Tell-A-Friend!

In a moment of incredible synergy, my work at Progressive Majority and this week's readings are on the same topic: email newsletters. Yesterday we sent out a newsletter to about 30,000 of our supporters. I'll discuss in a later post some of the things I learned along the way of helping to create an eAlert, but I wanted to touch in this post on the idea of viral emails. We have a report function on our eAlert toolkit that lets us source our Internet activity and analyze how effective various action items and emails are. One thing we can look at is a "tell a friend" count by month, which looks at the number of times supporters reading our emails hit the "tell a friend" link to forward an email or web action item on to their friends.

I looked over the last year and a half, starting Jan 2004, and noticed some visible spikes: February 2004, June 2004, and December 2004/January 2005. I went back through our archived emails and was surprised by what I found, then narrowed the date range on our tell-a-friend report to confirm it. In February and June 2004, we sent emails asking our supporters to oppose the Federal Marriage Amendment, and these worked incredibly well as viral emails. In Dec 2004/Jan 2005, we sent a series of emails asking our supporters to take action (meaning send a fax or write a letter) to prevent the GOP in Washington State from overturning the gubernatorial election in which Gregoire was elected. If you take a step back, it's clear that these were two hot-button issues for Democrats, especially for progressives who favor marriage equality and voting reform (IRV, etc).

The take-away? It's interesting to think that email newsletters may be more effective in rallying the ideological base than in reaching out to undecideds or issue voters. That makes sense. If I were a single-issue voter or an undecided voter, I may not open, click-through, and forward an email to my friends. But you can bet I would if I were an ideological supporter.

Thoughts?