Alternatives to e-mail newsletters - RSS
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article is current as of January 11, 2004.
E-mail newsletters are an important way for nonprofits to communicate with
donors, members, and other stakeholders, but they are rapidly losing their
effectiveness because of the overwhelming amount of e-mail traffic, especially
spam.
Spam messages often try to look like legitimate e-mail newsletters, even providing
'unsubscribe' messages at the bottom. E-mail users have learned not to reply
to spam messages, even to unsubscribe requests, because it will only result
in more spam. Consequently, real e-mail newsletters are getting mixed up with
spam by people who forgot or didn't realize they signed up for them. In the
next year or two, nonprofits must figure out how to prevent their e-mail communications
from causing anger and resentment among the people they are trying to connect
to. Spam rage is growing, and many legitimate e-mailers will be caught up
in the backlash.
The new Canadian online privacy legislation that came into effect on January
1, 2004 will also have an impact. Even nonprofits that are not directly affected
by the law (which lays out requirements for managing private information about
individuals) will be affected by the growing resentment around intrusive communications
and lack of privacy. You can safely assume that most people are going to be
trying to avoid additional unwanted e-mails, even from you.
Here are some suggestions for how to minimize backlash and begin planning for potential new channels of communication that may be seen as less intrusive.
Make it crystal clear when people sign up for newsletters
Many nonprofits trade mailing lists for their direct response campaigns, or collect
names and contact information any way they can - from special events, social
networks, donor lists, and so on. Expect to see increasing resistance and consumer
complaints, or just as bad, quiet frustration and resentment. You need to explicitly
ask whether it is alright to share information about the respondent, and whether
it is alright to send them communications in the future.
This will be difficult for many fundraisers, because they are constantly trying to deepen the relationships they already have with donors. I recently made a donation that I thought was anonymous, specifically because I don't want more junk mail. Two weeks later, I got a package of totally unwanted information in the mailbox. In talking to many other donors, I'm getting a picture of an ongoing struggle of wills between charities that want to communicate with us, and donors who are overloaded with information and want to make up their own minds without being hounded.
On the other hand, I sometimes do want to find information about charities or
particular issues of concern. It's very difficult to find and nonprofits are
going to have to figure out how to communicate better with donors who are ready
to 'buy'. United Ways have an important role, and opportunity, here.
Be careful about fundraising with e-mails
It used to be clever and cute to get individuals to 'sell' your charity to people in their social networks using viral marketing - encouraging donors to send requests to all of their friends, and so on. Stop it. Or if you insist on using this approach, be aware that many people, and many companies who pay for the e-mail services, the bandwidth, and the employees' time that are used up in handling your pleas for support, are getting very tired of it.
Make it really, really easy to unsubscribe
If you do send out e-mail newsletters (and despite everything I'm saying here, it's still the best way to update people on what's happening), make it extremely easy for people to stop getting them. For example, don't force them to remember the e-mail address that they used when they first signed up for it - most people have had more than one e-mail address over the years, and many people have five or six. There are technical ways to do this; some e-mail newsletters contain the identification of the person in the unsubscribe link itself. And you must test the unsubscribe function. Often when I try to stop receiving a newsletter, the link doesn't work.
Consider offering RSS subscriptions, and moving away from e-mail newsletters as other options get more popular
E-mail users are going to start demanding control over their e-mail communication.
Spam and junk mail filters are already blocking many legitimate e-mail newsletters,
and this trend will continue. On the other hand, e-mail is a wonderful tool
for receiving customized news that matters to people. I believe that professionals
will soon divide messages into three separate channels - e-mail from specified
colleagues, organizations or friends; subscriptions to specified news channels;
and everything else. E-mails in the third category will be discarded or passed
through severe filters that will routinely delete most of them.
One promising approach to the second category - subscriptions to specified news channels - is already spreading rapidly through the technology world. It is called RSS, or 'Really Simple Syndication'.
A Globe
and Mail
story on September 25, 2003 described RSS as a technology that might supplant
e-mail newsletters and help to eliminate spam. "RSS, short for Really Simple
Syndication -- also known as Rich Site Summary -- is most commonly described
as a news aggregator designed to facilitate the distribution of on-line content...[It] doesn't require the use of e-mail to reach consumers. Instead, news
headlines and associated links are delivered directly to the user, who can view
stories in a program browser or click through to the complete articles on-line...
"RSS is being touted as the latest weapon in the fight against spam and the newest solution to on-line content distribution. It's a system that's easy to install and employ; RSS readers can be Web-browser-based, stand-alone desktop applications, even integrated into Microsoft Outlook...There are currently tens of thousands of free opt-in RSS publisher "feeds" available on the Web (see Syndic8.com and News Is Free for directories). The top 100 most subscribed feeds, as listed by Radio UserLand, regularly include Wired News, CNN Sports, The Wall Street Journal and Business 2.0. But feeds also exist for the smallest of Web logs (blogs), housing the thoughts of random Internet users in on-line journal form."
This is really interesting. I've seen RSS in use for years, but never thought
of them as a mainstream alternative to e-mail newsletters. It allows users to
manage their subscriptions directly instead of trying to remember which newsletters
they signed up for and whether they are risking more spam if they try to unsubscribe.
The approach could be used to communicate between community groups, especially
on advocacy issues, as an alternative to ActionApps
slices. Most blogs offer RSS syndication, so it's something that a small
agency could set up in a few hours. I have cancelled most of my newsletters
and replaced them with RSS feeds that I can turn on and off as I wish.
For more information and resources on RSS readers, see Weblogs
Compendium - RSS Readers. For example, NewsGator
and Intravnews work within
Outlook, pulling all of your subscribed newsletters into a folder that you can
read or manage when you're offline.
**********
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
