By EchoDitto

Best Practices for Communicating With Your Email List

Raising money on the Internet can reach untapped sources of support and yield more money than a direct mail or events-focused campaign — at a significantly reduced overhead. Before you launch your online fundraising campaign, you must identify your audience and a clear goal for the campaign.

Your fundraising "ask" must target a specific audience that can respond to it and, ideally, pass it on to others. Successful fundraising campaigns start with previously established communities that have good reason to trust the organization that is requesting money. If you do not already manage an email list of people with whom you have been in regular communication, consider partnering with a group that has a list. The first email to your organization should not be an appeal for money. You need to build a relationship and establish trust first.

Set a Clear Goal

Your fundraising goal should be easy to understand and meaningful. Tell your audience what you are going to do with this money. Be as specific as possible. Risk-taking pays off. Online risk-taking pays off. Being bold excites online audiences, drives people to meet goals, and generates attention — both online and offline. When the Dean campaign announced an outlandish second quarter fundraising goal of $7 million, supporters knew that reaching this goal depended on them. Consequently, they poured energy into reaching that goal — and then justly felt like they, acting individually in a collective manner, had accomplished something great. Each individual $50 or $100 contribution is crucial to meeting the much larger and stunning total.

Provide a way for people to track their contributions and make this the centerpiece of your campaign. Dean for America made its contributions fill a baseball bat; Ken Salazar's Colorado Senate campaign used an animated ten-gallon hat; and Joe Hoeffel's Pennsylvania campaign added cars to a train as donations poured in. This visual mechanism allows your audience to understand that each individual's contribution goes toward the greater goal. This is not a new model — Jerry Lewis used local and national tote boards to create excitement for his Labor Day Telethons for muscular dystrophy.

Write an Effective Email

Invest the bulk of your time crafting compelling email messages because this will be the foundation of your campaign. Authenticity is critical to success on the Internet in any venture — political or otherwise. Most of us spend the bulk of our time on the Internet using email. Since email is an inherently casual and intimate mode of communication, effective fundraising emails are both casual and authentic — you've got to have personality!

Here are some key points to think about as you write your fundraising email:

• Develop a Voice. Write your email in a casual, personal tone and send it from a specific human being. Don't put an amorphous organization name in the "From:" line. Develop a unique voice for the authors of your emails — a regular voice to which readers can relate. This does not necessarily mean the principal of your organization. Often a mid-level staffer may do as good a job and protect your principal for over-communicating to your list.

• Make a Specific Ask. It's not good enough to say that you need money. You need to spell out why you're asking for money and what the money will do. People like to know what how their money will be spent — and, given the pace of the Internet, it's important that have a sense of urgency. The more specific the better. Don't say you need $500 to fund an after-school center; say you need $250 for the teacher, $50 for the basketballs, $100 for snacks, and $100 to keep the electricity on.

• Make It Pretty, But Not Too Pretty. With a few caveats, graphics don't make much difference, and, in fact, heavily stylized emails can distract people and slow them down. With caveats, graphics do not make much difference unless they serve a specific purpose — e.g., a contribute button, photo, or image summarizing the ask.

• Time It Right. When sending emails, it is better to send them earlier in the week, and you should always send during normal business hours. You want your email to arrive at a time when people are paying attention to their email — after they have cleared out the junk from the night before

• Track Everything. Track open rates, unsubscribe rates, click-throughs, contributions, and the growth rate of the list. Look at the data to spot trends and to speculate about what's working and what's not. Experiment, and be bold! Like other means of fundraising, you would not keep sending out the exact same piece of direct mail over and over again. You must try new and different things — new visuals, new language, and new ways of asking for money. The only way to know if one email works better than the another is by examining the data that you are collecting.

• Include Easy-To-Use Links. Use the actual hyperlink, not words with embedded links. Links to you Web site or contribution page are bolder and easier for readers to find when they stand alone. Your click-through rate will be higher if you make it easier for your email recipients to find the links as they scan through message.

Think about how and why you use email every day. The strength of email is that it is simple, efficient, immediate and personal. You should communicate with your email list just as you communicate with your friends and coworkers—keeping these values in mind. The majority of your audience is more likely to read your email messages than they are to visit your website each day. Your goal is provide personal, engaging content in your regular email communications that builds trust and interest in the organization and gives your members a reason to return to the site.

Tone and Relationship Building:

Your basic objective regarding email communications is to convince people to (1) open the email, (2) read the email, and (3) do what you ask in the email.

You have a greater chance of getting readers to complete all three tasks if your email originates from a human being with a name (i.e., include sender's name in "From" field—organization name can be used in conjunction with name, but should not be used exclusively) and if your message is written in an intimate, personal tone. To envision such an email, think about how you would communicate with a co-worker

Three Keys to Success: Contextualize Personalize Encourage

or friend (removing the typos, smilies, and run-on sentences).

It often makes sense to choose two or three people within an organization, including the director or CEO, and create an "email relationship" for each person with your list. Each person can be built up as the sender of a certain type of email, and then, as your list gets to know each person they are immediately aware of what type of email to expect, simply by reading the "From" line. These come to be trusted names, and readers feel a personal attachment to what they are being asked to do. For this reason, it's usually a good strategy to only attach the director or CEO's name (usually the best known name to begin with) to critical emails, for example, an end of quarter fundraising ask.

The first few emails to a new, growing list are especially important because they will set the tone and precedent for a reader's experience with all future emails and his/her likeliness to open future messages.

Structure

The structure of your email also makes a difference. We have seen the best results with emails that follow this general format:

Dear [First Name], Two paragraphs http:// link to action on Web site Two more paragraphs of text http:// link to action on Web site Two more paragraphs of text Closing Signed, [name] P.S. http:// link to action on Web site

In the above example, each instance of the hyperlink is identical—it leads readers to the same page or action on the website. Additionally, the hyperlinks should be written out just as they would appear in your browser. If the links are embedded in the text, they do not stand out enough, and your click through rate will be lower.

Even if your email is primarily informational, it should always ask the reader to take an action—whether that action is clicking through to an article on the website, forwarding the email to a friend, signing a petition, or contributing—adding something that people can DO engages them in the process.

In general, graphics don't have much affect on the success of an email one way or the other.

Scheduling

Finally, develop an email and online content calendar that you plan well in advance with your entire team and can commit to following. The calendar should flexible enough that you can act on unplanned events as they arise. The Internet is a fast-moving medium, so you may only have a number of hours to get in front of a story, or develop an action or online fundraising event for your community. Otherwise, try to keep your communications as consistent as possible. If you send emails on the same two days each week, for example, your list will begin to expect updates and action alerts on those days and be ready to follow through.

Each communication with the list membership must be done thoughtfully and with regard to real-world time. You don't want to email members too often, and you want to be especially aware of holidays and world events. You should generally avoid sending messages on Mondays and Fridays, as open- and response-rates are particularly low on both days. In our experience, the best time to send an email is early morning (before 10am) on Tuesday or Wednesday.

In terms of frequency, the acceptable number of emails per week or per month varies. It depends on things like: your relationship with your readers, whether your organization's issues are at the forefront of the news that week, if there is a time-sensitive action you are asking people to take, etc. It is critical to track the open rate of your emails to determine where you are being most successful—in terms of both frequency and tone—and consequently be able to back away from tactics that are not working.

Overall email sending rules:

• Keep it personal
• Keep it timely
• Keep it consistent.
• Keep it action-oriented
• Create relationships
• Don't be afraid to experiment
• Watch the numbers to determine what is and isn't working

Blogging Points

Most blog readers read dozens of blogs everyday, but they actually often spend very little time on any one blog—thus your goal is to grab them quickly, and hold them. They have only a handful of blogs that they read carefully. You want to be one of them. People want blogs to be provocative since they lend themselves to discussing cutting-edge topics in an informal fashion. People want to be challenged and made to think when they come to blog, and addressing the above issues will help put you on the blogosphere map.

• The three basic keys to a successful blog: engage with other blogs and your own readers, keep the material fresh and lively, and give people a reason to return.

• Be an honest broker. To build "street cred", a blog needs to establish itself as an honest broker in the blog world—a trusted source for news and information regarding its issues, and the blog needs to engage with the larger blogosphere.

• Blogs are about conversations. They live, breathe, and die based on the level of involvement with their readers and other blogs.

• Be a good blog neighbor. Blogs are successful because they build communities not just on their own blog, but across a group of blogs that converse. As you develop these brands, other blogs will begin linking to you. You can also strike up conversations with other blogs, build a blog-roll of solid voices for social change (we can provide selections and recommendations) and do guest-blogs on other major social change sites. All of this will further the conversation that you want to build.

• When your staff see an article or an entry on another blog that they feel adds something to the conversation, they should link to it on their blog—it builds readers in both directions, and it will bring more people to the site in the same way that it will establish your blog as an important stop in other people's blog reading.

• Use syndicating technologies. XML is a technical way of syndicating your blog to other blogs, a sort of personal AP Wire for your organization. It is a standard feature of most blogs, but make sure your blog has it, either through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) or Atom.

• Blog readers aren't a cross-section of America. A survey of over 17,000 blog readers this spring shows that blog readers are older, more affluent males: Over 70 percent of respondents were male, 61 percent were over 30, and 75 percent make more than $45,000 a year.

• They want news they can't find anywhere else. 54 percent of their news consumption is online. 21 percent are themselves bloggers and 46 percent describe themselves as opinion makers. They don't trust TV, and don't have especially high regard for print papers either.

• Blog readers are media-mavens: 21 percent subscribe to the New Yorker magazine, 15 percent to the Economist, 15 percent to Newsweek and 14 percent to the Atlantic Monthly.

• Politically, they are 40 percent Democratic, 22 percent Republican and 20 percent Independent. And, in the last six months: 50 percent have contributed more than $50 to a cause or candidate (compared to 25 percent of NYT.com users in last 12 months), and 5 percent have contributed more than $1,000.

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