Should you spend your money shouting or enhancing the user experience?

The Good Experience blog reports on the failure of Yahoo’s recent $100 million ad campaign to promote it's homepage and websites.

It’s a trap many organisations fall into.

Rather than spending time perfecting the product and the user experience, they pump money into a shiny ad campaign that they think will overcome the inferior product at the end of it. 

Newsflash: it won’t.

This has some clear implications for fundraising as well.  If, like me, you’re currently deep in preparing your budgets for the next financial year, then take a look at the expenditure you’ve got planned to ‘shout’ at people.

Could some of that money be better spent building relationships, trying to reduce the number of people who stop giving to you or making people feel better about donating to your cause?

I’d wager a tidy sum that it could…