Email

About that stupendous fundraising match in your inbox

April 12, 2023 by Ted Fickes

Recently I wrote about why people stay with a group. We looked at relationships, trust and delivering value to people. Keeping people on your list, in your community and donating, buying and engaging isn’t just helpful. Retention is a must. Inactive subscribers are costing you money. And disengaged supporters are telling you something about the quality of your communications, fundraising and overall value.

Conversations and questions about retention and reactivation keep popping up in my feed and among friends. I think it’s sign of economic and political uncertainty.

Folks are taking a hard look at how to optimize their email and other lists. Or they’re being told to by their bosses. It makes sense. Email lists aren’t free to build or maintain. A bigger list is not necessarily going to raise you more money, turn people out to events or develop activists, leaders and supporters. But a bigger list is going to cost more to host and send to. A bigger list may also increase inbox problems (aka more spam) and send the wrong signals about community power to your organizing and fundraising directors.

A barrel of monkeys approach

The world of powerful CRMs, big data and fast internet lets us find, label and reach people with amazing speed and volume. It also leads us to believe that we know people. We have email, name, location and their giving and engagement history. We may get the voter file, census data, buying history and all the sorts of things that come with consumer data files (income, home and car ownership, marital status…it goes on and on).

This isn’t much more than putting colors on monkeys in a barrel if you’re sending countless emails with countless asks for donations, actions, purchases.

The other day a colleague linked to an episode of a podcast for Republican politicos. The Business of Politics Show had a conversation with John Hall of Apex Strategies. Hall is credited with raising over $1.5 billion from 48 million individual donors. There’s perhaps nobody who knows more about shady methods of buying/renting lists and pitching 76X match gifts (an actual pitch in political fundraising) or any number of other lies (that’s what they are) to “subscribers.”

Hall isn’t seeking absolution for past acts. But he made a clear case for the need to shift perspective. Build donor lists, he says, not just big lists. It’s better to have a million subscribers than one but most million subscriber lists are failing to raise money for Republican candidates. Democratic and nonprofit lists are similarly underperforming if they’re optimized for size not community and impact.

Community and Impact

You probably don’t have the time and money to drag around a list that’s 50%, 60% or 75% inactive.

Instead, what does optimizing for community and impact look like. A few ideas:

Be much clearer and more honest about what you expect from community members, subscribers and supporters.

If you need donations then hone in on who gives, why they give, when they give and how they’re being retained over time. Recruit from places where you’ll find donors and have clear budgets and strategies for turning new people into donors.

Likewise for activists, volunteers and other categories of engaged supporters. Bring your communications and content, organizing, education and training staff into the planning for supporter engagement and its metrics.

Be brutally honest about subscriber value. If a new subscriber doesn’t open, click on or donate in the first 4-6 weeks after coming on board perhaps they’re already targets for reactivation. And this is a signal that their origin (list, event, lead gen activity) isn’t working.

You may be able to carry inactive people for months. It’s possible some will re-engage. And a community-driven organization should show some compassion for its community. But understand the costs associated with holding onto them. And recognize the signals that their inaction sends. What can you offer that increases their responsiveness? What obstacles do they face when engaging with you? Are your emails even landing in the inbox (or just spam)?

AI and that barrel of monkeys

John Hall, in the conversation linked above, spoke about the potential for AI to revolutionize how we customize subscriber, donor and supporter engagement. When you carry around a lot of data about supporters it makes sense to give an AI app the responsibility for turning that data into personalized content to motivate donors.

We’ll see a lot of this in coming months. Especially with the 2024 campaign. You can expect nonprofits to use these tools (and consultants and vendors to talk a lot about them).

But the potential for AI to leverage more donations isn’t community. All the data in the world isn’t community. Be clear about what you want with community, what people need, where those people are and how they’re living. Know that and you’ll know how to engage, retain and perhaps use the tech that’s here (and coming).

Complete Control: The Clash on corporate social media and email.

December 19, 2022 by Ted Fickes

The Clash were known as a band who loved their audience. They also demanded control over their music. They learned that corporations control communication between band and audience. This was the 1970s, long before social media. But their experience offers insights into how organizations control (or don’t) their communications.

What do you control, really?

The story goes that the Clash wrote their 1977 punk anthem Complete Control in response to their label, CBS Records, releasing the earlier song Remote Control as a single without the band’s permission. Complete Control pokes CBS Records, and capitalist culture, in the eye for mucking up the art and content that makes it rich.

We won’t know but I suspect Joe, Mick and the gang wouldn’t have been keen on corporate social media (or Substack for that matter), an enterprise that doesn’t just rely on your content but controls the ways in which it’s formatted, distributed and archived.

Last time out I shared some ways organizations should be thinking about community engagement as Twitter falls apart. Other social networks face challenges that may not be (or could be) existential but should have us questioning their future and our use of them.

This isn’t a cry to get off social media, a suggestion to double down on LinkedIn or a plea to build an audience on Mastodon, Post or other social networks.

But I do want to make the case for knowing the difference between communications and community channels you control versus those that control your organization and its assets.

Do you know when, where, and why your content will be seen by your followers?
Is your content removed or otherwise censored?
Are your photos, videos and even words in your control?
Do you have complete access to the data you’re generating?
Do you control design and content functionality?

You organization can control its email channel. Sure, companies like Mailchimp or EveryAction or Engaging Networks host your content, manage your data and can be bought, sold or shut down. But you have a contract with them. You own the data. You can see the metrics. The company’s product road map should be transparent.

Using email like the Clash

Here are a few ideas for maximizing and testing email lists. With inspiration a certain late-70s English punk band. I mean, if the Clash had an email list I’d subscribe.

Welcome everyone

Complete Control speaks to welcoming and appreciating your community:

On the last tour my mates they couldn’t get in
I’d open up the back door but they’d get run out again
And at every hotel we was a’met by the law
Come for the party, come to make sure
COmplete COntrol, Joe Strummer and Mick Jones

The Clash were known for giving away tickets, opening venue windows to let people into the show and bringing large groups of friends and fans on tour with them.

The welcome message is the first step to building community and long lasting relationships. It begins to turn content into experience.

Optimize for welcome message engagement. This means:

Be ruthless about getting welcome messages into the inbox.
Track and optimize welcome message deliverability rates.
Test welcome message subject lines. Again and again.
You want everyone to click inside the welcome message. Test actions, donations, forms, anything that tells email providers that your welcome message isn’t spam and, better yet, should get into the primary inbox.
Encourage people to reply. Ask questions. Solicit feedback and ideas. Email replies increase the odds your email address will be added to contacts and avoid promotions or updates folders.
Test simply formatted or even plain text welcome messages. HTML emails with photos, fonts and colors may not cause deliverability problems but poorly formatted HTML emails can almost guarantee a trip to the spam folder.

The goal of the welcome message isn’t branding. It’s not even fundraising. It’s about getting new subscribers to engage so that future emails are more likely to be opened, read and clicked on. Raising your welcome message click rates can improve deliverability, actions, fundraising and more.

Sometimes you have to go the extra mile to bring people into the community.

Simple can be powerful

The Clash proved that you don’t have to be pretty or even a trained musician to be (arguably) the biggest band in the world.

It’s possible that logos, photos and big headings are getting in the way of your story. Test simple layouts and plainer text. A simple structure may help the calls to action stand out.

Big logos, branding and headlines can also push a call to action “below the fold” of an email. You’ll lose a reader if they can’t get into the story or discern what you want.

Deliver

A band can practice but the payoff happens when followers listen. You can’t excited the crowd and build community if you don’t show up.

Deliverability is the email equivalent of a memorable live event. Prioritize deliverability.

Hire, train and support a deliverability role on your team. Give that person power to influence segmentation, testing and product decisions. You can outsource deliverability skills, too, but be sure deliverability guidance and rules have a way to seep into your communications culture.
Use segmentation to improve deliverability. If your newsletter goes to a million plus folks send it first to the most engaged. Check the deliverability rate. Then send to the next engaged segment and so on. You’ll learn when/where deliverability issues arise and can improve deliverability rates and domain reputation.
Clean the list of unengaged subscribers using re-engagement campaigns for people who haven’t responded in 4, 6, or 9 months. Also monitor cadence and frequency. It’s possible to send too often, too little or too inconsistently.

Get personal

People support people, not organizations. Share stories about doing the, people involved and communities affected, and how activism, fundraising and support changes lives.

Introduce a staff member, a supporter, a person/family impacted by your work.
People’s presence in a story should help them tell their story, not just the organization’s story.
Send emails from people, not just the organization.

Go long

Mother Jones found success with longer fundraising emails. You may not. But you may want to give it a shot with at least a segment of your audience.

Think about telling full stories with context and connection to theories of change. Look at the email as a landing page with multiple multiple calls to action and hooks. Draw people in, don’t just scare them to action. Connect on values. Share a story. Make a pitch. Deepen the story. Make another pitch.

Go short

On the other hand, a one paragraph or two line email can sometimes say everything that needs to be said. Especially when the need is obvious.

Give people something they can use

Almost every group has a newsletter. Every group sends action alerts and fundraising appeals to every subscriber or various segments built on factors like interest, location, and engagement frequency.

This typical approach can fall short in a few ways:

It doesn’t leave much space to deliver content that’s actually useful (or interesting, to be honest) to your supporters.
You’re mostly asking for things – money, action, time – not offering support to people.
It doesn’t view email and its content as a way to engage and reach new people.

Think about short-term emails that train people on skills needed to be activists, volunteers, successful donors or something else connected to your mission. Are you protecting wildlands? Do an email series on plant identification. Talk about how tree species and how to recognize healthy trees versus those weakened by climate change.

Alternate forms of email can deepen knowledge, give supporters content to share, and offer ways in for new people.

You’re sitting on mountains of knowledge – share it

Every band needs guest artists and greatest hits albums.

Your website is full of articles, blog posts, case studies and reports that, to be honest, probably aren’t doing much good once they’re more than a couple months old. You can post links to these on social media forever, of course. But consider integrating them into a new limited series email that dives deep on a particular subject.

Your staff and other supporters can also share their experience in an email series. They could host/send the series described above or even offer content for a new series. Consider having a comms person or freelancer interview the staffer and write content for the series.

This kind of content can also help generate podcasts, video series, photo essays and more. Really, you have so much great content to share the limitation is not social platforms, it’s managing a strategy for producing it.

(Well written) email matters

March 6, 2014 by Ted Fickes

Email is dead montage — Maybe crap email is dead. The rest is doing fine.

In the past week, three organizations I run into a lot online and through work posted writing jobs. More specifically, email writing jobs (a list of them is below).

Writing in less than 140 character snippets, coming up with the pithiest text to put over a share image, and (at the other end of the spectrum) even longer form essays seem to be the skillsets du jour.

Yet email remains a workhorse — building and connecting supporter networks more directly than social media. In combination with social media channels, video, websites, online ads and everything else, email can be more valuable. Email goes directly to the inbox, it can introduce a topic or remind the reader of something posted on Facebook or sent through postal mail.

“But wait,” you might say, “I get way too much email” or, if you’re in the field, you’ll point out the single digit (and falling) open rates in most sectors of the email world. Both are valid points. There IS too much email and most of it is just plain BAD.
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Behold the greatest threat yet to nonprofit organizations

August 16, 2013 by Ted Fickes

Nonprofit organizations face countless obstacles in their quest to protect the environment, improve education, tackle economic injustice, and otherwise help society.

Death Star poised to destroy nonprofit email — The Death Star – aka George Lucas’s early version of the Gmail tabbed inbox.

This is tough work, friends, and these days, as we gaze at computer screens or phones we are probably looking upon the most significant hurdle yet: Gmail’s tabbed inbox.

That’s the story, anyway, from a few recent nonprofit messages and news stories.Â Â Jeff Bezos’s new project, The Washington Post, Â has a story titledÂ Advocacy groups want out of Gmail’s ‘promotions’ ghetto. ItÂ includes a snippet from a New Organizing Institute (NOI) email containing one of the best (if overwrought) lines in email history:

Now some of you might love this new organization of your inbox, thatâ€™s great! But many important advocacy emails (like this one from your friends here at NOI), could get lost in the commotion of all these new tabs â€“ silencing our voices like those of the poor souls on the planet Alderaan.

The email went on to let people know how they could get rid of the tabbed inbox or slide NOI email into the primary tab so that future messages would appear there.

Not to be outdone, the international advocacy campaign group Avaaz sent a message to subscribers titled “Huge threat to Avaaz.” Here’s a bit of that one:

Avaaz email informing subscribers about the threat from Gmail. — Opening of a recent Avaaz email about Gmail’s tabbed inbox.

There is some debate about the impact the tabbed inbox is actually having on email response. MailChimp crunched data from millions of messages sent through its system to Gmail addresses and concluded:

What bothers me in this case is that open rates stayed down for 3 consecutive weeks. From looking at a year and halfâ€™s worth of data, I can say that kind of behavior isnâ€™t normal. Iâ€™m not willing to declare an emergency just yet. After all, I donâ€™t even know what the adoption rate is on Gmailâ€™s side. However, I would say this is an early indicator, and weâ€™re definitely keeping our eye on it.

Not exactly a call to evacuate Alderaan in the face of massive Imperial threats but perhaps we should be concerned. It’s worth noting that MailChimp looked only at open rates, a high level metric that doesn’t correlate to conversions (though it can be useful in spotting trends over time with large amounts of data).

ReturnPath has also taken a look at Gmail data using inbox placement and read rates. They found that already engaged subscribers are reading messages more often but read rates are down in general.

So, Â what to do about tabbed inboxes?!

The tabbed inbox is simply Gmail’s next step in a long progression towards trying to give people what they want (or what Google thinks they want). They know that most “mass” email is ignored and have been shifting towards engagement based ways of inbox placement and advance management for years.

I don’t begrudge any organization from making an effort to get its messages out of the promotions ghetto and into the Primary tab. It’s definitely worth testing, at least.

But the people that are going to take this step are likely those that were already engaged with your messages anyway. In some sense, raising alarm about messages not being in the Primary tab misses the point. If people want to read your emails (and care about your issue and what you have to say) they aren’t going to suddenly stop because your messages are in a tab two inches to the right.

Better to emphasize action, engagement, and value to the reader in every single message. The tabbed inbox is not the biggest threat to your work.

Note: We would love to talk to any organization that has tested and crunched Gmail data in the past couple months. It would be great for others to know what’s working, what’s not and if there has been a measurable impact on actions taken and donations given.Â

Annoying your list works except when it doesn’t

May 24, 2013 by Ted Fickes

This goes in the category of things you probably shouldn’t adapt from the Obama campaign for your organization.

A friend sent me an excerpt from Wednesday morning’s Politico Playbook. It amounted to an excerpt from Jonathan Alter’s book The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies (to be released on June 4th) that focused on the Obama digital team’s email strategy, fundraising, and the value of extensive testing.

The Obama campaign tested most everything. As Alter describes, they Â even (wisely) ran tests against their experience and hunches. As the campaign progressed the need to raise more (and more) money became more (and more) pressing. Good sense and experience told the email team that too much email would annoy people to the point of tuning out, unsubscribing or maybe just not voting.

You know what’s smart? Testing the frequency of your emails.
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Data Informed, Not Data Driven

June 11, 2012 by brightplus3

This Adam Mosseri talk about how Facebook uses data to make decisions is a little dated but his observations are still extremely useful. His key insight: clear metrics and strong data-driven feedback loops can be powerful, but they have their limits as well. Facebook often uses solid empirical data to make decisions about their website design, their products, and the workflows that users experience on Facebook. They can test two versions of a website design, for example, and if design option A produces higher engagement than design option B it’s an easy choice.

But Mosseri also explains how an excessive fidelity to data-driven decisions can privilege incremental and uninspired changes at the expense of innovation and ambitious thinking. Facebook sometimes is aiming not only for high levels of engagement but for more fundamental changes in the way people interact with it and with each other. Facebook’s Timeline, for instance, inspired anger and fierce resistance among many Facebook users and sharp derision from the press, and the use of a conventional data-driven decision process would have killed it before it got very far, but Timeline is now a central and deeply-valued part of the Facebook experience.

Most nonprofits don’t seem to rely much on data for their decision-making about their websites, email newsletters, programs, and fundraising efforts, and when they do those efforts aren’t often carefully crafted and executed (some do, of course, but for every one that does there are many, many more that don’t). The remedy isn’t to swap all the intuitive and qualitative decision-making for analytic feedback loops, but to find a good balance. “Data informed, not data driven,” as Mosseri says.

The Pitfalls of A/B Testing and Benchmarking

May 7, 2012 by brightplus3

14615953_a61bad3c43_z — Improvement begins with measurement, but the ruler can also limit your audacity to try wildly new approaches (photo by Flicker user Thomas Favre-Bulle).

Google is famous for, among other things, crafting a deep, rich culture of A/B testing, the process of comparing the performance of two versions of a web site (or some other output) that differ in a single respect.

The benefit: changes to a web site or some other user interface are governed by real-world user behavior. If you can determine that your email newsletter signup button performs better with the label “Don’t Miss Out” instead of “Subscribe,” well, that’s an easy design change to make.

The practice of benchmarking – using industry standards or averages as a point of comparison for your own performance – has some strong similarities to A/B testing. It’s an analytic tool that helps frame and drive performance-based testing and iteration. The comparison of your organization’s performance to industry benchmarks (e.g., email open rates, average donation value on a fundraising drive) provides the basis for a feedback loop.

The two practices – A/B testing and benchmarking – share a hazard, however. Because a culture of A/B testing is driven by real-time empirical results, and because it generally depends on comparisons between two options that are identical in every respect but one (the discrete element that you are testing), it privileges modest, incremental changes at the expense of audacious leaps.

To use a now-classic business comparison: while Google lives and breathes A/B testing, and constantly refines its way to small performance improvements, the Steve Jobs-era Apple eschewed consumer testing, assuming (with considerable success) that the consumer doesn’t know what it wants and actually requires an audacious company like Apple to redefine product categories altogether.

Similarly, if your point of reference is a collection of industry standards, you are more likely to aim for and be satisfied with performance that meets those standards. The industry benchmarks, like the incremental change model that undergirds A/B testing, may actually constrain your creativity and ambitiousness, impeding your ability to think audaciously about accomplishing something fundamentally different than the other players in your ecosystem, or accomplishing your goals in a profoundly different way.

The implication isn’t that you should steer clear of A/B testing or benchmarking. Both are powerful tools that can help nonprofits focus, refine, and learn more quickly. But you should be aware of the hazards, and make sure even as you improve your iterative cycles you are also protecting your ability to think big and think different about the work your organization does.

And if you want to dive in, there are a ton of great resources on the web, including a series of posts on A/B testing by the 37Signals guys (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3), the “Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing” on SmashingMagazine, an A/B testing primer on A List Apart, Beth Kanter’s explanation of benchmarking, and the 2012 Nonprofit Social Network Report.