Emails as Social Media: How and Why Non-Profits and Educational Orgs Should Use Email Lists
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In 2015, our organization went from having an clunky, outdated, legacy email list to a modern system. By giving our email list the same attention we do our social media channels (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), our impact has grown measurably. This is how we did it.
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Emails as Social Media: How and Why Non-Profits and Educational Orgs Should Use Email Lists
- 1. Emails as Social Media: How and Why Non-Profits and Educational Orgs Should Use Email Lists Gretchen Weber, Communications Manager Daniel Jones, Digital Media Producer Berkman Center for Internet & Society
- 2. About the Berkman Center Dozens projects launched to study and influence the development of the Internet, including Creative Commons and Global Voices 100+ events, reports, tools, videos, podcasts every year Founded in 1997 “to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development” We build, study, educate, and connect.
- 3. The Berkman Center: information flow Dozensof projects & 100+reports, tools, events, videos, podcasts every year Project specific communities and audiences: teachers, lawyers, parents, developers, journalists, policy makers, activists, librarians, storytellers, etc, and the interested public We build, study, educate, and connect. 500+ staff, fellows, affiliates, faculty associates , & alumni from 40+ countries; Network of 50+ Internet & society research centers internationally, as well as other partner institutions and Harvard
- 6. WHY THE HECK DO WE NEED EMAIL???
- 7. 2.5 billion email users worldwide, many with multiple accounts Source: The Radicati Group 2.9 billion email users worldwide by 2019 Facebook: 1.1 billion Twitter: 310 million LinkedIn: 255 million Pinterest: 250 million Google+: 120 million Tumblr: 110 million Instagram: 100 million >
- 8. 10 million lists 600 million emails sent per day 22-25% open rate for emails in our sector (non-profit, education)
- 9. Step 1: Assess the problem
- 10. Welcome to List Management Hell ● Using (mostly) 4 entirely separate lists (newsletter, events, reports, jobs) ● Buried among many other active, outdated, & defunct lists ● No mechanism for detecting overlap between lists ● No system for clearing bounces ● Unsubscribing was nearly impossible
- 11. Trapped in an outdated template Negatives: ● coded in html every week ● time consuming ● error-prone ● totally limited by outdated template ● not mobile-friendly Postives (sort of): ● We had thousands of subscribers… but did they engage with the content?
- 12. Impossible to gauge impact or success No metrics???
- 13. Know what you want PRODUCTION NEEDS Easy list management Quicker production time Flexible templates Multimedia inclusive Mobile responsive Meaningful metrics EDITORIAL GOALS Provide value to audience Be interesting to read Be inviting, tone & visually Better showcase our work with context & formats Share work from the broader community
- 15. Consider your audience... ...and their privacy
- 16. “Can we import your email address into MailChimp?” Be Transparent
- 20. Customizing cut our prep time in ½
- 22. when your emails are mobile friendly:
- 23. Editorial
- 24. After the pilot phase: Expansion Migrated 3 more lists - found tons of crossover Created groups within main list Merged our events & Buzz emails to reduce volume of emails sent A/B tested headlines On-boarded other staff
- 25. Prettify our templates Create better systems for finding good content Learn & experiment with features Look more closely at data More A/B Testing More work to do
- 26. Why Email? .8% 5% 8%
- 27. Join our Lists brk.mn/mail Follow us @berkmancenter Email us gweber@cyber.law.harvard.edu djones@cyber.law.harvard.edu Thank You!
Editor's Notes
- Greetings I’m Gretchen Weber, communications manager for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and this is Dan Jones, our multimedia producer. We’re here to talk to you today about email: Why it matters, how we use it, and to share some stories about a recent overhaul we did of the Berkman Center’s email outreach strategy. How many of you manage an email outreach program at Harvard?
- Gretchen First, a few fun facts about the Berkman Center Founded in 1997 at Harvard Law School to “to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development” We’re now an interdisciplinary, University-wide center We describe our our work as divided into four overlapping modes: We research, we build things, we educate, and we making connections across communities. We have dozens of projects, many with their own identities and audiences, all publishing things and holdings events all the time, and as the central comms staff, we have to be strategic about how and when we announce and communicate things to which of our audiences in which ways. (As I’m sure most people here do as well)
- Gretchen Really large and in some ways segmented community, which affects how we produce and share information Current & former 500+ staff, fellows, affiliates, faculty associates, and alumni (plus ~40+ interns per year) / more than 40 countries More than 50 Internet & Society Centers around the world are part of our Network or Centers initiative Project-specific communities & audiences & the general interested public (teachers / lawyers / developers / advocates /policy makers) Harvard & other partner institutions Berkman has been using email outreach for 10+ years But until last year our email outreach strategy, tools, and process hadn’t been examined or updated in almost as long. With all of these activities and projects to share and all of our various audiences and stakeholders to reach, it was clear we weren’t using email to its full potential.
- Gretchen This all started about a year ago, so we’re definitely not email experts But we did recently overhaul our email strategy & we’re here to talk about where we were, what we did, and how it’s going
- Dan But first a quick plug for email. Okay, you’re juggling dozens of different outlets for communicating with your audience. [name off a few and ask people to raise their hands for what they are using?]
- Dan
- Dan Okay, let’s just go purely by the numbers 2.5 billion people use email today. That number will reach 2.9 billion by 2019. Email is still required by default by almost all of the social networks we use today. The top 7 most popular social networks in the world combined amount to less than ½ the number of email users worldwide
- Dan
- Gretchen Last year at this time, Berkman sent out lots of emails, mostly to four lists maintained in an internal contacts database: a weekly newsletter, a weekly events email, and periodic announcements about research and job opportunities. It was clear there were lots of problems with our email strategy, but they mostly fell into two buckets
- 1: List management hell Four separate lists (buried within many old, no longer used lists) No mechanism for detecting overlap No system to effectively clearly bounces Contacts had been added in different ways over the years, which meant that some contacts could not unsubscribe without calling or emailing the Berkman Center directly. Not ideal.
- Gretchen 2nd bucket of problems: Editorial flexibility Focus on weekly newsletter, The Berkman Buzz Time consuming: Surprising process: HTML template that I updated every week, in HTML (for me this was a very slow and definitely error-prone process) Outdated look / limited by template, time, & my HTML skills Interesting content, but not presented in the most compelling ways (text heavy but little context, not very visual, no multimedia) Some potential positives! we had an audience of thousands of people on the list (but did they open the emails?)
- Gretchen We didn’t know, because we had no metrics at all We basically spent hours every week to send thousands of emails and had no idea if anyone opened them or liked what they saw (I did make a special request of our geek team to get a one-off open rate with email - it wasn’t pretty)
- Gretchen So much opportunity! :) Started compiling a list of what we wanted in an email product/process: better list management contacts should be able to adjust preferences and unsubscribe, bounces should clear, ability to group Reduced production time (not code in HTML every week, templates) More flexibility to showcase content: ability to easily add photos, multimedia, graphics, adjust shapes and sizes and sections Mobile responsive (70% of emails are viewed on phones?) Metrics reporting so we could get a sense of our audience and improve our emails Expanded editorial goals beyond just highlighting the commentary of the Berkman community by including: showcasing more content from the Berkman Center itself Adding more context, voice, and multimedia Provide additional value by curating interesting related content not produced by ourselves or our community
- Gretchen And so we asked everyone in the world what they used and how it worked for them, and the consensus seemed to be that Mailchimp was the way to go.
- Gretchen Good reasons for the change, but there was one big potential roadblock. While people had signed up over the years to receive our emails, they hadn’t signed up for MailChimp… and the Berkman Center community is pretty prickly about this kind of thing We couldn’t assume that everyone would be okay with their emails being migrated to a third party platform (privacy concerns, open-internet advocates,...) So... We had the HLS Cyberlaw Clinic vet MailChimp’s privacy policy For 3 weeks, we included a notification at the top of the newsletter warning readers about the change, pointing them to the privacy policy, and letting them know they could unsubscribe before we migrated their emails into MailChimp. And waited in fear Meanwhile, we tried to learn how to use MailChimp
- Gretchen Out of ~12,000 subscribers, we only got 6 unsubscribes (and 1 complaint who did not unsubscribe), and it was unclear if those 6 were unsubscribing due to MailChimp - they may have just been relieved to find a way to unsubscribe.
- DAN List migration was simpler than we thought. The 10,000 or so email addresses we’d collected over the last 10 years were easy to copy and paste into our new system.
- DAN List migration was simpler than we thought. The 10,000 or so email addresses we’d collected over the last 10 years were easy to copy and paste into our new system.
- DAN List migration was simpler than we thought. The 10,000 or so email addresses we’d collected over the last 10 years were easy to copy and paste into our new system. The system actually did a lot of work in de-duplicating email addresses and finding ones that were bouncing or otherwise outdated.
- DAN By creating a template we were able to cut our prep time in ½ Rather than writing html code by hand We could set up a flexible, drag-and-drop, WYSIWIG template
- DAN The new list format gave us a lot more control over what and how we could communicate to our audience. Because we weren’t spending half a day writing and formatting HTML to put out our newsletter - we had more freedom to experiment We’re able to schedule emails to be sent at more optimal times. We can insert a better variety of content - pictures, sound, video - than ever before AND Our newsletters are now mobile-friendly.
- DAN Open rate ~doubled, likely due to cleaning up our lists (we’d embedded a beacon once in the old Buzz to get a one-time open rate) And now we can see our click rates and what our audience is interested in
- Gretchen? at 6 months we migrated our 3 other lists to Mailchimp included notification in 2 consecutive emails for all migration process, de-duping and groups creation combined events email with Buzz (to reduce # of emails both for the producer and the recipients - in MailChimp we could see the lists overlapped a lot) trained others, comments about how surprised they were at how easy it was to use
- Gretchen? What we still want to do Update visuals/template Better sourcing of content from our community & the web More tests of headlines and content to see what works best Leverage lists/groups more effectively (how?) Improving open rate How can we get the emails not to go straight to spam folders? Let us know if you have any tips for us (I’m sure lots of you out there know MailChimp better than we do)
- DAN So - back to the question of “WHY EMAIL” Experimenting with a new platform gave us a chance to see if our self-selected audience would engage with our work if we could deliver it them in a better way. January - we had a perfect test case. It’s not ALL about numbers. But numbers can illustrate the larger story. Announcement of our summer internship program, and call for applications. We made up this beautiful page with a gorgeous, eye-catching GIF, guaranteed to convert anyone who looks at it into a click. So we posted it to Twitter, a big tweet that got a ton of engagement. 46,000 people saw it based on retweets and shares. What percent of those do you think clicked... Facebook - out of 1300 people… On our mailing list - out of 2600 people who opened the email… And applicants for this year’s internship program went up by 300.