This week I received an especially interesting enewsletter from Nten, the nonprofit technology organization that I’ve been involved with for many years. There was a lot of great content, such as:
- project management on web redesigns
- optimizing web sites for social media
- asking the right questions to appeal to the right audience
- getting help with web analytics with the Analysis Exchange
- tips on creating website content
- taking advantage of the mobile web
- a roundup of other useful links, also featured in Nten’s blog
Many nonprofits have started to phase out paper newsletters in favor of enewsletters, but I wonder whether even this medium is still an effective way to reach constituents. The average open rate for email newsletters is usually around 20% (see e2010 Nonprofit Benchmarks Study), and even those who do open them probably only scan them quickly. When I realized the value of Nten’s content, my first inclination was to share the articles individually through my Twitter stream. While many sites now have an easy way to do this, I often use Add This, which I’ve installed on my computer for easy sharing to multiple social networking sites.
No, I’m not advocating that you ditch the enewsletter. But I am suggesting that wherever possible, you make information available to your constituents in small bites, and make sure there is an easy way to share content through social media and by emailing to friends. And if you want to make sure your great content is noticed, make it available in multiple channels, but make sure to tweak to take advantage of strengths of each medium.
Thanks for the kudos Norman! When we updated the newsletter a few years ago, that was a key consideration. That’s why none of our newsletter articles exist only in that format. They are all blog posts. Not only does this make them shareable in multiple formats, but it means that we are able to hook some of that newsletter traffic into other parts of our site as well. I think one of the key advantages to online content is that we can multipurpose it – get lots of benefit out of the same bit. It’s as efficient as you can get!