Net Tuesday September notes

Thanks to everyone who came out to the Net Tuesday September event focusing on email marketing and fundraising. Your insightful questions were what made it all possible. Well, the awesome audience AND the panelists (Duncan Owen, Shannon Daud, and Ben Johnson.) Thanks all for making me look good!

There won’t be a Net Tuesday in October, but we’ll be back in November. In the meantime, you can relive the summer’s NetSquared Camp unconference with Russell Bennett’s great video.

What I learned this month:

  • Panels are a great format for Net Tuesday events. They have lots of energy and help bring the audience into the discussion because they support Q&As really well.
  • I need to bring in a mic and speakers for all future events. Struggling to hear the presenters sucks.
  • Name tags aren’t solving the “no mingling” problem. I need to bring in food AND assign people to start up discussions before the events.

Email campaigning service providers:

The panel didn’t have time to go deeply into their favorite tools for setting up and distributing email campaigns, but here’s the URLs for the tools mentioned.

For more see Seattle nonprofit consultants Groundwire’s great overview of email service providers with a focus on integration with Salesforce.com.

A-B testing in an email campaign

September’s Net Tuesday brought up a lot of questions about best practices for email campaigning.

Long or short subject lines? One ask or newsletter style? Weekly or monthly? Text or HTML layouts?

Now I may not be a grizzled old veteran yet, but I’ve already seen that “best practices” for one organization may not necessarily be the optimal strategy for everyone else. So, you have two choices when developing your email campaigns:

  1. you can guess
  2. you can test

I suggest test! It’s fast and easy with most email service providers.

Example using Mailchimp (but almost any major service will do)

NOTE: this was not a statistically valid experiment because of the small size of the test group. I did this as a test of Mailchimp’s functionality and to show how easy it is to setup an A/B test.

I setup an A/B test on the from field of a recent invitation to the Vancouver Net Tuesday group (instructions). The test sent the two variants of the email to a random 30% of the total list, and then after 24 hours automatically sent the winning variant of the email (based on open and clickthru rates) to the rest of the mailing list.

  • Group A: NetSquared Camp
  • Group B: Eli from Net Tuesday

And here’s the stats on the test. In this case “Group B” won with the more personal “Eli from Net Tuesday” from line.

As the French say, “et voilà!”

September’s Net Tuesday Vancouver has panelists

September’s Net Tuesday is next week, and I finally have all the panelists confirmed. Better late than never, I say. 🙂

TOPIC: Email communications – still alive and kicking

It’s easy to get distracted by that new-fangled social media stuff (so shiny!), but the folks on the ground in non-profits know that the real action’s in email. That’s where you raise the funds to advance your mission. That’s how you get people to show up to events. That’s how you get petitions signed.

There’s plenty of life left in email communications, and learning how to test, optimize, and integrate email campaigns is (I reckon) the best investment you can make in the online space.

Join a panel of  experts from Vancouver’s nonprofit community as they discuss the value of email to their organizations, how they manage and grow their lists, and how they test and measure their campaigns so that they’re constantly improving.

DATE: Tuesday, September 14
TIME: 5:30 (doors) 6:00pm (event starts)
LOCATION: W2 Storyeum, 151 W Cordova, Vancouver, BC

RSVP:

Meet your panelists:

BEN JOHNSON, Union Gospel Mission

Ben is an online marketing and research specialist. He’s raised over $1MM in donations online, currently works in the development department at Union Gospel Mission, and thinks email is the next big fundraising tool.

blog: http://979s.com.
email: mrbenjohnson@gmail.com
linkedin: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/mrbenjohnson/

SHANNON DAUD, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives
Shannon Daub is the CCPA-BC’s communications director and co-lead for the organization’s national online communications team.
email: shannon@policyalternatives.ca

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives is a research institute focused on social, economic and environmental justice. The CCPA works closely with social movement groups to support education and mobilization efforts by bringing providing information, analysis and solutions in areas like climate justice, economic policy, health care, education, human rights and more. www.policyalternatives.ca •  www.policynote.ca

DUNCAN OWEN, David Suzuki Foundation
Duncan has been with the David Suzuki Foundation for 1 ½ years focusing on fundraising campaigns (direct mail, telemarketing, email), supervising day to day operations of the donor relations team and looking to find innovation and efficiencies.

He’s got book learning too, including a Bachelor of Multimedia (Business Marketing) and a Graduate certificate of digital and direct marketing.
Born and raised in Melbourne, Duncan has been in Vancouver for 3 years.

Net Tuesday September 2010 – email communication isn’t dead yet

TOPIC: Email communications – not dead yet!

Join a panel of  experts from Vancouver’s nonprofit community as they discuss the value of email to their organizations, how they manage and grow their lists, and how they test and measure their campaigns so that they’re constantly improving.

DATE: Tuesday, September 14
TIME: 5:30 – 8:00pm
LOCATION: W2 Storyeum, 151 W Cordova, Vancouver, BC

RSVP for the next Vancouver event:

Net Tuesday September 2010 – email communication isn’t dead yet

TOPIC: Email communications – not dead yet!

Join a panel of  experts from Vancouver’s nonprofit community as they discuss the value of email to their organizations, how they manage and grow their lists, and how they test and measure their campaigns so that they’re constantly improving.

DATE: Tuesday, September 14
TIME: 5:30 – 8:00pm
LOCATION: W2 Storyeum, 151 W Cordova, Vancouver, BC

RSVP for the next Vancouver event: