Growing the size of your email list is an important strategic goal for your nonprofit's marketing, communications, and fundraising programs. Even with average email open rates under 20 percent, email is consistently the best performing communications tool for most nonprofits. It requires significant effort and discipline to keep building your email list, month after month.

And yet, it's important to make the effort, becauses email "churn" eats away at the size of your file as people change email addresses, close accounts, and change jobs. Also, to maintain the strong attention span of that core 20 percent of your list, you'll need to keep bringing on new engaged subscribers every day.

There are several effective free techniques to grow your email list using the current digital assets and online properties your organization already has. So before you spend money to rent email lists, distribute an email offer through a media platform, or work with a paid co-registration service such as Care2.com, consider the following. These free ideas and strategies will build your email file by tapping into your current website traffic and social media follower community.

Optimize the Email Signup Offer on Your Website Home Page

Your home page is usually the page that receives the most visitor traffic on your website, so it's critically important to optimize its email signup offer. Optimizing entails determining the best location for your email signup widget and the most effective language to drive the strongest signup activity.

The best location for an email signup widget is usually in the upper half of the page, either as part of the top navigation, or simply above the fold for larger screens. Furthermore, consider how people visiting your website with a mobile device such as a phone or smaller tablet will view the widget and fill it out. If your website is responsive for mobile devices, it will hopefully enlarge the widget for ease of use, otherwise the form will be small.

Be sure to check out Google Analytics to understand how many of your website visitors are using mobile devices and tablets. If your mobile traffic is over 20 percent, then it's important to consider the mobile user experience when optimizing the email signup offer on your home page.

It's also essential to determine the best language to encourage email signups. Too often, organizations use something bland like "Email signup" or "Get our newsletter," without considering how other language might improve response. Focusing on an issue or program area or simply using mission-based language may make a bigger impact.

Try "Get our Monday Activist Bulletin" or "Get weekly vegan recipes" or "Get weekly tips to expose police violence." This sort of language usually improves the signup rate.

Optimize the Email Signup Offer on Your Other Top 10 Pages

Although your website home page is your first priority, don't neglect to optimize how the offer is presented on your other top 10 traffic pages. If your email signup offer is built into the navigation at the top of every page, that's excellent. But otherwise, make sure that your email offer is clearly visible, either as part of a sidebar or a callout bar in the middle of the page.

Again, be sure to review how these pages will look on smaller mobile devices. If you have an appetite for more marketing data, you can set up a Google Analytics goal to measure which pages deliver the most email signups. Then you can focus your ongoing efforts to optimize the placement of the widget and the signup language.

Test Out a Digital Download to Capture Email Addresses

A proven technique to capture email addresses either from your website visitors or your social media followers is to offer a digital download. A visitor is invited to download the item you're offering in exchange for their email signup. Easy-to-create digital downloads include high resolution desktop images for larger computer screens, or smaller images for mobile phone lock screens.

Other options could be exclusive essays or a collection of article reprints in PDF format. Additional popular options include exclusive audio interviews or video compilations. Try testing a series of these digital downloads over several months to assess what works best.

Don't forget to test out these digital downloads with your social media follower community. Use a graphic image to display the offer and then create a trackable link to a page on your website where the download activity takes place. Be sure to use a Google Analytics goal to measure the impact of your social media offers.

Consider Using a Pop-up Lightbox on Your Website

Once you're comfortable offering a digital download and you've optimized your messaging techniques, consider using a pop-up lightbox on your website to present it more directly in front of your audience. While this is a more forceful marketing technique, it's also highly effective, and may be something you could use a few times a year.

Try a List Exchange or a Chaperone Email to Reach New Audiences

Another free technique to build your email list is to work with a like-minded organization, a publisher, a media property, or a corporate partner. All of these entities can help get your message in front of new audiences.

The "list exchange" is a reciprocal agreement that two organizations will each send an email message to their list, introducing a project that the other organization is engaged in. This sort of movement building activity is an effective way to seek out new email subscribers. It's common for two organizations to agree to email the same number of constituents and sometimes to exclude active donors from that list.

A variant on this technique is a chaperone email. A publisher, media property, or corporate partner will promote your campaign via email, website feature, or social media posting, as part of a strategic partnership.

Image: Constantin Stanciu / Shutterstock

spanhidden

In case you just upgraded to the latest gnupg-agent and used gnupg-agent as your ssh-agent you may find that ssh refuses to work with a simple but not helpful

sign_and_send_pubkey: signing failed: agent refused operation

This seems to come from systemd starting the agent, no longer a script at the start of the X session. And so it ends up with either no or an unusable tty. A simple

gpg-connect-agent updatestartuptty /bye

updates that and voila, ssh agent functionality is back in.

Note: This assumes you have “enable-ssh-support” in your ~/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf

The rapid rise of social media and mobile technology has had a profound impact on website design and email marketing, yet many nonprofits have not yet adapted to the new aesthetics and functionality of a mobile, social Internet. Based upon the knowledge and experience that the nonprofit sector has gained over the last 20 years of using websites and email for storytelling and fundraising, the webinar content below was presented August 23, 2016 to 1,662 nonprofit staff. It was the final presentation of the website design and email marketing webinar. To register for future free webinars, please see the Nonprofit Tech for Good Webinar Schedule.

5 Must-Know Stats for Nonprofits

1. 43% of the adult global population owns a smartphone and the number of smartphone owners is expected to grow to 6.1 billion by 2020.

2. There are currently 4.4 billion email accounts worldwide and the number is expected to grow to 5.6 billion by 2019 – a growth rate of 26%.

3. 55% of email opens are now mobile.

4. Email fundraising raises 27% of online revenue and in 2015 email fundraising was up 25%.

5. Email is not dead, in fact, it’s growing in popularity and power with all age groups.

10 Website Design Best Practices for NGOs

1. For your website and blog to be compatible with desktops, laptops, smartphones, smart TVs, etc., your NGO must mobile-optimize your content. WordPress.org is a content management system for websites and blogs. There are hundreds of responsively designed, low cost WordPress.org templates for NGOs and freelancers available for hire.

2. Prioritize images over text and provide ample white space: pbs.org (on January 5, 2015)

3. Use a large font size for title and body content: npca.org

4. Provide simple navigation and allow long scrolling: worldwildlife.org

5. Prominently feature your “Donate” button, social network icons, and e-newsletter opt-in: themarshallproject.org

6. Use large tappable buttons for calls-to-action: water.org

7. Maximize your website and blog’s right bar: aspca.org

8. Host your blog/stories* inside your website: audubon.org

9. Use the Facebook Comments Plugin or Disqus for blog comments.

10. Ensure that your website and blog is shareable: oceana.org

10 Email Marketing Best Practices for NGOs

1. Never send email newsletters BCC or as a PDF attachment. Your NGO must invest in an email marketing service.

2. Embrace a mobile-first email strategy. Mobile-optimize your email (UNICEF on desktop, UNICEF on smartphone) by using a responsive template.

3. Design templates that allow header images to be easily changed.

4. Integrate social media into your templates by featuring social network icons (and a “Donate” button) into your templates and by adding the ability for subscribers to share stories, pin products, like your Instagram photos, etc.

5. Focus on 1-5 stories and/or calls-to action and keep text to a minimum.

6. Prioritize image and video content.

7. Write short subject lines (50 characters or less) and use emojis to maximize open rates.

8. Send e-newsletters twice per month and donation appeals an average of once per month with increased frequency in December.

9. Study the email marketing of large NGOs similar to yours in mission and programs by making an online donation and/or signing up for their e-newsletter.

10. Prioritize growing your email list in 2016 and 2017.

Follow Nonprofit Tech for Good on SlideShare
slideshare.net/nonprofitorgs

Performance management can be a tricky beast — hugely important, but difficult to get right. Here are four common mistakes my team and I see made by social, government, and nonprofit organizations trying to measure their impact, and tips on how to avoid them:

1. Measuring Too Much

By far the most common problem we see is that most organizations try to measure too much. Every additional measure you track uses up precious staff time for collection, aggregation, and analysis. In some cases, tracking too many measures is as almost as bad as not tracking at all.

One client we served had a list of more than eight measures it was trying to track. Managers and the board were so overwhelmed by the huge amount of information that their eyes tended to glaze over when the data was presented. Little or nothing happened as a result. We helped them whittle the list down to just a few outcome measures for each client group, and that enabled them to focus their energy, track their efforts in a meaningful way, and improve their outcomes.

2. Underutilizing What You Have

Many organizations are so busy worrying about measurement that they don't realize what a trove of information they may already be sitting on. One national nonprofit I know had been working on putting together a measurement system for three years. It was engaging external consultants, and doing a lot of hand-wringing about its lack of a large-scale control study.

Its senior leaders, like those at many other organizations, found themselves overwhelmed by choices, confused by terminology, and with little to show for their hard work. Yet in the background, the organization had been collecting all kinds of information. With an infusion of new energy, leadership took stock. They found that simply by undertaking an audit and tidying up the organization's data, they were able to tell a compelling story to current and potential funders.

The moral of the story? Before you do anything else, investigate what you have at hand. What information are you already collecting that measures outcomes for your clients?

3. Over-thinking It

Most organizations feel like they have to build a system from scratch and get so ambitious that the effort invariably stalls. Fortunately, yours is not the only organization that needs to track and measure information. As funder pressure on social sector organizations to get better at measurement has increased, whole industries have sprung up with pre-developed surveys and data sets from comparison groups.

That means your organization may be able to purchase one of the many off-the-shelf tools to track its information and compare the results with results for other population groups. Such an approach makes it easier to measure your own results; it also allows you to see how your clients compare to those who don't receive your services. That's just the kind of information your organization can use to understand its impact, improve its performance, and tell a compelling story to potential supporters.

4. Poor Presentation

After working hard to gather relevant data, many organizations squander that effort by not going the extra mile to ensure that it's easy to understand. One large child-welfare nonprofit we work with collected a lot of interesting information but presented it in a tiny font on newspaper-sized spreadsheets. Neither management nor board members could make heads or tails of it.

We worked with them to pull out the key takeaways from the data and showed them how to present it in high-impact, easy-to-understand charts. This simple change to how the information was presented had a huge impact. The board and managers were finally able to make sense of the information and could see the areas of under-performance, information gaps, and differences in the outcomes produced by different programs. As a result, they are making better decisions with fewer arguments and improving their outcomes.

About the Author

Liana Downey is an experienced strategic advisor, author and speaker. As executive director of Downey & Associates, Downey and her team serve social enterprises, governments, and nonprofits globally. Downey, who previously led the social sector practice at McKinsey & Company, Australia, also is the author of Mission Control: How Nonprofits and Governments Can Focus, Achieve More and Change the World (Bibliomotion, May 2016) and lectures at NYU's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service.

This blog post was originally published on the Philanthropy News Digest blog.

Image 1: Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock

Image 2: Liana Downey

spanhidden