Blog | Blou Designs

May 17, 2021

Content packaging tips for click-worthy YouTube videos | A SOP Story

TL;DR? You can grow your YouTube channel without falling prey to cheap clickbait tricks and other “dark side” habits; the secret is providing value with your content and being strategic with your content-packaging SOPs. Scroll down to the Video Packaging Essentials Checklist for some content packaging points for your own YouTube upload checklist. Click-worthy. You know your content is 100% worth...

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 1, 2021

3 ways to use surveys to quickly figure out your next step when you don’t know what to do

How do you choose your next step? You’d like to do more of what’s working, but sometimes you’re not sure what parts of what you’re doing are working, or whether that pivot you’re considering might resonate with your target market, so you’re not sure what you should do more of or where to focus your efforts. In this post, I...

Data Strategy

April 19, 2021

How I adapted my in-person presentation SOPs for a virtual world | A SOP Story

TL;DR It’s rare that what works in person will perfectly transfer to virtual settings, and vice versa. When transitioning, it’s important to (1) identify your “must haves” in terms of those things you must keep in order to preserve your brand identity and quality of work and (2) vet and tweak your new format according to those “must haves.” Survey...

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

April 1, 2021

Improve data integrity, data quality, and business insights with standard operating procedures (SOPs)

Is your data worth tracking? This is a question about the quality and integrity of your data – its accuracy, completeness, and fit with your use cases. And it’s an important question to consider, because low quality data can mean that your business insights are ill-informed. I’ve covered some of these points in my posts on clean data and data classification....

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

March 1, 2021

Choosing the right visualization: A diversity, equity, and inclusion example

It’s frequently the case that we don’t just need to wrangle and analyze the data. We also need to communicate the findings of the analysis so that we can figure out what to do next. This is where choosing the right visualization comes in. In this post, I discuss how different visualization choices – in particular, a pie chart, a...

Data Strategy

January 1, 2021

Vision to Action: Turning ideas into actionable and measurable steps

It can be hard to figure out how to turn big picture ideas and goals into actionable and trackable steps. For many things, the “figuring out” lies in a mixture of clarity, and then reframing and rephrasing. Here we take a monetary target and some other information from a business model, and turn it into something that’s doable, measurable, and...

Data Strategy

October 25, 2020

Accessible PDFs: Good for humans, good for automation

If you’ve ever been to a workshop on accessibility – maybe you’re a professor that needs to create accessible materials for students, maybe you’re a business that needs to post accessible documents on your website or provide accessible documents internally – you’ve heard what sounds like a tired cliché: what’s good for people with disabilities is good for everyone. As...

Data Strategy/Tech Stack

July 31, 2019

Don’t Be Caught Out by These 6 Hidden Software Costs

The upfront cost of new software tends to be perceived as rather obvious. There’s the money you spend on the actual software purchase (if any) and the money you spend on any required hardware (if any). Folks frequently overlook at least six additional cost considerations that can impact both your future budget and your productivity. #1: Hidden Upfront Cost: User...

Tech Stack

May 31, 2019

How to Find the Best App Ever

People frequently ask me questions like, “What’s the best app for X?” That ‘X’ could mean the “best” CRM, the “best” photo management app, etc. It’s a good question, because there are a plethora of apps out on the market, some free and some not, some lackluster and some brilliant. So, how do you find the best app for a...

Processes & Productivity/Tech Stack

April 30, 2019

Can you afford a $90,000 mistake?

In today’s world, we’ve digitized almost everything, including our invoicing and payment systems. Even so, when we don’t support our data flows with an underlying structure, it can be easy to introduce costly human errors. I recently worked with a training client who was using an electronic payment voucher form, but the form still required manual (i.e., typed) data entry...

Data Strategy