It Makes Me Cringe
When I read an article like this one in DM News, it makes me cringe.
It’s talking about a study by online agency Return Path looking at the extent to which advocacy and arts groups collect (or not) and then use (or not) personal data on folks who sign up for these groups’ e-newsletters.
After signing up for fifty nonprofit email lists and monitoring communications for 30 days, here’s what they report:
"Segmenting the nonprofits revealed a 17% gap between advocacy groups, of which only 12% collect demographic information, and arts organizations, 29% of which collect this data. However, none of the arts organizations incorporated this information to personalize e-mails, while a third of the advocacy groups that collected the information did."
This is as basic as direct marketing and relationship building gets folks!
Arguably, maybe Return Path should have given its experiment more time to play out. That said, one would hope that a new subscriber would get some kind of communication within 30 days, and there’s no reason it couldn’t already be taking advantage of the data collected to effect some personalization.
Note, they’re not even talking about anything as "advanced" as rolling a previous donor’s giving history into the communications stream — for example, to drive the ask amount in a fundraising appeal.
For 99% of the email communications I receive from nonprofits — and I receive many — the extent of personalization is … "Dear Tom"!
Atrocious!
Tom
One response to “It Makes Me Cringe”
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Tom,
Cringing is my normal reaction too. I have signed up for more than 300 NPO e-newsletters to see what happens and to have fodder for the many speeches I give around the country. (I am sitting at the airport heading to one now!) The big disconnect for most NPO’s is that they do not connect their email program to their database. I know that sounds to simple but here are the facts from my perspective.
1. Most NPO’s have finally moved to an email vendor rather than using their Outlook
2. Once they did that, they thought they had handled their email needs
3. Most commercial email programs do not connect to the popular fundraising database programs
4. Therefore they cannot match up with other fields or giving data which we all know is essential for PERSONALIZATION
5. Sadly, most of the database vendors like Blackbaud and eTapestry have commercial email functions now integrated with the query and communication merging functions at the same price or less than third party email programs.
It is sad to see that most NPO’s personalize letters, but not emails. Surely one simple A/B test would prove how powerful it can be! Let’s hope that there is large awakening in 2010 . . .