July 22, 2009

Sierra Club Capitalizes On Sanford’s Shenanigans

By Mark Hrywna

Who says nonprofits don’t have a sense of humor? The Sierra Club blasted an email to some of its members last week asking to “help Gov. Sanford find the Appalachian Trial.”

The “Dear Friend” email from Deputy Director Greg Haegerle, promoting a new online community, begins: “We heard the governor of South Carolina had some trouble finding the Appalachian Trail last week.”

It continued: “We don't want that to happen to anyone else, so now’s a perfect time to let you know about our new online community: Sierra Club Trails. Members of the community are adding trails from around the country, sharing spectacular photos, and discussing topics such as whether guns should be allowed in our national parks.”

South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford originally told his staff that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail for a few days only to be found that he actually flew to Argentina over the Father’s Day weekend to meet a mistress.

Feedback to the email has been very positive in and outside the organization, from its humor to effective use of current events, said Jim Bradbury, online communications manager for the Sierra Club. He could only think of one complaint that the email was in poor taste.

What really stood out, Bradbury said, was that the original email was forwarded much more heavily than usual -- a bonus for the Sierra Club in its aim to get people outside of its normal email lists to find out about the site.

Sierra Club Trails is one of about three social networking/online community sites sponsored by the Sierra Club, separate from its own Web site. It was launched in beta version only a couple of weeks earlier and traffic tripled the week of the Sanford email, though Bradbury couldn’t attribute the spike entirely to the email. A larger email blast was sent the week before promoting Sierra Club Trails to a segment of membership.

The list of members that got the email was relatively small, Bradbury said, because they’d already sent one about the trails site to members interested in hiking or green living. This time, the club was planning an email to less than 10 percent of its total list, those members who are more politically engaged or interested in advocacy. “We segmented the audience a little that way,” he said.

That audience typically has a higher open rate than normal, Bradbury said, but it still was even higher than usual, almost double, for the Sanford email. Traffic to the site was triple what it was the week before, though he could not say for sure it was completely a result of the email.

It’s rare for the organization to capitalize on a breaking news event because of its sheer size. “It’s difficult to move that quickly on something; everything really kind of fell into place,” he said. “We’re really lucky that we got that email out,” said Bradbury, because just a few hours later Sanford was bumped off front pages everywhere by the death of Michael Jackson. “Really it was only out there a few hours,” he said.

“We don’t get many opportunities to do something like this,” said Bradbury. The organization already had been planning some outreach to membership about the launch of the trail site. He called the Sanford news hook a “spontaneous brainstorm.” People are more likely to open email with topical relevance, and this one had a little humor to boot. “It was a little different for us,” he said, running it past a few people first to see if it wasn’t too out of character or in bad taste.

The Sierra Club was committed to doing an email that day (June 25) and specifically for its political/advocacy-leaning members, Bradbury said. Without the Sanford news hook, he said it might have been sent a few days later. The nonprofit sends emails almost every day to some parts of its membership list, whether its advocacy, renewals, green living other segments.

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This article is from NPT TechnoBuzz, a publication of The NonProfit Times.

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