It has become almost a mantra among fundraisers: integrating your online and offline fundraising yields higher returns.

In my experience at Heritage, coördinating our direct mail and e-mail appeals brings in more money from both the online and the offline channels. This tracks with what Convio has found in its nonprofit benchmark reports (link in PDF).

But the Obama campaign, famous for testing every element of its work, did very little to integrate its online and offline efforts. That’s according to Steve Diagneault, who reports that “they hardly integrated with snail mail”:

The online program was mostly a separate entity from the direct mail stream. They used some of the same basic branding and content, but, by and large the channels were optimized to raise the most revenue possible, and that meant not integrating the details.

Does this mean the campaign didn’t even try to integrate its direct mail and online channels? Or that they tested it and found integration not to be worth the trouble?

If you have any insights, please let me know in the comments.

Harsh words for Google Reader aside, Aldo Cortesi offers an interesting analysis of the competitive landscape of the RSS reader market.

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Nathanael Yellis asks an important question: “why not make your organization’s emails more like the emails you send to your friends and colleagues?”

He’s right. There’s really no good reason not to do that.

Here are a few ways you can strengthen your organization’s e-mails to make them livelier, more interesting, and more personal:

• Include a salutation. Open your e-mails with a greeting: “Dear Jim,” or “Rebecca –.” That’s how you open your messages to your friends, right?
• Write your e-mails to one person. Remember, it’s an individual receiving your e-mail. Especially if you’re using a salutation, write to one person, not a group. Avoid at all costs language like “all of you” that’s addressed to a group. If it helps, keep one recipient in mind as you write.
• Be casual. Nobody writes an e-mail like they do a formal letter. So you shouldn’t either. Use short sentences and short paragraphs. When appropriate for clarity, break grammatical rules: start a sentence with a conjunction or end with a proposition.
• Use simple e-mail templates. Avoid the temptation to make e-mail templates pretty. Remember, an over-designed e-mail not only seems impersonal but may distract your readers from your message’s goal, whether it’s clicking or even just reading your content.

What else? What other elements can help make your e-mail marketing more human?

Even small changes in response times can have significant effects. Google found that moving from a 10-result page loading in 0.4 seconds to a 30-result page loading in 0.9 seconds decreased traffic and ad revenues by 20%. When the home page of Google Maps was reduced from 100KB to 70-80KB, traffic went up 10% in the first week, and an additional 25% in the following three weeks. Tests at Amazon revealed similar results: every 100 ms increase in load time of Amazon​.com decreased sales by 1%.

Citations omitted. Via A List Apart.

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Data can be a powerful tool to help you optimize just about anything—from your online marketing to your company’s personnel decisions.

When Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer decided to end remote working, she relied on data to help make her decision:

After spending months frustrated at how empty Yahoo parking lots were, Mayer consulted Yahoo’s VPN logs to see if remote employees were checking in enough.

Mayer discovered they were not — and her decision was made.

It’s not just businesses following using data for decisions. The Obama campaign obsessively measured its every activity, and sports franchises collect volumes of data about their players’ performance.

Data can help you, too—if you know what to do with it

“Data is an incredibly valuable resource for organizations,” Rob Bluey reports from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, “but you must be able to communicate its value to stakeholders making decisions—whether that’s in the pursuit of athletes or voters.”

That value, though, isn’t inherent. Marketing and behavioral data, which exists in unimaginably vast quantities, drives no decisions on its own. It’s essentially useless without smart people asking good questions.

Start with a good question

At Yahoo, data did not make Mayer’s decision for her. She started with a business question—are employees actually working from home the way they’re supposed to?—and then used data to arrive at an answer.

Likewise, piles of data about Barack Obama’s online supporters didn’t, of itself, make decisions for the Obama campaign, either. Instead, their marketers started with a question: whether their gut instincts about web design or e-mail behavior were right. They then set up a test to answer the question, and used behavioral data to draw conclusions.

Your question doesn’t need to be revolutionary. In fact, it can be mundane. But without a question, all the data you collect will just sit there collecting dust.