Flickr photo: kcolwell

We know that you, my fellow NTEN community members, are rock stars.

You can write fundraising email copy in your sleep and hand code your e-appeal while making breakfast and watering your plants. You track metrics while you're on the treadmill (without falling off).  

You are fundraising email campaign ninjas!

Like all good ninjas, you don't do it for the glory, you do it because it's right. But we want to shine a spotlight on your selfl

Yesterday, some of our staff members received an email with the following message:

We weren't alone. What followed were screams of outrage from across the Internet: "I can't believe they did this!", "UNSUBSCRIBE!", "What?!" 

Here at NTEN, we strongly believe in keeping private information private.

Flickr Photo: timsnellYou are not your target audience.

It's an old truism that, for one reason or another, we forget to take to heart when it comes to our websites and email. As nonprofit staff, we're passionate about our work; we have to be! But sometimes, we're so intimately involved, we forget to think about how and why others might want to engage with our work.

For John Kenyon, who authored a chapter on this topic in Managing Technology to Meet Your Mission, that's the key to a strong web presence. John will be moderating and speaking at the Online Nonprofit Technology Conference next week. He took a few minutes to chat with me about what it takes to make a great web presence:

John Kenyon, Jennie Anderson, AIDS.gov, and William Neuheisel, DC Central Kitchen

Imagine producing online communications you're proud to share with the world and that garner praise from funders, donors, and other stakeholders.

Well, I am here to tell you that in general they are actually, um... pitiful. Dreadful. While there are exceptions, most have a lot of room for improvement.

And while social media and Web 2.0 are great, but if you don't have an effective website and email communications, you are largely wasting your effort trying to engage new audiences online.

We just released the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study with our fantastic friends at M+R Strategic Services. The report is chock full of amazing and interesting information you can use to make better decisions about your online campaigns.

To help folks get started, we hosted a release party. Get the recording to see how Children's Defense Fund and HRC use benchmarks to increase the performance of their online campaigns.

Or, for those of you who can't be bothered to open another link -- that's how I roll, so I feel you -- here are some highlights from this year's report:

Jeff Patrick, Common Knowledge

How did your last email fundraising appeal perform? Did your new email template work? Were your copy and creative on the mark? Did you raise as much revenue as you planned?

Email marketing is the foundation for most nonprofits' education, advocacy, volunteering, and fundraising efforts online and the best practices for evaluating email marketing campaigns are well established. But nonprofits continue to underutilize ways to measure and evaluate the success of these campaigns.

It's not hard to take the first step to improving your email campaign performance through evaluation and optimization.

I just finished reading the 2008 donorCentrics Internet Giving Benchmarks Analysis, put out by Blackbaud company Target Analytics. Get the report and read it. It points to some great momentum in online giving.

By many measures, online fundraising had a red letter year in 2008:

• Online donors are younger and have higher incomes than traditional, primarily direct mail donors.
• Over the past few years, online giving has become an increasingly significant source of new donor acquisition.
• Online donors give much larger gifts than traditional donors.

You've probably already heard statistics like these floating around at various conferences and presentations. It's the kind of stuff we presenters say to justify the rest of our presentations. Fortunately, it's all true.

But, as the sector has embraced online giving, we've had a niggling voice in the backs of our heads telling us that the donors we've cultivated online aren't sticking around. It's one of those feelings we haven't wanted to talk about: Saying it out loud might make it true. And there really hasn't been a lot of data.

Well, this report has some pretty telling data. Let's get the bad news out of the way first, shall we?

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:

If you love food like I do, you've probably heard of Iron Chef (or at least Iron Chef America). The premise is simple: Take two talented chefs, add one secret ingredient, then give them one hour to cook up at least 3 delicious courses.

Eve Simon, Creative Director at Beaconfire Consulting, is serving up a tasty session at the 2009 NTC based on the theme: "This is Iron Chef...Battle Nonprofit". One San Francisco nonprofit will serve as the secret ingredient for four creative teams, who will each come up with a web site design, email template, and social media plan. Their results will be presented to you at the NTC, where you'll have a chance to vote for the winning plan.

You may also learn a thing or two about marketing best practices along the way! Check out this talk I had with Eve about her session: