This morning I went to a session on Building Relationships Online: Designing a Comprehensive Strategy. It was pretty good. It may have been better titled “effective memership-based and membership-building communication.” Two speakers had some great ideas that I want to use, the others were OK, but it felt kind of repetitive and obvious.
The two points that I took away and want to take back to work are:
- Test your messages. This is so damn obvious, but I’m sorry to say we hardly ever do it. We are usually either frantic, oh-my-god-the-senate-just-did-what? mode, or else we have invested so much in the material that we can’t afford to incorporate feedback anyway.
- Know your list. This is something I talk about, but don’t do. Hearing the speakers talk about their memberships, “they are 80% female, affluent, college educated, pet owners, interested in…” I realized that although I have some assumpions, I really don’t know who is on the lists that I train people to message to!