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Do Your Stakeholders Think You're a Spammer?
The Email Permission Policy That Fails (And the One That Works)
By Michael C. Gilbert, August 15th, 2008
I'll be teaching a new seminar in a few weeks on the
topic of Building Your Online List, focusing on methods
that have integrity and engender trust. The workshop
itself is highly practical in its content, but its spirit
very much informs this article.
Have you ever hired a firm to append email addresses to a list of your stakeholders for whom you only have postal addresses? Have you ever rented a list of email addresses for donor prospecting? Have you ever subscribed someone to your newsletter when you weren't sure how you got their email address in the first place? Have you ever sent a marginally relevant message to an email discussion list in an effort to get the word out to the subscribers?
If you answered yes to any of these, your stakeholders may, in fact, think of you as a spammer.
I'm not saying that you're violating the law. In most cases and in most jurisdictions, the four practices I chose as my examples can be perfectly legal. (I'm not a lawyer.) But the law is often not a very good guide to either professional ethics or effective practices. There's nothing in the law that prevents you from insulting your major donors either, but you still don't do it, right?
It's been over thirty years since the very first piece of email spam was sent out. Everyone knows by now that they shouldn't send unsolicited bulk email. Beyond that basic understanding, however, there are two different approaches to this challenge that have emerged.
The first is the legalistic approach. In the US, there is the CAN_SPAM law and numerous state level regulations that are mostly consistent with that law. The way it seems to be interpreted by most practitioners is that if, at some point, a person agrees to third party contact, then it's open season on their email address. The legalist approach easily permits list rental and email append.
It's a little fuzzier when it comes to the other two practices I mentioned (promotional messages on discussion lists and email addresses of unknown origin). In these cases, the legalistic approach manifests basically as: "what can we get away with?" Come to think of it, that's probably a really great summary of the legalist approach as a whole.
The legalistic, what-can-we-get-away-with approach is fueled by scarcity experienced by most nonprofit organizations, some ignorance of the consequences of the approach, and, from time to time, a sense of entitlement. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard someone say "but we have as much right to get our word out as anyone else".
Of course we have a right to get our word out. I would say, in fact, that we have a duty to do so. But that duty is to do so effectively, free from the blindness of our own issues, with an understanding of the consequences of our actions, and an eye to long term outcomes.
That's where a second approach is required: the empathetic approach. If the legalistic approach is captured well by the question "what can I get away with?", the empathetic approach is captured by the question "how would I feel, if I were in their position?"
Now, there are plenty of ways to cloak self-justification in the language of empathy. I've heard plenty of people say "I would be fine about it because I would know that...", followed by justifications from the organization's perspective. But eventually, most people are capable of genuinely putting themselves in the other person's position.
When you do that, you get a different perspective on the four practices I used as examples. You might have mixed feelings, at best, about suddenly getting email from an organization you gave money to once. Or maybe you wouldn't be so happy to be asked for money by an organization you had no previous relationship with at all, but who got your address from a broker who got it from an ecommerce site where you bought something that vaguely suggested to someone that your demographics suited the nonprofits target audience. Perhaps you would feel a bit intruded upon and disappointed when a nonprofit that you might otherwise admire pops onto an online forum with messages that are barely related to the topics being discussed at the moment and are transparently self-promotional. And chances are, you would be, at best, perplexed, when you suddenly find yourself subscribed, without explanation, to an email newsletter of an organization with which you thought you had a respectful, long-standing relationship.
The empathetic approach requires you to think about things from other people's perspectives and to leave the nonprofit perspective behind for a time. Most importantly, it requires you to consider how they might feel.
The empathetic approach doesn't make things easy. It doesn't draw bright lines of right and wrong the way the legalistic approach does. You and your colleagues may have differing conclusions about what you might think and feel were you in your stakeholders' positions. But I suggest that this diversity is one of the strengths of the approach, empowering you to engage with your stakeholders with a rich base of understanding.
It is a spirit of kindness and humanity that drives your stakeholders to support you in the first place. If you want to nurture and broaden that spirit among all your stakeholders, they deserve the same in return. So, don't ask what you can get away with. Ask how you would feel in their place.
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It will probably feel good!
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