How to Use Email Communications Effectively in Your Historic Preservation Advocacy Work
Even in this era of social media, email is still the simplest, most effective tool for reaching out to supporters of your historic preservation work. Most people are comfortable using email communications in business and personal settings. However, you'll need to give a little extra effort to effectively manage your email communications for advocacy work.
Everyone in your advocacy group who will be broadcasting email messages to your supporters should use good email etiquette practices. Your group may want to adopt a set of email standards such as these 15 Tenets of Proper Email Marketing Etiquette developed by the online community Social Media Today. The additional tips below will help you use email communications efficiently and effectively in your advocacy work.
Develop Your Contact List
You should plan to grow your list of permission-based email contacts over time. Permission-based contacts are people who have knowingly signed up to receive email messages from your organization. Use the following techniques to build a great database of contacts:
- Collect email addresses whenever you hold an event.
- Include a line for email addresses on your membership application form.
- Use your website to collect email addresses by providing interactive features, such as a "Tell Your Story" interface.
For more tips on building your email list, see these articles:
Building an Effective Email List
Email list-building tips from Idealware
7 Ways to Build Your Email List
List of suggestions for email lists from Network for Good
Use the Right Email Tool
As soon as you start developing your contact list, you'll need a tool to organize your supporters or members into their areas of interest and to tailor your email communications. Although you can use a conventional email program to do these tasks, email programs that are not specialized for these purposes can take more time to manage as your contacts come and go.
Most offline and web-based specialized email programs will allow you to replicate the look and feel of your group's newsletter or website design in the body of your email message.
MailChimp is a popular and free program that allows nonprofit groups to build subscriber lists and create tailored email communications. The "Resources" section of the MailChimp website offers many guides on email communications.
Constant Contact is an inexpensive program that is popular with nonprofit organizations. Constant Contact's templates are relatively easy for beginners to use, and the site offers some good tutorials to help you get started on using the software.
More Advice for Selecting the Right Email Software
For more tips on selecting an email distribution tool, see these articles:
Do You Need Email Marketing Software?
Advice from Email Marketing Reports
10 Reasons To Change Your Broadcast Email Tool
Email suggestions from Idealware
Manage Your Distribution List
When your contacts list starts to grow, you may want to group your contacts into different distribution lists such as these:
- Potential members
- Potential donors
- Members
- Press
- Board members
As you are shaping your membership or advocacy network, take advantage of the free text field in each contact person's address book file. You can search all text for key words such as these: bungalow owner, contractor, knows Congressman Smith, tech savvy, graphic artist.
The free text field is also valuable when you are developing relationships with your contacts, such as elected officials and the press. For example, you can include links to past articles that a journalist has written or record snippets of conversations you've had with an influential official.
Consider Email-based Advocacy Software
If you are gearing up for an online advocacy campaign, you might consider purchasing advocacy software to help you coordinate your effort. Advocacy software is designed to help you mobilize grassroots support for a targeted issue campaign. However, free social media tools have overshadowed these often-pricey advocacy software programs.
Advocacy software is most helpful with large campaigns that involve Congressional outreach or state-level lobbying. Grassroots advocacy programs will direct email messages to the appropriate elected official after the user enters his or her zip code. Here are two advocacy software programs that allow you to target and measure your outreach efforts more precisely than conventional email campaigns:
Local or regional campaigns generally do not require such sophisticated technology. In fact, if you manage a grassroots campaign through a pre-packaged email-based advocacy program, it may even work against your cause. If your group floods an elected official's small staff with the same email message, your campaign will not be as effective as thoughtful, strategic outreach. Remember that many other groups will also be sending messages to your elected officials on their issues. The impact of a one-click campaign is often directly proportional to the amount of time an advocate spends on the matter unless the volume of email is overwhelming.
Learn More
Historic Preservation Advocacy Guide
Find more how-to articles about historic preservation advocacy.
See this useful list of articles about email communications for advocacy work from Network for Good.