I’ve been in the business of advocacy communications a long time. And like all methods of communications, there are some best practices that have been established by experts in the field that you may want to consider adopting.

Spam is not just for breakfast anymore. And spam laws are strict, and the company that provides your CRM is equally as strict about their whitelist status. Most importantly you should be too, since you don’t want your emails to land into a junk folder. “Free”, “Opportunity”, “Act now”, and other ambiguous words can sink your email before you even reach your subscriber. Many CRM providers may have a list of words they recommend you avoid, check with them as a good place to start.

K.I.S.S. (keep it short, silly). The standard for subject lines these days is 50 character max. Remember, this should be something that will make your member want to open your email, not be turned off, overwhelmed or completely bored and delete it before they even read what you have to say. Not to mention in today’s world, people are accessing your emails on their smart phone. And a long subject line will definitely get cut off.

Test, test, test! Part of a successful email marketing program is analyzing your data is a practice you should incorporate into your continual evaluation. If you’re unsure how a subject line will perform, test it. Do an A/B split test (we’ll be blogging on that subject too, stay tuned) on your subject lines, let it run for 24 hours and whatever the winner is, use that subject line for the remainder of your group. It’s always a good idea to see how previous subject lines performed as well. You can test short v. long, straightforward v. ambiguous, etc.

Localize it. If you’re inviting people to an event or you want people to take action on an issue that is close to them, add it to the subject line. Check out Organizing for America, the Humane Society & travel sites like Travelocity to see some good examples of using this information in subject lines.

There are a lot of things to remember when creating a successful email marketing campaign. But do not underestimate the power of a smart and savvy subject line- it can make all the difference. To find out how Amplify Public Affairs can help you create email marketing campaigns that deliver results, visit us online at www.amplifypublicaffairs.net.

Though you might cry foul (or FAIL!), this cost-per-click model is really nothing new. Google Adwords works the same way. The lower your ad quality is calculated to be, the more you’ll see your investment affected by higher costs per click. Ad quality may be determined by several factors, including whether users view your ad as relevent to their search. In this way, the system pretty much punishes you for not thinking about and A/B testing for variables like audience, keywords and copy.

Back to Facebook. In Colin’s example of a recent ad campaign, he saw the most clever and creative ads do badly and therefore cost more, while the more generic ads skyrocketed. This is another bizarre and often frustrating fact about advertising. What YOU think is a good ad may not actually translate to the average user. Why this is true we may never know. But this is why we always say TEST, TEST, TEST. Create a spectrum of ad copy running from bland to snarky. Choose a variety of images – including ones you wouldn’t click on yourself…because the people you want to reach are not you.

And here’s my most important advice for someone about to test Facebook ads: separate your ads into individual campaigns. Why? If you have one ad in particular that is doing terribly, it will bring your campaign’s average click-through rate down, and your high-performing ads may suffer the consequences. So different ads and different target settings get split into different campaigns, to save your good ads the embarrassment of being seen with their less popular counterparts.

It’s a harsh truth, but in this case, popularity wins every time. Is it so far off-base to call your most winning ads your “cheerleaders”?

About two weeks ago, I took a screen-capture of the front page of Crist’s campaign site shortly before he announced his party switch. One element of the site that caught my eye was an image linking to an issues page, which said: “*Consistent Leadership* The Charlie Crist Conservative Record.” This had been a part of his site for some months, in an effort to defend credentials on the right when he was running in the Republican primary against Marco Rubio.

Now the “consistent leadership” remains, but in a slightly different form: “*Consistent Leadership* The Charlie Crist Record.” The word “conservative” has been deleted.

Here is the before picture:

And here is the after picture:

Facebook ads offer a low-risk, pay-per-click opportunity to start reaching out to new audiences. Within an enormous pool of potential new contacts,  you can target a large swath of people, or a very specific group—say, all people who live within 25 miles of Washington, DC, are women between the ages of 18 and 25, and list “hiking” as an interest. That’s about 2,100 people, by the way.

And according to a new report from Nielsen—as well as Amplify’s years of experience—these ads work when done right. Ads can be effective during a one-off campaign, even if you haven’t developed a Facebook presence. But if you’re really interested in cultivating a following that will be there for all your future campaigns, you should start out with ads that attract people to your fan page, taking some time to get them acquainted with your organization.

Nielsen’s report, Understanding the Value of a Social Media Impression, analyses the results of over 125 ad campaigns and 800,000 Facebook users . It concludes that, just as with traditional PR, a combination of paid media and earned media will reap the biggest rewards.

• Paid Media. For paid media in this case the report recommends starting with “Homepage ads” – the Facebook social ads that ask you to become a fan (or “Like” you, as is now the case)—combined with the more personal version of these ads in which a friend who’s already a fan is listed in the ad—suggesting the endorsement of someone the reader trusts. In branding terms, this adds up to a substantial increase in ad recall, brand awareness and purchase intent.
• Earned Media. Of course, more people taking action means more “earned media”—in this case, the story showing up on people’s Facebook feeds (as well as being actively shared)… what we call the “networking effect.” This is harder to quantify, but it’s clear that what earned media lacks in reach, it makes up for in how effectively it zeroes in on future fans.

The same branding recommendations hold true with advocacy groups. This is all a fancy way of saying that before you can expect people to do something, they should already know who you are and like what you do. This is far more likely to be the case if your message catches their attention, and if their friends will vouch for you.

The main takeaway is that it’s the time spent cultivating your fans before your next big campaign, and not the campaign itself, that will make all the difference. Your message could be the most important information in the world, but if nobody’s looking, it doesn’t matter.

To learn more about how Amplify can help you leverage Facebook, email Elena Berger.

World AIDS Day answered this question on December 1. The HubSpot marketing blog described the participation from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and even Google. Each site let its users participate in spreading AIDS awareness in a way that matched its mission (change your Facebook profile picture, make your tweets display in red, add a picture of a printed sign to a Flickr group…).

So what lessons can you learn from the World AIDS Day social media campaign? Instead of limiting your efforts to one specific site, take advantage of the variety social media offers by spreading your message through multiple channels. Such a multi-faceted social media campaign that elicits the power of multiple sites enables increased visibility and the opportunity to reach a larger audience.

An integrated campaign will reach more supporters and create greater awareness – when you have the time and partners to pull it off.

But that may not be good advice for advocacy. The Obama campaign made subject lines teasers rather than headlines: “Something extraordinary”, “A beginning”, “You have to see this”, “Results”, “In his own words”. Of course, there was little chance you’d forget what to expect from their emails, given how many they sent. And Politico has talked about the e-mail subject heading war, with PR staffers writing self-consciously clever lines to get reporters to open their emails.

So what should you use? Simple: whatever gets your organization the best results. Test an informative subject, a teaser, a challenge, something personalized, a question, something forwarded…. Pretty much any email system will let you do A/B testing with a fraction of your list and then send the better-performing email to everyone else. Take advantage – you don’t know what will work best for your audiences until you have actual data from their actions.

Sally's list (visit her post for the excellent reasons):

• Frogloop, Care2's nonprofit online marketing blog
• Beaconfire Wire
• Mobile Commons
• Sea Change Strategies
• The Agitator

And mine:

Three smart consultants:

• Beth's Blog: How Nonprofits Can Use Social Media – Lots of great advice, plus additional projects like We Are Media.
• Katya's Nonprofit Marketing Blog – Using marketing techniques for social good – she's the author of Robin Hood Marketing.
• SocialFishing by Maddie Grant – How associations can use social media, along with the Nonprofit Technology Network Water Cooler weekly chats.

Two software companies Convio would (for very understandable reasons) not list:

• Wild Apricot Blog – Advice for nonprofits and associations, centered around technology but going beyond their own products.
• Blackbaud's NetWits Think Tank – Some ideas posts, some technology posts, with an aggregated list of jobs at their clients at the bottom – nice touch.

And one innovative foundation:

• Pro Bono Junkie's Blog – News of the volunteering world and how to integrate volunteering into your career.  The Taproot Foundation puts together teams of volunteers that provide strategy, marketing, and technology consulting to nonprofits (I've volunteered with them as a project manager).

Would love to hear anyone else's favorites as well.

On the corporate side, integrated marketing communications and multichannel marketing
are responding to the same trends, and companies know that "Users who
interact with your company over multiple channels are more loyal than
single-channel customers." The trick is to become part of people's lives, something they choose to become more involved in over time – and keep reaching them in different ways, so they don't get bored.

We think about integrated advocacy campaigns as including:

• traditional public affairs – Hill briefings, media relations, coalition building;
• conventional online tactics – petitions, email newsletters, tell-a-friend forms;
• and new social media tools – virtual events, micromedia, social networks.

It's not easy to coordinate everything, but each piece increases your impact. Why not add something your constituents will want to tell their friends about?