EchoDitto

I’ve been listening to this song quite a bit recently. Not only is it the ideal mix of depressing lyrics/upbeat music that we all love so much, it echoes my thoughts on non-profit strategy.

Really? Really.

These days, I feel like too many non-profits are trying to rush me, and I really want them to take it easy, romance me, make me fall in love, aim for a long-term relationship.

How do I mean? This week, my friend, Jacque, sent me a MoveOn campaign to my gmail about Fox News and how they are being racist in their coverage of Obama. Okay. Because I love Jacque (+1 for leveraging social networks!), I went to the page, watched the video (+1 for interactive content that’s convincing!) and found it compelling enough to add my name (conversion—success!). So far, so good, right? Then, the minute I hit submit, a giant donate button appeared—-help MoveOn change media by giving us money.

Google's PageRank system singlehandedly organizes billions of webpages and baffles SEO charlatans. It works well enough that I never have to click through to the no-man's-land of search results that is Page 2.

But what is your MailRank? Or in other words, where do your emails rank with their recipients? It's hard to tell and you probably don't want to know.

One of my coworker's email clients mysteriously marks all of my missives as 'read', ensuring that some slip through the cracks. He swears he doesn't know why this happens.

Of course, when I'm chugging that first coffee and scanning the day's terrifying tally of fresh emails clogging my inbox, there are definitely emails that are going to have to wait until some other fires are out. People who might yell at me, on the other hand, get a Smart Mailbox of their very own. It's a very scientific system.

I recently assumed the mantle of Chicago Bears event coordinator for my local (well, sorta) pub, The Gael, which meant that, with the season quickly approaching, I needed a system easy to rapidly deploy for getting the word out to Bears fans in New York. After the (amazing, fantastic) NFC Championship game back in January, one of the pub's owners passed around an email signup sheet (wonderful forethought on his part!) and invited anyone interested to give us their email address.

So, the election is a full 21 months away and there are already a number of campaigns in "full gear." Being the DC nerd that I am, I went searching for the cool, hip, new features and functionality that campaign sites have for the election.

I was surprised by some of the stuff out there so I ended up doing a review of campaign sites for the 2008 Presidential election. My chart makes it pretty easy to see which candidates recognize the importance of their web site, and have already committed to using the site as a tool to be elected.

With the approach of the Fourth of July weekend, most people's thoughts turn to bbqs, beer, fireworks and traffic on the Long Island Expressway. Don't get me wrong, I'm thinking about all those things as well (maybe traffic on I-95 actually), but I'm also thinking about the Constitution, and freedom and liberty. Which brings me to my point.

Over the past few years, technology has made it fairly simple for nonprofit organizations to empower their constituents to contact lawmakers over the internet. Doing so has allowed organizations to mobilize quickly, efficiently, and cost-effectively, and to turn supporters into advocates.

The internet could be hailed as the best thing for democracy since the Australian ballot, empowering the masses to participate meaningfully in politics. But the house.gov web portal has taken steps to make it more difficult for issue campaigns to get off the ground and for citizens to communicate with their elected officials by filtering out what it calls “mass email”.

Most internet users are familiar with CAPTCHA, those psychedelic letter combinations at the end of a form designed to determine your humanness (and screen out the robots). Now, the House of Representatives has installed its own form of CAPTCHA on its “Write Your Representative” (WYR) site, the chief online conduit between citizens and their representatives. Check it out (try with "District of Columbia" as your State and "00000" as your zip code).

I attended a briefing on the eNonprofit Benchmarks Study two weeks ago. It is a must read for any nonprofit online professional because it provides a timely and robust analysis of online fundraising and advocacy programs for nonprofits. It even breaks down email and ROI metrics between nonprofits focused on civil rights, environmental protection, and international aid. With the study, nonprofit online professionals can measure their email marketing programs against the results of these 15 national nonprofit organizations.

There is one grand story to tell after reading the whole report: you have to invest, test, track and target for your online activities to pay off. Don't expect to flip the switch of an online fundraising program and miraculously fundraising will go through the roof. Of course, disasters and emergencies are a rare exception, but most of the organizations doing this work have had online programs for years now. Here is a summary of the key findings of the report:

I'd love to know what percentage Blackberry, Treo, and Sidekick users are aware that they can edit or disable this obnoxious signature from appearing on their emails. My bet is that most people, if presented with the choice, would and DO actually leave the tag on. Sadly, I speak from personal experience.

Why do we continue to willingly muck up our own communiqués with this free advertising? What does this say about us! Surely we'd protest if our mobile providers inserted a similar ad at the beginning or end of our phone calls: "This conversation powered by the Sprint Wireless Network." Totally unacceptable.

It takes a lot to get someone like me to stop and read an email from the many mailing lists I'm on. Even if the subject line is interesting, my work moves at broadband speed and I usually just don't have the time. But today, for the first time in a long time, I read an email from beginning to end. It was an email from Elizabeth Edwards expressing her support for Cindy Sheehan and her efforts to meet with President Bush in Texas.

What was remarkable about it was the fact that Mrs. Edwards drew parallels to her own son, Wade, who died in a car accident on April 4, 1996 -- exactly eight years earlier than Casey Sheehan, who died on April 4, 2004. As someone who followed the 2004 presidential election closely, I know that the Edwards family are intensely private about Wade, his death and their grief. I saw John Edwards on more than one occasion decline to discuss his son in interviews in 2004, so this email really made me stop what I was doing and read.

Last week, I headed out to San Francisco (my first time ever in CA!) to speak on a "Politics and Technology" panel at the Young Democrats of America convention. Many of the leaders there were just beginning to learn how to effectively use the internet to organize on the ground. I spoke about email--the first and best weapon in any online organizer's arsenal. What follows are my (somewhat condensed) remarks.

It's true that EchoDitto compulsively reads techno-geek websites like O'Reilly Radar and go nuts for the Google maps API. But at the end of the day, all of us are practicioners. We use the internet to effect real change for our clients. And more often than you'd think, that means convincing them to STOP worrying so much about their website.