End of year campaigns are finally wrapped up, with their frantic pace of getting the creative in the system on a tight deadline and segmenting like there is no tomorrow. Now you have turned to intensely pouring through all of the open, click through and conversion rates and guaging the success of your appeals. It's one of the more stressful times for communications officers in many of the organizations I know. I hope that everyone can take a breath and take a minute to relax - you've earned it.
With all the hubbub, it's easy to lose site of the real people your email list names represent. These are people that have signed up to hear from your organization because they care about your work and want to support you. So once you have a chance to catch your breath you might want to reconnect with them and get inspired about your outreach all over again.
Here is a little experiment you might want to try with your email or donor list to reconnect.
What: Take 1 hour a quarter (or even once a month) to check in on who is signing up for your emails or donating to your organization.
Pick 10 (or 20 or 50 if you are fast and efficient) names at random from your supporter list and quickly review their records.
What do you know about them?
Where do they live, how long have they been with you?
Notice any trends or similarities?
Any surprises?
Take a couple minutes and use your imagination to think about who they are, why they signed up and what they were hoping to get from your organization.
The point of this little exercise is not to find hard data or facts to plan your next campaign around, but to get into the mindset of connecting with your email names as real people.
Taking a look at who is on your list and seeing the names and locations is a great reminder that your list is made up of actual people and it helps to keep this at the forefront of your communications.
Doing this once can reignite your connection to your list members, doing it regularly can provide more insight into why people have signed up and can help you write emails that are more authentic and relevant to the recipients.
Part Two: If you really want to get some information, take another hour or so and write a handful of random supporters a personal email thanking them for their support and asking what they think of the emails they receive from your organization. Although you don't want to judge too much based on such a small sample, you can bet that if you hear the same complaint or compliment repeatedly its worth thinking about and maybe investigating further.
You might want to include a couple of specific items like the following:
Why did you sign up for our email - what were you hoping to receive?
Do you read our emails regularly?
What is your favorite part of them
What is your least favorite thing about our emails?
Do you receive too many or too few emails from us?
What would you like to see more of?
Offer them a link or piece of information that they might find useful - a new article on the web or fact that you have a facebook group for instance.
Everyone likes to be acknowledged and asked their opinion, and the personal touch can mean a lot. At worst you may hear some criticism of your communications, or reach someone with a personal issue with your organization. Thank them and tell them that you are noting this and help solve any issues you can (direct someone that was charged twice by accident to your membership department for instance). In any case you will enhance your brand, spread goodwill and create a deeper engagement with at least one of your constituents. Plus you never know what good things they may want to tell you that they never would have taken the time to say on a survey or web form.
Why do this?
It just takes a small effort to show respect: By taking an hour to reach out and respond, you will have shown your supporter that you are paying attention to the needs of your audience and made them feel special. Since this is a casual effort you control the volume and flow of feedback so it doesn't have to become a giant undertaking or time suck.
New input leads to new ideas: You might also find that its a good way to generate new ideas for segmentation, campaigns and ways to personalize your merge fields in the future. And I believe that having a few personal interactions with some of your list members will change the way you approach your broader communications as well.
Feel good about what you do: Having people give you their email address and invite you to their inbox is a sign that they are on your side and want to be a part of what you do. And if they give you their clicks or money they are showing just how good they feel about being connected with you. That is really pretty amazing and pretty cool if you think about it.
Again, this isn't about accurate statistics about your list, although of course you should make time to review and understand your big picture data too. This is just an exercise to inspire you about your email audience - people just like you that care about your work and your mission. Seeing that you have people in your corner that care about your cause can give you a boost of much needed energy for your next email effort and all the work that comes with doing it well.
A common goal of modern websites is to provide opportunities to engage. Rather than simply reading and watching, we want to encourage folks to give us feedback, to subscribe, to volunteer, to sign up for an event, to donate or purchase something, to collaborate. I particularly like working on the content challenge - what compelling words and visuals will grab your attention? What will help you understand our goals, and to adopt them as your goals too?
Its challenging to produce a concise, compelling story to illustrate what are often complex problems with various interrelated challenges. It's one thing to produce a short story about a kid in the foster care system who "made it", and quite another to illustrate the complex and maddening government process this same kid had to navigate year after year.
Can games help? A number of organizations have tried. And the strategy would seem to make sense - a recent Pew study finds that more than half of American adults play video games, including a third of those over 65. An interesting example is the ReDistricting Game, which invites people to engage in many of the same decisions elected officials make when determining congressional districts. Another is Escape from Woomera, a game that reconstructs Australian immigration detention centers, and invites players to explore and attempt to break out of these facilities. The Planet Green Game, a collaboration between Starbucks and Global Green USA, challenges players to green a virtual town. Virtual worlds, such as Second Life, allow players to define themselves anew and build communities - nonprofits from TechSoup to NPR engage large constituencies this way.
Games allow the producer to define the rules for engagement tightly coupled with a visual story, helping to direct participants to make various choices that illustrate critical consequences of our actions in real life.
Developing game applications on a small nonprofit budget is challenging, but can be doable. NTEN sponsored a session on video games for social change in 2007 to in part address this point. I am interested to learn more about afforable strategies for nonprofits to use gaming as an engagement strategy.
As I've been considering my own New Years Resolutions, I started thinking about what one client was thinking about for 2009. I was asked to put together my thoughts for a data maintenance ‘ritual’ for their new Salesforce system to ensure that they keep their data clean. Fantastic!! It's no new news that working out and eating healthy help you function in life better; similarly, it's old news that clean data helps your organization operate more effectively. Nevertheless, the beginning of the year serves as a new reminder to get in shape. I thought I'd share my quick list culled from various sources here. Would love any other suggestions.
Daily/Weekly
Back-up database. Set up an automated backup to be generated that can be download weekly.
Duplicate check. Check “Demand Tools” reports regularly to check for duplicates and other redundant data.
Scan for junk leads. Doing regular scans for junk Lead records that are filled with gibberish values from sources like online forms.
Check For & Tackle Incomplete Records. While most CRMs can validate or require certain data fields, it’s not always easy to ensure a value for every field at the time when a record is generated. For example, if staff import a list of event attendees with only name, title and phone numbers, it has very little value if it needs to be used in an email or direct mail campaign. While appending missing data is may require a lot of manual effort which will feel time consuming, it is a necessary evil to ensure that you have ‘actionable’ data.
Returned mail. Update contact records when mail is returned. [Determine policy…what happens? Alert to owner? Purge? Phone call?]
Weekly/Monthly
Run executive reports weekly/monthly. Use key organizational reports to spot poor data (as well as poor performance). Data that doesn’t match expectations are either an indicator of poor data management or poor performance by the individual.
Scan communications lists. Review lists (reports) that School Volunteers will use for communications (email, invitation lists, etc.). Is there missing data? Is data in the right format?
Run exceptions reports monthly. Run reports run monthly to find records with incorrect picklist values.
Quarterly
Post email cleaning. Use tools in VerticalResponse to identify Returned Mail or Bounced emails so that bad lead records can be updated/purged.
Delete or archive old data. Organizations merge, get acquired or shut down, contacts change addresses, change jobs, move within an organization …CRM data does expire. This is an area which is not easily automated and requires investment of time and energy. The more regularly you check for expired data, the healthier your data will be. According to one source, a database unchecked for an entire year can see as much as 30% expired data.
Data enrichment. Regularly ask what additional data in each record would help staff do more and have better insight. Adding political campaign contributions? Adding annual revenues of Community Based Organizations or Foundations?
Keep It Simple, Someone*! If there ever was a common man's rallying plea relative to technology, this is the one. How many people do you know who got an iPod for XMas, only to learn that, before they could use it, they would have to learn how to rip their CD collection to disk? And upgrade the hard drive, or buy additional storage? All of which is a piece of cake, when compared to setting up a wireless network or removing persistent spyware. The most frequent request that I get from the people I support as an IT Director? "I just want it to turn on and work!". I can relate. Which is why I'm here to tell you that keeping it simple can be a questionable goal, at best.
The fact is, it's not easy to manage even a home computer. It's gotten better: they're nice enough to color code the audio ports on a new PC, and put little labels below the connectors, and more and more things connect over USB, making the "where do I plug it in?" question a little easier to answer. And, wow, they even put a few ports on the front now. But we're a long way from the day when operating a computer is as easy as operating a toaster, and I, for one, question whether that will be a happy day.
My biggest case in point is email. Email is the application that everyone in the family knows and uses. It's compelling. Even the most technology-averse people can't escape the argument that communicating with family, friends and associates electronically is inexpensive and convenient. But the problem I see is that, once most people learn email, they don't want to learn anything else. Want online community? Sign me up for the email mailing list. Want news headlines and informational updates? Send it in the email. The problem with this is that email is an astonishingly useful application, but there's a point where it breaks down, and that point is when the volume of email becomes greater than the capacity to keep up with it. Email has a huge flaw as an information management tool: important things scroll out of sight. It's a FIFO medium (First In, First Out), that doesn't prioritize information for you, so that message from Aunt Irma supercedes the spam from the travel agency which supercedes the alert that your home is in foreclosure which supercedes the announcement that dog food is on sale... you get my point. And managing the email, staying on top of it and storing it in folders is a job.
So I advocate for making an early investment that pays off later -- learn a few more applications. Read RSS feeds in an RSS reader; visit your major social networks and online communities at their web sites; eschew the mailing lists -- or subscribe using an alternate email account that you follow with another application. Do some research before investing in any application or gadget -- there's a powerful argument that digitizing your music will save you time and effort in the long run, but that's of little use if, as happened with a friend of mine, you buy the iPod the day before you're shipped out to an island on military duty, with no chance to get any music on it. Keep It Separated, Sally, and Knowledge Informs Strategy, Sam. Because the idea that funneling all of that information through one conduit is somehow simpler than doing some up front research, management, prioritization and segmentation of information is a self-defeating myth.
* Substitute your favorite subjective noun starting with the letter "S".
What is "vendor lock-in" anyway, and how concerned should we be of it? A few experiences recently have me thinking more deeply about this.
In discussing a web project with a prospective client recently, they were very excited to build their website using open source tools to avoid vendor lock-in. "This way, we can use anyone who knows the code to support our site," they told me. I used to nod reflexively at this comment, but instead I replied, "Well, you will have the keys, but they can be hard to use."
Under appreciated as a data analyst, philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in shackles." What does it mean to be locked in to your vendor, to your software or hardware? I just replaced my dead laptop with a shiny new Macbook Pro with a full Apple warranty - I feel so much more free to toss around my laptop, while knowing that if I have anyone else try to repair it, I void my warranty. Did I just drink the Apple lock-in Kool-Aid or did I make a smart investment?
As reported by David Meyer, Microsoft has just filed a patent for "metered computing" - you get a heavily subsidized computer and pay for how much you use of it. DaaS - Desktops as a Service? Its appealing to have your hardware all taken care of - we enjoy this service with our web hosts, email providers, database service providers. Would I want to pay per hour of computer use in return for hardware and desktop software support? Will I be more upset if Microsoft tells me I can't monkey with my computer configuration, or if my system breaks down after the warrenty expires?
Each of our lock-in scenarios differ. While the open source Drupal website content management system may indeed have hundreds of thousands of users with all kinds of special Drupal administrative skills, that does not automatically mean I will be able to find one that will support my software implementation. It can and often does take work to open that lock with a new support provider. I may feel less locked into a proprietary database vendor if I have ready access to export all my data along with consistant support and predicable costs. Sure, my database vendor may simply disappear, and I need to get a new database. However, frequently we see open source consultants disappearing, and new ones declaring the system unfit to continue. In both cases, the vendor lock-in problem manifests into being locked-out.
Vendor lock-in sometimes takes an oversized role in discussions around best fit software solutions. We all want to easily use as much of our software as is useful to us, for as long as possible. Affordability, usability, access, support, licensing all play a role in determining this best fit solution.
I have been wrestling with how the concepts of “agile development” work in smaller software projects. Agile refers to a range of newer methodologies for planning, designing and implementing new web and data systems that include themes like these:
Designing and working in short phases, or iterations, of the desired end system.
Getting one set of new software features into full use and then moving on to the next
Not overreaching your budget or schedule in what you seek to accomplish at any given moment
Working in small self-organizing teams that include a client rep as well as developers and that meet regularly and work in person to the extent possible.
Focusing on getting software working and in use rather than on extensive documentation and planning.
We have been working through our own adaption of agile for Drupal projects where we see factors that favor it:
The client generally can’t predict exactly what they are going to need until they start using the software. Requirements change as new web and data systems get used.
Except in large businesses or organizations, the client team may be weighted toward folks with little experience in serious software design and who need time and training to work effectively.
If these problems sound familiar, you might do some more reading. Here are some good starting points: The original “Agile Manifesto”: http://www.agilemanifesto.org
You can find a lot more starting here, including lots of books by the Agile Manifesto authors. A lot of what is written out there is kind of abstract and geared toward software professionals already familiar with the issues. In fact, we see two types of problems in trying to adapt and stick with agile methodologies.
The frameworks often seem too rigid to use in smaller projects where the client-consultant team is new to working with each other. After reading a bunch of books and web articles about it, I sometimes think that agile advocates need to become a bit more agile in their advocacy. It should be easier to implement agile itself in short agile phases or iterations and easier to adapt to small teams and small budgets.
The other problem arises in grant-funded technology projects or similar situations. Organizations (and businesses, for that matter) may have a modest annual budget for software support and enhancement and then have to wait a long time for funding to do something new and strategic. When that happens, it may be an all or nothing situation: get everything pre-approved and documented in detail in advanced and done and in use in one cycle. You wait and you get one pass at the funding. This framework also runs smack into the agile point of view.
What can one do about these things?
First, if you are beginning a new software selection and implementation cycle, bring “agile” into the evaluation criteria for software or consultants you are considering. Ask how whichever of the ideas that sound useful apply, and learn from the process.
Second, there is a lot of room and need for educating funders, whether internal or external, on these matters. It would be great to have an extended dialog about how more agile-aware grant-funding could better support technology-infused projects.
Third, developers need to find more popular ways to discuss these concepts. I’ll end with one neat coincidence I have been thinking about. Agile software development is a lot like what we call the 70% rule in the style of Tai Chi I do.
If you have ever done Tai Chi, you may have experienced guidelines that say never aim to learn everything you can or to progress at your full capacity. In the school I go to, this is expressed as the "70% Rule." Make an estimate of your 100% goal level, and then shoot for 70% of that. If you are just getting started or recovering from an injury, reduce to 60%, 50% or less. You aim to achieve what you can comfortably achieve, get used to that. You soon find that your 100% mark has moved up, and therefore you have a new 70% level to work at.
Tai Chi’s Taoist classics have perspectives from which this rule emerges. For example, the Tao de Ching has a passage that says,
Everyone in the world knows that when the beautiful strives to be beautiful, it is repulsive. Everyone knows that when the good strives to be good, it is no good.
Clients and developers alike frequently have trouble wrapping their minds around such a perspective in software. The pursuit of perfection, of not just 100% of capacity, but 110 or more, is common, whether it’s in the desired features, data conversion or other factors. From trying to satisfy everyone and everything, things get messy and problematic on the fringes.
If you go to 100% to make sure the organization gets everything it hoped for, instead of reducing stress, you may increase stress. Instead of building capacity, you may do damage to staff and developer patience and commitment. Instead of adding resources, you scatter attention.
I’ve been thinking that the 70% rule could offer kind of a corollary to agile development. I’m planning to try it as a more accessible way to get at the same concepts. Keep the long term goals of perfect organizational growth, improved workflow, strenuous contact and program management. Then figure out what the organization can truly absorb right now, and back off to what it would mean to achieve 70% of that in smooth, effortless adoption. Implement that much, get used to it, evaluate it, then set a new higher set of goals, and plan to achieve 70% of that new mark.
Maybe you have experienced some other way to introduce these concepts you'd like to share.
Rounding out a fair number of email articles from us recently, here's A Few Good Email Discussion List Tools - taking a look at the software that's available to help you facilitate email conversations among your constituents, partners, or staff. Compared the dozens or hundreds of broadcast email tools, the options are surprisingly limited - but we round up the choices recommended by our contributors.
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