The Persistence of Email - Take 2
I have been thinking about email lately. Email predates the World Wide Web as we know it. In some settings, tackling email issues evokes about as much enthusiasm as planning for shoveling snow in the Northeast winter. Social media and what’s new on the web generally seem the forward place to be for communication. Yet email lives.
I recently helped facilitate Idealware’s debut of a new day-long email fund-raising boot camp training. Third Sector New England hosted this first one, and Idealware hopes to replicate it elsewhere. Toward the end, I suddenly had this flash. A couple dozen communications and development managers in the room, and not one “is email dead?” question all day. We had a great, collaborative spirit throughout the day based on what I see in hindsight as some shared understandings:
Email tools such as Constant Contact and Vertical Response make broadcast emails and e-newsletters easier and more professional than ever.
Email broadcast or newsletter tools are content management for email. They facilitate the same collaborative editing and planning that content management systems bring to the Web. They empower you to track statistics against goals. They bring consistent design templates to email. They enable reliable web links. They bring reliable viewing to different email readers.
Writing and editing email messages resembles other writing in some ways, but has its own professional features—such as brevity.
On the downside, the sea of spam email swims in and other challenges make successfully delivering and getting attention email harder than ever. Email tool bring an easy discipline to the legal requirements for safe email and to maximizing “deliverability” to your lists.
And having a full data strategy—integrating with forms on the web, contact databases and such, segmenting lists—won’t come without serious effort.
Even so, whether my organization’s constituents mainly, primarily or only secondarily look for email news, email remains a critical part of the communications circuit, requires planning and campaign models.
These expectations and understandings vary by generation and community context. (And globally, they also vary by technology infrastructure. Where the Internet infrastructure is weak, mobile text based messaging is stronger.)
Effective Email is one part strategy, one part design and one part data management. You can only learn so much by checking email stats. You need to correlate email campaigns with the full range staff and community advocacy and services that reach your constituency -- and the sub-groups and segments within it.
This was my third email training in the last few months. With each, it has become less of a guilty pleasure again.
I recently helped facilitate Idealware’s debut of a new day-long email fund-raising boot camp training. Third Sector New England hosted this first one, and Idealware hopes to replicate it elsewhere. Toward the end, I suddenly had this flash. A couple dozen communications and development managers in the room, and not one “is email dead?” question all day. We had a great, collaborative spirit throughout the day based on what I see in hindsight as some shared understandings:
Email tools such as Constant Contact and Vertical Response make broadcast emails and e-newsletters easier and more professional than ever.
Email broadcast or newsletter tools are content management for email. They facilitate the same collaborative editing and planning that content management systems bring to the Web. They empower you to track statistics against goals. They bring consistent design templates to email. They enable reliable web links. They bring reliable viewing to different email readers.
Writing and editing email messages resembles other writing in some ways, but has its own professional features—such as brevity.
On the downside, the sea of spam email swims in and other challenges make successfully delivering and getting attention email harder than ever. Email tool bring an easy discipline to the legal requirements for safe email and to maximizing “deliverability” to your lists.
And having a full data strategy—integrating with forms on the web, contact databases and such, segmenting lists—won’t come without serious effort.
Even so, whether my organization’s constituents mainly, primarily or only secondarily look for email news, email remains a critical part of the communications circuit, requires planning and campaign models.
These expectations and understandings vary by generation and community context. (And globally, they also vary by technology infrastructure. Where the Internet infrastructure is weak, mobile text based messaging is stronger.)
Effective Email is one part strategy, one part design and one part data management. You can only learn so much by checking email stats. You need to correlate email campaigns with the full range staff and community advocacy and services that reach your constituency -- and the sub-groups and segments within it.
This was my third email training in the last few months. With each, it has become less of a guilty pleasure again.
Labels: Communication, contact management, email
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