Development Seed Blog

“How do I get people to my site?” Try good old personal emails to you friends and members of your organization.

I was talking with an NGO in Peru last week and the president of the organization asked me how many donations I thought they might receive once their new site is registered on Google. I smiled and then explained (again) how the organization needs to publicize the site on their own and not rely on people stumbling upon it from a search engine. Development Seed does not just build sites for organizations, our team spends a considerable amount of time working with organizations on outreach methods, educating our clients on how to use their site afflictively to communicate with people. Our latest focus has been in pushing the good old use of emails.

If there is one sure place a user is going to go when they get online it is going to be to check their mail. Email is the still primary connection most users have with the Internet and non-profits need to take this form of communication seriously. To help our clients effectively use emails we did some research on how organizations are (or could) communicate better via emails.

One of the best resources that we found is Michael C. Gilbert's site: http://research.gilbert.org/nes/disconnected
Gilbert's research shows how ill prepared organizations are in capitalizing on emails, listing:
44% of organizations have email addresses for fewer than 20% of their supporters
64% of organizations do not collect email addresses on their web site
75% of organizations cannot survey their stakeholders online
78% of organizations do not have an email strategy

So how can we change these figures?
Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20020930.html discusses some important solutions to help organizations effectively use email to communicate with their members. In his section “Newsletters Must be Simple,” Nielsen discusses the importance of a well designed email for scannability with well crafted micro content to ensure your point quickly comes across and attracts the user to read more. Green Media Tool Shed http://greenmediatoolshed.blogs.com/gmt/2004/02/lessons_from_th.html purchased Nielsen's full study and wrote a key points brief on their blog that is worth a good read.
Green Media lists the key lessons from the report:
1. A good subject line with actual important content. (NOT NEWSLETTER #3 -GMT or IMPORTANT NEWS type subjects)
2. Keep it short
3. Write for scanning - Jakob has all the statistics to say folks don't read the newsletter they scan it. You should write so scanners "get" your core message. I Love this quote from the summary This implies the need for layouts that let users quickly grasp each issue’s content and zero in on specifics. It is kind of the general challenge for all advocacy.
4. Newsletters should be timely and informative about events, dates, deadlines.
5. Do it right or people will unsubscribe (worse they will stay subscribed because they are afraid of your unsubscribe process and come to resent you for spamming them)
6. You must convince folks that your regular email will be simple, useful, and easy to deal with.
7. Don't abuse your relationship. Be predictable and not too aggressive.

To see two good examples of these best practices at work see Development Seed's latest newsletter http://developmentseed.org/newslettermailer.php and our fundraising letter
http://developmentseed.org/fundraisermailer.php