There is such a thing as the 'Email Savvy Organization' and it's possible to identify the systems and practices that characterize it.
Following the publication of the Email Manifesto in the Spring, the dam seems to have broken on the subject of nonprofit use of email. Dozens of online publishers with nonprofit readers are now carrying information about the subject.
At the Gilbert Center, we are continuing to push this conversation forward. We just released Disconnected: the First Nonprofit Email Survey, which studies the email practices of over 900 nonprofit organizations. In its wake, we are launching the Nonprofit Email Study, a large scale numerical evaluation of nonprofit email practice, partnering dozens of nonprofits and consultants.
The survey identified five online practices related to email that were highly correlated. In other words, if one of these is present in an organization, it is more likely that the others are as well. It is this cluster of practices that characterizes the Email Savvy Organization.
The Email Savvy Organization:
- Collects email addresses on their web site, often on the front page.
- Publishes one or more email newsletters to its stakeholders.
- Can survey its stakeholders online and capture that information.
- Can raise money through email.
- Has an email strategy.
What roles do these five practices play? How do they fit together? How are they put to use by the Email Savvy Organization?
To answer these questions, I mapped these practices into the flow of communication that an organization has with its stakeholders to determine where they fit. This diagram is my representation of how they all hang together:
The orange items are the practices identified in the survey. The blue items are the missing links that make this a complete relationship building workflow. Each of the items plays a distinct role.
Collecting email addresses:
Nonprofit organizations that don't blink an eye when someone calls them on the phone to express their interest seem to have difficulty understanding that this is exactly what collecting email addresses on a web site does for them, only much more efficiently. The offering of an email address is the first level of "permission" offered by a new stakeholder -- the permission to correspond.
There are certainly other places that nonprofits will collect email addresses. The diagram contains two of them. Routine offline communication by mail, telephone, or in person, provides one of the cheapest ways to open up the online channel of communication. Given the costs of direct postal and telephone communication, many nonprofits are able to place a value on converting to email communication and are financing conversion efforts (postage paid reply cards, telephone campaigns) to get the addresses of their stakeholders and the corresponding permission to communicate through that channel.
Publishing email newsletters:
The overwhelming majority of nonprofits (71% in our survey) publish paper newsletters and, no doubt, some proportion of the rest do a fair amount of postal correspondence. Any organization that has stakeholders (donors, volunteers, activists, clients, and others) needs to do more than just ask them to do things, it needs to build those relationships by keeping people informed.
Email brings down the cost of keeping stakeholders informed. Email newsletters are the practice of choice for the Email Savvy Organization. An email newsletter is an organized and predictable form of communication that is not too personal for the level of relationship that exists when someone has first offered their email address.
Email newsletters take many different forms. Often, but not always, low tech is best, with plain text messages and links back to the organization's web site, if needed. Short newsletters that are delivered with greater frequency are more powerful relationship building tools than long newsletters which cannot be skimmed or read quickly.
Surveying stakeholders:
Part of relationship building is learning more about a person as time goes on. The representative practice of that process is surveying stakeholders online, discovering their interests and their preferences, and allowing them to shape the nature of the ongoing communication.
The key to learning about stakeholders is to have preferences, survey answers, and other behaviors that express something useful, entered into the nonprofit organization's records in a structured manner. The structure provided by web forms and similar tools can, when well thought out, provide the basis for increasingly personal communication.
Email fundraising:
The ability to accept credit card donations online is not fundraising. It's more like having a checking account. A checking account makes it easier for people to give you money when they have decided to do so. But just having a checking account does not result in thousands of donors lining up at the bank to offer their money. As many nonprofits have discovered, neither does having online transactions.
Fundraising is the age old combination of relationship building and asking, in an endless loop of deeper and deeper engagement. The Internet makes both relationship building and asking possible at a much larger scale and at a much lower cost than through other media. Email as a medium for "the ask" (as professional fundraisers call it) is a preferred practice for the Email Savvy Organization.
Email strategy:
Strategy is what pulls everything together, hence its central placement in the diagram. An email strategy answers specific questions for an organization: What is the path toward greater and greater engagement for a stakeholder? In terms that an email communication loop can understand and implement, how is each level of stakeholder engagement defined? How can each stakeholder be spoken to as an individual but managed as a part of a group?
Astute observers will realize that what really belongs in the center of the diagram is a complete, cross media communication strategy (not merely an "email strategy"), which integrates the power of email, as well as the power of other communication tools.
The Nonprofit Email Survey concludes that "to the extent that nonprofit organizations have not integrated email into the management of their stakeholder relationships, they remain profoundly disconnected." This map of the Email Savvy Organization provides an alternative: a vision of how nonprofit online success can be achieved.
These practices, when combined into a continual loop of communication with their stakeholders and integrated into a full communication strategy, provides nonprofits with a framework for building relationships with stakeholders in a way that truly capitalizes on the advantages of the Internet.
