RSS and Non-Profits
Things that go well together... Milk and Cookies, Peanut Butter and Jelly, Rogers and Hammerstein, RSS and Email Marketing!

Many non-profits use email marketing to reach out to their audience with news, donation requests, event announcements and to market their mission. Of course email is not a perfect world. We've all had email delivery problems. RSS can help with that. Although RSS can't do everything that email can do - and email can't do everything RSS can - together they can help you extend your reach to your existing audience and help grow your audience too.

Email newsletters are the mainstay of many organizations to keep their audience informed. It's inexpensive, and faster to publish than a printed newsletter. Because email newsletters can be colorful, have photos, surveys and can be tracked, they give much more insight on what the readers find useful than a printed newsletter ever could.

When people subscribe they have to enter at least their email address into a form on your site, and usually more info is asked for in order to subscribe. Some people like the anonymity of the web and don't like giving out their information while evaluating your organization. RSS is a simple way to give them another choice. They can subscribe to your news feed and unsubscribe just by adding or removing the feed from their RSS reader.

Because visitors to your site may not have an RSS Reader, you should offer them one. Either offer a Custom Branded Reader that has your logo and feeds pre-populated or link to many of the free reader available online. And have a page that explains what RSS is and include a list of your feeds.

Also RSS has no delivery issues. It is not email based. It's simply a file that is requested by the users RSS Reader. Thus, delivery is almost 100% guaranteed. So you may thing why don't I just do an RSS Feed and forget about email? The main problem is not everyone has an RSS Reader or even knows what RSS is. But everyone (for the most part) does have email.

You should post a feed every time you send an email newsletter. Make the same content available in your RSS Feed. You should also consider multiple feeds. One for newsletter content, one to cover your regular site news, maybe one for members only and one for the media. Create an RSS Feed today with a 14 Day Free Trial of the Tristana RSS Writer.

Think of RSS as another delivery vehicle for your news and content. Newsletters are the content, Email and RSS are the delivery methods.