Kid Squanders Relief Money

December 31, 2006

If you've been reading The Agitator over the holidays, you've seen we've been having some fun — hopefully spreading Christmas cheer — courtesy of one of our favorite humor sources, The Onion.

This is our absolute favorite “report” from The Onion, originally posted on The Agitator back in July … but just a teaser here:

“I could see that Mtumbe was a little free with his money, and I let it slide, probably for too long in retrospect,” said Anderson. “If I continue to let him get away with this kind of thing, the next thing I know he's got a glue problem.”

Read more here …

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Are Your Email Campaigns Getting Delivered?

December 30, 2006

From our archives. Happy Holidays!

Or are they winding up in the electronic equivalent of the “round mail box?”

With online fundraising and activist engagement becoming more and more central to nonprofits' marketing strategies, it's critical that fundraisers and campaigners know that their e-messaging is actually getting delivered.

Do you know how much of your e-messaging is being blocked by spam filters? A recent report on nonprofit email delivery from Mindshare Interactive Campaigns indicates non-delivery could be in the 24% range. In a worst case, they cite an example where only 20% of e-messages were actually getting delivered to the intended recipients' in-boxes … the rest being either diverted to spam boxes or blocked completely. Think about what spam filtering could be doing to the response rates of your e-campaigns!

The commercial e-marketing world is abuzz with warnings and advice about optimizing outbound email efforts so as to maximize delivery. Here is a recent example citing a 19% non-delivery rate across thousands of campaigns.

To shed light on this issue for nonprofit marketers, The Agitator went to two of the best e-messaging gurus we know — Bill Pease at GetActive and David Crooke at Convio. Both are CTOs at their respective firms, and they have provided us with extensive, helpful comments on the following kinds of questions:

  • Exactly how big a problem is non-delivery of e-messages for nonprofits?
  • How do you major league e-service providers protect your clients and optimize their email delivery?
  • What can any nonprofit do on its own to minimize non-delivery of its e-messages?

We've provided their invaluable advice for large and small nonprofits here in a downloadable PDF, which we strongly urge you to devour. But you can read on for some key takeaways.

Continue reading “Are Your Email Campaigns Getting Delivered?”

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Get Your Email Marketing Right

December 30, 2006

From our archives. Happy Holidays!

Print out this piece by direct marketer extraordinaire Denny Hatch.

Yes, like on paper. So you can easily periodically review its wisdom.

You see, Hatch seems to believe, and The Agitator agrees, that there are some fundamental direct marketing rules that apply across media … even to email marketing. He observes:

When a marketer undertakes a direct mail campaign, the cost will run roughly $500 to $750 per thousand—or 50 cents to 75 cents apiece. As a result, direct mailers are disciplined and very careful. They know the rules and follow them slavishly. When rules are broken, they know precisely what rules they are breaking and why. Otherwise, they will lose a lot of money quickly.

E-mail, on the other hand, costs virtually nothing, which means that e-mailers don’t need to know any rules. They can be very sloppy, mail billions, achieve minuscule results and still make a little money.

We'll take this a step farther. Someone in your shop needs to know the rules in the first place. And someone needs to know how to test them rigorously against new assumptions, techniques and capabilities. So …

    • If you're a nonprofit CEO, and your online marketing isn't accountable to a successful direct mail marketer, set in motion a staff change before you go home today.
    • If you're the online marketing chief at your org, and you don't start each day thinking about what to test next, why and how, you oughta be fired.

Hatch doesn't say “don't break the rules.” He does say “know why” if you do, and be prepared to measure and act upon the results. He notes that it is of course more feasible time and money-wise to test online and react immediately. And that smart online testing can inform and improve your direct marketing results in other media.

He talks of the best direct mail copywriters in the biz spending days on envelope teasers. By contrast, how much thinking goes into your email subject lines, or your offer, donate, join, or act now landing pages?

If you're “too busy” to be thinking about applying proven direct response rules to your online efforts or creatively testing the rules you question, well maybe you'd be better off shovelling less “stuff” down your fiber connection, and using that time to think more.

At this stage of the game, it's no great accomplishment to simply produce “better” online marketing returns year over year. There are structural reasons why this should occur if you simply don't shoot yourself in the foot.

It's like a funeral home director patting himself on the back for handling more burials when the number of deaths per thousand is growing annually as the overall population ages. Sorry to say, it's just a share of a naturally bigger pot.

More praiseworthy is the online marketer who can point to a record of systematic, successful testing of concrete variables, with resulting rollout strategies that produce greater per capita yield and/or enlarge the viable universe. That marketer really deserves a raise!

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Defending the Status Quo

December 29, 2006

From our archives. Happy Holidays!

Seth Godin lists these 17 excuses for defending the status quo. I can't help rounding it out to twenty with these three additions:

    1. “I could never sell this to the folks upstairs.”
    2. “My successor can worry about it.”
    3. “We've got plenty of good ideas, just no time to pursue them.”

No doubt many others will add to Seth's list.

Innovating & rattling cages is just too risky for most folks.

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Why Smart Companies (And Nonprofits) Do Dumb Things

December 29, 2006

From our archives. Happy Holidays!

Great common sense advice on helping your organization avoid doing dumb things.

The only way Guy Kawasaki might improve upon this post is if he could produce and distribute it in a wallet-sized card version!

One reason I might add is the phenomenon some management consultants refer to as driving by looking in the rear view mirror. By slavishly following the past, including strategies and practices that indeed have worked in the past, managers and execs can totally miss the huge changes happening right in front of them that totally transform the context. Smart then becomes dumb now!

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Liberals Suffering From Outrage Fatigue

December 28, 2006

Are you feeling it yourself during this holiday hiatus? A dangerous pandemic that could seriously affect progressive fundraising in 2007. Stay indoors, preferably at home!

From The Onion:

“For a while, I wanted more fuel for the fire, to really get my blood boiling,” said Madison, WI resident Dorothy Levine, a reproductive-rights activist and former Howard Dean campaign volunteer. “I read the policy papers on the Brookings web site. I subscribed to The Progressive. I clipped cartoons by Tom Tomorrow and Ted Rall. I listened to NPR all day. But then, it was like, while I was reading Molly Ivins' Bushwhacked, eight more must-read anti-Bush books came out. It was overwhelming. By the time they released Fahrenheit 9/11, I was too exhausted to drag myself to the theater.” Read more here …

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What Is The Fear Quotient In Your Message?

December 27, 2006

From our archives. Happy Holidays!

Thanks to David Roberts for an excellent series in Gristmill — including interesting references and reader comments — discussing the use of fear as a tool of motivation in American politics. Roberts is prompted in the first instance by the specific question of whether environmentalists should use scare tactics to win support on issues like global warming. He observes:

Progressives can be forgiven for envying the incredible hot hormonal rush of power that comes from stoking fear/anger. It's perfectly understandable, the temptation they feel to set up their own zero-sum struggles, to describe the dangers ahead (of poverty, or global warming, or infectious disease) in gruesome, apocalyptic tones, with a sprinkling of evil, mustache-twirling villains …

The idea is that, say, environmentalists should get people terrified of global warming, so that they hate it and seek out leaders who aggressively attack it.

But his discussion broadens considerably — including brain physiology and emotional intelligence — and is well worth reflection by all political and issue marketers and fundraisers.

After exploring the issue from a variety of perspectives, Roberts ultimately concludes that the end cannot justify the means … deliberately stirring up fear simply unleashes such negative attitudes and consequences that doing so is morally untenable.

In a nutshell, says Roberts:

We might gain some short-term victories by scaring the crap out of people, but a population in fear will always tend toward authoritarianism and violence. Reason, compassion, forbearance, and selflessness are the building blocks of true progressivism. If they have been driven underground, the progressive response should not be to resort to reactionary macho posturing, but to revive them …

Those who seek a compassionate society — who would bequeath their children a country and an earth in better condition that those they inherited — must always work against fear.

Think about it, and then fast forward to your latest direct mail copy, email alert, or press release. What's the fear quotient in your message? And should you feel guilty or not? Of course you need to draw your own conclusion.

But read on for our take …

Continue reading “What Is The Fear Quotient In Your Message?”

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Top Ten Cliches That Work In Copy

December 27, 2006

From our archives. Happy Holidays!

From Guest Agitator Jerry Huntsinger …

If you’ve heard it over and over and over again, yes it’s a cliché.
But is a cliché bad for your letter? Nope, because a cliché turns a light on inside your reader’s mind. Avoiding clichés leaves the reader in darkness.

1. Here’s how you can…

2. Let me show you…

3. The quickest way to…

4. One-of-a-kind

5. Isn’t it about time that…

6. Once in a lifetime

7. Once and for all

8. Discover the truth about

9. Urgently needed

10. You’ll be surprised to learn that…

If you have more, or better ones, we'd love to hear them.

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101 Ways To Brew Up A Great Idea

December 27, 2006

From our archives. Happy Holidays!

Earlier, we forwarded Guy Kawasaki's advice for avoiding dumb organizational decisions.

On a more positive note, Scott Baradell offers some rather creative suggestions for coming up with great ideas.

We'd like to add to the list, but we're stumped!

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What is the Web 2.0 Anyway? And Who Cares?

December 26, 2006

From our archives. Happy Holidays!

For those of you for whom sorting your email is a major tech challenge, all the buzz over “Web 2.0″ must be a real mystery. For most pundits, the concept revolves around “user-generated content” posted out there on the web for all to see.

Of course, an email is user-generated content; the difference is that the originator of the email controls its distribution or exposure … that is, til a recipient forwards it along! Isn't sending an email to 10 friends about your trip to Nassau, or lamenting the latest Congressional sex scandal, to be considered “social networking” (a term often joined at the hip to Web 2.0)?

So, we're back to where we started. What is this Web 2.0 stuff? And why might it be important to nonprofit fundraisers and communicators?

Here's the best conceptual discussion of Web 2.0 I've seen, courtesy of the folks at Pew Research Center. It includes some very interesting comparative examples of “then” and “now” — Encarta vs. Wikipedia, GeoCities vs. MySpace, Photobucket vs. KodakGallery.

And why is this 2.0 stuff important to the nonprofit world?

Continue reading “What is the Web 2.0 Anyway? And Who Cares?”

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