|
Welcome to our August E-Marketing Organization of the Month, featuring PatronMail Client: Poets & Writers.
|
|
E-Marketing Organization: Poets & Writers
|
|
Elliot Figman, Executive Director, Poets and Writers
Photo: Brian Morri
|
PMail Client Since: June, 2003
Starting e-list size: 2,128
Current e-list size: 28,000
Since 1970 Poets & Writers has been supporting writers across the country in a wide variety of ways.
The organization serves poets, fiction writers, and creative nonfiction writers by publishing Poets & Writers Magazine, producing a Web site,
helping to pay the fees for writers giving readings and workshops,
introducing writers who live outside of New York to the New York City
literary community, and offering prizes to talented writers.
P&W is the largest nonprofit organization in the U.S. serving creative writers, reaching over 100,000 of them annually.
As P&W's Executive Director, Elliot Figman oversees all programs and operations, working closely with the organization's program managers and Board of Directors. He is also very involved with fundraising, strategic planning and communications - including a very successful e-marketing program...
|
|
Q & A with Elliot Figman, Executive Director
|
Elliot, to begin tell us how you came to your current role with Poets & Writers.
I
first came to Poets & Writers in 1977 as a volunteer. I'd been writing
poetry for five years before that and learned about the organization
while I was teaching English in a high school in western Massachusetts.
Soon after I started working for P&W, the Executive Director's assistant left and I applied for the job. Happily, I was hired. A few
years after that, Galen Williams, the organization's founder and Executive Director, decided
to leave P&W to pursue a new career in landscape gardening. I was
appointed Executive Director in 1981.
How have you integrated e-marketing into Poets & Writers' programming and services in the last couple of years? What's the most important lesson you've learned?
One of the most important things we've learned is that the e-newsletter is a powerful tool for driving traffic to our Web site. Each month we include an item in the newsletter on upcoming deadlines for grants. This is a very popular feature, and it serves as a reminder to writers who are very interested in this information. We see a significant jump in visits to this and other pages on our site when we mail on the first of every month. For example, after the July newsletter was mailed, our Grants & Awards page was opened over 2,700 times by subscribers to the newsletter. In August, our page with information on copyright was opened over 1,500 times.
We've also learned that e-postcards are a good means to alert our subscribers to events we're sponsoring in their area. We've had great success in promoting events we co-sponsor with the Asian American Writers Workshop in New York, for instance.
When you began using PatronMail in 2003, your e-list was relatively small. How have you grown it so significantly in just over 3 years?
The primary reason our e-list has grown so successfully is that we prominently advertise it on our home page - with a very noticeable "Newsletter Sign-Up" button in the top right-hand corner. We've been getting over 600 sign-ups from the site each month.
Also, when we promote our e-newsletter, we give reasons why our visitors might want to sign up. For example, right now we're touting the information on writing contests that each e-newsletter carries.
Have you had any big surprises with your e-mail campaigns?
We were surprised by the rapid growth in our list, which we decided to build in order to more easily stay in touch with our constituency and to alert them to the features on our Web site that we thought they might be interested in. The newsletter has been quite successful in this regard. In some issues, we highlight articles from our magazine that are not listed on our home page and that visitors to the Web site might otherwise miss. For example, in August we drove over 200 newsletter subscribers to an excellent online-only interview with the Nigerian novelist Chris Abani.
Biggest surprises: we received a $10,000 contribution from one of our newsletter subscribers in response to a year-end appeal in 2005; also, the interest from organizations in advertising in the newsletter. We recently had to add another article-position in the newsletter to accommodate the growing demand to advertise in it.
|
|
Watch for our next E-Organization of the Month, coming September 26, 2006.
Our mailing address is
850 Seventh Avenue, New York, NY 10019
|
|
|