Like what you read?

Subscribe to our Blog Feed to keep up with all the NTENy goodness.

You might also like...

• Getting Your Online Presence Right
• Online Communications that Don't Suck
• Small is the New Big: 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study Released
• 5 Key Metrics to Improve Your Email Campaigns
• Attention All Shoppers: Online Fundraising Metrics Are In!
• 2009 NTC Preview: Eve Simon on Iron Chef Battle Nonprofit

Mia Hamm GoldMail ExampleDespite declining email open rates and our general fatigue with bursting inboxes, I think most of us agree that email is still an important component of communicating with our supporters and driving their actions.

With that in mind, it couldn't hurt to try to re-invent email, to freshen the experience for ourselves and our emails' recipients, right?

That's the idea behind GoldMail, a communications tool that marries email to voicemail, and throws in a visual slide presentation to round out the experience.

The folks at GoldMail recently gave me an overview. Some nonprofits are starting to deploy it to help engage their communities:

• The San Francisco Zoo used it in a fundraising campaign last spring, combining it with images of their new-born critters to add to their storytelling strategy. They ended up increasing their donor conversion rate over an earlier email-only campaign.
• Kat White, from Aim High in the Bay Area tells me they've "used GoldMail to communicate with staff and staff alumni as well as funders and supporters. The slideshow format allows us to share richer information, and the service is affordable and easy to use."

It basically works like this for a recipient: you receive an email with a logo or image embedded. Once you click it, the online mini-slideshow (Adobe Flash) with synched audio is opened in a browser window. Though the audio is a little corrupted, you can see the online presentation that was deployed for a Mia Hamm fundraising event.   

It sounds like a resource ideal for campaigns with a celebrity spokesperson -- like Mia Hamm -- to provide "face time" via email. Another application that jumps out at me is to engage board members, stakeholders, or a departmental team around a project or report.

For the organization, it's just a matter of adding slides and an audio recording via a user-friendly interface. (You can see a demo online.)

If there are any NTEN folks out there who have deployed this or anything like it, I'd love to hear about your experiences. Leave a comment!