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.

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.

This was a record year for the Hill Country Ride for AIDS, held last Saturday, April 26, in Austin, TX. In a soft economy, we raised more money than ever before by Ride date--$575,000--beating our amount raised as of Ride day last year by $60K. We had 20% more riders than last year. It was a record year for the number of teams and the amount of money raised by teams. I'm pleased to say that Team Convio turned in a very respectable $14,000. And  I raised $7000 individually, surpassing my initial fundraising goal by over $2000! All of my fundraising--and almost all of the Ride's--takes place online, using Convio's TeamRaiser component, which enables individual participants to maintain their own web pages and donations, as well as to roll those up into a larger team's fundraising totals.

What follows for those of you who are interested is my journal entry for the weekend:

**********************************************
It's Sunday morning, and I am basking in the memory of what is always the best day of the year for me--albeit with sore muscles and the sun still burning on my face!

The 9th annual Hill Country Ride for AIDS began Friday night with registration, packet pickup, and pasta dinner followed by an hour of opening ceremonies. It was a joyous time to greet fellow riders ("You look so different with your street clothes on!"), connect with crew from last year, and to remember why we ride. I sat with my team, Team Convio, through the evening. We heard a moving testimonial from a young woman who lost her "step father" to AIDS.

Back home after packing my gear and getting my bike ready for the following day, I retired early at 10 p.m. for the day ahead. I went to sleep to the sound of a thunderstorm and hail, wondering what the next day's weather would bring. But when I woke up, the rain had cooled the temperature down and cleared out the humidity. It was a beautiful clear spring morning!

I got an on-time start from the house at 6:30 a.m., arriving at 7:15 at Krause Springs, some 35 miles west of Austin, where we would start and finish the Ride. The morning was perfect for riding. Our team of 10 members was resplendent in our gold, white and purple Team Convio jerseys as we gathered at the starting line for a final team picture.

Riding out into the spring morning, the cluster of 480 riders quickly thinned into singles and pairs and small clusters. I rode for most of the morning with my boss and his wife. The scenery was beautiful: the Texas wildflowers were still in bloom in subtle shades of yellow, blue, red, and cream. I pulled into the lunch pit stop by 12:00 and 31 miles, earlier than usual since I had not elected to do the extra 20-mile extension this year.

Only 12 miles to go after lunch, but what a 12 miles! At 6 miles out, we encountered "The Hill." This was our steepest climb of the day, and the Ride had posted volunteers to run alongside us as we cranked up the last hundred yards of the hill. I was grateful for all my training that enabled me to grind it out without getting off my bike, but my heart rate was 170 by the time I crested the hill! We stopped for a well-deserved rest at the top to enjoy the incredible vista before us and to cool down on popsicles at the hilltop pit stop before riding into camp.

It was mostly downhill the final distance. At 5 miles out, we encountered a new feature of the Ride: the 2-mile "Ride of Silence." I rode through it solo, remembering the names of many friends and acquaintances lost to AIDS. I coasted into the finish line to the shouts and cheers of the many people lining the road. It was truly a triumphant moment--and I was beat!

By finishing early this year, I was able to take advantage of some of the recreational amenities of the camp: a wonderful swim in the natural springs pool, complete with a pounding waterfall to soothe tired muscles, then a relaxing chair massage in a quiet grove of trees.

A shower and change of clothes later, I felt human again as I walked down the hill to the ampitheatre for the Remembrance Ceremony. This is always the most solemn event of the Ride, a time to remember why we ride and to hear a list of names read of people who have passed away from AIDS. The list grows longer each year as the Ride grows and more people want to remember friends and loved ones.

After the ceremony, we ascended the hill to gather for a Mexican dinner under a big tent. The silence broken, over 800 people--riders, crew, friends, and family--gathered to enjoy one last meal and to hear the final totals for the Ride. This was a record year, with more riders (480) registered than ever before, and more money raised than ever before--$575,000.

What an awesome day!

One of the key benefits of the Software as a Service (on-demand) model is the unique insight that the model provides from a data and analytics perspective. Because of that model we are able to obeserve aggregate data that helps nonprofit professionals answer three questions:

1) What online metrics should I focus on?

2) How is my organization doing? and

3) What targets should I set for my organization?

As a company we have 9 years of cummulative data and experience in the nonprofit sector, and a team of employees and partners with even more personal experience and expertise in analyzing data to provide actionable insight to our clients and the market.  Today, we are exctied to share the results of the second annual Convio Online Marketing Nonprofit Benchmark Index™ Study with the market. The NonProfit Times has featured the research in their current issue.

One of the lead researchers, Vinay Bhagat, sat down with us for a series of interviews on the study. Today, Vinay discusses the value of the research and some of the key trends. 

Convio clients can get the full report in the Convio Online Client Community. Visit our Web site for a summary of the benchmark report and to learn more.

We would be remiss if we didn't thank the study authors Quinn Donovan, Lynette Perkins and Vinay for the many hours they put into completing this project.

I first became familiar with eCRM, not as an employee of a SaaS company (Convio, which is where I work today), but as an end user of Convio's eCRM software.

A charity bike ride I had helped to start in Austin, Texas, in 2000--Hill Country Ride for AIDS--had stumbled along in its first couple of years with around 100 riders and $100,000 revenue for its annual charity ride. When we first encountered online marketing, we were primarily excited about its ability to accept online donations for our event. That first year of using eCRM, we almost doubled our ridership and income!

Over the last six years, our sophistication as a fundraising organization has grown as the functionality of eCRM has dramatically increased. We have delved deeply into the fundraising functionality for teams and individuals through online mail campaigns, team and individual web pages, individual fundraising events like house parties, and viral marketing through social networking pages. This year we are anticipating around 500 riders and we expect to pass our raised income of $550,000 from last year!

That's a pretty impressive rate of growth over the past 8 years. I attribute much of that growth to our ability to promote our ride through online marketing and fundraising. Feel free to stop by my page and make a contribution! :)

I just attended the NTC session "Five Ways to Set Up / Amp Up / Screw Up Your Email Messages", hosted by Madeline from Watershed, with TJ from Convio, Heidi from CDF and Nzinga from Watershed.

As always, Madeline delivered an excellent session, full of clever quips, intelligent insights and rationale suggestions.

One that got me thinking is the idea of offering email subscription options.  What I'm talking about are sites where the organization asks "are you interested in topics a, b, c, etc., let us know and we'll keep you posted on these issues".  Sounds logical right?  But here's the problem... asking people for their preferences is notoriously a flawed approach because what we actually do and what we say are usually much different.

A smarter approach to interest-based email segmentation is to assign interest values based upon behavior, not preferences.  In other words, over a period of time your organization can analyze response rates, advocacy actions, fundraising conversions, etc. and use that data to populate interest values for subscribers more accurately than relying upon the preferences an individual will self-select.  Granted... you need the data, the tools and the capacity to get it done, but the payoff is worth the effort.

And there's another reason to limit or avoid subscription options - people are already reluctant to join yet another email list because they're concerned about spam and volume, and if you say "check each issue you would like to hear from us about: climate, poverty, animals, disease, etc. etc." the potential subscriber sees that list and thinks "hmmm... I'm actually interested in all of those, but does checking each one mean I'll receive X more email from this group? I think I'll just leave that blank". 

So what's a group to do? If you have a good reason to believe self-select options are good for your unique strategy, do it.  But consider also maintaining a non-public set of interest preferences you populate over time based on behavior. 

Welcome to Connection Café, a blog created from the hearts and minds of the employees of Convio. Our vision for this blog is to aggregate the latest trends, ideas and best practices for nonprofits online. Through discussions about online communication tactics, the latest in Web 2.0 strategies and integration of offline and online campaigns, we hope to share insight and create an open and honest dialogue in the nonprofit technology world.  

Unlike other corporate blogs you may have looked at, you won’t find information or sales pitches about our latest product and service offerings here. Instead, we are venturing out and doing something different - we’ll be writing about the issues you care about and the topics that can help you succeed online. From time to time that means our products and technologies and how clients are using them to get results will be part of the discussion, but we don’t want it to be a sales pitch, so let us know if we cross that line.

Connection Café will discuss how the Internet is fundamentally changing the way people connect with causes, forcing nonprofits to rethink the traditional models for communication, advocacy and fundraising. We want to share our internal resources and expertise with you, as well as information from our Fusion Partners and point you to other online sources that are having the same, or better, discussions. Bottom line, we want to keep you better connected and engaged with the people, ideas and technology that are driving the industry.

Over the past eight years, we’ve kept you connected with our Convio Connection newsletter, presence at industry events and our online client community. Now I’m inviting you - the nonprofit Executive Director, the weekend volunteer, the marketing/communications expert – to connect with us once again by being a part of our online discussion.

So, when we think we have something valuable to share, you’ll see it here. And while it may be natural for us to draw from past work experience, this blog is not about Convio as a company but rather the people, ideas and technology that are fueling the industry we serve. If you see us veering off that path or becoming too Convio-centric, send a note or post a comment to let us know. You have my word that we’ll listen to what you have to say.

I hope that each person who reads this blog will find something beneficial in the editorials, news and multimedia content we produce.  We also want to read your comments, get your suggestions and do our best to answer your questions – or find someone to answer them.  I encourage you to reach out and give us feedback from time to time on what we’re doing well and what we can improve on.

 -Gene, CEO