starting

Turning on the online spigot

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You have the forms, but now you need the traffic. Well, it’s important to remember that Field of Dreams was a work of fiction – building it is not a sufficient condition for people coming.

To start, you do have Google Grants don’t you? If not, we’ll wait right here while you apply.

(pause)

So, how about that local sports team? I heard they won or lost yesterday. That coach is a genius. Or should be fired.

(pause)

OK, you’re back. I’ll talk more about Google Grants in the future, but suffice it to say it’s a great way to start acquiring warm leads. There are limitations like the $2 cost-per-click maximum that chaff some in the nonprofit world, but try applying for this free money from Bing or Yahoo and you’ll find it doesn’t exist.  So $2 CPC it is.

As part of your Google Grant process, you need to identify some keywords and phrases that are important for your organization.

To do this, you will have to speak like a human being. There is a cognitive bias known as the curse of knowledge – once you know something, it’s really hard to act as though you don’t know that thing. Or, as the original authors of the paper describe it:

“In economic analyses of asymmetric information, better-informed agents are assumed capable of reproducing the judgments of less-informed agents. We discuss a systematic violation of this assumption that we call ‘the curse of knowledge.’”

There is a wonderful irony in this definition.

Anyway, in order to determine how people will find your wonderfully constructed conversion forms, you need to think like they will think. One example is from MADD. The organization teaches that there is no such thing as a drunk driving accident – that each crash is 100% preventable and that drunk driving is a violent crime.

Unfortunately, that’s not how people search for the terms.  Google Trends searches for drunk driving accident are in red; searches for drunk driving crash are in blue:

drunk driving accident crash

So MADD has ads set up for both accident and crash – they won’t say accident in their copy (ever), but they meet people where they are searching.

The same terms that you are advertising on with Google Grants should also be terms that you use in the page that you are looking to optimize. Not only will it help people convert once they come to the page, but it will also improve your performance for those terms in search engines. If you have partners in the space, be sure to link their pages and vice versa. This will increase your traffic and improve your search engine listing as well. There are a number of additional tips for optimizing for search engines that will cover at another time.

If you are developing and driving traffic to your online funnels and communicating with them regularly by email, you’ll have a better idea of what messages work for your audience and what don’t. From there, you can get a feel for whether a more robust direct marketing effort can further increase your net income. And remember, mo’ money means mo’ mission.

Thanks for reading. Please be sure to comment on this first week of blogging below, so that I can better write for your needs and thank you for your support!

Turning on the online spigot

Sending your first email

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Now you have an email client. And I have a print version of what I’d like to send. I can just put it in a PDF and attach it, right?

No. An effective email is not:

  • An attached PDF. PDFs limit interactivity and frequently exceed attachment limitations on emails, which limit deliverability.
  • An email asking someone to click to go to your newsletter online. Every click you add adds friction to the process and increases the likelihood that people will abandon your newsletter, especially when you don’t have the space to explain what you want them to do.
  • An email asking someone to download your PDF newsletter. All of the disadvantages of a PDF with the additional friction of an added click.

This brings up the question of what it is. A good email is:

  • About the person receiving it. “I” is bad. “You” is good. Me Tarzan. You Jane. Seriously, though, you want to be talking to donors, volunteers, and other supporters what they are doing through you. You are the tool that good people use to do good things. You should brag about yourself about as much as an Allen wrench brags about those Hemnes dressers it made.“We” is controversial. My perspective on it is that it depends on the use of “we.” If “we” is your nonprofit, it’s bad. If “we” is the community of people dedicated to making a cause come to pass, and you can clearly delineate it as such (this is hard to do), it can be good. “We” in the sense of Queen Victoria expressing her lack of amusement: awesome.
  • About a discrete topic. Frequently, email newsletters try to be all things to all people, instead of telling a compelling story.
  • About an interesting topic. This sounds like it would be self-evident, but you would be amazed about email newsletters that talk about the check presentation that just happened or the award from the local Chamber of Commerce the nonprofit received. Most bad topics fail the first test of whether they are about the person receiving it, but some other bad ones are about the person receiving it, but forget that that person is a person and thus is both self-interested and not immortal (thus not having ultimate time to read your newsletter).
  • Equipped with what you want people to do. You do not want to wind up your audience and not have them know what they are supposed to do with their new information.

If you are just starting out, try a few different types of emails to see what resonates with your audience. A few to try:

  • Thank you emails, whether it’s for donating or volunteering or simply being an email subscriber. People generally complain as much about being thanked too often as they hate being too handsome or too rich. Or so I’m told by handsome and rich people.
  • Urgent! Email is the perfect medium to get out timely communications. I’ll talk about ways to take advantage of this with things like matching gifts, but an urgent email is usually a good one.
  • Other ways to support. You will eventually be asking for money by email and if you are doing it right, you will be doing it often. To lay the groundwork for this, be sure to mix in other ways to support your organization that don’t involve a credit card. This can be volunteering, advocating, telling friends about something important, taking a pledge, giving your more information about their preferences, engaging in a cause-related marketing campaign and more.
  • The inside scoop. People love to get exclusive information, to feel like they are inside the velvet rope. One great example of this was chronicled in The Audacity to Win, David Plouffe’s account of the 2008 Obama campaign. In it, he reveals that offering people the opportunity to get the VP pick texted to them increased their mobile subscribers by 1500%. It can work for you too.

These learnings can be the background for your entire direct marketing campaign. Now is the time to find your voice and the issues that work for you, before it costs a lot of money to get that message out.

These are the basics. Now, you need a list. We’ll start that discussion tomorrow.

Sending your first email

Setting up your outbound emails

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Surely, you can test email marketing by going into Outlook or Gmail and hitting send right?

No, you can’t.

And don't call me Shirley

There are a few reasons for this:

  • Putting a bunch of people in the To: line of an email gives everyone’s email address to everyone else. This will royally tick off everyone who is on the list, making your list smaller and far angrier at you. And let the fates help you if someone decides to reply to all.
  • You’ll just put them in the BCC line instead? Both every email system worth its salt and AOL will recognize your message as spam, putting it in email purgatory with emails like online scams, pictures of (redacted), and (really really redacted) that you won’t be able to get out of your mind.
  • You can’t effectively customize emails. The loveliest sound to all of us, from the age of two-ish on, is the sound of our own name. Not having a name in an email isn’t a cardinal sin, but it is a venal one.
  • You can’t test and you can’t effectively report results. This is a cardinal sin. The commandments say “Thou shalt test,” and implied within that is being able to measure the results of said test.You may argue that it isn’t actually a commandment, but it will be at least as helpful to you in your career as anything that anyone says about donkey-coveting.
  • Your emails will look bad. This is not necessarily a deal-breaker. Ugly can often convert well. Let me rephrase: your emails will not look like you intend them to. That is the deal-breaker.

So you want some email software to help automate your sending. The things you are looking for are:

  • Quality reporting, including open rates, click-through rates, click-through rates on each link, unsubscribe rates, and (ideally) conversions. If you can’t measure conversions through your email reporting, you can set up different forms for each email and measure it on the back end.
  • Ideally, you want to be able to address people by name as discussed above. Also, you’d like to be able to customize other information. I’ve seen double-digit response rate increases just through simple state customization like “help reduce childhood cancer rates in XXStateXX.”
  • Mobile adaptivity. We’ll talk more about this in coming months, but if you had to choose whether something will look good on mobile or on desktop, you might choose mobile. Fortunately, you shouldn’t have to choose.
  • Form management. Your email provider should ideally have forms that allow people to sign up that automatically go into your email database. This moves people through your system easily and makes your life a lot easier.
  • Managing unsubscribes, email preferences, etc. Same reason.

If you absolutely must have free, you might want to look at Vertical Response, which gives you 10,000 emails per month free, and MailChimp, which gives you 12,000/month. Please post your comments in the, you know, comments section on either system.  I’m starting up with MailChimp, so if you would like to test the user experience for receiving newsletters, you can sign up at right. (hint hint)

However, I strongly urge you to look into email providers that you may pay for, in that it’s really nice to have an email system that ties into your larger database, is part of a true CRM system, or can be part of a larger marketing platform. Take a look at user ratings of different email systems (and different types of systems). This does bode well for MailChimp, which was highly reviewed for small and medium enterprises.

Tomorrow, we’ll talk about actual email content.

Setting up your outbound emails

Starting a direct marketing program

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There really is no reason not to have some form of direct marketing program. Strong use of, at the very least, email can lead to incremental revenues for your organization and deepen the ties that your supporters have to you. But jumping in with both feet can be extremely expensive for your organization and hurt your ability to fulfill your mission.

So how should you start? Blackbaud counsels you in their guide:

“The best way for your organization to tell if it is direct marketing-ready is to conduct a feasibility study with a proven direct marketing strategist. You wouldn’t launch a capital campaign or any major change in strategy without first consulting the experts in this area; the same should be said for direct marketing.”

So obviously you don’t want to do that.

Seriously. Don’t do that.

This is for a few reasons:

  • It will be expensive, just for the consultant.
  • Asking a direct marketing consultant whether you should do a direct marketing program is like asking your seven-year-old daughter if you should get a pony. (Yes, this is a gender-based stereotype. I base this solely on my own daughter, who would answer very much in the affirmative.) It is in their best interest for you to take your entire reserves and start acquiring donors every channel. For example, did you know that Blackbaud, who recommends you hire a direct marketing consultant, provides direct marketing consultants?This is not to pick on Blackbaud. (OK, maybe a little.) But while almost all consultants of my acquaintance are too professional to start spending your second mortgage on list rentals and will try to recommend a reasonable approach, they don’t necessarily have the entire view of your organization and competing priorities in mind.
  • You don’t need one. You can start a direct marketing program on the cheap and learn many of the things you need to know for a full-scale program without a consultant.

One of our mantras here is going to be to test everything – fire bullets, then cannonballs. Or it would be if we were to start having mantras. You will likely eventually need an agency and they can be a great creative and strategic partner. And you are going to make mistakes at first, but better than you are making the mistakes yourself than paying someone else to make them.

So let’s start with testing and let’s start with free. For acquisition, look at what you have around you already. You probably have lists already – people who you’ve served, alumni, gala attendees, walkers, open house attendees, whatever. These are all warm leads – people already pre-disposed to supporting you.

For there, develop your online warm lead acquisition machine. Do you have white papers, tip sheets, pledges, petitions, or any other online interactions? Ask for an email address and permission. Then, start pushing people to those pages, through smart use of search engines and Google Grants.

Now, start up your email newsletter. It need not be fancy. But it needs to be about what the donors and volunteers are making possible. And then it can also be about what additional support can do for the mission.

This skips over a few key things for your free start to direct marketing:

So, we have our marching orders for the rest of the week, with a post on each. Thanks for reading!

PS. If you still think you need a consultant, let me know. I’ll be inexpensive and I can pad this blog post to well over 50 pages, assuming I can add in some charts and graphs.

Starting a direct marketing program