Happy (belated) Mother's Day to all those moms out there!

With help from my colleagues I just did a quick roundup of some great Mother’s Day email and web campaigns that organizations used to encourage engagement around the holiday. 

Here’s the quick summary with links to examples.  Post your ideas and additional campaigns in the comments.

Create a Mother’s Day Campaign Site
The Ploughshares Fund created a great Mother’s Day Campaign Site with landing pages, content and rich imagery that asks visitors to honor their mothers by giving the gift of peace.

Tie American Mother’s Day to Issues of Mothers Around the World
The International Rescue Committee ran an email campaign that encouraged people to consider making a donation to honor “mothers and their families who are caught in the crossfire of conflict.”

CARE ran an email campaign with similar messaging that led to a strong donation form allowing people to send their mothers CARE-themed eCards after donating.

Encourage People to Act in Honor of Strong Women in THEIR Lives
Planned Parenthood ran an email campaign that leveraged the notion of intergenerational strength to encourage donations.

Appeal with Celebrities Talking About their Mothers
Susan J. Komen Foundation’s Policy Alliance sent an email campaign featuring actor Ricardo Chavira who lost his mother to breast and cervical cancer when he was 16 years old.  In the email donors are directed to take action on an advocacy campaign encouraging Congress to create a special cancer coin. 

Market Gifts that Give Back to the Organization
Save the Children ran an email campaign to encourage people to buy Save the Children themed roses or bracelet to honor their mothers and support the organization.

National Public Radio created an online store geared to Mother’s Day gift ideas.  They drove traffic to the store with an email campaign.

Recently I came across a blog posting titled Benchmarking with a Warped Stick.  The author, who chooses to remain anonymous, seems to hold some negative opinions about the two of the most recent benchmarking studies – specifically the Giving USA Study, and Convio’s Online Marketing Nonprofit Benchmark Study. 

The author states that, “Unfortunately, not all benchmarking studies are created equal. Some studies are nothing more than lazy half-assed analysis from vendors hawking thinly veiled sales pitches”.  Obviously, being the author of one of these studies I know first hand how much work they are to complete, and therefore I respectfully disagree. 

But that’s not the point.  The point is that everyone is entitled to an opinion and we are all lucky enough to live in a time, thanks to the internet, where we have an easy way to share that opinion with others. 

So let’s hear from you, the Fundraising professionals tasked with understanding the nonprofit fundraising landscape and how your results fit into it.   Should organizations like Convio, and Giving USA continue to offer these sorts of insights to the nonprofit community, or is this simply self-serving marketing fluff? 

Fashion is not my strength.  When it comes to shopping for clothes, especially shoes, I’m a pragmatist.  I tend to buy the shoes I can wear often and really get my money’s worth.  This does not please my fashion focused better-half.  She’s constantly urging me to splurge for the expensive and trendy shoes.  On occasion I break down, spend the big money and head home trying to imagine under what circumstances I will actually wear these fancy shoes.  I realize this is boring and I’m missing some critical DNA element that makes me cool, but I’ll get over it :).

Each time I visit my closet those expensive shoes (still in their box) stare up at me, reminding me how expensive they were and cause me to think about all of the other ways those funds could have been spent.

Recently I read the excellent blog post from my colleague Taylor about keeping your email house file clean and this is what started me thinking about shoes and data integration. 

You see, for organizations, it’s literally impossible for all data to come from a single source, or be stored in a single repository that can support the creative and strategic ideas they have to engage supporters and constituents.  Ergo the need for data integration, in some form or fashion is always necessary.  But “total” integration is not only incredibly difficult, expensive and resource consuming - and almost always unnecessary.  A better approach is to consider replicating your shoe buying habits.  Determine which data sets are most valuable and will best support your priority strategic goals and spend your integration resources on developing the most efficient synchronization of these data sets in a deliberate order.  In other words… be an integration pragmatist, don’t try and achieve 100% replication between systems, think about which pieces of data are most valuable and focus there first.  Start with the most obvious constituent profile fields like name, email, address, etc. and then expand to transactional data, interest values, group membership, etc.  If you prioritize the data that will be used the most, you’ll never have that wretched feeling of buyer’s remorse.

Hey techies, the next time a boss from your organization requests the integration of two data sources, ask the following questions:

• Specifically how are you going to use the combined data?
• Will this integration increase our results?  How?
• To achieve these results, will you need recurring synchronization or would a one-time or infrequent sync suffice?
• Once combined, do you have the tools you need to segment this data or will you be needing my help with that as well?

Understand, I’m not advocating data silos and a closet full of dirty old slippers, quite the contrary, in order to succeed in multi-channel (online, direct mail, etc.) marketing, integration is imperative.  But just as with my shoe shopping, there is a cost and we must always rationalize our investments with sound reasoning based on the results we expect to achieve.

One of the things I really love about working with non-profit organizations is their passion. Very few people, if any, get into the non-profit sector because of the big paychecks or the lavish lifestyle. More often than not, the people who are involved in these organizations are there because they really believe in the cause and mission that their organization supports and promotes.

That being said, one thing that often disappoints me with nonprofit organizations is the lack of that passion and conviction in the content on their websites. I have to admit that I am pretty ardent about content, so maybe I'm a harsh critic. However, websites are a visual medium. Not unlike their print-based brethren, they rely heavily on a combination of visual design and content to convey the voice of the organization. When the combination of these two components doesn't accurately represent the organization, the purpose of the website and the mission of the organization is often lost.

Remember that, just like those of you that work for nonprofit organizations, people who donate to and advocate for these organizations are passionate about what the organization is doing, too. So highlight the great things your organization does that differentiates it from other organizations in the same vertical. Talk about who donations help, not just how they are allocated. Share volunteer experiences. Get excited about what you are doing, and spread that excitement all over the content on your site. Get a content strategy together to make sure that what you say on your site represents your organization, not just another website. Your passion and your dedication are important and inspirational - you've got a lot to say, and we want to hear it!

Additional Links
Check out the following links for more information about this topic:
Winning Content Persuades, Not Manipulates
Turn Usable Content into Winning Content

I will sheepishly admit to being a personal productivity geek. I've read Getting Things Done multiple times, check Lifehacker the way others check their stocks, and am constantly looking for that nifty new Firefox extension that will magically render me Organized.

While I've gone down some dead ends, there are a few little apps that have made a lasting difference in my ability to feel in control of my day - or at least to minimize the drudgery. And given how buried most nonprofit staffers are, I figure anything that saves you a little time might be welcome.

Anagram: when a new major donor prospect or one of your super-activists sends you an email, wouldn't it be great if you could use their email signature file to create an pre-filled Outlook contact with one click?  Anagram instantly creates Outlook contacts and appointments out of text you highlight. 99% of the time it pre-fills the contact/appointment exactly right. Free 45-day trial...they also have versions for Palm, Netsuite, and even Salesforce.com (for those of you using SFDC as your database of record). Windows only, I'm afraid.

ActiveWords: I used to type the words "Thanks, Alex" 50 or so times a day...so it was very annoying when I would misspell my own name, have to hit the back button five times, rewrite it, mistype it again, etc. Now I just hit the letter t and then hit the spacebar twice, because ActiveWords lets me create keyboard shortcuts to automate common tasks...could be text snippets, opening a folder on your network, browsing to a URLs, or even a multi-step task. It sits in your taskbar so it works across all your apps. It has a built in calculator for totting up how much time and money it saves you...since installing it a couple of years ago, I've saved 30 full hours and avoided having to type 354,000 characters! Free 60-day trial. Windows-only, but I'm led to believe Quicksilver offers similar functionality on the Mac platform.

Jott. Call Jott's phone number and leave a message for yourself. It will be converted to text and emailed to your email address. Great for reminding yourself of an idea or action item when you're not near your computer. Free.

I've also playing around with Xobni,  a new, free Outlook plugin that organizes your email by person...all of your previous conversations and shared attachments with that constituent/colleague/board member in one place. Real potential for improving responsiveness....hat tip to my colleague Will Buchanan for that one.

How about you? What are your favorite productivity apps?

In today’s Wall Street Journal, technology columnist/blogger Ben Worthen wrote an interesting article on the 30^th anniversary of the first spam email. Since that first invitation to an open house for a new computer, spam has grown to an estimated 90 percent of all electronic messages sent.

To celebrate, ok, highlight the anniversary, I thought it was a good time to feature an article and blog post that help you make sure your email is getting through.

The first is from Convio Chief Scientist, Dr. Bill Pease. Culled from his oft-requested conference session on things that affect email delivery and the best practices required to avoid common delivery problems, the article provides insight that can help you succeed.

From the “oldies but goodies” section, Holly Ross (the post is an oldie, Holly is NOT) provided ten steps to improve email deliverability on NTEN blog last year.

Gary Thurek, the father of spam says people started complaining about his email immediately. He never sent another. Now, if only the Viagra pushers and Nigerian Princes would stop… Well, we can wish. But if you want results and not wishes use the opportunity of this infamous anniversary to share these tips across your organization.

In addition, share your best tips here and we’ll compile them for a future post. Also, share some of the worst tips you've heard and we can put them on a list too. We heard some at a session in San Diego a few weeks ago that made our clients and team cringe - things that good email marketers stopped doing years ago were touted as best practices - but that is a future post. You can also visit the resource center with lessons learned from nearly a decade of research and collaboration with clients and partners on email practices.

And don't blame Gary - as he puts it, blaming him for spam is like blaming the Wright Brothers if the airline loses your luggage.

I just read a great article on the cost of free software, published by Boston Interactive.  They take some time to describe the merits of "free" software, or software that doesn't have a pricetag for taking it off the showroom floor.  They then spend a lot of time describing many of the costs of open source tools that are seldom considered. 

When you consider using open source (or make ANY decision around purchasing technology for your organization) you might want to consider the following:

1. You Get What You Pay For
What are you getting for the money (or no money)?  Is the tool reliable and dependable?  Can you talk to other users who have used the tool to solve similar problems, whether it's managing content or analyzing data, to the ones you're solving?  Have you outlined your needs thoroughly and can the tools meet most of them?

2. Deployment or Setup Costs
Every software product requires some kind of setup.  Off the shelf, it probably needs to be configured for your organization's needs.  How much will it cost to get that thing set up? Whether your staff or a consultant sets it up for you, there are definitely labor costs involved.

3. IT Expenses
Besides labor, what else will be required to support this system?  Will you need to purchase additional hardware (i.e. another web or database server) or software (e.g. MS SQL Server or Cold Fusion Server) to use the tool?  If you're not hosting it in-house, how much will it cost each month or annually to have someone else host the tool? 

4. Support
What kind of help will your organization need to maintain the tool over time?  Does someone need to deploy security patches and upgrades?  Is there someone you can call for help the moment you need it?  Or, are you going to have to post a question in an online user forum and wait for someone that can help you?

5. Openness
Is the tool you're selecting "open."  A lot of times we'll buy software that doesn't meet all of our needs, but that can be coupled with other tools to get 100% of the job done, just think of all the crazy things you do with MS Excel that other programs cannot do).  Be sure that the technology you select makes it easy to integrate with other solutions at the content, data, and authentication levels (assuming it's web based technology).  Also, consider the costs of doing this integration.  Just because the technology can be integrated doesn't mean it'll be cheap to do so.

6. Portability
You're making a significant investment in this technology because it's going to help you solve some process that's important to your business.  Just like mutual funds, you want to be sure your investment will go as far as possible.  Should you decide to move to some other tool to solve the same problem (i.e. moving from one CMS to another to support your organization's web site) be sure at a minimum you can move your data or content.  Also, keep in mind that the customizations you make getting this thing set up or need over time will complicate the portability of the investment you're making in this system.
 
Well, there they are.  Six things you should consider when considering open source or really any kind of software.  I'm excited to hear what others think of these and what else we should add to the list.