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Your e-mail Newsletter - How and Why to Start Now!
By Rick Christ The speed with which events are happening today makes it essential that you can communicate with your donors and supporters in a more timely way than you have been doing up until now. Donors are responding today far more quickly than they have been doing before, and you need to provide them with the tools to respond to you at the speed that they choose. The outpouring of donations after the September 11 attacks were not just bigger than ever before, they were faster. Many nonprofits could not keep up with the speed of the donors. You can. Coupled with the anthrax scare among mail customers, and the shutdown of several vital post offices, many nonprofits found themselves temporarily unable to communicate at all with their donors and supporters through traditional direct mail. Yet it continues to amaze me how many large nonprofits have pitifully small e-mail lists. Organizations that have hundreds of thousands of direct mail donors typically have only a few hundred e-mail addresses. The reason they don't have more e-mail addresses is that they haven't asked for e-mail addresses, either in their print newsletters or on their web site. The reason they usually give for why they haven't asked is that they don't have a plan for what to do with these e-mail addresses. This article will outline a few simple steps you can take to begin an e-mail newsletter to offer to your supporters. E-mail addresses should be stored in a database that can be used to segment the names into various groups. (Ultimately, you need to synchronize your e-mail list with your direct mail list. That's a whole other article.) At a minimum, you need to capture the e-mail address and a status code ("A" for active subscriber, "C" for those that have cancelled, "U" for undeliverable addresses, or whatever scheme you come up with). Also capture information that will help you personalize the e-mail, like a salutation. If you want to send donors a different e-mail than non-donors, you'll need to move that information to this database from wherever the donor information is kept. If you assign a donor ID number, keep it here too. In order to make the e-mail newsletter more relevant to each recipient, you'll want to offer them some choices, too. The most common are html/text, and frequency. Too many direct marketers are still thinking in terms of online supporters as one homogenous group. They ask, "Should I send a text or an html message?" Why can't you send html messages to those who request it, and text to everyone else? They ask, "How often should I send my e-mails?" I would suggest that monthly works for some people, but the hard core supporters may want to know every new snippet of information on a daily basis. I once asked my e-mail newsletter readers that question, and the best answer I got was, "Send me an e-mail when you have something important to tell me." Why can't you give the reader the choice? It doesn't cost any more. So build a field into your database for text/html and another for frequency. To illustrate the variety of options in e-mail newsletters, I will paraphrase some advice I gave to a medical library recently. They serve some 10,000 research and medical professionals and were afraid that they would be accused of "spamming" if they sent too many e-mails to these professionals. I suggested they offer subscription options by medical discipline, by delivery format, and by frequency. For example an oncology researcher may want every story on cancer treatments immediately, with the full story in the e-mail. They may also have an interest in radiology, but they only want radiology stories weekly, and only a summary of the article with a link back to the full article on the web site. This is very easy to offer with just two files: one of subscribers, which stores the subject, frequency, and delivery format choices; and one of articles, which lists the article "publication" date, subject(s), title, summary, body text and the web page of the full article. It's easy to build links to web pages into a text newsletter. Just put the full address or "URL" (if you know what that stands for, you're a geek) in the message. Both Netscape and Outlook, and probably other e-mail programs, automatically makes any "word" that starts with http:// a hyperlink. Of course, AOL does something differently. To make a URL a link in an AOL message, you have to make it look like this: Click Here. The AOL reader only sees the words "Click Here" which are blue, underlined, and a link to www.rickchrist.com. So, to make links work in AOL and to not have all that junk in everyone else's messages, separate your file into two groups: AOL addresses (probably about 1/3 of your file) and everyone else. Unlike direct mail, it's not essential to ask for money in every e-mail. The economics allow you to ask every fourth or fifth time (some say every seventh is a magic number). This allows you to make your newsletters really do the work of your organization, whether it's advocacy, education, or something else. I still want to see a "call to action" in every e-mail, but they can be varied among the following options: I'm sure you can think of even more. So, how do you work this into your budget? Here are a few ideas: Again, I'm sure you can come up with more clever ways of getting budget approval. Remember, right now there's very little risk. You don't have many e-mail names, so the program isn't going to cost you much. Even if you make some mistakes, it's only to a few hundred names (even if you have more names, there's no reason you can't start the program out with a sample). On the other hand, there's little doubt now that e-mail will play an increasingly large role in the support of your organization this year. Start now! | |
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