You’ve Got Mail
I’ve been thinking about my email journey … no not the email journey you get when you sign up or buy something online, but my journey with email. You might ask why?
One of my favourite movies is … you’ve guessed it, is ‘You’ve got Mail’ with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Classic. Go watch it if you haven’t — it’s on Netflix! Anyway, I digress. Back in 1998 email was accompanied by whirring and beeping as your dial-up service connected. Opening my InBox resulted in dings for the 1 or 2 messages I’d received. Messages from work or friends. No email journeys, mass email marketing, promotions, spam or hustle here. It was a pure communication tool as Kathleen and Joe in the clip below, wonderfully communicate their ‘zingers’ to each other.
How lovely email was!
Back then it was Stu, my husband, who got all the emails. He was, even then, working remotely running a business. Email was new, exciting, space-age and felt like The All-American Dream. To be honest, as I tell most people, I don’t remember much of those years, I was a stay-at-home mum, helping Stu with the business when I could, but with 4 kids, life was full of ballet classes, football, school runs, parties, playdates, nursey drop-offs, shopping, cooking, cleaning (on occasion) etc etc etc etc We were both flat out!! Email was the last thing on my priorities …But for others, according to our old friend Wikipedia, email had“gained ubiquitous status” with the advent of webmail, just as in ‘You’ve got Mail’.
Plot twist — Australia here we come
Come 2005 … we’d spent the year applying for permanent residency visas for the family to live in Australia. Now email was super important to me. Information was gathered, collated, shared, and finally, a wad of papers was printed out and sent via DHL (I’m sure it’s all done electronically now!) Finally getting visa approval and leaving the UK in 2006 for Sydney, Australia.
Life became very different! The reality of communicating with family across the world, finding work, studying, landing a job in marketing and then entering a whole new world of the not-for-profit and NGO. And I started working in a fundraising agency looking after multiple clients. Email was pretty much running my life!
The arrival of the iPhone in 2007 and prior to that old chestnut the Blackberry in 1999, meant email was already on tap and on-demand - remember that scene on the plane between Rose and Jasper in The Holiday and the clicking of the Blackberry keys…..
Life in the social good sector
End of Financial year appeals, major campaigns and newsletters were fast and furious. Deadlines were tight and fast, waiting on the data team to manually pull that data, double and triple-check it, manually, sending files via email as attachments (what were we thinking!!!), which flew in and out of my InBox, generating multiple versions to be managed. Did we have the right version to upload to that email platform, for that crucial e-appeal? Did every entry have a salutation field, were all the right names against the right people’s email addresses, were we asking someone to give who had already given? Did all the ‘Partners’ get onto the right list? The horror when it went wrong, as of course, it did, with such manual processes.
Donor acquisition and care were email-led, through digital campaigns that took them on an email journies that informed and educated those who had indicated an interest in a project or organisation, to hopefully give a second gift or even, become a regular giver. Email was king! I loved how we could take a concept or a need and share it, so that people who were passionate about a cause could get involved, share, volunteer or give! But my goodness it was painful!
Becoming a Co-Founder
So when Stu, who meanwhile had set up a new business called Red Arc, that builds apps that extend Blackbaud’s Raiser’s Edge NXT, told me about a new app the team were building that connected NXT data to a dedicated email platform, like Campaign Monitor or Mailchimp, and automate all those processes…. I got super excited!! How much time, resources, sanity and data integrity were suddenly saved!! How much better was the donor experience going to be and how much would Red Arc be helping those under-resourced teams in all those organisations just trying to build and engage with their supporter base! How much simpler and easier would life be for all those marketers, fundraisers, and alumni engagement people!
Fast forward, I took the leap to join Stu as Co-Founder at Red Arc in 2021 and now I hear the stories of organisations who are using our Email Marketing Connector to make their jobs just that little bit easier and work a little bit smarter so that they’re not living that double/triple-checking life — wondering if their campaign was all about to go pear-shaped.
Interestingly enough on another level, while life is still as fast with just as many deadlines, email is not running my life at Red Arc. We’ve actually banned it from internal comms and structured our comms differently. No more running life out of email!!!
However, email is still undeniably one of the best tools to use when thanking donors, attracting more supporters, and spreading your cause to a broader audience. And I'm so excited to be able to help the organisations we work with, to work smarter and easier when it comes to thier email campaigns! They can see right within their CRM whose engaging and the data flows automatically between the two systems, meaning segmentation is available for all the team, at their fingertips, confident their data is up to date!
Kinda makes me think of the hand terminals in The Expanse TV series. In the show these hand terminals integrate with the environment around them, spaceship or space station, or bedroom, connecting and sharing and receiving data seamlessly… love the realistic crack in the screen on this particular one ha ha …we really are in the new space age!
Now if you haven’t watched The Expanse … do I need to say more #doit
