Email still matters.
Has social media and text messaging entirely replaced email as an effective direct outreach tool?
No - not entirely. And it probably never will.
Different people are reached in different ways. Some people interact with friends and read news primarily via the most popular social media tool or an instant messaging app. But some people are still best reached via email. In addition, email messaging can reinforce a theme or message on social media, and email is excellent for longer message, such as introducing a new Executive Director with more than a photo and a name.
Remember that what YOU prefer in terms of online communications may not at all be what others prefer.
One way to find out which tools are reaching which people is for your staff to ask "How did you hear about us / this event?" to every:
Put that question on any volunteer form, order form or sign up sheet you have for new volunteers, new donors or customers. Also, make sure all staff that interact with members of the public know when to ask this question and how to track responses. And be ready for answers to change over time.
By gathering this information, you will very likely find that
some members of your constituency are reading your email
newsletter or mass emails (emails sent to several people).
Email newsletters allow you to say all that you need to in the way you need to, without the limits on number of characters that you have with social media and text messaging. It may take more than just one short pithy text message can convey to say why your upcoming theatrical production is worth viewing, your new program for women experiencing domestic violence is worth supporting, your new property acquisition was fundamentally important to your historical society, etc. Email is the perfect tool for those messages that need to say more than just a sentence or two. All of that detailed information is going to be on your web site as well, but email is in a person's mail box, ready to read - your audience doesn't have to go looking for it.
Your email newsletters and mass communications via email (one email to several people) should provide enough information so that a reader has the most important information you want them to have without having to click on anything - unless they need to take action. For instance, it shouldn't just announce a new class with dates and a link but also provide enough information so that the person will know whether or not it's something the person wants to sign up for. Email is push marketing in that it puts a product or service in front of a person, and it can also be pull marketing, in that it can, and should, draw a person into some action, usually via the organization's web site: to sign up for a program, to buy a ticket to an event, to sign a petition, to purchase a product, to watch a video to build awareness about something, etc.
Another advantage of email is that it can be be easily forwarded
by subscribers to their friends, family, associates - to new
contacts - provided it's been properly designed.
I had an email newsletter for MANY years, Tech4Impact. I haven't been sending it anymore. Why?
I asked my email newsletter subscribers to ask if they preferred to subscribe to my blog instead, and feedback was overwhelming: they wanted the email newsletter. HOWEVER, their statements didn't translate into clicks or interactions: I look at my web site analytics to see why people are coming to my web pages or blogs, and there were months when there was not even one reference from my email newsletter. And that is the same criteria you should use when deciding whether or not to continue with your email newsletter.
That said, I still undertake email campaigns where I prepare a
message for a specific audience and send the message to that
audience via email - each person getting a separate email, because
putting everyone in the "CC" line is rude and putting everyone in
the "BCC" line often results in the email getting blocked by the
recipients email provider.
With any communication you undertake, whether its an email newsletter or a billboard or a paper poster, you need to answer these questions:
In answering these questions, your organization may decide to produce more than one email newsletter, each addressing a different audience (volunteers, donors, the general public, etc.).
Remember that, regardless of the intended audience, this newsletter can be forwarded by readers to anyone, including members of the press. You may discourage people from doing so, but you cannot entirely prevent someone bent on doing it - so write every email communication as a possible public publication. If you have created links within your newsletter that track web traffic in such a way that links are customized specifically to one reader, then when a reader forwards that email, the links won't work for a new recipient - note that somewhere in your newsletter. It's a good idea to reproduce your email newsletter as a web page, and encourage anyone who has received a forwarded email to view the newsletter there, so that all links work.
Put items that have upcoming dates associated with them, or items
that require action by readers, near the top of the newsletter.
Consider a table of contents at the top of the newsletter as well.
But KEEP IT SHORT. Expect readers to spend no more than three
minutes reading the newsletter. You can (and should) point to your
web site or blog space for more in-depth information.
When preparing your email newsletter, include a "signature" at the
end of the document. This should include this information, AS
TEXT, not just within a graphic:
If you consider the email a mass communication to several people rather than a formal email newsletter, it should STILL have some kind of signature. I received an email that was sent to several people - I have no idea how many, but it was to a group - and it had all sorts of information about what time to get to an event and where to park, but never said who the organization was that was sending it, why I was receiving it, etc. After some investigation, I found out it was sent to everyone who had signed up as interested in volunteering within the local school system.
Point Back to Your Web Site, Blog, Videos & Social Media
All of your communications, in print and online, should feed into each other: web sites should link to your videos on YouTube. Descriptions in YouTube should link back to your web site and blog and social media channels. Facebook posts should link to information on your web site and announce new podcasts. Your paper newsletter should remind people of your social media channels.
That means all of these channels should, at some point, link to
information about how to subscribe to your email newsletter. And
your email newsletter needs to point to them sometimes as well.
Your newsletter information also should not contradict anything
said in these other communications. That's why it's fundamentally
important for one person at your organization to be charged with
reading all of your communications. While it's often not realistic
to have one person approving every social media message sent out
by the social media manager, there must be one person who is
reading all of the organization's communications regularly and
letting different managers know how they need to adjust their
messages. Absolutely, an email newsletter should be reviewed by
the most senior marketing person before being sent - you can
delete a tweet or edit a Facebook message and, very likely, no one
will notice, but once you send an email out, you have no control
over it at all - you cannot take it back.
Email programs vary from user to user. Not everyone uses Gmail. Not everyone uses the same web browser. Not everyone uses the same email program reader. And how email looks on my laptop is not how it looks on my phone.
It's a good idea to design your email newsletter or mass communication so that it can be read on either the large screen of a laptop or the small screen of an smartphone. You may need to consider the bandwidth of your users: not everyone has a fast Internet connection. Conducting a survey of your volunteers, donors, clients and employees can help you learn more about the Internet resources of your potential audiences and just how simple your email newsletter needs to be.
Your email newsletter should also the accessible design standards a web site does: excellent color contrast, providing alt tags for all graphics, no essential text inside of graphics, etc.
In fact, your email should still make sense to a reader even if they don't see the graphics. I am someone that blocks all graphics within emails unless I choose to download such, because I read emails on my phone sometimes and don't want to spend the bandwidth to download graphics. Many times, that has meant an email makes no sense to me, because essential information is in a graphics file - a jpeg, for instance - instead of just text.
I have received email newsletters that are entirely in a jpeg file, and I do NOT automatically download graphics files when I open an email. Usually, I just delete such a newsletter, and unsubscribe from it, rather than open it. Graphics files eat up up data on my phone and make it harder for me to read the information I want to read in an email when I'm on my phone. In addition, any information you put into a graphics file cannot be read by any assistive technology that reads information to a user: if I am a sight impaired user who uses a tool that reads messages to me in a computerized voice, I cannot access the information in your graphics file.
As noted earlier, by email newsletter, I do NOT mean attaching a
.PDF or word processing newsletter to an email; I mean text
within the body of the email. Many, and maybe most, of your
readers will never open that PDF you send as your email
newsletter. That also means they aren't going to forward it.
I also do not mean designing the newsletter as a graphic, or a
series of graphics. If you do this, then:
How long can your newsletter be? As long as you feel it needs to
be to get information to readers, enough information that they
would not have to click on any link to a web page or blog to know
the essentials of what you are trying to say.
There is no magic formula for an email newsletter or a regular
mass communication to all volunteers, all committee members, etc.
Some people want monthly communications. Some people want weekly
communications. Some people think both of that is too much. Some
organizations send out emails twice weekly in December, per their
annual giving campign.
Just don't do mass communications only on an ad hoc basis: have a
plan, with publication dates and a goal for each of those
communications.
You may want to make a newsletter for volunteers something
mandatory that volunteers must subscribe to. If so, you need to
let volunteers know that upfront.
You should have a way for people to subscribe on their own as
well.
Some people automatically add financial donors to an email
distribution list. I think that's fine, but there needs to be a
way to one-click unsubscribe in every newsletter.
Just as your newsletters should point back to your web site,
blog, videos, social media channels and other online products, as
well as talk about any of your paper publications, those other
online channels and traditional publications should mention your
email newsletter and explain how to subscribe.
You can send your newsletter manually, meaning that you note on some kind of database who is subscribing to the newsletter and, when you are ready to send the publication, exporting subscriber email addresses from this database and putting them in the BCC (blind carbon copy) line of your email. However, this if quite labor intensive; someone has to input the addresses of new subscribers into the database regularly.
Purchasing or subscribing to software may be worth the money.
MailChimp, Constant Contact and SalesForce are but three examples
of for-profit companies selling software you can use for email
newsletters. I'm not linking to them because I don't want to be
seen as endorsing any of them - I have been a recipient of email
newsletters sent via these platforms but I have never used them
myself to send newsletters.
How do you know if your email newsletter is having any impact?
Also see Evaluating Online Activities: Online Action Should Create & Support Offline Action. Hundreds of "friends" on an online social networking site. Thousands of subscribers to an email newsletter. Dozens of attendees to a virtual event. Those are impressive numbers on the surface, but if they don't translate into more volunteers, repeat volunteers, new donors, repeat donors, more clients, repeat clients, legislation, or public pressure, they are just that: numbers. For online activities to translate into something tangible, online action must create and support offline action. What could this look like? This resource can help organizations plan strategically about online activities so that they lead to something tangible - not just numbers.
Also see the article "5
Emails That Foster Volunteer Engagement and Community Building,"
from Wired Impact, which reminds nonprofits, charities &
others that email is still a powerful, important way to engage
& support #volunteers & to show they are valued.
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