I hope this will be instructive and I hope you, the reader, will also provide some instruction. Looks like I’m going to need it.
Currently, I work as Vice President of Communications for the Lighted Candle Society, a non-profit organization fighting pornography. When I started with the group in June our email list was sparse and fleeting. We needed to build a larger base of support both for our activist efforts and our contributor base. We redesigned our main website, launched a blog, built a targeted interactive website, and promoted some “sticky tools†to drive interest in our cause.
We then set out to build on our existing base of subscribers and contributors to expand our message to their friends. We built specific "landing pages" for each member of the Board of Trustees (see mine here) and helped them send out emails to their contacts. The results were positive but the growth was incremental. That's not a bad thing but I'm always looking for those special "inflection moments" when you can capatalize on a timely situation and grow some things exponentially.
Enter Oprah. About three weeks ago we received an email from a subscriber who was at a taping of an Oprah show and came away shocked at the content of the episode. We made some quick inquiries to Harpo Productions and discovered that the show was going to air on September 25, 2007. The show featured several "sexperts" advocating casual sex with friends, pornography for women, and "open marriages". Needless to say, most of our supporters would be very interested in giving Oprah a piece of their mind.
We sent out an email to 1300 of our subscribers to call Oprah and send her an email about the episode. There wasn't enough time to drive a huge petition effort so we kept the request to self-action as our medium. Of course they aired it anyway... but we received so much email on the subject we decided to drive this a little further.
A note on petitions: They are usually ineffective in actually causing change but they are very effective in bringing together a group of supporters and building energy among advocates.
Email 1
Using iContact as our email system we identified a small number of "power users." We defined "power users" as subscribers who had sent on the initial Oprah email onto 20 or more friends. The results were positive (the 12 "power users" reached 87 people). But we realized the subject line ("Well, she did it...) was ineffective and didn't tell the people what we wanted them to do (pass it on). Sent on Monday October 1st.
Email 2
This email went out to the entire list of subscribers with the subject line: "Forward this email. Tell Oprah not again". This turned out to be a winner. The open rate was 27% (356 opens) but ultimately led to over 1500 opens as the people began to foward it on to their network. Sent on Wednesday October 3rd. See email here.
Petition and Realtime Email Tweaks
Once we realized that we had a real chance at success we posted a graphic indicating how many people had signed up and updated it throughout the week. We also replaced the graphic within in the email dynamically to drive some more interest. Sign-ups began to pour in. We posted the petition on a few key blogs and had the BOT send out the notice to other friends.
Email 3
I crafted an email to 500 of my personal contacts and sent it out from my email address via iContact as a personalized forward message including the previous crafted email in the body of the email. Again the results were very positive. 35% open rate (so far) and double the number of true opens.
So far we have 4000+ people who have signed the petition with 75+ people signing up per hour now. Through a combination of tweaking, blog posts, and personalized emails we have amost tripled our current base of subscribers. Next question to you reader... what do I do with these people?!
