested by companies. Like most approaches, one of our key concerns wraps around statistical validity. Can you trust this sample of people and this methodology to bring you accurate enough information for you to make multi-million dollar decisions on it? We’ll come back to that issue next Tuesday. We’ll simplify the jargon, and give you the information and tools you need to understand validity to do research correctly.

In the meantime, there’s a lot of potential in letting your constituents, or the whole world, give you their best guess into the future.

WANT TO EXPLORE FOR YOURSELF OR YOUR BUSINESS?

Begin with a comparison of online prediction software used for crowd-sourcing. It’s a bit dated, but there’s a good discussion of various online prediction software on Mercury Research and Consulting’s Mercury’s Blog on prediction markets.

David VanAmburg’s involvement with marketing research began in 1968 when he was hired as a research analyst with technology leader, Lord Corporation. Since 1977, he has provided over 2,000 research studies for clients in 165 industries, designed the first national hunger study for America’s Second Harvest, and taught MBA courses in the subject. He loves designing research studies and analyzing results.

VanAmburg Group and MutualGravity design automated real-time marketing research and customer feedback systems for large and small corporations, from utility customers to hospital patients to restaurant patrons, and more. What can we implement for you?

Focus Group Process
click to enlarge

FOCUS GROUPS LET YOUR CUSTOMERS TALK

Conducting your marketing research [Wikipedia] incorrectly can cost you millions of dollars. Honest, I’ve seen it happen.

A lot of folks take the attitude, “It’s not rocket science”. And it’s not. But if you do it wrong, you can draw the wrong conclusions and destroy your business. So please do it right.

I thought I’d begin our weekly posts on marketing research with some of the research tools that have been developed over the years, starting with focus groups.

There are two categories of research, direct (do it yourself) and indirect (find someone else’s data). If you are going to do your own research, there are two general approaches, quantitative (statistically valid surveys, for example) and qualitative, such as executive interviews or focus groups.

We’ve written a number of articles for your use in this site, with one article on focus groups.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH INSIGHTS

You can access any of the research articles by clicking on the Research button at the top of every page, or on Research in the left navigation bar. Then simply look down the navigation on the right to find the article that interest you. You can find the article on focus groups at http://www.vanamburggroup.com/research.php/focus-groups/20/2091/123/456.

You can use focus groups in many ways:

• As a single-session stand-alone research tool
• In a sequence, modifying your questions from one group to the next
• To understand issues before creating questionnaires for statistically valid surveys
• For clarification of issues by selected respondents to completed surveys

RELEASE STRESS TO TURN YOUR CUSTOMERS WITH NIGHTMARE EXPERIENCES INTO YOUR STRONGEST ADVOCATES

Whenever we include a client’s customers in a focus group, we’ve learned to allow up to 20 minutes for venting of problems. This is particularly true for companies like utilities, whose geographical monopolies prevent dissatisfied customers from securing another vendor. Or large technology companies like Microsoft.

Utility customers will bring up events that may have occurred 5 to 15 years previously. But they never found anyone from the company who would listen. They usually don’t expect resolution (fixing the problem) or recovery (making up for the problem). They just want a sympathetic ear. And your moderator is representing the company.

By listening carefully, the moderator can turn these long-term angry customers into advocates for the client in a matter of minutes during the meeting. These individuals then often provide the most insightful information, perhaps because they have thought a lot about the company and its products or services.

IS THE CLIENT ANONYMOUS?

This takes us to an interesting issue. Many companies insist on remaining anonymous throughout the entire  research process – some because they don’t want to taint the objectivity of responses, the rest I don’t know why.

After a number of decades in the field, I have strong opinions on this. I prefer transparency.

Research done correctly can maintain the objectivity of the results, while still having a marketing impact on all respondents.

We normally get the best results by explaining to the participants that the client has to be anonymous so that they give us unbiased answers, but that before the session is over, they will know who the client is. Then we design the focus group to collect needed objective ratings and other information before releasing the client’s identity.

By knowing who is paying them to share their experiences and opinions, participants usually rise to the occasion and present deeply insightful comments and suggestions.

Want further insights on how to design your groups? Read the article on focus groups.

David VanAmburg’s involvement with marketing research began in 1968 when he was hired as a a research analyst with technology leader, Lord Corporation. Since 1977, he has provided over 2,000 research studies for clients in 165 industries, designed the first national hunger study for America’s Second Harvest, and taught MBA courses in the subject. He loves designing research studies and analyzing results. “Getting the data back is like Christmas. You can learn so much”

CONTACT US to help make your research the key to your company’s future.

David VanAmburg President/CEO VanAmburg Group, Inc. Brilliant Marketing Solutions Erie, PA, 16509

Thinking Big Works: Marketing Tech Mindshifts BLOG MutualGravity, Inc., Custom eBusiness Solutions SOFTWARE FullCircle Rewards, Loyalty Programs INTEGRATED MARKETING

Marketing: Writing Tools

WRITE AT A READING LEVEL TO MAXIMIZE YOUR READERSHIP

Is your writing reaching your readers? Or are you writing above their heads and turning them away? Whether you are creating surveys, website articles, blogs, or any other materials, it’s important for your audience to be drawn to your writing. One way is to test the reading level of your writing.

We’ve been taught over the years that newspapers should write to a 6th or 8th grade reading level. Some studies have shown, and it’s logical to expect that readership is directly correlated to writing to readers’ reading levels.

Want to test your writing? Read on.

INSURE YOU ARE COMMUNICATING CORRECTLY WITH YOUR READERS

Through my good friend, Anne Davis, we received a request for a tool to test the reading level of a self-care guide for cancer patients being designed by a team of Ph.D. candidates in the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Nursing.

Internally, we also wanted a test for our own writing. And we wanted to understand the criteria within any test we used. So we did some research, and found a number of tools designed over the years to calculate readability:

• Flesch Kincaid Reading Ease, Flesch Kincaid Grade Level, Gunning Fog Score, Coleman Liau Index, SMOG Index, Automated Reability Index, Dale-Chall formula

Then we discovered a great tool powered by the open source project, PHP Text Statistics, http://code.google.com/p/php-text-statistics/, which has created a PHP class for giving information about text, including readability scores. This updated class was released under a BSD License in August 2008.

With thanks to the folks at PHP Text Statistics, we’ve incorporated this class for your use.

P.S. For what it’s worth, we tested one of our research tools pages, thinking we were writing for about 12th grade level, and found it was at 17.5.

TEST YOUR WRITING NOW

RELATED RESOURCES

Do you want to explore more about reading levels? Here are three articles we found very interesting. Each of them tests reading levels of various publications and specific articles.

• William DuBay at Impact Information, http://www.impact-information.com, wrote an excellent detailed analysis of readability at various newspapers, Victims of Fog Creep: What’s With the Newspapers? http://www.impact-information.com/impactinfo/newsletter/plwork15.htm.

He tested readability of various publications from The Times of India (grade 15) to The Daily Mirror (grade 9), and provides tables over time for various publications.

“Two magazines with the largest circulations in the world, TV Guide and Readers Digest, are written at the 9th-grade reading level. The newspaper with the largest circulation in the world, the Sun, is written at the 9th-grade reading level. USA Today is written at the 10th-grade level.”

• Bill Sloat of the The Bellwether Daily, http://thebellwetherdaily.blogspot.com/, wrote a very good article, Cleveland Plain Dealer Internal Memo: Connie Schultz Writes At 5th Grade Level, http://thebellwetherdaily.blogspot.com/2007/10/cleveland-plain-dealer-internal-memo.html.

In the article, he discusses the insightful book, A Writer’s Coach: The Complete Guide to Writing Strategies That Work by Jack R. Hart

• Tim Porter writes Second Draft, http://www.timporter.com/seconddraft/. In his earlier blog, First Draft, he wrote an excellent article, Reading the Vanishing Newspaper, 6: Readability, http://timporter.com/firstdraft/archives/000418.html.

Part of his discussion is about the great book, The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism In The Information Age by Philip Meyer.

“In the last chapter of the ‘Vanishing Newspaper,’ I learned that reporters too dumb for sources. In Chapter 6 of Philip Meyer’s new book, I find out that newspapers are too smart for their readers. Talk about a conundrum of the damned.”

I enjoyed his use of the Flesch-Kincaid index to test readability of the most popular blogs (based on the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem), which showed Instapundit at a grade level, 10.0, and Daily Kos with a grade level, 12.0.

COMING FOR YOUR NEXT SURVEY

Are you tired yet of calculating sampling errors manually? We gave up in 1981 and wrote a simple calculator to determine the random sample size needed for our surveys at a given statistical validity (or the reverse). We’ve integrated it into our real-time customer and patient satisfaction systems. Now we’ve decided you deserve to use it as well. So it’s coming soon, just for you.

WHAT OTHER TOOLS DO YOU WANT?

Let us know what we can provide that could make your research and marketing communications easier.

Marketing: Client Solutions

LOYALTY IS EARNED

Since we began VanAmburg Group in 1977, we have worked with thousands of clients, mostly in North America. During those 30 years, we learned a few things, and developed a few more. Within confidentiality limits, we’ve decided to share many of them with you. Every week over the coming months, we’ll add multiple articles, templates, case studies, interviews with thought leaders and CEOs, and tutorials, along with trends and analysis on everything at the intersection of research, planning, marketing and technology.

Read about us. Welcome aboard.