Email

Sites we like that offer quality low-cost images

davida — 2008-10-10T20:32:47Z

A picture is worth a thousand words and thanks to many low-cost and free photo websites finding images for your site may only cost you pennies. Here are some great websites to scour if you want to find the perfect image for your website.

Keep in mind you always have to make sure you read the copyright information to ensure you are using the image as allowed by the copyright owner.We also suggest you make a note of where you got the image and what the licensing restrictions were when you upload it to your site (in Plone you can add this information to your image description).

If all else fails, just take some pictures yourself! You can get a lot of mileage out of carting a digital camera around with you. Best of all, you own the rights to your own photographs and no one else will have used them first.

iStockPhoto

A large and inexpensive stock photo library. http://istockphoto.com/

Flickr's Creative Commons pool

Flickr is photos and they have a great listing of photos that have the creative commons license attached to them. http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

Stock Xchng

A favorite around ONE/Northwest. They have both free and low cost photos available. http://www.sxc.hu

Openphoto.net

Openphoto has a great assortment of photos and has the items tagged so it is easier to find an image by subject. http://www.openphoto.net

Rhizome Images

An exclusive collection driven by images of positive, negative, and alternative green concepts, the archive includes rights-managed and royalty-free images of solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, mining and general power images along with landscapes, architectural and botanicals images to name a few. A dynamic alternative to traditional big-box image libraries, the collection now holds more than 1,000 images. http://www.rhizomeimages.com/

ELATED ImageKits

These are images you can download for free to help you build your website. They include buttons, bars, animations, stock photos and more - all created by the Elated team. http://www.elated.com/imagekits

Photoshare

Photoshare is a service of The INFO Project helping international non-profits communicate health and development issues through photography. Images are for non-profit educational use. Their online photo database currently contains more than 13,000 cataloged images shared by colleagues around the world for documentary use. http://www.photoshare.org

Mondolibrary

Mondolibrary is a quality image library, tailored to the needs of United Nations agencies, civil society organizations and public interest communicators, where you can find and download issue-relevant photos for your website or publications. Becoming a member is free. http://www.mondolibrary.net/

Dreamstime.com

At Dreamstime.com you can find a large variety of royalty-free stock images. http://www.dreamstime.com

Tips for Facilitating an Environmental Email List

jons — 2008-10-10T15:57:56Z

The popularity of email lists within the environmental community has increased enormously in recent years and are an important organizing tool. However, as the number of email lists has proliferated, the quality and focus of these lists has not necessarily improved along with it. There is considerable duplication of effort, and well-managed email lists take a long time to find. The combination of these factors has often caused activists to spend a lot of time in front of a computer rather than building relationships with people.

This manual was created to help environmental organizers learn to use email discussion lists more effectively. Its goal is not to encourage an increased volume of email. Rather, we want to encourage more strategic use of email, to make it more effective as an organizing tool.

Table of Contents

I. Tips for Moderating Email Discussion Lists
-- What is moderation?
-- Encouraging relevant discussion
-- Curtailing excess verbiage
-- Evening the flow of discussion
II. Large Scale Email Organizing (500 or more subscribers)
III. Technical considerations

Please note that this document mainly addresses discussion lists (lists which allow all subscribers to post), rather than broadcast lists (one-to-many email newsletters). Specific tips for email newsletters will be covered in a future article.

I. TIPS FOR MODERATING EMAIL DISCUSSION LISTS

Small to moderate-sized lists can be either moderated or unmoderated, but typically allow all subscribers to post. Regardless of whether a list is moderated, an email list moderator should play an active role in discussions, trying to promote relevant discussion and ensuring that the list is not being abused. The following sections will outline what the role of a facilitator should be in a discussion and will also provide some useful tips for email list moderators.

-What Is Facilitation?-

Progressive groups commonly use the term "facilitate" rather than "moderate" when referring to the person who "chairs" a meeting. Software or online services often employ the term "moderator". In common usage, the terms are nearly interchangeable.

The facilitator is concerned with promoting good process encouraging participation, allowing many people to participate and ensuring that the discussion remains democratic. Most of the software designed by various hosts usually attempts to apply some of the concepts of "in-person" facilitation to the Internet. This doesn't mean that facilitation online is the same as it would be in face-to-face situations; the medium is very different. However, email can be used successfully to encourage participatory dialogue and decision-making.

-Responsibilities of a List Facilitator-

Facilitation is what you make of it. On active discussions, it takes about 10 minutes a day to do a minimal job, 20 minutes to do a good job, 30 minutes to do a great job. Some discussions function as occasional alerts and the time commitment may be even lower. Facilitation is a skill that takes time to perfectthe more time you put into it, the better your discussion will be.

Key responsibilities of a list moderator/facilitator include:

1. Helping to create or revise the description used to promote your discussion and the welcome message people get when they subscribe.

2. Encouraging people to post (submit) material that is appropriate and relevant to guidelines in your welcome message -- and to be polite.

3. Cleaning the list when you get "bounces" due to bad email addresses or full mailboxes and helping users who have problems getting off the list.

4. Helping people subscribe or unsubscribe and answering any questions that pertain to that list.

5. Balancing power dynamics within the discussion -- often people who work 9-to-5 jobs that involve using computers have their opinions over-represented on lists.

6. Bringing debated topics to closure by summarizing and reposting the conclusions of important discussions.

Facilitators are also expected to be able to check their email regularly and to plan in advance when they are going to be away for more than 4 days to have someone help them. Facilitation can be shared with someone else if you configure the list hosting software to permit additional facilitators. You should also be able to make a commitment of several months.

Most people who have been involved in group meetings can exercise pretty good judgment about what is appropriate to put out on a list. The biggest obstacles are usually dealing with the email system, not because email itself is that complicated, but because the software that operates mailing lists can sometimes be confusing.

-Encouraging Relevant Discussion-

So, how in practice do you encourage people to send material to your list that "is appropriate and relevant to the topic of the list"? At first, the challenge is to get the discussion going. When new people subscribe, a "welcome" message could ask them to introduce themselves; since people are understandably "net-shy," a little gentle prodding may be necessary to make the introductions really happen.

Asking people questions that directly pertain to the topic of your list will help your discussion stay focused. For example, if you run a creative action list and you don't explicitly encourage people to share creative action ideas, what you end up getting on your list may mirror the rest of the Internet -- activism ideas may comprise less than 5% of the content, and creative actions less than 1%. By merely asking people to report what creative actions they have organized or participated in and then asking them to say how they were able to do it, you should be able to increase the flow of information related to "orchestrating creative actions" to at least 20%.

Here are some general suggestions on how you can open up discussion:

-- Announce on the list and elsewhere that the list will be used for discussion of a particular issue or event that is imminent and start this discussion off with an initial message introducing the issue or event and how it affects or has inspired activism

-- Establish a reserve of flyers and articles in your computer, either ones you have made or ones collected from other Web sites or lists, that you can send to the list whenever there is a lull.

-- Scan other lists on the Internet, picking out relevant articles to repost, sometimes tagging on provocative questions to generate feedback

-- Establish a list "editorial board" of some active users who are responsible for posting interesting material to the list

-- Encourage people to post drafts of their work to the list for comments (poster ideas, pamphlets, or analyses of previous actions)

-- Give private feedback to people who have posted good stuff, encouraging more

-- Advertise the list to get new subscribers with a fresh perspective

-- Conduct some sort of inquiry or survey requesting info on what's happening "out there." This can be as simple as saying "Do you know about any interesting actions or campaigns that are currently taking place?" (this works very well)

-- Remind people occasionally about the potential for email to build social movements

-- Put policies in the "welcome" file for new subscribers setting up guidelines to limit the length of messages, posted, or to prohibit the forwarding of messages, articles, etc. from other places to the discussion.

-Curtailing Excess Verbiage-

The flip side of the problem of getting a discussion going is the problem of preventing long discussions, which digress from the main purpose of the list. You may just have a problem with a few people posting too often, or people posting messages that are too long. Or you may have people who wish to disrupt the discussion.

History has shown that when progressive discussions on the Internet are effective, they get attacked and subverted by ideological individuals who criticize every point and every assumption, to the extent that a constructive discussion is no longer possible. For example, on the ACTNOW-L campus activism list, there were 100 messages posted per day for a few weeks debating libertarian positions on gun control. This activity effectively forced people interested in having their mailbox free for discussions about student activism to take themselves off the ACTNOW-L mailing list. Readership fell off 70% during this period.

To help your discussion stay focused, prevent it from circulating impertinent material, and to make sure it remains a friendly environment, we suggest that you adopt clearly stated list guidelines. These guidelines should be emailed to all new members, periodically be sent out to the list, be kept on a Web site for the list (if one exists).

We suggest that you consider including the following guidelines for email discussion lists.

A message may be judged inappropriate if it is:

-- not relevant to the subject of the list at hand.

-- dated (no longer relevant)

-- shameless self-promotion or a fund-raising gimmick.

-- a personal attack (it is O.K. to criticize someone's ideas, but not OK to call the person stupid.)

-- too long (anything over 35K should be checked to see if it needs to be that long)

-- contains large attachments

-- part of an endless back and forth argument that has grown tired

-- a me too message that doesnt add anything substantive to the discussion

-- part of too-frequent postings by the same individual (i.e. more than 7x a week) unless that person has made an extraordinary contribution

-- a local event of local interest posted to a non-local group

-- already cross-posted to many other discussions lists

-- in violation of guidelines you have established for your discussion.

If you need a sample set of list guidelines to work from, we have published a set of Sample Guidelines for Large Email Discussion Lists.

Even if you are running an unmoderated list and cannot prevent inappropriate messages from being posted, you can still remind people on the list about proper protocol if the list seems to be receiving too many inappropriate messages. Alternatively, you can email individuals if you see that they are repeatedly violating guidelines and, in a worst case scenario, unsubscribe them from the list.

Also, the Internet tends to produce a lot of action alerts that may draw people away from local activism. Repeatedly sending out action alerts that are about issues other than the one your list focuses on can result in your list becoming "just another hodgepodge activist list" that does not serve any specific purpose.

To help compensate for the globalizing tendency of the Internet, only post action alerts that are pertinent to your lists topic. Alerts should be relevant to your issue, constituency, or local area. By focusing on localized goals, action alerts can be much more effective. If a list is sending out ten action alerts a day notifying subscribers about another national campaign or an action that is taking place 1,500 miles away, it is unlikely that the one action alert out of 50 that is pertinent to the reader will actually get read. However, if a list focuses on a specific issue or local area, and only transmits action alerts that are relevant to that list, there is a greater probability that the action alert will be read and acted on.

Finally, a danger in Internet-inspired activism (or with groups focused exclusively on lobbying) is the tendency to bounce around to whatever "fashionable" issue has won this month's competition for national or international attention. You can counteract this tendency by periodically reminding people of the importance of staying focused on outlined goals and objectives, rather than becoming caught up in discussing the latest action-of-the-month.

-Evening the Flow of Discussion-

Finding the middle ground between an excess and an insufficient number of postings can be difficult. Listed below are a few suggestions that might help you to achieve equilibrium. These tips will also make messages sent by your list more absorbable.

-- Limit postings to no more than one or two per day per person (or per week for larger lists). This forces list members to wait for commentary by others and provides an opportunity for people who are able to check their email only once a day to participate equally with those members who are online 10 hours a day.

-- Set the list to default as a "digest" if your list software permits. This will cause all the messages in one day to be delivered in one large "batch" every 24 hours. The Hanford Watch list, dealing with controversies involving cleanup of radioactive waste, uses this approach. It makes the volume of 8-10 messages per day more "digestible."

II. LARGE SCALE EMAIL ORGANIZING

Tips for lists with 500 or more subscribers

Email lists with 500 or more subscribers seldom work well as discussion lists. Therefore, large email lists need to be configured differently than smaller lists. Similarly, if a list is intended to be used for organizing large numbers of people, it must be designed in a special way. There are several ways to approach a list this size.

The easiest way to administer a list of this size is to run the list as a broadcast list. Only the list owner can post to a broadcast list. Broadcast lists are thus often known as email newsletters. How frequently email newsletters are published depends on the interest level of subscribers, the amount of information that needs to be circulated, the time sensitiveness of material and how much time the facilitator/editor can spend developing newsletters.

A second alternative, which is primarily useful for moderated discussion lists that have grown too large to be administered in the manner that they previously were, is to have multiple moderators for a single list. Moderators can then share facilitation tasks, reducing individual time commitment and improving the quality of the list. In many cases when lists have become unmanageable because the facilitator no longer can devote the time necessary for administering the list, changing the design of the list to have multiple moderators can save the list. ONE/Northwests email list hosting software allows this feature to be turned on at your request.

Breaking down discussions into smaller, more focused subgroups and then sending out the most pertinent mail from each discussion to all the lists is another way to deal with large scale e-organizing. This is a good solution because it creates a greater sense of community and allows stronger relationships to develop through the list. Encouraging specialized or local discussions is an important way to reduce the amount of email that activists receive and to streamline the Internet to make e-activism more effective. Smaller lists with a narrower topic will be able to generate the most effective and directed discussions with the least amount of traffic. For instance, it is more sensible and efficient for a teacher to join a discussion for fourth grade math teachers (assuming that this is their specialty), than it does for the same teacher to join a nationwide discussion for teachers.

This is not to say that large lists are not as effective as smaller lists or vice versa, each has their virtues. It is just to highlight the importance of having a list designed for a specific purpose and running your list according to your goal. If your objective is to keep as many people as possible informed about your organization work or recent events, than a large list is ideal.

III. TECHNICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR EMAIL LIST FACILITATORS

List facilitators are the point-people for keeping on top of the technical and administrative aspects of the list. Some suggested best practices include:

-- Include list rules and posting guidelines in the list's welcome message, and configure the list hosting software to send the welcome message to all new subscribers.

-- Make the list guidelines clear, and enforce them, but avoid being dictatorial.

-- Keep your current members informed of any changes in the guidelines.

-- If you set guidelines, follow them yourself. Don't expect that just because you're the moderator, you should be able to blatantly promote yourself, etc.

-- Include instructions for leaving the list in the footer of list messages.

-- Problems with list members should be handled off-list and kept private.

Some list facilitators put in place rather stringent technical rules to keep postings readable and to prevent confusion. These types of rules are usually most appropriate for larger lists with active moderation, but may include such practices as:

-- Email must be in plain text, not in HTML or in some other format that is not accessible by all list members.

-- Messages should include the authors full name and organizational affiliation (if any).

-- Replies should not quote an entire previous message. Unfortunately, some email programs make this easy to do by automatically including the original email at the end of all replies. You should edit the original message to only quote relevant pieces and put your comments in context.

-- Copyrighted material should not be posted to the list. In general, long articles should be referenced by URL, rather than copying large portions into an email.

-- Cross-postings (messages sent simultaneously to other lists) are discouraged.

List facilitators may also filter accidental postings, such as SPAM, list administration ("add me," "remove me," etc.) and replies mistakenly sent to the list instead of an individual.

Again, you may find it helpful to refer to our Sample Guidelines for Large Email Discussion Lists as a source of inspiration for creating your own list guidelines.

Conclusion

Running a successful email discussion list requires active moderation, both to draw out discussion and to keep distractions in check. Email list facilitators also have an important role to play in managing the administrative and technical aspects of discussion lists, which helps lists maintain a high "signal to noise" ratio.

Are there specific "best practices" that you've found helpful when you're facilitating email discussion lists? Do you have questions or comments about this article? Drop us a line at info@onenw.org -- and we'll refine this article based on your feedback!

This article is adapted from Tips on Facilitating a Social Change Email List by Marissa King and Rich Cowan of Organizers' Collaborative, which can be found at: http://www.organizerscollaborative.org/

Preparing Images for the Web

sknox — 2008-10-06T15:39:37Z

Digital images can come from many places: your digital camera, the web, digital scanners, and other sources. Before uploading your images into Plone, you must often do some preparation first to optimize them. Common problems encountered with images that aren't ready for the web are:

images that are too large and overwhelm your pages visually
images files that are too large and slow down your page load time
images that are in a non-standard file format and don't load properly

Fortunately, there are some easy steps to take to prevent there sort of problems. It's a good idea to go through your image library before uploading your pictures into Plone. There are three main things to check before an image is ready to be uploaded:

Image dimensions: How big (in terms of pixels) is the image? Your website's content area has a fixed width generally around 350-400 pixels wide. So what's the best size to use? The simple answer is that the smaller you can use, the better. Under 200 pixels square is best for most images. Only use larger images if you need to display maps, groups photos or landscapes.

File size: How big (in terms of bytes) is the image? Just like image dimensions, the smaller the better. Under 100 Kb is good; under 50Kb is even better. The more images you have on a page, especially large ones, will slow down the time it takes for a visitor to load the page. Slow loading pages will drive people away from your website.

File format: What file format is the image in? The two formats that are cross-browser compatible are .jpg and .gif. Either one will work for a particular image, although .jpg is best for photo-realistic images while .gif is better for simple graphics. Avoid formats such as .tiff and .bmp

Image Software

In addition to these guidelines, you may also need to crop your images to focus on one part of the image. Plone does not have the ability to perform cropping, compressing, or re-sizing and must be done with software outside of Plone. Here are some ideas for software and web applications that can perform these tasks:

Adobe Photoshop - Expensive and probably overkill

Abode Photoshop Elements - Inexpensive

ShrinkPictures.Com - Free through-the-web tool

GIMP - Free and Open Source

Review of Email Newsletter Tools

jons — 2008-10-01T18:04:12Z

Idealware's A Few Good Email Newsletter Tools

ONE/Northwest has been using WhatCounts as the eNewsletter solution for its clients since about 2004. By 2007 we realized that the reasons for adopting this service needed to be reevaluated. The nature of email has changed substantially in the 21st century, and the direction and focus of our consulting practice has also changed quite a bit. In particular, we needed a solution that has tight integration with Salesforce, the powerful CRM database.

In Autumn of 2007 ONE/Northwest set out to explore the landscape of Email Service Providers (called ESPs in the trade) in an effort to understand how the world of eNewsletter delivery services had changed in the last few years.

Results

Vertical Response

At the end of our evaluation we decided upon Vertical Response as the focus for our email newsletter consulting. Early on in the evaluation process it was clear that this was a very strong candidate. All aspects of the user interface were well liked by the evaluators: images are easy to upload and insert, and the workflow from campaign creation to send is very clear and helpful. Vertical Response can also send actual postcards via the US Postal Service to your subscription list (designed and paid for by you), which is a service not seen anywhere else, but probably a good fit for non-profits. Salesforce integration is there, as well as segmentation, profile management, and best of all no monthly fees. You simply buy blocks of email "credits" when you are ready to do a send. This makes budgeting easier, especially for groups who send only occasionally. Demos are free and provide access to the full suite of tools.

The Comparison Matrix

For a quick-and-easy comparison of the various email newsletter tools that we evaluated, see our comparison matrix. You may click on the thumbnail image to view the full-sized matrix.

Use this matrix as a starting point for discovering which tools are most likely to meet your email newsletter needs. Don't base your final decision on this matrix alone. Every organization is a little different, so you'll want to do some evaluating on your own before choosing a tool.

For a full description of our evaluation process (updated for 2008) read our Comparison of Email Newsletter Service Providers [Word 200Kb].

Alternatives

Sympa

Sympa is the open-source email list tool that has powered ONE/Northwest email list hosting services since late 2002. It's very simple, extremely inexpensive, but offers a relatively limited feature set. It's a great starting point for low-budget groups or people just wanting to dip their toes into email newsletters. It's also good for folks who need to send to very large lists or very frequently at low cost.

Good candidates for Sympa:

Have no budget for email newsletter services
Need a system that requires minimal setup effort
Don't require advanced functions such as click-through tracking, polls & surveys, and forward-to-a-friend
Have the abililty to compose their own HTML email messages using tools such as Dreamweaver (plain-text messages are also an option)

For more information starting a Sympa email list see our page on email list hosting services.

WhatCounts

At the end of our evaluation, WhatCounts didn't stack up as well as some of the other services. Some features common to all others are missing from What Counts: Automatic inclusion of an unsubscribe link being the most obvious omission. All that said, WhatCounts has one of the best segmentation features out there and some robust reporting tools. The editor is decent, but inserting images is something of an arcane art which has been a stumbling block for many of our clients. Client of ONE/Northwest are eligible for major discounts - so groups who have very large (20,000+) subscriber lists could save money with this service.

Good candidates for WhatCounts:

Groups who need to do very large sends on a recurring basis
Need to use list segmentation frequently
Don't need Salesforce integration
Are comfortable with HTML editing

Tips for Using Visual Editors

sknox — 2008-09-09T15:52:58Z

Visual editors, also known as WYSIWYG editors, are commonplace today on the web. You use them when you post a blog entry, review a product, edit a webpage, or format an HTML newsletter.

Visual editors make writing HTML easier. They operate much like word processor software does in that you can format your text using a variety of icons and pull-down menus to get effects like: bold, italics, text alignment, font size, and so on. As you type away, push enter, and use formatting icons, the visual editor writes HTML code that the website, blog, etc will use to display your content.

The trouble is that sometimes HTML tags are entered that you didn't intend on, which can make getting the page layout you desire more difficult. One of the most common problems is that too much space gets put in between lines or paragraphs.

Below are some easy, but powerfully useful tricks when using visual editors on the web, to achieve a greater degree of control. Some of what is described below is specific to Plone, but the concepts are the same for any visual editor.

Paragraph vs. Line Break

When you push the Enter key on your keyboard, Plone (and most other visual editors) assumes that you are starting a new paragraph. There is a certain amount of space between lines that is used to demarcate paragraphs and sometimes it is more space that you need. If you want to force a single line break, you need to hold down the Shift key, then press Enter. Here's an example:

sampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletext

The Enter key was pushed between each of those lines above. Notice the amount of space between those lines. Now look at the same lines of text, this time using Shift+Enter:

sampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletext
sampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletext
sampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletextsampletext

There is a bit less whitespace between lines in the above example. Shift+Enter can also be quite useful for positioning text in relation to images. If you need to go the other way, shift+delete will erase a single line break.

Paragraph Style and <no style>

Similar to paragraphs and line breaks, the drop-down style menu in Plone also has an effect on how your lines are spaced.

Highlight some text on your Plone site, and look at the style drop-down menu in the toolbar. If you chose a regular block of text (not a heading or table), you should see the words Normal Paragraph. Normal paragraph, is the standard text style used in Plone. The style gives each line a particular height, and the font a particular size and color.

Sometimes, you may encounter lines of text that appear closer together than they do with Normal Paragraph. This is because, somehow or another, the text isn't recognized as being in a paragraph. When this is the case, you'll see the words <no style> in the drop-down menu.

The above paragraph was written with the Normal Paragraph style, but this one has <no style>, and therefore each line is rendered a bit closer together. Usually, you do not want to keep things this way, because your information is harder to read with the lines so close together. Fixing it is easy, though. Simply highlight the offending text and select Normal Paragraph from the style drop-down menu.

The Bottom Line

No visual editor is 100% accurate. By not having to learn HTML, they make our lives easier, but at the cost of a little control and accuracy. However, with the simple keyboard shortcuts mentioned above you'll find that some of the frustration can be overcome.

Writing Email Newsletters: Best Practices

sknox — 2008-07-30T16:10:11Z

For more ideas on writing email newsletters, visit the Vertical Response Blog

Writing an effective email newsletter is an exercise in brevity and restraint. It's very tempting to dress up your monthly newsletter with attractive graphics and lots of articles - much like how you might write a printed newsletter. However, an email newsletter and print newsletter are very different forms of communication. The average internet user receives dozens of emails every day. With your newsletter you are competing for a person's attention. Long, elaborate looking emails tend to be ignored.

Below are 8 things to consider when crafting your next email newsletter:

Keep it short! And link to your website whenever possible. Your newsletter should not contain the full text of each article (unless it's very short). Write a headline and lead-in paragraph, then link to your website for the full text. The idea is to grab people's attention quickly with easily digestible bits of information.
Use a minimum of graphical elements. Focus on useful and informative content, not pretty pictures. E-mail is just not the place for creative graphic design. E-mail messages based mainly on graphic images often are caught or blocked by SPAM filters. Also, most email clients turn images off by default unless the recipient explicitly turns them on.
Be consistent. Decide on a standard number of articles and a standard format for writing articles and stick to it! Always use the same colors and placement of elements within your newsletter. This will help in a number of ways: you'll build "brand identity" with your subscribers, they will find it easier to scan and read your newsletters if things are always in the same place, and you can do more effective analysis of your statistics.
Optimize for the preview pane. A large percentage of people only read email in their preview pane. This means that the top 200-300 pixels of your message is what people are going to see first. If all you have there is a large banner image, you won't get as many reads as you might if you include the titles of your articles in that space. Also keep an eye on the width of your newsletter. Under 700 pixels is best to account for low screen resolutions that some of your subscribers will have.
Use a table of contents. Put the titles of each article toward the top of your newsletter and use anchors to link to the text of each one. This allows people to quickly scan the articles in your newsletter.
Make your content scannable. Ideally you should have between 3 and 5 articles in each newsletter. More than 5 articles is just too long. Prioritize which articles you want to use and maybe keep some for the next newsletter. Use bulleted lists and boldface help make your articles scannable.
Use links properly. Avoid "click here" links. Instead use actionable language such as "read more . . .", "donate", or "unsubscribe". If you find that an article is more than about 200-300 words, cut it off and link to your website for the complete article.
Test, test, test! Send tests to a variety of email clients such as Outlook, Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail. You can avoid embarrassing mistakes by viewing your newsletter in different environments.

At ONE/Northwest we do our best to create HTML templates that are optimized for delivery via email. However, the template is only part of the story - how you write your content can have a profound effect on deliverability and readability.

Additional Resources:

Action Alerts: Best Practices

sknox — 2008-07-21T21:02:49Z

Writing an effective action alert means staying focused on specific actions you want your supporters to take. It's tempting to include donation links, latest news, or other content. The problem is that these are often distractions from the purpose of an action alert.

Here are several ways to improve the effectiveness of your next action alert:

A good subject line is critical. It's your chance to catch the attention of your members and supporters.
Use the body of the action alert to describe what the issue(s) are, why it's important to care, and how to take appropraite action.
Keep the content short and action focused. It's tempting to include many things in your email communications, but for these everything should be related to the issue you are trying to address and the decision makers you are trying to influence.
Link to your petition (or other center of action) many times in the body of the alert to increase the chance that people will go there. Use different wording for each link such as "Take action", "Tell your representative", or "Write a letter".
Images should be used sparingly. It's best to not use them at all unless you have one that helps tell the story. Examples could be a compelling image (of a strip mine) or informational graph (such as carbon emissions since 1950), but be sure that the bulk of the alert is text based.

Additional Resources

Ten Tips for Writing Effective Action Alerts

Techsoup's Writing Effective E-mail Alerts

Guidelines For Using CSS In Email Newsletters

sknox — 2008-07-16T15:24:17Z

Email newsletters are more popular than ever, and everyone loves to design a rich website-like newsletter for their subscribers. Unfortunately, email isn't the web. Your beautiful design work might look great in one email program, but chances are when you look at the same work a different email program the results will not be the same.

Why? In a nutshell, some email clients are moving away from full CSS support. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is the technology that allows for modern, powerful, flexible website designs. (If you don't know what CSS is or how to use it, chances are the rest of this article isn't for you -- but show it to your email newsletter designer!)

As of early 2007, Gmail is the most restrictive as it will ignore all external and embedded style sheets. (It will support inline styles.) Worse, Microsoft's just-released Outlook 2007 actually takes a few big steps backwards in its CSS support. (Check out Campaign Monitor's article for the shocking lowdown!) For this reason, we consider compatability with Gmail to be the baseline CSS support to design to. If it looks great in Gmail, chances are, it will look great in most other clients.

Even with inline styles, there are some restrictions. Fortunately, deprecated tag attributes will fill the role of certain disabled inline styles.

So here are ONE/Northwest's guidelines for creating successful email newsletters that will look good even in the worst email clients. We don't mention much about design aesthetics, just coding practices that will succeed in all environments. (For testing, we used Gmail, Outlook 2003, Outlook Web Access, Hotmail, and Yahoo).

Things To Avoid

Do not rely on external (<link rel="stylesheet">) or embedded style sheets (those contained within the <style> tag above the <body> tag). This is the most important thing to avoid. Many email services cut everything above the body tag and disable external style sheets.
Don't use javascript in an email newsletter. Ever. There's no better way to have your newsletter marked as spam.
Don't use tag attributes on the <body> tag (such as widths or background colors). Most email services ignore the <body> tag. You can try putting your whole newsletter inside a <div> and apply inline styles to it. Results may vary.

Things To Do

Use tables for layout. Lots of them. You're welcome to try <div> tags for positioning and layout, but our research shows that tables are more consistently supported. C'mon now. Get over your table-phobia. But do very simple layouts, avoiding lots of nested tables.
Use inline styles liberally in tables. In fact, you'll find you can get the best mileage out of inline styles in <td> tags. That way you are setting up little style regions within each table. Think of these inline styles as miniature style sheets. This allows non-technical users to swap content in and out of pre-formatted cells in a modular fashion.
Declare width, cellpadding, and cellspacing for all tables and table cells. Doing so will result in a fixed width for the template. This helps because most people will view a newsletter in a preview pane which is much smaller than the width of their monitor.
Test your newsletter by sending to yourself or colleagues. This will give you the chance to catch any problems before your whole subscriber list does! Send test messages to a variety of email clients such as Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Gmail.

Images

Don't use background images. Gmail, among others, will ignore any url() attribute in an inline style, and the simple background= tag attribute. You can use background colors if you wish.
Don't use images for important content like calls to action, headlines and links to your web site. Outlook, Gmail and others turn images off until allowed by the user. If your entire newsletter is graphical, all your recipients are going to see is a lot of broken images.
Provide alt text for all images. That way the reader will see some content in place of the disabled images. This works particularly well for logos.
Declare BOTH height AND width parameters for images. Poor old Outlook Web Access especially needs this for your table layout to display properly.

External sources:

An awesome article by Xavier Frenette which lines out exactly which properties, tags, and selectors are or are not supported by various email clients.

A similar article by David Greiner which includes information about Macintosh

Campaign Monitor's Guide to CSS Support in Email

Campaign Monitor's rundown on CSS support in Outlook 2007

Moment Stories and Movement Stories: Four Rules for Effective Email Alerts

jon — 2008-05-20T16:11:25Z

Ever wonder just how organizations like MoveOn structure their email alerts to make them as effective as possible? At a 2008 New Organizing Institute training in San Francisco, Ben Brandzel, former MoveOn.org Advocacy Director provided the following four rules for effective email alerts. ONE/Northwest staffers Drew Bernard took notes and adapted his talk into this text. Any wisdom is Ben's; any mistakes are ours.

Rule #1: Cut the fat

Keep alerts short and think like a reporter: put the most important stuff up top. Get rid of the wordy, patronizing "happy talk" that we all tend to start articles with. See Jakob Nielsen's article "Writing Inverted Pyramids in Cyberspace" for more.

Rule #2: Track what works

Pay very close attention to what works and what doesn’t work. If an alert fails, don’t just assume it was an anomaly, figure out what was wrong with it and make the next one better.

Rule #3: Include a "Moment Story"

The first section of your email alert, before the action link, should be a Moment Story, which consists of three elements:

The “Cris-i-tunity”: a combination of crisis and opportunity: usually a reflection of something in the media or the opportunity for the campaign.
Reader-focused theory of change (RFTC): a chain of events that begins with the reader and ends with the crisis being happily resolved or opportunity has been achieved. Ask yourself, "Am I telling a story about a chain of reaction that leads to success."
The Ask: the first action that will trigger the chain of events that you have just outlined in your reader-focused theory of change that will resolve the cris-i-tunity

The last thing to do is to look for weak spots. You may find that some of it may be a stretch for your readers. Some of it may not seem realistic or credible. Edit until it does.

For example: Bush won’t actually back down on his global warming platform even if we flood him with emails. You might want to include a historical example. If you identify a weak spot in your RFTC to back up your point, then you might need to re-think your whole approach because it may not be compelling enough.

Rule #4: Include a "Movement Story"

The "Movement Story" is the part of your email in which you (briefly) recount the story of the movement that brought us to this opportunity for action.

The moment story draws you in; the movement story is what is going on. Tell stories about what is going on and how we got to this moment. Reflect back on the organization. Be specific in the story you are telling. Give people a story of success and that we are growing and getting better.

People often like to start their emails with the movement story. This is natural, but wrong! Move it below the action link.

Domain Name Registration Recommendations

jon — 2008-04-22T16:05:54Z

Back in the old days, when small organizations got their Internet access, email hosting and website hosting services from a single provider, registering a domain name was fairly straightforward: your ISP did it for you, and made any changes that were necessary.

Today, our needs have become more sophisticated. For example:

We might choose to get our email services from Google, and to host our website with a web design consultant (like ONE/Northwest!).
We might want to run our email through a spam-filtering service like Electric Embers' NPOShield.
We might want to redirect subdomains "e.g. lists.ourdomain.org" to an email list broadcasting provider like WhatCounts, or to an online donation service provider.

All of these scenarios rare much easier if our domain name registrations and DNS records are not tied directly to our hosting provider, but are instead managed by an independent domain registrar who offers solid DNS management services.

ONE/Northwest has had good experiences with:

GKG.net: GKG provides basic domain registration and DNS hosting services. Domain registration is $7.95/year per domain. Their services are straightforward, and no-frills, and their management tools are fairly straightforward. We've had generally good experiences with their customer service. GKG offers very limited email hosting services.

We've heard good things about:

NameCheap.com As their name suggests, NameCheap is a low-cost, few-frills domain registrar. Their level of service and pricing seems very comparable to GKG.
1and1.com Another low-cost provider.
Dreamhost.com Dreamhost is more of a full-service web, email and domain hosting provider. But they offer a very attractive free hosting package to nonprofits, and offer domain registration for $9.99/year so even if you don't use their web hosting services, it's still a pretty good deal.

What we recommend

If you're registering a new domain

Use a registrar such as GKG, NameCheap or Dreamhost.

If your current domain registration is expiring

Renew it with your current registrar, unless you are in the midst of changing web and email providers.

If you are considering a change of email or web hosting providers

Consider transferring your domain to a new registrar such as GKG, NameCheap or Dreamhost. It will make your upcoming email/web hosting provider change much smoother. You may need assistance from someone who is comfortable with domain registration and DNS configuration processes to guide you.

Be aware that most domain registrars will try to sell you expensive, unnecessary add-on services like web hosting, private domain registration, etc. etc. In general, you should avoid these offers. In most cases, superior services are available elsewhere for less.

ONE/Northwest Website Consulting Clients

Once you register your domain, ONE/Northwest will provide DNS hosting services to you as part of your regular website hosting fees. This means that you only need basic domain registration services from your domain registrar.

Putting Email To Work

jons — 2008-03-25T22:10:58Z

by Michael Stein

This article was originally published in Grassroots Fundraising Journal

Oh, email! For many individuals and organizations, email has transformed both the quantity and quality of human communication. Simultaneously intimate and public, email is a daily symbol of the potential and danger that technology promises. To some, email is a simple and sublime medium to communicate in the modern world. To others and often the same people it is a reviled and bottomless pit of unwanted spam that infuriates and frustrates.

Nonprofit organizations of all sizes and budgets are exploring how to integrate email into a comprehensive communications and fundraising strategy. Some are far along the road of doing so; others are just starting out. This article provides an overview of why and how to use email in your fundraising program.

THE BENEFITS OF EMAIL

Email is a flexible and easy-to-use medium for both the sender and the receiver. Email is important precisely because it's regular, constant, and often the way most people engage with the internet. It's fast, cheap, easy to use, and informal. There's also that quality of its being "viral" that is, email is content that's easy for your readers to pass on by forwarding. As many organizations can attest, this can exponentially expand your network and reach.

Email brings immediate response, allowing us to gauge how well we're reaching our constituencies. The benefits of that immediacy goes both ways: now your community can have more access to you and provide the gold of any good relationship: a dynamic feedback loop.

Email can also provide content in its own right. The voice, style, presentation and format are all critical to your success. Email is fast, but that doesn't mean that you can jot off emails without foresight and the help of an editor.

Recently, one organization, MoveOn.org, has demonstrated how effective the personal email voice can be. MoveOn has a database of two million email subscribers, but each mailing they send feels as though it's written to just the reader receiving it because each communication is written in a direct, simple, clear and personal voice. One way they achieve this is by keeping each email focused on one central thought.

The same virtues of email also highlight its limitations. While it's fast and easy, it's also rather "disposable," as it's easy to delete. The very quality of immediacy can negate its power and impact. When sending email, we are dealing with the dreaded domain of unwanted email or "spam," a sensitive issue for many email users.

That "send" button warrants perhaps more caution and respect before we use it. From a communications point of view, it's important to be sensitive to when it's appropriate to use email, and when the phone or regular post mail is better. From a communications point of view, it's important to be sensitive to when it's appropriate to use email, and when the phone or regular post mail is better.

INTEGRATE EMAIL INTO YOUR FUNDRAISING MIX

There are several reasons that email should be seen as the foundation, or basic unit, of your online fundraising practices and strategy. The key to understanding email and leveraging it to suit your needs is to recognize how it gracefully complements all aspects of your communications from your website to the forms people fill out when they mail in a donation and the ways you ask for donations. Simply stated, email is now a vital part of all of your outreach and communications.

Email can complement your fundraising efforts by enabling you to create campaigns, conduct seasonal fundraising, and work across mediums by integrating it with your other fundraising strategies, including direct mail, web, phone, face-to-face solicitations, and events.

Email can be effective at augmenting some of your current fundraising practices. For example, you may choose to send an email newsletter at the same time that you're mailing a direct mail appeal , or send a personal email "thanks" after you've made a phone call. More and more, supporters and donors are becoming comfortable with being contacted in multiple mediums. Email is now ubiquitous enough that you can even make the "ask" in email. Asking for financial support via email is most effective when that donor originally donated via your website.

In all these instances, the idea is to use email to cultivate dynamic, strong relations with your donors and prospective donors.

HOW TO USE EMAIL TO EXPAND YOUR DONOR RELATIONSHIPS

There are three major formats to reach your members or prospective members through email: email newsletters, action alerts, and donation appeals.

1) Publish a Regular Email Newsletter to Reach Out and Touch People

The email newsletter is arguably the most effective use of email at this time. It's malleable, dynamic, and easy to produce. The email newsletter is where using email shines. You can keep your community in the loop, present a personal and branded mode of communication, conduct a very efficient and inexpensive method of regular updates, and get as fancy or plain as you want to.

One common email newsletter formatting question for organizations concerns the "plain text or HTML" issue. HTML stands for "Hypertext Markup Language," which is the basic programming language for creating web pages. HTML when in email enables messages to appear with complex formatting of fonts, columns, and embedded images.

There are increasing numbers of inexpensive tools to use to create your own HTML email template, and several internet vendors specialize in HTML email creation and delivery. Recent studies demonstrate that recipients receiving messages in HTML are more likely to pass the message on and to "click-through" to the organization's website.

However, not everyone has the kind of sophisticated email application required to view HTML. Fortunately, most vendors who send email newsletters use what's called an "HTML sniffer," a feature that automatically substitutes a plain-text email message if the recipient's email program cannot handle HTML. Keep in mind, too, that the more graphically fancy your newsletter is, the longer it takes to download regardless of the email application.

[ONE/Northwest provides several email newsletter solutions to Northwest environmental groups.]

2) Use the "Action Alert" Model to Mobilize Supporters

The action alert is perhaps the first real application of email by nonprofits, beginning with simple text emails circulating among lists of affinity groups and communities. The action alert has evolved, thanks to the advancements in vendor technology, to provide more leverage and options for how you choose to mobilize your constituencies.

For example, you can now efficiently target action alerts to specific individuals by narrowing your list by any of your database fields, such as zip code, state, or issue interest. Technology also allows you to create follow-up emails based on previous responses to earlier action alerts. So, for example, you might filter your list by all the people who sent faxes from your website last month.

3) Don't Fear Using Email to Make a Direct Appeal for Donations

Most donors give simply because they're asked. It's that simple. Email can be effectively used for donation appeals. Email tends to work best when it's used as part of a coordinated effort across multiple mediums. For example, you may be raising money to send a delegation to the state capital by conducting a variety of fundraising activities, such as house parties, a print mailing, and a phone campaign. Adding an email component to this campaign and encouraging people to forward the email to five friends will help spread the word and tie in well to the other activities.

Other occasions that work well for email appeals are seasonal occasions, such as an annual fund drive, an awards dinner, or a holiday. Again, online fundraising works best when it's coordinated with a real-world activity.

MoveOn.org is a vivid case study in how personal, direct, and simple email solicitations can work. MoveOn follows a few basic guidelines that ensure their success: they solicit on rare occasions that tie in with real-world urgencies (such as the invasion of Iraq); they make the pitch transparently clear and tied to a specific campaign; and they communicate with clear language and from a distinct person.

HOW TO GET MORE FROM EMAIL

There are several other uses to which you can put email.

Use Email to Drive Traffic to Your Website

Email notices are particularly effective at getting your email reader to visit your website. If your organization's website is rich in resources and content, with frequent changes or additions of information, you can use email notices to inform people when you have made updates to your website.

Specific update emails can be a simple and quick way to drive traffic to your website, while providing a service to your community. This is also a good way to use your email newsletter, as it can provide hyperlinks to new content on the website.

While your website is extremely important, it's vital to view your email and website as integrated and working together. View email as the outreach aspect of your website and your organization's content; it's what goes out, and on the website is where the substantial content resides. Emails are tasters, reminders ideally used for short messages, time-specific items, and action prompts.

The email should drive traffic to your site with links. Using technology to track your email "click-throughs" allows you to measure how well your email efforts are working . When you send an email out, how is the traffic to your site affected? If you don't see a rise in traffic, how can you modify your email messaging to enhance traffic?

Segment Content to Communicate Better

Many organizations decide to tailor their email messaging to their various constituencies and communities. If your organization has lots of rich content to share, it's extremely effective to package this content to specialized lists.

For example, the nonprofit think tank Redefining Progress begins with a simple link on their homepage that the reader can click to receive electronic updates about the group's work. The visitor is taken to a sign-up page where they can select from a menu of newsletters based on issue areas. This enables Redefining Progress to segment their list based on issue area, while learning more about their community and catering to the distinct needs of their diverse constituencies.

What does this have to do with fundraising? Everything. Stronger traction with your members and community through more personalized communication translates into higher yields when it comes time for fundraising. It also increases the value to the reader of participating in the organization.

Evaluate Your Email Effectiveness

It's essential to evaluate your email practices continually to gauge their effectiveness and whether you are meeting your desired outcomes. Assembling a profile of your email practices can inform decisions about features like formatting, content, and timing.

Measure the number of new email newsletter subscribers and the number of unsubscribers every month, charting them in a spreadsheet. When you notice spikes in either subscriptions or unsubscriptions, look at what was happening with your e-messages during that time to identify how your approach is working and what may need to be modified.

Many email vendors used for sending electronic newsletters have built-in features for tracking whether the email is received, opened, and whether the recipient clicked through to your website or took some other action, such as forwarding the email to others. You will find this information to be enormously valuable and it's exciting to have such a "live" reading of how people are responding to your communications. Email is one of the few mediums that can allow you to do that.

Use Email Respectfully

Issues of privacy are increasingly important for people on both sides of the email screen the sender and the receiver. Therefore, when you ask for people's email address, let them know exactly what you intend to do with that information.

The most important things to make clear in a first email are whether or not you will share their email address with other partners, how people can unsubscribe ("optout"), and how people can contact you with complaints.

The last thing you want is for people to feel you are abusing their email address. This fear can be easily avoided by making your practices and intentions transparent from the get-go. A good method is to create a privacy statement on your website that people can review when they sign up or give you their email address.

Avoid Spam Filters with Effective Practices

After all your work, you need to know how to avoid having your lovingly crafted email newsletters and other email communiques relegated to the "trash" bin by a spam filter. Spam filters are programs email users can set up that automatically delete email messages according to criteria the user establishes.

A large factor in avoiding having your message deleted has to do with the From, To, and Subject lines in your email communications. The "From" line should clearly identify your organization so that there is no doubt in the recipient's mind about who the email is from. The "To" line should show the name of one recipient, rather than a "suppressed list." The "Subject" line should identify the email newsletter and maybe the issue date.

For example, each email from MoveOn.org comes from one of their staff, and this name appears in the From: line in the email, thereby reducing the likelihood of interpreting their emails as spam.

Collect Email Addresses Everywhere You Can

Does your website offer a box where the visitor can enter their email address to receive further information by email or subscribe to an email newsletter? When people join your organization, whether by postal mail or online, is there an email field to enter?

Collect email everywhere, both online and off. An email address is a basic piece of data about your donor, member, supporter, or affiliate. Therefore, you want to do everything in your power to make sure you have this data.

Do an inventory on how you collect data and information about your prospective supporter. There should be a sign-up option on all your website pages and on all your giving forms, phone calls, mailings, at all events in other words, at every opportunity.

While you're collecting email addresses, be sure to have people also give their full name, postal address, zip code, and possibly interests. It's also useful to know how they found their way to your organization.

[For more ideas on gathering email addresses, see http://www.onenw.org/bin/page.cfm/pageid/31.]

EMAIL IS ABOUT CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIPS

Using email for fundraising is much more than literally soliciting for support. It's about cultivating relationships, keeping the feedback loops intact, and thereby ensuring a stronger base of support. Email is a versatile tool that can be leveraged to greatly enhance and complement all aspects of donor and member relations.

Once this broader picture is firmly in place, it may become more evident how each aspect of how your organization uses email can be linked to your overall fundraising efforts. The range is wonderfully broad: from collecting email addresses on your website to a carefully executed online fundraising campaign that uses email as its central vehicle. As a core component of a broad stakeholder communications strategy, email can be the glue to hold your donor relations together and create traction in your communications to yield wonderful results.

Finally, email is not intended to be a substitute for "live" relationships meeting with your donors and other supporters, whether one-on-one or in group settings. What email does is add another method to be in touch with people. So be careful not to start depending on email as an all-purpose fundraising communication vehicle. The harder work of real relationship building still needs to be done.

Michael Stein is a technology writer and internet strategist with two decades of experience working with nonprofits, foundations, labor unions and technology companies. Michael is the author of three books about the internet including "The eNonprofit: A Guide to ASPs, internet Services and Online Software. Find him online at http://www.michaelstein.net/

Fixing Poorly-Formatted Email

jons — 2007-08-16T17:37:20Z

With the increasing use of email, more and more messages are appearing in our inboxes looking rather bedraggled from excessive forwarding, poor formatting, or both. Not only does this make the messages hard to read, but it makes it virtually impossible to efficiently cut-and-paste the text for use in another program. And the problem just gets worse as you forward the mail!

==============
Line Breaks: The Root of the Problem
==============
The key to understanding why poorly-formatted email happens is to understand how line breaks are used in email. Back in the old days, before there was multimedia on the Web, all email was just plain text. (A lot of it still is!) An email message contained many separate lines of text, each separated by a "hard return," just as paragraphs in your word processor are separated by a paragraph mark.

Even though you don't type in a "return" at the end of each line, your email program automatically adds these line breaks when it sends your message. This is necessary because many of the systems that process email on the Internet will not handle lines that are longer than about 80 characters. The line length of your email messages can be controlled in your email programs' preferences, and generally defaults to about 72-75 characters.

The second contributing factor to poorly-formatted email is the fact that the Internet has evolved a convention (i.e. an arbitrary standard, or a habit) for marking text that is included from another email with a ">" character at the beginning of each line. Each time a message is responded to or forwarded, another ">" is added, making the line one character longer. Eventually, the lines in the forwarded message are longer than the line length in your email program, and those long lines are split into two when the message is sent, producing messages that look like this:

> See Dick. See Dick run.  Run, Dick, run.  See

Jane

> dance.  Dance, Jane, dance. Spot is a very good

dog.

A third thing that can cause "messy" email is the fact that some older mail programs do not gracefully handle the advanced character sets that let us use "special characters" such as bullet marks, foreign letters, and other non-standard characters. Eudora and many other email programs use something called "quoted-printable" encoding to send these special characters, which requires that the receiving email program support an email standard called MIME. If the email program of your recipient is not "MIME-compliant," then they might see text that looks like this:

>See Dick=20 >See Dick run.  Run, Dick, run.=20

See Jane dance.=20 >Dance,.=20 Jane, dance.=20

The solution is to turn off "quoted-printable" encoding for messages that are going to people with older mail programs.

In Eudora, there is a button in the compose mail window marked "QP." Usually it's toggled on. Press it to turn it off. It will stay off until you turn it on again.

Outlook and Outlook Express do not use quoted-printable encoding by default. You can make sure it's not on in Outlook at Tools>Options>Mail Format>Settings. The "Encode text as" item lets you choose none, quoted-printable or base64 encoding. In Outlook Express, the same choices can be found at Tools>Options>Send>Plain Text Settings (under Mail Sending Format).

==============
What You Can Do To Prevent Line Breaking
==============
Unfortunately, there's no way to prevent forwarded emails from eventually running over the line limit. While it might seem that turning off automatic line breaking in your email program is a good idea, doing so will result in some people receiving messages that consist of one long line of text.

Another potential solution would be to send "new" messages out with very short line lengths (70 characters, perhaps), which would allow others to forward messages multiple times before they began to break. However, unless you adjusted the line length up to 75-80 for messages you reply to forward, your "non-original" emails will become very messy indeed. Even worse, most email programs don't offer a handy setting for line length; they bury the control deep in the preferences where it's a pain in the rear to change. Dynamically adjusting line lengths is thus not a very viable option.

Newer email programs such as Eudora Pro 4.0, Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Netscape 4.0 support HTML-formatted email. HTML-formatted mail doesn't have internal line breaks, and thus is not vulnerable to "spontaneous decomposition," but many people are still using old mail programs such as Eudora Light that simply can't read HTML mail. And a lot of email list programs will scramble HTML-formatted mail. While it's clear that the Internet is moving in the direction of HTML-formatted mail, we're not there yet, and we generally recommend avoiding HTML-formatted mail for widely read messages.

If you set your email to NOT append ">" characters to replies and forwards, it would reduce the chances of the lines breaking unexpectedly. (Unless your email program was set to create shorter lines than the lines in the original message you've received.) But delimiting reply/forward text with the ">" character is important because it helps make it clear which words are yours, and which are someone else's. If you decide to disable reply-marking, then we recommend that you be very clear to explicitly attribute other people's words so they're not mistaken for your own.

==============
The Best Solutions (For Now)
==============
If that's a bit overwhelming, don't worry. There are two easy things you can do to make email formatting much better.

Make sure your email program is up to date. Older email programs don't support rapidly-evolving email standards such as rich text formatting, HTML formatting, clickable hyperlinks, etc. See our document on Recommended Internet Software for lists and links to up-to-date email programs.
There are two easy-to-use programs that will allow you to quickly fix messy email that comes in BEFORE you send it along to others. There are several free or shareware tools that do this quickly and easily.

For Windows, the best thing we've found is "eCleaner." A free program, it can be found at:
http://members.tripod.com/schin26/index.htm
eCleaner also has a plug-in available for Outlook 2000 that will allow to clean-up email messages from within Outlook 2000.
A similar program for the Macintosh is called "Magic Bullets," and it can be found at http://members.aol.com/billKarsh/MacProdPages/MagicBullets.html.

We strongly recommend that you download one of these tools today. They're very simple to use, and will make your email more effective.

Writing Online: Best Practices

sknox — 2007-07-23T23:25:58Z

Following are some guidelines, tips, and hints for writing more effective web content. This is a wide-ranging article, but we hope it will help whether you are writing for a web page, email newsletter, action alert or anything else that will primarily be read online.

Keep it short!

Above all other advice, this is probably the most important point. Online writing needs to be much shorter than other writing. Research shows that people scan much more than they read every word. Therefore, you want to make it easy for your visitors to scan for information quickly.

Large blocks of text are much more difficult to read online than in print. Long paragraphs that run on and on with nary a break will drive all but the most dedicate visitors away. Break up your writing into shorter sentences, and shorter paragraphs than you would for print.

On your website, avoid including lengthy descriptions about your mission, achievements, history, etc on the homepage of your site. Your site's "About Us" section is usually better for those things. Use your homepage to showcase what's new and to guide difference audiences towards the content that will help them accomplish their goals.

Subheadlines, lists and boldface make content easier to scan

Along with writing short, easily digestible chunks of text, you should also make good use of boldface, lists and subheadlines. These elements help guide readers' eyes towards the most important content, and make it easier to absorb large content.

Another way to break content up on a page is to use a bulleted list. Write a short sentence and then support it with bullet points. Example:

Here's some ways you can reduce your carbon emissions:

Commute to work
Drive a fuel-efficient car
Turn your thermostat down when you leave the house
Turn lights off at work when you leave for the evening

You don't need to end sentences in a bulleted list with a period. They tend to stop the eyes from scanning anyway.

Use hyperlinks effectively

Write short, to-the-point pages and link to other pages on or off your site to allow visitors to find more information. The average time new visitors spend on any one page is around 30 seconds. Take advantage of that short attention span by providing lots of links to explore.

Web usability experts discourage the use of the phrase "click here" for links. Instead use an accurate description of the linked content worked into a sentence. For example, instead of

"To see our most recent annual report, click here"

try

"For more information, see our most recent Annual Report."

This is a usability issue because if a vision-impaired person is using a web reader, "Annual Report" will tell them about the content, while "click here" gives them no real information about where the link will take them.

Build trust with citations

Many people are wary of linking off to other website for fear that their visitors will simply spend time on other sites instead of theirs. This is not necessarily so. You want people to think of your site and the center for good information whether that information lives on your website or not. The idea here is to build confidence in your site visitors that if they want information about a subject, they'll come to you first. People prefer websites that provide "click worthy" links to good information.

It is particularly hard for people to assess the accuracy and quality of information they find online, so consider citing your sources whenever possible.

Use active voice

Never use a passive voice construction like "Marketing and communications plans are being developed." Instead, try "We are developing marketing and communications plans" that make it clear who is performing the activity. Using the active voice is one of the best ways to write more clearly and more directly and to avoid getting caught in a dead, dry, bureaucratic voice.

Use "inverted pyramid" construction on top level pages

Sometimes called the "Model T" method, the idea here is to load your most important information at the top of the page and at the top level of your website. Often this is little more than a few sentences or bullet points. You are trying to capture the interest of your site visitors early on. Save the more specialized and lengthily pages for deeper levels of your site.

Downloadable file or webpage?

We all use word-processing software to generate at least some of our content. Often, web content is generated from a collection of various word processor documents, PDFs and spreadsheets.

When is appropriate to copy that content onto a webpage and when is it better to simply upload to original document so that your visitors can download it themselves? It's a difficult decision, with no clear right and wrong.

We suggest three criteria:

1) If the content is longer than about 10 printed pages, or intended to be read as a whole, you should probably post the document for download. Few people have the patience to read such long documents online -- they will probably print them out anyway. Long documents often benefit from the additional formatting that you can do in print. Finally, it can be very cumbersome to convert that much text to HTML.

2) If your original document contains complex graphics or layouts it is better to post it for download. Complex documents generally can't be faithfully rendered into standards-compliant HTML.

3) If your content is short and non-graphical, it is probably best to turn it into a straight-HTML webpage. It would be silly to make your visitors download a one-page Word document. If you have a longer document that visitors may only want to read a short section of, you should consider breaking the document into a series of shorter HTML pages.

Additional reading

Following are some online resources that contain more great tricks and tips for writing more effectively online.

How Users Read on the Web

Writing for the Web

Headlines are Critical Content

How to Communicate Effectively Online (PDF)

Got a favorite of your own? Leave a comment and let us know!

Registering a Domain Name

jons — 2007-06-26T17:48:38Z

What is a domain name?

If you're reading this online, you're already familiar with Internet domain names perhaps without even knowing it. An Internet domain name is essentially the unique, "user friendly" name for each machine connected to the Internet; they make it easy to keep track of people, organizations and businesses who use these machines for email, the World Wide Web and other Internet services. In email addresses, the domain name is everything after the "@" symbol in an address (i.e. in "stevea@onenw.org", "onenw.org" is our domain name). In web addresses, domain names usually found after the "www", as in "www.onenw.org." Again, "onenw.org" is the domain name. These friendly names mask a more complex numbering system used to keep track of the hundreds of thousands of machines on the Internet.

Domain names, like street addresses, are unique; each machine has a unique name that no other machine on the Internet can use. To keep all these domain names straight, they are managed by an organization in Virginia known as Network Solutions. Network Solutions maintains a large database listing all the domain names currently registered by companies, non-profits, educational institutions, etc.

Why should I register a domain name for my organization?

Two important reasons. First, registering a domain name enables you to establish a recognizable presence in cyberspace that you can use for your Web site (www.myorganization.org) and for email addresses (myname@myorganization.org). This helps people find and recognize you on the Internet, and helps establish the online identify of your organization. Second, having your own domain allows you to "move" your Internet presence to another Internet service provider without having to change your email or Web address on business cards, letterhead, and other materials. If you find a better service provider, it is fairly easy to move your information to the new provider's server and arrange for all inquiries to your domain (emails and Web browsings) to go to this new machine. This portability in a time of ever-changing Internet rates and services makes sense for groups that are planning to be online for the duration. Again, Domain names must be unique, and they are being allocated on a first-come, first-served basis by Network Solutions. Even if your organization is not ready to make the leap to individual email accounts for every staff member and to the World Wide Web, registering a domain now that clearly reflects the name of your organization will prevent others from "taking" this name later. As an example, if another organization had already secured "onenw.org" as their domain, we may have been forced to select "onenorthwest.org" or "1northwest" as our domains. Still workable, but not as easy to work with.

How do I register a domain name? How much does it cost?

Domain names are administered locally by Internet service providers (i.e. the company that provides you with your email account and/or Web site), who work directly with Network Solutions. To register your domain, do the following:

Select a domain name that closely matches the name of your organization or is otherwise easy to recognize as representing your organization. Shorter domain names are generally better (saves on keystrokes!). For example, when we registered a domain for ONE/Northwest, we selected the domain name "onenw.org".
To see if anyone has already claimed that domain as their own, go to GKG.net and check your proposed name. Type in your preferred domain name ("enviro.org", for example) and hit the search key. If it returns a match, you're out of luck: someone else has already registered that name. "No match" means that the name has not been taken, and it is probably yours to register.
Register your domain name with GKG.net (cost is ~$9/year).
You'll need to also establish web/email hosting service with a high-quality web/email hosting provider. If you aren't ready to "go live" with a website and email, then you can "park" your domain name with GKG for next-to-nothing.

For more information

GKG.net: http://www.gkg.net

Recommended Web, Email and Domain Name Hosting Providers

jons — 2007-06-26T17:46:19Z

This article had become outdated, and the landscape of web, email and domain hosting providers has become more complex, so we've replaced it with the following three articles: