If your organization’s email communications was one of the three bowls of porridge from the Goldilocks story, which would it be?

Too hot – indigestible because it’s too frequent, too wordy, and burdened with attachments and overlarge graphics?

Too cold – unappetizing because it is infrequent, dull, and doesn’t offer calls to action or interactivity?

Or are your organization’s email communications just right – craved by subscribers because it delivers content they want when it’s most useful, provides them ways to learn more or get into action, and avoids the dreaded spam filters.

Before you hit send again, evaluate your email communications to make sure you’re delivering value every time you deliver an email to people on your list.

How do you determine the right email frequency?

• Frequency is tied to value. What you send impacts how often you can send.
• Frequency is tied to length. The more frequently you email the shorter each email should be.
• Best practice. Send newsletters once a month. Send up to one other email per month for special announcements. Use social media for brief, more frequent, and more timely communication.
• Test and measure. Test whether varying your email frequency will improve your open and click-through rates. Email a control group at the same frequency you’ve been using, and also vary the frequency (more and less) for test groups. Observe how the test groups’ behavior changes relative to the control.

How can you create email content that people will want to gobble up?

• Be fresh. Make sure each email has something new to say. Create an Editorial Calendar to coordinate the content and timing of emails across your entire organization.
• Be creative. Use simple graphics and formatting to make your email easier and more interesting to read.
• Be brief. 2,000 word multi-column newsletters are a form of email torture.
• Be organized. Grab their attention and make your email easy to scan. Use short intros in your email and link to the longer main stories on your website or blog.
• Be interactive. When possible use polls and surveys or other means to allow readers to engage with the content.
• Be linky. At the very least, link to your organization’s home page and social media channels. Better yet, link to interesting content by collaborators and partners.

How can you increase the odds that your email won’t languish in a spam folder?

• Use an email marketing service. They’re cheap or free, and go a long way to getting your email past spam filters and into inboxes. They also track metrics — such as open rates and click-throughs—and help you manage unsubscribes. There’s no reason not to.
• Opt-in, not opt-out. Only include people who have opted-in on your email list. Never email anyone who has not given you their explicit permission.
• Follow the law. Provide an unsubscribe option, include your physical address, and follow other rules of The CAN-SPAM Act.
• Optimize graphics. Improve loading time by using smaller images. Create them by choosing the right file format (jpg, gif, png) and quality settings. Get more information on saving images for the web here and here.
• Say no to attachments. Just don’t do it. Attachments make it more likely you’ll get caught in the dreaded spam filter. Instead, post the file on your website and link to it.

What are some of your tips for finding that just right balance for your email communications?

. . .

Lauren Girardin is LightBox Collaborative’s tactical curator. She thinks porridge tastes just right when served with lots of honey.

(image courtesy Flickr user Sam Klein, Creative Commons)

We are inherently visual creatures. We approach the world around us with eyes wide open, and speak about what we see in metaphors that paint a picture of our experiences. Visuals and language are interdependent ways of conveying information. So, what does our visual nature mean for effective communications?

Pictures can convey a lot of complex information, which is where we get that “worth a thousand words” adage. Pictures can also serve as a common reference point for a group, helping align everyone to the same process. This efficiency and unity can help the group move more quickly to deeper conversations and to the real work that needs to be done. In other words, pictures can be a powerful internal communications tool to align your team in preparation for external action.

Using visuals can be an effective way to brings groups together, to galvanize a team, and co-create big ideas. The power of communicating with pictures is at the core of visual facilitation – an approach that can breathe new life into your next team meeting.

But I’m no Van Gogh

People often assume that I’m an artist. But, I haven’t had any formal training. Why do they make that assumption?

As I work with groups, I track their conversations to create large-scale visual maps, drawn in real time, to facilitate a group toward their desired outcome. Besides the color and design of the shapes, they figure an artist must have been at work because the resulting images have meaning. Yet, the power of the images is actually due to the connections they themselves made with the images. The images represent their experience in that room that day, which is powerful, personal stuff. They made their own meaning. I just provided the pictures.

By watching something being drawn, the viewer’s memory becomes anchored in that moment. When they see the image again, they will recall that moment in a more visceral way.

Images engage

The most powerful quality about using visual tools is not the resulting picture your group creates together, but rather the enhanced engagement you gain from working together in a visual way. Working with ideas that can be touched, moved around, and seen together will result in more opportunities for individual insight, innovation, and involvement in the group process. The picture becomes an anchor for the content the group worked on, triggering sensory recall of the work that cannot be accessed in a Word document or bullet point summary of the session.

So bust out those markers and crayons to picture your way to greater team engagement and more effective internal communications. If your team had a shared picture of your common goals, what would it look like?

. . .

Julie Gieseke is a LightBox collaborator with a knack for responding creatively in the moment. She urges you to create your own pictures for impact.

A few nights ago I got a fortune cookie that said, “Everything you are against weakens you.”

And I had two thoughts:

1. That’s not a fortune! It’s a message, that troubling trend in fortune cookie writing.
2. It is, however, a succinct way of saying what we at LightBox Collaborative often teach our clients: Stating what you are against is not actually a message. Sharing with people what you are for is how you generate support and excitement.

In just six words, the fortune cookie conveyed a mouthful. The fortune cookie not only taught me a valuable lesson, it schooled me in how to deliver it.

Get mad, but then get smart

Many of us got into social justice work because we got mad. We were outraged and we wanted to change things.

So, now we tend to think that making people mad like we were will move them to action. But it doesn’t really work that way. Just think of some of the most successful efforts that have changed hearts and minds—

• “Pro-life” advocates put a positive spin on their anti-abortion stance via political framing. The pro-life terminology has helped to re-frame national debate and erode the right to choose.
• “Just Say No” just didn’t work. But the “truth” campaign lowered teen tobacco use by giving young people a positive outlook on being anti-smoking.
• President Obama designed his campaign not on opposing the Republicans or McCain, but on what he had to offer: hope and change. His optimism swept him into office and inspired global Obamania.
• The American Cancer Society recently showed that being for something is more powerful than being against a dreaded disease. By becoming “The Official Sponsor of Birthdays,” the group rallies people around the common desire to live longer and celebrate more.

Everything you are against strengthens your opponents

Another problem with being on the “against” side of a debate is that it can be flipped.

Conservatives are very, very good at exploiting our efforts to be against things. In particular, Frank Luntz has made an entire career out of it. By renaming the things we don’t like, and giving them names that sound more positive, he has taken the wind out of the sails of a number of important efforts.

If instead of campaigning against oil drilling, those advocates were proposing “energy solutions that protect oceans”, it would have been harder to rename it. If we campaigned for a tax code where people pay their “fair share,” “tax relief” would be a less appealing option. When Luntz renamed these efforts, he also effectively re-framed them, giving people something to be for that was more evocative than what others were asking them to be against.

Listen to the cookie

It turns out the fortune cookie is right. We get stronger by coming together around our shared vision and goals, not our common enemies.

When we focus on the negative, our work becomes alarmist, unwelcoming and downright depressing. It’s not inviting to new supporters, and it drains our energy as professional activists.

Being against things isn’t a strength. It’s being for things that gives you momentum and power.

To have campaigns and movements that can inspire and thrive over time, just listen to the cookie.

. . .

Amanda Cooper is a LightBox collaborator with a talent for crafting meaningful messages. She can often be found listening to cookies and other desserts.

(Image courtesy Flickr user Angela Mabray, Creative Commons.)