It’s wonderful to see how many of you have been implementing the “Five Minute Google Search” described in my earlier article, “Now that you have Breathing Room”. I’m accumulating questions from several readers who’ve emailed me, and I’ll be sending new posts soon sharing my answers to those questions here.
Until then, I have a few more important suggestions that you and each and every staff member of your nonprofit can do while working remotely during the pandemic.
First, (and thanks for my friend Evan S. for the reminder), this is an excellent time to do some very basic maintenance of your mailing list.
As a donor, it’s beyond annoying when I receive duplicates, triplicates and more of snail mail from a given organization. It’s also annoying when they have my name wrong (e.g. I get snail mail every couple of months from a nonprofit that thinks I’m “Eric Greer” — no idea why the “Eric”). As you know, it’s much more difficult to stop snail mail than to delete emails, and it’s painful to receive so many pieces of the same promotion from the same organization at the same time. Assuming that the organization is one I have donated to or follow, it’s hard not to think about the money (donor’s money!) wasted in these mailings.
This is, then, another of the “if I only had time to do that” moments. You now have the time.
A simple search of your snail mail database sorting by mailing addresses will surely expose the duplicates and triplicates. By removing the extra names, you’ll not only save money for your organization, but you’ll end up with happier donors.
You’ll also want to decide what you want to do with couples. Do you really want to mail a given promotion to “Susie Dorchester” as well as “James Dorchester” as well as “Mr. and Mrs. James Dorchester” and even “Susie and James Dorchester” — all at the same address? Or to two of the four at a business address, as well as the four to the home address? I’m sure you see my point. You’ll want to come up with a company standard to answer this question and implement it. (Once you determine the standard, make sure that future, new donor input materials ask how a donor wants to receive mail.)
Don’t delay doing the above actions because you can’t decide your standards. At the very least, do the duplicate/triplicate removal part. It’s not hard to do, and a “clean” list, like a “clean” email box, feels good.
Again, you now have the time.
A few other “clean-up” things that you can do include:
Go through your bounce-backs and even unopened emails. As in my previous suggestions, you can divide this task up between all of your staff members. Compare the recipient’s name against the email address. Without even doing any research, I guarantee you that you will find many that have a single letter wrong, and you can fix the email address on the spot. For example, if you have an email going to Jayne Doe, the email address (that relates to email not being opened) might say janedoe@gmail.com or jaynedoe@aol.co.) As you can see, neither of these will end up in Jayne Doe’s email box, only because a single letter was missing.
Assuming you get through the exercise above, another great project is taking the resulting/remaining list (of bounced and unopened emails) and “play detective” to find the correct email address. In this case, you can do a(nother) simple Google search under the company name of those emails that are at company domains, and you will also find that many of them either (a) have the company domain spelled wrong, of (b) the company has changed their standard domain, which you can easily find on the website, or (c) the person doesn’t work there anymore. The last of these (c) is the only one that takes more than a minute or two to figure out, and you may have to do some more detective work to get the correct and current email address.
Once you’ve done most of the projects above (#1 and #2), you should then put all the results together, sort the emails by name, and you’ll find many more duplicates, which you can then remove.
You can be creative with which order you do these in, too, because you might find that although Jayne Doe’s email (janedoe@gmail.com) has bounced back or remained unopened, you actually do already have Jayne Doe’s correct email address (as a separate entry in your database).
Note that having an accurate email list, without duplicates or misspellings, will also increase your “open” rate!
A wonderful side benefit of all staff doing this (esp. more senior staff) is that you’ll notice names of folks who you know or knew, but forgot about over time. Then you’ll have a new list of prospects — ones who haven’t been personally spoken to in maybe years, but who may have been following you — to go after as soon as the world settles down.
Until next time, take good care!
p.s. just to help you smile, my friend and book co-writer, Larissa Kostoff gets email to Larissa Castoff, and her partner Jules Goss gets mail to “Jules Gross”. ha!