It’s that time of year, when the daffodils bloom and we all say goodbye to winter and look forward to the warmer months.  I’m not sure why, but spring always leads me to want to take stock and tackle new and ambitious projects.

For nonprofits, the best way to harness this new energy is to conduct a full review of your lists. As one of your organization’s greatest assets, it somehow is also an area that receives the least attention. By cleaning your list it will help your organization separate the dead weight from your true advocates and turn the casual supporter into a leader.

Here are six steps to removing the thorns from your list:  

1. Define Inactive

Determining whether an email recipient is inactive will vary based on the frequency of which you are sending emails. Someone who doesn’t click on a daily email for three days may be busy. However, someone who doesn’t click on a monthly email three months in a row may be telling you something. Use six months as a rule of thumb for defining an inactive account.

2. Give Non-Responders a Chance

Don’t assume all non-responders are dead weight. You can figure out who has not opened or clicked a message for a year, and see who the top influencers are amongst these, and engage them. For the rest, you can send an email specifically saying “We noticed you haven't clicked — would you like to like us on Facebook / follow on Twitter?”

Send several emails designed to re-engage your supporters starting with the more active subscribers. If they don’t respond or open the email, send a final personalized email encouraging them to take action even if it means they unsubscribe. For those that do respond, this is a great opportunity for them to select what issue areas they would like to hear about and a great starting point for list segmentation.

3. Segment the Messaging

This is also a place to segment by top influencers who have mentioned keywords on select campaigns, people who have mentioned your organization on Twitter or Facebook in last 3 months, people who are super-activists on both email and social media for your organization, and top social influencers.

4. Practice Good Growth

When doing your first list overhaul, you should also consider making changes to its template and other improvements. These might include:

• More images in emails

• Requiring a first name along with email address at sign up, so emails can be personalized

• Welcome email sent within minutes of signing up

• During sign up, give members opt-ins for each issue area

• Develop a consistent schedule for sending out emails for each segment

• Send “chaser” emails only to supporter who haven’t clicked within a pre-determined amount of time

• A/B test subject lines to see what gets higher open rates

5. Get Ready for Your List to Shrink – At Least a Bit

If you follow this process your list will likely shrink, but those who stay will be engaged and active supporters. You can now begin delivering targeted content on a consistent basis gaining additional trust with supporters. This added value will help the list grow naturally through referrals from top advocates.  

6. Keeping Up with List Maintenance

Your organization will need to regularly prune the list to remove duplicate and non-working email addresses. Non-working email addresses are now easily identified by the bounced emails they generate. This ensures your team will not have any dead weight on the email list which can drag down performance metrics and efficiency.

Once your list spring cleaning is complete, your organization can expect to see increased open-rates, lower opt-out rates, increased donations, improved word of mouth sharing around important campaigns and issue areas, and see your supporters move up the ladder of engagement and become leaders and advocates for your organization and campaigns.

Please feel free to contact Fission if you’d like to know more about list clean up. We’d be happy to discuss list clean up further, and how we our team could help out.

Jennifer O’Reilly Mott is a strategist at Fission Strategy. She works with clients to bring big ideas to life.