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An idea: Be needed

Deliverability is great! 👏 But it's far better to be needed by your supporters and subscribers. Don't assume you are needed.

An idea: Be needed

Hello to every single one of you! Thanks for being here. Future Community is a product of me, Ted Fickes, and Bright+3. We look at how nonprofits, news organizations and others use story to grow community, be more sustainable and provide value to their members.

I’d love to hear more about your work, the big questions and bigger opportunities you’re facing in this (waves hands) wild time. Please reach out with questions, feedback, links, jobs or to chat about any ideas or projects you have going at the intersection of community, content and revenue.

What are we talking about today?

  1. It’s better to be needed than to be deliverable.
  2. That said, here’s a simple sixteen(!) step email deliverability plan.
  3. New jobs in digital strategy, communications and nonprofit news.
  4. Reading: Want to stick around? Be valuable? Help build - and being part of - the community. Also make better surveys.

Email deliverability is essential to organizations. But getting to your supporter’s inbox is not a feat of technology, timing, wordsmithery or even magic.🪄

And getting to the inbox is only the first step. For instance…

I had a conversation about email yesterday with someone who is 24, doesn’t work in email or news or politics, is online a lot, and gets all their news (politics, weather, sports and music) from social and video feeds on their phone.

In other words, this is a regular person. What struck me was something he said about reading email:

I don’t look at any emails. If there’s something I need or am interested in I search for it in my email.

The inbox - whether that’s primary, updates, promotions or even spam - is like a store. If you need something from it you might go looking for it. Everything else is just stuff.

Perhaps this approach to the inbox is a unique personality trait. An edge case. It may be unique but it also represents a fact about information.

Most people use information (in this case email) to get their shit done. Not yours.

Your need is not my problem.

The Washington Post reported yesterday on the GOP’s small dollar fundraising problems. One GOP fundraiser put the problem plainly >> the party treats people horribly:

“The biggest problem in GOP fundraising is that we don’t treat donors well,” said John Hall, a Republican small-dollar fundraiser who runs the digital firm Apex Strategies. “Sending eight emails and texts a day that promise an artificial match, threaten to take away your GOP membership, or call you a traitor if you don’t donate doesn’t build a long-term relationship with donors.”

Political fundraising is inherently problematic. Candidates only have short-term incentives.

But a political party is an organization that, like any nonprofit or community group, needs to be needed. It needs to build relationships, infrastructure and systems that hold up over time. It needs to serve people. I would say the GOP, in large part through its email and texting - the primary way it interacts with most people, is not putting the needs of its people first.

Most people (even those cultishly following a political candidate) aren’t anxiously awaiting your next fundraising ask, a chance to contact their legislator or even your updates on what live shows to see this weekend.

People do not need your email. So help them need your email.

I'm seeing more and more conversations about nonprofit email deliverability. Most start like "our open rates are way down, is it a deliverability problem?" or "our fundraising is down, is Gmail not delivering our messages? How do I even check?"

Email deliverability is a real issue. Messages that land in spam aren’t doing you any good.

Hey. Want to jump straight into deliverability? SEE BELOW 👇👇

But landing in an inbox is a far cry from being needed. Here are a few ways to move the needle on need.

  1. Be mission critical. Let’s face it. This isn’t likely if you’re a nonprofit or news organization. You’re probably not offering work or money, help filing taxes, or transactional updates on banking, groceries or car care.

    But you could have a regular nugget of absolutely essential information.

    …the top 3 restaurants to eat at this month and fantastic photos of their food.

    …a daily action to take and report back on what happened as a result of yesterday’s action.
    Or your could have a mountain of essential information.

    …a “how to make 10 essential Korean dishes” offered as a ongoing email newsletter with shareable videos, full recipes on your website and links to buy ingredients.

    …the absolute best voter guide for your city or state: where to register, how to cast a vote, where to find polling places or ballot drop boxes, contact info for local party offices and so much more.
    The point is: Your content (including email) needs to build and sustain a track record. It needs to be intriguing, accessible, useful, reliable and useful.
  2. Be part of the community. It’s hard to be needed when you’re some organization out that once said something interesting or who sold you a ticket to that one event.

    You can try to stand out all on your own. But you’ll get farther faster with friends.

    What I mean is this: engage people in many ways so that they have lots of opportunities to hear from you and about you:

    …Be on the ground in the community. At events. At meetings. In the mail (like a real postcard). In local newsletters. On podcasts.

    …Be in other channels. Don’t grow lots of separate audiences on different platforms. Instead grow one great audience that you can reach in many different places. Your current or future audience is probably using different channels - email, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, Discord - so hone in on that audience in more than one place.

    …Support your friends (and get them to support you). One of the best ways to lift up yourself is to support others. We all live in networks - some with strong ties, some with weak ties. But we only grow those networks by bringing others in and making space for them.

We are always looking for guidance, cues and ways to make sense of the world (or even our local news). We do that by being trusted, reliable, and part of the network in which others operate.

There’s SO MUCH MORE NOISE today so the challenge is on us as organizations and communicators to be accessible, useful, and to exist in the networks in which people move.

Lines and boxes drawn on white walls and floor. The drawing represents a huge flow chart.
Photo by Hanna Morris on Unsplash.

An email deliverability plan

So you still want to dig into email deliverability? Here are some reasonable principles and bits of guidance - both technical and non-techie - for organizational communications folks in 2024.

WHY CARE?

  1. Deliverability is critical to retention. You can't keep subscribers and donors who don't get or see your email.
  2. A rising tide of deliverability lifts all boats. A focus on deliverability will give you a reason to create emails that people open and engage more often.

CHECK THE TECH

Get your tech settings squared away. These bits are important for every sender. But they’re also the most easily fixed and monitored. And, for most nonprofits and news orgs, these are not the source of deliverability problems.

  1. Check on your DKIM, DMARC, and SPF settings with tools like MXToolbox.
  2. Use Google Postmaster.
  3. Look into email address verification tools.
  4. Use a spam checker like Litmus. These are often built into email providers. But consider a third party review.

THINGS TO DO

  1. Keep your list clean. Pull off inactives for starters.
  2. Build your list with the best leads possible. Garbage in = garbage out (or lots of time and effort turning garbage into gold).
  3. Send people what they’re interested in. Start by not sending everything to everyone. Don't just send fundraising appeals.
  4. Send wanted email (another way of writing the above bullet). Subscribing is a sign someone is kinda maybe sorta interested, not a commitment to marry and run off with you forever.
  5. Send to questionable domains separately. Worried about gmail addresses? Segment them out and send on their own. See what happens.
  6. Go slow with new emails (especially a big batch).
  7. Early engagement is like yeast. An inactive list is going to be a list with deliverability issues. Prioritize welcome series and other early emails that have high value = high likelihood of engagement.
  8. Moderate your ALL CAPS, p!nct?At$ion and 😀 👋 🚨 🔥 (emojis). LinkedIn loves it emojis. Email is ambivalent.
  9. Test test test test test.
  10. Consult a deliverability pro.

Deliverability is not the end all. A delivered email is the start. I mean, if google shuttles your email to a spam folder it counts as delivered. An unopened email that's one of 128 that day in someone's promotions tab is a delivered email.

Email that is consistently opened, clicked, replied to is more likely to go the inbox instead of a promotions or updates tab.

IN CONCLUSION

🦸🏼 Some heroes wear capes. Others send email people want - or even need.

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Jobs

These are some of the latest + intriguing roles. Head to the full list here. I keep it updated as new things come up (and drop out).

What we’re reading

Who loves surveys? Reader/member surveys can be a great source of guidance and inspiration. They can also give you a pile of dung (I mean data!) that points you astray. So go read Cory Brown’s 99 Newsletter Project for solid tips on better surveys.

We’re reading Next-Gen News: Understanding the Audiences of 2030 to learn how young people around the world consume news daily but are frustrated by news that doesn’t reflect their experience, isn’t applicable or useful to them and can’t be trusted. Worth digging into for anyone thinking about communications and content strategy.

The team at LA Public Press already gets the ideas in Next-Gen News. In One year in: The future of Los Angeles and your LA Public Press, publisher Matthew Tinoco reflects on how LA Public Press navigates a complex content ecosystem to create value for the community:

Journalism is only valuable if it reaches people. To reach people, it needs to be accessible, and must conform with existing media consumption habits. It’s not enough to simply click “publish” on a web story.

We are also mindful that the vast majority of people access information via social media, by word of mouth and direct messages, through social service agencies, at community events, and a world of other online options like search and aggregator apps like Apple News, Newsbreak, and Flipboard that are all somewhat distinct from a traditional “newsroom.” 

Building a newsroom that can journalistically evaluate information and construct a basic understanding of present circumstances is step one. Making sure that journalism is distributed accessible across multiple digital platforms and other distribution channels in a highly heterogeneous ecosystem is step two.

I’m enchanted by Jacob Fenston’s quest to visit all 683 Washington, D.C. parks. It’s a project of City Cast DC – one that offers all sorts of opportunities for community involvement.

In Local Journalism is in the Wrong Business (LinkedIn), Max Kabat tells the story investing in community needs to help save (and grow) local news. It’s a story of the Big Bend Sentinel and The Sentinel. The first is a weekly newspaper. The second is a local events, retail and whatever else is needed center. Both are in Marfa, Texas.

In Automatic for the People Troy Young lives in the the tension between a world of information riches and the firehose of chaos that it pumps over us.

We dare you to figure out what our nonprofit does via McSweeney’s. h/t Mark Rovner of Sea Change Strategies for that one…be sure to check out Sea Change’s Missing Middle report - a new deep dive on mid-level donor motivations and needs.

How print got cool again by Belle Cushing in Columbia Journalism Review.

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