Grooming Your E-list

In my inbox this week was an e-mail advertisement for a new, all-natural approach to dealing with hair loss. Fortunately, that’s one thing I don’t need to worry about.

But the marketing pitch did get me thinking about all the excitement around “growth.” The increase in U.S. postal rates has all the direct-response fundraisers I know focused on list growth — specifically, growing their e-mail files.

While I can’t vouch for the latest hair-growth remedies, I can assure you that the following list-growth strategies will make you more attractive — at least to your executive director — because they work.

Encourage the “pass-along”
Rather than hoping people will pass along an e-mail, ask them to do it. The Human Rights Campaign, with the help of Madeline Stanionis, CEO and co-founder of Watershed, a consulting firm that helps organizations build, grow and sustain relationships with constituents online, launched two identical advocacy campaigns, but only one took recipients to a Tell-a-Friend landing page. The campaigns got the same response rates, but the one that landed on the Tell-a-Friend page was much more successful in getting results: 46,000 actions and 6,000 new sign-ups compared with 20,000 actions and 500 new sign-ups.

Organizations are finding that online advocacy campaigns not only build lists, but also are an effective vehicle for converting supporters to donors. The International Rescue Committee collected more than 15,000 names from an advocacy petition focused on Uganda. Then it sent a follow-up fundraising e-appeal, which was more than twice as successful with IRC’s online activists as with non-activists. The percentage of recipients who donated was two and a half times higher for online activists (those who signed the Uganda petition) compared with non-activists.

Another version of a pass-along is giving volunteers the online tools to create personal fundraising Web pages and send donation appeals via e-mail to their networks of family and friends. Easter Seals is one of several nonprofit organizations that successfully use this strategy.

Dare to be different
What prompted you to forward that recent e-mail from a nonprofit? Did it make you cry? Laugh? Get angry?

To be worthy of being passed along, the message must be compelling. CARE’s “I Am Powerful” campaign, launched in March 2006, continues to capture my attention. Every time I see a CARE e-mail or billboard, I travel back in time to the five years I spent growing up in Nairobi, Kenya. A powerful message will deliver results. CARE’s ongoing promotion of this campaign has added nearly 19,000 to its Power Circle.

Leverage participatory media
Social-networking Web sites, including MySpace and YouTube, can’t be ignored. The Humane Society of the United States saw a 50 percent increase in traffic to its site from MySpace since its “Sunny the Seal”
campaign went live, recruiting 500 new additions to its e-mail list. Similarly, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s successful Polar Bear SOS video has gotten nearly 84,000 views.

Another way to leverage the power of social-networking sites is to provide “widgets” or “badges” — small blocks of code with specific branding — from your organization’s Web site that individuals can add to their personal Web pages to recruit supporters.

While social-networking sites attract nearly half of all Web users in the United States, clear fundraising success stories are few and far between. Still, it makes sense, if not immediate cents, for organizations to experiment with these sites and build a foundation now in order to reap the benefits later.

Invest in paid and co-marketing programs
Search is an under-utilized marketing channel that could be used by nonprofits to drive donations. By buying keywords that relate to your organization, you can send searchers who already have identified themselves as interested in your mission to your Web site.

Many nonprofits also build their lists by working with for-profit consumer Web sites such as Gather.com, Change.org, and Care2.com.

The Ploughshares Fund recently did three petition campaigns with Care2, growing its list more than tenfold in less than a year.

Additionally, contests are a great way to get people to provide their e-mail addresses as part of the entry process. In 2006, Citizens for Global Solutions ran an online contest soliciting Flash movies that drove 9,000 new registrations to its Web site.

Collect e-mails offline
The collection of e-mail addresses should be part of both your online and offline activities. Ask for an individual’s e-mail address when interacting in person, by phone or through mail. Determine where you can find your constituents offline, and have a presence there.

Many organizations are looking at e-mail appends to grow their lists. E-mail addresses are obtained by matching records from the marketer’s database against a third-party database (e.g., provided by FreshAddress, Acxiom or Navigant) to produce a corresponding e-mail address, which then is appended to that constituent’s record. Let the buyer beware: E-mail appends increase your risk of spam complaints. One solution is to get explicit opt-in from your appended e-mail addresses. You’ll get fewer names but a higher permission level, which boosts list quality.

Leverage blogs
Blogs provide a cost-effective way to generate buzz, raise awareness and drive traffic to your Web site.

Environmental Defense monitors blogs where its name appears or where topics of interest to the organization are discussed. As Kira Marchenese, director of Internet strategy at Environmental Defense, says, “You have to be in a lot of places to end up in the right place at the right time.”

Visibility on blogs might not translate into immediate list growth, but it will help build your brand and improve search results. Eventually, this increased awareness and better search-engine placement will lead to higher Web site traffic, where you can convert visitors into opt-in
subscribers.

For fundraisers just beginning to add online approaches to their traditional tactics, applying instant hair-growth serum might seem a lot easier than implementing these tips.

But if you’re looking for sustained list growth, develop a plan and try these strategies, and let me know how they work for you. Meanwhile, I’m headed off to the barber shop for a summer trim.

Sheeraz Haji is president of Convio Inc.