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If I ran your email program

A manifesto of sorts about care and joy and finding meaning in the work we do.

If I ran your email program

👋 Hello and welcome to Future Community. Thanks for joining us Alexandra, Alan and Courtney. Want to talk? Have a question? Need a hand? Reply here or schedule a chat.

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Running an email program with care and joy

I've been putting together a training program called Email for Impact that we hope to launch later this month. As you may expect, there's a lot in there about platforms and tools, segmentation and metrics, design and storytelling.

But there's an element that flows through the project that is hard to describe, name, or measure. It feels crazy to say this (or even write it) but it might be this:

An email program can (and should!) be run with care and joy as core values. This goes for other communications programs, be it social media or video or internal comms or whatever.

That's because there are real people on the other end of the email. Humans with ideas and interests and opinions. People who are parents and kids and brothers and sisters and employees and neighbors. People who like to cook, eat, listen to music, read a book before going to bed, or stay up watching too many TikToks because they can't sleep.

Those of us running email, fundraising, membership, and subscription programs are out here talking about click rates and conversions and churn. We're optimizing and testing. We're measured with every email and campaign. Then asked to do more. Usually with less.

So we get caught up in our data and our testing and how cool it is to use AI to better profile people and target our asks to the right people at the right hour of the day for an amount that is optimized based on some algorithm that, well, who knows what it is.

Then we get through the end of the year and maybe we raised more money and met our goals and maybe we didn't. And we do it all again. Rinse. Repeat. Data in. Data out.

It's too easy to forget there are people at the other end. People who care, want to learn, want to be seen, want to feel power and experience joy.

Don't get lost in the data. You'll lose track of what's important and why you're doing this work. And the results will suffer as a result. You'll chase growth and meet a numerical goal but run a program that rings hollow with stories that don't connect with people.

Find ways to connect yourself and your team to the people on the list. Listen. Survey. Meet them. Pick up the phone. Bring people onto your team who care about people, not just goals and quotas and data.

Anyway, if it was up to me we would start there - with care and joy and success of the people on the list as our metric. And not just the dollars or clicks or other data flowing into our AI-powered dashboards. We'd find our people sticking around longer, doing more with us, reading, listening, and sharing the care we send their way out to their community. Maybe we would would all enjoy the work along the way.

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