Blog: Email Newsletters

“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.

About once a week I receive an email from “my” farmer, who I have a community agriculture share with and get my organic vegetables from every Tuesday afternoon. Today I learned about “bee wars” and his delivery schedule for the coming week.

Every email starts our with a nice personal story about what is going on at his farm and then breaks into news about what vegetables will be available this week. It is a nice personal mix of a good story and business information. His emails are in just plain text paragraph form that is hard to scan but the content is so interesting I read the whole email.