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:

Flickr Photo: Mick OFor a long time, there was a great debate in the nptech community that divided us into two distinct camps. The discussions were fierce, the arguments occasionally heated. We were battling for the future of email, and the question was:

Text or HTML?

These days, any e-marketer will tell you that HTML tends to outperform text across the board (though you're still obligated to provide a text version for those who haven't crossed over to the dark side). The problem is, designing HTML emails is a total pain in the, well, I'll go with neck. This is a family blog.

Unfortunately, the explosion of email clients, and more importantly, their myriad ways of handling HTML and CSS code, means that it's nearly impossible to design an HTML email that will render the same in every client. Figuring out what worked where was basically guesswork.

Well, guess no more!

VerticalReponse used to offer a 15% discount to qualified nonprofits -- and they still do.  But now, the first 10,000 e-mails you send through VR each month will be free! You can read all about in on their web site and blog.

NTEN uses VerticalResponse for App Exchange to send out our monthly newsletter, NTEN Connect, and we've been generally pleased with its performance.  I suspect the price break will only increase our level of satisfaction.

There's nothing revolutionary about the idea that your most important eNewsletter article should be at the top of your newsletter. Still, there's some good, practical advice in the the 2-page article just released by M+R, "Digging Into eNewsletters." As usual, my favorite part is that there are some actual numbers in the report, giving us a chance to compare our own.