Are Your Action Alerts Not Getting the Response You'd Like? Join the Crowd

If your advocacy alerts aren’t generating as much action as you would like, don’t worry. You’re not alone. According to M+R Benchmarks’ 2015 report, non-profts see an average of only 29 actions from every 1,000 e-mails sent. This is down 18% from 2014. So, yeah. It’s getting more and more difficult to get advocates to take action.

At the same time, the success rates in getting people to hand over cash to the organization (i.e., fundraising e-mails) is INCREASING. I suspect there might be a connection between these two trends. Many people don’t believe their voice matters, so they don’t want to take action. But they still want the organization to be able to make a difference (whether in advocacy or other arenas), so they give money.

What can we do with this? Well, we want to keep the momentum on money coming in going while also boosting advocacy action rates, right? So how do we do that? Two pretty obvious options occur to me:

First, increase the size of your audience. Many organizations are turning to social media to get the word out to more people, and potential advocates are starting to get on the bandwagon. In fact, the rate of Facebook likes and Twitter follows is increasing far more than e-mail sign-ups.  As more and more people turn to these sites (while deleting your e-mails), you better be sure you’ve got a social media strategy for your action alerts.

Second, get more of the 1,000 people receiving the e-mails to take action. Maybe (and this is something explored in much more detail in the M+R report) if you tie fundraising goals to advocacy outcomes, you’ll be able to leverage that to get more people to participate in the policy process. Maybe.

Anyway, I’m just touching on the tip of the iceberg here. There is a ton of really great information in here. To get your paws on it (for free – or, at least, in exchange for your e-mail address), go to www.m+rbenchmarks.com. You can download in either 3D and 2D, but I recommend the 2D, as most of us don’t have 3D glasses laying around (or is this a thing I don’t know about?). Check out the tool that allows you to compare your association to the industry standards and even make a cool infographic. Seriously, it’s pretty awesome.

- Written by Stephanie Vance, Advocacy Guru