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Understanding E-Relationships
By Michael B. Soper, July 2005
This article was first published in the July issue of the Nonprofit Online News Journal.
Like many readers of Nonprofit Online News, I'm passionate about the potential of email and the web for nonprofit organizations. While hard copies and snail mail will remain essential in the years ahead, email and personal landing pages are powerful new tools in building and maintaining relationships with an institution's constituents: volunteers, supporters, service providers, political contacts, the press, staff and more.
Plenty has been written about email and web communication, and much of it is good. The challenge, it seems to me, is gaining an understanding of the relationship from the other side.
Real Relationships Are Rich In Options
Gaining a better understanding of e-Relationships is tougher than many initially think. Sure, there are a blinding number of web measurements, but you'd never try to describe your relationship with your best friend using clicks, page-hits, nor any of the other currently available metrics.
Research gives us insight into self-described attitudes. Analysis provides glimpses into collective or individual recipient behavior. Both of these measures reflect the specifics of a given situation. Neither addresses what is possible. Neither addresses what changes, large or small, in overall industry practices might help us get the most from each and every relationship we enter.
Great friendships aren't born; they're developed at a speed that reflects the shared interests, personal values, and available time committed by the individuals involved. So, a relationship metric would need to gauge each of those areas and compare them with how you would describe your organization were it an individual. That is to say, you can't reflect the quality and depth of a relationship without knowing your organization and measuring how others' interests and values match up.
Typical mass emails to our constituents provide a single, nuclear option, in the form of "unsubscribe." All of us committed to reducing spam are committed to making it easy to unsubscribe, counting on the fact that our content is so good people won't do it.
That's logical, but not human. People have good days and bad. More than likely, those people with whom you seek to strengthen relationships receive a lot of email. There are days where their inbox is overflowing to the point of being unmanageable. This depends on many factors outside your control, and likely beyond the control of your recipient.
What an individual reader may perceive as a valuable newsletter on one day is simply deleted, or marked as junk, or unsubscribed from the next. But, just as you wouldn't end a friendship because of a bad day, it's past time that we give recipients more options than just to unsubscribe.
Look at how you manage the relationships in your life. When you leave for a vacation, you don't cancel your social relationships, you simply put them on hold. And, certainly one step short of unsubscribing to your newsletter would be to give recipients the option of unsubscribing for a fixed period of time, knowing that when they begin receiving your newsletter in the future that all of their preferences will be just as they were.
Beyond the Unsubscribe Link
So is it time to eliminate the "unsubscribe link?" No. But it may be time to provide those who have gone beyond thinking about unsubscribing, with a dashboard of options. You depend on your newsletter having what each recipient likes most, to keep him or her subscribed. But it's what they like least that may generate unsubscriptions.
What if when they reached the "unsubscribe" personal landing page on your web site, participants were made a promise? "Stick with us and we'll do more of those things you like, fewer of those things you don't. Just take this three-question survey." The survey provides two questions with multiple-choice lists of every type of article you publish. They are asked to identify those types of articles they like most and least. The third question has to do with how often they would like to receive this kind of information, including the capability to suspend their subscription during an especially busy time.
Those participants who participate in the survey have a much greater chance of being retained as subscribers. After all, they've just made an investment in improving your newsletter. From the perspective of an e-newsletter publisher, it may be easier to remove what individual subscribers "don't like/don't want" than to focus on just giving them what they like most. The latter strategy can sometimes result in a very short newsletter.
Your challenge is to keep your promise to subscribers. Devote more "shelf space" and better "shelf position" to the kinds of stories they like most. Find alternative locations for other short articles and promotion. Consider encouraging all subscribers to participate in the survey and report back on their responses in a cover story. Do not have "about to unsubscribe" or other subscribers participate in a survey if you are not prepared to take immediate action on the feedback and suggestions they provide.
Once you begin allowing your subscribers (or supporters) to adjust the frequency of your newsletter, you've opened the door to another key question about how best to build relationships. How easily will you let subscribers marginalize their relationship with you?
Imagine a personal friend of yours, a valued relationship in your life, becomes less and less available. You'd probably take extra steps to make yourself even more flexible with regard to when you can meet. You might even ask if there are others ways, places, or times to connect. The point is simply that the responsibility for building valuable relationships rests not with one part, but with both.
If a subscriber to your newsletter tells you they want to receive information less frequently, that is no doubt the case - today. But recognizing that as the publisher of a newsletter you share a responsibility for that relationship, how might you convince them to increase the frequency of receiving your mailings?
Special reports can be used to reconnect with subscribers who have at one moment in the past requested less frequent communication. These reports share your mission and can serve to remind subscribers of your organization's importance in their lives. As a result, they will build subscribers' desire for more frequent communication. But once again, don't expect them to automatically become more involved. Explicitly offer to provide them with more frequent updates within the special reports themselves.
Conclusion
Understanding e-relationships and how to strengthen them demands the best from any organization. And while analyzing behavior and researching attitudes are essential, don't forget common sense. Know that real life relationships that matter are a shared responsibility. Our e-relationships deserve no less.
In the long run, we can't afford a passive approach that allows subscribers to downgrade, fall away, or drop relationships that are vitally important to the future of our organizations.
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