M+R Research Labs recently conducted an interesting study on whether “failing to communicate with your [email] listmembers consistently might cause them to not respond to your organization’s emails as consistently as they might if you stayed in better touch.” M+R looked closely at the effect that gaps in email communications have on listmembers’ responsiveness.  In other words: Do Email “Silences” Matter?

To find the answer they gathered data from four national nonprofit groups – The Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, International Planned Parenthood Federation/Western Hemisphere Region, American Rights at Work, and The Wilderness Society.  They looked only at email advocacy messaging across all the groups, such as filling out an online petition. Here’s are the key results:

• Three of the four organizations experienced declines of at least 1% in click-through and response rates after gaps of one or more months in their email advocacy messaging. The other organization had only a one-month gap in its messaging and its click-through and response rates fell only slightly (less than 1%) the next month.

• An email silence of two to three months resulted in lower click-through and response rates to the next advocacy message. The gap in communications caused click-through rates to drop an average of 3.80% while response rates dropped an average of 3.03%. A one-month gap in advocacy messaging resulted in an average drop of 1.41% in click-through rates and a 1.06% drop in response rates to the first advocacy message after the gap.

We know that floodiing the inboxes of our members is a “no-no” — but now we know that regular, measured contact is key to keeping an active list.

There are people out there that hate – and we mean hate – spam.  As the blogging team writing as “No NonProfit Spam,” says “Your mission is noble, and your intentions are honorable. But if you subscribed us to your organization’s bulk email list without our permission, then you are sending us spam. That is discourteous, unethical, illegal, and ineffective – so please stop.”  Deborah Elizabeth Finn’s Spam Manifesto is well worth a read if your organization is pumping out bulk email:

My standards for bulk email sent by nonprofit organizations are fairly simple:

* Confirmed opt-in policy:  good
* Unconfirmed opt-in policy:  acceptable
* Opt-out policy: evil

In other words, if I did not actively request that you send me regular e-bulletins or e-newsletters or urgent action alerts, then it’s spam.

However, it’s not spam if:
* You’re sending me a one-time-only message that is relevant to something that I posted publicly.
* You’re emailing me to invite me to join your subscription list.
* I went to your web site and subscribed to your e-bulletin.
* We had a conversation about your organization, and I said, “Do you have an e-bulletin? I’d like to subscribe.”
* I’m a dues-paying member of your organization, and voluntarily gave you  my contact information.
* You’re my client.

I would encourage every nonprofit that sends out an e-bulletin to think about it as (at least in part) a relationship-building tool.  Your goal should not just be to inform us, to ask us for money, or to prod us to action.  It should also be to help us feel connected and emotionally invested in your organization.  Perhaps you should be asking yourself whether you want us to perceive you as intrusive and presumptuous, or as friendly and respectful to stakeholders? If you prefer to be seen as friendly and respectful, then please stop sending us unsolicited bulk email.

Funding for Change has another very helpful set of tips for how to generate better newsletters. They argue that “Reading is optional. The people who look at your newsletter are virtually all going to start by skimming it. So, how do you get your point across when most people are just going to spend 10 seconds skimming what you send them anyway?”  Here are some of their useful tips:

Write compelling headlines that tell the whole story: Headlines are the most important part of your newsletter.  But they are usually thrown on as an afterthought, once everyone has spent hours and hours tinkering with text that most people aren’t ever going to read anyway. This is the exact opposite of how it should be.  For every ten people who read your headlines, one person might go on to read the article. It’s not uncommon to spend as much time writing the headlines as it takes to write the articles, especially at first.

Use photo captions, pull quotes, and other tricks to visually tell your story: Your eyes are drawn to anything that is different from the standard columns of text.  Make that work to your advantage.

Make it easy on the eyes: The easier it is to read your newsletter, the longer people will stick around.  The name of the game is making it effortless.  And that’s your goal when you hit the design phase — presenting your content in the most readable way. After you spend all this time writing, you don’t want people to have to work to read it.  Studies have been done on different fonts and colors. We know what is statistically proven to be easier to read.  So, to make it easy for your readers…

• Use serif fonts like Times or Garamond for print publications.  Use sans serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica for e-newsletters.  (The “feet” of the serif font that make letters easier to identify in print blur on screen.)
• Use black ink on white paper — not colored ink, not white ink on black (also known as reverse or knockout type), not colored paper or colored background.
• Indent your paragraphs.
• Leave “white space” — don’t cram text all the way to the margins.
• Format your text in 2-3 columns; don’t run your text all the way across the page.

Make it easy on the brain: Once reading your newsletter becomes time consuming and laborious, your brilliant supporters will move on to the other ways they’d prefer to spend their precious time.   To say it another way, the easier you can make it for people to read your newsletter, the longer they’ll spend with it. Write for a 7-8^th grade reading level.  Newspaper articles are around the 8th-grade level. Microsoft Word has a built-in tool to help — the Flesch-Kincaid scale.

• Flesch-Kincaid grades your writing based on the length of your words, sentences, and paragraphs.  It’s a feature that usually has to be enabled.  But once set up, whenever you do a spelling or grammar check, you’ll get a quick readability report at the end that includes a Reading Ease Score and a Grade Level Score.

Aim for a Reading Ease Score of 60-70 (the higher, the better).  And, go for a Grade Level Score of 7-8. Check your score regularly when you write.  To lower your scores, write shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs.

CopyBlogger has put together 5 quick and dirty common mistakes groups make when they write and send out newsletters.  According to the post, “Newsletters are a lot of work. There’s no point in doing them unless you see the response you’re looking for. And avoiding these five big mistakes will perk up your response in a hurry.”  Here’s the top 5 list, but head over to Copyblogger’s site for more detailed answers:

• Mistake # 1: Your newsletter isn’t helpful: Pure self-promotion won’t work — make it useful.
• Mistake #2: Your voice isn’t particularly compelling: Your tone of writing is critical. Record yourself if you have to, but connect with your own unique voice.
• Mistake # 3: You’re not telling stories: If you can’t get your head around structure, use customer stories.
• Mistake # 4: You have a half-hearted call to action: Don’t be half-hearted about promotion — give a strong call to action.
• Mistake# 5: You don’t have a specific frequency: Without consistent frequency, your customers will forget who you are even if you do everything else right.

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.

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.

The direct mail guru’s over at Mal Warwick Assoc. have posted a useful summary of the key points from a new book by Chip and Dan Health entitled Made to Stick, which explores what ideas work best in direct mail. They are:

• Simplicity—short, profound statements are powerful. Focus on the message’s core—think “proverbs.”
• Unexpectedness—generate lasting interest. Create a gap in people’s knowledge to make them curious.
• Concreteness—make ideas clear so everyone understands them. Explain ideas through (many) real examples.
• Credibility—make people believe your idea. Use vivid details, use statistics to illustrate a relationship (rather than a number) that people will remember.
• Emotional—tap into people’s feelings to make them care about the idea.
• Stories—the right stories can inspire and make people act.

This might be useful little checklist the next time you’re drafting up some direct mail.

A new 2009 eCampaigning Review Study by Advocacy Online was released last week which analyzed if nonprofits are effective at using online communications to reach supporters. Here’s what they found:

• 60% of nonprofits studied present a compelling argument for supporters to take action, yet close to 70% of the organizations did not send a follow up email within one month. 37% of nonprofits did not even bother to send a thank you email.
• 50% of organizations’ online lists had 40% or more inactive supporters. Only 9% had a strategy for reactivating dormant supporters
• 76% of the organizations surveyed ask their donors to take action online.
• 69% ask their online members to make a donation.
• 92% collect email addresses from at least two sources, including: events, website, and offline mailings.
• 51% of organizations have 10,000 members or less.
• 5% of supporters are active members (meaning they took one or more actions in the period of the study between June and August 2009).
• 7% of respondents conduct split tests of email alerts.
• 4% of campaigners are supporters of more than one organization.

Based on the report, Frogloop’s Allyson Kapin suggests some strategies that nonprofits should utilize to move their members up the ladder of activism

1. Segment their lists more and write separate emails that resonate with different levels and types of supporters.

2. Survey their list at least once a year and ask supporters what issues do they think the organization should take on?

3. Determine if these inactive members are bad email addresses.

4. After a few attempts of trying to re-engage inactive supporters, consider removing them from your nonprofits list.

5. Grow your online lists to account for churn rates

According to Thomas Gensemer, one of President Obama’s key online strategists, it’s time for NGO’s to stop sending out email newsletters. He believes that short, personalized emails to supporters giving clear instructions for participation work much better.

“Email newsletters don’t get read, yet they take more effort to prepare than a 250-word email,” he said. “Email is still a killer application, but only when used properly.”

For the Obama campaign, fundraising and participation tactics included sending regular, short emails to supporters asking recipients to do one thing that day. Each email also told the supporter what their action would accomplish and what would happen next.  These emails gave supporters a “steady narrative of actions, feedback and milestones”, Gensemer said.

But Vinay Bhagat, founder of Convio, believes that online newsletters still play an important function for NGO’s.  In a blog response to Gensemer, he wrote: “Political campaigns are short lived and maximizing participation during the campaign cycle is critical.  In contrast, nonprofits rely on building long-term donor relationships. As such, they should adopt a much more stewardship centered email strategy, regularly sharing stories about the impact of their work, interspersed with calls to action/ fundraising asks at the appropriate frequency.”

Our previous post laid out a few of the challenges associated with using graphics in our email blasts. This post lists several best practices M+R Strategic Services recommends to avoid counter-productive graphics:

1) Use smaller header images. Large header images may take a long time to load. They also push the text of your email message farther down the screen, forcing readers to scroll down to read your message or click on the all-important links to the action or donation page. To minimize scrolling and loading time, make sure that the first few paragraphs of your email message (and at least one link to the action or fundraising page) are visible above the fold in your HTML message.

2) Avoid image overload. While it can be tempting to jam pack HTML messages with images and photos, the more images you include in your message the longer it will take to download. For your list members with dial-up or other slow Internet connections, this can lead to a frustratingly long wait time to read your email messages! Try to avoid sending image-laden messages and be sure to keep the file size of any images you do include to a minimum.

3) Consider adding an unobtrusive “view web version” link. This link offers people an option to view the message as it was intended to look. However, keep in mind that this link does constitute another (unnecessary) barrier between your user and whatever it is you want them to do. Ideally, your message should be created so that it’s not necessary to include a link to a web version.