Email systems

Building a list

One of the potential benefits of email is in building a list of people who are sympathetic to your campaign and may support it in a variety of ways.

Ask anyone who provides you with contact information for their email address. Explain exactly what you will use it for – i.e. to keep them up to date with your activities.
Use email campaigns to build your list. So when you have an important issue that you need to involve supporters in ask them to forward your email to colleagues and acquaintances.

Only add people to your email list who have expressly agreed to receive email from you. Be careful not to ‘spam’ people, as this will deter support.

A great archive of examples of advocacy email to supporters can be found here: http://www.fairsay.com/labs/actionarchive/all/archive_folder_contents

Managing databases

Email programmes have address books with the capacity to store a variety of information about each contact. In the initial stages of developing the list this capacity could be used to build up information about contacts. Using personalisation – personal details, e.g. first name, in emails increases response rates.

As your list grows you will need to consider how you store the contact and response details of your supporters. Using a database to store the details in or manage your contacts will give your organisation extra flexibility. You could use a spreadsheet to track these and your exchanges with them if the number of contacts is very small. If you are trying to manage a large contact database over time you will fine a CRM system (client relationship management system) very useful. This will not only allow you to keep track of contacts, but also to keep track of your interactions with them and to target them specifically according to groupings you create or things they have expressed interest in.

Two free and open source CRM’s worth investigating are Civi-CRM and Sugar.

CiviMail is the mass-mailing component for Civi-CRM, which allows you to engage your constituents with personalized emails and newsletters. It works alongside internet content management systems like Drupal and Joomla too. With CiviMail you can:

• Target mailings by including or excluding any number of CiviCRM group(s), or previous mailing recipients
• Personalize your messages using mail-merge tokens.
• Track when recipients open your message.
• Track click-throughs.
• Manage bounces and unsubscribe requests.

You can also manage event registrations and donorship programmes with CivilMail. It's a truly powerful piece of opensource magic.

If CiviMail doesn't meet you needs, other services like Emma and Pure360 can help with managing your email marketing campaigns for a reasonable price. The time you will save and the results you get might make it well worth your while. Emma offers free services on application to non-profits.

E-newsletters

Communicating regularly with supporters, funders and advocates ensures your message is uppermost in their minds. You could;

• Establish a calendar with an e-newsletter on a regular basis, once monthly or bi-monthly.
• Keep your newsletter fairly short – equivalent to a couple of sides of A4 paper.
• Give concrete feedback about activities.

However, always be certain not to abuse your mailing list. Bombarding people with emails will likely result in people signing off your list or putting it on to automatic spam. You should carefully plan your regular communications over the year. Experiences vary as to whether this should be 10 emails a year, less or more.

You need to gauge your audience and their level of interest in your work, but you should always be aware that a well targeted and conceived email will be much more valuable then sending a large number of emails people may or may not be interested in.

If you have specialist information that some of your audience may be interested in, try targeting a smaller group of people with this more detailed information on the basis of interest.

When to email?

Once you know how to email effectively, it's time to get clear about when to do it. In many ways this is similar to when you might have issued a media release via traditional marketing techniques and should run in parallel with other tactics.

• When you have a major announcement to make
• Some crucial information has come to light
• When you want people to take action
• For the launch of a new campaign or initiative

Remember to always include direct links to key pages on your website (if relevant) and a call to action.