From brochureware to actionware:

Creating Change & Raising Money By Growing Connecticut Parent Power’s Online Presence

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6.14.10 Paul Wessel, Director

CT Parent Power paul@ctparentpower.org www.ctparentpower.org

203-654-7958

for CT Parent Power Steering Committee

Nancy Leonard, Graustein Memorial Fund

memo available for viewing & download at http://drop.io/meismnb/asset/ctpp-online-engagement

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The next twelve months offer CT Parent Power (“CTPP”) a unique opportunity to reach out to Connecticut parents about schools, early care & education and health care. Our web-based activity can be a key tool in taking advantage of this opportunity. Through early November, Connecticut will be engaged in a spirited debate over our state’s leadership as candidates vie for an open Governor’s seat. Beyond the election and through mid-2011, the Connecticut General Assembly legislative session will the focus of public policy debate on our core issues. A strong parent voice on school reform, state-based health care reform and early care issues over the next year can shape state policy for years to come. CT Parent Power’s online presence can be a key tool for building and amplifying Connecticut’s parent voice.

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We are proposing to deepen our online engagement work to strengthen our existing parent relationships, build new relationships, and begin a small donor campaign to build our sustainability.

This memo offers an overview of the possibilities for such a project, proposes a menu of approaches, and, subject to Steering Committee and funder approval, will be the basis for pursuing technical assistance from strategic online marketing consultants with 2009 carryover funds from the Graustein Memorial Fund. It is drawn from work developed as part of an Online Engagement course in the spring of 2010 at Milano - The New School for Management and Urban Policy.

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Rebuilding our website is an opportunity to: better define our policy and advocacy role

sharpen a tool well served for that purpose

more clearly project our public face or “branding”

determine how best to put to work grant resources designated for resource development

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This memo is broken down into six sections covering:

1. Project Goals and the CTPP Strategic Plan

2. Developing our “Parent” personality on the Web

3. Sharpening our online “personality”

4. Building Online relationships = Building Fundraising xxxcapacity

5. The Importance of Email

6. Email: Growing Our Online Community & Growing xxxGrassroots Fundraising Measuring Our Performance

7. Next Steps

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1. Project Goals & the CTPP Strategic Plan

The goal of our online engagement work is to o Deepen our relationship with our existing members

o Grow our list by building online relationships with new supporters

o Expand the use of our online program for education and advocacy work

o Deepen our relationships to include small dollar contributions and/or dues

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This project’s goals support the 4 strategic goals CTPP established in its planning process:

1. Strengthen and support member communities and the Delegate base

2. Influence policy change on children’s issues at state and federal levels

3. Become Connecticut’s premier parent-led advocacy organization

4. Build & maintain an effective infrastructure to sustain growth and vitality

In addition, 15 of the 16 strategies adopted by CTPP as necessary for achieving its strategic planning goals will be supported by our online work.*

* The remaining strategy of completing our governance policies will need to be fulfilled offline.

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Strategic Goals: Strategies:

P 1. Build and sustain strategic partnerships at local and state levels to influence public policy solutions.

P 2. Support the 16 existing communities in CT Parent Power.

P 3.       Implement reorganization to support existing communities, and build volunteer capacity for growth.

P 4.       Assist each Delegate Community with staff support to sponsor events and action in their community.

P 1.       Conduct a campaign to implement universal health care for every child in Connecticut.

P 2.       Promote and protect quality early care and education policies and programs for children.

P 3.       Advocate for comprehensive education finance, and school reform.

P 4.       Select and advocate one new statewide and one federal policy issue for action by CT Parent Power.

P 1.       Assure CT Parent Power establishes and maintains presence in all eight Connecticut counties.

P 2.       Expand and broaden the Delegate Community base of CT Parent Power implementing a system of recruitment and

xxxxxxretention.

P 3.       Institute a Leadership Development program to build a cadre of skilled CT Parent Power volunteer leaders.

P 4.       Implement a communications campaign to promote CT Parent Power, increasing visibility and recognition among parents

xxxxxxand policy leaders.

P 1.       Develop and implement a comprehensive resource development plan to diversify funding and grow CT Parent Power.

P 2.       Reorganize, strengthen, and expand the Delegate Community and membership structure.

3.       Refine and complete the governance policies of CT Parent Power.

P 4.       Expand staff capacity to support the organization.

Our mission: Educate, engage, empower and mobilize a statewide network of parent advocates to act on children's issues and

participate in solutions.

Our vision: All parents will influence public decisions that impact children and families.

CONNECTICUT PARENT POWER STRATEGIC PLAN 2009 - 2011

4. Build & maintain an

effective infrastructure

to sustain growth and

vitality

3. Become

Connecticut’s premier

parent-led advocacy

organization

2. Influence policy

change on children’s

issues at state and

federal levels

1. Strengthen and

support member

communities and the

Delegate base

= supported by our online program

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While we face serious challenges in achieving our goals…

Our resources are limited and our aspirations large: we are seeking to shape public policy on multiple large issues.

Being right on the issues is not enough. We have to become effective.

Parents are, by and large, a disorganized interest group. We are not yet the AARP for parents.

The complexity of the issues which we address can be daunting for our supporters.

Our supporters – parents – tend to be very busy juggling at least two full time jobs - working to pay the rent and parenting.

…a robust, online presence can help overcome these challenges by giving parents an accessible way to learn about and speak up on their issues.

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2. Proudly CT Parent Power: Developing Our Personality On The Web CTPP fills an important niche in Connecticut’s landscape of groups fighting on behalf of families and children. Our online presence will reflect this:

We are proudly “parent-led.” Our message is that you are us, and we are you. We’re not about parents; we are parents. We are authentically “parent.”

Our voice is not that of experts (though we don’t mind hanging out with wonks and learning from them) but of parents. Our messengers are parents and our website will reflect this: our “About Us” page will have pictures / videos of our parent leaders talking about why we do what we do.

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Our number one priority is parents participating in public policy discussion. We believe that when parents are present, the world is a better place for our kids, and by extension, our future and everyone else. We value participation over having “the” right answer. Experts are about being right; we’re about helping parents be heard.

We offer accessible, timely information. We have strong partners in Graustein Memorial Fund, Universal Health Care Foundation of Connecticut, Voices for Children, and the Connecticut Early Childhood Alliance who produce lots of good information. Our job is to turn that information into parent-friendly bite-sized nuggets, promote it, and help people act upon that language. Our top-line take on the issues will be short and tight – and offer opportunities to act. Behind those opportunities will be more detailed information or links to that information from our partners.

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In rebuilding our website, we have sought reflect this by creating a space that is open, friendly, and where it is easy to act on our issues.

We seek to feature pictures of parents on the home page, and provide easy access to “social media” tools like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube as well.

We seek to project our participatory, parent-focused nature.

We strive to be a friendly, front-door to the world of activism and policy.

We want to prioritize easy ways to act, and to be a bridge between our policy-producing partners and parents who just want to know what to do for their kids.

This plays to our strength – inclusion, participation, parents – and uses our partners in areas where we don’t have the internal capacity.

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We will feature actions people can take on a revolving slide show on the homepage. We will be able to easily update the actions and added pages as our work evolves, so we will always be fresh and current.

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Detailed information about our issues will be available through two clicks of the mouse: the first click will take you to a page with two or three paragraph description of our take on school reform, for instance, with another click to get access to background documentation. We have the pieces in place to be where some parents already are - including Facebook, Youtube, and Flickr:

.

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CTPP leader Marilyn Dunkley reports that she’s using Facebook as one of her primary means for getting the word out to people. This is her PLTI Middletown page.

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CTPP is authentically parents – our strength is our steering committee and delegates. Videos of our steering committee members will tell who we are and why we do what we do.

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In the advocacy and policy worlds, we dwell a lot on being right; in our CTPP work and on the Web, we want to focus on being effective. Other partners will focus on the details, on being “correct,” and engaging in the policy debates. Our job as CTPP, and our presence on the web, is about talking, listening, and giving people an opportunity to act. That’s the plan for the website. We know what we would like it to do, and we’re working hard to put it together. We know too that we’ll fall short, that our reach will exceed our grasp, and that we’ll need to modify the site over time, and will need the assistance of some “strategic communications consultants” to help us more strategically communicate.

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3. Sharpening Our Online “Parent” Personality

How we use our online presence to achieve both our project and our strategic goals requires us to think deeply about a seemingly simple question:

Who are we?

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How we present our self to the world through our online presence – our branding – can make or break our program. The personality we choose to project online reflects our sense of who we are. Yet the answer to the question “Who is CT Parent Power?” is very different for o each of the 9 members of our Steering Committee,

o for the Steering Committee as a group,

o for our 106 delegates,

o to the 300 or so members who regularly open their emails, and

o for the 2600 people who signed up for CT Parent Power (“CTPP”) over the years.

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Our recent – and as yet unresolved – email exchange over updating our tagline was a good demonstration of how hard this can be. We all seem to know that “Engaging, educating and mobilizing parents to act on children’s issues” could be a little tighter and snappier, but getting there can be painstaking. Similarly, updating our logo under severe time constraints entailed a much-truncated process of thinking about the image we wanted to present to the world. Our old logo was developed quickly without much thought. Our new logo was adopted quickly with some thought. As we pondered the final few options, we embraced an idea gleaned from years of person-to-person organizing and affirmed by the online world of “social networking:” Let’s let our members decide. We had the technology and the courage to do it. We sent a message to our members about who CT Parent Power is in doing it. The result: we got the highest participation rate of any email offering we’ve ever sent (more on this later) and picked an awesome logo.1

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As hard as it is to think about what “we” - the steering committee and staff – think CT PP is about, it gets even more complicated when we add our supporters in the mix. But it also gets more productive since, ultimately, as Todd Whitney, VP for eMarketing at The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society recently said about their online program:

“It’s not about us – it’s about what our community wants.”

The beauty of the web allows is that it allows us to get real and regular feedback from our community – and to strengthen our community in the process.

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In “Integrating Online and Offline Activities to Build Strong Relationships,”2 a principal at a leading nonprofit direct marketing agency suggests an experiment to help us become more “donor-centric” and better understand our supporters and their view of CT Parent Power. As we think about our work ahead, and about how we position ourselves in the online world, it’s an approach that will strengthen us and lead us in a good direction:

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Becoming “Donor-Centric”: Understanding Your Supporters and Their View of Your Organization (adapted for CT PP)

Step 1: Select ten to fifteen people involved with CTPP. Be sure to mix it up a bit.

Step 2: Ask each to: “Tell me how you would describe to a friend or family member your reason for getting involved with CT Parent Power and the top two things that you feel we do or should be doing.” Write down, or have them write down, their responses.

It is likely that you now have a list of several – and perhaps may – different answers. There is a good chance some of them do not reflect what your leadership feels is the mission of the organization. Don’t fret; you are not alone. Many of the organizations that perform this experiment find that people, both within and outside their organization, have very different views of the same organization. And while this may concern the folks who crafted your organization’s very succinct and crystal clear mission statement, it really should be seen as an opportunity. If all the answers on your list are similar, take a look at the narrative of what they people are telling their friends and family. Are there any major differences in the way they are describing your organization? Again, there may be some more subtle differences in what people think is most important about your organization, and perhaps there is an opportunity to widen your focus or alter your message to attract more people to your cause.3

(We may even want to do a modified version of this in our annual parent survey this year.)

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4. Building Online Advocacy Relationships = Building Fundraising Capacity Building online relationships is key to both our advocacy work AND our future fundraising work. As the author of the piece cited earlier on “donor-centric” fundraising noted in 2007:

“…advances in online technology are enhancing existing interactions and creating new opportunities for people to form and build relationships, both with like-minded people and with the organizations they support. And the exciting part of this for nonprofit organizations is that although online giving has increased dramatically over the last few years, even the most aggressive estimates for the amount of money being raised online indicate that it is still only one to three percent of the total amount of money being given by individuals.”4

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Online community building is central to building future donors. In “The Changing Nature of Community: Leveraging the Internet to Build Relationships and Expand the Reach of Your Organization,” a leading non-profit fundraising software provider explains:

A fundamental reality of fundraising is that people give to people with causes, not to organizations… People need to feel a personal connection to the causes and initiatives they choose to donate to. The power of personal content, communication and collaboration all combine to create a sense of community…In that sense, community building is fundraising – you cannot separate the two.5

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Successful fund raising – as well as successful advocacy - will build on the idea that CT Parent Power offers CT parents something that they can’t get anywhere else:

Fundraising is not about what you need. Really. It is about what the donor – through you – can achieve. It’s about giving donors the gift of knowing they changed the world for the better. It’s not about your goals – it’s about your donors’ aims. Everyone knows you need money. So do the other 1.8 million nonprofits in the United States – and the millions more around the world. If that’s all you’ve got to say, you are just another organization with yet another appeal. What is special about you? The answer can’t simply be that your programs need support. It must be that with your donor, together you can achieve a difference that no one else can.6

What is special about Connecticut Parent Power – our “value proposition” as they say in the marketing world – is that we offer a parent-centric take on the issues – and a parent-centric opportunity to act on them. Embracing this quality is key to our growth.

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GROWING OUR ONLINE COMMUNITY “Communities are not created; they evolve,” explain two online strategists and entrepreneurs in “Building Successful Online Communities:”

The growth of an online community takes time and effort. Relationships must be initiated based on trust, and then carefully cultivated. Develop a plan that articulates specific steps you will take over time to engage your general audience and convert a significant segment into active supporters. Organizations must identify a sequence of steps to increase a constituent’s level of involvement and offer a variety of participation options that work to engage different components of their audience. To build a vibrant online community, organizations need more than an individual’s donation or membership application – they need ongoing interaction opportunities that will keep a constituent engaged and developing into a lifelong supporter.7

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Voting on our logo and our annual parent surveys are the kind of opportunities envisioned here. When authentic, they build CT Parent Power:

Experience demonstrates that it is possible to build a strong sense of community quickly if audiences are made aware their opinions matters and that their participation counts. Which specific feedback tools are used is less important than an organization’s willingness to listen to constituent feedback.8

Once valued and inspired, our key supporters can become evangelists for CT Parent Power:

The challenge is to mobilize supporters to use their social networks for the benefit of your organization…if you provide supporters with an easy way to help spread the word about your organization’s activities, many will reach out to their social network and encourage participation.9

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Tools like Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Ning allow for online opportunities for CT Parent Power supporters to become “content creators.” Just as face-to-face meetings with participatory sections are far more productive than “talking heads” meetings, the same is true on the web:

The value of user-contributed content is better content. From the viewpoint of constituent-based organizations, user-contributed content presents an opportunity to break down the barriers that currently separate an organization from its Web site visitors and encourage a passive observer to become an engaged participant…Once users participate in the content creation process, they have a vested interest in that content and in the community, and will be more inclined to promote it to friends and encourage others to comment on their content.10

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As CTPP supporters mature to active CTPP members – in both their offline as well as their online activity – opportunities for personal online fundraising emerge.

Where today we might ask someone interested in reforming their school to buy tickets to the Waterbury Duck Race, next year they might be part of an online “person- to-person” fundraising campaign where they tell their friends their own story about how working with CT Parent Power has helped improve their child’s life.

These personal stories can become powerful tools for CT Parent Power.

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Personal stories are powerful. They cut through the chatter. The Obama campaign was built on the power of supporters’ stories as well as those of Barack Obama himself. We saw this past year how important Heather and Tawana’s stories were in moving legislators. Personal stories are central to fundraising as well:

Story is at the heart of personal fundraising and its effectiveness. When people hear a story, they are transported with the storyteller outside the present moment, to another time and place, creating a shared experience… People do not remember how many houses were destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. We remember stories of people stuck in the Superdome, women screaming from their roofs, or an elderly man leaving his pets behind. Those stories were what made us give, and together, those stories are the filter through which we experienced and remember the disaster. And if you have a good story, you have everything. That is why as nonprofits, we should listen to the stories our supporters tell, and we should give them the freedom and tools to share those stories broadly. Our work can be broad and complex, and that can make it hard to communicate compellingly. Donors tend to talk about work through their own stories, making it specific and simple. That is a great gift to us.11

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When those stories come to us from someone we already know - say from Marilyn Dunkley in the email’s “from” address rather than Paul Wessel – they build from an existing connection, more likely get opened rather than discarded or ignored, and stand a better chance of eliciting the response we want. As one online marketing expert summed it up: “People give to people, even online!”12 Personal fundraising pages relying on personal stories -for walkathons, community campaigns, to help a family member, to celebrate a birthday and the like - all are effective, participatory ways to raise money. They decentralize fundraising, provide an easy framework to build from supporters relationships, increase the number of “asks” (since it’s much easier to email someone than ask them directly for money), and grow the list.13

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5. “Stop waiting for people to discover your web site, and start discovering their mailboxes.” The web is seductive – and the ability to update an organization’s presence on the web – daily, hourly , even minute by minute – can be incredibly seductive. The explosion of social networking sites – like the ones we showed above we are already using – can make you feel like a ball slamming around in a pinball machine, bouncing from this site to that to keep up. Ultimately, however, with extremely limited resources, it is CT Parent Power’s use of email that will be the key to the growth of our effectiveness. The reasons for this are laid out in a classic document of the online advocacy, the “Gilbert Email Manifesto,”14 which opens with this command:

Repeat after me: "Email is more important than my web site!"

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Gilbert proceeds to lay out three rules for focusing one’s online work:

1. Resources spent on email strategies are more valuable than the same resources spent on web strategies.

2. A web site built around an email strategy is more valuable than a web site that is built around itself.

3. Email oriented thinking will yield better strategic thinking overall.

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Gilbert argues that email is “the killer application of the Internet” because:

o Everybody on the net has email and most of them read most of their messages.

o People visit far fewer websites than they get email messages.

o Email messages are treated as To Do items, while bookmarks are often forgotten. Email is always a call to action.

o Email is handled within a familiar user interface, whereas each website has to teach a new interface.

o Email is a very personal medium.

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(Here’s recent proof from our own experience: An email we sent under CT PP Chairperson George Hensinger’s name urging members to contact their Senators was forwarded to someone who has worked with George for years, but wasn’t on our email list. She replied with this:

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Even today, nine years after Gilbert’s articulation and despite the dramatic explosion of web-based social networking communities, leading strategic communications consultants15 still argue today for the centrality of email in an organization’s online presence:

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Just last year, the leading online activism and fundraising benchmark study harkened back to Gilbert’s original 2001 language while affirming his message:

Despite the astronomic growth of social media – more than 35 percent of American adults now have a profile on at least one social networking site – the most efficient way to reach supporters is the still the same “killer app” nonprofits have relied on for a decade: email.16

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6. Email: Growing Our Online Community & Growing Grassroots Fundraising Remember those “donor-centric” relationships we talked about earlier? Email is a great tool to use in creating and deepening those relationships. In Raising Thousands (if Not Tens of Thousands) of Dollars with Email, online fundraising, advocacy and marketing expert Madeline Stanionis suggests three reasons why we should use email to fundraise: it’s cheap, it’s easy, and it’s everywhere.17 She then spends about 100 revealing pages detailing how to do it successfully:

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In stressing that “It’s all about the list,” Stanionis grounds us with some useful “email fundraiser’s arithmetic:”

To generate 10 donations

at least 1000 people have to receive your message,

at least 250 need to read – that is “open” – your email, and

at least 50 people need to click on the donation link in that email18

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CT Parent Power currently has a list of 2700 with 1700 email addresses. Given there are 450,000 households in Connecticut with children under the age of 18, we have barely scratched the surface. Growing our list is key. Stanionis lays out five basic approaches19 to email fundraising that can help us grow our list.

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Advocacy campaigns – In the course of our ongoing advocacy work, we already take advantage of this approach by creating opportunities for people to demonstrate support for our campaigns by signing online petitions and the like.

We did this earlier in the year with a petition to President Obama on early care issues:

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Fun stuff – Contests, giveaways, ecards, quizzes can excite our supporters and encourage them to pass on to their friends. Putting a short survey up on our website about a hot issue – “Is teacher tenure good or bad for education?” - attracts participation and helps grow the list. We could do a drawing for high-quality children’s picture books or a (hopefully donated) PSAT prep course. Fun e-cards or videos that people want to send on to their friends is a great way to share lists. A recent technique inserts the name of the recipient as a “winner” in a video. For instance, here Paul Wessel is celebrated as Mother of the Year (!!) – and if I forward it to friends, their name would be inserted instead.

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“Chaperone” emails – Here an organization sends an email on behalf of another organization. For instance, Elaine Zimmerman could send an email to Parent Leadership Training Institute alumni encouraging them to take part in our annual parent survey. Or the Connecticut State Employee Association, which represents state employees who work in the Zero to Three Program, could email its members to join and promote a campaign we are doing to fight state budget cuts. The national organization MomsRising recently sent out such an email in support of CT Working Families Paid Sick Days campaign:

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Tell-a-friend - Tell-a-friend campaigns encourage supporters to take action – and to get the message in front of their friends. For instance, there was a great video from Ben (of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream) showing with Oreo cookie bar-graphs how little we spend on children’s health care and the Head Start compared to Pentagon spending. As well as being enjoyable to watch, the site featured a hard-to-miss big red “Tell A Friend” button:

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Once our website is fully functional and we have engaging campaigns underway, one easy Tell-A-Friend approach is to for members of the CTPP Steering Committee, and some of our closest allies, to go through our own personal address books and engage in our own “Friends and Family” campaign. Our email provider allows us to track sign-ups from our Tell A Friend campaigns, providing an added element of friendly competition for our sign-ups.

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Offer something parents want – and get their email address as part of the deal – We can offer a free report on, say, ways for parents to raise kids who are readers, or offer “I Care About Kids – And I Vote!” buttons. To get the giveaway the person has to provide their name, email and snail mail address before downloading. A recent example is a combined gift offer / tell a friend email from MomsRising promoting a free MOM bumper sticker and an opportunity help our “favorite mom” do the same:

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In addition to these specific approaches offered by Stanionis, she also emphasizes the need to see emails as part of an ongoing program of interactions with our supporters.

Successful email programs often start like first dates (either through introductions from a friend or a random encounter) but blossom over time into relationships.20 And, like other relationships, it deepens over time and expands into other parts of our life: We start to show up a meetings, we give of our time, and then dig into our pockets.

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7. Measuring our performance

The single most powerful feature of online advocacy is the ability to track one’s effectiveness. Fund raising, inherently, is about numbers and performance; long before the web was born, direct mail marketing firms were tracking lists and measuring performance. The growth of email has allowed the melding of these fundraising practices with previously difficult to track advocacy campaigns, and online advocacy tools allow for very detailed data collection and feedback of campaigns.

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Nonprofit industry benchmarks The annual eNonprofit Benchmarks Study provides an analysis of online messaging, fundraising and advocacy metrics for nonprofit organizations. This study of 31 US based national non-profit organizations serves as the industry standard. The findings for 2009 advocacy emails21 include:

Open rate: 14.26% of advocacy emails get opened. The statistic means, on average, more than 85% of the emails communications professionals unleash on the world go unread. Click-through rate: 4.65% of the recipients of advocacy emails click on the action link contained in emails. Response rate: 4.00 % of email recipients actually sign the petition, email the legislator, or take the action desired. Churn rate: On average, 16.83% of email addresses “went bad” in 2009. (Another 2010 benchmark study of 500 nonprofits found that most organizations lack usable email addresses on 44% of their membership file.22)

These statistics remind us that (a) growing our list is vital, and (b) we should be grateful that the cost difference between sending 1,000 emails and 10,000 emails is zero.

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Comparison of CTPP’s list performance with industry standards

Salsa, our email package, is a very user-friendly, robust tool which our first organizer, now a part time consultant, handles well, and which CTPP’s new executive director is coming up to speed on.

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Two groups with very similar missions and communities to ours use Salsa and have grown their influence through strong online programs. One is the Connecticut based Working Families:

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The second is a “moms” organizing group:

MomRising, a national organization started by a founder of MoveOn.org, used petitions and other online tools in Salsa’s online program to grow to over 140,000 members in 24 months.23

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Salsa boasts a variety of online tools, and just announced a new series of “apps” produced by marketing partners.

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One of the tools we most regularly use allows us to track the email performance metrics we spoke of above. See the details below on our “vote for our new logo” email.

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We can also track performance of specific action campaigns: On our recent email seeking support for the Children In the Recession bill we saw that 52 emails were sent to Senators, 10 with personalized subject lines or content. We can alsosee which Senators got how many emails and from whom:

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We are just starting to scratch the surface of what we can do with Salsa and look forward to learning the system more and gaining some technical assistance to help us refine our use of the system's tools.

The following pages show what we can learn from a relatively quick look at some of CTPP's 2008 – 2010 email experience

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CT Parent Power Email Open Rates

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Emails sent to more than 1000 recipients 2008 - 2010

On average, our open rates were high – 19.54% - but they have steadily diminished since end of the 2009 legislative session.

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Generally, and not surprisingly, opens rates were higher during the 2008 and 2009 legislative sessions.

Open rates peaked in early and late 2008 for emails around schools work, an email titled “Victory,” and a meeting notice.

Two 2009 emails - “Upcoming Trainings and Events” and “We won!” - enjoyed open rates exceeding 30%.

Click-through (taking action) rates have generally been below industry average, but exceeded those at specific points, most notably during the 2009 legislative session.

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CT Parent Power Email Open and Click-Through Rates

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00

9

2/4

/20

09

2/2

4/2

00

9

3/6

/20

09

4/4

/20

09

4/2

7/2

00

9

5/4

/20

09

6/3

/20

09

6/9

/20

09

6/1

1/2

00

9

7/1

3/2

00

9

8/1

3/2

00

9

8/2

7/2

00

9

9/1

/20

09

9/1

4/2

00

9

9/3

0/2

00

9

10

/16

/20

09

12

/7/2

00

9

12

/21

/20

09

2/1

4/2

01

0

3/1

1/2

01

0

Open Rate

0.00%

2.00%

4.00%

6.00%

8.00%

10.00%

12.00%

14.00%

Click-

Through

Rate

Emails sent to more than 1000 recipients 2008 - 2010

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At points, our open rates have exceeded 30%, double the industry average, and our click-through rates exceeded 5%.

Click through rates exceeding 5% were on emails with subjects about saving the HUSKY (Medicaid) program, saving parent leadership training programs, and the “We Won” email.

Our highest click-through rate was in the recent vote for our logo and is the peak on the right hand side of the above chart. That 11.7% click through rate affirms the idea that people like being asked their opinion and will respond when presented with the opportunity.

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Since the “We Won” email had both high open and click-through rates, it deserves the right to take a bow:

Not surprisingly, this email is about the culmination of a broad offline and online campaign and had a clear, timely message.

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This chart shows all emails exceeding a 20% open rate and/or a 4% click-through rate, with red highlighting for those emails exceeding 30% open rate and/or 5% click-through.

We will continue to mine this data for its lessons about the work that our members value.

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Google Analytics: taking the guesswork out of what works on our website Once we launch the new site, we can take advantage of Google Analytics, a free tool which give us information about who is coming to website, what they are finding useful (and what they are ignoring) and data like: o new versus return visitors

o “visitor loyalty” - how frequently people come to our site and how long they stay.

o how someone got to us: Did they google us? Did they come to us through a link on someone else's website? Find us through our Facebook or YouTube page?

o which pages were most popular

o keywords people used to find us24

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8. Where Do We Go From Here? Our new website is projected to launch in mid-July. Most of the design work is completed and the next few weeks is focused on writing. In addition, we need to finalize the three action components for the revolving slide show on the homepage, which will feature one action each for health care, schools, and early care and education. Finally, we will need to identify documents and links for some resources pages; this may be a good project to “crowdsource” out to our list, in a similar fashion to how we voted on the logo. Beyond this immediate work, we hope to engage the organization in

learning from the experiences of others.

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“Imitation is the highest form of flattery” We propose looking more closely at the sites of similar groups and seeing what best practices may be out there. Steering committee members, staff, and supporters can begin this process. It may helpful to bring in some seasoned expertise to help dig deeper and see what is relevant to us. Sites worth considering include:

Momsrising.org

CT Parent Advocacy Center

ConnCAN

CT Working Families

CT Commission on Children

Children’s Alliance (A “local” group surveyed in the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, M+R Strategic Services and Nonprofit Technology Network)

Children First for Oregon (A “local” group surveyed in the 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, M+R Strategic Services and Nonprofit Technology Network)

Voices for America’s Children

Equal Voice for America’s Working Families

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Old Tricks and New Tools There are many old tricks and new tools we could consider, and the support of a strategic online marketing consultant may well help us figure out which may be useful and when to deploy. Specific approaches to consider include:

1. Site “Check-up” - Once we’re up and running, it might be helpful to have someone with more technical competence than us to take a look and make recommendations about what we’ve done well and what we could improve. Consultants with expertise in Salsa or PicNET, our new web provider, would likely be of value. 2. Mining our lists - In most organizations, 7% of members account for almost one-third of all the online advocacy.25 In addition, different types of user seek different online experiences. A study of “the Wired Wealthy” found three main user types – “All Business,” “Casual Connectors,” and “Relationship Seekers” – each of whom could be appealed to in different ways.26 As our list grows, there may be more strategic ways to segment our supporters. 3. Dues and memberships – The idea of more defined membership and dues paying has been kicked around for a while. We built out the website anticipating some sort of formal membership status. This is an area calling for some deeper thinking. 4. IfIwasCTgovernor.org is a domain we purchased with the possibility of kicking off a campaign to get grass-roots Connecticut residents to proclaim what they would do if they were governor. Such

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a direct, participatory way of the electorate educating the candidates has intriguing possibilities. There are online approaches to do this which would allow others in the community to vote for their favorite ideas, or, in Facebook lexicon “like” specific proposals. Done well, this has the potential to generate a lot of interest and harvest a lot of email addresses. 5. Web Meetings – We know that good “face to face” meetings provide both for “one to many” communication - a parent leader telling their story about why school reform is so important or an health care wonk explaining what’s in the federal health care reform – and for “many to many” participatory discussion. In the past, CTPP used conference calls with our members for “many to many” discussions. We can now do the same with online web meetings. Services from our current provider, ReadyTalk, allow for calls in presenter only mode as well as in discussion mode with web presentations with real time polling and reporting, recording capability, and tools for connecting with Facebook and Twitter both before and after the meeting.

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Consider the potential for a doing a series of online, interactive half hour sessions on the issues at stake in school reform and health care reform and the importance of the 2010 gubernatorial election. We could have a PowerPoint presentation with commentary, questions and answers, online polling and the like all scheduled conveniently for parents – we could even poll our members for the best times - and then record the meeting and post for others to view. CAHS has been successfully holding webinars already so this may be a good collaborative project with one of our partners. 6. Going to where our potential supporters already are: We can purchase banner ads, get a nonprofit grant for Google ads, post information on parent websites, ask supportive organizations to post links to our site and engage in other forays out into the online world. We’ve just scratched the surface with Facebook. The site keeps encouraging us to take advantage of their ads:

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Additionally, Google provides grants to non-profits for its ad program:

Exploring how might use these opportunities – and how we would track their value – are clearly worth considering. The best wisdom about social networking is that organizations should develop a coherent strategy that is sustainable for the organization rather than engage in a scattershot approach.

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7. “Paid acquisition:” Care2, Network for Good, FirstGiving, Greater Good Network and other online services create communities around participation in progressive causes, host petition campaigns, and drive traffic towards partner non-profit sites.

These services will recruit a set number of new e-mail addresses for you on a cost-per-name basis. To do this, they set up online actions related to your mission, promote the actions to their own members and then enable those who take the actions to check a box to opt in to your nonprofit’s e-mail list. You then pay a set cost for each name. You might be able to entice third-party Web sites to recruit donors on your behalf, too, by offering to pay them a set amount for every donor they send your way. The cost per donor typically will be much higher than the cost of the e-mail address of someone you later try to convert into a donor.27

While generally these services have a nationwide focus, in discussion they have indicated that they are able to do state-specific“geotargetting” and their pricing typically includes charging only for delivering what their end user non-profit is looking for. 8. “Catalist:” Catalist is a list provider that specializes in meshing voting lists with commercially available consumer data. Catalist reports it could provide a list of 998,172 registered voters (in 690,151 households) in CT in households with children under the ages of 5, 11 or 17 and coded as either likely or possible to vote in 2010. The data fields they supply would include all of the voter data, phone numbers and some census data, and could be matched for email addresses.

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A list of registered voters in Connecticut with children under the age of 5 and likely to vote in the 2010 gubernatorial election could be a very useful list to work via direct mail, phone banking, or email for our early care and education work. MomsRising found Catalist data helpful in their work:

MomsRising’s use of the Catalist-Salsa integration was two-tiered. First, they matched their Milwaukee voter-file list from Salsa and called unregistered members to ask them to register to vote. This proved especially powerful for the members who had been dropped from the voting rolls, many of whom had no idea that they weren't registered. Second, MomsRising ran a "Sick or Treat" campaign on-the-ground in Milwaukee. They distributed 15,000 pieces of "Sick or Treat" candy with "Vote YES on paid sick days" on the wrapper to families to hand out on Halloween. To boost this effort, MomsRising pulled Catalist's phone data on Milwaukee members, and called them to ask them to vote YES on paid sick days, and to ask if they would like to distribute the candy. The phone calls made using the Catalist data increased member participation in the Sick or Treat campaign by 50%.28

Catalist’s data is typically expensive, running more $10,000 for a one-shot deal, and $35,000 for a subscription. The good news from Salsa, which arrived shortly before this writing, is that they renegotiated a partnership with Catalist that will make this data available at a nominal rate (in the hundreds of dollars.) We are pursuing more information on this.

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9. Cultivation plans for our donors – as we develop a donor base, we need to make sure to nurture those relationships. The two way communications of Web 2.0 allow us to do that more systematically, allow us to listen, engage and deepen the relationship.29 There are some very developed strategies about how we could do this, and we can learn usefully from the experience of others. 10. Supporting the Interaction Institute for Social Change Process - Graustein Memorial Fund has contracted with the Interaction Institute for Social Change (IISC) to help create an inclusive, transparent 18 - 24 month process for the building of a statewide early care and education system. GMF states, “Connecticut will need broad based public awareness and will to make the decisions required to remake the early childhood system.” CTPP’s online program may well be a useful tool in the dissemination of information and interactive discussions of issues as the process proceeds. 11. Mobile - Mobile computing - using one’s phone to access the web - is becoming increasingly important. As web access by phone expands, it becomes a relatively inexpensive and convenient way to go online. At least 2 of our 9 member steering committee get their email almost exclusively on their phones. African-Americans are among the most active users of phones for internet access and are the fastest growing segment of the market; this growing use is narrowing the digital divide. Texting, text-based fundraising, and “call now” alerts are all growing tools for online engagement, particularly among low-income communities.30 It may be an opportunity for us.

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CONCLUSION As the length and breadth of this memo indicate, not only are the possibilities of online advocacy endless, but they evolve daily. It’s a dynamic and confusing landscape, ripe with possibility and, as you see here, quite overwhelming. Clearly, both continuing to use our tools and learning from our community will be one way to grow our capacity. It is equally clear, that we could use the benefit of a strategic online marketing “Sherpa” to help us figure out the best ways up the Connecticut parent online organizing mountain. This would be someone(s) to help us figure out which paths to take, which to avoid, when to stop for provisions, and where to seek shelter when the avalanches occur.

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This memo offers an overview of where CT Parent Power might go with its online program. As a next step, we propose to seek advice on strategic online marketing consultants who colleagues think might be a good match for us, share this memo with them, and solicit some proposals from them about assistance they might offer. Following receipt of these proposals, we suggest establishing a working group of Steering Committee members and supportive colleagues to consider next steps. Thank you for the time you've taken to plow through this memo. We look forward to hearing your thoughts about how we might continue to expand CT Parent Power’s work in the online world.

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1 With our online program in the middle of a transition, an extremely part-time eAdvocacy staffer, and the hectic activity of the legislative session, we did something really stupid: I don’t think we thanked people or told them what they’re choice even was! Maybe we’ll announce their good work with the launch of the new website. 2 Mark Connors, “Integrating Online and Offline Activities to Build Stronger Relationships,” People to People Fundraising, ed. Ted Hart, et al., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2007) 187. 3 Connors 188 4 Connors 187 5 Steven R. MacLaughlin, “The Changing Nature of Community: Leveraging the Internet to Build Relationships and Expand the Reach of Your Organization,” People to People Fundraising, ed. Ted Hart, et al., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2007) 4. 6 Katya Andreson, The 8 Online Fundraising Changes You Must Make in 2010 (Network for Good, http://www.fundraising123.org/article/8-online-fundraising-changes-you-must-make-2010 ) 9. 7 Sheeraz Haji and Greg Neichin,“Building Successful Online Communities,” Nonprofit Internet Strategies, ed. Ted Hart, et al., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2005) 89. 8 Sheeraz Haji and Greg Neichin 93. 9 Sheeraz Haji and Greg Neichin 96. 10 Sheerz Haji and Emma Zolbrod, “Advocacy 2.0: Leveraging Social Networking to Further Your Organization’s Mission,” People to People Fundraising, ed. Ted Hart, et al., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2007) 40. 11 Katya Andreson and Bill Strathmann, “Crafting the Marketing Strategy to Make it Happen,”, People to People Fundraising, ed. Ted Hart, et al., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2007) 80 -81. 12 Phil King and Nicci Noble, “Peer to Peer Fundraising and Community Building,” People to People Fundraising, ed. Ted Hart, et al., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2007) 62. 13 For more, see Mark Sutton, “How Individual Supporters Use Online Fundraising Pages to Make a Difference,” People to People Fundraising, ed. Ted Hart, et al., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2007) 117 ff. 14 Michael Gilbert, “The Gilber E-Mail Manifesto for Nonprofits,” Nonprofit Internet Strategies, ed. Ted Hart, et al., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2005) 329. 15 Farra Trompeter, “Online Communications Opportunities” presentation slide 2.25.10.

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16 M+R Strategic Services and Nonprofit Technology Network, 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, 9 May 2010, www.e-benchmarksstudy.com, 2. 17 Madeline Stanionis, Raising Thousands (if Not Tens of Thousands) of Dollars with Email, (Medfield, MA, Emerson & Church, 2006) 10. 18 Stanionis 15 19 Stanionis 16 ff 20 Stanionis 39 ff 21 M+R Strategic Services and Nonprofit Technology Network, 2010 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study, 9 May 2010, www.e-benchmarksstudy.com, 2. 22 Vinay Bhagat et al, The Convio Online Nonprofit Benchmark Study, March 2010, 5 May 2010, http://my.convio.com/forms/2010ConvioOnlineNonprofitBenchmarkStudyGuide 14. 23 “Salsa Helps MomsRising.org Grow to 140,000 Members in 24 Months,” 11 May 2009, http://www.salsacommons.org/o/8001/p/salsa/commons/content?content_item_KEY=1001 24 Ten Best Features of Google Analytics, 9 May 2010, http://notesfornonprofits.blogspot.com/2009/03/ten-best-features-of-google-analytics.html 25 M+R Strategic Services and Nonprofit Technology Network, 2009 eNonprofit Benchmarks Study. 26 Convio et al, The Wired Wealthy, 5 May 2010, http://my.convio.com/?elqPURLPage=104, 33. 27 Geoff Handy, The Five Basic Steps to Acquiring Donors Online, May 2009, 5 May 2010, http://www.fundraisingsuccessmag.com/article/the-five-basic-steps-acquiring-donors-online-406763 28 “Salsa » Case Studies » MomsRising ,” 9 May 2010, http://www.salsacommons.org/o/8001/p/salsa/website/public2/?reference=MomsRising 29 For more on this, see Jon Thorsen and David Lawson, “Relationships Take Two: Donor-Centered Stewardship,” People to People Fundraising, ed. Ted Hart, et al., (Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley, 2007) 107 ff. 30 See Mobile Commons - Connect / Engage / Measure, http://www.slideshare.net/501technyc/mobile-commons and Chrisse Brodigan, Texting for Change, Immigration Reform’s Stealth Strategy, 29 January 2010, Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chrissie-brodigan/texting-for-change-immigr_b_442128.html

thanks Farra and Leah