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Product descriptions may seem straightforward, but if done right they can significantly improve conversion rates. Today Jon explains why product descriptions are one of the most effective changes you can change to your website and how to write great product descriptions that will convert. The article Jon mentioned on how to write production descriptions that sell: https://thegood.com/insights/product-descriptions/ TRANSCRIPT: Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better eCommerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. Ryan: Jon, you recently wrote an article that kind of put my head in a spin around product description. Jon: Sometimes that's too easy. Ryan: I know. Spinning my brain's not necessarily the most difficult thing to do if you're in the space, but you wrote an article about product descriptions and how they can significantly improve conversion rates. And that surprises me because I personally ignore those all the time and I focus on other aspects of marketing and driving traffic as per usual. But that for me, is kind of like a side, just put it in there. As long as it's in there and then we can manipulate it going into Google shopping, where it's going to have an impact on your traffic. Just get something in there, period. Obviously I was wrong on this in my opinion. And I'm probably not alone in that. I'm excited today, Jon's going to school us on product descriptions and what you should be doing as an eCommerce business to leverage that to improve conversion rates. Jon, kick us off, explain at a high level, of all the things you could be focusing on on your site, why product descriptions in your mind, are one of the top things you can be doing to improve conversion rates? Jon: Yeah well, I think you basically just said it best in your tee up here where a lot of people just don't pay attention to this. And I think it's really, really forgotten. And that's a challenge in that as you're optimizing websites, it's one of the first places we go because most people forget about it. But look, we've learned over a decade of running AB tests on hundreds of product detail pages that optimizing your product descriptions is just one of the highest return, lowest investment improvements that an eCommerce manager can make. And look, they're key part of your potential customer's decision making process. I think the stat that my team here at The Good always says is that 87% of consumers rate product content extremely or very important to deciding to buy. Ryan: Wow. Jon: 87%. Ryan: Way higher than I would've thought. Jon: Right. Well, that's exactly the problem is most people don't think about this. And so if you're not optimizing product descriptions, you're certainly leaving money on the table. That's why you should focus on this. Ryan: If we're going to improve it, if we just assume that for example, my product descriptions are just terrible because I didn't focus on them, what are the areas I need to be looking at as I'm staring at my product description? And where do I start? I guess would be the best question. Jon: Well, I think there's four main areas that everyone should be focusing on and we can chat about today, but we can break these down. But the first is the real job of a product description. Most people think the real job of the product description is something that it's not. And we'll dive into that a little bit. The second is that it's an effective product description template needs to be used, so we can talk about what goes into those and what items you need to check the box to really make it great. And then how to write one that converts. It's not just having the content, you need to also be thinking about how you're writing that content. And then we can really talk about frequently asked questions around the product descriptions that I get, because I get a lot of questions about it. Once we start optimizing, people start thinking about it, a lot more questions come up than you might imagine. Partly, that's why we're doing the show today, it makes your head spin a little bit. That means there's a lot of questions there and you're not alone in that really. Maybe we can just break those four down and discuss each pretty briefly. Ryan: Yeah, I'm excited for it. What's the real job of a description of a product? In my mind, it's to describe the product. It's a blue t-shirt, congratulations. Jon: Yeah, right, exactly. If you just said blue t-shirt, how many sales do you think you're going to get? Let's just poke a hole in the idea that the job of the eCommerce product description is just to describe the product. I think that that's not right. Given the name, it makes sense that most folks think this, but product descriptions aren't there to just describe what's on your eCommerce site. They're also there to qualify. Do they help your visitors quickly assess, is this for someone like me? Do they persuade? Is it a compelling description? Is it customer centered on the reasons they should be considering that product? And then it's also there to surface. And what I mean by that is to help people find the product. This is the third one on purpose because a lot of people will stuff keywords throughout in terms of search engine optimization in optimizing the product description, but look, SEO keywords and search terms, and if you use those in a natural way, you'll get the page to show up and you want it to show up in search engine or even Amazon results if you're talking about optimizing your product descriptions on Amazon, which should also be done. Here's really one way to really think about this, product descriptions are a bit like your 24/7 in store retail associate for your online store. We often talk about if you wouldn't do something in a retail store, don't do it on your website. Let's take that analogy a step further and say, "How would associate talk about the product?" If you walked into a store and said, "Hey, I'm looking for a t-shirt," what questions are they going to ask to help you find the right one in that store? As a virtual retail associate, the product description can have that same kind of impact. And if it does its job well, it's going to draw visitors to your goods and then increase the conversions on those. And if it's done poorly, it's just going to frustrate visitors and push them away and hurt sales. It's very, very similar. Ryan: I like that. I think a lot of people, at least in what I think through is I don't think about qualifying. I'm like, you got to my page, you click on my products from Google shopping, you saw the price, just go buy it. And then if I'm in the jar looking at the label in the wrong way, from that perspective and I step out, I realize, okay, well I know conversion rates on shopping traffic is generally lower than category page traffic and so I'm like, oh well, possibly because my category is doing a better job describing a product or qualifying that person coming in and I'm just leaving that there rather than pulling it through and looking at qualifying them. Jon: Yeah. You're not alone on that. A lot of brands look at a category page as an opportunity to convert. I look at a category page as an opportunity to help somebody to the next step in the funnel, which is get them to that product detail page. And that's where you can really convert and sell and make sure people are getting the right product for them. Ryan: Okay, I concur. Tell us then okay, once I decide that it's more than just describing a product, what's a template look like that's going to help me through creating this product description that is going to be more than just describing my product? Jon: I love when I can change minds. And I'm glad we're helping do that today. All right. Ryan: We are. Jon: Again, here. Ryan: I'm taking notes. Jon: There are a handful of bullet points of things that you want to ensure are included. First of all, you need a descriptive headline. Use a product title that's going to hook your audience. Bonus points if you can connect with them emotionally. We don't want blue t-shirt, we want the t-shirt that makes your dad bod look hot. Ryan: I'm getting those ads on Instagram, by the way. I'm like, no, this is terrible. Jon: Ryan's looking good today in his shirt, by the way. All right. Benefits focused paragraphs. Use a descriptive paragraph to explain why, and I mean exactly why the customer benefits from the product. Too many people talk about features and that's it, they're just bullet point features and then don't talk about the benefits. You know how I led with the t-shirt that's going to make your dad bod look hot? That's what we want to be talking about here. What's the benefit? Not that it's a blue t-shirt. Yeah, that might be in there, but what's the benefit of wearing that t-shirt? The other thing we want to have in here is a key benefits list. Follow that description with a bulleted list of product features and benefits and this is where you can get into those details that if somebody is just skimming, they're going to look at that list. You're really what you're doing here is you're providing the benefits in a paragraph, maybe even telling a little bit of a story could be really helpful there. Don't make it too long. But then if somebody really wants, just give me the details. I already know I want a blue t-shirt, I just am deciding between two or three different ones and they want to know the specs and the features, that's where they're going to go is the bullet list. Don't bury those in the paragraph. The paragraph should be, hey, here's the benefits to you. If you want to know the features and the details, look at the bullet list that comes next. And then the fourth thing is, add some additional motivations. Really what we're trying to do here is just minimize those remaining purchase hurdles. Will it fit? Do others like it? Do things like credibility, social proof, you can bake in product reviews or even urgency. And of course, make sure you have a clear call to action. So many brands, we talk to have four buttons to add to cart and it's like, oh, you can use quad pay, after pay. You could use Amazon checkout. You could use both. And it's like, just give them one button and then push that to the next step. Get them to commit and then ask them how you want to pay. Ryan: Because my brain goes in funny directions when you say urgency, can you explain what that means from you, your perspective? Because it's probably not the little popup thing on Shopify that says, "Hey Bob in New York just bought this and Suzie in Florida just bought. Jon: You know me well. Ryan: Because I guarantee you don't like that one because I don't like that one. Jon: Yeah, nobody likes that. Ryan: And I don't have as many dislikes as you. Jon: I call that one of those wildfire apps and I call it wildfire because they just spread without anyone knowing how it started or why it's spreading. Ryan: Yeah, my competitor's probably doing it so I did it, and that's the worst way. Jon: And you don't see those apps as much anymore, a couple years ago, it was really popular and then everyone installed it and they realized this isn't doing anything. And also half of the companies using it are aligned about who's purchasing what, they all had Bob from Waco, Texas and it was kind of like you see Bob from Waco, Texas. Ryan: That guy shops on every site and I've been on. Jon: Exactly. And you're kind of like, that's the default it gives you. Here's the other thing. I really think what you need to be thinking about here in urgency is stock levels. And I'm not talking about lying. I'm saying, okay, only a few left. And what I mean by few? Well, I have two or three and you'd better buy it right away or it's going to go out of stock. There's some great tools, especially if you're on platforms like Shopify that are great apps that will do dynamic badging around quantity left so it can pull your quantities and do a dynamic image overlay on your product images. It will put a badge up in the corner that says, "Two left, one left," whatever. That's what I'm talking about with urgency. Or something like, hey free shipping. You're doing an offer, not a discount. When I talk about urgency, I'm not talking discounts as you know quite well. There could be some offers. It could be, right now it's a buy one, get a free gift. There's a whole litany of offers you can do that are not discounting and so I think when I'm talking about urgency, I'm talking about those type of items. Ryan: And so generally if you're a brand that has just tons of inventory, you have to focus more on getting creative and incentivizing without discounting to get that purchase from the product page. Jon: Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Create urgency if it's necessary. The other thing we see perform really well in terms of urgency is if it's out of stock to sign up to get notified when it's in stock. We have a client we've worked with for years, that is a really well known Japanese outdoor brand, outdoor camping high end. And what we have done for them over the years is help refine their out of stock notifications. They have some products that never are in stock because as soon as they send out that out of stock notification, they burn through their stock again. And I'm not talking that they only get five or 10 in, no, they get thousands. But the thing about it is, is that consumers have all signed up for this list and they want these products. We say, "Hey, you want this product? Sign up to be notified." And then we send out on an email and that email goes out, "Back in stock, click here to buy it," adds it right to the cart and they're able to purchase. And then before it even ever hits the site and it changes the product detail pages show how much stock is left, it's gone within hours. Ryan: Geez. Yeah, I'm going to test pre-sale. I'm going to say, "Hey, this new blend from Joyful Dirt's coming out, we're going to start advertising it and pre-sell it on social so we can start demand, figuring what demand looks like, what our production runs need to look like." Jon: That's a great idea. Ryan: And hopefully there's a lot there, but if not, they were like, "Yeah, we're only going to produce a few hundred. We'll be fine." Okay, so what else do we need to be considering what's average eCom business owner not going to be thinking about that you know that they don't even know to ask? What don't I know that I should know. Jon: Well, I think there's some simple questions that need to be answered. Let's look at this as maybe I don't know, questions that somebody doing a natural deodorant product might have. You need to think about this, who's the customer? That's always the first one, who's the potential customer? When you're starting to write this, you need to be thinking about that first. Let's say here, it would be men and women who are fed up with chemical packed deodorants. Just being a normal deodorant and saying, "Hey, people who don't like to stink," that's not going to be good enough. What's your differentiating point? The second is, what problems does it solve? This is where you can get into it helps keep them stink free. The potential customer is not the problem, it's what pain are you solving for them that is a little bit deeper than the surface level? And then the problem it solves is really the high level okay, people buy deodorant for this main reason. But the differentiating point is what's going to define that potential customer. Then you get into what desires does it fulfill? For this theater and it would be something like feeling healthier, more responsible towards their bodies and the planet, maybe just feeling less dirty and smelly. They could be that generic. And maybe they've been fertilizing their garden all day with a Joyful Dirt and now they don't want to come back into the house and smell. And then you need to be thinking about what objections people have. And this is where it's like, hey, why are you using a natural deodorant? Or maybe other natural deodorants just don't seem to work or they lie about the ingredients. Those are all types of things you should really be thinking about there. The next question you really want to ask yourself is why you? Why your brand? Compared to the other guys, why does this deodorant actually work? And then last of all, definitely not least, but you really want to think about what words your consumers are using so you can mirror what they're looking for there. And this is great, this is where user research can really come in, just interviewing consumers, doing some user testing, for instance so when they talk about what words they use, things like natural, fresh, perhaps scent or confident, and those are words that you can bake into your product description. They're going to write it for you. And if you go and you answer all of these questions in an outline, kind of like I just did where I answered each question a little bit about deodorant, you'll have most of your product description written and then you can move on from there. Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, the podcast focused on eCommerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with eCommerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay per click management, search engine optimization and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. Ryan: I know though, pictures are worth more than words and so do you consider the images on the side of a product description as part of the description? Or is that different entirely? And that's a whole nother conversation around the images? Or do you use them together? Jon: I think it's a whole nother conversation, quite honestly. Although people say a picture's worth a thousand words, I think that's true. And that's why pictures, we should do a whole nother episode on that because I do think it matters. And I think that there's a lot of things out there that you could be doing. I think on model, off model, 360, in use, size comparison. You really got to be thinking about all the different types of images that you could be doing. And a lot of brands will focus on the words, because a lot of consumers will go to the words and with one good photo you can still get them to convert. But after that, you really need to dive in and start thinking about all the other photos that you could do. And that's a ripe opportunity for optimization as well for sure. Ryan: Got it. You've done a lot of obviously user testing and listen to a lot of people go through the process of buying, are there certain types of people that are only going to pay attention to image and some that only pay attention to the words and that's just is a personality or a person? Or is it everybody's taking all that information in together? Jon: I think that as humans we're visual, but there are some people who will, if you have a video, they're just going to watch the video and they're going to skim. This is really huge on B2B websites where you want to bake in video because what's going to happen, meaningful video, Telling you about the product and walking you through it, et cetera, because consumers are going to just scroll until they find video and then watch that video while they're doing something else like on a bus or in traffic or eating lunch. I just did that. I was evaluating some software for our business, for The Good, over lunch and I was eating lunch, watching product videos. I didn't want to read about it. I just wanted to sit there and watch the video. I just put it on one and a half speed and then go. And I think that's a lot of people will do that. And I think in terms of images, it's similar. A lot of people will get that content from the images, but they're not going to get all the features and benefits that way. They're really not. People still need the bullet point list to see all of the features. People who are going to be watching the video, looking at the images, that's where they're going to start and if you don't get it right there, they're not even going to go on to read the bullet list. It is important for a segment of the audience for sure. Ryan: I think of product descriptions kind of like I think of one on my website and I think of the one on the Amazon and I probably put more time into the Amazon one, but I have more volume on Amazon right now. And so, but Amazon has multiple areas for information. You get the top there's image and then a short description and then you go down and you have A plus content and the expanded descriptions. And now that I think about it, a lot of websites have that same type of feel built out around them. Are you seeing a lot of focus needing to be on the short snippet, kind of at the top, more than at the bottom? Because sometimes the descriptions I see, especially on B2B, all the spec tab that is really long and drawn out, you can tell people are just dumping information from an SEO perspective sometimes in there. Is there one area that's more important in all of that? Jon: Yes. I think in the concept of the description, this is what those towards the top of the page. Often you'll have images on the left and then all the product description content on the right. As you scroll down, you can take those bullet points we talked about earlier with the benefits and the specific features and that bullet list and break that down throughout the page. That's typically what I would recommend. Have the bullet point and if people want to dive into each one of those, so say you're talking about the deodorant as we talked about earlier and you want to look at the ingredients list. Well, you can say all natural ingredients as a bullet point. And then at the bottom you could start saying all natural ingredients and then you break out what those ingredients are and talk about the benefits of each and how it's truly all natural and it doesn't include, what is the big one? Aluminum or something that people don't like? I don't know. But I think, it's something like that where you would use the rest of the page to truly break it down. And that's where you can also inject some brand. And it's also where you should be injecting supporting content like blog articles. To me, too many brands put the blog on the homepage, so they have like this lineup of blog posts that nobody cares about on their homepage. The blog post is top of the funnel. It's great for getting people to your site. It's great for SEO for instance. But then if they're on product detail page and you send them back up the funnel, you need to make sure that it's done in a supporting fashion so that you're not just sending them right back to the top of the funnel for no good reason. What I mean by that is maybe you have a blog article all about those ingredients or a specific ingredient that you're using and you want to talk about why it's more superior and you need a 1,000 or 1,500 words. Well, that's not good for your product detail page, but it would be good to link to that and say, "Hey, want to learn more about this? Read this blog post about it." That's also going to help your SEO and Google find all of that content together. Ryan: Yeah, I think exactly zero times have I ever gone from a homepage trying to research a brand for a product and gone to the blog and be like, hmm, let me read some blogs. Jon: No, not going to happen. Ryan: Never happen. And I'm like, no, I'm here to buy a product or research the product, not read about how the product worked on X, Y, Z in these conditions. Jon: Yeah, but when you're on a product detail page and doing your research and you're far enough down that step, it might be relevant to some degree to know that it's there. Ryan: Awesome. No, obviously Jon you've broken down and torn apart a lot of product pages over your life. What are some of the questions that you've had clients ask you as they've gone through the process and tried to implement a lot of what you've talked about, even with your template? And are there any funny ones or when it makes sense that other people are probably going to be asking after they start doing this? Jon: Yeah. Yeah, you're right, I've probably broken down hundreds of thousands of these at this point. I don't know that might be exaggerating, but it is kind of like what's that movie with the kid where he's like, "I see dead people." That's me. I can't go down the internet and shop without seeing messed up product detail pages everywhere. It's just unfortunate side effect of my job. But I will say, I do love when we have a positive effect on those. And so I'm always happy to answer questions, but yeah, I do get some off the wall ones. I think the biggest one I get all the time is, can't I just copy my description from a competitor? It's working for them so why not? I hear that all the time. But I'm shocked I even have to answer this. But yeah, the short answer is no, you can't lift product descriptions from your competitors. Look, beyond the SEO challenges of that, meaning that it's going to be a challenge where Google sees the same as that content across two sites and then you're playing a really hard to win game because Google is going to pick one of them or when they do that, it's likely not going to be you because it knows that content has been on the other site longer and so that's what it considers the original source. Ryan: Now what about product descriptions from the supplier or the manufacturer? Especially if you've got a site with a 100,000 products on it. Jon: Well, you might want to evaluate why you have a site with a 100,000 products. Ryan: True. There's a lot of them out there. Jon: Yeah. I wonder how many of those are just dropped shipping, not doing that great. And that's why they're not doing that great. If you really want to be successful at something like that, you need to customize the heck out of it. And so you really do need to sit down and do this for all the products so it's not just the manufacturer description. Now you can base it on that manufacturer description, but don't copy and paste that because everyone else who's drop shipping that product is doing the same thing. Or on top of that, you're not really adding any additional value and I can promise you, most of those subscriptions are D level work. They're not even a passing grade in most cases. I think copying is a moral issue for me in addition to the SEO issue so it's two strikes you're out rule, really. Using the manufacturer, I think is the SEO role and ineffective. It's just a non-starter. Ryan: And I think that if you are in the eCommerce world and you are assuming something, you're going to lose. You never assume that this is working for a competitor because they're doing it and you think they're bigger than you. And you assume that somebody knows what they're doing. Obviously I have a wine and beer read business and you drink wine, if you read wine descriptions, those are generally written by somebody sitting at a desk at a winery that's coming up with weird terms. One of my friends owns a winery and I'm like, "Well, how'd you come up with your descriptions?" "Oh my wife and I started drinking wine and decided, let's start putting these things in there." You can't assume that, if it works it's on accident many times. Jon: I have a good friend who runs an agency that does nothing but branding and labels for wine and spirits brands and that is the number one challenge that they get from brands, their customers that they work with, is that those vineyards will send over the descriptions and they're like, this isn't going to fly, we got to help you optimize this. It's a challenge. It's not unique. They're like, you might as well just label it alcohol, alcohol from grapes. And that's always the joke. My friend is always just like, "You sent me this description. I'm just going to change it and say alcohol from grapes." Ryan: We're planting wine grapes right now. And I told my wife, it's like, "We're going to make some wine with it." She's like, "You think it's going to be good?" I'm like, "Probably not, but we're just going to call it Ryan's Yeast Juice. It's going to be great. It's going to sound like crap." Jon: When you gift me a bottle, I'll know. Ryan: Yeah, Ryan's Yeast Juice. That's actually why, I add grape juice with some yeast in it that sat in the bottle for too long, became alcoholic. Jon: Can't wait, can't wait. Ryan: I can't wait for my marketing to go, all the marketing energy I have, Ryan's Yeast Juice. I should probably trademark before it gets out. Jon: Yeah. Made with Ryan's fertilizer. How's that? Ryan: Yeah. Jon: Joyful Dirt line. Well yeah, I think the other question that I get a lot here is how long product descriptions should be. And I think it's not a one size fits all. It's long enough to be helpful, short enough to be digestible and depends on the product. A few quick sentences could work for your products or you may need to write 1,500 words, but I think it's something where you really need to understand your audience. Are they here quick? Are they deciding between a couple of things and want a feature list? Or should you put more effort into the story? Also, there's the brand aspect. There's a lot of brands who have a lot of fun with their product descriptions. And then there's a lot of brands who are just dry. That's just kind of their brand and you go from there. Ryan: Okay. Over the past, let's just keep it recent, three years, who would you say of companies you've at least seen their site, you don't have to work with them, probably did the best with their product descriptions? Jon: Yeah. Are you familiar with Chubbies? Ryan: I'm not. Jon: Ooh, okay. Chubbies is a men's, mostly men's clothing brand and they do some hilarious descriptions. They started out, I believe selling swim trunks. Ryan: Oh yeah. Yeah, now I remember. Jon: And it's now a bunch of other stuff, but they've always done some good work. I haven't looked at the site in a while, but they were pretty good one from back in the day. And I think, generally there's brands like OLIPOP and a few others like that who are new and are doing a really, really good job with it. I don't know if you've heard of OLIPOP. It's kind of like a new flavored seltzer brand. They do a really, really good job with it. I also think that there's a couple out there around more around eyeglasses, Felix Gray, things of that sort, that do a really, really good job. And I think that their biggest competitor is Warby Parker. And I think Warby Parker does a good job, but Felix Gray has really made their calling card being better content on the page. Ryan: Got it. Jon: The other one that I really like is Cards Against Humanity. I don't know if you've ever been to their site. Ryan: I love that game. It's the most inappropriate fairly game we've played with my in-laws. Jon: Okay, I was going to say, yeah, that could be awkward at best. Ryan: Oh it for sure is. Jon: They have a teenager version I've played with my cousins and I will tell you, that got awkward real quick too. But they have add on packs and all this other stuff and they do a great job with branding. And they have a couple of sentences, they'll say, "Hey, this is just," they'll be very quick. This is all about these topics. It's 300, but they'll inject some brand. They'll say, "All new absurd box contains 300 mind bending cards that came to us after taking peyote and wandering in the desert." And it's kind of like, that's funny and I know what I'm going to get is just weird random stuff. And then it's, they did in the bullet points. 300 brand new cards to mix into your game. This one's pretty weird. They're going to be weird, I get it. It's an expansion. It requires the main game. Now I'm like, okay, I get it. It's expansion pack. And you have nothing to lose, but your chains, I don't know what that even means, but that's what they're telling you. I think, it's on brand because it's super random. And I think that last bullet point is all meant to just demonstrate the randomness that you're going to get out of this pack. And then if you go down the page, they have a lot more info about and some samples and stuff, but that kind of gives you a good example there. Ryan: Thank you. That's awesome. Any parting words or places people need to be focusing and getting started on? Jon: Yeah, I think look, it's there's a simple formula that you can follow and too many brands don't even try to follow the formula. And if you go to The Good's website and on our insights or articles page, or just go to thegood.com/insights/product-descriptions, we have a really great article that breaks all of this down and more. Gives you ton of examples and it's a great way for you to just take the template we've got on there and start using that and applying it to your product descriptions and Ryan, it sounds like you may have some work to do, but it will get you a higher conversion. Ryan: I think I might. But thanks for the time, Jon. I appreciate it and educating me as always on how to make my site work better. Jon: All right. Well, I'm looking forward to seeing the results on that. Thanks for chatting today. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com

There are seven different types of people that you're going to find coming to your site. And if you can understand who these people are in each one of their buckets, you're going to be able to help each one of them convert because they're all going to look at your site a little bit differently. So how do we understand who they are? And what do we need want to know how do we convert these people? Jon's got the answers! TRANSCRIPT: Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast about helping online brands to build a better e-commerce growth engine, with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. Ryan: Well, Jon, welcome to the Drive and Convert podcast. You've done a lot of writing, to say the least. You've got some phenomenal content out there on the internet and as somebody that reads most of your content and speaks to you often, it's always good to read. So if you're listening to this, go find Jon and all of his content on his website. I highly recommend it. You will come away as a smarter human. But one of the fascinating concepts that at least for me seems fairly unique to your brain and at least the content you're putting out is the idea of there are seven different types of people that you're going to find coming to your site. And if you can understand who these people are in each one of their buckets, you're going to be able to help each one of them convert because they're all going to look at your site a little bit differently or want to do slightly different things. But I guess step one is just, how do we understand who they are? And then we want to know how do we convert these people? We've got them to the site. We know who they are, now how do we convert them? So I'm excited to hear about this because I can never get enough insight into how to make my businesses and my clients' businesses work better. But can you kick us off just by telling us who are the seven personas that you're seeing on the internet coming to websites? Jon: Well, thank you, first of all, for the kind of compliments on the content. I'm blushing over here if you can't see that. Yes, there are seven and a lot of people think, seven that's a lot. But the reality here is there might be some overlap in these as well, right? And these are all different types of people that you really need to address on your site. And so many people don't do that, that it really led me to write this content. So the first set of folks coming to your site are what I call lookers, right? These are people who are just looking. They're browsers, if you will, right? They're not after any one thing in particular, they're having fun just looking around. They want to see what you offer that maybe will catch your attention. Honestly, they may even have been just searching around Google for different types of products and ended up at your site, not necessarily by mistake, but they ended up there and now they're just looking at what you have to offer. Really you just need to understand that not everybody who approaches your site's going to buy. Most e-comm sites know that, right? Because their conversion rate's not a hundred percent or else we wouldn't exist. But the reality here is that you still need to address this audience. A second one to be thinking about is bargain hunters. These are people who are only at your site because you're having a sale or some type of offer. Ryan: Hopefully, it's not a discount. Jon: Exactly. That would be my point of view. But that's what they're looking for there. They're trained, as we have said, several times, they're trained to look for that sale. And so there are people, and there is a segment of folks who will only buy if something's at a perceived bargain, right? And they really want to see if they can find the bargain. Sometimes it's the thrill of finding the bargain that really gets to them. The third you really want to think about it as the buyers. Now, it seems pretty obvious, but some people are really on a mission. They know exactly what they want and they're there to get it. So they searched for the model number, they found your site, and they are ready to buy. And so you really want to facilitate that. A fourth is researchers. Some folks are just researching. They have a general idea of what they're after, but they want to compare those options and the prices. So, a lot of people will go to Amazon for this, but now, a lot of people are doing that on brand sites as well. They go to Amazon and they find the product they want but then they end up on your brand site after they've done that research. They find the model number on Amazon, they Google it to find more details about the brand behind the product. Amazon isn't always the best at having product details, right? So a lot of times you'll end up on a brand site trying to do that and that's what these folks are. Ryan: Now, what would be the big differentiator on the researchers and the lookers? Because a lot of similarities between the two, but what would be the key differentiators in your mind? Jon: The key differentiator is the researcher knows what they want. They know what they're looking for. The lookers are ... It's kind of like wandering around a mall versus going right into the Apple store. You're at the mall but you beeline it for one shop because you know that you need something from that shop. Where you might just go to the mall to hang out, right? If that's even a thing, post-COVID one day, we'll see. Ryan: Someday we'll get back to a mall, maybe. Jon: New customers is another one. People don't really think about that often. And this is really where some visitors are just going to be new customers. They enjoyed their last visit. Maybe they were a looker on their last visit and now they're there to find out more and potentially become a new customer. Perhaps these are people who you should really be thinking about post-purchase, like they just purchased. What happens at that point, right? So these could be people who are buying from you the first time. And it's an audience you really need to be thinking about because you need to make them feel welcomed and appreciated. One that a lot of people don't think about is dissatisfied customers. Everybody has them. I don't care if your net promoter scores is perfect or you don't hear about these complaints. Everybody has a dissatisfied customer or more. And that's okay. These people are there for a number of reasons and it might not always be that bad. Maybe they're just dissatisfied because it didn't fit the way they thought it would, but they still like the product, they're there to return or exchange. For some reason, a previous purchase didn't suit them and now they want customer service. And the goal here is to make it easy for them to get that and perhaps even do self-service where possible. And the last one, seven of seven, we blew right through these, but we'll dive into each in a second, but this is loyal customers. So some of these are your best customers. They come back, they love shopping with you. They love your product and then they're going to be repeat customers. So, that's the seven. To run them real quick, it's lookers, bargain hunters, buyers, researchers, new customers, dissatisfied customers, and loyal customers. Ryan: Got it. So we know what personas people are in, generally. And then are there ways outside of the types of traffic that you help decide who this one is on the site to do that, or is it, I just want to make sure the site works for all of them? Jon: You really want to make sure the site works for all of them. And I think that there's many ways to group people into these different types. As I said earlier, they could be multiple types. But I heard you say the word persona, and I think I really want to make clear that it's easy to get dragged into things like personas, or where people are in the sales funnel, or warm, hot, and cold leads and visitors, or any of those things that can really just take you down the rabbit hole if you will, right? And I see this all the time where we ask people, who's your ideal customer, and they give us an avatar of somebody that has flowcharts, and photos of Charlie, the avid runner, and his demographics, and preferences, and what soda he drinks, or what bottled water he prefers, and all of that stuff doesn't really matter. It's never really put to good use, especially when it comes to optimizing a website, because that guy, Charlie, the runner, he was generated in the mind of the brand. He's not an actual consumer, right? So what you really want to do here is just keep it simple. Really you just want to focus on better serving each of these. And by doing that, you're likely to increase your conversions for each of these. Additionally, if you go any deeper than that, you're unlikely to get started because you'll end up in this, as I said earlier, rabbit hole of trying to figure out who Charlie is. Well, Charlie, isn't going to be all seven of these, right? So don't worry about Charlie and don't worry about going so deep. Ryan: Because you might have your ... If you've done the persona thing as a brand, you could have your same persona being all of these types. And so at the same time, keep this very top level when you're looking at your site and trying to guide traffic and just do what Jon says at the end of the day. Jon: If the world only worked that way. I'll have you call my wife after this and tell her that too. Ryan: Yeah, you do the same for me when we're talking about driving traffic. Okay. But we've got to tell people how do we take these groups of traffic and these people and get them to take the action we want them to take on the site. Because I'm guessing to a degree, not all of them are the same conversion either. Jon: Very accurate. That's true. Ryan: So we've got to think about that as well. Like a disgruntled customer is probably different than a looker at the end of the day, as far as action. So guide our listeners and viewers around what that looks like and how you're seeing converting those people. Jon: Well, let's break them down one by one, shall we? So start with lookers, really is what I would recommend here. And I think the thing to be thinking about here is with lookers is you're going to catch your attention and get them to stop that just shopping and not browsing long enough to consider some type of offer or something that gets their attention, right? So if you know your customers well enough, which most brands listening to this will, they'll know what will entice their customers. And I'm not just talking about an offer or a special or deal or anything of that sense, I'm also saying what's that one feature that makes you unique and makes you stand out? What's the benefit of the product that's really going to hit home for these people? They're at your site because they had a pain or a problem they're trying to solve. And they think your products can help them solve that problem. So you really want to make sure that you're putting that right upfront to get these people's attention early. But know also, it could take a few sales to get these people in there, right? So don't be discouraged when you see the bounce rate up there because people are just looking and leaving. That's what they do. That's why I call them lookers. Ryan: I hate when people talk to me about bounce rate. Take your bounce rate to the bank. Have them tell you what that's worth. Jon: Yeah, it doesn't help, right? Ryan: No. Jon: And it's a metric so many people chase, I think, thinking, oh, I can get my bounce rate down. Okay, this one goes in with time on-site with me as well. So many people track time on-site and I think it's a false metric because if you think about it, I'm there to get my tasks done. I'm there because I want to buy this product, or even if I'm just looking around, I generally have an idea of what I'm doing at your site. I might just still be browsing, but I have an idea of why I'm there. The problem with this is if I'm there for 10 minutes, you've made my life really complicated. I'm there because I need something, I'm looking around, and then the problem is I can't find that or I got sucked into something and I'm there for 10 minutes. As opposed to, I would much rather have customers who are at my site for three minutes and buy, right? And then I have their information. I can continue to market to them at another opportunity. But if somebody is spending 10, 20 minutes on your site, we probably have some type of usability problem. Ryan: Well, and also I laughed when you started talking about catching their attention because I know you're going to tell people it is not a pop-up telling them to join your email list for 10% off your first order, especially if you're a looker. Jon: Yep. I agree with that. Ryan: That is not going to be a quality email. Jon: Not at all. But you do want to encourage them to get on your mailing list but not through a discount, not through a pop-up, really encourage them in other ways so that you can then follow up with them later. Maybe that's something like an upcoming new release that they might be interested in, right? You should be thinking about it in that way. Once you've kind of got their attention, then how are you going to continue to keep that attention and continue to market to them? This is where I hear you say all the time, you're happy to pay for ads and break-even knowing you're building your customer roster. And I think that this is a good opportunity to be thinking about that without actually converting for a sale, right? This is what we would call a micro-conversion, where they're doing something that's not actually an exchange of money. Ryan: Now I would venture a guess and you can probably correct me if I'm wrong, but lookers probably make up the largest portion of traffic to most e-comm sites. Jon: Yes. There's a reason that I put them first on the list. It's because it's going to be the vast majority. Ryan: So it's a vast majority. You've worked with some pretty large brands with the ability to test measure lots of different things. Top of mind, obviously on the fly because we didn't talk about this beforehand, but what's a good implementation of this catch your attention that you've seen implemented that caused the brand to continue to be able to grow and push these lookers further down the funnel? Jon: Yeah. So this is where things like we were just looking at a company that sells a bunch of different pants. The price point was like $128 for a pair of pants. And I was like, man, that's, that's kind of expensive. I'm just looking at these pants. I don't really need a pair of pants right now. But the reality is what caught my attention was that they are five times stronger than jeans and I can do a lot of different activities in them. And that caught my attention because now I'm thinking, "Wow, they're going to last a lot longer than jeans and I probably spent $100 on a pair of jeans." So what's 28 more dollars to have them last five times as long as jeans, right? So just something like that, the benefit is really going to hit that. And I'm the target audience for that site I was looking at. So, these lookers, they're likely, the vast majority of them should be your target audience. If you're working with Ryan in Logical Position, then you're driving qualified traffic. And so assuming you're driving qualified traffic and these lookers end up there, they're going to be within your demographic of who is your ideal customer, so then really it's all about connecting with them on the benefit. Ryan: Got it. Okay. I think that's a great thing. It's easy to execute for most brands, I think. Jon: Yeah, for sure. So we can also talk about for each of these how I would recommend converting these. And I think for the lookers, I would want to really just make sure the e-commerce site is easy to navigate and search because really that's what they're here to do, is just walk around the store, right? So make it easy. Don't put barriers in their way, help them get where they want to go, and give them a really excellent reason to give them that email address that we talked about or other contact information, and so you can build a relationship with a nurturing campaign. That site I was just talking about, they had a bi-weekly $150 gift card that they would give to somebody who signed up. So you're entered to win a $150 gift card every other week, which is great because of $128 pair of jeans, I might get those for free. So if I'm seriously interested and I want to continue to stay in touch with this brand, I might've given them my email address there, right? And then another way really here is cart abandonment because a lot of lookers will add stuff to cart as a way of holding it to compare and look at when they're done browsing your store. It's kind of like if you go shopping and you might pick up a couple of different pairs of clothing or something off the rack when you're walking around the store because, "Oh, I like this. I might like it. Let me see what else they have too." And then you end up with three or four things, right? It's the same thing browsers are doing on your website. They're throwing it in their cart and then they want to just take a look at that and evaluate after. So having some type of cart abandonment there can be a great way to captivate their interest. Ryan: Awesome. Jon: So next would be bargain hunters. With bargain hunters, it's really not about discounting, right? That's not conversion optimization. I think you know my stance on discounting. People who listened to this show will know I'm fervent about not discounting, right? But instead, really look to offers like free shipping, or gift with purchase, BOGO. We did a whole episode on this. People really want to know the alternatives, they exist. And really here, you just want to be thinking about things like current offers on your website. Don't make your customer's desert at the checkout and then go elsewhere to find that bargain or that special code. If they have to go to any of those sites, they're not coming back. And so we really don't want to drive them there. And you might also highlight, last chance or clearance items instead of making shoppers really go find those on your site. It could be really good on every category to have a little tout or badge or flag on each product that says something about how it's last chance, or low inventory, or something that's on clearance. Ryan: Now, do you advocate for having a clearance or an outlet navigation button on brand sites for this type of thing? Jon: Generally not. Where I want to see that as within the category because, yes, having a clearance item ... A lot of brands will put that in the main navigation. The problem is you're wasting a really critical main navigation slot. You only want five to six navigation items to begin with. And if you're taking clearance as one of those or something of that sort, a sale, I see a lot of people have sale in main navigation, what's going to happen is people are going to go there first and they're not going to get a total view of your products. Usually, the products that are in that clearance are in clearance for a reason. They weren't really popular. So why do you want the first impression of what your product should be, for a person coming into your site to see, is only the products that other people normally wouldn't buy and they're on clearance, right? So instead, mix clearance in with your other products. That way you're not promoting only your worst sellers if you will. Ryan: A couple interesting points that deviate a little bit from what we're talking about, but it's applicable in that I can afford most things on the sites I go to, but I am cheap by default so I always go to the clearance button first. Because I'm like if I can find what I'm looking for on clearance first, I'm going to get it. Even though if I didn't see clearance, I would have gone to the product and probably bought a higher price one by default because that's just how I operate on a site. But also, when you are throwing discounted products on your site, and there's a clearance section that they are in, if your Google shopping is not set up properly, all of those products would have been going into the clearance section and you can be stuck in the clearance section of the site and you're going to be staying in there most of the time. And because products are discounted price, generally get to show more often in Google shopping because they're lower price point or there's a discounted price, you will, unfortunately, be sending a lot of discounted traffic to your site when that maybe is not the focus of your brand. So some brands I advocate for having an outlet site that's completely separate. Jon: That's a great point. Ryan: Kind of like Gap Outlet, their stores, they sell all their old stuff and they'll have a separate site, and then having the people going to gap.com on that. Jon: That's a great point. And that probably makes Kanye very happy as well. Next up is buyers. Buyers should be buying from you in a way that's hassle-free, right? These people want to buy. They're there to buy. They have a job. That's one job that they're there to do and that's to buy, so let them buy. Clear these obstacles, make it easy and simple to buy, really be thinking here about the bottlenecks in the path to purchase that people must take, right? What are the hurdles you're asking them to jump over? Let's get rid of those. A really great way to look at this is to do user testing, get people who fit your ideal customer profiles, and have them run through your site while you record it and talk about the challenges they're having. Again, the whole goal here is to get outside the jar, read the label from outside the jar. And it's really hard to do that when you're too close to it. So really be focusing on just eliminating every single possible barrier, too many fields on checkout, making people create an account before they buy, all of those things that would be extra steps or what we're looking to eliminate with these. Ryan: And be clear on your shipping rates. That's the one that makes me so mad lately, is people not telling me what I'm going to pay for shipping, so it'll increase your cart abandonment too. Jon: Yeah, Exactly. I mean, these people are ready to buy until they saw you were going to charge them 20 bucks to ship, right? And so, there you go. Perfect case study. Announcer: You're listening to Drive and Convert, a podcast focused on e-commerce growth. Your hosts are Jon MacDonald, founder of The Good, a conversion rate optimization agency that works with e-commerce brands to help convert more of their visitors into buyers, and Ryan Garrow of Logical Position, a digital marketing agency offering pay-per-click management, search engine optimization, and website design services to brands of all sizes. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us out by leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing it with a friend or colleague. Thank you. Jon: All right. Should we move on to researchers? Ryan: Yes. Jon: Really, researchers, my point of view on these is these folks need to just make sure that they feel like they've considered their options and they're making the right decision. And your job, your only job is to help them do that. So what does this look like? Well, provide all the info you can think of, dimensions, instructions, details, data, data, data. That's what these people want, right? They're comparing. They came to your site because as I mentioned earlier, they were on Amazon, the Amazon didn't have the details, so they're relying on your site to have them. And you want to help them just make an informed decision. This could be everything from product reviews from other consumers to video. Researchers love video because they can see the products in motion and in use. Somebody even just holding the product and walking them through it. Specialized Bicycles does an amazing job of this. They actually have employees of Specialized, not models or anything else. It's employees hold the bike and then walk a consumer through it on video. And it's really, really well done. It does not have to be ... They shoot it in a studio, but it doesn't feel like it's a super well-polished and professional video on purpose, right? It's not some high production quality. You're aiming for your local news versus the national morning show, right, in level of quality here. Ryan: Got it. Jon: So the other thing is, really help these people understand things like sizing and photography. Video, I mentioned. So those are the things you just really want to help people dive into are all these different decision points. All right, new customers. These folks, they really want to feel like they've made a wise decision or that you want them to feel like they can make a wise decision, understand your warranties, helping people stand behind their products. You want to make sure that you're glad that they are your customer and make them know that. So this is where you think about retail source. Like your wife's retail store, right? She's there to answer questions. She can help out with returns. She'll generally just express gratitude when these people are shopping, right? It's hard to do that online, but this is where it becomes really, really important that you're doing things like building relationships with nurturing campaigns. And that can start with, as I mentioned earlier, a post-purchase campaign. What happens after this new customer becomes a new customer, right? They're no longer a visitor, they're now a customer. What do you need to do there? Loyalty campaigns, a huge way to engage these folks, right? You get them in and say, "Thank you so much for your first purchase. Here is points for your next purchase," or, "Two more purchases and your fourth one is free." Something of that sort, right? Where you're helping these loyal people become loyal customers. That's really what this is all about. Ryan: And these people just purchased, so maybe they haven't even gotten the product yet or maybe they just got it. Jon: Exactly. Ryan: Even just user videos on how to use the product you're getting can be valuable. I do that with Joyful Dirt. Jon: That's a great point, right? So what can you send as that follow-up email flow while the people are waiting for their package to make sure they know that you have their back, right? So if I bought Joyful Dirt, what do I need to prep for? Is there a season I should be doing this in? How much water do I need to apply? All these other types of things that I probably don't really think about, but are really key to somebody getting the most out of the product and buying again, right? If I follow your instructions for Joyful Dirt, I am more likely to have a good experience and then buy again, then if I just use the product without reading the instructions, which is more likely for me than not so. Ryan: What I appreciate on it too, on that first email after I purchase, usually the next day, it builds the anticipation because often I forget what I bought yesterday and I get surprised by Amazon in two days, who are the site I purchased it on. And so you're like, "Oh, yeah, I do have that coming in a day." I'm excited to get it now because I was excited yesterday when I bought it, and I forgot today, and then tomorrow when it arrives, I get excited. So it's a good way to continue that kind of that high from my purchase that I just paid. Jon: How is there not a phrase like the Amazon phenomenon or something, where everybody forgets what they ordered at Amazon at midnight the night before and then it shows up two days later and you're like, "Oh, yeah, I was looking for that. That was great. I'm a genius." Ryan: I know. I was like, well, I knew I wanted one of these and like, oh, I did want one and then I bought it. It was great. In college, it would have been, "Man, what did I do at 2:00 AM?" and talk about, "Oh, I had a bean burrito." Now, it's just transaction fatigue or something. And I'm just [crosstalk 00:25:48]. Jon: That was much lower key than I thought you were going there, Ryan. 2:00 AM in college. But this happened to me recently where I was working out with a trainer and we do an outdoor workout in my garage now. And it was really funny because he didn't bring his TRX bands. If you know about these TRX straps, they're a way to do workouts. And the reality is that I went on and I just ordered a pair from Amazon. I was like, "Well if you ever forget them again, I'll have some here." And totally forgot about it. And then the next workout came by and the Amazon guy literally showed up two days later while we were working out. So it had been like two days to the hour and the guy shows up and I'm like, "Oh, I wonder what that is." And you could read the outside of the box. It said TRX. And my trainer is like, "Did you get something from TRX?" I was like, "Oh, yeah. Last time you were here. Yeah, remember?" Yeah, so that's was pretty funny. I was like, Amazon wins again. Ryan: Yep. Jon: All right. Dissatisfied customers. We have two left. So let's talk about the dissatisfied customers. Everybody has them, right? And they exist. And that's okay. These folks often can just be made satisfied by helping them understand that you're trying to fix their challenge and improve the experience for everyone else. Often, it's like if I come across a problem on our website, okay, let's just say, I just bought a bed. I'm not going to name names, but I bought a bed online and it has a whole bunch of technology in it. Love it. But, I'm a tall gentleman, right? And I bought a king, and it comes, and I was like, "This is a lot smaller than a king." It turns out, I measured it, it's two inches less than a king. And I was like, that's really weird. It's not a queen. So what's going on here? And so I contacted the brand and said, "Hey, this bed is two inches smaller than a king." And they said, "Oh, yeah. Because of some of the technology, blah, blah, blah, we have to make it a little bit smaller." And I was like, "That would have been nice to have known up on your site. You need to tell people that it says king, but it's actually two inches smaller. Because you're advertising all these NBA players use this bed and things like that, and I'm thinking great, right? But then it's two inches smaller." And the founder actually emailed me and said, "Hey, I got this feedback. I heard this. Well, we're going to add this to the website and make sure people know." And I was like, okay, well, I still have the bed, now I'm satisfied. And I was like, at least other people won't have that problem, right>. So I felt vindicated in some way. And so I think I made this point to say that complaining customers are an excellent source of feedback. And that's how you need to look at these, right? It's not about just having dissatisfied customers, it's about understanding what their problems are and fixing them. They tell you what the problems with your website and your consumer experience are, and so you could fix those problems. So really just want to be quick to listen to things like bad reviews, understand the complaint before responding, and understand that you can turn dissatisfied customers into loyal ones. It is possible. Ryan: I think too often brands hear or get bad feedback or just dissatisfied customers, and it's just for them, it's almost scary confronting it, or they're really excited and passionate about their brand, and somebody doesn't like it, they're like, "They just don't know what they're doing." I've done this myself with brands, and I'm like, "They just don't know what they're doing." And then I'm like, okay, it happened again. I'm like, okay, fine, we need to adjust the product. And my baby may be ugly, so let's fix it and not make it so ugly to some of these people. You can't be scared of dissatisfied customers, or you're going to lose your brand. At the end of the day, it's going to be just terrible. Jon: That's a good point. Yeah. All right. Last one, loyal customers. So, look, the 80/20 rule says that 20% of your customers will be responsible for 80% of your business. So the way I like to look at this and it's hilarious, I was just saying this to somebody else, but loyal customers are your bread and the rest are your butter, right? So really want to be thinking about what are you doing for these loyal people? So look at loyalty programs. I like to use airlines as examples because they are so good at gamifying, right? I'm platinum on Delta. I mean, I haven't flown them in nine months and I just got another letter from them yesterday with baggage tags for platinum level. And they said, "Hey, we're going to keep you a platinum level for another year. Don't worry about it. All the miles you've accumulated will count towards next year. So you don't have to start over. We understand." And they're gamifying it and in a way that's, okay, now, next year, when I start flying again or whenever that is, I'm going to go right back to Delta because I'm still platinum there. If they had removed, I'd just figure out, I'd be like, hey, well maybe Alaska or whoever else flies more on the West Coast where I'm all the time going, I would probably switch. But now I'll stick with Delta, right? They've done a great job with that through what's no doubt a challenging time for them. So really want to be thinking about a way to keep customers coming back and how you can take care of your most loyal customers. As I say, gamifying works very, very well. Every customer is special, but you really want to treat these folks with even more kid gloves, if you will. And then find ways to reward and recognize these people, you can give them special amenities. Baggage tags aren't really going to be much for me. I don't really care about that, but I'll take the free upgrades and the free alcohol and everything else that comes with being platinum with Delta. And then really just treat them like a VIP and they'll continue to be loyal. That's really my key point here. Ryan: And this is really probably the one area that I advocate for companies looking at competitors and taking note because a lot of times when you look at competitors and they have this widget on their side, or they do this thing in their ads, they probably have no idea what they're doing. At the end of the day, they're testing something. But when it comes to loyalty and what they're doing with their customers to try to keep them loyal, often, this is where a lot of research goes and especially in the airlines. If I was running an airline, I would go to all of the other airlines' loyalty program, find a list somehow and say, "Look, if you are platinum with Delta, I will automatically make you platinum or whatever my highest thing is with Alaska, give me a shot." And just automatically, because you're losing nothing. I'm not getting Jon's business right now. Jon: Right. It's funny you say that because Alaska does just that. They'll do a status match, where if you're platinum on Delta, they will status match you and give you that for a year on Alaska. Sadly, you can only do it once in your lifetime. And I did it right before the pandemic, so that's not a good situation for me. But yeah, at any rate [crosstalk] travel. Ryan: Join your competitor's loyalty program. I highly recommend everybody do that because it's going to give you some ideas of what they're seeing in the data or how they're gamifying it. Just jog your brainstorming ideas. Jon: Yeah. Status matches is a great idea, right? That's wonderful. Yeah. Where do you think you want to go from here? Ryan: Well, we're about out of time. So, I guess, I've got a lot to chew on too because I'm sure we're going to come out with some other ideas on this after digesting most of your data. But there's a lot of things you can do on a site to target a lot of people. And so what would your suggestion be to somebody that's just taken this fire hose to the face for their site and they're like, oh, my gosh, seven different groups of people? Where do you start and how do you start taking some actions so you're not a paralysis-analysis scenario? Jon: Yeah, great point. I would say here, start by asking questions about each of these groups and taking a good look at your site from their perspectives, right? So do each of these customer types get their needs met or are you just leaving some out in the cold? And how do you identify and engage the most loyal customers, or how do you flag and recognize new customers? And are you providing enough information to researchers? So really there's a key question in each of these if you go down and just ask yourself, am I meeting the needs of these people? And you'll come up with tons and tons of optimizations that you can do to your site on your own pretty easily. Ryan: Got it. And I would probably just broad stroke saying if you move up through the list in reverse order, you're taking care of some of the easiest or most important things. Like keeping your loyal customers loyal to you, you can't lose lifetime value customers, otherwise, your top-funnel marketing is just wasted. So keep those and move up. If you have to make a choice on where you're taking actions, I'm guessing that's where I would start. Jon: There you go. Awesome. Well, thank you, Ryan. I really enjoyed the conversation today. Ryan: Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for bringing your brain and letting me pick it and add some value to our listeners. I appreciate that. Jon: All right. Well, have a great afternoon. Ryan: You too. Thanks, Jon. Announcer: Thanks for listening to Drive and Convert with Jon MacDonald and Ryan Garrow. To keep up to date with new episodes, you can subscribe at driveandconvert.com.

Season 3, Episode 1 — 8 October 2018 About this episode Carol Schall, Assistant Professor of Special Education and Disability Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Director of Technical Assistance for the Virginia Commonwealth University Autism Center for Excellence, discusses her article, “Employees with Autism Spectrum Disorder Achieving Long-Term Employment Success: A Retrospective Review of Employment Retention and Intervention”. It is one of a collection of articles in the September 2018 special issue of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities dedicated to “Critical Issues in the Employment of Persons with Severe Disabilities”. About the presenters Carol Schall is the Co-Director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Autism Center for Excellence, the Director of the Virginia Autism Resource Center, and the Principal Investigator in the development of the Community Based Functional Skills Assessment for Transition Aged Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorders, a grant funded by Autism Speaks. She has over 30 years experience supporting adolescents and adults with ASD as a teacher, administrator, researcher, and consultant. Dr. Schall is also the co-developer and research coordinator for Project SEARCH Plus ASD Supports. Additionally, Dr. Schall has consulted nationally and internationally on issues related to adolescents and young adults with ASD. Donald Taylor is responsible for membership and chapters at TASH and is the producer of Amplified. Transcript Announcer: You're listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Today we are talking with Carol Schall, an Assistant Professor of Special Education and Disability Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Director of Technical Assistance for the Virginia Commonwealth University Autism Center for Excellence. We discuss her article, “Employees with Autism Spectrum Disorder Achieving Long-Term Employment Success: A Retrospective Review of Employment Retention and Intervention”. It is one of a collection of articles in the September 2018 special issue of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities dedicated to “Critical Issues in the Employment of Persons with Severe Disabilities”. She is a co-author, along with Valerie Brooke, Alissa Molinelli Brooke, Paul Wehman, Jennifer McDonough, Katherine Thompson and Jan Smith. Professor Schall talks about her study, but throughout, addresses the the best practices, challenges and future direction of the broad issue of employment for people with disabilities. Musical introduction Complete transcript forthcoming Announcer: You've been listening to TASH Amplified. For more about the series, including show notes, links to articles discussed, a complete transcript and a schedule of episodes, visit tash.org/amplified. You can subscribe through iTunes or your favorite Android podcast app to have the series delivered automatically to your device so you never miss an episode. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with your friends and on your social networks. Today we discussed research from the current special issue of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, a special issue dedicated to “Critical Issues in the Employment of Persons with Severe Disabilities”. The current issues, as […] The post Employee Retention in Competitive Integrated Employment for People with Disabilities appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 3, Episode 1 — 8 October 2018 About this episode Carol Schall, Assistant Professor of Special Education and Disability Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Director of Technical Assistance for the Virginia Commonwealth University Autism Center for Excellence, discusses her article, “Employees with Autism Spectrum Disorder Achieving Long-Term Employment Success: A Retrospective Review of Employment Retention and Intervention”. It is one of a collection of articles in the September 2018 special issue of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities dedicated to “Critical Issues in the Employment of Persons with Severe Disabilities”. About the presenters Carol Schall is the Co-Director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Autism Center for Excellence, the Director of the Virginia Autism Resource Center, and the Principal Investigator in the development of the Community Based Functional Skills Assessment for Transition Aged Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorders, a grant funded by Autism Speaks. She has over 30 years experience supporting adolescents and adults with ASD as a teacher, administrator, researcher, and consultant. Dr. Schall is also the co-developer and research coordinator for Project SEARCH Plus ASD Supports. Additionally, Dr. Schall has consulted nationally and internationally on issues related to adolescents and young adults with ASD. Donald Taylor is responsible for membership and chapters at TASH and is the producer of Amplified. Transcript Announcer: You’re listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Today we are talking with Carol Schall, an Assistant Professor of Special Education and Disability Policy at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Director of Technical Assistance for the Virginia Commonwealth University Autism Center for Excellence. We discuss her article, “Employees with Autism Spectrum Disorder Achieving Long-Term Employment Success: A Retrospective Review of Employment Retention and Intervention”. It is one of a collection of articles in the September 2018 special issue of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities dedicated to “Critical Issues in the Employment of Persons with Severe Disabilities”. She is a co-author, along with Valerie Brooke, Alissa Molinelli Brooke, Paul Wehman, Jennifer McDonough, Katherine Thompson and Jan Smith. Professor Schall talks about her study, but throughout, addresses the the best practices, challenges and future direction of the broad issue of employment for people with disabilities. Musical introduction Complete transcript forthcoming Announcer: You’ve been listening to TASH Amplified. For more about the series, including show notes, links to articles discussed, a complete transcript and a schedule of episodes, visit tash.org/amplified. You can subscribe through iTunes or your favorite Android podcast app to have the series delivered automatically to your device so you never miss an episode. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with your friends and on your social networks. Today we discussed research from the current special issue of Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Disabilities, a special issue dedicated to “Critical Issues in the Employment of Persons with Severe Disabilities”. The current issues, as […] The post Employee Retention in Competitive Integrated Employment for People with Disabilities appeared first on Tash.org.

This is the last episode of Rachel's Story, part of Mencap's Treat me well campaign.Transcript: Announcer: You are now listening to Episode 6 of Rachel’s story, part of Mencap’s Treat me well campaign. Every episode of Rachel’s story is based on real experiences of people with a learning disability who have been to hospital. If you haven’t listened to previous episodes, please go back to Episode 1 to hear Rachel’s story from the beginning. Rachel: When things are going seriously wrong with your appendix, you need surgery right away. I was very afraid. The doctor who was putting me to sleep. They tried to relax me, but it didn’t help. Dad was outside.Doctor: Are you sure you’re okay? Do you need a blanket? Do you have a favourite toy or something you can hold onto? I could try and get your dad back in here if that would help.I may not understand things really fastly but I’m not a kid.No one would just say what was happening.They went to put a needle into my arm. I jumped really badly.They said they were sorry. I said I wanted to know what was happening.Doctor: All I’m going to do is wipe this bit of your arm with alcohol and put in this needle. It should be just a quick pinch. Then, I’m going to put this mask over your face, but it won’t smell bad. Just take deep breaths and we’ll count to ten together.Once they said what was happening, everything was fine. They put a mask on my face, but I was calm. I counted to ten.One.Two.Three.Four…...Rachel’s story is a combination of experiences that real people with a learning disability have had in hospital. Rachel’s experiences in this episode are based on Ronnie’s story. To read Ronnie’s story and to find out more about Treat me well, our campaign for better hospital care, please visit www.mencap.org.uk/treatmewell.Sign up to campaign emails on the website to get the next episode. Thank you. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is Episode 5 of Rachel's Story, part of Mencap's Treat me well campaign.Transcript: Announcer: You are now listening to Episode 5 of Rachel’s story, part of Mencap’s Treat me well campaign. Every episode of Rachel’s story is based on real experiences of people with a learning disability who have been to hospital. If you haven’t listened to previous episodes, please go back to Episode 1 to hear Rachel’s story from the beginning. Rachel: Sometimes, hospitals can be so big.I felt like I was running for ages.Finally, my dad ran found me. He helped me calm down. Some of the doctors tried to find me. They told my dad I needed a scan now.They needed to know what was making my stomach hurt. I told them I was afraid of little places.Med Professional: We can definitely do a different kind of scan if a CT scan isn’t possible.They did an X-Ray instead.I told the person on the X-Ray that I have a learning disability. They said their brother had a learning disability too.They walked me through the X-Ray. They told me about each step. They helped me understand what the X-Ray does.It only took a little bit of extra time, but I felt so much better. Med Professional: We’ll put you on this table, Rachel. Then we’ll put this heavy blanket over you because X-Rays can be bad for your health if you are around them a lot. I’ll stand behind there and push the button and then it’ll be done.After the X-Ray, another doctor said there was something wrong.I needed to have surgery right now.My dad was very unhappy. He wanted to make a complaint.I have gone home without no test. The medicine they had first given me wasn’t good for me to take.I didn’t want to make a fuss but Dad was right. Announcer: This is the end of Episode 5.Rachel’s story is a combination of experiences that real people with a learning disability have had in hospital. Rachel’s experiences in this episode are based on Angus’ story. To read Angus’ story and to find out more about Treat me well, our campaign for better hospital care, please visit www.mencap.org.uk/treatmewell.Sign up to campaign emails on the website to get the next episode. Thank you. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is Episode 4 of Rachel's Story, part of Mencap's Treat me well campaign.Transcript: Announcer: You are now listening to Episode 4 of Rachel’s story, part of Mencap’s Treat me well campaign. Every episode of Rachel’s story is based on real experiences of people with a learning disability who have been to hospital. If you haven’t listened to previous episodes, please go back to Episode 1 to hear Rachel’s story from the beginning. Med Professional: Rachel, come with me, quickly.Rachel: I’m not sure who it was, but they rushed me out of the room. I didn’t know what was happening. The doctor was talking so fast. They rushed me to another room. Where is my hospital passport? And where is my dad? I wanted to ask but couldn’t get the words out.Med Professional: So sorry for the delay and the mixup but we’ve just been backed up with different requests. I’ve managed to get you in to get a CT scan so we can see whether or not you’ve got appendicitis or if it’s just maybe just a fever along with some gastrointestinal problems.Rachel: When we got there, I saw this big machine. You could lie down inside it. They wanted me to lie down so that I could go in the machine.No one told me what’s gonna happen. I wished that nurse from before was here.Med Professional: Now if you’ll just get on the table, we’ll get you into the CT scan so we can…. Rachel: I don’t like little places. They scare me. And my dad wasn’t there. I can’t understand what this person was saying.I couldn’t help it. I started to get upset. They tried to get in the machine. I screamed and I ran.Announcer: This is the end of Episode 4.Rachel’s story is a combination of experiences that real people with a learning disability have had in hospital. Rachel’s experiences in this episode are based on Desmond’s story. To read Desmond’s story and to find out more about Treat me well, our campaign for better hospital care, please visit www.mencap.org.uk/treatmewell.Sign up to campaign emails on the website to get the next episode. Thank you. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This is Episode 3 of Rachel's Story, part of Mencap's Treat me well campaign.Transcript:Announcer: You are now listening to Episode 3 of Rachel’s story, part of Mencap’s Treat me well campaign. Too many people with a learning disability face problems when they go to hospital. We want to change this. Every episode of Rachel’s story is based on real experiences of people with a learning disability who have been to hospital. If you haven’t listened to previous episodes, please go back to Episode 1 to hear Rachel’s story from the beginning. Rachel: I’m lucky that my pharmacist knows me really well. She helped calm me down. She says things in a way I can understand. She called my dad so that he could go with me. Blood tests make me feel really nervous. I told the nurse I had a learning disability. The nurse said they had had training last month in helping people with a learning disability. I had brought my hospital passport with me, and the nurse read everything inside it.Nurse: Now Rachel, I’m going to feel this part of your arm to find a vein first. Is that OK? Then we’ll put this rubber band on your arm to make it easier for us to get the blood. I’m going to take this small needle and then we’ll quickly put it in the vein and get the blood.Rachel: The nurse told me everything she was going to do with the blood test, but she noticed that my head felt hot. I told her my stomach was hurting all of the time now. The nurse looked worried. So did my dad. She said we can’t wait for the blood test results.Nurse: I’m going to see what I can do to get a scan for you, Rachel. I think it’s going to take too long to get the blood test results.Rachel: My dad and I were waiting in the lobby. He went to the toilets and while he was in the toilet, they called my name. Announcer: This is the end of Episode 3.Rachel’s story is a combination of experiences that real people with a learning disability have had in hospital. Rachel’s experiences in this episode are based on Nick’s story. To read Nick’s story and to find out more about Treat me well, our campaign for better hospital care, visit www.mencap.org.uk/treatmewellSign up to campaign emails on the website to get the next episode. Thank you. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Season 2, Episode 2 — 7 August 2017 About this episode In preparation for the return to school, the theme of the current issue of our membership magazine is “The Individualized Education Program as a living document”. We talk with Amy Toson, the guest editor of this issue, about what the IEP as a living document means and how to implement such a vision in your meeting or school. This issue is free to members and non-members alike for the month of August. To read the entire issue, visit tash.org/iep. About the presenters Amy L-M Toson, Ph.D. has been working both nationally and internationally for well over fifteen years in the area of inclusive community and school capacity building and systems change. She began her career as a community inclusion facilitator and K-12 inclusive education teacher. She then moved into the role of consultant and professor working with families, teachers and leaders across the globe facilitating effective inclusion for all learners, paying special attention to those who are traditionally marginalized and segregated, such as students with intensive support needs. Currently, Amy is an Assistant Professor and Special Education Ph.D. Program Chair within the College of Education and Leadership at Cardinal Stritch University. She researches and teaches doctoral courses on multi-dimensional capacity building, leading/building inclusive systems and communities, doctoral research symposium, and legal and political analysis. Amy received her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida within the Departments of Educational Leadership/Policy Studies and Special Education in 2013. She now resides in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas and is taking up action for building inclusive communities across the lifespan there. Donald Taylor is responsible for membership and chapters at TASH and is the producer of Amplified. Transcript Announcer: You're listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. TASH just released the latest issue of our quarterly member magazine, Connections, the theme of which is “The Individualized Education Program as a living document”. Today we are talking with Amy Toson, the guest editor of the special edition, about what the IEP as a living document means and how to implement such a vision. Musical introduction Complete transcript forthcoming Announcer: You've been listening to TASH Amplified. For more about the series, including show notes, links to articles discussed, a complete transcript and a schedule of episodes, visit tash.org/amplified. You can subscribe through iTunes or your favorite Android podcast app to have the series delivered automatically to your device so you never miss an episode. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with your friends and on your social networks. Today we talked with Amy Toson, the guest editor of the latest issue of our membership magazine, Connections, on “the IEP as a living document”. We're sufficiently excited about this issue that we are making it available to members and non-members alike, free for the month of August. To read the […] The post The Individualized Education Program as a Living Document appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 2, Episode 2 — 7 August 2017 About this episode In preparation for the return to school, the theme of the current issue of our membership magazine is “The Individualized Education Program as a living document”. We talk with Amy Toson, the guest editor of this issue, about what the IEP as a living document means and how to implement such a vision in your meeting or school. This issue is free to members and non-members alike for the month of August. To read the entire issue, visit tash.org/iep. About the presenters Amy L-M Toson, Ph.D. has been working both nationally and internationally for well over fifteen years in the area of inclusive community and school capacity building and systems change. She began her career as a community inclusion facilitator and K-12 inclusive education teacher. She then moved into the role of consultant and professor working with families, teachers and leaders across the globe facilitating effective inclusion for all learners, paying special attention to those who are traditionally marginalized and segregated, such as students with intensive support needs. Currently, Amy is an Assistant Professor and Special Education Ph.D. Program Chair within the College of Education and Leadership at Cardinal Stritch University. She researches and teaches doctoral courses on multi-dimensional capacity building, leading/building inclusive systems and communities, doctoral research symposium, and legal and political analysis. Amy received her Ph.D. from the University of South Florida within the Departments of Educational Leadership/Policy Studies and Special Education in 2013. She now resides in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas and is taking up action for building inclusive communities across the lifespan there. Donald Taylor is responsible for membership and chapters at TASH and is the producer of Amplified. Transcript Announcer: You’re listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. TASH just released the latest issue of our quarterly member magazine, Connections, the theme of which is “The Individualized Education Program as a living document”. Today we are talking with Amy Toson, the guest editor of the special edition, about what the IEP as a living document means and how to implement such a vision. Musical introduction Complete transcript forthcoming Announcer: You’ve been listening to TASH Amplified. For more about the series, including show notes, links to articles discussed, a complete transcript and a schedule of episodes, visit tash.org/amplified. You can subscribe through iTunes or your favorite Android podcast app to have the series delivered automatically to your device so you never miss an episode. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with your friends and on your social networks. Today we talked with Amy Toson, the guest editor of the latest issue of our membership magazine, Connections, on “the IEP as a living document”. We’re sufficiently excited about this issue that we are making it available to members and non-members alike, free for the month of August. To read the […] The post The Individualized Education Program as a Living Document appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 2, Episode 1 — 22 June 2017 About this episode Today's episode is particularly urgent. The Senate released its bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut Medicaid this morning. Listen to it right away then get busy. TASH talks with Gonzalo Martínez de Vedia, a Policy Manager with The Indivisible Project, about what this bill means and how you can talk to your Senator — Republican or Democrat — to effectively convey the importance for people with disabilities of it not passing. About the presenters Gonzalo Martínez de Vedia is a contributor to The Indivisible Guide and Policy Manager with The Indivisible Project in Washington, D.C., where he helps demystify Congress for 6,000 Indivisible groups across every congressional district in the country. Previously, he advocated for the rights of workers, immigrants and survivors of human trafficking through several NGOs including the Worker Justice Center of New York, the Freedom Network, and Humanity United. Gonzalo was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He holds a BA cum laude from Cornell University. Donald Taylor is responsible for membership and chapters at TASH and is the producer of Amplified. Transcript Announcer: You're listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Today we are talking with Gonzalo Martínez de Vedia, who is a Policy Manager with The Indivisible Project. Indivisible started as a 23-page guide on how to influence your congresspeople, written by former congressional staffers with first-hand experience of what works and what doesn't work. The guide had been downloaded over 2 million times and Indivisible now comprises nearly 6,000 local groups. Their primary focus in recent weeks has been on preventing Congress from repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and cutting $800 billion from Medicaid — which they could do as early as next week. We talk with Gonzalo about what TASH members can do to protect these essential rights of people with disabilities. Musical introduction Complete transcript forthcoming Donald Taylor: The American Health Care Act is really close to having the votes to pass in the Senate. So I think the idea is to look at specific [influenceable] Senators. Which Senators, and in which states, are the most important Congresspeople for citizens to try to influence? Gonzalo Martínez de Vedia: Yeah, so there's two answers to that. You know, the first answer, of course, is we encourage people to call whoever their individual two senators happen to be in whatever state they are. And there is work to do in all in all states. But as a national campaign, of course, we have to hone in on certain targets, especially now that we're getting into the final stretch. You know, the House has already voted. We are now in the Senate and in we are in the final stretch of the Senate negotiations. And what the Republican caucus and leadership is trying to […] The post How to Talk to Your Senator About Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 2, Episode 1 — 22 June 2017 About this episode Today’s episode is particularly urgent. The Senate released its bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and cut Medicaid this morning. Listen to it right away then get busy. TASH talks with Gonzalo Martínez de Vedia, a Policy Manager with The Indivisible Project, about what this bill means and how you can talk to your Senator — Republican or Democrat — to effectively convey the importance for people with disabilities of it not passing. About the presenters Gonzalo Martínez de Vedia is a contributor to The Indivisible Guide and Policy Manager with The Indivisible Project in Washington, D.C., where he helps demystify Congress for 6,000 Indivisible groups across every congressional district in the country. Previously, he advocated for the rights of workers, immigrants and survivors of human trafficking through several NGOs including the Worker Justice Center of New York, the Freedom Network, and Humanity United. Gonzalo was born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He holds a BA cum laude from Cornell University. Donald Taylor is responsible for membership and chapters at TASH and is the producer of Amplified. Transcript Announcer: You’re listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Today we are talking with Gonzalo Martínez de Vedia, who is a Policy Manager with The Indivisible Project. Indivisible started as a 23-page guide on how to influence your congresspeople, written by former congressional staffers with first-hand experience of what works and what doesn’t work. The guide had been downloaded over 2 million times and Indivisible now comprises nearly 6,000 local groups. Their primary focus in recent weeks has been on preventing Congress from repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and cutting $800 billion from Medicaid — which they could do as early as next week. We talk with Gonzalo about what TASH members can do to protect these essential rights of people with disabilities. Musical introduction Complete transcript forthcoming Donald Taylor: The American Health Care Act is really close to having the votes to pass in the Senate. So I think the idea is to look at specific [influenceable] Senators. Which Senators, and in which states, are the most important Congresspeople for citizens to try to influence? Gonzalo Martínez de Vedia: Yeah, so there’s two answers to that. You know, the first answer, of course, is we encourage people to call whoever their individual two senators happen to be in whatever state they are. And there is work to do in all in all states. But as a national campaign, of course, we have to hone in on certain targets, especially now that we’re getting into the final stretch. You know, the House has already voted. We are now in the Senate and in we are in the final stretch of the Senate negotiations. And what the Republican caucus and leadership is trying to […] The post How to Talk to Your Senator About Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 1, Episode 14 — 10 November 2016 About this episode We talk with Alice Wong and Andrew Pulrang about their numerous projects, most importantly #CripTheVote and the Disability Visibility Project. We discuss the election, the affordances of online collaboration and activism, intersectionality and disability, and the importance of culture, not just politics. Be sure to check out their #WhatsNext post-election #CripTheVote twitter chat on 10 November 2016, starting at 7:00 PM Eastern. Visit the Disability Visibility Project page for the event or the twitter feed for the hashtag to find out more. About the presenters Alice Wong is a sociologist, research consultant, and disability activist based in San Francisco, California. Her areas of interest are accessible healthcare for people with disabilities, Medicaid policies and programs, advocacy-based storytelling, and social media. Currently, she is the Founder and Project Coordinator for the Disability Visibility Project (DVP), a community partnership with StoryCorps and an online community dedicated to recording, amplifying, and sharing disability stories and culture. Partnering with Andrew Pulrang and Gregg Beratan, Alice is a co-partner of an online campaign called #CripTheVote encouraging conversations about disability issues during the 2016 Presidential election. You can find her on Twitter at @SFdirewolf. Andrew Pulrang started working at the North Country Center for Independence, a Center for Independent Living in Plattsburgh, New York while in college, rising to serve as the Executive Director from 1998 until 2012. Seeking to explore disability issues in a different way, Andrew started Disability Thinking. You can find him on twitter at @AndrewPulrang. Donald Taylor is the Membership Manager at TASH and the producer of Amplified. Transcript Announcer: You're listening to TASH Amplified a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Today we are talking with Alice Wong and Andrew Pulrang about their numerous projects, most importantly #CripTheVote and the Disability Visibility Project. We discuss the election, the affordances of online collaboration and activism, intersectionality and disability, and the importance of culture, not just politics. Concerned about the implications of the election outcome for people with disabilities? Wondering where we go from here? #CripTheVote will be hosting an election discussion as one of their regular twitter chats on Thursday, November 10th 2016, starting at 7:00 PM Eastern. For more on how to participate, search for #CripTheVote on twitter or go to facebook.com/CripTheVote/. Complete transcript forthcoming Announcer: You've been listening to TASH Amplified. For more about the series, including show notes, links to articles discussed, a complete transcript and a schedule of episodes, visit tash.org/amplified. You can subscribe through iTunes or your favorite Android podcast app to have the series delivered automatically to your device so you never miss an episode. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share it with your friends and on your social networks. Today we talked with Alice Wong and Andrew Pulrang about #CripTheVote and the Disability Visibility Project. You can find Alice Wong on twitter at @SFdirewolf. […] The post #CripTheVote and Online Disability Activism appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 1, Episode 14 — 10 November 2016 About this episode We talk with Alice Wong and Andrew Pulrang about their numerous projects, most importantly #CripTheVote and the Disability Visibility Project. We discuss the election, the affordances of online collaboration and activism, intersectionality and disability, and the importance of culture, not just politics. Be sure to check out their #WhatsNext post-election #CripTheVote twitter chat on 10 November 2016, starting at 7:00 PM Eastern. Visit the Disability Visibility Project page for the event or the twitter feed for the hashtag to find out more. About the presenters Alice Wong is a sociologist, research consultant, and disability activist based in San Francisco, California. Her areas of interest are accessible healthcare for people with disabilities, Medicaid policies and programs, advocacy-based storytelling, and social media. Currently, she is the Founder and Project Coordinator for the Disability Visibility Project (DVP), a community partnership with StoryCorps and an online community dedicated to recording, amplifying, and sharing disability stories and culture. Partnering with Andrew Pulrang and Gregg Beratan, Alice is a co-partner of an online campaign called #CripTheVote encouraging conversations about disability issues during the 2016 Presidential election. You can find her on Twitter at @SFdirewolf. Andrew Pulrang started working at the North Country Center for Independence, a Center for Independent Living in Plattsburgh, New York while in college, rising to serve as the Executive Director from 1998 until 2012. Seeking to explore disability issues in a different way, Andrew started Disability Thinking. You can find him on twitter at @AndrewPulrang. Donald Taylor is the Membership Manager at TASH and the producer of Amplified. Transcript Announcer: You’re listening to TASH Amplified a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Today we are talking with Alice Wong and Andrew Pulrang about their numerous projects, most importantly #CripTheVote and the Disability Visibility Project. We discuss the election, the affordances of online collaboration and activism, intersectionality and disability, and the importance of culture, not just politics. Concerned about the implications of the election outcome for people with disabilities? Wondering where we go from here? #CripTheVote will be hosting an election discussion as one of their regular twitter chats on Thursday, November 10th 2016, starting at 7:00 PM Eastern. For more on how to participate, search for #CripTheVote on twitter or go to facebook.com/CripTheVote/. Complete transcript forthcoming Announcer: You’ve been listening to TASH Amplified. For more about the series, including show notes, links to articles discussed, a complete transcript and a schedule of episodes, visit tash.org/amplified. You can subscribe through iTunes or your favorite Android podcast app to have the series delivered automatically to your device so you never miss an episode. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please share it with your friends and on your social networks. Today we talked with Alice Wong and Andrew Pulrang about #CripTheVote and the Disability Visibility Project. You can find Alice Wong on twitter at @SFdirewolf. […] The post #CripTheVote and Online Disability Activism appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 1, Episode 13 — 20 October 2016 About this episode Paula Wills and Michelle Phillips of Chicago's Family Resource Center on Disabilities discuss the services that are available through the Parent Training and Information Center to parents trying to navigate the education provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Prior to being the Executive Director at the Family Resource Center on Disabilities, Michelle Phillips was a skeptical parent seeking help securing her son's educational rights. She explains her journey from Angry Mom to Power Mom with the help of her Parent Training and Information Center. About the presenters Michelle Phillips (pictured above, second from the left) is the Executive Director of the Family Resource Center on Disabilities, the Parent Training and Information Center for the Chicago metropolitan area. She is the mother of an adult son with osteogenesis imperfecta and a recent grandmother to a grandchild, also with osteogenesis imperfecta. Prior to directing the Family Resource Center on Disabilities, she was a parent who learned to use the provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act from he local Parent Training and Information Center. Paula Wills (pictured above, right) is the Technology Outreach Coordinator for Family Resource Center on Disabilities Parent Information Center. Her interests include advocacy for parents of children with disabilities utilizing special education services, and technology and media management for non-profits. Transcript Announcer: You're listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Today we have two of our favorite regular contributors to our Annual Conference, Paula Wills and Michelle Phillips, both of whom work at the Family Resource Center on Disabilities, which is the Parent Training and Information Center for the Chicago metropolitan area. Paula is today's guest interviewer. She is the Technology Outreach Coordinator at Family Resource Center on Disabilities. She is also the Co-Vice President of the Illinois TASH Chapter and has been the photographer at our annual conference for two years running. Importantly for TASH Amplified, because Paula does her own interviews at BlogTalkRadio, she helped us get started when we were just trying to figure out this podcast thing. Paula is interviewing Michelle Phillips, her boss and the Executive Director at the Family Resource Center on Disabilities. Michelle will be a panelist at one of the general sessions at our 2016 Annual Conference to be held in St. Louis from Wednesday, November 30th-Friday, December 2nd. In today's interview they discuss the services available through the Parent Training and Information Centers and Michelle's own experience shepherding her son through the provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The upgrades continue here at TASH Amplifed. Starting this week we now have a regular musical introduction, an original composition and performance by Sunny Cefaratti, the Co-Director and Autistic Self Advocacy Mentor at the Musical Autist. Musical interlude Complete transcript forthcoming Announcer: (music playing in the background) You've been listening to TASH […] The post From Angry Mom to Power Mom: The Parent Training and Information Centers and Your Child's Individualized Education Program appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 1, Episode 13 — 20 October 2016 About this episode Paula Wills and Michelle Phillips of Chicago’s Family Resource Center on Disabilities discuss the services that are available through the Parent Training and Information Center to parents trying to navigate the education provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Prior to being the Executive Director at the Family Resource Center on Disabilities, Michelle Phillips was a skeptical parent seeking help securing her son’s educational rights. She explains her journey from Angry Mom to Power Mom with the help of her Parent Training and Information Center. About the presenters Michelle Phillips (pictured above, second from the left) is the Executive Director of the Family Resource Center on Disabilities, the Parent Training and Information Center for the Chicago metropolitan area. She is the mother of an adult son with osteogenesis imperfecta and a recent grandmother to a grandchild, also with osteogenesis imperfecta. Prior to directing the Family Resource Center on Disabilities, she was a parent who learned to use the provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act from he local Parent Training and Information Center. Paula Wills (pictured above, right) is the Technology Outreach Coordinator for Family Resource Center on Disabilities Parent Information Center. Her interests include advocacy for parents of children with disabilities utilizing special education services, and technology and media management for non-profits. Transcript Announcer: You’re listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Today we have two of our favorite regular contributors to our Annual Conference, Paula Wills and Michelle Phillips, both of whom work at the Family Resource Center on Disabilities, which is the Parent Training and Information Center for the Chicago metropolitan area. Paula is today’s guest interviewer. She is the Technology Outreach Coordinator at Family Resource Center on Disabilities. She is also the Co-Vice President of the Illinois TASH Chapter and has been the photographer at our annual conference for two years running. Importantly for TASH Amplified, because Paula does her own interviews at BlogTalkRadio, she helped us get started when we were just trying to figure out this podcast thing. Paula is interviewing Michelle Phillips, her boss and the Executive Director at the Family Resource Center on Disabilities. Michelle will be a panelist at one of the general sessions at our 2016 Annual Conference to be held in St. Louis from Wednesday, November 30th-Friday, December 2nd. In today’s interview they discuss the services available through the Parent Training and Information Centers and Michelle’s own experience shepherding her son through the provisions of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. The upgrades continue here at TASH Amplifed. Starting this week we now have a regular musical introduction, an original composition and performance by Sunny Cefaratti, the Co-Director and Autistic Self Advocacy Mentor at the Musical Autist. Musical interlude Complete transcript forthcoming Announcer: (music playing in the background) You’ve been listening to TASH […] The post From Angry Mom to Power Mom: The Parent Training and Information Centers and Your Child’s Individualized Education Program appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 1, Episode 12 — 8 July 2016 About this episode Sean Gray, vocalist for the D.C. punk band Birth (Defects), talks with us on how the ethic of punk music affects his disability advocacy and his project, “Is This Venue Accessible”, a crowd-source website to document the accessibility of places to hear music, first in the Northeast, but increasingly globally. About the presenters Sean Gray is the owner and founder of the website “Is This Venue Accessible?” which catalogs accessibility information of music venues across the globe. Along with running Accidental Guest Recordings and playing in the band Birth (Defects) [Bandcamp | Facebook], he has also written for press outlets such as: Pitchfork, Washington Citypaper, and NPR's Bandwidth.fm. Edwin Canizalez is the Director of Operations and Change Management at TASH. He grew up in Queens in the 1970s and 1980s and his experience of New York hardcore strongly influenced his values of equal access and self-determination. Transcript Announcer: You're listening to Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Programming note: we're introducing a few upgrades to Amplified this week. First, today's episode is an interview with Sean Gray, a local punk musician. Our operations director, Edwin Canizalez, is known around the office for his earlier days in the New York hardcore scene, so when we first proposed this episode, he insisted that he get to do it. He'll be our guest host today. Second, content warning: befitting punk, today's episode includes an explicit word or two, some reclaiming of ablest language and some loud noise. Third, given the topic, this will be our first episode to include a musical introduction. So, bring the noise, Sean. Musical interlude Edwin Canizalez: Hardcore punk is a music style that's been around since the 1980s, and is still around today. This genera is known for its social messaging: things like equity, school-to-prison pipeline, and autonomy. Today's guest is a veteran of the D.C. hardcore scene, an IT expert at the United Cerebral Palsy, and the originator of a really, really cool crowd-source website called “Is This Venue Accessible“. Sean Gray, welcome to Amplified. Sean Gray: Thank you, thank you very much. Edwin Canizalez: Sean, tells a little bit about yourself, beyond the things we have said. Sean Gray: Well, so, I uh, my day job — I do work for a disability advocacy nonprofit, United Cerebral Palsy National, which is literally about five minutes from here. I do that during the day and, you know, basically do music stuff when I get out of the office. And I've been involved in punk and hardcore and underground music — even more so — since I was probably about fifteen or sixteen, and I'm thirty-three now … Edwin Canizalez: Right on. Sean Gray: … so it's been over half my life. Edwin Canizalez: Now you have a record label too, right? Tell us about that. […] The post Self-Advocacy and the Culture of Punk Music appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 1, Episode 12 — 8 July 2016 About this episode Sean Gray, vocalist for the D.C. punk band Birth (Defects), talks with us on how the ethic of punk music affects his disability advocacy and his project, “Is This Venue Accessible”, a crowd-source website to document the accessibility of places to hear music, first in the Northeast, but increasingly globally. About the presenters Sean Gray is the owner and founder of the website “Is This Venue Accessible?” which catalogs accessibility information of music venues across the globe. Along with running Accidental Guest Recordings and playing in the band Birth (Defects) [Bandcamp | Facebook], he has also written for press outlets such as: Pitchfork, Washington Citypaper, and NPR’s Bandwidth.fm. Edwin Canizalez is the Director of Operations and Change Management at TASH. He grew up in Queens in the 1970s and 1980s and his experience of New York hardcore strongly influenced his values of equal access and self-determination. Transcript Announcer: You’re listening to Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Programming note: we’re introducing a few upgrades to Amplified this week. First, today’s episode is an interview with Sean Gray, a local punk musician. Our operations director, Edwin Canizalez, is known around the office for his earlier days in the New York hardcore scene, so when we first proposed this episode, he insisted that he get to do it. He’ll be our guest host today. Second, content warning: befitting punk, today’s episode includes an explicit word or two, some reclaiming of ablest language and some loud noise. Third, given the topic, this will be our first episode to include a musical introduction. So, bring the noise, Sean. Musical interlude Edwin Canizalez: Hardcore punk is a music style that’s been around since the 1980s, and is still around today. This genera is known for its social messaging: things like equity, school-to-prison pipeline, and autonomy. Today’s guest is a veteran of the D.C. hardcore scene, an IT expert at the United Cerebral Palsy, and the originator of a really, really cool crowd-source website called “Is This Venue Accessible“. Sean Gray, welcome to Amplified. Sean Gray: Thank you, thank you very much. Edwin Canizalez: Sean, tells a little bit about yourself, beyond the things we have said. Sean Gray: Well, so, I uh, my day job — I do work for a disability advocacy nonprofit, United Cerebral Palsy National, which is literally about five minutes from here. I do that during the day and, you know, basically do music stuff when I get out of the office. And I’ve been involved in punk and hardcore and underground music — even more so — since I was probably about fifteen or sixteen, and I’m thirty-three now … Edwin Canizalez: Right on. Sean Gray: … so it’s been over half my life. Edwin Canizalez: Now you have a record label too, right? Tell us about that. […] The post Self-Advocacy and the Culture of Punk Music appeared first on Tash.org.

Season 1, Episode 11 — 30 June 2016 About this episode Barb Trader retired this month after ten years as the Executive Director of TASH. She has spent a lifetime thinking about and working for the betterment of the lives of people with disabilities. Her time at TASH was the culmination of a 40-year career in disability rights. We talk with her about the accomplishments she’s seen and contributed to, what she’s learned in 40 years of service and the tasks that remain. About the presenters Barb Trader was the Executive Director of TASH from 2006 until her retirement this month. Barb was in direct service as a recreation therapist for 17 years in parks and recreation, public schools, and non-profit agencies. An activist by nature, she facilitated the inclusion of athletes with disabilities in the Georgia State Games and formed a wheelchair division for the Peachtree Road Race, the first major race in the country to include wheelchair users, serving as race director the first 10 years. The 1996 Atlanta Paralympic Games were the first to be held in the United States as a part of the overall Olympic celebration, due in part to a grassroots effort led by Barb and local ADAPT leaders that gathered 40,000 signatures in less than 10 days. She was a founding board member for the Paralympic Organizing Committee and an integral part of the bid process and served as the vice president for youth and community programs. She has authored and launched several national programs, including Paralympic Day in the Schools and Express Diversity!, both aimed at helping school-aged youth understand that disability is a natural life experience. Prior to TASH, she worked in program development and director roles for the national headquarters’ offices of VSA arts and Easter Seals. Donald Taylor is the Membership Manager at TASH and the producer of Amplified.   Transcript Announcer: You’re listening to TASH Amplified, a podcast that seeks to transform research and experience concerning inclusion and equity for people with disabilities into solutions people can use in their everyday lives. Today we’re talking with Barb Trader, who retired on June 14th after ten years and two days as Executive Director of TASH. Her time at TASH was the culmination of a 40-year career in disability rights. We talk with her about the accomplishments she’s seen and contributed to in her time, what she’s learned in 40 years of service and the tasks that remain. Donald Taylor: Barb Trader, where were you born and what was your childhood like? Barb Trader: Oh my goodness! I was born in Burlington Wisconsin in 1954. Donald Taylor: You don’t have to tell us that part. Barb Trader: Okay. I was born in Burlington Wisconsin, which is in the southeastern corner of the state, or just North of that or about thirty miles outside of Milwaukee and I grew up and was raised on a farm. My childhood was really spent outside. Wisconsin gets cold in the winter, but me and […] The post Barb Trader Reflects on a Lifetime of Accomplishment in Disability Rights appeared first on Tash.org.