Email Explosion
For most of us, it’s been an explosion of emails from companies and organizations with COVID messages about their safety standards, treatment of and care for staff, plans to stay afloat, care for us, their customer. (Many of them look so lawyered-up that there’s very little “heartfelt” in them.)
Sending emails about your response to the pandemic is fine, except that, for me, a very very large portion of those emails are coming from organizations that I either don’t recall having any interaction with, or that I had a single interaction with many years ago. I’m certain that you’ve had the same experience.
The emails are not so bothersome (it’s sort of like looking at my life’s history of purchases and donations, and they’re easily deleted), but I can’t help but wonder why those organizations emailed me now, but didn’t email me for the last many years. If the emails were in their database, why didn’t they email me?
Even if they didn’t have a business reason to email me, shouldn’t they have done a check periodically to see if I still wanted to be on their mailing list?
This reminds me of a story I wrote about earlier, where a university’s development department made the momentous and “difficult” decision to stop calling donors who hadn’t responded for 10 years. Ten years! A decade of having a telemarketer call is just too much. (Five is, too.) Imagine the resources it took for each staff person to call and call and call — and get hung up on. Or leave a voicemail that isn’t returned. On the donor side, you can bet that eventually, the donor will think of your organization as a nuisance. The point is also true about emails.
Do we need to talk about the concept of “stale”? Or the Einstein definition of a crazy person — doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result?
It feels like those emails were buried somewhere, and it was “all hands on deck” to send them now. Maybe they’re doing it because staff didn’t have anything else to do? Or is it that this is an effort, after 5-10 years and via COVID, to establish/re-establish a relationship? Does anyone who received these emails say “Wow! What a great statement on their COVID plans — I’m going to patronize that company now.”
I don’t think so.
The same applies to nonprofits. If there are tons of emails that you haven’t used in the past, you’ve been letting an asset, essentially, rot. You’ve heard “use them or lose them”? That applies to emails. They can be a hugely important asset when they’re “fresh”, but over time, they lose their potency.
There is really only one way to utilize these old email addresses. Stop thinking of them as money, and start thinking of them as opportunity. There’s a difference. Thinking of them as money means that you think that if you keep sending them out relentlessly for years, eventually money will come. Actually, the opposite happens. The longer an email addressee doesn’t donate, the less chance that they ultimately will. With emails, they’ll just move them to their “junk” folder or blacklist and be done with them (you). You won’t know that on your end.
The opportunity comes when you think of these old emails as representative of a living, breathing person. If you do, you won’t think of harassment as a fundraising tactic, but instead you’ll keep their email address as an opportunity to find out more about that person. When you put a concerted effort into doing that, you’re sure to find some “gold” in those old lists. Specifically, you can pick, say, 10 or 20 of them a day, and do a google search on the person. If they look like someone whose interests fit with what your nonprofit does, you should then look further to see if you can confirm that the email address you have is still valid, and then try to re-engage them. If you don’t find a “fit” in your research, the email address needs to be purged from your database.
Another way you can act on the “thinking of the human at the other end of the email address” idea, you can always email them asking if they’d like to continue being on the list, and mention (briefly) the wonderful things that your nonprofit does and has accomplished. If they answer “yes”, then you have a new, fresh email to start a relationship with. If they say “no” or don’t respond, hit “delete”.
More next week. Until then, take care and be safe!
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- Lisa