Online Organizing

Introducing Google Analytics

sknox — 2008-10-07T20:08:25Z

Google Analytics is a free, powerful tool for tracking a host of interesting web statistics such as: number of visitors, time spent on pages, keyword searches used to find content on your site, and many other metrics. If you don't already have Google Analytics installed on your site, it's easy to do so. Just go to http://www.google.com/analytics and sign up. Google will give you a little chunk of code to place on each page of your website. Send that code to us through the technical support form on the ONE/Northwest website.

Getting Started

Watch the Google Analytics Interface Tutorial Video

When you first login to Google Analytics you'll see the dashboard, which gives you a nice summary of statistics for one month's worth of activity. There is a graph showing number of visits, and below that some numerical data for visits, pageviews, bounce rate, average time on site, and percent of new visits. Google Analytics uses a lot of terminlogy that you need to become familiar with. Here is a brief definition of the terms seen on the dashboard:

Visits: Visits are the number of times your website has been viewed. Visits are different than visitors on the internet for the same reasons as in a grocery store: you can have a visitor who visits one time or multiple times, so it's not a direct measure of the number of visitors coming to your site. Visits are a good metric for tracking the overall performance of a website.
Pageview: The number of pages that have been viewed. This number is usually higher than the number of visits, unless everyone visiting only looks at a single page!
Bounce Rate: A bounce is a visit that consists of a single page view. Bounce rate is commonly the percentage of bounces to overall visits. It's like walking into a grocery store and quickly deciding that there's nothing in there you want, so you turn right around and leave. Imagine a site visitor coming to your page and not finding anything that interests them. If they don't go to any other page, it's considered a bounce.
Average Time on Site: Fairly self-evident. It's the time spent on the site commonly given as an average of all the visits to your website.
Percent of New Visits: The percentage of visitors who are viewing your site for the first time. This is a big picture way to track repeat visits.

In order to dig into other website metrics, use the navigation links in the upper left corner: Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content, and Goals. You can find a wealth of information here, and even start to set up goals to track how effective your site design is in directing visitors to the content you want them to find.

Interpreting the Numbers

So now that you have looked at your statistics, how do you interpret what it all means? The information given to you on the dashboard is interesting information for tracking trends on your website. You can answer questions like: what month did we get the most visits? the least? did publishing new content increase site visits? are we getting mostly new visitors over time or repeat visitors?

Once you get a feel for how to read the numbers, you can start digging into how you might change your website structure or content in order to better serve your audiences. It takes time and thoughtful analysis to start using the full potential of Google Analytics. Consider it a long-term learning project which will require a significant investment of time.

Learn More

It's worth looking at the documentation on the Google Conversion University site. Some of what's there is very retail oriented, but the basic concepts are applicable to non-profits. Here are some highlights from the Conversion University that we think might be useful:

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

Movement as Network

gideonr — 2008-07-21T17:52:52Z

In early 2004, ONE/Northwest’s executive director, Gideon Rosenblatt published a paper called “Movement as Network: Connecting People and Organizations in the Environmental Movement.” This think piece represents much of the philosophical underpinning of ONE/Northwest’s work in the decade ahead.

You can download the full paper in PDF format. Below is a synopsis of its core ideas.

Movement as Network: The environmental movement is not just some vague concept, but an actual entity. It is a network, made up of very real interconnections between people and organizations; a networked whole that is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

Fragmentation of the Movement: Today’s environmental organizations are so disconnected that they are barely recognizable as a movement – particularly by those within the movement itself. Some of this fragmentation is due to the broad diversity of environmental issues and the large number of places in which they occur. But a frustratingly large portion of the fragmentation is institutional. It stems from a lack of diversity in organizational models, which leads to competition for resources and resistance to building the kind of collaborations and value-added networks prevalent in newer industries within the private sector.

Fragmentation of Power: To engage on environmental issues in and around the places they live, citizens must choose from among a dizzying array of issue-specific organizations. While a small number of citizens do have a particular affinity for specific issues, most are frustrated by the movement’s failure to address their more holistic understanding and concerns around the environment. Citizens who do join the environmental movement are scattered across hundreds of tiny membership bases within issue-specific organizations. Their political clout is fragmented, thus critically weakening their political and economic power at the local and regional level.

Differentiated Roles in the Network: Movement as Network uses three prototypical organizational models as an analytical framework and prescription for addressing this fragmentation:

People Organizations serve as an interface between the environmental movement and various segments of society. They define themselves by the specific audiences they serve – and not by specific issues. In fact, they move from issue to issue, serving these audiences by “aggregating” issue-specific information and engagement opportunities supplied by Solution Organizations. People Organizations are largely missing at the local and regional environmental movement today, yet are essential to reaching new and broader audiences.
Solution Organizations define themselves by the issues they focus on and by the solutions they use to address these issues. Examples include land trusts, agency-specific watchdogs, and water policy experts. These organizations are critical to keeping long-term attention on specific problems, yet the large number of potential solutions and places in which they are needed is one of the key sources of the movement’s fragmentation.
Resource Organizations define themselves by the particular expertise or resources they bring to the rest of the network. Examples include foundations (which supply money) and capacity builders (which supply some particular expertise).

A Connected Network: These different types of organizations can be combined to form powerful new network clusters for the environmental movement:

People Organizations and Solution Organizations have the potential to form powerful new networks, where solutions are aggregated for specific audiences, much like retailers aggregate products for specific customer segments. These networks might start with news aggregation, with a People Organization pulling together and interpreting the most salient environmental happenings in a particular city or state. The organization would specialize in understanding what matters most to its audiences while pulling most, if not all, of its issue-specific expertise from Solution Organizations in its network. This collaboration could eventually lead to the aggregation of civic engagement opportunities, shifting fluidly from one campaign to another based on opportunity and audience interest.
Solution-Coordinating Networks help organizations with different solutions collaborate and target their different approaches on a particular issue. Forest campaigns, for example, might connect one group’s legal strategies with others’ public outreach and land acquisition work in a coordinated push for protection in a particular area. These types of solution networks typically take the form of short-term collaborations and account for the bulk of multi-organization campaigns in the environmental movement today.
Solution-Sharing Networks share knowledge and resources related to a particular solution to environmental problems. These networks tend to be geographically dispersed to minimize competition over resources. In some cases, the network is hub-like with the bulk of the expertise and innovation occurring in one centralized location. In others, the network is more peer-like with expertise shared in a more distributed fashion across organizations.
Resource Organizations are already pulling together loose outsourcing networks in which they supply needed expertise and resources to a variety of environmental organizations. ONE/Northwest works within this type of network, building skills and resources that can be distributed cost effectively through the Pacific Northwest environmental movement. Resource Organizations play a critical role in knitting the movement as a network. These organizations also need to be better networked to one another in order to provide clients with holistic and integrated services.

Network Building: The kinds of shifts in organizational behavior outlined in Movement as Network will not be easy. Entrenched ways of thinking and the sheer scale of the changes will lead many to conclude it is unrealistic and cannot be done. And yet, deep down inside we know that something is not right. We see that despite all its advances over the past quarter century, environmental protection is still dangerously dependent on short-term shifts in the political and economic climate. True and lasting environmental protection depends upon building a society that thrives in harmony with the natural world and this level of impact requires integrating environmental concerns into the fabric of society at a much deeper level than exists today. Working harder doesn’t get us there by itself. We need new models and new approaches. ONE/Northwest’s work over the next decade is focused on building the infrastructure, tools and strategies necessary to bring these new approaches into reality.

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.

"The Wired Wealthy" - Great Report!

jon — 2008-05-16T18:17:43Z

In March 2008, Convio, Sea Change Strategies and Edge Research released a report titled, "The Wired Wealthy: Using the Internet to Connect with Your Middle and Major Donors." We think it's one of the most interesting, actionable pieces of online fundraising research we've ever read. If you're part of our world, you need to read this report.

Here's a quick snippet from the intro:

The wired wealthy are by definition engaged online and are generous givers. A closer look at demographics and practices adds some useful details.

First, they are very generous givers. Wired wealthy say they give an average of $10,896 each year to various causes, with a median gift of $4,500. And they are notably wealthy. More than twenty-five percent (25%) have household incomes above $200,000 per year. More than half have annual household incomes above $100,000.

Of the 13 participating charities and nonprofits that provided additional data, on average, high dollar donors make up about one percent (1%) of their records (high dollar defined as giving a cumulative total of $1,000 or more to the partner organization in an 18-month period). While small in numbers of people, that one percent (1%) is responsible for an average of thirty-two percent (32%) of the organization’s total dollars raised. Partner organizations reported having, on average, email addresses for twenty-five (25%) of their $1,000+ donors.

Demographically, wired wealthy are predominantly baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), with the center of gravity falling right in the middle of the baby boom cohort. And, they are extremely wired. They have been using the Internet for an average of 12 years. They are online an average of 18 hours per week. They know their way around the Web. They do their banking and bill paying online. They read the news online. They make purchases online. And, of course, most make charitable contributions online.

The wired wealthy have dabbled in various social networks and so-called "Web 2.0" venues, but do not appear to be among the heaviest adopters. One exception may be YouTube – more than half of wired wealthy respondents have watched at least one video. A quarter of this group at least occasionally read blogs. Perhaps predictably, Facebook and MySpace do not represent fertile hunting grounds to find or engage the wired wealthy.

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/

Tracking "Ladder of Engagement" Organizing With Salesforce

jon — 2008-03-04T22:09:17Z

Here at ONE/Northwest, we're keenly interested in helping environmental organizations use databases as powerful tools for grassroots organizing. We're trying to bake proven organizing strategies into database tools.

In this short article and the accompanying screencast, we'll demonstrate one example of this: how we're modeling a "ladder of engagement" in a Salesforce.com relationship management database.

The folks at Online Engagement, drawing on work by Steph Legault, summarize the concept of the Ladder of Engagement as follows:

The Ladder of Engagement sets out a simple scale for ranking different activities that online supporters may engage in. Low on the ladder are quick and easy items such as signing an online petition or forwarding an email to a friend. At the top of the ladder are the most involving forms of activism, including meeting with elected officials, organizing local actions, and making donations.

High Engagement

Recruit friends/family
Upgrade monthly donation
Signup for monthly giving
Renew single donation
Make single donation
Make a phone call
Write a letter
Attend a "real world" event
Sign petition
Viral / Tell a friend
Send an e-postcard
Subscribe to e-Alerts / Issue Alerts
Subscribe to eNewsletter
Enter a contest
Visit website

Low Engagement

Over time, an individual supporter would be expected to engage in a variety activities, both high and low on the ladder. The goal of an engagement strategy is not just get increased numbers of people involved, but also to encourage them to climb the ladder of engagement.

Here's an example of how Amnesty Canada used a ladder of engagement in a real-world campaign.

In other words, groups are communicating with their members and engaging them in the activities that affect policy decisions. Each action has an associated leadership value, and as a person completes more actions, their leadership score increases. Over time, you track people's progress up the ladder, and ask them to do more and more high-engagement actions.

Here's a short 5-minute screencast by Steve Andersen, ONE/Northwest's Database Program Manager, in which he demonstrates how to use Salesforce to model a ladder of engagement strategy:

Why this is interesting

A relationship management database that can track people through a ladder of engagement helps you create targeted prospect lists for people you might want to focus your limited outreach resources upon. For example, you can easily write queries that show you:

Everyone who took an action last year but hasn't taken one this year.
People who've taken multiple easy actions, but not yet taken a harder one.
All your members who haven't taken actions, and all your leaders who aren't members.
Everyone who's taken an action and is interested in a particular issue area.

While your organizers likely know all of your most engaged activists personally, and have a lot of information in their head about these folks, a database can helps you keep track of your "second tier" activists -- the folks you really want to develop into top-tier activists. These people are large in number, yet easy to lose track of because you don't see them as often.

Questions you should ask yourself

Do you know who your most active leaders are? Is that information recorded anywhere other than inside your organizers' heads?
Do you currently have the ability to target your outreach to people whom you know are likely to respond based on their past actions for you?
What are the 5-7 long-term issue areas or campaigns that you want to track activists' interest in over time?
What are the rungs in your ladder of engagement? Are you effectively moving people up that ladder?
The essence of effective organizing is person-to-person contact. But, are you capturing those "touches" in your long-term organizational memory so that can be continually building and deepening the relationship, rather than starting over from scratch again all the time?
How would your organization make the shift to a culture that, in the words of Steve Wright of the Salesforce.com Foundation, combines both passion and rigor. Are you recording your work in sufficient detail that you can analyze what's working, and what you need to do next?

Surveying The Digital Future

jon — 2007-10-31T22:57:36Z

The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School has released the results of the sixth year of its "Surveying the Digital Future" project. Six years of longitudinal research on use of broadband at home, the wireless Internet, on-line media, user-generated content and social networking.

Interesting findings include:

43 percent of Internet users who are members of online communities say that they feel as strongly about their virtual community as they do about their real-world communities.
More than one-fifth of online community members (20.3 percent) take actions off-line at least once a year that are related to their online community.
Almost two-thirds of online community members who participate in social causes through the Internet (64.9 percent) say they are involved in causes that were new to them when they began participating on the Internet. And more than 40 percent (43.7 percent) of online community members participate more in social activism since they started participating in online communities.
In spite of the recent growth of online communication by political parties and candidates, the number of users who say the Internet can be used as a tool to gain political power declined.

Read the report here.

Creating the Relationship-Centric Organization

jon — 2007-09-25T17:38:22Z

Our friend, colleague and fellow database consultant Paul Hagen has written an excellent piece for Idealware entitled "Creating the Relationship-Centric Organization." In it, Paul does a great job of explaining the conceptual leap from "donor databases" to "constituent relationship management" (CRM) -- thinking about ALL of the relationships your organization needs to track, manage and grow:

Every nonprofit manages relationships with constituents, whether through a sophisticated tool or through scraps of paper, Excel spreadsheets, and miscellaneous databases. However, managing through these informal and decentralized methods is inefficient if not downright chaotic.... Isolated silos of contact data means that supporters may only hear about one aspect of the organization – for instance, they may hear about fundraising needs but miss communications that would tell them about accomplishments or volunteer needs.

Poor management of constituent data translates to greater costs, lost revenue, and decreased impact.

Is your organization Relationship-Centric?
How well is your organization doing with its CRM strategy? Our sector divides into four categories on this critical measure:

Constituent Chaos. Some organizations have constituent data scattered everywhere. They have irregular, one-size-fits-all communications with supporters, and miss many opportunities to gain more value from constituents or grow relationships. These organizations can be described as being in a state of Constituent Chaos. They are underserving their organizations’ mission by failing to engage supporters more robustly.

Self-Centric. Self-Centric nonprofits have constituent data consolidated into one or only a few places (they are likely to be newer organizations with up-to-date systems), but focus their attention primarily inward rather than on interactions with the outside world. Like organizations in a state of constituent chaos, they do little to differentiate between their supporters and miss many opportunities to cross-promote different aspects of the organization.

Enlightened Stone-age. Enlightened Stone-age nonprofits appreciate and actively seek to engage their constituents with high quality interactions, but a multiplicity of data collection mechanisms requires staff to jump through hoops to coordinate outreach.

Relationship-Centric. The organizations that have contact data consolidated in only a few places, have regular targeted interactions with constituents in which they cross-promote different aspects of the organization and create opportunities to grow the value of their constituents are Relationship-Centric nonprofits. They maximize their relationships with supporters: they regularly increase the average donation size and effectively engage an increasingly wide swath of constituents to take actions to meet the organization’s goals.

If your organization is thinking about how to improve your database situation, Paul's article is a great background piece. The concepts he describes are at the heart of ONE/Northwest database consulting practice.

Read the whole article at:

http://www.idealware.org/articles/
relationship_centric_org_CRM.php

Communications Toolkit for Nonprofits

jon — 2007-07-13T19:06:49Z

Cause Communications from Santa Monica, California has recently released their Communications Toolkit for Nonprofits. They describe it as:

...a comprehensive resource offering practical information in virtually every area of communications based on findings from national qualitative and quantitative surveys of what nonprofits want in the area of communications.

We think it's a thoughtful overview of how to think about who you need to reach to achieve your mission and how best to find those people on a shoestring budget. It covers a range of communications concerns from how to write print ads, what to consider when designing a logo, best practices in direct mail, events planning, websites and media relations. It provides some helpful statistics what percentage of groups do the activities they suggest as well as resources to dig deeper into each of the categories.

It's a polished and easy-to-read 77-page publication that we highly recommend you consider downloading and putting beside your bed or on your office coffee table.

http://www.causecommunications.org/clients-cause.php

NTEN's 2006 Nonprofit IT Staffing Report

jon — 2007-07-13T19:06:49Z

Our friends at NTEN recently published the results from a wide-ranging survey of nonprofit information technology staffing they conducted during 2006. Their first-of-a-kind study generated some great baseline data, and it's well worth a read if your organization is considering how to make IT staff investments, or wondering how your organization compares with other nonprofits. Here are some of their key findings:

● Salary and budget expenses: Nonprofits’ IT salary and budget investments varied widely.
They didn’t just differ from smaller organizations to larger ones, but between organizations of
the same size. Larger organizations not only had more IT expenses, but invested more per
employee as well.

● Technology adoption and investment: Technology “Early Adopters” and “Fast Followers”
invested substantially more in all aspects of their IT infrastructure.

● Nonprofit IT staffing levels: Nonprofits on average had about one staff member with some
IT responsibility for every five organizational staff members. Smaller organizations had more IT
staff per employee than larger ones.

● IT within the organization: Where does the responsibility for IT live in nonprofit
organizations? Small nonprofits most frequently answered that they had no one with official IT
responsibility. Large organizations most typically had a separate IT function. It was also
common to consider IT part of general operating functions, or part of the finance department.

● Staff time across functions: Nonprofit IT staff spent the most time on desktop and
application support, but they devoted significant time to management and strategic issues as
well.

● The understaffed perception: The majority of organizations felt they were understaffed in
the IT area. While larger organizations were slightly more satisfied with their staffing level,
there was not a substantial gap between large and small organizations. Organizations with
higher turnover or lower salaries were more likely to feel they were understaffed.

● Salary baselines: The survey provides some baselines for typical salaries. Some positions,
like CTOs, paid a wide range of salaries, while others, like Webmaster, were fairly low for
everyone. The salaries were not significantly different by level of education, issue area, or
geographic region.

● Outsourcing: Nonprofits tended to outsource fairly technical things the most – the most
commonly outsourced functions were website hosting, telephone services, and custom software
development.

● Organizational digital divide: Smaller organizations appear to be notably behind on the IT
adoption curve – indicating a substantial organizational digital divide.

Download the entire survey at:

http://www.nten.org/sites/nten/files/NTEN_ITstaffing_survey.pdf

A Strategy for Using Email Lists

jons — 2007-06-26T17:46:41Z

1) Discussion list for your board of directors

All your board members should have email access. (If they dont, and you value their participation, you should do whatevers necessary to get them hooked up.) Every organization should have an email discussion list for its board; this is the single most effective way to keep your board up-to-date with the latest information, and for the board to have an ongoing conversation between meetings. Because ONE/Northwest-hosted email lists include archives, it is easy for new board members to catch up on past conversations.

If you have a larger board, and active board committees, you may want to consider creating an email list for each committee.

2) Discussion list for your staff

This might seem like overkill for small organizations, but we've found that routing less-urgent communications and updates through email helps reduce interruptions and makes staff meetings and phone calls more productive. Email lists are especially useful for groups who have field staff or other folks who don't come into the office every day.

3) Email newsletter for all organizational stakeholders

If your organization doesnt have a general email newsletter, published at least monthly, then youre probably missing an important piece in your communications strategy. Email newsletters help you sustain your ongoing relationships by providing regular, small doses of information. Studies have shown that folks who receive email newsletters are better informed about your organization, and more likely to support your organization when asked.

4) Email newsletter for volunteers

If your organization makes heavy use of a corps of volunteers, you should strongly consider creating an email newsletter or even a discussion list just for your volunteers. These folks have a special kind of relationship with your organization, and communicating with them regularly via email will help you sustain that bond over time.

ONE/Northwest provides donation-supported email list hosting for Northwest environmental organizations. To start an email list, or find out more, please see our Email List Help Guide.

CAN-SPAM For Nonprofits

jon — 2007-05-23T17:51:09Z

In late 2004, the U.S. government put out its final regulations for the CAN-SPAM act, which is intended to cut down on unsolicited email ("spam").

Nonprofits are not exempt from CAN-SPAM!

Our friends at Guidestar have some brief, helpful advice about how to send email that complies with the CAN-SPAM act. Their tips:

Send all e-mails from a legitimate, active e-mail address.
If the recipient hits "Reply" and responds to the message, the answer should go to an in-box that is monitored, not just disappear into cyberspace.
Provide accurate header information and a postal address for the sender.
The "From" section of the e-mail should identify either the sender or the organization, or both. The body of the message should contain a snail-mail address.
Give the message an accurate subject line.
It is unlawful to use subject lines that mislead the recipient about the contents or subject matter of the message.
When in doubt, err on the side of caution.
If it's likely a recipient would view the message as an advertisement or promotion, put the word Advertisement in the subject line or body of the e-mail, even if the message is related to your mission.
Provide recipients a way to opt out of future mailings.
Either include a link to a page where recipients can remove their addresses or provide an e-mail address where they can write to have their addresses removed.
If someone opts out of future mailings, respect their wishes.
You have 10 days to remove them from your mailing list(s).

New Guidance on Nonpartisan Voter Guides

jons — 2007-03-06T18:05:56Z

In September 2005, the IRS released details of a settlement with the Christian Coalition, a 501(c)4 organization that -- among other activities -- produces and distributes voter guides through 501(c)3 organizations such as churches. The settlement with the IRS includes 11 criteria for voter guides, and as such offers new insight into the confusing area of exactly what constitutes a nonpartisan voter guide.

Attorney Gregory L. Colvin of Silk, Alder & Colvin, who is an adviser to Washington Conservation Voters Ed Fund and many other progressive clients, recently wrote a short article summarizing the settlement and its implications for other nonprofits. It's well worth a read if your organization is considering producing or distributing voter guides in the 2006 election cycle.

High Engagement
		Recruit friends/family Upgrade monthly donation Signup for monthly giving Renew single donation Make single donation Make a phone call Write a letter Attend a "real world" event Sign petition Viral / Tell a friend Send an e-postcard Subscribe to e-Alerts / Issue Alerts Subscribe to eNewsletter Enter a contest Visit website
Low Engagement