An Advocacy Group Tweaks Its E-Mail Messages to Reach Mobile Readers

As the number of people using smartphones and tablets skyrockets, a growing number of nonprofits are tweaking their Web sites to make them easier to navigate on the devices or creating separate mobile sites.

The Human Rights Campaign has taken a different tack, focusing instead on making its e-mail messages compelling and easy to read on the small screen of a smartphone.

“A lot of the peaks that we were seeing in our overall Web traffic were correlated with days that we were sending out e-mail,” says Lindsey Twombly, associate director for social media and online mobilization at the gay-rights advocacy group. “So we felt that the first place we needed to look was the e-mails.”

When the organization first started to examine the growing number of people reading its messages on mobile phones, the group analyzed its e-mail data and found that 17 percent of the messages people opened were read on mobile phones.

But people who used phones to open the messages on their phones didn’t respond nearly as much as their counterparts who read the messages on their computers. Although people on mobile phones accounted for 17 percent of all e-mail advocacy messages that were opened, they made up only 9 percent of the people who clicked on a link in the message and totaled just 7 percent of the people who took action, such as signing a petition or sending a message to a lawmaker.

The Human Rights Campaign took a two-pronged approach to try to solve the problem. The group redesigned its communication approach so that people reading an e-mail message on their smartphones would see a version of the message designed for a small screen.

At the same time, the organization revamped its advocacy-action pages so relevant forms would be easier to complete on a mobile device.

Now, when people open an e-mail message from the group on mobile phones, they see a version that is significantly shorter than what people at desktop machines see. The nonprofit’s logo and the text are larger, making the message easier to read. When supporters click on a link in the message, they are directed to an advocacy page that is designed to appear within the width of the device’s screen, eliminating the need to scroll left and right. The fields on the page are also larger.

“Before we did the optimization, it was all very cramped, very small, hard to complete what you were doing,” says Ms. Twombly.

A Winning Format

The organization tested the new mobile-friendly e-mail messages against messages it had been sending in the older format. The new format was the clear winner.

The rate at which people using cellphones clicked on a link in a mobile-friendly message was 6.5 percent higher than it was for people who received an e-mail message that wasn’t modified for mobile, and the rate of response in completing an act of advocacy was 7.7 percent higher. The rate at which recipients chose to unsubscribe to the group’s messages was 6.7 percent lower among people who received the mobile-friendly ones.

The Human Rights Campaign is in the process of revamping its donation page to make it easier to fill out from cell phones and hopes to eventually make its other frequently visited Web pages more mobile-friendly.

Thinking about all the steps a nonprofit needs to take to respond to the growing use of mobile devices can be overwhelming, says Ms. Twombly. She recommends that groups break their master lists down into more manageable projects.

“You don’t have to do it all at once,” she says. “I can tell you, if we tried to do everything all at once we still wouldn’t be done.”