NTEN Webinar Roundup: Stepping Up Your E-mail Marketing

Beginning in mid-March, NTEN presented a seminar a week in a four-part series on improving results from e-mail campaigns. Topics included getting to know online stakeholders; finding more online donors, members and advocates; storytelling via e-mail; and evaluating e-mail marketing efforts.

This article focuses on Part 1: Getting to Know Your Online Stakeholders: Who Are They and What Do They Want From You? (See the other features in this edition of Giving 2.0 for more on other parts of the series.)

In the first webinar on getting to know online stakeholders, presenters Jocelyn Harmon and Sahar Rashidi-Meyer spoke about the role analytics can play in learning who your online donors are and what they want from you. Harmon and Rashidi-Meyer are the director of business development and analytics and the database manager, respectively, at Triplex, a division of InfoUSA.

They recommended creating an online profile, which is a process that zeros in on the unique attributes of an organization's donors, members and advocates so it can get the right information to the right people at the right time and price.

Creating an online profile helps organizations segment and better communicate with stakeholders; differentiate between stakeholder segments; and target new donors, advocates and members. The goal is to find out what is unique about an organization's stakeholders and use that information for acquisition and retention.

Before beginning the process, determine your goals. Are you trying to:

• increase response rates;
• increase the dollar value of donations;
• stop talking to the wrong audience; or
• segment your campaigns?

The steps involved in the process are:

• Audit your list to show counts by geographical area. Look at your stakeholders file and try to get an idea of their geographic distribution. Look at different states. Which states do most stakeholders reside in?
• Append demographic data to all the matched records. A lot of this information can be acquired through the Census Bureau if you don't have it on file. Data worth appending includes geographic, marital status, adult age range, head of household gender, presence of children, household income and length of residence.
• Match to a list company's database or a national sample.
• Designate a benchmark. Pull a random sample from your donor population.
• Create an online profile report.

A fundraiser’s job is to put the profile to work by adjusting messages as appropriate and using the profile to maximize acquisition efforts.