On the American Chemical Society homepage, there’s a heading for a big Virtual Meeting & Expo this week; then there’s a very cool member invitation: “Me Becomes We, Improve the world through the transforming power of chemistry” with a super-diverse, 16-square face box; and also a Personal Stories area with testimonials.   One more element on the page must get a lot of clicks to be so prominent: “Molecule of the Week: You'll get a bang out of making me. What molecule am I?” (There's always a clever question.) I click for the answer. “Azidoazide azide.” When I click on their archive, I see they’ve been doing this feature since 2005! (Bullvalene was the first. Superbowl was the fifth.)   People like quizzes, trivia—virtual nights still attract a big crowd—and puzzles. The Wall Street Journal studied how different reader habits affected subscriber churn. They looked into how various products and subscr ...

The Wall Street Journal studied how different reader habits affected subscriber churn. It looked into how various products and subscriber actions affected customer retention during the first 100 days after a reader had signed up. They found that “playing a puzzle had a more dramatic impact on reader retention than other actions the team had been promoting."   We know that quizzes can be good for lead generation, but interesting that they can boost retention as well.    Research last year from Northwestern’s Medill Local News Initiative looked at audience data from three major metro dailies. Their conclusion was that the frequency with which a reader comes back to a publication’s website “is the single biggest predictor of retaining subscribers—more than the number of stories read or the time spent reading them.”   So with that established, here are a few successful quizzes and one contest:   Remote educ ...

Three SIPA Member Companies Represented Among 25 SIIA Emerging Leader Finalists

An image of "G R A M M A R" emerges on my screen in tiles from the game Scrabble, with the headline, "How Good Is Your Grammar?"

Washington, D.C. Trade Association Veteran Jeff Joseph Will Be SIIA's New President and CEO 

Editor's note: This is the ninth of an ongoing series profiling the 2018 SIPAward winners. See links to the others below.

Mo Willems, the award-winning children's book author—Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus—wrote and illustrated five books early in his career, none of which were published.

"According to a study by Predictive Intent, which method results in 4% of sales compared to just 0.2% of sales? Cross-selling or upselling?" And so begins the new SIPA game, prepared by member edCirrus, now posted on our site. 

Like many others, I'm back from seeing family, and my biggest takeaway, besides the leftovers, is that everyone plays games—video, board, jigsaw, quizzes—especially my two 20-something nephews. People are competitive and like to win.