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Twelve Ways To Fail at Email

By Michael C. Gilbert, July 2003

This article was first published in The Basics of Nonprofit Email, and later in The Guide to Nonprofit Email (Feb. 2006).
 

When I speak or consult about nonprofit communication, there are certain key issues that arise again and again with every organization that is struggling toward a workable strategy. In this article I summarize the twelve most common of these issues. They are interrelated, of course, but some will resonate more with you than others.

My recommendation on how to use this list is to rank them according to two criteria: Which ones are having the most damaging impact on your current online communication? And which ones, if you were to tackle them, would meet with the least resistance? I would then take a maximum of six weeks to address the overlapping issues. Then pause for six weeks and evaluate. The momentum for that reform should give you the ability to deal with all the remaining issues and to truly refine your online strategies.
 

1. Not Collecting Email Addresses

The offer of an email address by a stakeholder is the first and most important level of engagement they can have with your organization. It represents their willingness to be contacted by you and is a gesture of trust, in your mission, your programs, and in your skills in managing an online relationship with them. Without this first level of engagement, no genuine relationship between them and your organization is possible.

In the Nonprofit Email Survey, 64% of organizations did not collect email addresses on their web site. Not collecting email addresses is like not answering the phone when a potential supporter calls. Not collecting email addresses is turning people away from engagement.

You should collect email addresses on the front page of your site, on any page that might motivate people to get more involved, and, probably, on every single page of your site. Indeed, the very purpose of many pages of your web site should be to motivate people to offer their email address to you.

In addition to your web site, every form -- whether online, on the phone or on paper, whether filled out by a stakeholder, a volunteer, or a staff member -- should collect their email address.

You should continue to keep addresses up to date, mostly through sufficiently frequent and relevant communication. Otherwise, your email address collecting is for naught.

But what's our premise for collecting email addresses? There are many. Most of them fall into the category of an email newsletter of some kind. (See "8. No Email Newsletter" below.)
 

2. Buying Email Addresses

It's easy to think of email as a cheap form of direct mail. This leads to a great many mistakes, the greatest of which is buying lists of email addresses. When you do that, you have crested the top of the slippery slope toward becoming a spammer.

When you buy a list of email addresses you start your relationship with everyone on that list from a position of distrust and disrespect. It doesn't matter that somewhere, somehow, those people may have technically opted in to receiving email from a chain of resellers. What matters is that most of them will see your email as unwelcome.

Nonprofits have no excuse for becoming spammers. There are many excellent alternatives. You can do cost effective campaigns to convert your existing stakeholders to the new channel of communication. You can work with other list owners to "chaperone" an online introduction. You can use dozens of small strategies for systematically building a list of people with whom you have genuine permission to correspond.
 

3. Investing More in Their Web Site than in Email

Organizations overinvest in their web sites at the expense of their email communication with their stakeholders. There are at least three important forms of overinvestment: Overinvestment in copy, where they spend more time and money to produce words for their web site. Overinvestment in functionality, where they work hard to make a web site do various dynamic things, often those most easily performed by email. Finally, they overinvest in planning, which means that they are overinvested at all levels.

Email efforts take a double hit from this. First, they don't get the investment that they need in order to be successful. Second, to the extent that they get any attention at all, they end up revolving around the web strategies. Unfortunately, the relationship should be the other way around, if anything.
 

4. Not Having an Email Strategy at All

An email strategy does not need to be a standalone document. It can be part of a larger communication strategy. But that strategy needs to reflect the virtues of email by always having the entire communication loop in mind. Outbound communication is shaped by the desired inbound results. Inbound communication shapes the outbound in turn.
 

5. Not Responding to Email

Organizations that don't make it easy for someone to offer their email address are often those that don't make it easy to contact them by email as well. But this problem extends even further and includes those organizations that hide their contact information behind layers of content or other obfuscations. A few years ago, the Nonprofit SiteAnalyzer studies reported that two thirds of the front pages of environmental sites provided no way to reach the organization.

Of those organizations that do make it possible to reach them, very few have well organized procedures for responding to email from visitors. Organizations who will casually interrupt their staff to take phone calls, will treat email as an inconvenience to be shuffled to the bottom of the to do list. People expect email to be returned on much the same schedule as they expect phone messages to be returned, but many organizations fail to meet that expectation.

Why is this? In many cases it is simply sheer unfamiliarity with the medium. In some cases it is fear of being inundated with email. (Imagine complaining about being inundated with queries from potential supporters.) In some cases it's simply what can be called the "In Box Problem" -- there just is no place or person to whom the email is really supposed to go.
 

6. Communication Lacks a Human Voice

Every organizational communicator should read The Cluetrain Manifesto. It critiques the stilted and inhuman language of most organizational communication and argues instead for genuineness in communication between people, even when some of those people represent organizations.

Genuine language is destroyed by the committee process that produces most copy. It turns personal statements into impersonal ones. It turns the quirky into the bland. And it is the enemy of most humor. Also, too many people think that email copy will be the same as direct mail or magazine copy. Those are longer messages suited to a different medium and don't translate well.

Yet genuine language is what connects people. Connections are the very lifeblood of an organization. Yes, human language will alienate a few people. But to the vast majority it will be a breath of fresh air and an invitation to deeper engagement.
 

7. Not Converting People to Online Communication

Nonprofit organizations are still overly focused on finding new supporters online, to the detriment of converting their existing supporters to a relationship that is mediated more by online communication. In the Nonprofit Email Survey, 44% of the organizations had email addresses for less than 20% of their stakeholders. The proportion for the nonprofit sector as a whole is probably much worse than that, given the bias of the sampling method of that survey. Large and medium sized organizations in particular are sitting on huge lists of supporters with whom it is very expensive to communicate. The largest organization in the Email Survey had over 5 million stakeholders, with email addresses for almost none of them.

Email correspondence and online communication in general has the potential to (a) dramatically reduce the cost of informing, attending to, and enrolling your stakeholders and (b) increase the frequency, intimacy, and effectiveness of that communication.

You need to ask yourself these questions: What proportion of our stakeholders are online? (Demographics suggest between 50% and 80%.) What proportion would prefer to communicate with you that way? What proportion would respond better to online communication?

Every nonprofit should be investing in converting portions of their existing base of supporters to email communication -- through post card, phone calls, or other methods -- and then testing the return on investment -- cost savings and responsiveness in proportion to the cost of conversion.
 

8. No Email Newsletter

There are many types of communication that fall under the rubric of an email newsletter: straight up news, action alerts, web site updates, personal commentary, educational articles, and so on. In other words, as much variety as there is in paper newsletters that organizations distribute to their supporters.

The overwhelming majority of nonprofit organizations surveyed publish paper newsletters. But most in turn don't take advantage of email to publish similar newsletters to their stakeholders.

In most cases, the cost savings alone justify publishing by email. A single four page print newsletter will have a marginal cost of at least 25 cents (and often closer to a dollar) to print, prepare, and post. The marginal cost of email publishing can be as little as one one hundredth of that amount.

More importantly, an email newsletter dramatically lowers the barriers to response on the part of the subscribers. Whereas before, a subscriber would have to make a phone call or pen a letter in order to respond, with an email newsletter, all they have to do is hit reply or click on a link.
 

9. Not Testing

Once an organization has committed itself to online communication, it is far too easy to overcommit to a single solution. Whether this is a large organization investing hundreds of thousands of dollars in an unproven web site strategy or a small organization throwing itself into a monthly email newsletter, the results are often the same:

No sense, other than the experiential or anecdotal, as to whether the project was a success. No learning other than that which comes from debriefing. No confidence about what contributed to the success or failure that they did, in fact, experience. Therefore, no confident way to move forward.

Commitment to online communication is essential. But so is a commitment to good testing. Good testing is scientific (control groups, random sampling), not casual. Good testing is regular (precedes any major commitment), not sporadic. Good testing is shared (with clearinghouses, with peers), rather than hoarded.

A commitment to testing will speed the progress of online communication. Testing allows an organization to manage the risks involved in major projects and thus make the commitment to those projects easier. Testing also generates the benchmarks and understanding of what works that engenders confidence in those same projects.
 

10. Not Giving Stakeholders Control

The key to trust is the appropriate sharing of control. But too many organizations don't share even the simplest control well with their stakeholders, by making it hard for people to control their subscriptions or the email address at which they receive correspondence. In other words, the most control you can give is control over the existence of the relationship itself.

The sky is the limit after that point. Give people control over how frequent or deep the communication is between you. Give people control over the nature of the relationship. That control will bring trust, which is the greatest contribution that anyone can make in your organization.

Mutual permission is the basis of any relationship. Spam is a trite but powerful illustration of not giving control to the people with whom you?re corresponding.

If you refuse that control, you will limit or even destroy the relationship. You end up with the wrong match between content and the reader, or between frequency of communication and their level of interest, or between length of material and their online reading habits.
 

11. Not Acting upon the Profile, Preferences or Behaviors of Stakeholders

Email is a medium that lends itself to personalization. From the simplest of personal greetings by name to the selection of content and frequency of communication, we all personalize our email communication with our friends. It's a very natural thing.

To not personalize email to our stakeholders is to ignore the natural strengths of the medium. It means lower engagement and lower response rates. It means we get a less personal level of participation from our stakeholders and that means missing out on the deepest kinds of involvement and support.

There are three well established ways to personalize: by their profile, by their preferences, and by their behavior. Their "profile" means things like demographics, their location, and other verifiable facts about them. Their Preferences are the things they say they want, like whether they want to be subscribed to your newsletter, what information they want, and how often. Their "behavior" is facts about how they have actually responded, such as whether they have donated to you, or clicked through to read an article.

Some of the mistakes that organizations make include: not collecting any of this information in the first place; trying to collect it all at once, rather than naturally, and slowly over time; collecting information which they don't intend to actually respond to, or that is, in other words, of no clear relevance; not acting on the information at all or not acting transparently, which is the biggest mistake of all. All of this is called NOT LISTENING.
 

12. More Concerned with Content than the Relationship

Many people in many nonprofit organization are what are sometimes called "issue heads". They are people who are deeply engaged with the subject matter of their work. But this, combined with many other factors, can lead to nonprofits having a deeper relationship with the content that they send to their supporters, than with the supporters themselves.

When this happens, newsletters get too long and details that are of interest to sophisticated readers obscure the information that is of interest to everyone else. The content, despite the effort put into it, ends up lacking value and relevance to the person whose support is needed.

The alternative is to always start with the relationship objective in mind:

What relationship objective is the communication intended to achieve? Remind them of our existence? Make them feel good about us? Get them interested in learning more about something? Get them to volunteer or donate? Get them to tell you more about themselves?

The relationship should drive content, not the other way around. Of course, that's the secret of email.
 

Conclusion

I described one way to use this tool in the introduction. If you find after reading this that you have a hard time critiquing your existing strategies based on some of these issues, then I recommend that you use a devil's advocate approach: Print each of them out on a single piece of paper and give each to a different person. Ask them to identify all the ways in which the problem exists. Generally choose people who are likely to have an ego investment in the issue, so that they are working on their own resistance and so that later defensiveness is minimized.

You may also find that a consultant can be useful to help you evaluate and develop your communication strategy, because it is all too easy to get caught up in the language and conventions of business as usual.

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