Effective Electronic Communication Strategies
February 2007 (More monthly articles)
Are you still using paper as your organization’s primary method of formal communication with members? Why not take advantage of all the benefits electronic communication has to offer? Electronic documents are more efficient, timely, less expensive, and environmentally friendly. What’s more, electronic documents can be easily personalized. Unlike paper, you can measure the effectiveness of electronic means. Communicating electronically lets you do more with fewer staff resources and creates the impression with members and donors that your organization is current with the latest technologies.
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Most of the paper generated by not-for-profit organizations can be converted easily to digital media. Examples include newsletters, daily news feeds, event confirmation notices, payment receipts, invoices, dues statements, continuing education certificates, surveys, marketing material, membership directories, and much more.
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A good place to start developing your own strategy is to take an inventory of all the paper documents generated by your organization. Once complete, decide what makes sense to convert, based on your members’ needs. Next, choose the best format for each document. Some items will be best viewed in HTML formatting. Others might be best suited for text only. Still others might be sent as Adobe PDF (Acrobat) files.
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Newsletters, daily news feeds, and marketing material should probably be emailed as HTML messages without any attachments. HTML allows your email messages to include colors, pictures, and large fonts. HTML makes your email message look like a web page. When sending this type of communication, you should be aware of some common guidelines. Your stories should be brief, no more than a paragraph, with a link to your website for the rest. Members don’t want long stories. They prefer to get the point of an article in just a few sentences, with the ability to click on the most interesting ones. You can be very creative with newsletters, allowing members to tell you the ones they want to regularly receive or even the types of stories they should contain, thus personalizing the content.
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Your electronic newsletter should not be an exact replica of the paper copy. For example, a simple way of getting a digital version into the hands of constituents is to convert the paper to PDF format and email it. This strategy, though tempting, would be a mistake. The reason is that news and marketing efforts should drive traffic to your web site. By sending people there, you can measure the effectiveness of your communication. You can track which stories are most popular. You’ll also be able to see whether readers click on a link within an article in order to get related material. Conversely, sending a PDF file is not much more effective than sending paper. You won’t know whether people are reading it or forwarding it to others.
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One final point is worth noting about electronic newsletters and similar documents. Be sure to provide people with an easy way to opt-out. Making the “unsubscribe” process difficult will leave a bad taste in the mouths of your constituents. In addition, some states require an easy-to-use “opt out” option, so be sure to conform to state and federal laws.
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A number of tools are available to assist you with your electronic communication strategy. A very inexpensive way to send messages is to use Microsoft Word and perform a Mail Merge to email message. This option allows you to personalize your message with such information as a member’s or donor’s name and address. MS Word can easily extract information from a member database so that you don’t have to import any data before performing the merge. The downside to using MS Word is that sending out a large volume of mail can tie up your workstation for a long period of time. Mail merges from Word to Outlook also lack the more advanced features available in third party solutions, such as click-through analysis (which tells you the web links in your message that your members clicked) and opt-out features.
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A number of fee-based services specialize in sending electronic communication. Those who use iMIS, Destination 3000, or Olive Software, can subscribe to a third party solution called Informz. One advantage to Informz is that it merges data into your message right from your member database. Consequently, you don’t need to export any data out of it in order to use the service. ASAE has endorsed a product called MagnetMail and another called CommPartners. Both of these also happen to be partners of Avectra, another popular member database system. Each of these web-based communication providers has an excellent reputation for customer service and support. Each has expertise to help you design electronic newsletters for your various constituency groups.
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While these solutions are great for electronic newsletters, they may not be the best solution for other forms of digital documents. For event confirmations, receipts, invoices, continuing education certificates, and the like, a web-based service may be overkill. For these functions, you may want to purchase an application to install on your computer network. A product called Communicate may be appropriate. Although designed for iMIS clients, the makers of the software can probably modify it to work with other systems (for a fee, of course). For those willing to design an in-house solution, SQL Server and Cold Fusion can both send email messages. Experienced developers can also use a product called ASPEmail, an application whose job is to queue email messages for a mail server.
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Whatever your budget, an electronic communication strategy can be tailored to fit your needs. Start simple by going after easy targets then tackle the more difficult conversions as you succeed and gain experience. The main thing is to get started.
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