Groundwire recently surveyed its clients and followers to identify common email broadcasting trends in the nonprofit sector.  Here is some of what they discovered:

Time Investment: Like anything worth doing, good email communications programs take a fair bit of time to execute well. Preparation of content and troubleshooting of formatting problems are the two major contributors to the time crunch. On average it takes 3 people 5.9 hours to create, test, and deliver 4 email messages per month to a list of about 6300 subscribers. Therefore, in general, expect to spend about 23.6 hours per month running your email communications program.

Groundwire asked how strongly respondents agree with this statement: “In general, do you feel that you are given adequate time in your job role to prepare and send email communication”. The responses were:

• Strongly Agree – 31.9%
• Agree Somewhat – 41.5%
• Disagree Somewhat – 17.0%
• Strongly Disagree – 9.6%

Some of the optional responses to this question are quite interesting. For example:

• “Impact of email marketing not given high enough value internally, despite being the channel with far and away the highest ROI.”
• “The problem isn’t total time, it’s the “rush jobs” (“need it done today”) with no notice or advance planning”
• “We have made sending out our e-newsletter a communications priority. As such, we have a lot of organizational support for producing a high quality product. To streamline our process, we profile content that is on our website, then drive people to the website, significantly reducing the time spent on the e-newsletter”

Problems: The majority of responders (66%) said that formatting the email properly was the biggest problem they faced when trying to get an email newsletter or alert out the door. Many layout problems can only be solved through analyzing the underlying HTML or through lots of trial and error. A solid understanding of HTML is an essential skill for successful email communication.

The second major blocker on email was simply getting the content written (35%). Content (especially quality content) takes time to develop. It’s part of the cost of doing business and is fundamental to being successful online. Hire a staff writer or allocate the responsibility to someone who shows writing talent on staff and you’ll see the benefits of good copy working for you.

Service Providers: Here is a list of the top 4 service providers the responders said they are using:

• VerticalResponse
• ConstantContact
• CampaignMonitor
• WhatCounts

Benefits of Email Communication: The final question in the survey asked responders to list some of the benefits of having an email communication program. The question as stated was – “What are the most important benefits of mass email to your organization? What goal(s) does it help you accomplish?” Common responses were:

• Communication with supporters/members and donors
• Getting the word out on programs and events
• Easy method to deliver important messages
• Driving traffic to the website
• Fundraising

In 2008 email fundraising response rates were .13%, and email advocacy response rates were 4%. Online fundraising grew overall by 4.5% between 2008 and 2009.  For those of us trying to ramp up our online fundraising, those numbers are nothing to write home about. But in these hard times, we’ll take what we can get.  To help capture a slice of this fundraising action, Frogloop has put together a useful list of tips.  Here it is:

Create Killer Landing Pages: Tell people what you want them to do quickly. Be clear how their donation will make a difference. One tactic that has been successful for the nonprofit CARE is to provide their donors with two simple pie charts that illustrate how funds raised are allocated below the credit card donation form. Also give people several options to contribute money – one time giving, monthly giving, etc.

Cut The Wonk: You nonprofit will raise more money by telling compelling stories that resonate with real people. Donors are human beings (not ATM machines) and they need to feel connected to your organization and to your story. Save your press releases for the media, and your “talking points” for policy makers.

Build A Great List: You need invested people on your list to fundraise. There are two main ways nonprofits can build lists: 1) Organic Cultivation: via your own website, events, social networking sites, direct mail, etc; 2) Paid Acquisition: Online acquisition Google Ad Words, email appends, chaperoned emails, etc.

Cross Promote: The best way to reach your donors is to connect with them wherever they are – which means everywhere. Make sure you cross promote your fundraising campaigns across multiple channels such as your website, email appeals, social networks, direct mail, telemarketing, etc. Also be sure that the content is edited for each channel since each one has its own unique tone and voice.

Segment: Querying and segmenting your online membership may not be a ton of fun, but it’s vital to the success of your online fundraising program. You need this information to tailor appeals to different segments of your list. Why would you send members of your list who have never donated to your organization the same exact appeal to members who have donated $250 3x in the past 12 months? These two audiences are connected to your nonprofit very differently and therefore should receive different appeals that match their level of engagement.

Close The Loop: Don’t forget to thank your donors and tell them if you met your goals. This simple strategy has proven to help build better relationships with donors. Also make sure you include any compelling stories, successes, or photos so donors feel that their donation made a difference.

Measure The Results: There are myriad amounts of ways your nonprofit can measure the success of your online fundraising campaigns. Here are a few key ones:
•    Open Rates: What percentage of people opened up an online fundraising appeal.
•    Unique Web Visits: How many unique visits to the landing page.
•    Conversions: What percentage of people who clicked on the donate link, donated money.
•    Click-Through Rates: How many people clicked on a donation link.

The folks over at the Sunlight Foundation have been trying re-think their advocacy email strategy.  They’ve faced up to the fact that their constituency gets too many emails from non-profits.  And not only do people get too many, almost all of them sound and feel exactly the same. Here’s a breakdown of the common nonprofit email:

SUBJ: Something catchy/funny/intriguing/pun to get you to open the email

Here is the first line in which I try to surprise you or say something memorable so you’ll keep going down.

Now I back up that sentence with some facts, and tell you what’s happening out in the world that needs your action.

Link 1: http://DoThisActionRightNow.com

More information describing the problem, and why our action is going to help – maybe even solve – the problem. We really need to do this!

Link 2: http://PleaseActNow.com (going to the same place as link 1)

Something nice that sums it all up and puts things in context, as well as thanking you for your support.

Love,

Us

PS Here’s a link to something else I want you to see, knowing that the PS is one of the most clicked through parts of an email. http://WatchOurAwesomeVideo.com

According to Sunlight’s Engagement Director, Jake Brewer, “Go through your inbox, and I suspect the vast majority of advocacy emails look or feel something like that.  I’ve been thinking about how to do it better for quite some time…”  Then Brewer heard back from a constituent, who responded to a blast email saying “Just got (your email). Deleted it right away because it looked and felt like all the other political email spam I get.” But he also sent along mock-up for what he would have liked to see a call to action look like:

:

We can all see the virtues and possibilities of such a simple format.  According to Brewer:

• First: most people simply don’t want to read all that you write. So why not give them a succinct summary of your problem with the option to read, but less requirement, as Sid does here.

• Second: create a moment of analysis that gets supports or potential supporters to ask the most critical question you need them to consider.

• Third: offer a simple way to act to help in solving the problem at hand – with the ability to dive deeper and get more information.

As you continue down the layout, you also see quick and easy buttons that could be used for sharing the message throughout the web. It’s decidedly un-email.

David Pogue, technology critic at the New York Times, has put together a “handy clip-and-save” primer on social networking.  It’s for those who know little about Web 2.0 — or as Pogue writes: Those that Facebook left behind. Here are the key sections:

FACEBOOK: This is the biggest social networking service, with almost 500 million members — 22 percent of everyone on the Internet — and it’s growing by 5 percent a month.

It’s a glorified “facebook”— name-and-photo directory — of the sort that colleges distribute to incoming freshmen. (In fact, Facebook started out exactly that way, as an electronic facebook at Harvard.) You answer as many questions about yourself as you feel comfortable sharing: your name, contact information, relationship status, favorite music and maybe a few photos. Then you search for friends, past or present. When they accept your friend invitations, you can now see their Facebook pages and they can see yours.

Why you’d bother: Facebook is great for sharing news, photos and videos with people who might care; for finding long-lost friends (or snooping on old lovers); for joining groups that support various causes or interests; for sending messages (it’s somewhat more streamlined than regular e-mail); and for playing games with each other (FarmVille, Mafia Wars).

Why not: Facebook keeps making policy and programming blunders that expose personal information to other Web sites. It also lets its advertisers place ads on the pages of very targeted members: divorced 45-year-olds in Texas, for example.

Similar: MySpace (a teenage and preteenage crowd, heavily focused on pop music and do-it-yourself page designs), Bebo and many others.

LINKEDIN: It’s Facebook for the professional set. Here, the concept is establishing a “who you know” network of current and former business colleagues.

Why you’d bother: LinkedIn is especially useful when you’re looking for a new job — or a new employee, which helps explain its 70-million-strong global membership — because you’re no longer limited to asking your immediate colleagues for referrals. Now you can ask colleagues of colleagues, which greatly expands your reach. LinkedIners can also vouch for one another as references.

A popular feature called Answers lets you ask business-related questions of people who might know — advice on everything from résumé formatting to business software.

Why not: As with Facebook, not all connections are legitimate. When people accept “friend” invitations from people they don’t actually know, the whole trusted-colleague concept weakens.

TWITTER: This is the service that lets you send tweets — er, brief, 140-character updates that feel a lot like text messages. They can be news, jokes, observations, links, gripes, questions, anything.

Except instead of sending them to just one person’s cellphone, you’re sending them to a handful, or thousands — as many as have signed up to receive them from you. Meanwhile, you’ve signed up to receive other people’s postings (to “follow” them). Once you’ve signed up for a few good ones, the messages scroll up your screen, like the transcript of a global cocktail-party conversation.

You can use Twitter on its Web site, but it’s much easier if you do it using a free Twitter-reading app for your computer or phone, like TweetDeck, Twitterific and Twitter (the official Twitter app for the iPhone, formerly called Tweetie).

Why you’d bother: News frequently breaks on Twitter (by being passed around so fast that pretty soon, everybody’s heard it). It’s fun to follow famous people; the stuff they (or their minions) type appears directly on your phone or computer screen, without any layers of interpreters in between.

Using search.twitter.com, you can find out what the world is saying about you, your company or any topic that interests you.

And if enough people, or the right people, follow you, you can get something truly revolutionary: expert, instantaneous feedback on questions or opinions.

Why not: Twitter can be a lonely place when you first sign up. Figuring out whom to follow, and how to get people to follow you, takes time and effort. And Twitterites use a lot of conventions and shorthand codes that can be confusing at first.

Similar: Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Facebook updates.

FOURSQUARE: As cellphones with GPS become more popular, crazy new possibilities pop up — like Foursquare.

It knows where you are. So when you open the Foursquare app on your iPhone, Palm, BlackBerry or Android phone, you see a list of restaurants, bars and shops near where you’re standing. By “checking in” (tapping the name of the one you’re in), you broadcast your location to your friends. There’s a game element, too: you earn points whenever you check in. In fact, whoever visits a certain place the most becomes its “mayor,” and may be rewarded by a giveaway from that business.

Why you’d bother: You can see where your friends are right now, making it easy to meet them. Businesses can offer you free products as you walk by (“Since you’re right outside, how ’bout a free coffee?”) — win-win marketing. And your buddies can leave pointers about an establishment (“avoid the halibut”) that appear right on your screen as you enter. Really cool concept.

Why not: With not quite two million members — mostly bar-hopping twenty-somethings — Foursquare isn’t for everyone. Most people don’t use it, and most businesses aren’t listed yet.

Similar: Gowalla, Loopt, Brightkite.

YELP: It’s a huge database of restaurants, shops, hotels, doctors, museums and attractions, all easy to find, with store hours, directions and phone numbers, covering 34 cities. But the magic is in the customer reviews: 11 million of them so far, mostly helpful and articulate.

Why you’d bother: Armed with those reviews, you have no excuse to go to a terrible restaurant or shady shop again.

Why not: There’s always a chance that the reviews are being manipulated (although the company says it’s diligent about filtering out suspicious ones).

Similar: OpenTable, Urbanspoon.

THE BOTTOM LINE: These sites all derive their power the same way: We, the people, provide the information — not the Web site owner. Some of these services establish lines of communication between people who might otherwise never meet, joining them by interest rather than geography. Others connect you with people you do know, or once knew, so that you can help each other out.

Dazed and confused about Twitter hashtags?  We stumbled on a this nice little introductory wiki primer entitled “Hashtags Introduction“.  Below are a few key points:

• Hashtags are a community-driven convention for adding additional context and metadata to your tweets. They’re like tags on Flickr, only added inline to your post. You create a hashtag simply by prefixing a word with a hash symbol: #hashtag.
• Hashtags were developed as a means to create “groupings” on Twitter, without having to change the basic service. The hash symbol is a convention borrowed primarily from IRC channels, and later from Jaiku’s channels.

How To Use Hashtags

• Start using hashtags in your tweets, preceding key words. It can be helpful to do a little research first, to find out if the subject you’re tweeting already has an established hashtag. Also, check Suggestions and Tips and Example Uses below for ettiquette and general usage.
• Finally, track other tweets on the subjects you’re interested in (ie: those containing the appropriate hashtags) by browsing/searching at Hashtags.org, TwitterGroups, TweetChat, TweetGrid, Twitterfall, etc. You can set it up with RSS feeds as well.

Suggestions and tips

• The use of hashtags is still an emergent phenomena, and as such, etiquette is negotiable, though some have already expressed their distaste for hashtags.
• Used sparingly and respectfully, hashtags can provide useful context and cues for recall, as well as increased utility for the track feature. Used excessively can cause annoyance, confusion or frustration, and may lead people to stop following you. It’s best to use hashtags explicitly when they’re going to add value, rather than on every word in an update.
• A good rule of thumb to follow is to focus on your update first, and only if it quantitatively adds value, to append one-three hashtags. There are no hard and fast rules, but Twitter should continue to be about answering the simple question: “What are you doing” rather than “What tags apply to what you’re doing?”
• CamelCase: When creating a hashtag for something that may consist of two or more words its a good idea to use the “CamelCase” format to maintain legibility. The idea is to join words with each words initial letter capitalized. For example if I wanted to create a hashtag  for south Africa, I would type out: #SouthAfrica instead of #southafrica

Many grassroots are still struggling with how to transfer their long-standing offline newsletters and newspapers into the online universe.  Many still have a dedicated readership — often their older members — who look forward to getting a printed publication every month.  But printed material doesn’t translate well online. Some groups simply post a PDF version — but that’s cumbersome. Others split up the content into blogs, email letters, etc.  — but this often fails to show the breadth of an organization’s work.

One possible solution is Issuu, a digital publishing platform that allows uploaded print material to be viewed through a web browser and is made to look like a printed publication with an animated page flip options.   While the documents are meant to be viewed online, they can be downloaded and saved as well. There’s a free version on Issuu’s website and the full, customizable version is $19 a month.  You can also use the service to publish books, reports, etc. The service is used by some of the largest publishing houses in the country, including Random House, Cambridge University Press.

According to a new study out of the University of Michigan, college students today show less empathy toward others compared with college students in decades before.

Researchers looked at 72 studies that gauged empathy among 14,000 college students in the past 30 years, and tracked that empathy has been declining — especially since 2000.  Digging a little deeper, students today show 40% less empathy vs. students in the 1980s and 1990s. The students are less likely to agree with statements such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective.”

Why? Well the researches didn’t try to answer that, but they wonder whether it’s because your people are having fewer face-to-face interactions, communicating instead through social media such as Facebook and Twitter.  They argue that empathy is best activated when you can see another person’s signal for help.

According to a survey conducted last year by the Boston-based marketing outfit Cone, nearly three quarters of those surveyed agreed with the statement that new media raise their awareness about causes but do not motivate them to do any more to help, and 39 percent said they didn’t trust that their efforts would actually help the cause.  For the study, the company defined new media as “dialogue among individuals or groups” on social networks, blogs, Twitter, online games, mobile devices, message boards, and sites that allow people to share photos, audio, and video. In some cases, the company also included e-mail and Web sites.

Among the other reasons participants sited for the lack of engagement:

• I’d rather spend my time and/or money supporting causes offline. (31 percent)

• I didn’t see any existing results or impacts. (27 percent)

• I felt overwhelmed by the number of causes on new media. (22 percent)

• My favorite issue, cause, or organization doesn’t use new media. (19 percent)

• I didn’t understand the tool/application. (17 percent)

“Americans are actively engaged with causes on new media, but they’re lacking a degree of trust that takes them to the next level of engagement,” Alison DaSilva, Cone’s executive vice president. “Organizations can overcome this barrier by showing tangible and compelling results, offering multiple consumer touch points, and making the bridge to offline activities wherever possible.”

According to Reuters, the actor Ed Norton is leading a new venture called Crowdrise “that gives people a free way to create their own fundraising pages to share through social networks, winning points and prizes along the way.” Crowdrise was developed after Norton found Twitter to be an effective way to raise $1.2 million for his long-term cause, the Maasai Wilderness Conservation Trust, by running New York’s marathon last year.  According to Norton “People use Twitter or Facebook because it’s a way to share their personal narrative but we wanted to give people a platform to say, these are the causes I care about, I am volunteering and sponsor me.”

Here’s how Norton and Co. describe the way users can tap into Crowdrise:

START FUNDRAISING PROJECTS: Whether you’re running a marathon, volunteering, or have causes that you care deeply about, create your own Fundraising Pages on Crowdrise and choose from over a million charities to raise money for. If it takes you more than a minute to create your Page, you’re probably just a really slow typist.

GET YOUR VOLUNTEER PROJECTS SPONSORED: Post all your Volunteer Projects on Crowdrise so everyone sees how you’re making a difference. Go a step further and get your friends to Sponsor your Volunteer Projects to raise money for Charity, the exact same way someone running a marathon does.

MAKE YOUR CAMPAIGNS COMPELLING: Use your personal stories, powerful photos and videos, and our Best Promos Ever to create campaigns that are so compelling that your supporters not only donate money but want to join your Project Team and tell everyone they know about it.

GET VOTES AND WIN AMAZING PRIZES: Earn 100 points for every Vote you get from the Crowdrise Community and get 10 points for every $1 you raise for Charity. The goal is to allow the community to award the best Volunteers and Fundraisers in the world with lots of Points. Top Point Earners not only win amazing prizes, but they’ll be recognized for their extraordinary achievements by becoming Crowdrise Royalty.

And here’s a chart for how the program works: