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Category Archives: Email
September 5, 2012, 3:06 pm
Tweaking E-Mail for the Mobile Age
Ever since e-mail programs gave users the option of blocking images, many organizations have added short notes to the top of their messages—variations on “Trouble viewing this e-mail? Click here”—to direct recipients to online versions of the e-mails, images and all.
But while the notes make sense for people who read their e-mail on desktop computers, they can reduce the number of people who open the message when checking e-mail on mobile devices, says Holly Ross, executive director of the Nonprofit Technology Network.
She says that if someone is checking e-mail in a preview pane on a computer, they’ll usually be able to see enough of the message to know what it’s about.
“But on a mobile device, often all you see is a name, some part of the subject line, and then you see, ‘E-mail not displaying correctly?’ and that’s about it,” says Ms. Ross. “It doesn’t give…
July 24, 2012, 5:35 pm
Y of N.Y. Uses Social Media to Collect Stories—and Donors
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A story from the YMCA of Greater New York’s timeline project
To celebrate its 160th anniversary, the YMCA of Greater New York is offering free T-shirts to people willing to share their stories of how the Y has made a difference in their lives.
Within 48 hours of issuing the appeal by e-mail and social media, the organization received nearly 300 stories recounting childhood swimming lessons, triathlon training, exercise programs started after injuries, and long-ago summer camps.
The YMCA has organized the stories—some submitted with photographs—by decade and posted them on a digital timeline. All of the stories that are collected will also be buried in a time capsule beneath the organization’s new Coney Island branch, which is under construction and scheduled to open next spring.
From…
June 13, 2012, 10:58 am
How Young People Learn About Nonprofits Online
To reach people in their 20s and early 30s, the most important thing nonprofits can do is to make sure their Web sites are easy to read on a mobile device and not overly cluttered, says a survey of more than 6,500 young people released Tuesday.
About 65 percent of respondents said they liked to learn about a nonprofit through its Web site, compared with 55 percent who said they turned to social networks, e-mail newsletters (47 percent), print (18 percent), and face-to-face conversations (17 percent).
Other findings from the survey, conducted by two consulting companies, Achieve and Johnson, Grossnickle, and Associates:
Keep e-mail newsletters short and to the point. Members of focus groups conducted with the survey said they were more likely to read short, focused e-mails than long messages. About 65 percent of young people said they wanted e-mails to give them news about the…
April 5, 2012, 2:39 pm
Online Fundraising Increased 19% in 2011, Says New Report
The total that charities raised online jumped 19 percent in 2011 compared with the previous year, and the number of Internet gifts they received climbed 20 percent, according to a new study that analyzes online fundraising and advocacy at 44 national charities.
The 2012 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study was published by M+R Strategic Services, a fundraising consulting company, and the Nonprofit Technology Network.
The share of people who responded to e-mail fundraising appeals and advocacy requests dropped in each of the last five eNonprofit Benchmarks studies. But in 2011, organizations said the percentage who made gifts increased 2 percent and the percentage who responded to advocacy alerts jumped 28 percent.
The increases can be attributed, at least in part, to organizations’ being smarter about their use of e-mail, says Sarah DiJulio, a principal at M+R Strategic Services.
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April 5, 2012, 9:20 am
The Dangers of an Inactive E-Mail List
Inactive e-mail lists have always posed a challenge to fundraisers, but as spam filters get more sophisticated, the stakes are getting higher, Dan Atherton, a consultant at Chapman Cubine Adams + Hussey, told participants in San Francisco at the Nonprofit Technology Conference.
He said e-mail providers like Google, Hotmail, and Yahoo monitor how people interact with an organization’s e-mail communication, and if not enough supporters open the messages, the providers will stop delivering the messages to subscribers’ inboxes.
“If nobody in the first wave of e-mails I send out opens my e-mail, other people won’t even see that e-mail,” said Mr. Atherton. “It will go into their spam folder.”
The Environmental Defense Fund recently ran into the problem with Gmail, said Matthew Grimm, an analyst at the organization.
“We saw our Gmail open rates plummet recently and didn’t…
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