Our Challenge in 2010 - Converting a Country into Good Savers

I'm preparing to publish a set of metrics soon after the new year. These metrics will give you, our community, a sense of how far we've come since launching our beta this summer and our public site this October. I'm overwhelmed by our early success. Stay tuned.

One metric that you'll be hearing a lot about starting in 2010 will be our conversion rate. Roughly speaking in the internet context, conversion measures the number of casual visitors who take an intended action. In our case the most obvious action would be an online donation. We are working on a process where we can quantify this real-time and will be trying to publish this number to our community as we set this up.

But, I wanted to write a bit about conversion from a more strategic perspective. The underlying premise of SaveTogether is a strong belief in the power of saving and investing or, perhaps better termed, the importance of setting responsible savings goals and making responsible investments. Over the past several decades, Americans have been drifting away from a focus on this underlying frugal ethos. Recently, of course, in the face of the worst economic climate in the past 80 years, we have seen our savings rate creep back up. But, it remains to be seen rather our new found belief in savings will stick.

That's where SaveTogether comes in. We believe that the dedication, sacrifice, and hard-work profiled in the stories of our savers can be an inspiration for us all. We hope that each donation made on our site is a recognition of the responsibility represented through our saver's story, but also a reminder to our donors of the need to be responsible financial citizens themselves.

And that's where I loop back around to conversion. As an organization, we can only be successful if we inspire thousands of Americans to participate in this experiment. We have to find a way to make savings fun. And, as a corollary, we have to inspire people with their limited time and resources to take specific action to encourage savings in low-wage workers. It's a uphill battle. We don't have a strong history of savings in this country. But, things are changing. And, we are going to do our best to make it stick.

But, I need to ask each of you - what can we do to making savings fun?