The year is almost over, 2 more days and the first people are in the Alps - hopefully in the snow. Of course Online Dialogue continues to work for everyone the last 2 weeks as well, but of course demand is now going down towards Christmas. That's okay after the hustle and bustle of 2015. After all, demand for our surveys, designs, optimizations, organizational support and training increased 35% compared to 2014.

Colleagues

Thanks to the arrival of Jorrin (UX), Tom (Analytics), Lotte (Strategy), Paul (Analytics), Eddy (Operations) and Bas (Psychology), we were able to continue to help everyone well and accommodate the departure of Annemarie and the transition of Michiel and Jules to our interim pool.

However, many more colleagues have joined us. From business development, we continued in 2015 to build Testing.Agency - your A/B testing support team. This spinout saw Wilmer, Wilfred, Kenneth, Jayne, Lecaman and Erwin join the team under the wings of Martijn Reintjes this year. In terms of A/B test development resources, Online Dialogue obviously benefited greatly from this as well.

Many new people with a lot of energy, working daily to improve the online dialogue with our customers, that makes you enjoy sitting in our office (where we did a small last minute renovation, come and see us soon).

Customers

Our clients are becoming increasingly international - with great satisfaction, for example, together with Online Dialogue partner Bart Schutz I had the opportunity to give a customized conversion and psychology training course to the online specialists of the various Schibsted labels in Europe. Schibsted is the largest publisher in Norway and Sweden, so we were helping people sometimes in Olso and other times in Stockholm. I was especially energized by the fact that the learnings from the workshops were also directly applied with us by Schibsted on its various digital channels. I am already looking forward to the next in-house training sessions that we will start at our customers in this way.

From hustle and bustle to silence

In addition to the trips to our clients, the trade congresses often brought us to Schiphol Airport. I myself experienced Berlin, London, Riga, Tallinn, Vancouver and Las Vegas again as half a tourist - the organizations often pamper their speakers - as it happened in these cities. Unfortunately, I'm not easily impressed anymore, but after being taken by helicopter from Las Vegas to the Grand Canyon to raise a glass of champagne to the beautiful scenery, I was quiet for a moment. Not because of the whole setting, but because of the quietness - as I wrote, it was a busy year and when you suddenly find yourself in the middle of the mountains and your ears suddenly experience nothing at all - that's great - from the extreme hustle and bustle of Las Vegas to suddenly nothing at all. Try it next year too: sometimes nothing at all for a while.

New Year's gift: € 2016 for the Hollandsche Molen

In addition to meeting many conversion experts abroad, they sought us out. From Colin McFarland of Skyscanner to conversion source Craig Sullivan, from You Sould test that author Chris Goward to ConversionXL founder Peep Laja. All were able to toast our profession together and show them our beautiful country. What they always find beautiful about the Netherlands, besides the fact that we are partly below sea level, are the many windmills that are still here. We completely agree with them. Mills are a unique piece of Holland.

As you probably know, we don't give you a bottle of wine at Christmas to thank you for working with us. We are keeping our tradition of supporting a charity this year as well. In previous years, these were “Braille and ICT“, “One Laptop per Child“, “The Brain Foundation“, “Online Detective” and “The national forest fund“.

This year our donation, of in this case 2016 euros, goes to Association de Hollandsche Molen. As the windmill association of the Netherlands, they work on the perception, protection and advocacy of wind and water mills and we are happy to support that. For ourselves and our foreign guests.

We wish you cozy holidays and a happy and successful New Year, with in 2016 for you too: more evidence-based growth!