ROI of Listening: 17 Things to Do with What You Hear

If you’ve already started incorporating social media into your communications strategy and have done any research on it at all, you’ve come across the advice to LISTEN FIRST.

What you are less likely to have found in your research is a practical list of what you can actually do with all of this new-found knowledge and perspective that you gain from building your listening network.

If you really apply what you are hearing, listening can become the cornerstone of not only your nonprofit marketing strategy, but your mission-oriented programs as well. Listening helps at every level: It can help your professional community thrive, your organization prosper, your individual programs grow, and your own personal career soar.

Here are 17 concrete actions you can take using what you learn from listening.

1. Better understand the people who matter most. Find, follow, and listen to the people who you think match the personas of your target audience, whether they are potential clients, funders, donors, advocates, or volunteers. Learn more about what interests them, what kinds of questions they have, and the language they use, so you can communicate with them in more meaningful ways.  It’s basic market research and if you listen for no other reason, this is the one.

2. Start conversations with potential new supporters. See who’s talking about your issues. Look at what else that person is saying online. If he looks like someone who would be interested in what your organization does, reach out to him with a personal message. Offer information or resources or invite him to an event. Open the door to a relationship just like you would to a personal friendship.

3. Answer questions and provide suggestions. People are constantly posing questions and talking about the challenges they face on social media and networking sites. Answer questions, offer suggestions, and become known as a good source of information and assistance. This is a great way to position your organization as an expert source.

4. Correct misconceptions. Is someone confused, misinformed, or worse, spreading rumors? Try to set the record straight by presenting your point of view in a non-confrontational way.

5. Find new partners. Discover who else is interested in and working on the same things you are, especially people and organizations you might have never known existed otherwise (e.g. they do what you do, but on the other side of the country). Share your successes, replicate theirs, and create new partnerships to get more done.

6. Measure the success of your communications. Are you trying to get the word out? See how well the message is spreading by monitoring who’s passing it on to others and how the message is changing as it spreads.

7. Feed your biggest fans. Build personal relationships with your biggest fans and give them what they need to spread the word about you (e.g., great stories, photos, videos, inside scoops on what’s happening in your field, etc.). These are the people who will not only introduce you to their friends and expand your circle of supporters, but also stand up and defend you and your cause if attacked by others, so keep them on your side.

8. Increase your own professional knowledge. Identify the leaders and big thinkers (I call them the “big brains”) in your field and keep an eye on the issues they are discussing and the resources they are recommending. It’s like attending a professional networking event without leaving your desk.

9. Keep tabs on your critics. Even if you choose not to respond directly now, keeping up with what your critics are saying will help you develop better rebuttals and fine-tune your messaging in the future.

10. Find your niche. It’s a competitive world, even for nonprofits (some might say especially for nonprofits when financial times are tough). By listening to what’s going on in your professional world, you’ll have a much better understanding of where you fit in, where you can fill gaps, and how you can stand out. And you must stand out – that’s what nonprofit marketing is ultimately all about.

11. Knock down your writer’s block. Not sure what to write about in your newsletter or blog? Read what others in your community are talking about and then write about the trends you see, draft a response to something you found particularly interesting or offensive, or summarize the best points others are making on a particular topic.

12. Pick up a reality check. We all make assumptions each day, but when you make too many, you know what happens: “You make an ass out of u and me.”  (I thought that was so profound when I figured it out at age 10!) Road test your assumptions by putting them out there and listening to the responses you get.

13. Spot programmatic trends earlier. By consistently listening to the “raw feed” you’ll be able to pick up on trends related to your work long before they transform into conventional wisdom. You can adjust your programs accordingly, and when others finally catch up, you’ll be considered on the cutting edge.

14. Respond rapidly to flare-ups. Listening puts you higher up in your own personal fire tower, so when a potential firestorm sparks, you can get water on it much faster than if you were on the ground, miles away.

15. Learn the lingo. Learn what words your target audience is using. The language that your clients use, for example, is often very different from the language that professionals in the field use. The reverse is true too: If you are trying to break into a new community, professional or otherwise, listening is a good way to pick up on some of their jargon and buzzwords.

16. Be relevant. If you want to be considered a player in the space you are working in, you have to be relevant. And to be relevant, you have to understand where people are right now.  Listening helps you keep up with what’s happening to the people who matter to your organization’s success.

17. Give good customer service. If your nonprofit is in the business of providing direct services, the people you serve are not unlike customers at a commercial establishment. Several commercial brands from Dell to Comcast are using social media listening on a near-constant, real-time basis to answer customer questions and address complaints, and you can too.

Want more? Join me for Who’s Talking About You and What Are They Saying? Listening to Online Conversations, a 60-minute webinar on Tuesday, September 8, 2009.

Have more practical uses for what to do with what you hear? Add them by leaving a comment on the blog.

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Market or Promote Your Cause on Social Media? Yes, You Can!

The conventional wisdom these days seems to be that nonprofit organizations should not use social media for marketing, communications, promotion or anything like that. Instead, the CW goes, social media is only for listening and learning (call it market research and professional development if you actually want it to survive your work planning process). Ironically, people who support this point of view generally seem to have no problem with the idea of using social media for fundraising.

I think the conventional wisdom is wrong, because

(1) it assumes that all marketing, communications, and even promotions are one-sided sales pitches. That’s just flat-out false. Good marketing, as Katya Andresen points out all the time, is a respectful conversation. I fear I’ll be making this point forever, but I guess marketing comes with so much baggage, that’s just the way it has to be.

(2) it creates this illusion of  social media “conversation cops” out there waiting to bust anyone who talks about their own programs without first being asked about them. I think this illusion may be scaring off some nonprofits who could really benefit from participating in social media.

Look at a couple of recent tweets from two nonprofit social media rock stars . . .

From the National Wildlife Federation — tweets promoting their photo contest:

• 12 days left to enter the National Wildlife Photo Contest. $25,000 in cash prizes for Pro, Amateur & Youth divisions http://ow.ly/gMiL
• Amazing Wildlife Photos and the True Stories Behind Them: http://ow.ly/gU4F

From the Humane Society of the United States — tweets promoting their work to protect dogs:

• did you know ONE in FOUR shelter dogs are PUREBRED and there are breed-specific rescue groups? http://bit.ly/12Z0Sz
• Wayne’s Blog: Eight-State Dogfighting Raid Largest in U.S. History http://tinyurl.com/ml26gu

These tweets and links clearly promote the organizations, their programs, and their positions. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that!

Rather than saying that nonprofit marketing doesn’t belong in social media, I’d say this.

Good nonprofit marketing via social media is:

• Genuine. Real, specific people at the organization are doing the talking. They never hide behind the 501(c)(3).
• Generous. You promote others, as well as yourself, and freely offer resources, info, help, etc. that advance your mission. You do so by commenting, retweeting, linking, etc.
• Grateful. You acknowledge the support and generosity of others in accomplishing your mission.

Conversely, bad nonprofit marketing via social media is:

• Greedy. Always promoting only one’s organization, programs, and points of view at the exclusion of everything and everyone else.
• Grandstanding. Holding up yourself or your organization as the be-all, end-all, know-it-all.
• Grabby. Always trying to latch on to others or using unrelated posts or tags to get your message out.

(OK, I admit that I entertained myself on an otherwise boring flight this morning by coming up with six alliterative words to describe what I was thinking about. The time crammed in the flying tube really does go by faster when you are working a good word puzzle!)

The reason that NWF and HSUS are social media rock stars is because of their Twitter-stream as a whole (and similar streams on other sites). They include plenty of tweets linking to their own websites and promoting their programs, but also many, many retweets and replies. They aren’t simply talking about themselves, but retweeting people who are talking about aspects of their own lives that are related to the nonprofit’s mission and participating in back-and-forth conversations. We know the staff members behind the organizations. In other words, they are genuine, generous, and grateful. And they are marketing the heck out of their organizations at the same time by being that way!

So, yes, nonprofit friends, you may market, communicate and promote your organization and your cause through social media. But just like any other set of tools, there are good ways and bad ways to go about it. Keep these six Gs of social media marketing in mind, and I think you’ll be just fine.

P.S. I’ll be talking a little more about this on Wednesday, during The Personal/Professional Mix: Getting it Right in Social Media.

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Nonprofit Blogs: 5 Reasons You Do & Don’t Need One

Thursday’s Webinar: Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps and Tales July 9, 2009 1:00 p.m. Eastern (10:00 a.m. Pacific) Get the details and register Missed It? Watch the recording when you get an All-Access Pass.

Does your nonprofit need a blog? That depends on your overall communications strategy. But to help you think through this question, here are my top five reasons why a nonprofit should have a blog and my top five reasons why a nonprofit shouldn’t.

5 Reasons Why You Need a Blog

1. You need a better way to share the small stuff. You have many wonderful little anecdotes that your supporters would love to hear. You also run across cool resources and surprising statistics all the time, but none of it really ranks as “newsletter worthy” because they are too short.  Blogs are perfect for 50-word updates.

2. You need to take people behind the scenes. This is especially important for organizations that work in places people either can’t get to easily on their own (e.g., overseas or restricted areas like hospital wards or prisons) or are reluctant to visit, even if they could (e.g., the “bad part” of town). For your supporters to really get what you do, they have to understand where you do it. Blogging lets you take them there by giving you a platform to share stories and photos over time, creating an ongoing narrative, post by post, all in one easily accessible place.

3. You need a better way to organize the resources you have available. If you see yourself as a service, training, or resource provider, you probably have a ton of information on your website that is actually pretty tough for people to find. One of the beautiful things about blogging is that categories and tags are a natural part of the software, so you can easily group items and your readers can easily find them.

4. You need to react quickly. If your organization responds to breaking news, I don’t see how you can be effective online without a blog — or without the functional equivalent built into your website (i.e. some other kind of RSS-producing “news” section).

5. You need to incubate content for bigger publications. If you produce reports, white papers, books, etc., then a blog is perfect for your organization. It lets you publish bits and pieces as you create them and get comments from others who care about your issues. Then it’s all right there when you are ready to create a larger publication.

5 Reasons Why You Don’t Need a Blog

1. Because transparency is too scary. Blogging is about sharing. If the idea of strangers getting a peek into your work wigs you out, then forget about blogging.

2. Because writing in a personal tone of voice is too hard. Good blog writing is direct, conversational, and personal. If you are only comfortable writing as “the organization” rather than as a person working at the organization, then blogging is not for you.

3. Because criticism is too scary. If you only want to hear from people who think you are brilliant, blogging is not for you. In my opinion, you can’t turn off comments and still call what you are doing blogging. Moderate comments, yes, but don’t delete comments just because they are critical.

4. Because you can’t make the time. Because of the chronological nature of blogging, people pay attention to how often you post. If you can’t post once a week, blogging probably isn’t for you.

5. Because you can’t articulate the value of your blog. If you don’t know how your blog fits into your nonprofit marketing strategy and what you what to accomplish with it, then don’t do it.

P.S. On Thursday, July 9, 2009 at 1:00 p.m., I’m teaching my Blogging 101 webinar called Blogging for Nonprofits: Tips, Traps, and Tales. If you can’t make it live, you can watch the recording if you have an All-Access Pass.

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My Five Favorite Twitter Tools

I’ve received several questions about the Twitter tools I use, so here are my five favorites. Yes, to use Twitter as efficiently as possible, you actually need to do more than what Twitter.com offers!

1. TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop

These tools let you put people you follow into groups, which is essential once you start following more than a couple hundred people. I currently have  groups for nonprofit marketing pros, nonprofits, social media “big brains”, nonprofit tech, and a few others. They will also break out all the replies to you and mentions of your username into separate columns so you can keep track of conversations and retweets. Of course, you can also set up special searches, like your organization’s name or keywords or tags you want to follow.

Both tools do just about the same thing with the differences being fairly technical and/or aesthetic at this point, so pick which ever fits you best. Mashable has been reviewing the constant upgrades to both tools. I’m using TweetDeck for now, but like Seesmic just as well.

2. TwitterFeed

This turns the title of your blog posts into tweets, including a link. So this post here will automatically appear in my Twitter stream shortly after I publish it as “kivilm blogged on My Five Favorite Twitter Tools” with a shortened link to this post.

3. Selective Twitter for Facebook

This Facebook application (add it to your personal Facebook profile) lets you update your Facebook status through Twitter by adding #fb to the end of your tweet. There are other applications that update your Facebook status every time you tweet. But I don’t want everything I put on Twitter to appear as my Facebook status. For example, if you are having a conversation with someone on Twitter, only your side of the conversation would get sent to Facebook and it doesn’t make much sense to your Facebook friends. If you only use Twitter to post “updates” and don’t engage in much banter or replies, those other “all tweets to Facebook” apps will work for you.

4. Friend or Follow (now I’d pick Tweepler)

A great tool to catch up with the people who are following you, but you aren’t following back, and vice-versa. The best part is you can export the list as an excel file and it will also include the person’s profile description. This is great for people like me who fall behind on following. Now I can export this list every now and then and see who I need to go follow. No, I don’t follow everyone who follows me. Some people are clearly just trying to get higher follow/following numbers or work in industries and/or tweet about things completely unrelated to what I care about. If you choose to follow everyone who follows you, then you definitely need to set up groups in TweetDeck or Seesmic to maintain your sanity (assuming that you actually want to read what others are tweeting!)

UPDATE on 7/9/09: I’d replace Friend or Follow on this list with a tool I just used to process 500 followers: Tweepler. You can quickly follow or ignore based on their profile and click to see their last few tweets. By the way, if your updates are protected, I’m not following you unless I already know you well.

5. TweetLater

OK, I admit I haven’t actually used this one yet, but I just heard about it from @johnhaydon and I will definitely use it soon! It allows you to schedule tweets for a later time. When you end up doing a lot of work at night like I do, this is great, because it allows you to work at night, while sharing that work during the day when most people are actually using Twitter.

John is a great source for all things “Twitter for Nonprofits” so check him out. Darren Rowse’s Twitip is also a goldmine, though not specifically geared to nonprofits.

Bonus for Blackberry Storm Users: I tried several different apps that were supposedly optimized for the Storm and landed on TinyTwitter as my favorite — go to http://m.ttwt.at from your mobile browser to download over the air. I use that, along with the mobile Twitter site —  http://m.twitter.com

Tags: twitter

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Where are the Problem Spots on Your Website’s Home Page?

During yesterday’s webinar on “Successful Nonprofit Websites: How to Make Your Website Work for You,” I asked participants to rank their own websites on 8 of the 10 criteria we discussed.

About 30 people participated, mostly from small nonprofits, producing some interesting results from their own evaluations of their websites.

56% said that their website didn’t allow visitors to sign-up for email communication at all. Only 11% said their email newsletter sign-up form appeared either within their site template (and thus on every page) or at least on all of the major pages of the site.

Getting people to your website is the hard part. Don’t let them just disappear back into cyberspace. Encourage visitors to stay in touch with you by signing up for an email newsletter, action alerts, or whatever you’d like to call your email correspondence. The point is to capture those email addresses so you can start a conversation with those website visitors.

In contrast, only 27% said they didn’t offer visitors a way to donate online. Hmmm . . . What’s the reasoning here? You’ll take their money, but not their email address? Maybe because following through with producing the e-communication is more work and throwing a donate button on the site is easy? You need to do both — email communication and online fundraising — and I’m willing to bet that the orgs with donate links with no e-newsletter aren’t raising much online.

72% own just a single domain name. I strongly recommend that at a minimum, nonprofits own the .org, .com, and .net versions of their main domain names. Ideally, you should also own any reasonable guesses that people might make. For example, The Nature Conservancy owns nature.org (its main site), natureconservancy.org, and thenatureconservancy.org. They own most, but not all, of the .com versions as well. When you don’t buy all the versions, someone else will eventually snatch them up and most likely put an advertising site up.

Only 27% said they usually or always have a story on their homepage. 45% said there were no stories on their websites at all! Ack! Storytelling is probably the most powerful marketing tool nonprofits have and yet it’s not being used on websites. Stories are the easiest ways to give examples of the need for your organization, the challenges you face, what you are doing to overcome them, and your successes. If I had to pick one single area for improvement among the group as a whole, it would be this one.

Only 34% said their home page offered visitors a clear path to the top answers and actions they were most likely seeking. To help focus your site on your visitors instead of your organization itself, I recommend that you think about why people would come to your website in the first place. What three questions would they be seeking answers for? What three actions would they like to take (e.g. registering for an event, donating online)?  The path to those answers and actions should be crystal clear on your home page.

It’s a lot to absorb, but the good news is that all of these problems are very fixable. Here’s what a few people said about what they learned during the webinar:

“You hit on so many of the issues I’ve been trying to articulate to my organization about our website that I’m thinking about just having them listen to the recording at our next committee meeting.  The idea of a CMS, of making the website relevant to our clients (and donors and volunteers) and of loosening IT’s grip on the website is so intimidating to agency management that I feel I need another voice to back me up.  They’re open to making changes, so I hope an expert voice will help me make my case!”  ~ Rebekah Hickey, Community Services Consortium

“(Liked) the reinforcing comments about having pictures and stories. Also, I like it when you pose questions about how to improve example websites – the interactivity is great. Also nice to hear other suggestions and get my brain thinking, rather than just being a passive listener.  ~  Erin Kangas, Manitoba Children’s Museum

“(The webinar) had a lot of practical ideas. We are in the process of selecting a company to re-do our website as part of a capacity building grant and I wanted to have some information on what I should ask for. I got it!”  ~ Belisa Urbina, Renovacion Conyugal, Inc

Wish you’d joined us? You can get the next best thing – the video recording – by purchasing an All-Access Pass to Nonprofit Marketing Guide.com. The recording is available in the Webinar Archive right now, along with nearly all the recording from the past year. Your All-Access Pass also let you RSVP for live webinars for the next 12 weeks at no additional cost. Get the details.

P.S. Join us for our next webinar on Tuesday, May 12, Getting Your Nonprofit Started with Social Media.

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Online Marketing Strategy & Website Makeover – Example from #09NTC

My favorite session at last week’s Nonprofit Technology Conference was “This is Iron Chef . . .  Battle Nonprofit.”

Three teams made up of consultants from four different agencies (Beaconfire Consulting, Forum One Communications, Free Range Studios, and Firefly Partners) got together on a Sunday for a strategy and design competition. Their challenge was to remake the online presence of Youth Speaks, a nonprofit presenter of Spoken Word performance, education, and youth development programs. They were all given the same information and amount of time to develop their programs.

Each team, comprised of 3-4 of the consulting firm frienemies, then presented their online strategy and home page redesigns for the first time at the conference. Take a few minutes to check out the slides to see what they came up with. You’ll see how some very creative firms go about a project like this, how they define online goals, set priorities and timelines, and use a blend of tactics.

I was tweeting during the session and these were my impressions as I listened:

• team 1 seemed a little too kitchen sink for me
• loving team 2’s real focus, storytelling, bringing in rural areas, building fan base for artists
• loving team 2’s thanks for attending email the day after event to get people to go online to share their impressions.
• team 3’s emphasis on artist’s own pages that they can really customize is nice touch.
• think I like team 3’s home page the best, but team 2’s strategy the best.

What made this session so good?

The Open Sharing. How often do we get to see four leading firms talk openly about how they would approach a real project, in quite a bit of detail? Uh, never. This one session saved Youth Speaks thousands and thousands of dollars, but it also let all of us learn about ways to approach these kinds of projects too. I admit that I feared that the firms wouldn’t want to give too much away and the proposals would be lightweight, but instead they were really packed with substance. Kudos to the four firms for really sharing their best ideas!

The Collaborative Spirit. This could have easily been set up as a firm-against-firm competition. But by blending the teams, it removed the real-world winners and losers element, and made it much more fun and less pressure-filled (at least it felt that way as someone in the audience – not sure how it felt to be on a team!)

No Right Answer. While there was certainly overlap between the three approaches, this session proves that there is no one right way to do online marketing – so don’t believe anyone who tries to convince you otherwise. Yes, when in doubt, follow the conventional wisdom or best practices, but don’t be afraid to try something new or to put your own twist on it. Although the intention was for the audience to vote on the winner, people were apparently having trouble getting a signal in the Hilton basement, so they did a “Make Noise” vote instead and called it a tie. More proof that there is no “right way.”

I would love to see more collaborative makeovers like this in the nonprofit marketing world. It doesn’t have to take on the whole Iron Chef theme. You may recall that Britt Bravo asked Nancy Schwartz, Katya Andresen, Nedra Weinreich, and me to review the Social Actions home page back in October. Here’s what we all said.

That wasn’t structured as a competition, but the outcome was similar – lots of concrete ideas that a real nonprofit can sort through and use, while also letting others learn from the analysis and strategies as well.

By the way, it was fabulous hanging out with Nancy, Katya, and Britt at the conference. (Photo of Britt and me by Nancy Schwartz. Photo of Nancy, Katya, and me by Nice Waiter at Foreign Cinema).

I’m already mulling over ways to pull them into some kind of Iron Chef / Extreme Makeover Something or Another for next year’s conference (Mark your calendars for NTC 2010 in Atlanta, April 8-10). Your ideas for a session? Or something we could do sooner online? Leave a comment.

P.S. Webinar Reminders: Successful Nonprofit Websites: Making Your Site Work for You this Wednesday, May 6 and Getting Your Nonprofit Started with Social Media on Tuesday, May 12.

Tags: 09NTC

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When Trying to Fundraise from Friends of Friends is a Complete Waste of Time

When we talk about fundraising through social media (and we had many of these conversations at 09NTC this week), the discussion always turns to how we should go about converting into long-term donors those friends of friends  -  people who gave to the cause because a friend of theirs and an existing supporter of ours (let’s call her the “Original Fan”) asked them to.

The standard advice is to come up with a cultivation campaign that introduces these new people to the organization over time and encourages them to become involved as a volunteer or donor on their own, directly with the nonprofit.

The problem is that this treats the Original Fan, whom we sometimes call the evangelist or über-friend, like some kind of inconvenient or spent middle man. For many nonprofits, the Original Fan is anything but a middle man; instead he or she is more like a gatekeeper or nightclub bouncer. It’s only through the Original Fan that the nonprofit will have access to those people and their wallets.

Most national organizations with widely understood or broadly supported missions should probably go ahead and try to establish direct relationships with all of those friends of friends. But nonprofits with specific geographic limitations or niche missions (e.g., diseases that affect relatively few people) should move forward much more carefully and deliberately, checking to see just how likely it is that the friends of friends will actually convert into long-term, direct donors.

For example, I recently donated to the Community Food Bank of New Jersey,  because my friend Nancy Schwartz asked me to as part of her birthday celebration.  While I certainly support the mission of food banks in general, I live in North Carolina. Nancy is the sole reason that I donated to this food bank in New Jersey. No matter how many newsletters or appeal letters the Community Food Bank of New Jersey might send me in the future, it is extremely unlikely that I will ever give them another dime.

Unless, of course, Nancy – the Original Fan – asks me to.

That’s why when the executive director of Positive Wellness Alliance (PWA)- the beneficiary of my own birthday fundraiser and also a very locally based organization – asked whether she should add the names of my donating friends to her prospect database, I told her no. (I serve on the board, so that’s why I was asked. I doubt few Original Fans are consulted at all – which may be part of the problem.)

Instead, I asked her to send a thank-you note directly to my donating friends and invite them to sign-up for PWA’s e-newsletter, should they want to.  I’ve asked her not to message these people again otherwise. Why?

Because as the Original Fan, I know these people are giving because of me, and because I asked, not really because of the cause. While I’m sure that everyone who donated to PWA supports the mission, just as I support food banks, nearly all of the people who donated lived outside the geographic service area, and I believe it’s extremely unlikely that they would give again on their own.

Unless, of course, I – the Original Fan – asked them to.

I hope it is clear by now where I am going with this. While your nonprofit should definitely spend some time coming up with cultivation strategies for friends of friends, it is equally important (and more important for local or niche organizations) to develop strategies to keep your Original Fans fully engaged and willing to fundraise again and again for you.

The food bank and PWA don’t need strategies to reach Nancy’s friends and my friends; they need strategies to keep Nancy and me and all of the Original Fans happy with the organization and excited about its work so that we will continue to tap our networks on their behalf. It’s just not worth twisting ourselves in all different directions trying to convert these people into direct donors when it’s both easier and more productive to more fully engage the Original Fan.

Does your org have strategies of either kind — for friends of friends or for the Original Fans? Where do you think nonprofits should put the most priority? Leave a comment and let’s talk about it.

Tags: 09NTC

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See What Your E-Newsletter Looks Like in Different Email Programs

“Oh, no! That’s what our newsletter looks like to a third of the people on our mailing list?!?” Don’t be her. Preview your e-newsletter in different email programs.

Those new to the world of e-newsletter publishing are often surprised to learn that their email newsletters can look quite different to someone who is using Outlook versus someone using  Gmail or Thunderbird, not to mention what it looks like on a smartphone. That’s because email programs (called email clients) process HTML in different ways.

The only way to be sure that your email newsletter template is working well in all the major clients is to actually view it in all of the different programs.

While some email newsletter service providers make this easier than others, it’s not a standard service. But two companies do offer testing programs that will deliver screen shots of your newsletter in various email programs at reasonable prices, even if you don’t use them to send out your newsletter: Mail Chimp’s Inbox Inspector, powered by ReturnPath, (sign up for a free account, then buy three tests for $29) and Campaign Monitor’s Design and Spam Test (sign up for a free account, then pay $5 per test).

It’s well worth paying for the test services every now and then, especially when you make changes to your layout.

If you simply can’t pay, you can do it yourself, but the hassle factor is high. Start by getting free accounts at services like Gmail and Yahoo and installing multiple email programs on your computer (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird). Beg friends with various ISPs (e.g. AOL, Roadrunner, Comcast) to do screen captures for you. Then run your own tests.

The goal isn’t necessarily to make your newsletter look exactly the same in every program. It’s to make sure that your newsletter is readable in every program and that there aren’t any wacky design shifts that are so distracting that the reader instantly hits delete.

I tweaked my Nonprofit Marketing Tips newsletter this week (go here to sign up, in the left sidebar, under the blue bar) and ran it through both services this morning. Here’s what I found.

MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector

To Run the Test: Set up a free account. Go to Create a Campaign > Inbox Inspector Test.  You’ll copy and paste your HTML, and add some other campaign details. Then you’ll pay $29 for 3 tests (nonprofits may get a better deal – I don’t know.). Within one minute, the results started to come in, but they changed after a few minutes, so I’d give it at least 15 minutes before even looking at it.

Campaign Monitor’s Design and Spam Test

To Run the Test: Set up a free account. This email service specializes in serving designers who manage e-newsletters for multiple clients. Just pretend you are your own client. Click on the client name, then create a new campaign (you have to have the campaign ready to go before clicking on the “Run a Design and Spam Test” button). Instead of cutting and pasting your HTML, you have to upload the HTML file. When I got to the section about the mailing list, I stopped and clicked on Design and Spam Testing, and it asked for a $5 payment. Speed was about the same – some results quickly, but not worth looking at until about 15 minutes later.

If you are using another email newsletter provider rather than creating your own HTML, simply login to your account, open a newsletter, go the HTML tab and copy the code. Paste it into a plain text program like Notepad. Then you can copy/paste into these services.

The Results and Pros/Cons of Each System

Plain Text Versions: Both systems convert your HTML to plain text versions for you, although Campaign Monitor’s looked much cleaner than MailChimp’s. Campaign Monitor also showed me the recommended line length on the plain text message, which is nice, so you can add hard-returns if you want.

Spam Filter: My newsletter passed all of the Spam Filter tests in both systems,  although there were some non-lethal warnings. For example, apparently the McAfee Security Center spam filter considers these words somewhat spammish: source, way, focus, print, pass, accounts, really, others. It would be crazy to worry about such common words, so I’m not going to. Campaign Monitor said McAfee identified 25 words like this as warnings, where MailChimp said McAfee found 30 words. I guess they must be using different versions of McAfee in their testing.

MailChimp tested against eight different spam filters. Campaign Monitor tested against the same ones, plus the Norton 2008 spam filter, but after several hours, the Norton results aren’t available, so that’s a wash.

Content Assessment

MailChimp analyzes your HTML for you and suggests code fixes. I ran the “clean up HMTL” tool in Dreamweaver before running the tests, but MailChimp still found a few code errors. Fortunately nothing serious — just leaving the # sign off of some of the color codes. My heart did skip a beat when it said it found 47 content errors, however. Turns out they were all spelling errors, which weren’t really mistakes (it didn’t like my name, the way I hyphenated All-Acess Pass, etc.). Campaign Monitor doesn’t offer this service.

Email Client Screen Shots

This is what I really cared about.

MailChimp’s Inbox Inspector

Campaign Monitor’s Design and Spam Test

After about an hour, only half of the screen shots were back in both services, but by that point, they both produced some of the biggies, like Outlook, Gmail, Comcast, and AOL. I had simplified my design quite a bit, although I still use a table with two columns, so I wanted to make sure the text wasn’t flowing or overlapping in any strange ways. Fortunately, everything looked reasonably good across the various platforms, although neither one was able to come up with a screen shot from Yahoo! Mail today.

The screenshots did remind me to set all image borders to zero so a blue box doesn’t appear around them when a link is attached. The blue blox showed up in AOL and Comcast, but not Gmail and Earthlink. I’d rather not have it anywhere, so it’s worth adding the border setting in.

Overall, I like Campaign Monitor’s screen shots better. They let you toggle images on and off when those email clients offer that option to readers, so you get a clear picture of exactly what people are seeing. MailChimp lets you see the same thing, but in a less convenient way – you have to open the preview of images on and the preview of images off. Campaign Monitor also groups the screen shots by web-based email clients, desktop email clients, and mobile clients, which I found much easier to scan, where MailChimp groups them all together.  MailChimp does show several clients used in Europe, if that matters to you, that Campaign Monitor doesn’t.

What’s Missing

It would be really nice if these services included screen shots of what your email looks like in different web-based email programs in different web browsers. That’s where you can see some real differences.

Look at the these three screen captures of my newsletter in my Gmail inbox viewed in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Chrome. Though I prefer Firefox as a user, my newsletter looks the worst in this browser. The text at the top is wrapping oddly so that my name and organization are below the logo instead of beside it like in the others. Firefox and Chrome both remove padding within the table, so the columns butt up against each other, where Explorer keeps the nice white space. Chrome doesn’t include the ALT text on the images in the sidebar, so those are just blank boxes, while the others give you some of the text.

None of these differences are earth-shattering for this particular newsletter, but they could make a real difference depending on your layout and how important your pictures are.

In Mozilla Firefox 3.0.5

In Windows Internet Explorer 7

In Google Chrome 1.0.154.36

My Bottom-Line Recommendation

I prefer Campaign Monitor’s service, and it’s the more affordable option too (always a nice result!). If you really want that extra code check or send lots of email to Europe, then I’d take another look at MailChimp. In addition, be sure to preview the HTML file in different web browsers to make sure there aren’t any differences you can’t tolerate. If you pasted your code into Notepad, just open the browser and go to File, then Open to view your HTML – it doesn’t need to be online to be previewed.

P.S. Get more email newsletter tips during tomorrow’s webinar on E-Newsletter Essentials (1/7/09).

Tags: Campaign Monitor, email preview, MailChimp, nptech, spam test

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