From Our Brains to Yours
A relationship with an excel file?
e.politics has posted a six part series on the lessons from the Obama campaign. I highly recommend reading all six posts, but last week’s missive was particularly insightful: “Learning from Obama’s Financial Steamroller: How to Raise Money Online.”
The article includes a long list of basic principles, and a few really struck a chord:
“Email activism is really relationship management, since people vote, volunteer and donate because of the feelings they have toward a candidate or cause.”
I’ve seen the confused expression on people’s faces when I tell them that they need to build a ‘relationship’ with those on their email list. Not that they don’t value the people who want to help their cause, but that it’s hard to think about an excel file with multiple thousands of names and email addresses as something tangible enough to get a beer with. Well you may not need to have a beer with them, but learning to entertain (engage) them is very important.
As has been said often, your emails should be timely and relevant. The more you feel like you are really writing to one person or a group of 10 people who are very similar, the more people will respond as if they are being communicated with personally, rather than as part of a giant mass. The Obama campaign found many ways to segment their list – not just by demographics but by how users signed up and responded to previous messages. If the Obama campaign can segment a giant of 10 million into 10,000 lists of 10,000 folks, surely you can find a way to segment your list of 15,000 into 3 lists of 5,000.
“The email initiation sequence was critical to starting the relationship-building process, with new list members receiving a pre-set series of messages after they signed up. The sequence steadily “scaled the ask,” encouraging newbies to step deeper and deeper into the Obama waters — first they show up to phone-bank, and the next thing they know they’re devoting 30 hours per week to managing a volunteer team.”
How many messages do new registrants on your email list get before they are included in the ‘general population?’ Are there ways to slowly step up their level of engagement over the first 2-3 months, learn more about them and gradually transition them to the best of your list segments? I bet there is and there are rewards to reap in doing so.
“When possible, staff mapped out email narrative arcs in advance. For best effect, each message had to stand alone but also be a part of the stream.”
Your organization may not send 10% or even 1% of the messages that the Obama campaign sent in just a few short months. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t (or shouldn’t) develop longer narratives for your email campaigns. Presumably, you have a set of goals for the quarter, or year, that your members should know about and be engaged with.
In the context of your goals for the year (or any time period you’re planning for), develop a story for how you could ideally communicate your progress to your members. Then map that story out on your message calendar for emails, direct mail and in other media. While you may need to tailor messages to the particulars of a given month, you’ll have an outline to help your members follow your organization’s developing story of success.
Much is still being learned from the Obama campaign’s success in 2008. Not all of it is applicable outside the context of a hotly contested national election featuring a rock star, but much of it can be adapted. I highly recommend checking out the full list of principles and the rest of the post at e.politics. We’ll certainly be referring back to these principles in future posts.
-Stephen