Making the Transition from Rapid Response to Campaign

Since the Trump Administration was inaugurated we’ve been in a near constant state of rapid response to policies that threaten our progressive values. Rapid response is much needed and we shouldn’t stop the reactive actions but we need to turn these rapid response messages into cohesive campaigns to engage our supporters. We must give people meaningful actions that have a solid theory of change so our community continues to fight back over the next four years and connects to the mission of your organization.

Here’s a list of questions that I ask myself when thinking about whether a rapid response message can turn into successful long term campaign.

Will this continue to be in the news?

If this answer is yes then you should definitely develop an action arc so you have several actions to put in front of your audience, particularly your most engaged supporters and people who are joining your list through your rapid response campaign.

What will move the needle on your issue?

Is it sending letters to Congress? Taking it to the streets ask asking your supporters to march or host house parties? Is it financial support so you can put up a billboard to influence policy makers or directly provide services to those impacted by the policy? Once you know what the targets of the campaign are then you can determine what support you need, which will help you develop your arc of actions and theory of change. A pro tip is that if it takes you more than one sentence to explain how the ask connects directly to the issue then you haven’t picked the best action yet.

Do you need a different strategy for certain segments on your list?

Prospects who haven’t taken action yet often need to be treated differently than those who have already taken action. I recommend resending the action to non-action takers at least once with either a short liftnote above the original email or an email that uses a different messaging tactic to resonate with the prospects. At the same time you’ll want to provide more actions that can be higher-bar for your action takers. This could be donating, starting a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign or calling their members of Congress.

Rapid response moments are also a great time to recruit new supporters and donors. If you’re running an advocacy action then a cost per acquisition (CPA) buy, where you agree to pay a certain price for new leads through an organization like Care2 is a great options since the people on their website and email list are likely to be good activists. You can also run Facebook ads promoting either an advocacy action or a fundraising ask. Facebook ads often take less time to launch than a CPA buy and can allow you to experiment with different audiences modeled off of a donor file, email list, donation page traffic, page likes, or Facebook interests to list a few options.

Can you connect this to a campaign or program your organization is already running?

Connecting the rapid response issue to a current program or campaign is one of the easiest ways to leverage the situation into a longer term campaign. It can create a new messaging opportunity within the campaign or a new action to re-invigorate your current supporters. This is also important for people who joined your list through this campaign so they can feel connected to the broader work of the organization. If you bring in a large number of new supporters its important to think about whether you need to customize the content of your welcome series or send them entirely different content.

 

You’re Small But You Can Still Test

I hear the same advice at practically every digital strategy conference and event I attend ~ test everything. In principle I agree with this advice, but when I was working for a small nonprofit I also had to be practical about what I could realistically accomplish on the testing front given the other varied demands on my time. I’ve worked for a series of organizations with small digital programs, where it’s been just me or it’s a two-person shop. We all wish we had a list the size of Organizing for America and a digital staff to match. But we don’t! So how should you structure a testing program that matches the resources and constraints faced by a small digital department?

There are two questions you should ask yourself:

  1. What do you have the tools or software to test?

Do you have Optimize.ly to test website performance? Do you have ShareProgress which allows you to test your organizations social sharing text and indirectly test your messaging? Do you have an email system, like SalsaLabs or Convio, that permits you to A/B test your emails? If not, I suggest you acquire at least one of them pronto so you can optimize your program!

2.  The next question you should ask yourself is what do you want to optimize?

Focus on the acquisition of information that could have a large impact on your digital strategy going forward. When someone asks me if we can test something I always ask what they are hoping to learn and what are they going to do with the information the test(s) provide? I want to make sure there is a plan to use the information we gather to advance the performance of the organization moving forward.

If you’re testing on email do you want to learn about your email template, signers, or length and tone of the email? If you’re evaluating a donation page you could test the ask string, image or no image, one column or two, and the text. Clearly, there are many features and outcomes that can be evaluated with a test, so it’s important to choose carefully to get the most value for the time you allocated to testing.

When I’m trying to decide what to test during a campaign I make a list of the options and then determine which one I think will have the biggest impact moving forward for the program. If you’re working for a small nonprofit it’s also important to consider your capacity to set up the test.

Once you’ve decided what you want to test you have to decide how you want to determine success so you can interpret what your test reveals.

For example, if you’re testing a new donation page your variables for success could be the number of donations, the total amount donated, or the average size of a donation. However, you should decide up front which, if not all, of these outcomes is most important. If you choose multiple measures of success it is possible that the tests will reveal that you are successful on one front but not in another. I had a situation like that once where the tests I ran revealed that a new donation page raised more money than its predecessor, but from fewer donors.

You also need to decide what level of statistical significance you’re going to use to determine success. Do you want to be confident in the inference you have drawn virtually all of the time (i.e., 99 percent of the time) or would you be comfortable if 90 percent of the time the conclusion you reach is accurate. Not sure what I’m talking about? Never fear I’ll explain statistical significance in the analytics section of the post in a little bit.

Now you’re ready to devise a testing plan. When you do this make sure to keep in mind the amount of time it takes to conduct a series of A/B tests. Testing often involves two versions of something so if you do your own coding make sure to give yourself double the amount of time.

When I test something that I think will fundamentally change our digital strategy I want to test it multiple times before settling on a view of what the results reveal and hence deciding whether or not to implement a strategy. I do this to determine if results are consistent – say the same thing – and are believable (i.e., statistically significant), because findings can be inconsistent. Moreover, the confidence you hold in your findings can change over time. Running the same test a number of times over a period of time is called longitudinal testing. One of the organizations I worked for tested a new donation page to see if it was attracting more donors and raising more money. The organization ran the test four times over a few weeks. The initial test revealed that the original and the new donation pages yielded practically the same results in terms of number of donors and amount of money raised. However, the second test showed that the new page raised more money and had more donors than the old donation page. The third test resulted in the old donation page having better results for both variables. The fourth test suggested that the original and the new donation pages provided equivalent levels of performance in terms of total donors and total donations. Interestingly, when I compared the two donation pages by examining the performance of each from the begining of the analysis period to the end of the examination period the new donation page outperformed the old donation page in both total donations and number of donors. Situations like this is why longitudinal testing over time is important when considering making major changes to your digital program.

Analytics time!

Analytics is how you’ll determine which version wins the test.

Hang on I want to stop and take a minute to talk about statistics. I know they can be hard to understand but I want you to understand your numbers. I promise it’ll be painless!
Statistical significance is how confident you are that if you repeated the test the results would be the same. Generally three levels of statistical significant are used: 90%, 95% and 99%. The level you use depends on how sure you want to be that your results aren’t random. When testing a new donation page I generally use a 99% confidence interval. Whereas, when testing a subject line I’ll use a lower standard, typically I am happy with a 90% level of confidence in this realm. The reason to use a higher confidence interval for a test that will affect your entire digital program is you want to be much more confident that you can hang your hat on your finding so you don’t casually do something that might harm your program. Subject lines are important, however they only affect one email not the entire shebang. Fortunately, for you, me and the rest of the busy world there is an online calculator called AB/BA that will calculate the statistical significance of your test results.
Finally, save your test data. It’s impossible to remember everything you’ve ever tested and the results of the test. I have a spreadsheet that I use to record the key findings from all my tests and if it was significant or not. I’ll even make this easy for you. Here’s a template of the spreadsheet that I use.

The beauty of testing is that you’re now empowered with evidence to guide your decision making!!

 

Year End Fundraising Campaigns That Work Webinar

Planning a kick-ass end of year fundraising campaign is a must for every digital strategist. Looking for some inspiration? Check out this webinar featuring me, Colleen Hutchings the Senior Director, Online Strategies and Development with Environmental Working Group, and Salsa Labs for a webinar on Year End Fundraising Campaigns that work.

What does the webinar cover?

How do you put together just the right mix of emails, landing pages, social media outreach, and other tactics to raise a significant chunk of money from your supporters? There are a ton of strategies out there. Which will work for your organization?

We’ve got some ideas for you. The webinar discusses end-of-year fundraising campaigns and strategies, including:

  • Why matching emails to landing pages is key
  • Utilizing multiple channels for the ask (email, social media, your website, etc…)
  • How #GivingTuesday can boost your end-of-year campaign
  • Real-life examples of successful end-of-year fundraising campaigns

Check out the webinar!

Ready, Set, Rapid Response?

Something happens and one of your organization’s issues is in the news.

The next question you should ask yourself is should we respond? There’s a series of questions that I always ask myself when deciding if running a rapid response campaign is the right thing to do.

Keep in mind that these questions didn’t materialize out of thin air. As Beth Becker previously wrote on Connectivity, organizations can and should prepare for rapid response campaigns in advance. This series of questions as well as the call on who makes the final decisions during a rapid response campaign should be plotted out in advance before the need for a specific rapid response campaign arises.

1.     Is this issue in your organizations wheelhouse?

This question is important because you don’t want to look like you’re shoehorning yourself into an issue that is not at the core of your organization’s mission. If you do, people’s reaction could be that you’re attention hungry and exploiting a situation.

2.     Is this something the media is talking about and you expect they will continue to talk about?

One of the reasons that rapid response campaigns can be incredibly successful is the media attention surrounding them. Can you make your campaign the center of the response discussion?

3.     Do you have time to pull off the campaign?

Rapid response campaigns are a very time-intensive endeavor. Although its usually over a short period of time, other activities will likely fall by the wayside. You need to ask yourself if you have the time and the bandwidth to respond in an effective manner. Are you in a situation where you can afford to drop everything else you’re working for a few days to do this?

4.     What is the goal of your rapid response campaign?

Is the goal of your rapid response campaign to give people a way to take out their anger and feel like they are doing something? Is it to create policy change? Is it to drive list growth or donations?

The answer to this set of questions will help you decide if and how to respond. Hint: the answer to this question can be more than one of the options above.

5.     How will you respond?

The answer to this question can dictate if your rapid response campaign needs to be a cross-platforms campaign or not. Is the press already coming to you for a response? Will you create a petition and email it to your list? Will you write blog posts or op-eds? Will you just respond on social media?

The extent of your response typically depends on three factors:  the nature of the issue (i.e., is it one fostering lots of emotion and calls for immediate action), the platform it originally surfaced on, and whether discussion of the issue is moving from one platform to another.

 6. Can you turn your rapid response campaign into a longer term campaign?

Is this a campaign that you can turn into a broader campaign on an issue? Can you make a bigger point about something that needs to be changed?

If the issue is getting a lot of media coverage and your organization is receiving press requests the answer to this question may not matter.

Originally on Connectivity

Tis the Season to Get Ready for Year End Fundraising

Planning a kick-ass end of year fundraising campaign is a must for every digital strategist. Looking for some inspiration? Join me, Colleen Hutchings the Senior Director, Online Strategies and Development with Environmental Working Group, and Salsa Labs for a webinar on Year End Fundraising Campaigns that work.

What will the webinar cover?

How do you put together just the right mix of emails, landing pages, social media outreach, and other tactics to raise a significant chunk of money from your supporters? There are a ton of strategies out there. Which will work for your organization?

We’ve got some ideas for you. Join us for a webinar where we’ll discuss end-of-year fundraising campaigns and strategies, including:

  • Why matching emails to landing pages is key
  • Utilizing multiple channels for the ask (email, social media, your website, etc…)
  • How #GivingTuesday can boost your end-of-year campaign
  • Real-life examples of successful end-of-year fundraising campaigns

See you there!

Email List Swaps: How to be Happy After the Fact

Email List Swaps: How to be Happy After the Fact

Just about all Digital Strategists want bigger email lists: who wouldn’t want more supporters to talk to, mobilize and fundraise from? But list growth is expensive and hence sometimes out of reach for small nonprofits. Never fear, you can still find ways to grow your list that don’t cost money…only time!

A number of ways to grow your email list are available, but if I covered them all, this blog post would seem like a novel. So today, we’re going to focus on list swaps –- “trading” supporters with a like-minded organization.

Let’s start with the features of the two most common ways of doing a list swap. A critical aspect of both methods? They’re opt-in, meaning that the people taking action know whom they are taking action with and are consciously signing up for a new list.

Method 1: Separate Petitions

Each organization sends a different action request to its own list of supporters. However, each organization asks its supporters to engage in an action from the other organization. When individuals take the action, they join the list for the organization they were not previously associated with. Thus, each organization can expand its email list.

Method 2: The Joint Campaign

Each organization sends out the same action request to their email list, although the narrative in the emails can differ. In this joint campaign, any person who takes the desired action will now be a member of both organizations’ email list.

With Whom should You Swap?

Now that you know what a list swap is, how do you decide whom to swap with? When deciding whom to approach about a swap, think about your goals. Do you want to connect with a new group of people who are already linked to related organizations and who might be passionate about your core issue? Alternatively, are you a multi-issue organization seeking to build up a segment of your list that is concerned about a particular issue of the many that you aim to influence?

You should always chose a partner whose mission you agree with and support. Otherwise, the new group of supporters won’t be the right people for your organization. Thus, when I start brainstorming a list of potential partners, I think about organizations who work on similar issues and issue areas where my organization wants to grow. If you’re stuck for ideas you can also use Wisdom App, which analyzes your Facebook likes and gives you a list of other pages your community likes.

One consideration about whether to swap lists at all: if your hope is to expand your email list to allow your organization to more effectively address new issues or noncore issues, you’ll need to spend time and other resources to accomplish these ends. This can draw energy and attention away from your traditional activities, and is that trade-off worth it?

List Swap Logistics

With all that in mind, how do you actually pull off a list swap?

  1. First, reach out to potential partners.
  2. If one (or more) of your potential partners agrees to work with you, keep the celebration short, because it’s time to decide if you’ll be running a joint campaign or individual petitions.
  3. Now you need to create an agreement with them so that everyone is on the same page. The agreement should cover:
    1. Who is responsible for what components of the swap?
    2. How will you track signers from each organization?
      1. The best way to do this is through tagged links. When I do list swaps, I always make sure to have a separate tag for each organization as well as social media links for each organization. When the other organization is hosting the action, I always ask for three separate files: anyone who signed via my organizations link, signers who came in through social media, and the new signers from the other organization.
    3. How you will determine the number of names swapped?
      1. One way to do this is to agree to swap a number of signers within a range. This method is best for swaps with separate petitions.
      2. If you’re running a joint campaign and send everyone to the same action page then you can swap the exact number of new signers the smaller list is able to generate.
    4. You should also think about how you’ll handle new people who come in through social media or actions that where shared.
  4. Once you’ve worked out the agreement logistics, you can move on to developing a timeline. From my experience, it’s a good idea to give yourself more time that you think you need because both organizations have to approve the language for the emails and action.
  5. Send out the emails and watch the signers roll in!
  6. Swap the names based on your agreement
    1. It’s best to do this through excel files that can be uploaded to the CMS/CRM system that you use to send email blasts.
  7. Welcome your new members

How to Write the Email So People Know it’s a List Swap

It’s important for your list to know that this is a joint campaign or a petition from another organization. Otherwise, people might not know what they’re getting into!

If you’re sending out individual petitions, you can put an intro at the top of the emails that introduces the other organization and explains why their petition is a good idea. Here’s an example of what this would look like:

Sample email message

If you’re sending a joint petition, in the text of your email add a line about the organization you’re partnering with and why. Here’s an example of this method:

Sample email

How to Welcome Your New Members

Every organization should have a general email welcome series (for more, check out this webinar by Care2 about welcome series) but your standard one may not be right for your new members.

A different welcome series is especially important if you’re doing a list swap on an issue that’s new for your organization or where you’re trying to increase your list interest. You need to make sure to connect the new issue to the issues your regular email program focuses on. This is also true for multi-issue organizations that mainly focus on one or two of their issues on email.

Your welcome series should introduce new members to your organization and explain the issues you work on (particularly if you’re a multi-issue organization and your new supporters came in via an action related to only part of your work). Then, give your new supporters ways to engage with your organization and explain why if they care about X issue they should care about the other issues you work on. This should help to increase their affinity for your organization and boost their engagement rates.

Analytics Analytics Analytics

Are your new supporters working for you? The only way to tell is to track their behavior, such as email open rates, click-through rates, response rates and the number who unsubscribe over time. You can then compare this data to your overall email program to help understand which issues your new supporters are connecting with and which ones they aren’t. It will also help you track your return on investment by determine if your new supporters are performing as well as you would hope. For more on list swap performance, check out this Epolitics.com article on the subject.

What NOT to Do

Growing your email list by buying a list from a company needs to be structured properly or else it’s a risky business. It’s fine if an organization sells you a list of people who signed a sponsored petition that you are running on their website (a la Care2 and Change.org), but buying a list that wasn’t obtained through a sponsored petition (or other opt-in mechanism) typically leads to low engagement rates from the purchased list.

This is because the people receiving your action requests are not connected to your organization and may not even be familiar with your nonprofit and mission. Moreover, people receiving these emails might mark them as spam. If enough people do this, some email delivery systems might designate any email from your organization as spam. This means that fewer of your supporters will receive your emails, which leads to less engagement. This also puts your organization at risk for collecting spam traps, which also harms your email deliverability. So be sure to start on the right foot –- only acquire supporters through opt-in channels like the ones discussed above.

Happy list swapping!

Originally posted on epolitics.com and cross-posted on Connectivity.

Year-End Fundraising: What You Should Be Doing NOW

Year-End Fundraising: What You Should Be Doing NOW

It’s August, which means fun in the sun, vacations and a few weeks without Congress in session. It also means it’s time to start thinking about December and end-of-year fundraising. I know you’re thinking, “you have got to be kidding.” And yes, I know for many of us our year-end content will depend on what happens in the midterm elections in November.

However, here are five things you can do now to prepare -– a little late-summer work will make your late fall and early winter far more pleasant. Trust me, time spent now will be worth it then!

1. Set your goal(s)

Decide on your goals for end-of-year fundraising. Is it a dollar amount or a number of donors or both? Make sure to base these goals on your previous year-end fundraising results, with an increase that makes sense for your list-growth plans for the year. I do this by looking at how much our list has grown vs. how much our fundraising has grown over the year. I also look at our year-end fundraising trend over time. Use these data points to set your end-of-year fundraising goals.

2. Decide on your tactics

What platforms will you use for fundraising, and how will you use them? Will you be using a light box (a pop-up “donate” window on your website) and if so, for how long? Will you redirect your home page to a dedicated fundraising page on December 31st, when most groups see a big bump in donations? Will you fundraise on social media? How many emails will you send? How will you space them out? How will you incorporate the results of early messages into your final appeals?

3. Set a timeline

When will you decide on your messaging? When will you write all of your emails? When will you create content and graphics for social media? Who will be responsible for each part of the plan? Who will need to approve the content, and how will that affect your timing?

4. Test things you may want to use during end-of-year fundraising

I’m a huge fan of testing. I believe everything should be tested. However, end-of-year fundraising is not the best time to test because your content should be as optimized as possible by December. So, test anything you may want to use during end-of-year fundraising NOW. Right now I’m testing different senders, one-click donations and whether or not a picture with the signature makes a difference. Everything I learn from these tests will be used to build a stronger email program and a stronger end-of-year fundraising plan.

5. Start optimizing donation pages

Are your donation pages mobile-friendly? If they aren’t, start working on that now. If you use Salsa, you’re in luck: Cornershop Creative has free mobile-friendly code for donation pages! You should also ask yourself if your donation pages are easy to read and use, and if you aren’t sure, do some user testing. For a start, ask people in your office or your friends to try to use them and see what their experience is. Be sure to ask people who aren’t as tech-savvy as you — you’re not the typical user.

Good luck with your end-of-year fundraising! Did I miss something you should be doing now? Comment below and tell me!

Originally posted on epolitics.com. 

Don’t crash your own website

Each organization has those moments that you wait for. Those moments when an issue that is central to your organizations mission is what everyone is talking about. It’s important to take advantage of every second of that situation – because they don’t happen every day!

One of the organizations I worked for had one of these instants. We knew that there would be a decision made at the national level that would fosters lots of conversations taking place on an issue associated with our organization. However, we did not know which way the decision would go!  We planned and we were ready with versions of our fundraising emails, press releases, lightbox (a pop-up “donate” window on your website), blog posts, and social media content so that we could quickly respond with our thoughts no matter which way things went; we were  ready.

The moment happened and I hit send and sat back for a minute to watch the donations start rolling in. And then the website crashed.

The website crashed because one of the images in our email template was hosted on our website instead of by our CRM. So every time someone opened one of the emails it was registering as a visitor on our website. We didn’t have a server that could handle traffic spikes so the website crashed because it had too many visitors in rapid succession.

So how do you make sure you don’t make this mistake?

Host all of your images for emails on your CRM’s server. Their servers will expand to handle traffic. Take my advice and go check all of your email templates now!

Are there other ways to make sure you don’t crash your website? Share them in the comments!

Originally posted by the New Organizing Institute as a Tip of the Day.