PTP Blog

Here’s the story.  A colleague posted a note on Twitter about an organization that got a really low response rate when they sent out a subscribe request to people who had done a paper sign-up for their announcement email list.  Their webhost requires that list recipients opt-in via email, and so the organization sent their subscribe request to 586 people and 94 chose to opt-in to the list for the second time.  My colleague was disheartened for obvious reasons – a 16% (did I do my math right?) response rate, while not bad, isn’t really something to shout from the rooftops either.  I started to respond via twitter, but decided to move from the twitter-verse to the broader internets because I think there’s something here that’s worth unpacking.

First, some assumptions I make when it comes to communications – these are based my experiences working with community organizing groups, and while somewhat critical, are said with love:

• most people don’t read
• there is a strong tendency in community organizing groups toward verbosity
• additionally, groups tend to under-analyze their audience
  • the clearest manifestation of this is evidenced by a difficulty in articulating the value of a particular communication to the recipient not the organization

Now, I’m not suggesting that the second and third assumptions are at work in this case.  Still, in the case of this organization, they can view their responses as 492 people who don’t see any value in their communications and feel bad.  Or they can see that they have 94 people (almost 100!) who do see value in receiving their updates and use that as their base to build on.

Fundamentally, it comes down to goals – at PTP, we call this the BIG WHY.  Why does the organization want an email announcement list?  What do those goals suggest about what they send via the list and who they target with it?  Maybe a survey of the 94 is in order to see how those folks would like the organization to improve their communication so it better meets the needs of the people that want to hear from them.  And for the 492 that don’t want email, what about blast faxing them with the urgent/one-page flyers as necessary?  I suspect that a combination of approaches would accomplish the organization’s goals while at the same time making their different audiences much happier with the communication they are receiving.

Finally, I think is a great reminder that no matter what we’re doing and who we’re communicating with, it is really unlikely that a significant portion of any list is going to opt-in to receive more email.  As email has become more and more spam filled and overused, many people just aren’t going to agree to yet one more message in their inbox.  It demands that groups look to other mechanisms for contact including blogs, RSS feeds, and text messages while also reexamining older technologies like faxing, paper mail, and phone trees.  It also demands that groups answer the BIG WHY and use that answer to target their efforts.  In the end, while these approaches may take more work at the front end, if more people hear and act on your messages, it’s a clear win.

We all know that spam’s a problem. But a recent post on gigaom.com had a stat that caught my eye: quoting a NY times article that said spam “accounts for more than 9 of every 10 e-mail messages.”

I knew that it was bad, but since we’ve set up with Mailfoundry, the number of spam messages that actually make it to my inbox have dropped to fewer than 10 a week - yes, a week.

I’m not suggesting that Mailfoundry is the answer to spam filtering - running mail through Gmail, using SpamAssassin, and any of the many other tools out there are probably equally good.

What I do think is that as the number of spam increase relative to actual mail, we’re going to see three things happen:

1. spam filtering that happens away from your inbox is going to increase in popularity due to its greater efficiency for the end user (you).
2. spam filtering that aggregates the spam reporting of its userbase is going to become ever more effective - think about something like Gmail or Mailfoundry, where many users are marking messages as spam thereby training the filters for everyone. It just makes sense that this sort of approach is going to always be more effective than what you or I can do invididually by training our own anti-spam system.
3. some form of verified sender and “pay to send” email is going to arise out of the competing proposals. Making spam unprofitable is the only realistic way I can see to shift this trend. The concept has problems, but spammers are spamming to make money. A serious reduction in the profits would go a long way towards reducing the allure of spamming.

The trick is going to be coming up with a solution that retains the utility of email while signifcantly reducing the spam problem in a manner that doesn’t restrict control of who can send email.

Earlier this week, I was talking to someone about spam and was asked why people do it.

This article from the BBC suggests an answer to that question: 

“Our analysis shows that spam works,” the team wrote.

“Among its millions of recipients are not only those who read it, but who also act upon it”

so there you have it.  The simple answer is that spammers spam because it works.  Read the article for more (surprising) detail.

Just saw that the Pew Internet and American Life Project has released a new study that finds that:

The internet and email expand and strengthen the social ties that people maintain in the offline world, according to a new report released today by the Pew Internet

I haven’t finished reading it yet, but from I have read it largely confirms what many of us in the Technology and Community Organizing space have been saying for a while now - that internet use doesn’t replace face-to-face contact, but can serve as a powerful add-on to enhance that contact.

It’s not a terribly long read, so if you’re intersted in this sort of research, check it out. I’d love to hear what you think of their findings.

Mail merge is a powerful tool that I love dearly, but let this be a lesson to all of us - pay attention to detail when you’re inserting those merge fields. This is a marketing email I got today. Note how my name changes from Arif to Joe between the salutation and closing of the email:

continue reading…

I wouldn’t quite say that this was a New Year’s resolution of mine, but at some point over the last week, a small part of me started to feel that reducing the size of inbox was probably a good idea. I mean I’ve done more than enough lecturing about how bad it is to have a super-full inbox, and I’m the one of the worst offenders I know with over 6000 messages in my inbox.

So, today, after reading Fresh Start: The Email DMZ, I did as instructed:

1. Open your email program and create a new folder called “DMZ“
2. Go to your email inbox and Select All
* You might alternatively choose all email older than n days
3. Drag those emails from your inbox into the DMZ folder
4. Go, and sin no more.

it’s only been a few minutes, so all I can say is that as of now, the experience is startling - I click over to my mail program and my Inbox is empty! I’m embarrassed to admit that I actually did a double take and wondered if I was looking at the wrong folder.

If this actually works, I’ll let you know how it goes.

“Cingular Wireless is introducing a service for nonbusiness users to get BlackBerry-like mobile access to their personal e-mail accounts from AOL, Yahoo and MSN Hotmail on a cell phone.The new service, powered by OZ Communications Inc., is designed to adapt the look and capabilities of a Web portal or e-mail program such as Outlook to the limited screen size, keyboard and processing power of a garden variety handset.”

From: Cingular Introduces E-Mail Access on Cells

Which raises all kinds of questions for possible use in an organizing context.  We’ve heard that ACORN was using text messaging to connect with members follow Katrina - could email via cell phone change how we think about using email?

Technorati Tags: Email, cellphones, communityorganizing

I know, I know. HTML formatted email is evil, even so, here at PTP, and at lots of other places, we occasionally use HTML in email, and our HTML messages use CSS to try to make things look nice.

If you have ever tried to do this on purpose, you know that it’s difficult to do it well, and that even with your best efforts, things can still come out looking strange for the reader, so I was very happy to see a link to CSS and Email, Kissing in a Tree from OneNW.

The article is a nice summary of the problems involved in using CSS to manage the look of your HTML formatted email. It also has some good advice on how to get your CSS styled email into a format that is most likely to be displayed correctly across browsers and operating systems.

If you send HTML email, it’s worth a look.