Issue campaigns have a lot in common with startups, especially when it comes to marketing. For example, a non-profit will often come up with a campaign idea, invest significant resources in building the relevant tools, and then market it to the public. Sometimes the campaign is successful and even goes "viral", but too often it doesn't. This is very similar to startups that invest millions in developing a cool idea only to have it fail. Webvan -- which raised more than $800 million in venture funding only to go bankrupt -- is a classic example.
To avoid these tragic stories, a new methodology is gaining popularity in Silicon Valley. Called "Customer 
Development", it focuses on intelligently assessing the opportunity for an idea before developing it. More than simply asking a couple friends or colleagues if it's a "good idea", customer development asks hard questions early on so that uncomfortable facts aren't discovered too late.
Development", it focuses on intelligently assessing the opportunity for an idea before developing it. More than simply asking a couple friends or colleagues if it's a "good idea", customer development asks hard questions early on so that uncomfortable facts aren't discovered too late.
In its simplest form, customer development could be summarized as:
- Customer discovery: What need is your initiative going to fulfill for the user? Is that really important to them (or is it simply wishful thinking)? Do you offer a credible solution or are other alternatives more compelling?
- Customer validation: Are users willing to take the desired step, whether it is to donate, volunteer or write a letter to Congress?
- Customer creation: How are you going to reach out to new users and build your audience base? What are the costs and metrics for each of your activities?
- Company building: Do you have the resources and processes to achieve the desired goal? Is there a reasonable return on your organization's investment of time and resources?
Some organizations already undertake some limited form of customer discovery. For example, an organization's staff might review the related twitter feeds, watch the comment inbox, or pick up the phone to talk to real users. The Red Cross reviews each of the 400+ daily online mentions about the Red Cross, and sends out an internal summary of the important mentions. Properly used, processes like this can help the organization stay informed about what's important in the public dialogue and exploit opportunities.
A useful tactic in customer validation is to market a product even if you haven't built it yet. This "pre-marketing" of an online initiative can help you assess the potential viability of the idea before a single HTML tag is written. Using this methodology, I've happily killed projects after initial testing -- and thereby prevented important resources from being wasted. While I might have thought the campaign ideas were strong, my target audience clearly didn't agree. Situations like this are frustrating, but they give us the opportunity to explore other potential ideas and avoid costly failures.
There are a number of tools that can help you test ideas, including:
- Performable.com: set up quick landing pages and see how they perform
- Usertesting.com and Silverbackapp.com: put your project in front of users and get high-quality feedback
- SurveyMonkey and 4Q: survey your users. But remember that people aren't always objective in their responses
- Google Optimizer: test out variations of a page and quickly evolve the best possible option.
Google Adwords and Facebook Ads are also very useful for marketing tests, and can give you useful information about the possible cost of a campaign. For example, you'll be able to get early indicators about the cost-per-click and click-through rates of the campaign's ads. You might discover that the cost-per-click is just too high and therefore retire the project.
Customer development won't sound too strange to many marketing professionals. After all, we already review click-through rates and a host of other metrics to see how campaigns perform. Customer development simply gives us a methodology to evaluate a campaign before we even starting building it.
Further reading:
The best material on customer development is found in Steve Blank's "The Four Steps to the Epiphany". He also has a number of blog posts and slides online, including this slideshow presentation. In both cases the content is targeted at startups, but there are some great ideas relevant to anyone doing online initiatives.
I'm also a big fan of Andrew Chen's blog where he writes about customer development, and related topics such as "minimum desirable product".
This article was written by Matt Howes, who leads Arcadia Campaigns, a consulting company that helps progressive non-profits succeed online.
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