 Welcome to How to Write Earth Changing Emails. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm a webinar program manager here at TechSoup. I've been with the organization for a little more than 6 years, and prior to that I spent a decade working with small nonprofits in Washington, D.C. and Oakland, California. I was frequently the accidental techie who had to make the technology decisions with very little expertise. So I've been in the situation that many of you join us from today, and hopefully can make this event one that helps you learn how to make good decisions for your technology at your organization. Also joining us as our expert presenter today is Allison Carleman, the Senior Unmarketing Manager at Global Giving. And her job there is, she's responsible for telling Global Giving's story and helping the organization understand its social impact. And she's really in charge of a lot of there email strategy and the work that they do around fundraising. She began her career in the nonprofit communications sector at the Denver Art Museum, lives in Washington, D.C. now, and is joining us from there today. She spent time also in the Western Cape in Africa and South Africa, and in Kenya working with organizations like Kiva and Medesans en Frontier, or Doctors Without Borders. So we're very happy to have her joining us today to share her expertise on how she helped the huge range of organizations connected with Global Giving both improve their email campaigns and reach more audience to support their programs. In addition, you'll see Ali Bazdikian on the back end, and she is an Interactive Events and Webinar Producer here at TechSoup. And she'll be there in the chat window to flag your questions, help you with any technical issues, and chat out to you throughout the webinar. So if you have suggestions to share, please chat them to her and she can share them with the rest of our audience. A look at today's agenda, I'll do a quick introduction of TechSoup, followed by a couple of polls to get us started on the topic of the day, and help us understand where you're at currently with your email strategy. We'll hear a little bit about Global Giving's secret sauce from Allison, and then she'll take us through three different ways of looking at how to improve and make your emails earth-changing. And then she'll talk about her strategy to listen, act, learn, and repeat. We'll have time for Q&A at the end, but there may be opportunities during the webinar to also chime in. So feel free when it moves you to ask those questions in the chat window. So who is TechSoup? We are a 501c3 nonprofit working toward the day. And every nonprofit, library, social benefit organization on the planet has the access to technology resources and knowledge to better achieve their mission. We do this in a lot of different ways. Primarily we do it through our donation programs that have connected more than 200,000 charitable organizations with donations from companies like Microsoft, Adobe, Cisco, and Intel in more than 60 countries around the world. And we do this every day, and we're always trying to expand the different product offerings available through our catalog as well as the services we provide like our webinars and events and articles and blog posts. In addition, we're trying to expand to offer more services that can help you make technology decisions like consulting services as well as the latest products like Windows 8.1 and QuickBooks 2014. You can find all of this and more by visiting TechSoup.org. So for those of you who aren't familiar with us, please join us there to learn more. Now on to the topic of the day, How to Write Earth Changing Emails. This isn't a question just to pull you for our benefit. This is a question on screen to help us understand where you're at currently with your email. So what's the size of your current email list? Roundabout. We know these are broad categories, but let us know are you, and this is your list or list combined. And this helps us get an idea of sort of what your audience reach is and maybe what your capacity is. It gives us a hint into maybe how many staff you might have. And you can feel free to comment in the chat window if you feel like these categories don't capture your organization all that well, or if you have some other thought to share. I'll give just a few more seconds for people to respond. It looks like the great majority have email lists that are either 1,000 or less or 10,000 or less, which is really helpful to know. I'm going to go ahead and look at the results here. I have people also chiming in in the chat to let us know. So this is great. Thank you for participating. And one more question for you. So we have one person commenting that their list is 1,500 or so, so it's not anywhere near 10,000, but it's slightly more than 1,000. So yes, we know our categories don't capture everything, but it's helpful for us to know and to guide Allison as our expert in what kind of audience reach you're currently working with and what kind of capacity for email you're handling on a daily basis. A couple of other people have commented 2,800, 2,000. So it might have been helpful for me to have another category there in the middle. One of our commenters asked, not sure what you mean by email list? Is that our contact list or people that we regularly send group emails to? I think that could include both, but I'm really thinking of your bulk email list, so the people that you would send a newsletter to, for example. So let's go ahead and look at our next question before I hand it over to Allison to take us through some of her earth changing tips. Have you done A-B testing on your emails before? This is a yes, no, and not really sure what it means, and it's totally okay to say that you don't know what it means. That's what this type of event is geared toward, is to make sure that everybody is on the same page and can utilize the tips that Allison brings to us today. And so in doing that, we want to make sure everyone knows what we're talking about. And it looks like quite a few aren't sure. And so maybe one way to start us off is what we will be talking about this further into the webinar topic as well, but just a really quick overview or definition of it is A-B testing means taking a segment of your existing list. So say you have a thousand subscribers, and maybe you take 100 of those subscribers, and you divide them into two groups, and you test something in your email. Maybe you test the subject line, or you test some of the content, and you send a batch of that to group A, that 50, and then you send a slightly different email to the other 50, and you see which one performs better. And then whichever one really performs better, then you send that one to the bulk remaining part of your list. We'll talk more about that later on, but this is really helpful to get an idea of where our audience is at today. And so we can spend time really defining that later when Allison talks about it in her agenda. So around almost 70% say that they're not sure, and the other 26% are saying that they aren't using it. So this is a great opportunity to talk about how that can be leveraged to help you improve your email. So with that, I'd like to go ahead and invite our speaker, Allison Carleman, Senior Unmarketing Manager at Global Giving, to join us at the line, and to take us through her strategy for helping us all achieve Earth-changing emails. So thank you so much for joining us today. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Can you hear me? Loud and clear. You sound great. Great. Well, it's such a pleasure to be here today. It's so exciting to see all these names popping up. It's really great to get a chance to talk to you, and I'm glad to have a little bit of an idea of who I'm speaking with, and maybe the size of organizations and email strategies that you might have. So I'll just go ahead and get started here. My goal is that in the next hour, now in the next 50 minutes, you will learn the most effective way to motivate your audiences using emails. Also, we'll talk about identifying your super friends and what that means. And finally, in the next hour, hopefully you will walk away having written a hypothesis for one email experiment that you're going to do. So here we go. I'm from Global Giving. Many of you may be familiar with Global Giving already. You may know of us as the world's first and largest global crowdfunding platform for nonprofits. So we work with nonprofits of all shapes and sizes all around the world in 157 countries. And then we also have donors of all shapes and sizes, mostly individual donors, but a really robust set of more than 100 corporate partners, who also donate to the nonprofit projects on our site. So our goal is to channel more dollars to more doers every day. But in addition to providing nonprofits with the critical funding that they need, what's exciting is that we can also provide critical information and tools that enable nonprofits to be as effective as possible with the money that they do receive. And because we have some really great incentives on our platform and some great bonus dollars in corporate funding, as organizations become more effective, we can provide them with a kind of exposure that assures that the world knows it. And as their effectiveness increases, so does their funding. So my shameless plug here is if you're a nonprofit and you're interested in the idea of individual crowdfunding online and working with us, you're welcome to apply. We would love to have you apply to join. And we get organizations on the site through something called an open challenge. And you can learn more about it at the link that I just sent where you can learn about our open challenge and the application process. And the deadline is July 24th. So that's the end of my shameless plug. Now more back to emails and how to write earth-changing emails. So I talked about we have tools that can help organizations become more effective. And you're probably wondering how do we know what makes an organization effective? And the answer is that we've seen that whether in business, government, or the nonprofit sector, some of the world's most agile and adaptable organizations are ones who do this. They listen, act, learn, and repeat. We call it a cycle of progress where they're constantly honing what they do based on the best information that they can get their hands on. And we've seen that nonprofits, including ourselves, become more effective when we listen to what our stakeholders are saying, including the constituents that we serve, our peers, experts who are also talking about the type of work that we're doing. And then once we hear those ideas, we test some of them out with our own target audiences. And we track results and learn from those results and then try the whole process again. That's the repeat step. So we really believe that this not only helps you become more effective at the work you do in achieving your mission, but it's also a way to help improve your fundraising strategy as well. So we're going to talk about listen, act, learn, repeat today in terms of email marketing and your fundraising strategy over email. So this is it. This is the punchline of this whole presentation, Global Giving Secret Sauce for Writing Earth-Changing Emails in order to get your audience and your readers to act in the way that you hope. I get people all the time asking me, what's the best practice for email? What's the best time to send emails? What are the best word lengths? And all of that. And the answer, unfortunately, nobody wants to hear this, is always, well, it depends on your audience. Have you tried it? What works best with your audience? Because it's not the same for every audience. So I'm going to start by showing you how we at Global Giving have listened, acted, learned and repeated with our own emails so that you can then get an idea about and be inspired to listen, act and learn, repeat on your own. And then you'll already be a third of the way through the cycle because you'll have listened to me talking for 30 minutes here. And then you'll be able to develop some ideas about how to act and then prepare to learn from your experiment by tracking your results. And again, this is a cycle so there's no real beginning or end to it so we're just going to jump in at this point where I'm going to share with you some of the acting that we've done. And you'll listen on that and be able to act yourself. So here we go. The cycle starts with listening. And we group all of our sources of feedback into three different categories here. The first is users. And users could be anything. Users could be the constituents, the people that you serve. Users could be the people that are reading your email. So in this very specific case we're going to be talking about the users of the emails that you're sending. So these are the people on your email list. And then there's also peers. So peers are, you could call them your frenemies, other organizations that are doing similar work to you who are friends but also competitors. But I think one of the really most powerful things about the nonprofit sector is that there's so much good to be done in the world and there's so much more potential for more good to happen that the world works better when we work together to meet our missions. So we really see peer collaboration as a great way to help one another improve the work that we're doing. The third is theory. There are people who get paid to do studies and research about things and it's always great to test out what you read and what other experts who are spending a lot of time doing very scientific studies are saying. Okay, so first the users. We are going to take a look back through the way back machine of GlobalGiving's emails. These are some snapshots of emails that we as GlobalGiving have sent. And we send approximately one to four emails every month to a list of about 140,000, which sounds like it's a lot bigger than the list that you guys are probably working with but I believe that the principles can still be the same. We're usually asking for donations in our emails on behalf of our nonprofit partners who have projects on our site. Last year we raised just under $300,000 from those emails for our nonprofit partners. And this year we're poised to do even better because we will continue to test, test, test and find out what works with our audiences. So to start out I'll give you an idea of about five years ago. This is what our email newsletter looked like. The term e-newsletter is what we use now but it's kind of a relic because it's actually more descriptive of how our emails used to be. They used to have news. They used to be about us and they would be little snapshots of news articles where you could click to view the full article. And what we found from our users based on the way that they were interacting with our emails and what they were just telling us was that they didn't want to read. I think this has changed a lot just as all of us in the past five to eight years have gotten a lot more email. We don't really want to read. So I think a lot of us are guilty of wanting to share so much content in our newsletters but our experience is that people don't want to read. So the next feedback we got once we changed the format, this is how we changed it, was that it worked really well once we started to humanize it. And instead of talking about ourselves we started talking about our users. So that's what I mean by show me what it means to me. This email says, Dear Kevin, Kevin is the reader of this email. What are you doing for Black Friday this year? So this is now about you the reader and not us as global giving. And that's our next step. We started to see our emails were performing a lot better when they were not about us. We also started to include some better images and found that people clicked on images. So the next thing we did was we just made a really big image, a big header image. And we also realized that being more focused and making it even shorter was working for us. So more focused and even shorter with big images, that was our next steps in the next way that we iterated. The next bit of user feedback we got was we saw that a lot of people were, we could track where people were clicking on emails and we saw that they would really click on emails or images where people, where there was one person in an image that's looking at you, making eye contact, and looking hopeful. And so if you look at our past newsletters in the past couple of years, that's what we do. We feature one person making eye contact, looking hopeful because people tend to click on that and we've seen that over and over again. Then the next thing we started to do was to continue. Here we have a turtle looking at you, looking hopeful, making eye contact. The next thing we started to do was try and make it more clever and unexpected. So here we have a pretty cool image and then we started to incorporate a lot more humor. This email has a bunch of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles jokes in it. And we saw that those started to go over really well. And in fact people were sharing them just because they liked the style of the email, not even necessarily because they liked the call to action but it got the word out there. The next thing we started to do was instead of just writing our call to action in the email and text, we started making it into a button. And then we made it into a larger button and then larger and larger buttons. And so now we have a pretty embarrassingly large Give a Gift Card button in this email or it might say Donate Now. We realized that the bigger we made the call to action, the more people clicked on it. So that's what we do now. And then finally the last thing that we learned from our users that I'm going to talk about today was personalization. And so some of you who have smaller lists than 1,000 and maybe you're sending out 100 emails or even 20 emails, you might be able to just manually personalize emails and maybe you already do that a little bit. But if you use a different mail provider, we use MailChimp for example. We found a few ways to customize by including the person's first name in it. And what we actually do in this email here is I'm trying to show how we included the images and projects from the organizations that people had donated to. So they were seeing things that were familiar to them. And so every person that got an email on our list had a different email because it pulled in their own personal project information to organizations they'd given to. And so you can take this tip in a lot of different ways but the more you can personalize it and make it hyper relevant to the person receiving it, the better. So that's my quick and dirty list of the things that we've learned over the past few years that we try and implement with every email that we're sending. Here's a summary of it. Keep it short and focused. Make it about the users, not you. Make it even shorter. Use big, compelling images. Often the best images are one person making eye contact. Use humor and do things that are unexpected. Feature a very clear call to action and personalize. So that was from the users. Those were things that we were learning from the users. The next thing I want to talk about is peers and what we can learn from our peers. And so I'll tell you a little bit about who we consider our peers are. We have a small group of folks who work on online communications in a group of similar organizations that all met up a few years ago and started just sharing what we were learning. And we call each other the super friends. Or at least that's a global giving people call. The rest of the group is the super friends. For us it's kiva.donorschoose.org and Charity Water. Similar organizations. And we get on a call a couple of times a year to talk about, hey, what are you testing and what are you learning so we can share those best practices? Because we think we probably have a lot of the same donor base. It's a pretty bold thing to reach out to people who might be considered competitors. But again, we've all really thrived from this relationship and we feel like we're just improving the sector and advancing our missions, each one of us. And it's been really cool. So I would really encourage you to think about who your super friends are. So what I'm about to show you is three emails. I asked each of our super friends to share their best performing email from 2013. So I'm going to show you one from Kiva, one from DonorsChoose, and one from Charity Water. And I'm actually going to ask you to start engaging here and start typing in your chat what you think makes that email really compelling. What made that the best performing email of the year? So here we go. Here is Charity Water's email. I'm going to give you a second to read it. And as you're reading you can start typing into the chat to tell us why you think it was their best performing email. So it looks like some of the comments coming in. Some people are suggesting, Story says little text. Christie suggests it's a pick of a family. Kimberly says the picture. Story suggests that it's a big picture of people smiling. There's a big button, positive image, family facing forward. It makes me curious from Cynthia, that was my response when I first saw this one, was what does the ha mean? What is the answer? Inspires curiosity, family atmosphere, they're smiling, eye contact, great picture, consistent color theme. People want to know the answer. Good humor asks a question, visually very appealing, hopeful, little amount of text. Some of the asks, what's the subject line of the email? We can't see that in here. I don't know if you know what that is. Another person says it's unexpected. You do know what that is? Or you don't? I don't, no. Okay, that's okay. It's zeroed in on water, talks about giving, assuming most people want to give. And somebody says it's the ha. It's a button. I love it, really creative. So tell us, are all of our participants chiming in? Are they correct? I think you all nailed it. And I don't actually know what the perfect answer is, but I think we can all guess. And this is a list of things that Charity Water also said why they think it worked out well. Oh, I'm sorry, here is the subject line. Tis the season for a box full of sand. And we think it was really excellent because it's a beautiful image. It's well laid out. It's formatted for mobile phones. I don't know if you could tell that, but if you look at the size of the image, it's perfect for an iPhone. And you're right, there's very little text. You can read it really quickly. And everybody loves that button at the bottom that says, huh? Everybody would probably just click it because you're like curious, what are you going to tell me? Even if you didn't read the text above it. So those are things that they had narrowed it down and iterated to to come up with a really powerful email. And you can't keep us in suspense. So we need to answer what the huh is too because that was my question when we first looked at it. Then the huh talks about, I believe it's like a bio-digester that they're helping families with in Cambodia. So that's why they're trying to talk to people about it. So if you think that your nonprofit does work, that's not very sexy. Here's a great job of talking about a not very sexy topic in a pretty sexy email. That's great. And one of our participants' comments that their friend's daughter just got back from Cambodia doing exactly this work. So a little connection there. That's great. That's awesome. Okay, so then here's the next one. This is from donorschoose.org. And the subject line was urgent classroom requests. So again, chime in in our chat and let us know what you think made this successful. I'll be reading off your answers. Max comments that it's personalized, hopeful kids, large link. Stacy comments, very specific request. Vicki, happy smiling kids. Susanna, hopeful little faces. Personalization. Cynthia says, I honestly probably wouldn't even finish reading it. So maybe she's not a fan of this one. Little children smiling, lots of happy kids. That it's a specific ask, has a cute homemade card, gives the opportunity, a personal response, colored text. Donation goes to someone and it's not abstract. So those are some of the feedback that our audience is sharing. Yep, that's all really excellent. Here's what donorschoose told me that they think made this most successful was that it was personalized by state. So you can see here, they said our little list learners in New York could use some holiday cheer. So wherever Morgan was from, it was in New York is where her database information was. So this was personalized to the state of every recipient. And then also it was simple and brief, although you're right, it's possible people might not even get all the way through there. But it really is only three sentences and two sign-offs. So I think that was also really effective. And then urgent. So this is one thing that's really interesting. They said urgent classroom request, which is a very specific thing. But since this was mass sent to every person on their list, it wasn't about any specific classroom that really needed one thing. Just using the word urgent and made it actually feel urgent for people. So they didn't even have to get into what was urgent about it. But it still created a sense of urgency and people gave. So that's something that you can think about, is how can you create a sense of urgency and sense of timeliness around an email that you're sending, even if there is no real deadline? You could sometimes just say, we have a goal of raising $500 this week. And that enough could be enough to motivate people to help you get to that goal, even if there's no real reason for that. One thing that I think is interesting about this, just to comment on it quickly, one of our participants was saying that they didn't like it as much. And I agree. I think visually it's certainly not as pretty as the last one we looked at, but it's a great example of how you don't necessarily need to have the fanciest graphics or the most awesome system to be able to make a really effective email. Your text matters a lot and personalization. So these kind of tips can work for anybody no matter if you're just using your Gmail or a regular email tool, not a blast email tool to send out emails. So just thought I'd chime that in there. I totally agree. And that's what's really interesting about what I'm learning these days in emails is I think we all like to think that really beautiful images like this are always going to be the most effective. But you'll see with the next example, lower tech actually ended up working better. What's most important is that you test with your audience and you see what version, what really gets people to move because ultimately you're trying to get results out of your email. And we all think that everyone loves really powerfully written stories and really beautiful imagery, but sometimes short and brief and punchy is what works. So here's Kiva's example of what was the most powerful email of 2013. And this one I'm going to have to kind of give you the punchline because it's kind of confusing. So you can see at the bottom half of this email there is just the regular e-news letter. And you can see it says hi, first name. You can see that's where they would have used their data system to import a person's first name. But then they added this chunk of text on the top of it that said, it looks like you haven't used your Kiva balance to make a loan. Please don't let your money sit idle in your account. Thanks for everything you do to support borrowers around the world. Best wishes, Chelsa Bacci who is the Senior Director of Community. So what it looks like is that this woman herself, Chelsa, has boarded this personally. She's like, hey, you didn't read the email we just sent you so I'm making sure you saw it. But they did this to everyone. So everyone on their list got this version. And it was outstandingly like one of the, it was the best performer of the year because it was this one kind of interesting trick that wasn't super high tech. They just added this bit of what looked like personalization up at the top. So here I'll summarize. It was personalized. It made it look like it was boarded by a staff member. So here last formatting was more effective. However, in my opinion this might be a one-trick pony. So it's something that you could maybe do once or twice a year. But if you started doing that all the time, your audience might either get tired of it or sort of like realize what you're doing. So just, I think it's a great example of how trying new and out-of-the-box things can be really effective. And it's maybe worth doing sometimes if you think it might work with your audience. But it's not necessarily going to be the thing that you now start doing every time. That one's really interesting I think. I do too. So here I'll just summarize. Again, this is what I learned from my peers. Okay, so I want to ask you who your super friends are, who your peers are. We talked about it a little bit earlier, but I'd love for you to just spend 30 seconds thinking about who could you ask next week when you're writing an email to go to your supporters. Who could you gut-check it by? Somebody outside of your organization that already does this who might be able to just say, oh, you know, we learned a long time ago that shorter subjunct lines work better with our audience. Some ways that you could find these people if you can't think of them would be Facebook groups. Right now I'm in a Facebook group called DC Social Media. And people post requests all the time and hey, have you ever tried this or does anyone know what this is? Another thing would be conferences like N10, the nonprofit technology network conference, or social media for nonprofits conferences come through lots of cities in the U.S. and all over the world actually. LinkedIn groups are a really great way to find a community of practice around the subjects that you work on and find people who work in communications or marketing at those organizations. And then if you can't think of anything, what I've done is I've just even created just my own Google group or Yahoo group with four people that I know that all work in marketing at our peer organizations. And we just email the group if we have a question about something yesterday I saw it was like a question about how something works on a Facebook wall, that the group of four people all knows each other and we can all respond and learn from one another. And then Becky here also said that NetSquared local group in your area, there's a ton of resources. I know it takes time to sort of foster those connections and ask, but you probably already have some of those people. You just might not be thinking of them as a resource to help you improve the next email that you're going to write. So think of your super friends. And the last thing I'm going to talk about is theory. So people who are doing academic or other research on the topic of what makes people give are a great way that we could start to get some ideas of tests we could do. There are two studies that I want to just highlight today. One is this book called The Science of Giving, Experimental Approaches to the Study of Charity. It's a pretty great book that's just a combination of research on different topics about what makes people give. And then the second is more money for more good. It's the second in a series of two studies by the Markets for Good group about what nonprofits in the U.S. say about their donor's behavior. And I'm going to summarize some of their learnings here. So the first thing that these studies say is that if you increase a donor's emotional proximity to your subject, they will give more. Or in English speak, if you connect the donor to one person, one animal, one object, one story, then they'll be more likely to care about that. It's easier for people to connect to one person than it is to connect to a group of people. The next thing is now once you've connected them to one person, tell a compelling story about how that person has grown or changed or succeeded because of your help or how they've gotten to where they're going or need to get somewhere else and need the interaction of the donor. So if you can tell a compelling story, that's really helpful. Donors will give if they feel it will bring them closer to people in their own network. I think this one is fascinating. So it turns out, according to this research, that people give often because it elevates their own position among their own friends and network. So if you think about it, if you ever share things on Facebook as a person just with your own personal page, you often probably share things that you think your friends will benefit from. So maybe it's a funny video or it's an inspirational quote. And you like the feeling that you're the one that brought them that bit of content and they sort of associate you with that content. Or maybe you're always sharing news and facts and you like being seen as an expert in some sort of field. All of our donors are the same. And they want to somehow feel more connected to people in their own network. And so sometimes that's why they give. And so it might even be like, well, I have a friend who, you know, my friend was just in Cambodia doing that similar work. So I feel connected to that, so I will give. So that's something to be thinking about. And then four, of course, people give more when it's easy. So sometimes they are maybe motivated by your email but they're going to get tired and move on if it's too many clicks or too much to do once they've gotten into the process of giving. So make sure that whatever you're using, wherever you're directing people to give is an easy process. And then finally, unfortunately not all donors are the same. Some people really do want to do all the research to make sure that you are a trusted source that will keep their credit card information safe and use the money as you said you would. And other people are really just moved by a compelling image or story and they don't care who you are, they will give because they want to just immediately feel better about the fact that they've helped solve some problem in the world. So that's why, unfortunately, I wish I could tell you just what works for everyone, but I'm just giving you lists of things that organizations, including ourselves, have found that worked for our audiences and you now have to figure out what works for your audiences. So that brings me to the next part that's going to be even a little bit more interactive. Now that you've heard and listened to what your users and your peers and what researchers have to say, then you get to test it out yourself and figure out what works for your audience. And so the big question then is how do we know what works for our audience? What do we even measure to know what's working? And there are three things that you can kind of test when you're sending emails to see what's working for you. The first thing is the subject line. And so often that's just the last thing people think of after they've crafted a beautiful email and then they're like, oh yeah, I've got to put a title on it, a subject line, and send it off. And your subject line is the most important thing because if people don't like the subject line or if it's not compelling, they won't even open their emails so they'll never see your beautiful image and they'll never read your compelling text and call to action. So we test subject lines with what we call open rates, what percentage of your audience, your email recipients are opening your emails. If you're sending an email through any sort of third party provider, they will be able to tell you your open rates. So I use MailChimp. I know that they have some free services available just anyone actually can use their free version. And I think that's a great way but most any third party provider will provide you open rates through emails. Next, does the email content make people want to do more? Does it make people want to click and follow the call to action? And that we just measure by click rates. How many people are clicking on your emails? Email providers like MailChimp again will tell you that. Also Bitly is a link shortening service where you can type in your website URL and it will give you another version of that link that you post as a hyperlink in your email and then you can track through bitly.com or bit.ly how your link is performing and how many people are clicking on it. Last, does the content of your email and the landing page, so the next thing that they get to after they click on your email make people act? So are you asking people to donate? Are you asking people to sign up for a petition on a petition or an email? That's your conversion. That's your goals and you want people to convert on your goals. So what is your conversion rate for the email? Ultimately, is it getting people to do what you want it to do? Again, email providers will help you figure that out. Google Analytics can work in some ways to help you figure that out. If all of this sounds like way too much for you, global giving actually does offer this. All these open rates, click rates, and conversion rates for your email so that you can track through emails that you're sending to your donors through global giving. Now that you're thinking about the three ways, the three metrics that we use to test email, I'm going to get a little bit into an A-B test and I'll give you an example of one that we've done. So this is the poll that you took earlier. You had the choice to say whether you've run an A-B test and whether or not you've heard of it before. And an A-B test is very similar. Think back to fifth grade when you learned about the scientific method. It's really just doing a science experiment with your web content. So here, if you look at this bar as the entire list of people that you're sending email to, when we do an A-B test, we take the first 20% of the group and we divide that in half to group A and group B. And you can see that those two people or the people in that group that 20% are who will send the test email to and will send two different versions, A and B, to that 20% and we'll see which one performs better, A or B. And then the winning email we will then send to the rest of the group. So that's the secret behind the Obama campaign and all of their email glory is test, test, test with a segment first and then send the winning one to the rest of the audience. So here is an example of an A-B test that we did. And I see someone here asks, how long do you wait after sending the initial test? It depends on the size of your list because you want to make sure that your results are statistically significant or at least give you significant results. So in some cases, if the size of your list is big enough, maybe an hour will be enough time to see a difference in the results. Sometimes people do it a day before. It really just depends. Okay, so what I'd love for you to do is see these two versions of these emails that we sent. And what we did when we sent these emails, we had a hypothesis that we were testing. And I'd love for you to type in what you think our hypothesis was for this test. So Jennifer has highlighted what the difference was. Do you want me to call that out? A couple of people have caught on to what it is. So it's really highlighting whether or not having a price tag on those three different items down in the lower portion of the email. So in A, you see the prices listed. B, you don't. And that is the big difference. So a lot of people have caught on to that and were chatting in. So in order to gauge which you think did better, we want to have a little poll again. So go ahead and tell us, do you think that version A with the prices listed performed better than version B? Go ahead and click which one you think, whether the prices… Go ahead, give the background. A little bit of background, this is a Father's Day email we sent where we were promoting these custom LEGO sets where the LEGOs were free gifts with donations to projects on global giving of a certain amount. So yes, you got it right, but there's a price tag or no price tag. Price tag was A, no price tag was B. So let's give a few more seconds for people to weigh in and let us know, do you think that A or B did better with the price tags in A or without the price tags in B? And I'm going to go ahead and skip to the results. It looks like the majority by far, almost 78%, thought that A did better with the price tags and that the prices made a difference in getting people to click through. So tell us Allison, is our audience correct? So our hypothesis for this email was that if we didn't list the price, the required donation amount, then more people would click through to the main page where then they could learn more about the LEGOs. And how did it go? Version A got 80 clicks. Version B without prices got 175 clicks. Dun dun dun. While their audience is wrong. I know. So it turns out that people actually made their decision when they saw the price and they moved on. But they were maybe more engaged and clicked on the email and were willing to read more about it and see more there. And I see someone here typed in the question, what was the conversion though? Because you can see I'm not tracking opens because I had the same subject line for this rate for both versions. So that wasn't a significant factor. And then the conversions are the donations. And that is a great question. I'm so glad you're asking because that's the most important thing. And we actually did find that the version B was converted better as well. But yeah, I didn't put that in there because I wanted to focus here on just the click rates. That's what we were looking at. But this is really important and why it's really valuable to do that testing because a lot of us, and myself included when we first went through this in our practice run, assumed that A would have done better, that the more obvious it is that people know what they're getting into and they know the cost of the service that they might be providing up front. And it turns out that it was just not as – it didn't perform as well. So that's really I think helpful, a good reconformation of the need to test. Great. Okay, so then now we're going to – it's time for you as the people listening to this webinar to design your own email experiment. So I've demonstrated how we've listened to our users, to our peers, and to experts, and how we actually learned and repeated. So I would love for you to start an experiment. So start thinking about what your hypothesis could be. I want you to answer in the chat, I believe that trying blank will lead to higher blank. And the second one will either be higher open rates, higher click rates, or higher donations. And as you're thinking about it, I will summarize some of the ideas that you heard earlier so you can think about them. These are some of the things I heard from users, peers, and theory. And then also here are the ways that you can test it. So you have to make sure that the metric you're looking at is related to the content that you're testing. So a couple of people have chimed in in the chat saying, Jennifer says, that I believe that trying shorter program descriptions will lead to higher click rates. Let's see, Joy says that she could test, I believe that trying larger donate now button will lead to more clicks. So we have people doing it live in the chat, which is great because this is the experiment that we want you to be able to go back and do with your own email list. Susanna comments, I believe trying listening will lead to higher donations. Which is great on a meta level, but I'd love for you also to think about what's one specific thing that you could try. So you listened during this webinar. You've now committed 40 minutes to listening. What is one thing that you could do to act? So Malia says, I believe that a hashtag in the subject line will lead to higher open rates. So that's interesting, an interesting idea to test out. Monica says, I believe that trying to tell a more compelling story about one person will lead to higher donations. So that would be testing your conversions. Great. So lots of ideas coming in, ways people could test this. I believe that positive imagery with shorter words and a meaningful purpose will lead to increased donations. Now the one thing with that is that it's really two or three different things in there. So you may want to call out and test one of those things at a time. Is that the best practice, Allison, to try and test one area in each? Yeah, absolutely, because it may turn out that they love your pictures and they love the descriptions that you have, or let's say maybe they love the pictures but they hate the descriptions. So the results don't change and you won't know why. So if you first test changing the images and see what the results are and then you test changing the content and the descriptions and see what the results are, then you'll be able to pinpoint what's made it successful. Exactly. If you test too much at once then you really don't know what brought you that result necessarily. Great. So a lot of good ideas coming in. Well I would encourage you to continue to be thinking and don't let this hour end without thinking about one thing that you're going to do to do a test in your email. The last part of this Listen, Act, Learn, Repeat cycle is the repeat, the point that you have to keep doing it all the time. So you make sure that what you learned before and may not even still work five years ago because people change and your audience probably changes. Not the same people are on your list. So you have to keep repeating this cycle, listening, acting, learning, and repeating. Last thing I just wanted to go back to the goals that we had for this webinar. I wanted you to think about and to learn the most effective way to motivate your audiences and not just to learn what works for them. And you do that by listening, acting, learning, and repeating. Also to help you think about identifying your super friends, probably the very easiest way you could do this without having to talk to anybody would be just sign up for a bunch of emails from organizations that you know that are sort of your friends and competitors and see what they do. Although I would warn you, you don't know how well they're performing. So just because they're trying something doesn't mean they're succeeding at it. So maybe sign up for them, find a cool thing that they're doing, and then just email the person who wrote it and the person in charge of communications there and be like, that was such a great email. How did it work for you to see if it worked or not? And then like I said, I would love for you to walk away with a hypothesis. And I want to close with one really quick story here. I had a friend who worked for an organization that helps people who are blind get paired with service dogs. And the organization had been around for a long time and they found that after a while that people really started to connect and respond more to stories about dogs and about how they're training the dogs and finding the dogs than the other stories that they were telling. So they started using more and more pictures of puppies and great dogs and it was just super compelling. And it was going really well. But it started to sort of change the environment in their office and it turned out that less people who were blind were still on staff and even on the board. And they finally found themselves in a place where the organization over a couple of years had shifted to really be about dogs and a lot less about the blind people that the dogs were ultimately intending to serve. And so I tell you that just to remind you that we all every day would love to have the best practice in doing really great emails and just really compelling people to give. But if it's not serving the mission and if it's not serving the dignity of the people that you intend to serve then we're doing something wrong. You always have to keep in mind is this tactic that I'm trying really going to bring dignity to the people that I'm intending to serve? Great, great story. I love it. And I always love a picture of a dog in any presentation or a cat. I'm a lover of both. With that I'd like to go ahead and get us started with questions. Thank you so much Allison for the excellent presentation. Feel free to put your questions in the chat. We have just a few minutes to try and get through some. And if we don't get to all of your questions today you can feel free to ask them in our community forums where we'll continue answering them there. So Michelle asks, I think a really valuable question up at the front end she was asking about how do you incorporate humor when the subject that your agency is dealing with is something really hard like suicide? And I can imagine the supplies to organizations that work with domestic violence or sex trafficking or child neglected abuse or any number of topics that are really hard topics. Do you have any ideas or suggestions of how somebody could incorporate humor or make an email kind of fun? Like have the little turtle like what we showed in the example? Yeah, that's a great question because I hear that all the time too. People are like, well we just don't work with animals. And animal pictures might work but they don't work for us. And I think a lot of that has to do with helping to find your organization's voice and the voices of the people who work for your organization. So while the topic of suicide is so heavy I'm guessing that not all the emails that you write are very specifically telling the story of a family who's survived a suicide in their family. You might also be writing about matching campaigns that are happening or things that are a little bit less heavy. And you can do those things from the voices of the people who work at the organization and they are allowed to have a little bit more, you know, the lighter tone and more of a sort of human and less organizational tone in the things that they write. And everybody understands that they are people too. So I think it's a matter of honing your voice so that it's always respectful. And so maybe none of your emails are ever going to be funny or have like a super witty or punny headline or subject line. But I think you can also have a little bit of grace with just the words that you are using if they are coming from people and not necessarily signed always just the name of your organization. That's great. Good advice. We have some other questions asking, how are open emails determined and how do you do A-B tests? And that's not so much a question for you Allison as much as it is a note to myself that I'll be sure to include some resources for bulk email lists. And none of them are ones that we have in-house. These are all comparison conversations and articles that we've done research on to help you find a tool that might work for you if you need one. Most of those kind of features like A-B tests and looking at click-through rates or conversion rates are something that's built into your email tool or into your Google Analytics or connected with them. So we'll send some resources out after to make sure that you have some options if you think you may want to move to that. Another question for you though before we wrap up here is Nicole asks, how do we develop a larger email list? How do you grow that list? Not just serve the people that are currently on it? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think it's one we're all trying to figure out. I think it has to do with just connecting the people that you know if you have events, making sure you have somebody helping sign people up at events, if you have other forms that people fill out at any process. If you are taking donations, are you collecting and asking people if they want to be on your email list there? It is a really hard thing to do and I think probably the best thing to do would be just to Google that question and see what other nonprofit resources like N10 or Beth Cantor's blog are saying about how do you grow your email list. Unfortunately, that could probably be a whole other webinar and one I'd love to sit in on and probably not teach. Well, we are at the top of the hour so I'm going to quickly just go ahead and show a couple of resources that will be shared with you in that follow-up email you'll receive in a little while. We have some articles already pulled out for you and some forum conversations that discuss broadcast email tools, how you can make those emails more mobile friendly for those of you who ask questions about mobile, some email tactics to employ, how to make the most of your email signatures and the emails you are sending already, and bulk email software for very small nonprofits. So we will include that in our follow-up email later today. Additionally, I'd like to invite you to attend our upcoming webinars which would include next week's on looking at the sharing economy, organizations, and companies like Kickstarter, Uber, and Airbnb, and what the impact and capacity is for nonprofits to join that kind of economy with the sharing model. So particularly if you are a library or an organization that has a sharing model already, this would be an interesting event for you to attend. And then we also have another event coming up for libraries on implementing adult library programs with mobile. And then at the end of the month for those of you who want to learn more about your website and how to improve it, we have a webinar with some experts on how to captivate and engage your constituents. So we hope you'll join us for those. Thank you so much again, Allison, for your participation today. I'd also like to thank, thank you so much. It was really great. And I'd like to thank Allie on the back end for helping field all those questions. Lastly, thank you to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk for the use of their platform. They make it available to us so we can provide these on a regular basis. Please take a moment when you leave this window to complete the post-event survey to let us know how we did today and how we can continue to improve our webinar programming. Thank you so much everyone, and have a terrific day. Bye-bye.