Of course, I am (among other oddly assorted things) a well-trained ethnographer, so this sort of reflexive research methodology comes easily to me.* However, I'd be the last person in the world to patronize nonprofit/philanthropic professionals by saying, "Kids - don't try this at home!" In fact, I encourage everyone to reflect on his/her own experiences as an end user, and see if he/she doesn't agree with my so-called "research findings."
Let's reflect on what it's like to receive an email from a mission-based organization has (or would like to have) a relationship with you as a donor, community activist, client, constituent, voter, or friend. When you scan your in-box, you probably take two seconds at most to decide - on the basis of the sender's name, the sender's email address, and the subject heading - whether to delete, to skip, or to read the message.
If you decide to read the message, you probably take another two seconds at most to scan the first two lines and decide whether you are going to continue reading, to delete the message, or to skip to another message.
Ok. That's a total of four seconds.
You know it's true - or pretty close to the truth. Right?
No matter how brilliant the second through fifteenth paragraphs of your email message are, you won't have a chance to use them to build your relationship with stakeholders unless the name of the sender, the sender's email address, the message's subject heading, and the first two lines of your email provide your reader with an incentive to keep reading. If he/she quits after four seconds, then he/she will never know how brilliant the rest of the message was. That particular window of opportunity to build your relationship with a stakeholder has already closed.
One of the problems with this insight is that it's much easier to arrive at it - and to identify some things that you should definitely not do - than it is to lay down the law about what is going to work most of the time. I struggle with this constantly, and have no grounds for boasting about opening lines that compel everyone to read every word I write.
Therefore, I'd like to encourage those who have truly effective practices (for ensuring that stakeholders keep reading our email) to post them here.
In the meantime, I'd like to offer, with all due humility, some ideas about what doesn't work well:
- Jagged, unjustified lines and muliple generations of quote marks. As mentioned in another blog article.
- Names or email addresses of senders that are unfamiliar or don't make any sense. The latter can be a result of a mass emailing application that generates a unique string of numbers and letters for each mailing - although this may help you track responses, a hefty number of recipients will simply assume that you are sending spam.
- Duplicate messages. Some of these are inadvertent, especially if your outgoing email stays on the screen after you hit the "send" command. However, if you get the same message from me three times because I haven't triple-checked my list, then I'm to blame, and I owe you an apology.
- Fancy-schmancy graphics, HTML, or anything other than plain text in an email. In theory, it's great to have your logo appear in the body of your email message to stakeholders, but if it takes 20 seconds for the logo to materialize onscreen, you've already lost a lot of readers.
* I started out in sociology of religion, and honed my ethnographic techniques while doing field research about Moonies, radical nuns, Jews For Jesus, and Christian fundamentalists. A lot of the skills I picked up in graduate school turned out to be extremely useful for understanding organizational behavior in the nonprofit/philanthropic sector. I've been known to do an on-the-spot analysis of the organizational dynamics of a nonprofit agency on the basis of a proxemics analysis of its server room. But I digress.
NPtech
