Molly Brooksbank

Expanding on Sally’s post last month, Online Advocacy - Using Petitions for List Building, here are a few of my favorite nonprofit pledges. Unlike petitions, which are specifically political, pledges can promote any kind of action or invite general participation. Pledges can be a very effective outreach tool and the lists tend to be of a very high quality.

• CARE's "I Am Powerful" campaign from last year
• An "interactive monument" from the Anne Frank Museum (It’s also a nice screensaver)
• Amnesty International’s "Tear it Down" campaign against the detention facilities at Guantanamo
• "12 Months to Sustainable Good", a campaign microsite from Outreach International targeting students

Are pledges really just a smokescreen to gather emails?

I suppose they can be, but I think these examples demonstrate another possibility. Like any other nonprofit communication, your pledge has to be authentic. Just like newsletter subscriptions, these pledges act as tools to educate and engage, and serve as an entry point to broader participation.

To make your pledge work, you have to be prepared to respond to your signers' enthusiasm while it's fresh. If you have a stated goal, update them on your progress. If you can, tie the pledge into a broader campaign. But above all, make sure you're prepared to follow up signatures immediately with offers of other, deeper ways to engage with your nonprofit.

What can you genuinely ask for in a pledge, and what can you offer in return?

• Education: Elucidate the need you address and how supporters can contribute.
• Emotional Connection: Find common ground with potential supporters through your most compelling stories.
• Participation through Outreach: With a pledge, you give current supporters a reason and a means to share your mission with their friends and family, as well as a non-financial way to support your organization.
• Readiness: A pledge can help you build a base and keep your organization front of mind for the moment when a timely response is critical. Be clear in your pledge about your goals and about any communications the signer is opting in to.

Got any great pledges to share? Post them in the comments!

Some people like tuna from a can. Me, I like sushi. Like your email housefile, it’s all about how fresh it is and how you slice it. And fish that are carefully chosen and sliced with skill are more valuable than the stuff in a can for a reason.

Eric Rardin at the Care2 frogloop blog has posted an excellent calculator to help nonprofits answer a key question: What’s the value of an email? It’s a question Care2 has been taking head on since it’s important to how they connect activists and donors to causes.

As he mentions, Care2 gets this question a lot. As a consultant working with nonprofits, I ask it a lot. How should organizations be building a housefile? How do you prioritize? What tangible and intangible benefits can an organization offer to build a list directly? Are appends worth it? Should you advertise online? And for all of these questions – at what cost? If you’re trying to build your file, you need to be able to assess expenditures for acquisition and you need to be able to determine which source is most valuable.

In other words, you have to know where to get the best fish.

Tom Belford at the Agitator observed that if you’ve been running online campaigns for a while, you should already have your own way of measuring the value of email addresses and should be taking into account the cost of acquiring those addresses, but nonprofits are definitely all over the map on this one. Depending on where you are, this calculator may be a very good starting point for you.

The calculator gives results based on a number of campaigns per year. Seems simple, but you have to know what you mean by a campaign—it’s usually not just email responses. Email alone typically drives about 15% of donations and the rest comes from a variety of other sources. A single campaign could include donations driven from direct mail, search, viral referrals, or from activists, volunteers and information seekers who just happen to respond to an appeal while visiting your site.

Since the calculator uses a number of responses rather than a response rate, you can pretty much define your own terms, but if you want to compare your results against the benchmarks provided from our 2008 Nonprofit Benchmark Index Study, you’ll want to consider all online gifts in a one-year period, divided by the number of individual emails. In other words, the easiest thing to do is use your aggregate numbers as a single campaign.

If you’re already calculating the value of email, but you’re not looking at the multi-year implications, this is a great reminder to add it in. How fresh are your addresses? You can keep email addresses fresher through good communications, but there will always be some that become unusable.

If you’ve done that, try taking some different kinds of slices. Can you find the value of various relationships online (e.g. advocates or volunteers)? Are there constituents who are more valuable because of higher engagement (the people who open your email and read it)? Segmenting your file to speak to constituents in context can improve response rates, but you have to know your baseline, and if you want to learn to make beautiful sushi, you’re going to have to spend a lot of time studying fish.

P.S. I’m using tuna as a metaphor so I have to mention this tuna-related game developed by Conserve Our Ocean Legacy. It also conveniently happens to  demonstrate an innovative way to educate, engage and list build at the same time. (You won’t see my name in the high scorers list. I got netted at 70,193).