Email is dead.
by Michael HoffmanThursday, December 21st, 2006
Email is dead.
Now that might seem like a very strong position to take. Maybe a better way to put it is that email is dying. Before I prove it to you, I want to tell you that the consequences of this are huge, especially for nonprofits and many nonprofit vendors.
While many nonprofits have been using email for donor stewardship, advocacy and communication for years, many others are just discovering tools such as GetActive (and their competitors), to manage sophisticated email campaigns. In many parts of the nonprofit sector we are just now getting to clear best-practices with email. Many organizations are discovering the potential of email newsletters, fundraising appeals and advocacy solicitations. These folks are spending lots of staff time and money to ramp up their email programs, just when the whole thing is starting to fall apart.
Nonprofits need to start, right now, thinking about how they can transition their electronic communication from an email-centered universe to one where email becomes one of many communications strategies. The vendors also need to be more aggressive in their release of new products and services that help organizations make the transition. From my conversations with a few people at some of the larger vendors, I think there are two things happening – two normal business things. On the one hand they are desperate to keep email alive, even if it’s on life-support. Email is their bread and butter and they are fighting tooth and nail to address the issues that are killing it. But their power in this regard is limited; the problems are bigger than they are. On the other hand, they are starting to develop new tools, and pushing additional services, such as full-blown content management systems that integrate their email management tools with website management tools. One problem they have is that most of their technical resources are not dedicated to R&D but rather to support of existing products and services. The pace will be slow. One thing to watch here is the movement of open-source systems and how they might provide an alternative, especially for smaller organizations.
Why is email dying? Here are the four main reasons:
1. Spam.
Yes, you could have guessed this one. I hate my in-box. It’s become the enemy. Someone told me yesterday that they have a client who has an assistant come in at 7am everyday and spend an hour and a half deleting spam before the boss gets in. That’s insane. The story in the New York Times on this subject reports that an estimated 9 out of 10 emails flowing through the Internet are Spam. 90%! For my email I would guess it’s been about 80%. We are installing Brightmail on our Exchange Server next week and I will let you know what happens. Obviously the system is terribly broken. The last thing I want is to sign up for another email newsletter and put something else in my inbox.
2. Our reactions to Spam.
As bad as Spam is, our reactions to it might be worse. What inspired me to write this post in the first place was that in the same day I got two anti-spam messages in response to emails I sent. Both of these required me to reply to the automated message BEFORE the my original message would end up in my target’s inbox. One of them used a captcha, the other simply a reply. Here’s an example of a company selling this product, which is a hardware solution that sits on your email server.
The first problem with these is that the messages end up in my inbox or more likely my Spam folder. If every email I send generates one back to me I am in big trouble! (Most of these systems only require you to do it once, but I send a lot of email to new people.) The second problem here is for organizations and legitimate mass mailers. How do you deal with this and not have open rates even more in the toilet than they already are? Even without these drastic measures the likelihood that the email newsletter – sent from a third-party vendor – gets caught in my spam filter is pretty great. I doubt many people add info@whatver to their address book, even when the organizations ask them to.
Another recent anti-Spam reaction was a logic puzzle implemented by Congress to limit the amount of emails generated from all these advocacy campaigns. The email vendor community reacted harshly to this, starting petitions, trying to get them to stop. But can we blame them? And more than that, we know already that these kind of emails are heavily discounted by Congressional offices. My (totally out of thin air) guess is that a handwritten (or typed) personal letter from a constituent is worth 7,345 emails in terms of influence in your average congressional office.
3. Email is reactive and puts others in control of our agenda
I think this is a big one, and one we don’t hear discussed very often. I read recently about a boss who turns off the email server one day a week. Why? He wants people to get work done! How often do you hear that alert or see that mini-preview pane of an email and stop whatever you are doing and react to it by firing off a response. Faster than you can say “Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.” Steven Covey’s management classic First Things First about time management says that to be productive you have to prioritize and block out time for things that are important. You can’t do that if you react to your email 50 times a day.
The inbox is not prioritized. It is a list that we usually keep in chronological order. Going down the list is like randomly assigning tasks with no thought to their importance. It is not a good way to manage information.
4. My kids don’t use email
My kids are online more and more. And while my 8-year old sends an occasional email to her grandparents (in response to their emails) my 11 year-old web addict never touches it. They IM! And they leave notes on little kids game websites. And they surf together while talking on the phone. Email? Nope.
Email won’t totally die, but it won’t work the communications magic it once did. What will replace email? Of course, a combination of things, deployed differently for different organizations. Here are some of the email alternatives that organizations should be considering now:
a. RSS
We techies love RSS but adoption has lagged. Still, I was impressed when I saw Techcrunch has 140+ thousand feed readers, even though its all techie. (I am assuming the 140,000 number from Feedburner refers to feed readers and not all readers.) As Google, Yahoo, Firefox and now IE7 continue to push feeds, adoption will increase. Bet on that.
b. Custom IM – Direct to Desktop communications
I have batted this idea around with Nick Allen from Donordigital for a while and now see it implemented around a few places. The idea is to have something similar to an Instant Messaging application – where it sits in your tray on a PC. But this is one-way IM. The organization can message you and a note pops up on your desktop. You can ignore it, and it goes away, or click it and go to a web page where you get more information. It’s like a feed reader/widget that delivers items one at a time, in their own branded desktop thingy. (Technical enough for you?) Here’s an example from folks supporting Israel called Megaphone.
c. Widgets
Widgets are the next big thing. A widget is a small application that can sit on your desktop on a web page. It is connected to a central server and delivers updated information. I am right now using the ChipIn widget on my blog so that my daughter can raise some money as part of her Bat Mitzvah tzedakah project. The idea of distributing content is a core of what people call Web 2.0. Organizations need to change their thinking for this to work. It is not, bring people “here” all the time. It’s put the information there. The “there” is MySpace, blogs, Google and Yahoo home pages, etc. This is the essence of Nonprofit Communication 2.0.
If you have your own email horror story or idea of what will replace email, blog about it and trackback or email me at michael-at-see3-dot-net.
December 22nd, 2006 at 1:11 pm
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