Josh Nelson is the CEO of Civic Shout, an ad platform built to help progressive causes reach supporters who actually want to hear from them. Earlier in his career, Josh ran major email and digital programs for groups like Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and CREDO Mobile.
What first caught my eye about Josh was his willingness to speak out when political and advocacy senders are doing email wrong. Even when it is a cause many of us care deeply about, Josh hasn’t shied away from calling out deceptive messaging, sloppy permission practices, and other bad practices that burn trust and damage email as a communication channel. That stance resonates with me.
Josh cares, and it shows.
In this Spam Resource Spotlight, we talk about how he got into email, where he draws ethical lines, why political senders keep getting deliverability wrong, and what it will take to keep the inbox usable for the causes that depend on it.
Al: Josh, thank you so much for participating in the Spam Resource spotlight! You have spent your entire career in progressive advocacy, digital organizing, and list growth. Did something change at some point, did your thinking on email move from “just a channel” to something you cared deeply about getting right? And was that driven by anything specific? A moment early on where you realized that bad email practices were actively harming causes you believed in?
Josh: Throughout my career, I’ve seen email play a powerful role in policy fights over and over again.
I’ve recruited tens of thousands of people to show up and participate in in-person events. While some of these were pretty straightforward vigils and protests, some of them were much more hands-on, including recruiting people to engage in civil disobedience, training people to participate in meetings with elected officials, organizing and hosting in-person community meetings and helping grassroots activists testify at public hearings. I’ve also had the opportunity to drive hundreds of thousands of phone calls to elected officials, including coordinating with allies on Capitol Hill to ensure that the right offices received the right constituent calls at exactly the right moment.
That scale of advocacy and offline event recruitment was only possible because we had built a large, fired-up email community and earned people’s trust over a period of years. That’s what gave us the permission and the ability to directly reach large numbers of people and ask them to do the hard, meaningful things that influence policymakers and move the needle on advocacy campaigns.
Over the past 10-15 years, I’ve seen political campaigners and PACs, and even some nonprofits, resort to spamming and scamming potential supporters to juice their short-term fundraising numbers. As that went on, I’ve become increasingly concerned that using email to exploit supporters runs the risk of diminishing the channel’s incredible power for fundraising and advocacy.
We follow the law, that should be good enough: This is the most common response I would get when trying to help a political or advocacy sender resolve a deliverability issue. We’re totally legal, and everybody else is doing the same thing. Is that what you hear, too? What is the most common pushback you receive when trying to guide toward best practices? And how do you answer that pushback?
When campaigns and organizations get called out or criticized for spamming supporters or using deceptive email fundraising tactics, their typical response is: “We do it because it works.”
It’s true that spamming and scamming supporters "works" to raise money quickly. But that’s only true if you don’t take into account the damage you’re doing to your email deliverability, the risk of getting kicked off your CRM, the harm you’re doing to your organization’s reputation, or the long-term damage you’re doing to other organizations’ ability to fundraise effectively online.
Civic Shout positions itself as helping causes reach people who actually want to hear from them. How do you measure that in a world obsessed with raw list size?
We start with a user interface that facilitates high-intent opt-ins. We do that by allowing our partners to publish branded petitions and lead generation forms and having a prominent opt-in checkbox. That helps ensure that people are explicitly and intentionally choosing for themselves which email communities they’re signing up for. From there, we only expose the forms to email-sourced, issue-aligned donors and activists.
Ultimately, the proof is in the results: We hear from organizations all the time that the supporters they acquire on Civic Shout donate and take advocacy actions at much higher rates than supporters acquired through other channels.
In other words, cleaner data and better practices lead to better results; just like in email marketing. I'm not surprised!
Are you optimistic that political email can clean itself up, or do you think inbox placement is going to keep getting worse for this sector?
I am, but it’s taking longer than I would have hoped. There’s a growing recognition among campaign staff and consultants that the status quo spam and scam approach is not sustainable. There are some prominent consultants who are very invested in that broken status quo, but I’m confident that respecting people’s privacy and runninng email programs that treat supporters with dignity will eventually become the norm.
If you could erase one myth about email marketing in advocacy work, what would it be?
That online petitions are pointless.
As a standalone advocacy tactic, they’re not particularly effective. I don’t think anyone would argue otherwise.
But online petitions are great for two things:
Identifying a big group of people who care about a specific topic and want to hear more about it. This is what makes petitions so great for opt-in email list growth for campaigns and causes.
Serving as the first step in a ladder of engagement, where you start by asking people to sign a petition, then ask those who do to take a series of increasingly important and difficult steps, like submitting a public comment, making a phone call, or showing up in person to a protest, hearing or meeting.
Outside of email and politics, how do you unplug? What are your non-digital, or at least, non-political/advocacy-related obsessions?
Spending time with my wife and kids, hiking and exercising.
Here’s your chance to plug Civic Shout and the Civic Shout Newsletter. Tell us who Civic Shout can help and how, and why folks should consider clicking on through to learn more, or sign up for your newsletter.
Civic Shout helps nonprofits, progressive causes, Democratic campaigns and socially-responsible businesses reach new supporters, email list growth campaigns. The best place to learn more is at https://civicshout.com/partners
The Civic Shout Newsletter focuses on what’s working now in nonprofit email. Twice per week, it publishes case studies, insider interviews and campaign breakdowns designed to help nonprofit causes raise more money and build more power.
Thanks for the opportunity, Al. I’m a big fan of your work, and I’ve enjoyed answering these questions.
I’m so glad for your participation today, Josh! Thank you for that, and thank you for your efforts to help improve political and advocacy email practices, because making the world a better place needs to include ethical practices around bringing people into your cause and building online communities. I really do think you’re doing good, important work.
Josh Nelson is the CEO of Civic Shout, an ad platform built to help progressive causes reach supporters who actually want to hear from them. Earlier in his career, Josh ran major email and digital programs for groups like Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection and CREDO Mobile.
What first caught my eye about Josh was his willingness to speak out when political and advocacy senders are doing email wrong. Even when it is a cause many of us care deeply about, Josh hasn’t shied away from calling out deceptive messaging, sloppy permission practices, and other bad practices that burn trust and damage email as a communication channel. That stance resonates with me.
Josh cares, and it shows.
In this Spam Resource Spotlight, we talk about how he got into email, where he draws ethical lines, why political senders keep getting deliverability wrong, and what it will take to keep the inbox usable for the causes that depend on it.
Al: Josh, thank you so much for participating in the Spam Resource spotlight! You have spent your entire career in progressive advocacy, digital organizing, and list growth. Did something change at some point, did your thinking on email move from “just a channel” to something you cared deeply about getting right? And was that driven by anything specific? A moment early on where you realized that bad email practices were actively harming causes you believed in?
Josh: Throughout my career, I’ve seen email play a powerful role in policy fights over and over again.
I’ve recruited tens of thousands of people to show up and participate in in-person events. While some of these were pretty straightforward vigils and protests, some of them were much more hands-on, including recruiting people to engage in civil disobedience, training people to participate in meetings with elected officials, organizing and hosting in-person community meetings and helping grassroots activists testify at public hearings. I’ve also had the opportunity to drive hundreds of thousands of phone calls to elected officials, including coordinating with allies on Capitol Hill to ensure that the right offices received the right constituent calls at exactly the right moment.
That scale of advocacy and offline event recruitment was only possible because we had built a large, fired-up email community and earned people’s trust over a period of years. That’s what gave us the permission and the ability to directly reach large numbers of people and ask them to do the hard, meaningful things that influence policymakers and move the needle on advocacy campaigns.
Over the past 10-15 years, I’ve seen political campaigners and PACs, and even some nonprofits, resort to spamming and scamming potential supporters to juice their short-term fundraising numbers. As that went on, I’ve become increasingly concerned that using email to exploit supporters runs the risk of diminishing the channel’s incredible power for fundraising and advocacy.
We follow the law, that should be good enough: This is the most common response I would get when trying to help a political or advocacy sender resolve a deliverability issue. We’re totally legal, and everybody else is doing the same thing. Is that what you hear, too? What is the most common pushback you receive when trying to guide toward best practices? And how do you answer that pushback?
When campaigns and organizations get called out or criticized for spamming supporters or using deceptive email fundraising tactics, their typical response is: “We do it because it works.”
It’s true that spamming and scamming supporters "works" to raise money quickly. But that’s only true if you don’t take into account the damage you’re doing to your email deliverability, the risk of getting kicked off your CRM, the harm you’re doing to your organization’s reputation, or the long-term damage you’re doing to other organizations’ ability to fundraise effectively online.
Civic Shout positions itself as helping causes reach people who actually want to hear from them. How do you measure that in a world obsessed with raw list size?
We start with a user interface that facilitates high-intent opt-ins. We do that by allowing our partners to publish branded petitions and lead generation forms and having a prominent opt-in checkbox. That helps ensure that people are explicitly and intentionally choosing for themselves which email communities they’re signing up for. From there, we only expose the forms to email-sourced, issue-aligned donors and activists.
Ultimately, the proof is in the results: We hear from organizations all the time that the supporters they acquire on Civic Shout donate and take advocacy actions at much higher rates than supporters acquired through other channels.
In other words, cleaner data and better practices lead to better results; just like in email marketing. I'm not surprised!
I am, but it’s taking longer than I would have hoped. There’s a growing recognition among campaign staff and consultants that the status quo spam and scam approach is not sustainable. There are some prominent consultants who are very invested in that broken status quo, but I’m confident that respecting people’s privacy and runninng email programs that treat supporters with dignity will eventually become the norm.
If you could erase one myth about email marketing in advocacy work, what would it be?
That online petitions are pointless.
But online petitions are great for two things:
- Identifying a big group of people who care about a specific topic and want to hear more about it. This is what makes petitions so great for opt-in email list growth for campaigns and causes.
- Serving as the first step in a ladder of engagement, where you start by asking people to sign a petition, then ask those who do to take a series of increasingly important and difficult steps, like submitting a public comment, making a phone call, or showing up in person to a protest, hearing or meeting.
Outside of email and politics, how do you unplug? What are your non-digital, or at least, non-political/advocacy-related obsessions?Spending time with my wife and kids, hiking and exercising.
Here’s your chance to plug Civic Shout and the Civic Shout Newsletter. Tell us who Civic Shout can help and how, and why folks should consider clicking on through to learn more, or sign up for your newsletter.
Civic Shout helps nonprofits, progressive causes, Democratic campaigns and socially-responsible businesses reach new supporters, email list growth campaigns. The best place to learn more is at https://civicshout.com/partners
The Civic Shout Newsletter focuses on what’s working now in nonprofit email. Twice per week, it publishes case studies, insider interviews and campaign breakdowns designed to help nonprofit causes raise more money and build more power.
Thanks for the opportunity, Al. I’m a big fan of your work, and I’ve enjoyed answering these questions.
I’m so glad for your participation today, Josh! Thank you for that, and thank you for your efforts to help improve political and advocacy email practices, because making the world a better place needs to include ethical practices around bringing people into your cause and building online communities. I really do think you’re doing good, important work.
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