Wired Causes

You are browsing the archives of 2010 April.

I’ve been preparing for a Leadership Conference with TCG (Theatre Communications Group, the service organizations for theatre companies) on strategic social media. So, I’ve been looking at a lot of different examples of how theatres are using social media. As…

Japanese net-broadcast/net-media now on crisis.
Japanese new Broadcasting Law have possibility lead to supress Net Communication like NetBroadcast/NetVideoJournalism http://ow.ly/1FbS4
i want to draw figures about this soon..

Last week, Billy announced the launch of the NetSquared Camp pilot.  Local organizers are already off and running, gearing up for the local events taking place in Chicago, Douala, Portland, and Vancouver.  (Plus Campfire events in North Carolina and Paris!) Each week, I’ll be reporting here on the blog - a public view of the field notes in a way.  This pilot is a chance for us to learn and experiment together as a community and we know that the more we can share, in real time, the more we can learn!  I hope you’ll join me, share you

read more

So while I’ve been off twitter, I’ve had time to research social CRM (funny, that.) And what I’ve found is pretty interesting.
CRM stands for “Customer Relationship Management” (not to be confused with “Cause Related Marketing”- it came from the for-profit space. In the nonprofit world we use this acronym to mean “Constituent Relationship Management”, generally. [...]

jhhwild, Flickr

At today’s release of their 2010 eBenchmark study, M+R shared four ways your organization can achieve a “data-driven culture.”  That sounds rather dull and wonky to someone like me, so I’d call this four ways to “stop guessing and start testing” in your online outreach.  Because one theme of today’s event was that testing makes a HUGE difference.  Don’t just gut-check your next email - send it along with a similar but different version and see which does better with your community.  If you don’t have to get an email out immediately, you might want to try the 10-90 test.  Send an email to 10% of your list and see how it does.  Then tweak it and hit the other 90%.  See if it does better - and do more of what works.  This can help you avert a disaster if the 10% does horribly - and learn if you do better the second try.

If this sounds appealing - and I hope it does - here is the approach M+R recommends:

1. Have a template for tracking your online outreach results.  This is good advice, because most organizations are drowning in data.  A simple template might list, by campaign, the following data along with a year to date benchmark for all of your campaigns.  Try to keep it to one-two pages so you’ll actually be able to use it.
-Number of recipients of the email
-Open rate
-Click-through rate
-Response rate
-Number of responses
-Revenue
-Unsubscribe rate

2. Set benchmarks:  Have some standard for telling if an email was a winner or a stinker.  Your own benchmarks will be great - and you can also look at ones from the eBenchmark study, Convio, or Target Analytics.

3. Have a system:  Keep track of each test, even if it’s only on a Google document, and evaluate and save the results.  That way, you can look up past tests when making future decisions - and keep refining accordingly.

4. Lather, rinse, repeat: Set a goal for a campaign.  Then measure the results.  Then do it again.  And again.  Forever.  Testing never ends. Learning is infinite.  Fun!

I just returned from M+R’s presentation of its 2010 eBenchmark study of online outreach with NTEN here in Washington, DC. 

I encourage you to review the whole report, but the most striking finding for me was how well small nonprofit did online compared to larger organizations.  (Small is defined as an organization with a list size of under 100,000, Medium, 100,000-500,000, and Large, 500,000+ deliverable email addresses.)

Specifically:

*Small organizations saw an increase in online giving in 2009 (up 6% in dollars), driven by an increase in average gift size—this while large groups saw both their number of gifts and average gift sizes decrease (down nearly 4% in dollars) —at Network for Good, which serves mostly small organizations, our average nonprofit raised 20% more!

*Organizations with small list size (under 100,000) had DOUBLE the email response rate for fundraising compared to other groups.

*Small groups also had higher click-through rates and open rates on their emails (20% open rates compared to 14% across all groups, DOUBLE click-through rates compared to other organizations).  This is good news because the largest difference between high and low performing email programs in the study was seen in email click-through rates.  The study authors urged nonprofits to work to improve your click-through rates.

*Small groups grew their list sizes at double the rate of bigger organizations (likely due to the fact it’s easier to achieve a strong rate of growth when starting small)

*The only downside?  small groups also had double the unsubscribe rate of their larger peers.  Though M+R noted this is not necessarily a negative—small lists performed really well on fundraising appeals, so the high unsubscribe rate for small groups may be the result of a more attentive list - which is a good thing! 

So what does this all mean?  I asked that very question of Steve Peretz from M+R.  Here are the thoughts of the study authors:

*Small groups are getting greater ROI from their online outreach
*This may be because small groups tend to have more engaged lists.  A higher percentage of their lists are people who came to them, signed up on their website or otherwise signaled interest in the organization.  Big groups may have bigger lists - but often there are more disengaged folks from lists that were traded or bought.  They end up with a less passionate file.

I asked if M+R had seen this every year - but this is the first year they have broken out nonprofits by size, so that’s an unknown.

Smart nonprofit marketing people are always saying it’s list quality, not quantity that matters, and this is an interesting illustration of how a small but passionate core is better than a massive list of mildly interested folks.

Another interesting finding was when it comes to the share of online revenue attributable to different types of gift programs – such as monthly giving, one time gifts and tribute gifts – the study “showed marked differences across sectors.  Whereas Environmental nonprofits in our study raised 96% of their online revenue from one-time gifts, Health nonprofits raised 50% of their online revenue from “other” gifts (including event giving) and tribute gifts, and International groups lead the way through monthly giving, which made up more than 25% of their online revenue.”

Here are other highlights from M+R:

■The average study participant sent 4 emails per subscriber per month, but Environmental nonprofits sent their subscribers 5.2 emails per month, while Health nonprofits sent just 2.1 emails per month, on average.
■Email fundraising response rates were .13%, and email advocacy response rates were 4.00%.
■The average gift size for a one-time online gift was $81.33.
■Annual email file churn was just under 17%.
■Online fundraising grew overall by 4.5% between 2008 and 2009.
■For half of the nonprofits in our study, online revenue either held steady with 2008 or declined.  This decline was driven by a drop in the average gift size.

Last, some attendees noted the results of this study were different from Convio’s recent study and were asked about why there were some discrepancies. They said it may be that Convio has a different set of nonprofits on its platform - including more, smaller, ones.  I’d like to hear Convio’s thoughts on that at some point.

More posts to come!

Isaac Holeman and Josh Nesbit from FrontlineSMS:Medic have recently become finalists in the Echoing Green Fellowship Competition.

read more

Looking for a way for your community members to contribute information to an online collective database? Why not consider a wiki? A wiki is a website that allows multiple contributors to easily add, edit, and contribute content, images, web links, and more. Wikis are specifically designed for collaborative editing and are used as public websites, for personal note taking, in corporate intranets, and for knowledge management systems.

read more

The session I did at the Nonprofit Technology Conference with Mark Rovner and Alia McKee is available online!

Check it out here or below.