Jeremiah Tolbert

My col­lege pal, artist, and teacher Ed asked last week:

I belong to a pro­fes­sional orga­ni­za­tion of teach­ers that has been slow to embrace inter­net tech­nolo­gies. I am inter­ested in propos­ing improve­ments to their web­site but I am unsure how to com­mu­ni­cate the ideas. What for­mat­ting do you sug­gest for a writ­ten pro­posal to an organization?

I’m going to broaden the topic a bit, because the answer to your last ques­tion is, I don’t know, and I wouldn’t try to con­vince an orga­ni­za­tion with a writ­ten pro­posal. In my work, which is pri­mar­ily done for indi­vid­u­als and not orga­ni­za­tions, I only write pro­pos­als to make it clear what we’re going to do after we’ve dis­cussed it. I do the con­vinc­ing before I write word one of a proposal.

In my expe­ri­ence, you’re not going to get very far with a prospec­tive client, or very far with con­vinc­ing your orga­ni­za­tion to update their web­site, if you haven’t sold them on the ben­e­fits. The eas­i­est way to do this, in my expe­ri­ence, is to start with hav­ing them iden­tify and acknowl­edge a problem.

For exam­ple, “we’re not get­ting any leads from the web­site.” Or, “I keep get­ting email about how hard our web­site is to nav­i­gate.” Management or the client can deal with con­crete specifics. They have goals, some­times ones that they don’t even know about, so your task in early meet­ings is to iden­tify what those goals are and then explain how an updated tech­nol­ogy can solve those problems.

Problems and solu­tions may be a good for­mat for a writ­ten pro­posal as well, if you’re still deter­mined to go down that route. Provide the prob­lem, and describe the solu­tion. Relate these solu­tions to the over­all goals of the com­pany. We should improve X because it will cause Y, which is good for the bot­tom line. Or whatever.

Explaining why cer­tain tech­nol­ogy is bet­ter than oth­ers, or why a web­site shouldn’t look like it was built in 1997 can be more spe­cific and dif­fi­cult. One thing I try to explain early on is that web­sites are about pro­ject­ing an image. Your web­site should reflect the image that you wish to con­vey to your clients, cus­tomers, what­ever. If your website’s image is that of an old man yelling at the kids to get off his lawn, that might not be in line with your organization’s over­all strategies.

There’s a lot of resis­tance to change in the world in gen­eral. Change is costly, it’s hard, and it doesn’t always result in improve­ments. I can under­stand com­pletely why some peo­ple might become resis­tant to change because of that. How you con­vince them oth­er­wise is no dif­fer­ent a task than con­vinc­ing a per­son of any­thing. Listen to their objec­tions, con­sider them, and describe how you will over­come them.

Hopefully some of these basic strate­gies will help you, Ed. If worse comes to worse, find a com­pet­ing web­site that does it bet­ter, and pull up the two sites side by side, and let them stare at it for five min­utes. Then ask, “any ques­tions?” I’ve never tried that before, but I wanted to at my last day job. Let me know how that goes if you try it.

How about the rest of you? How would you approach a skep­ti­cal boss or client that a web­site or other tech­nol­ogy needs to be updated? Do you have any suc­cess sto­ries or hor­ror stories?