Outreach Question: Double Our Email List For $5,000?

[Bill Scheurer]

We have an offer from Care2 to run a campaign that will add 2,200 new and motivated subscribers to our "Weekly Briefing" email newsletter for $5,000. These are guaranteed subscription results.

With nearly 10 million registered users, Care2 is the largest online community and social networking portal for adults interested in social causes, the environment, and healthy living. Care2 has attracted the largest online audience of sophisticated and caring individuals, and has helped over 350 nonprofit recruit millions of online supporters, activists and donors.

The campaign that Care2 proposes to run for us includes a branded pledge or petition hosted on Care2’s thepetitionsite.com, along with other forms of targeted outreach. Their full proposal is attached.

Please share your thoughts on this possibility. If we do this, it would be a pilot test like our billboard and library display projects.

Thanks!

[John Webster]

I am wondering if we could add to the number on our email list by asking each person who is presently involved to ask other interested persons to sign on. If we each could get one new person involved, we could double our list without spending the $5,000. I feel that I could get a number of folks I have worked with on "peace" projects to sign on. This is just my personal feeling. Perhaps we could use the $5,000 to better advantage. John Webster

[Bill Scheurer]

John, that is a great idea! We know there are many people at the edges of our contact who have not yet signed up for our newsletter, and asking everyone to refer and forward would be a great help. Nevertheless, it could be a both/and rather than an either/or proposition? The value in reaching outside our immediate circles of influence is in extending our reach to entirely new circles, hence the "outreach" term. That is why it is like our billboard and library display projects -- they all reach out to people that none of us know yet. Thanks!

[Elaine Hallmark]

Very interesting proposal, Bill. My immediate hit is that we are not ready to do this and should not be trying to decide and sign by Dec. 31 (although I understand the date may be negotiable). I am very interested in what others think about the idea, so I hope you will all weigh in. I think it is an interesting thing for us to consider. I would prefer that it be part of an overall marketing/outreach strategy for how we are going to reach the numbers we want. I think it would be good for us to get our own membership drive going first, and see how we are able to handle the new members we do get. It seems to me that if we designed a campaign for getting member sign-ups, we could each send to our own e-mail lists and learn a lot about the responses we get. Once we have made our own efforts, then hiring someone to get us some broad numbers outside of our own circles who would just be added to our e-mail list might be helpful. I will list below the specific questions or hesitations that occur to me as I read through this proposal. I do not mean these to be saying we should not consider doing this, but only to raise the questions I would want us to discuss/answer.

1. CARE2 takes a petition or campaign type approach. I think it would take us some time to zero in on a campaign of that sort that would work for us. I do think it might be a good thing to do—maybe a pledge rather than a petition. (But then, wouldn't this be the same as a membership drive--to pledge to live by the principles?) I think we need to complete our discussions about who we are really and what our focus is before trying to build in this way.
2. The return in terms of fundraising seems quite small, and takes a lot of money to generate a 10% (or less) return on your investment.
3. What process (and staff or volunteers) would we need in place in order to make good use of a large number of new names signing up for our e-mail list? How would we expect to use the names? I assume we would put them on our weekly newsletter list. Anything beyond that? Would we just keep them on our list and see what they end up responding to? Or would we give the names to local team coordinators to try to nurture along with a study series or something more? Would we give them all a DVD? Would we send them a fundraising request?