Harman Interactive LLC » branding

Two Books & An Article

betsyh — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 14:21:00 +0000

If you are looking for resources on how to brand your organization or begin utilizing e-mail to raise money, here are a couple of books and an article that I’m sure you’ll find helpful.

Branding for Nonprofits: Developing Identity with Integrity by DK Holland (Allworth Press)
This book explains what branding is not just a logo (a typical misconception) and provides a very practical guide for developing your brand from writing a design brief to getting key stakeholders on board with the concepts and even finding funding to support your branding initiatives.

The Mercifully Brief Real World Guide to Raising Thousands (if not tens of thousands) of Dollars with Email by Madeline Stanionis (Emerson & Church Real World Guides) What I love about this book is that it is packed with examples of successful fundraising e-mail appeals and Madeline’s take on exactly why they worked. It is filled with suggestions that any organization, whether you currently have 50 e-mail addressess or 50,000, can easily use to improve results. I’ve known Madeline for a few years. She is a very creative, high energy, fun person who really cares about the work she does. Her personality comes through in the book. I cracked up when she was discussing testing and decided to out her inner geek. She said that she has spent many a Friday night playing with results to see what she could learn from them. I know I’ve done the same thing! Whether you are just getting started with e-fundraising or you’ve been doing it for while, I’m sure you’ll get some great tips from this book – I did. Just a note – buy it from Amazon, the order form page at the the publisher’s website, Emerson and Church, does not appear to be secure – not a good thing.

A Few Good ENewsletter Tools
I was one of the contributors to an article by Idealware, which provides comsumer report style reviews of nonprofit software. If you are just getting started with sending bulk e-mail, e-newsletters or e-solicitations, this article can help you identify some useful tools.
http://www.idealware.org/articles/fgt_email_newsletter_tools.php

Automated Email Messages

betsyh — Fri, 21 May 2004 17:34:00 +0000

I have been thinking recently about how important welcome, goodbye, and other automated e-mail messages are. When is the last time you checked to see what the automated message says when someone signs up for or unsubscribes from your e-newsletter?

Most companies and organizations seem to set up these messages one time and then forget about it. And most also don’t give a lot of thought to what these messages say. Maybe a techie actually writes them rather than a marketing person.

Your welcome message is the first message that a subscriber receives so you want it to be warm, welcoming and informative. You also want the tone to match your organization’s overall tone.

Several clients I work with use GetActive Software and I think a really cool addition to the latest version of their e-mail marketing tool is the fact that if you have multiple e-newsletters, each can now have its own customized “unsubscribe” message. I am thinking of the many ways that you could use this feature. If you had both a weekly and a daily e-newsletter for example, on the unsubscribe message of the daily version you could say something like “Sorry to see you go. If you are unsubscribing because a daily e-mail is too frequent for you, consider giving our weekly version a try by clicking here to subscribe.”

Also think about your routine, automatic, operational type e-mails. How well written are those? Like many Americans, I’m trying to lose some weight. I recently signed up for Weight Watchers e-tools. I then forgot my password so I clicked on a link to ask their system to send me a reminder. I was struck by how well written and friendly it was. This simple message that said “Sorry you lost your password…….. We’re here to help……” really reinforced the Weight Watchers brand as a supportive organization.

So, if you haven’t taken a look at these types of messages at your organization for awhile, give them a once over. Do they reinforce your brand? Are you making the most of them as a communications touch point? Perhaps consider scheduling a regular review of these types of messages.

Branding and Public Radio

betsyh — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 15:14:00 +0000

Jackie Huba, co-author of a great book called Creating Customer Evangelists told me about an excellent blog on branding. It’s called Brand Autopsy. Jackie thought I would be particularly interested in this week’s discussion which is public radio pledge drive dont’s. There is some great stuff here. The blog author, John Moore, and others who write in say that stations need to take a few tips from the Creating Customer Evangelists playbook. They need to gather more feedback so they can use that knowledge to craft more effective pitches that are targeted to their audience. They need to do a better job of leveraging the brand. And, they need to better communicate the positive benefits of going from listener to member rather than taking the “begging” approach. John Moore said “stop the guilt approach” but I brought up that a little guilt can work well for some people and mentioned the piece that Ira Glass did a few years ago where he made someone in front of Starbucks sweat. Moore agreed that guilt can work if it is done in a really creative way like Ira’s piece. He even got the audio from Ira’s excellent guilt piece and linked to it in his blog.

Beyond the public radio discussions on this blog, I enjoyed a lot of what I found here. There is a very funny discussion on “A Brand Called Omarosa.” If you are a fan of The Apprentice, you’ll love it. So, thanks Jackie for telling me about this blog. I’ll read it regularly.