Newsletter: Musk Buys Twitter: Why Nonprofits Need to Act 💨 ; How to Prioritize Partners to Maximize Effectiveness 🔢 ; This Toilet Sponsored By… Have We Gone Too Far? 🧻

Elon Musk's buyout of Twitter will be bad news for the platform and the world.

This is too bad because you all know how much I like, use, and recommend Twitter. Like you, I would also like to see a better world.

With the election in 2016 with the pandemic in 2020 I said the same thing: "It won't be so bad."

No more pollyanna for me. I'm preparing for the worse, and you should too.

I say this not just about Twitter, but about social media in general. Social media sites are increasingly fickle, expensive, negative, and frustrating places to be.

While I'm not cutting the cord on my social media accounts, I am recommending that nonprofits - and more specifically partnership teams - spend less time focusing on social and more time on email and building their email list(s).

There's a lot of good reasons to focus on email, but here's the most important one.

Your email list is the only online audience you truly own.

My audience on Twitter is three times the size of my email list. But that audience only exists on Twitter. I can't pack it up and move it to another platform.

With email, your audience goes with you. Sure, a billionaire 🍆 could buy and screw up my email service provider. But I can decamp - with my audience - and switch to another ESP.

I can't do that with my Twitter audience. It belongs to them, not to me.

So the one big takeaway from Musk buying Twitter is this: Don't spend a significant amount of time, money and resources building an audience on any platform that you don't fully control. And the place where your attention is best spent is on the one channel that everyone uses and that you fully control.

That channel is email.

✍️ Partnership Notes

1. The gang at UK-based Remarkable Partnerships has an opinion on where you should spend your time when it comes to existing partners. ⬆️

2. To close more partnership deals try using a Sales Close Plan. I like this idea! It gels with my box-checking nature and maybe yours too!

3. Any retail business could do this as a fundraiser for your nonprofit. An easy, doable example of a purchase-triggered donation program.

🤑 Marketing Your Cause

1. Do you ever think about the pre-header text in your emails? Do you even know what a pre-header is? The pre-header is the text that appears after the subject line in the inbox. People read it more than you think! Here are 10 ideas on how to use it to boost opens!

2. I'll never understand why more nonprofits don't create curated newsletters! They are useful and powerful - I know because I write one! Interested? Here's how to start a successful curation newsletter. Need some help? Just hit reply to this email.

3. Once you setup that curated newsletter (or any newsletter for that matter), when should you send it? The case for sending it on weekends.

😎 Cool Jobs in Cause

1. Corporate Development Officer, Habitat for Humanity International, Remote

🧠🍌 Brain Food

1. This toilet sponsored by... Have we gone too far?

2. Brands are speaking out on social issues, but it could take years before consumers believe their efforts are sincere.

3. Now, some good news: When you twist an Oreo ⚫️, why does the ‘cream’ always stick to one side? We finally have an answer.

Being a gifted child, I figured this out very early in life and only ate the side with the cream. I would toss the other side behind the couch. Mom was not happy.😡 I wish my "gifts" included a higher tolerance for pain!