Email troubles: pick your battles
What happens when your organization’s outbound emails are getting flagged as “potential spam”?
Lots of headaches, that’s what.
Your constituents find your emails in their Junk folder — or not delivered at all.
Your staff have no confidence that any emails are being received, whether that’s your annual end-of-year appeal, your newsletters, or just a simple “Hi Allen” email to a single recipient.
Your organization is all but cut off from the world.
That was the situation of an organization that came to me this week. We discussed a few options:
Get this fixed ASAP for all of the ways that email is going out now (Gmail, CiviCRM, MailChimp, etc.)
Additionally work to improve sender reputation by establishing strong policies for list maintenance, relevant content, and effective segmentation.
Further streamline the whole operation by decreasing the number of systems that are sending email: get CiviCRM fully configured for all mass email use cases, and get rid of MailChimp and other newsletter services.
They were interested in all of it, but like everyone, they face numerous pressures of limited time and limited budgets.
So they made a smart decision:
Solve the immediate crisis now: at a minimum, we have to be able to send email reliably, and that can’t wait.
Take on more proactive improvements in the new year, when the immediate crisis has passed and new funds are available.
Here’s the thing:
You’ll probably never be able to solve every problem and pursue all of your aspirations at once.
Picking your battles is a matter of considering both urgency and importance, and weighing that against available resources and potential value.
Being able to think clearly in a crisis is key. And with practice, we can all learn to do it.
All the best,
A.