Automated meaning

👋 Welcome to Future Community Oli and Zoe. It's great to have you here!

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It's not about the automation, it's about the meaning

Email automations or automated workflows are getting more attention. We can blame AI for this. It's showing more people what's always been baked into a lot of email and CRM tools - an ability to personalize, schedule, and automate sending.

Organizations do this a lot with welcome messages and reactivation campaigns. But you don't see many other examples of automations except somewhat skeevy abandoned cart marketing ("did you forget to make that donation? It's still waiting...").

I'm also seeing folks write about using automations to build community, relationships, and fundraising impact. My thoughts on this are "well, sure, but no, not really."

Connection is not the product of frequency + followup. Connection is the risky and vulnerable act of real people talking with other real people. It's you walking into a room and giving a talk to 100 people then taking questions. Most will walk about without saying much. But most will also remember what you had to say. And ten will walk up, ask more questions, and be activist/donor types that you now know personally. So automate around things with that kind of meaning.

Here's an example that could be modified in a thousand ways depending on your needs. It doesn't add much extra effort. Frankly, it's all info that you have already (or should, if you're doing this work).

• An advocacy action that asks people to contact their Congressional representative or a local agency head. People who take the action will get an automated thank you.
  • But is there a next step to include in that thank you? Maybe "join us for an update call" next Thursday.
  • An automation could be sent that gives everyone who took action an update on the number of people who took action. Or the next steps in the legislative or regulatory process.
  • After three days invite people who took action to join the "what's next" call.
  • Set up an automation for people who register for the call that thanks them for attending and sends them to the notes page (that has a fundraising ask on it).

What really makes this work is not the automation but the event or statement or "reaching out with value" that connects people to other people.

Bright Ideas

Jason Lewis has a thoughtful take on automation/AI and Giving Tuesday (and maybe giving more broadly) as a ritual. Read his Why Scarlet Can't Show Up for Giving Tuesday.

Jason is speaking here about fundraising and the gift. But the effects are broader. The trust-free and respect-free way organizations build email lists, send texts, and try to grow/live at scale flattens not just the relationship between member and organization, but the work itself.

In The inefficiency of local news in its Golden Age, journalist Stephen Stirling (currently a data editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer) gives the back story of Scribe. Stirling takes us through the decline of not just local news in general but of coverage of all the community events, government updates, and activities that no longer get into shared public view. Scribe is a system to help surface notes from local gov meetings, community gatherings, and more. Would love to think about how local advocacy and mutual aid groups plug into work like this.

Listen to Community: A Conversation between Philanthropy & Nonprofits will be hosted by Feedback Labs and Fund for Shared Insight on Thursday, December 4, from noon to 1:15 pm. Thanks Dave Algoso for mentioning this one.

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