Keeping in touch with your members

Building and maintaining relationships with your members, supporters, clients and funders is one of the key measures of a nonprofit organisation’s effectiveness.

Email is one of the best ways to foster that sense of community. The following are some of the ways in which you can use email. Most are variants or components of the e-newsletter.

Invitations to events

Complement your other forms of invitations – paper mail, newsletters – with email, including requests for pledges.

Surveys

Often it’s useful to find out what your organisation’s members, or some segments, are thinking, or what they want the organisation to do about an issue. You can do this by sending them an electronic survey. It’s fast and it’s cheap and you should get a good response rate.

There are a number of suppliers of free or cheap survey software such as FormSite and SurveyGold.

Housekeeping and autoreplies

Members and others can be encouraged to send in changes of address, requests for materials, or other correspondence, via email.

And if you are having trouble responding to everyone that replies to you, try an autoreply or infobot. Set up your organisation’s email system to respond automatically when someone mails to an address such as info@yourorg.org.au. Have different autoreplies for different purposes – for example, dinner@yourorg.org.au for information about the annual fundraising dinner. Autoreply functions are built into most office email systems, or your internet service provider should be able to set them up.

How to start

Survey your organisation’s target audiences to find out how many use email and would like to communicate that way.

Keep messages short – not more than two screens full – and in every message, offer the option to unsubscribe. Figure out what you want to communicate to these plugged-in donors, and start slowly. It’s so easy to reply to email that you should get plenty of useful feedback.