According to the blog Frogloop, “It was recently reported that one in three Americans owns a smartphone.  Some sources are indicating that more people will own smartphones than traditional cellphones by 2012. Add tablets into the mix and its clear that people are quickly adopting mobile computing.”

And as smartphone and tablet use rises, your email follows. Email reading on mobile devices rose 81% from October, 2010, to April, 2011. It stands to continue rising. Today, 16% of email is read on mobile devices while desktops get 36% of messages and webmail 48%.

Here are some of Frogloops tips on how to craft your emails to make them compatible with smart phones:

• Clear, short and actionable subject lines followed by quick easy to read text with a link (to whatever your action or conversion might be) early on. This is a good argument for minimalistic header images in email. As you know, more and more desktop and webmail email clients default to hiding images from readers. In mobile, images are vigorously suppressed.
• Remember that messages received on iPhones with lots of images can become awkward when email is viewed on a small mobile device.
• Include a mobile stylesheet. This is something that can be worked into most email templates but is still not often seen. Check with your provider for assistance or just try it out yourself but if you have any sort of CSS in a template or “wrapper” now then chances are you can add a mobile stylesheet.
• Call to action up front and very clear. People need to see it/read it/have chance to click it without scrolling up/down or left/right. Don’t rely on image-based links as images may not appear on mobile messages. Try to work a call to action text link into the first few lines of your message.
• Make sure you have a “view this message on the web” link clearly visible in the preheader (the area at the top just above the message). You may not be able to fully optimize your message for mobile but the web browser version may be easier for mobile users to read and navigate because images and style sheets are better supported.
• Take Google design principles to heart: speed and simplicity matter even more on mobile.

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.

In response to a recent study showing that as many as half of congressional staffers believe online form messages are fake, M+R Research Labs put together a helpful tip list on how to “turn online advocacy into real-world change.” The list was developed to help groups targeting Congress, but they’re equally usefully for local legislative organizing.

1. “Online petitions” should only be the first step. For most organizations, easy online advocacy actions such as petitions or letters to Congress are the best way to recruit large numbers of new supporters. But don’t stop there! Think of your online petition as an entry point for a new activist or a way to begin engaging your list on an issue, and then build up to higher impact actions like phone calls, letters to the editor, and offline events.
2. Make high-impact advocacy easier. Congressional offices pay much more attention to phone calls than online messages (as long as they’re from actual constituents!). But picking up the phone is much harder than filling out an online form to send a letter, and many supporters can find it intimidating. Make sure you’re guiding your advocates through the process and arming them with information, and consider using online tools to make calling and writing letters to the editor easier. For instance, M+R recently helped AARP create, implement and roll out a tool that helped constituents call their legislators with just one click. When users clicked the “call now” button, a personalized link made action-taker’s phone ring immediately, automatically connecting them to their own Members of Congress — no dialing required!
3. Integrate online and offline work. If you’re offering an offline petition, make an organizational commitment to deliver the petitions at a lobby day or press event, tell supporters what you’re going to do, grab some video or at least a few good photos while you’re doing it, and then report back to your activists on how it went. Hold virtual lobby days so that your supporters are writing and calling at the same time that representatives of your organization are visiting Capitol Hill. And help your most hardcore supporters meet with lawmakers on their own. The Human Rights Campaign ran integrated campaigns in 2009 and 2010 that helped ordinary supporters set up meetings with their Members of Congress in local district offices. The sign-up tools and promotions were all online, but the online effort was backed by a strong field team that followed up with constituents to provide them with the resources and support they needed to be successful (and to ensure that their meetings actually took place!)
4. Take advantage of social networks. A recent study found that 64% of surveyed Hill staffers think Facebook is an important way to understand their constituents’ views. Direct your supporters to their representatives’ Facebook pages and ask them to write on their walls. Encourage your supporters to tweet members of Congress who are on Twitter. Last year, the ENOUGH Project flooded the Facebook walls of ten members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee with messages in the hopes of getting the conflict minerals bill out of committee. 48 hours and over 500 messages later, two of the ten — as well as another three who had not been targeted — decided to co-sponsor the bill, which passed into law a few months later. During the health care reform debate, Organizing for America built a “Tweet Congress” tool that allowed users to enter their zip code to find their Representative or Senators, making it easy for them to connect and apply pressure via a new medium.
5. Go local. Capitol Hill is crowded and noisy. New tools make it easier than ever to reach supporters, and easier than ever for supporters to contact Congress — so more people are doing it than ever before. To avoid being drowned out, reach out to members of Congress in their home districts. M+R’s grassroots mobilization team puts organizers on the ground in key states and districts to mobilize local partners, recruit and train activists, push an issue in the local media, provide support to national online organizing, and facilitate congressional contact at town halls and district offices. We use online tools to connect supporters to organizers, generate grassroots momentum, and turn out attendance at locally organized events. It’s a highly effective combination!

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.

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.

For more than a decade, progressives and liberals have dominated online politics, but that’s beginning to change. A year after Obama’s campaign domination of online fund-raising, online organizing and social media, Ross Douthat of the NYT raises the possibility that the right may have begun to outflank the left online. According to Douthat:

• Republican politicians have taken over Twitter. Sarah Palin has 1.2 million followers on Facebook. And in liberal Massachusetts, Scott Brown, the Republican Senate candidate, has used Internet fund-raising to put the fear of God into the Bay State’s establishment. Last Monday, Brown raised $1.3 million from an online “money bomb,” and his campaign reportedly went on to raise a million dollars a day throughout the week. The race’s online landscape looks like last November’s in reverse: from YouTube views to Facebook fans to Twitter followers, Brown enjoys an Obama-esque edge over his Democratic rival, Martha Coakley.

• Brown’s race…demonstrated there’s no necessary connection between online organizing and liberal politics. The Web is just like every pre-Internet political arena: ideology matters less than the level of anger at the incumbent party, and the level of enthusiasm an insurgent candidate can generate.

• The attempts to turn the [Obama] campaign’s online community, weakly re-dubbed Organizing for America, into a permanent political force have flopped. In a recent post on the Web site Personal Democracy Forum, Micah Sifry captured the free-floating sense of anger with Obama’s governance: “The people who voted for him weren’t organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests … sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting.

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