Mandy Kutschied & Sam Hanley: Employee Wellness
Meet a company where one of the employees is a wellness coach for all the others. Mandy Kutschied and Sam Hanley are with The Fresh Perspective Group. They share practical strategies for employee wellness; ergonomic resources; a 4-day work week; productivity tips; and, talk about the ethics of wellness coaching in the workplace. Sam often hears things she cannot reveal. This is part of our coverage of the 2025 Nonprofit Technology Conference (#25NTC).
Anne Paschkopić: Email Deliverability
This comes up frequently at the Nonprofit Technology Conference, because the rules often change about whether your emails get delivered and how they get treated by email providers. Are you right to only mail to people who’ve recently opened a message from you? No. Is it good practice to make sure everyone has opted in to your list? No. Anne Paschkopić explains why these and other former best practices, are no more. She’s from M + R. This conversation is also from #25NTC.
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Welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host and the podfather of your favorite hebdominal podcast. This is show number 740, which means we are a mere 10 shows, 10 weeks away from number 750. Nonprofit radios, unbelievable. 10 weeks away. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d be stricken with dextroduction if I looked to the right to see that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer Kate with what’s up this week. Hey, Tony, more conversations from 25 NTC. Employee wellness. Meet a company where one of the employees is a wellness coach for all the others. Mandy Kuthi and Sam Hanley are with the Fresh Perspective Group. They share practical strategies for employee wellness, ergonomic resources, a 4 day work week, productivity tips, and talk about the ethics of wellness coaching in the workplace. Sam often hears things she cannot reveal. Then Email deliverability. This comes up frequently at the nonprofit technology conference because the rules often change about whether your emails get delivered and how they get treated by email providers. Are you right to only mail to people who have recently opened a message from you? Now Is it good practice to make sure everyone has opted into your list? No. Ann Paskaic explains why these and other former best practices are no more. She’s from MNR. On Tony’s take 2. The federal budget, part de. Here is employee wellness. Thank you for being with our 25 NTC coverage. We’re all live at the Bal Baltimore Convention Center. With me now are Mandy Kutchide and Sam Hanley. Mandy is vice president of people at the Fresh Perspective Group. Sam Hanley also at the Fresh Perspective Group as wellness coach. Mandy, Sam, welcome. Thank you so much pleasure, pleasure to have you. How’s your conference going so far? Good. It’s awesome both of our first time here. Have you done both first? Oh, this is a very good conference, isn’t it? I mean so far? Yeah, it’s great. This is our 10th or 11th. Uh, having the podcast here, yeah, capturing interviews, it’s a very good conference. You chose you chose well it’s a good vibe. Um, and your topic is what employee wellness really means and why it matters. Um, Sam, let’s start with you because I don’t know any other companies besides the Fresh Perspective group who I’m just meeting today for my first time, uh, that have a wellness coach. Maybe it’s very common. I don’t know, but, uh, why is it so let’s answer the second part of the, uh, the topic. Why does it matter? Why does it matter? Come a little closer to the mic. Yeah, thank you. Um, I think it’s very rare to have someone as a wellness coach on a team. No, not very common. Um, typically speaking, many orgs have human resources, so it’s even a shift to be more people oriented and so I have a background in counseling and behavior analysis, so my intention is to support the company as a whole. In the culture and how we operate and embed wellness into our culture but also on an individual level level so supporting employees one on one whether that’s just venting or need an emotional release or something’s going on at home because home life and work life are so interwoven together so how can I support our employees as as human beings. OK, um, and, uh, we’re not gonna do this right now, but part of what we’re gonna talk about is what the ethical considerations are when people vent versus talking to their HR director. It’s very different, I imagine. OK, we’re gonna talk about we’ll, we’re gonna get to that. um, Mandy, what, what, why does the you’re a vice president there, officer? Why does the fresh perspective group, um, invest? I mean, you’re paying, uh. Paying salary to Sam and benefits, but she is a benefit. He program is a benefit to the employees so but I don’t mean to answer my own question. Why, why is the fresh perspective group investing in employee wellness to the to the point of hiring someone to do it? Yeah, we think it’s incredible incredibly um critical to our success. So the company itself is a people centric organization that does sales force consulting and manage services for nonprofits who are. Struggling with their technology as we’ve heard throughout the day and we know that what we’re selling is our people the the the keynote speaker this morning 10 minute gap or the sound went out but also she was talking about, um, we, you know, technology part of the, the issue with adoption or how we use it is like the people using it are really designing how it gets used um so what we’re selling is our people, our consultants, obviously they’re great. At tech, but they’re also human beings and we know that in order for them to support the nonprofits that we serve, we need to be supporting them as humans um so that’s really critical and one of the ways we want to do this is by being different in how we structure so I came out of HR I almost 20 years of HR um and there are some legal ramifications and sort of legal things you have to think about when you try to structure support in this way, but we knew that we really wanted to be people centric. Want to build something that was different, that really took care of the whole human and we were going to do that with intention and with care and part of that was having a wellness coach that was focused on the individuals. Yes, yeah. Well, she’s a founding member, so we all founded the company in July. We’re only 8 months old. Yeah, it’s a new venture. Yeah, so she’s been here since the beginning really helping us a people-centric culture through the decades of the practical strategies for employee wellness. Sam, I’m guessing that is more suited for you. I’m just answering. I’m, I’m not, I’m, I’m not committing you to anything. This is from your session description. You looked a little nervous. Practical strategies for employee wellness. You’re committed to this. Yes, OK, um, Mandy and I and I it we’ll we’ll talk to you so when employees are on a big project, so allowing a bit of breathing room afterwards, what does that look like afterwards, what do you, how do you how do you? Looking at what do you what do you say to them? Uh, what is your plan? What does your schedule look like? Is your calendar completely jam packed in full, or do you have space to take lunch? Do you have space to go for a walk? Do you have space to take an afternoon off? Our pay time off policy is very flexible, um, so if you need to take a Friday off, go take a Friday off. We also work 4 days a week, Tuesday to Friday, so we every week have Monday off. Um, so all employees except for myself work 32 hours a week, um, and so having that Monday allows just natural breathing room in our everyday week in itself because it’s embedded in that. So our every all our team members have that day to get appointments done, relax, be by themselves at home. Weekends are always busy doing errands and family functions and events and all that stuff, so just allowing that space and making it sacred so. We all know not to ping anyone on a Monday, um, so after projects making sure that continues to be sacred, but also checking what’s your schedule look like? Is it jam packed? Can we, can we check you is this you emailing to remind people or is it you knocking on, you’re probably not you’re virtual knocking on doors but how do you practically how do you do it? What do you do? Yeah, a one on one or 15 minute call. Your plan, how are you doing checking in? What does your rest look like afterwards? What’s your workload look like? Is it is it manageable? Do we need to support you in finding ways to take things off of your plate? Do you need to lean more on other team members and just giving them the autonomy to make those choices but still being proactive in that check in? What does that look like? Yeah and Sam has um scheduled one on one sessions with everybody who wants to they can opt in or opt out. Most of our folks opt in. Um, she’s so she’s taking that sort of like individual care, but then if she’s hearing something, so for example I think this is a good one, we, when we were launching as a company, there was a lot of heavy lifting from our marketing team right away when you launch a company, right? There’s a website, there’s branding, there’s material, so our marketing team is one person and one consultant, and they were doing a ton to get us ready and so Sam had been meeting with the our director of marketing individually noticed. That you know there was just a lot going on so after the launch um we worked with the marketing director and their supervisor and we said OK we’re gonna get, we’re gonna throw a couple extra days and we’re gonna ask if she has the capacity to take that time off and she did we said great, go like rejuvenate a little bit and recover and restore so you can come back refreshed um and she did, she said, oh, I feel like I can actually come back and like feel excited instead of daunted and drained and. And tired, so it was a it was a good sort of in the moment recovery plan. Now Sam, if you hear from someone that they’re overburdened, maybe they need to they need do you have a link to the CEO do you how do you get the person the help that they need. So in one on ones it’s what does that look like for you? How can I support you in your communication with others to be able to lean on them. Um, do you feel comfortable talking to the CEO or talking to your supervisor in, in getting support, um, I think that’s 1414 now. I was relevant for folks to know how big an organization we’re talking about 5 or 14, so you were saying that uh you’re asking. How comfortable do you feel or then can you be a voice on their behalf if they don’t feel comfortable, but then if they don’t feel comfortable, you’re going on their behalf. They know they came from you. How does that give them greater comfort ultimately everybody knows that it came from them. Yes, I think that plays into the ethical consideration so just really. Staying grounded in the relationship with that person and knowing that I’m only doing anything on their behalf with their consent and having that discussion first so if they want me to speak on their behalf or support them in that way then it’s important that I have their permission and that we do that together. I want it to be. Involved partnership to get help them help them get what they need. What if they aren’t comfortable with you speaking on their behalf, but this remains a challenge for them, and obstacle it’s burdening them, but they’re not comfortable speaking or having you speak on their behalf, then what? That’s that’s difficult. So a part of my job too is looking for themes so on in my one on ones are the themes that are coming up is communication being lost is one team feeling more stressed than another um so then I talked to Mandy and we figure out how can we support this individual, um, theme or this team team as a whole, um, and we yeah. And that’s why I think like in our session we talk a little bit about the evolution of workplace wellness and the history from you know industrial era to post COVID time and a lot of it is around the systems that we set up so there may be individual themes of burnout or um not feeling like there is that sort of self advocacy or self care that you can enact with your supervisor because maybe it’s a lack of emotional intelligence or empathy from. The leadership, so if we’re seeing those themes, then we know our systems need to improve. We need to train our leadership on EQ and emotional empathy and how do they have engaging conversations with their direct reports or is it more around like how we work and how we’ve designed work? Do we need to rethink those systems and structures, um, because sometimes it’s at an individual level, but a lot of times it’s on a systems level. Has this all come up in just 8 months? I mean it’s come up in other organizations for me over the last 18 years, yeah, but we haven’t experienced as much of that, not to any extreme. Yeah, yeah. OK. Um, since we sort of touching on ethics, what about, um, confidentiality? I mean, are you, are you sworn to confidentiality if the person doesn’t want anything revealed? Yes, OK, OK. And then, but your role is to try to aggregate themes, but. That might not be that might not be part of a theme. It might just be individual and the person so like is there a resource of referrals like would you make a referral to a deeper consulting that you can’t do or therapy basically we’re talking about therapy yeah so yeah if there’s deeper concerns or things coming up, yes, it’s referring out to counseling services. Can I support you in finding the appropriate service provider to help you with your mental health? Um, I, I had a thought there, um, I think sometimes at work, you know, you, you have something going on in your life and you go to your manager and so you dump your emotional things that are happening for you to your manager and the manager isn’t always equipped to support that person and so both people are kind of feeling disconnected, not sure where to go from there something’s there’s kind of a bit of a. Elephant in the room and so I’m, I hope that I can be that mediator of come let’s let’s chat get get what you need off your chest and then let’s move forward into that problem solving piece so I can be there for the empathy help you problem solve so you can go to your manager and say hey I’ve had a death at home I I need more space my brain is not in it this week whereas I think like Mandy said um historically there’s just that pressure to perform. Form and get work done no matter what else is happening in your life. So how can I help people move through that process a little bit smoother and still feel heard and supported and know that their workplace has their back even when something else is going on in their personal life. Encourage everyone to take their lunch break away from their screens, um, so, uh, there’s even a couple individuals at work where it it was encouraged to put that into their calendar. They just blocked off for lunch. No one can book a meeting at that time, so that kind of holds us accountable to actually take our lunch, um, rather than meetings just be booked and you then don’t have lunch, you’re not eating, you’re not taking time away from your screen, you’re not getting up and moving your body, um. So in that lunch break going for a walk, uh, we also have every week I post something and it’s often around that physical health so moving our body um snacks, getting exercise water yes. Stretching was an issue. I was she’s very good at reminding me to drink my water. I don’t drink water. I think ergonomic is also in the virtual world there’s a lot of because we’re working at home and we haven’t really thought about ergonomics set up to be physically supportive we’ve talked a little bit about how do we make sure folks have the right level for their computers so they’re not um putting pressure on shoulders and how do they have the right chair and we have a budget for that so we can support standing you got it yeah I have a walking pad, yep. see me in my walking. Oh, it’s just like why is it not a treadmill? It doesn’t go as fast. It’s just walking like a desk you’re walking you’re OK. We had Beth on a couple of years ago because she had just written a book on wellness for nonprofits she had a co-author too. I’m sorry, I don’t remember the co-author’s name, but Um, she was, they were advocating, um, doing walking meetings, physically walking out and you’re you’re in a meeting. Why not, right? Our brain works differently that way, yeah, getting fresh air and the repetitive movement of our body walking there’s real digital screen fatigue happening right now, so it’s like how can you also make sure you’re limiting some of the screen time. Uh, you have any other tip tips so the pad I’m sorry, it’s not what’s it’s OK um what else do I appreciate that you’re sitting on a ball, so you’re just you’re naturally moving your body and it probably feels more comfortable on your body to be that way. I use it at home it’s actually born of an NTC. In previous years they contracted with a furnishings company for the booths back when we had booths 10 by 10. This is your first ATC, but every year before this it’s been 10 by 10 booths, and the company that they use, uh, is expensive. Like a chair is like $300 or maybe I’m exaggerating $200 for the 3 days, right? And then, but I wanted a nicer chair, so I was like a 4 or $500 chair for 3 days. That’s a. That’s that, you know, I, I got my my ball and just blow it up and I’ll spend $0 and I’ll be more comfortable and you’re $500. So it was born of a couple of years, I think last year was the first year. I just got tired of the ergonomic chair expense. So yeah, yeah, OK, so, uh, yeah, it’s movement, right? Is core like centering taking even 5 minutes to step outside, sit on your front step. Breathe in some observing outside what do you see for distance it helps your eyes like you need a yeah just that quick yeah reset, refresh, change of environment for a moment can be really helpful in getting you back and refocused, um, having snacks at your desk, chewing things can be helpful for your nervous system, help regulate just simple little things, yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, that oral sensory feedback, yeah, more crunchy or like like peanut butter is sticky, so you’re, you’re working your oral motor and it can just be helpful to regulate your body so it doesn’t have to be anything major, right? We don’t have to get our 10,000 steps in and we don’t have those types of initiatives at our at our work, um, but. Just getting those small little things 5 minutes away from your desk standing up yeah it can be in your in your 5 NASA says the optimal nap is 22 minutes scientists and they know this 2 longer than they. Longer than that and you’ll feel groggy and a little disorient maybe not disorient groggy when you wake up shorter than that, not restorative. So the optimal nap according to NASA 22 minutes but I’m a proud napper. I love. Yeah, OK. Um, the 4 day work week last year at NTC we had advocates, we had, we had the leader of the 4 day work week. Um, nonprofit. I, I forget what 4 days a week or I forget what it’s called, but he, he and a couple of panelists, including someone from N10. N10 has a 4 day work week here. Patty was on, um. but you chose Mondays off instead of Friday would have been the natural choice, I think for a lot of organizations. Why did you choose Monday? It was really intentional. So the again, the organization that we work in is consulting and we consult with nonprofits and so just the organic cycle of the stuff we do, we felt, um, there’s a lot of Tuesday Thursday meetings with our nonprofit clients so there was like uh inherent Tuesday could be meeting heavy day Wednesday could be. Down work day Thursday could be meeting heavy day. Friday we’re taking that feedback and kind of making changes and Monday we rest. So it just like it worked with I think um for us it worked because of who our clients are. It’s gonna be different exactly yeah you got it, yeah, exactly. It’s also an interesting mind shift too because most people work until Fridays and so you’re getting ready for that weekend naturally with. Community and so then you’re having your fun on the weekend and then you get that Monday oh yeah I have Monday and it feels more productive naturally because that’s what we’re all used to so you can get your chores done you can schedule in your massage um you can get the all the the housework done. OK, an intentional choice to make it to make it and just to be clear we’re talking about a 4 day 32 hour work week, not a 4 day 40 hour work week 2 hours. Yeah, yes, that’s what the campaign is all about. We, we had the panel on, yeah, that’s it. Yeah, OK. OK. Um, you mentioned massage. I’m, I’m a massage, I do, it’s not luxury, it’s it’s part of taking care of myself massage massage advocate as well. Yeah, we have quite a comprehensive benefits. acupuncture, it’s part of the, yeah, we’ve got different levels for folks, right? So depending on what you opt in high deductible, low deductible, but it’s acupuncture, yeah. It’s I I’m I’m from Canada too and so Mandy is from here, um, so we, we, we’re a little bit different anyways, um, so I can’t always speak to what I can’t always speak to that. But I think a lot of Americans consider that a luxury. Like when I’m at the resort for a week, you know, I’ll I’ll get a, I’ll get a spa treatment. I’ll massage, but it can be very, I mean like yeah very yes exactly physical touch that. Muscle movement and it I mean we have uh I have a coworker, we have a coworker at the Fresh perspective group who goes in for medical reasons monthly and because she can’t move her neck otherwise and it’s like she needs that and it is it’s not, it’s not nice to have it’s need to have. And, and, and can I go one bit deeper than physical touch is the human touch. Like this is something I never want a robot to do. I don’t want AI massage as as good as some, some, uh, medical services company may tell me that it is, uh, I don’t want it. I want, I want the human touch. We want to be seen and heard. Um, 4 day work on site counseling. I think we kind of talked about on site. It’s all virtual you can check in any time. I mean if you’re in a crisis, and I, I need to I need to I need to. I very much encourage everyone to book one on one, same day, any time, any length of time that they feel they need. And is there routine check-ins too like do you have a monthly or weekly with everybody or how does that work? Yeah, it’s about monthly for about 45 minutes, yes, yes, yeah, some opt for more and some opt for none some have their own um counseling services outside of the workplace too that they’re very regular and feel very well supported in that way so yeah. Uh, creating a culture of wellness at work. I mean, it comes from the top down. The CEO must be devoted to this, yeah, definitely, and, and again that was very intentional when we were setting up the organization. She was very much, um, a fan of a people centric culture, so I wanted to make this into policy process practice, so things like the 4 day work week, but also, um, when we have a decision and you know. You know we have to prioritize something we tend to prioritize people first and that means our clients but also our employees and then we might prioritize, you know, the tech or the finances and they go hand in hand, but we’re often um we’re really looking at the impact on the person so when we look at our benefits package when we look at our time off policy like all of those things we take up people. First lens too and like is this really improving the wellness of our culture or is it not um so thinking about just those systems are really important um so I’ve been really happy and you’re right from the top down like you have to have the buy in of the CEO or it’s never gonna stick um and I think she’s a huge advocate for wellness which is makes it a lot easier for sure. Uh, have you hired any new team members since the inaugural team? OK, um, so we only have a sample size of one, but what was the reaction when they were told that there’s a wellness, you’re, well, the wellness. Uh, the wellness coach, yeah, we have a wellness coach on on our team. What was the reaction? I think it was a huge draw so, um, part of the recruiting process, everyone we talked to the candidates before we made our final selection we’re all very excited about it. I think at first we had to explain it because it’s not something you see often so there’s a lot of education around this is. Resource for you they’ll be, you know, counseling available they’ll also just be a coach there to help you with your sort of own understanding of all of the dimensions of wellness, um, and it’s a 4 day work week like all those things were huge draws. I think it got us the the the big candidate pool that we saw, uh, and the final candidate that was selected was very excited about it. outstanding and uh productivity. I don’t know you don’t have a, you don’t have a control group. it wasn’t a pre-A and now how do you measure the productivity of the wellness program? It’s a great question, and we talk a little bit about metrics in our in our session tomorrow, um, because you’re right, there’s no control group pre wellness coach and 4 day work week and sort of people centric culture, but I think the metrics you we. And look at and use are a lot of the ones that other places have things like your employee engagement scores so like net promoter um but also just feedback. I know you know feedback is um is often seen as anecdotal but like anecdotal data is still data and so feedback from employees um we we haven’t um launched a net promoter score survey yet but we’ve gathered like you know monthly feedback on different offerings we’ve talked. The the staff, um, but I think turnover is like the biggest thing I look at it’s a lagging metric, um, and nobody has left. Well, always a good thing, right? Like no one’s like, I’m out of here, this isn’t working for me. There’s no exit interview data, yeah, exactly, um, so I think those are just big things to to keep an eye on and then there’s just, you know, participation rates of who’s engaging with the the services we offer, the programs we offer, um, their satisfaction from those programs and all of that that you can measure. Right, Sam, can you leave us with a wellness tip that we haven’t talked about yet? I’ll put you on the spot. You must have a deep repertoire of a tip tip. Yes, yes, your screen or away from screens. OK. Um, Mandy, Mandy, uh, vice president of people at the Fresh Perspective Group. Sam Hanley, wellness coach at the Fresh Perspective Group, Sam, Sam, you go by Sam Andy. That’s yeah that’s our duo name now. It’s the the the team, thank you, thank you very much for sharing. Thank you for having us. Thank you very much. And thank you for being with Tony Martignetti nonprofit radio coverage of 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit technology conference, where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting technology services for nonprofits. It’s time for Tony’s Take 2. Thank you, Kate. Very similar to what I said last week. The federal budget process is still ongoing in Washington DC. There are hearings, there are negotiations going on, and there are bad things in the budget for nonprofits. For instance, uh, uh, something that I didn’t mention last week, the, uh, the permission of the authority for the Secretary of the Treasury to singularly denote that a charity is a terrorist supporting organization. Now, you may recall, that sounds familiar, because back in late last year, There was the House resolution. Remember 9495, it was the nonprofit killer bill, a lot of people called it. That’s what 9495 allowed them to do. Now that that didn’t pass in the last Congress, so it’s not called that anymore, but the, the unilateral authority for the Secretary of the Treasury to designate a charity in that way and thereby, you know, canceling the charitable status, that is part of the proposed budget. Um, there are also the, the big funding cuts to, uh, USAID and the State Department for, uh, for foreign funding, um, so, you know, there are, there are bad things in the budget proposed for the nonprofit community. I’m urging you to contact your Congressional representatives, senators, and your House of Representative, House of Representatives representative, your congress people. Uh, let them know how important your work is and how important our nonprofit community is that you don’t want to see it threatened. That you don’t want to see funding cuts. How vital the work is that all the members of the nonprofit community do. Uh, I had said last week, I, I, I had a LinkedIn post last week that had a link for how to find your senators and your congressmen or or congresswoman. Um, you know, it’s easy to find. You don’t, you don’t need my LinkedIn post. It’s just last week I had done it, but I do urge you to reach out to these folks. I’ve been doing it, I’ve been, my people, uh, the, the, the three that I call, you can only leave messages, it’s unbelievable, and nobody ever picks up. But if that’s, that’s all you can get, that’s fine. They need to hear from All of us how important. The nonprofit community is in the US. And that is Tony’s take too. Kate I remember in high school we had to, one of our assignments was to actually make an email and then send it over to our congressman. So if a high schooler can do it, I think anyone can do it. Uh, absolutely, yes, it’s not hard to, you can reach them by email, by phone, uh, you can go in person because they have offices throughout your state, however you do it. It’s, it’s, yeah, very doable. We’ve got bou but loads more time. Here is email deliverability. Thank you for joining our 25 NTC coverage. We’re live at the Baltimore Convention Center. My guest now is Ann Paska. Very close. Pashka Pitch. There’s an accent over the sea, which is an unusual character. accent is. Yes, it is. Uh, well, it’s actually my wife’s last name. I’m Pasky. She was co-pitched. We’re married now we’re Pask pitch, uh, and she was born in Yugoslavia, which doesn’t exist anymore. OK, yes. Yeah, so I haven’t seen that before. I don’t know if it’s definitely a lot of our friends thought we were joking until they saw it on our legal documents, but it’s, uh, we didn’t wanna pick one over the other. Well, did you decide who goes first? No, we just thought Pakay. I agree. OK, OK, wonderful. Uh, she’s Ann Paskaic, managing production specialist at M. They probably just say, yeah, it’s uh we are a consulting firm, uh, we do digital work, advocacy, audience research, advertising, uh, mostly digital, some PR social media, well, most of that’s online as well, um, we work with nonprofits across the country and across the world. Your topic is email deliverability. Have the rules changed? That’s almost an ironic or sarcastic question, uh, because they have indeed changed. We’re gonna talk about. Uh, you know, so we’ve had this topic over a few times in the past 3 to 4 years, uh, probably because the rules are, are, are changing. So, so the answer to your question is, uh, or maybe it’s a rhetorical question. Yeah, the answer is yes, right? It’s mostly changed. There’s some things that have stayed the same, um, I mean for a given level of same, of course we’re sending emails and. Not just uh mail and phone calls anymore, but some stuff is the same but a lot has changed. For instance, uh, you say in your session topic, are only mail the people who’ve opened recently. Oh no, that’s not true anymore. Now it’s clicked. Only mail to people who have clicked. So where, where do we get started with this? Is this an OK place to start or what? I think this is a great place to start because I think who do you email? How can you tell that they’re consenting is essentially the question, you know, of course you’ve got people who hopefully have opted in um at a minimum you wanna give them the language that says you’re getting emails maybe you have a confirmed opt in, but then once they’re on their list, how can you tell that sort of ongoing consent? I think that my approach to this is, you know, deliverability can be really technical and complicated, but you just have to remember that the people on the other end are humans and you’re trying to read those signals to try and understand what’s going on with the human at the other end. In terms of the opens question, um, of course Apple came out in 2021 with the Apple privacy policy for emails, uh, which basically said it’s common knowledge, it may not be common, it’s not so common, but, but you’re the expert so I glad you thank you for breaking this down for us, but, uh, just in case there are any listeners who didn’t, uh, who didn’t know that, uh, I’m with you. I did not know that Apple came out with this, uh, 4 years ago now. Yeah, so give us the history. No, no, I’m not, I didn’t want you to gloss over. I just want, I didn’t want, I don’t want anybody to be uh disappointed if they didn’t, they weren’t aware of this common knowledge. That’s true, that’s true. I I I assume obviously it’s my. If you were watching your email open rights, if you’re in the part of your industry that does that, you probably saw them go haywire in early 2022 and that is because of this change. So what Apple did is they said essentially You know, when somebody opens an email, the way that we track opens is whether or not they download a tiny little tracking pixel, so essentially an image, and when you download that it sends a bunch of additional information to the CRM that you’re using, whatever, um, where are you, what’s your IP address, what device you’re on. And essentially Apple said, you know, we’re really big on privacy and we think that that’s too much information. So what they did is that anybody who opted into this new policy, which they opt you in by default, so pretty much anybody with an iPhone has opted in, yeah, yeah unless you’re a real nerd and you’re like, I’m gonna go 3 levels down on the menu and turn it off. Um, what they do is they essentially open the emails on your behalf. So instead of like Ann Paska Pitch Malden, Massachusetts, my home’s IP address, if I have an iPhone, then that privacy policy just says, oh this was opened by Apple and you know Pasadena, California or wherever that IP address is, so it is protecting my privacy. On the marketer’s end, instead of getting, well, OK, probably a human person downloaded this tracking pixel and we can see where they are, we can see what their devices, you just get well Apple opened this and because Apple opens that for everybody with an iPhone, just a lot of people, what happened is Openreach just kind of went everywhere. Um, it depends on the email tool you’re using. Some email tools that, you know, this is confusing, we’re gonna separate it out, we’re gonna, we can look at the signals and say. This is a human eye open, um, yeah, you know, like oh it’s Pasadena, California and Apple’s IP that’s a machine, you know, it’s a little more complicated than that, but from our end we were able to be like, oh OK, this is human open, this is machine open. Usually they prioritize looking at those human opens your open rates go down. For everybody else, the CRMs went like, I don’t know, it’s still an open, it’s all the same and so their open rates went up because everybody with an iPhone was quote unquote opening everything, yeah. And then coming back to the like how do you target your emails um before this change we said you know opens are good top of the funnel indication that somebody is probably looking at your email, you know, it’s a bit of a rough it was a it was a rough statistic even then because of course if you have all your images blocked or you’re just on a slow connection and the images don’t load, doesn’t matter if you read the email, it’s not going to download that tracking pixel and track it as an open. And then on the flip side, if you’re one of those people that opens an email in order to delete it, that was tracking as an open, but an open was still kind of a good indicator that at least a human was using that email address and probably looked at your email. OK, right, that that we could say. Yeah, and it was like a good rough estimate. And of course Apple comes out with this change and everybody’s like, well now I don’t know if a humans looked at it, uh, you know, the machine is doing this and I don’t know if somebody’s completely ignoring it, um, so a lot of organizations said, well, I’m not going to take into account Ops anymore because I don’t think it’s a good good success. So we’re talking about the users or the the email the email providers. Uh, neither the, the nonprofits who are sending our email, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, we’re part of this too. OK, so we don’t know what to. Yeah, yeah, you know, like I’m somebody reading my email. I’m not gonna notice the difference. Inbox providers, they can still get all that information because they have access, you know, if I’m Gmail, I own the inbox, even if you’re looking at it through your Apple iPhone. So they’re still getting the same data. It’s just us as marketers who are using a third party tool that’s, you know, only tracking opens through that little pixel. That’s where our data starts to get weird and our decisions about who to send to has this whole other variable. OK, so let’s drill down on that because that’s what our listeners I think are gonna be most interested in um at least in this around this part of the, this part of the topic, who should I be mailing to or who should I be scrubbing off. Or whatever that’s not the right. Who should I be dropping off our list because they’re not engaged. They’re bringing down our engagement rate. They, they don’t, they don’t open or maybe we, we don’t know if they open or even if we assume they open but they don’t click, they’re still bringing down our engagement rates because because the providers know all this, right? You know, they know what you see, they know if you, if you, if you open it or if you only look at it in your um. The browser, not the like the preview pane yeah yeah if you only see the preview pane you know if you click, you know if you open or open and then click. They know everything they know how far down you scroll. They know how many times you looked at it. They they know if you like after reading it, did you like carefully file it away in a file folder or did you delete it? Did you forward it? Did you, yeah, like all of these things they’re collecting every single data point. And feeding into their machine learning and we’re over here with that for your emails to people’s inboxes or not that’s the subject. OK, so what’s your uh expert advice? Who should we be taking off our list or if you want to approach it in the positive, who should we be mailing to so. I’m gonna say you should actually be emailing people that open and this is not what we thought was gonna happen when Apple came out with this whole machine thing but it turns out um whether you’re looking at just machine and human opens or rather whether you’re able to distinguish between them or they’re just in a big pool, you can’t tell the difference, different tools are different. Opens are still a really good indicator of whether somebody is using that inbox and it turns out that that is good enough for inbox providers um yeah pretty low threshold it it is a pretty inbox, yeah, well, it’s not just somebody owns it, it’s that. So sorry, I’m I’m gonna, I’m I’m gonna do other sidebar. So Apple’s robots will only open emails if one that email is landing in the inbox. So if you have a bad reputation, your email is going to spam, the robot’s not gonna open that essentially they’re like this isn’t good enough. I’m not gonna open it. Probably nobody’s gonna pull this out of spam and look at it. They also only open emails if somebody’s actually using that inbox. So if you, you know, we talked about me changing my name when I got married. I’ve got an Ann Pasky email address. If I don’t use that anymore and I stopped using it, so I stop logging on, then Apple’s gonna stop opening those emails for me, you know, they’ve they’ve they’ve got a lot of server space but it’s not infinite, so they’re not gonna spend it on people who aren’t using their email. So, if you get that machine open, it might not mean that I actually saw it, but it does mean that it 1 landed in my inbox and 2 that I am actively logging into that account. And it turns out, and again like this is not what I thought was going to happen, you know Apple came out, we said you should look at pulling back to just looking at other indicators, but what we saw is that the groups who were like I’m gonna wait, I’m gonna like wait until I see problems uh by targeting these opens that may be humans and may be machines they never had problems um they they saw that continuing to email. Active addresses whether or not those people were actually engaging with their emails in terms of opens kept them in a healthy deliverability spot. OK yeah, alright, so, so encapsulate to summarize that for our listeners who are not technologists but they’re certainly technology users uh into a sentence or two that we can digest. Yes, so if you are targeting your email list based on activity and open is a good indicator of activity. That was very concise. Thank you. I hope it was helpful. Yeah, yeah, it’s, it’s not the only indicator, you know, I think you should also be looking at clicks, you should be looking at things that aren’t deliverability related but are important to your program, whether that’s donors or event attendance or whatever other indicators somebody’s giving you that they’re going to be engaged because Tony, deliverability is not the point, right? It’s a tool, it’s a, it’s a requirement if people aren’t gonna read your emails if they can’t see them, but ultimately most people aren’t running a program where the goal is to deliver emails to the inbox. They’re trying to change the world. They’re trying to like talk to people, yeah, so. That’s why I say like also target people based on recent online actions because that’s what you’re actually going for. It’s not all about the technology and it’s it’s a yes, absolutely. It’s an online but it’s a nonetheless. Um, OK, making sure everyone has opted in. No, that’s not quite true anymore. Now we want double opt in. What, what, what’s the issue here? This is, this is a big one and one that I think is really different in the nonprofit space compared to, you know, obviously a lot of the advice out there is for for profits, you know, assuming you’re you’re selling the shoes or something like that. And this is where I feel like my take is maybe a little controversial but it’s based on what I’ve seen you don’t have to do a confirmed opt in if somebody is, for example, donating. They are putting down their credit card information they’re saying I care about you as an organization and I’m giving you my money and it is OK to just say, hey, thank you as part of that we are opting you into email. Obviously always give people the option to unsubscribe um you know there are some situations where you might want to do a confirmed opt in where it’s something like. Uh, we have an organization that sends, uh, cards to children in the hospital, and a lot of people want to do that, but they don’t actually care about signing up for the email list. So that’s a situation where we might want to do a confirmed opt in or a double opt in. Um, or anywhere where you’re a little bit worried about the quality of names you’re getting. So if you’re having people like sign up at a at an event and they’re typing things into an iPad or even if you’re writing your name on a piece of paper, that’s where you might want to make sure, hey, are you, did you make a typo? Is this really your email address? Did you really mean to sign up and send them that email confirmation that they have to click on to confirm, you know that? That is what a double opt in is, yes. you did not explain that. Yeah, we have jail. Yeah, opt in, confirmed opt in. It just means I put my email in on a form, but then I have to go to my inbox and click that link before I actually start receiving emails. Yeah. We do that all the time exactly a couple times a week. I mean it seems routine, OK, but that’s a double opt in so initially we’ve included you but please confirm. And then you confirm through clicking on an email, yes, yes, and that is kind of the gold standard of opt in, but of course a lot of people don’t do that so you have to kind of gauge what are my quality of names, what’s the likelihood that they’re going to see that one single confirmation email versus maybe the quality of action that brought them onto your list. How does this impact deliverability? the the inbox providers know whether there’s a double opt in? They do not. All they know is what happens when your email gets to the inbox that they own or you know, that they provide for your subscriber, their customer. Um, I guess they do it, yeah, yeah, they’re providing a, yeah, they’re providing a service to the user who is your supporters probably, um, and I feel like it’s important. I’m talking here about, uh, mostly free mail providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, you know, Hotmail, AOL, um, when we’re talking about. Uh, like, like a corporate inbox provider, um, meaning like I have a company and our IT team runs the spam filters versus Google running the spam filters. Those rules might be different. Most nonprofits lists are, you know, individual people using those free email boxes. The rules are a little bit different if you’re, um, mostly talking to corporations. Well, now we get to what which email address people have provided. Isn’t the personal, isn’t the personal email more valuable because it’s less likely to change through a person’s life? Yeah, yeah, but I think it also depends on like what context you’re talking in, um, you know, like I I just signed up for your list and I give you my work email because this is a work relationship so uh different organizations are gonna be relating to people in different parts of their lives. Right. Well, I guess it, I guess it depends on the relationship from the user perspective, which, which you gave us the second rate email because you might change your business and then I would lose you. I might, I might, but I don’t know. I’ve been in MR for almost 13 years now, so it’s, it’s pretty good. I just always have. I, I’m not disparaging your joining our list. Thank you. I’m grateful that you joined the list. I’m not disparaging the email you gave us. I’m having an academic discussion about which is, which is more valuable. I would have, I would think that someone’s Gmail or their, their home, their home, their personal account would be uh a more valuable over time. Address that I think all other things equal somebody’s probably gonna be on their personal email address for a longer period of time, but the thing to think about with deliverability is what what does that person want? Look how smart you are back to the top. I’m I’m wildly digressing and to the topic. Well, I can only speak to my area of expertise, so you’re doing great. Thank you for trying to build up. Um, no, but I think it’s a good question because it’s asking what is valuable to you as the sender versus what is valuable to the recipient if, uh, you know, we’re talking about, um, I mean yeah, let’s keep using me as the example. I’m like, OK, I want I want to know when my recording comes out. I want to know what other sessions you’re doing. That’s a work topic. I try to have good work life boundaries, you know, not always perfect, but so I wanna be like I wanna know when that’s coming out at work and you know be able to forward that email straight from my work email to my marketing email. If your email came to my personal inbox I’d be like no I don’t wanna think about work. I’m trying to trying to see when my pizza is delivered. I’m trying to see what my grandma sent me last week kind of thing. So it is, it’s relative. I might get upset I mean not me, but the hypothetical me might get upset if you’re sending work emails to my personal inbox. So I think that is a thing to be balanced. Like, sure, if I leave my job, you can’t email me my work email address anymore, but that’s where I want it. So I digression. Thanks for using yourself as an example all the time. I don’t know. Does your grandma send you stuff online? She’s pretty savvy. She does sometimes. She’s she’s got an Apple watch. Uh, she’s very, she is 92 and pretty savvy. 2. Yeah, I wouldn’t have even thought that old. Wow, 92 in an Apple watch it? Yeah, she does get her email on it? Uh, I mean, I don’t know if she gets her email. She does try to answer her phone on it sometimes and that’s it’s a little hard, but she’s great. She’s trying, yeah, yeah, not afraid. Apple Watch 92 savvy. Yes, let’s get into some nasty acronyms. Uh, we’ve, we’ve talked about these in the past. I was telling you off mic it was either last year or the year before we did email deliverability from uh at an NTC. SPF or DKIM first I live on the beach, so to me SPF is the sun protection factor. I look for at least 30 sometimes I I may transition to 50. I know that’s not what you’re talking about. Uh, let’s acquaint us first with these before we get to the deliverability advantages or disadvantages of each. Yeah well you know what I I’m gonna actually throw a third one in there and that’s D D M A C, OK, yeah, yeah, we’ll take one at a time. What’s our SPF? Gosh, OK, now I feel like you’re quizzing. It is a sender policy framework SPF. So there you go. Alright, yeah, and what’s its relevance to us in in the deliverability subject? Well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna actually bucket these together. I’m not. No, no, so I think that these are, these are really important to understand. They’re very technical. I will say you only need to understand them once, probably, uh, the first time that you set up your email system, and then you only have to change them if you either change your domain name or send your change your sending IP address, which you probably don’t know what your sending IP address is, so TLDR if you move to a different email system. You know, whoever you’re sending from owns that IP address. All of these different frameworks are just different ways to say, hey, I’m sending an email and I’m allowed to do that and I am who I am, so I like using myself as an example. This doesn’t apply I’m not a bulk sender, but if I were a bulk sender. We’ll use MNR. M&R sends a labs post periodically, you know, I write about deliverability you get in your inbox. Um, the SPF DIM and DMmark are all different ways of saying hello, this email is indeed from M&R. I’m not spamming you. I’m not spoofing. I have permission to send, I have permission to use this IP address and these things all line up, um. Part of the reason I’m bundling this together is honestly, I have spent time trying to understand the technical differences between these and what all of them are. And it doesn’t stick in my head because I don’t need it that often. I mean we needed this initially when we set it up set up our email with our provider, yes, yeah, you, you need to talk to your your email provider, your CRM, whatever you wanna call it, and you need to have access to your DNS, which is the back end of your website essentially, yes, exactly, and it is essentially taking different pieces of code from different. Places and pasting them in other places to say what I said that you are a legitimate you’re sending OK so I think it’s bucket. There are a lot of really great resources about these. I, I will be honest, I am not one of them. I can tell you that you need to have it and I can tell you you should check and keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t break, but it is. Hopefully you set it and forget it. If we don’t have an IT uh CIO or an IT director manager, who should we check with? You should check with whoever you are sending your email out of. So your Salesforce, your Fonterra, every action, they will have their support team, um, so one of these again, uh, I don’t have a best friend of mine, one of those, they, they will. have to set up for you to provide the code to say you know we own this IP address and you’re allowed to send from it, but they will be able to help you through the other pieces because obviously they they want you to be able to send email successfully out of their system so they will be able to walk you through the technical difficulties or hopefully not difficulties, the technical details, give you the code, tell you where to put it, talk to if you don’t have an IT team, whoever is the best person with access to the back end of your website. Um, and that sort of thing that they’re gonna be a good resource. This is all about proving that you are who you say you have to send this. Name the sender that we’re telling you it’s coming from. It’s both the domain so whatever parts after the at sign of the email address, so MRSS.com for me uh and the IP address that is owned by that email tool that you’re using. OK, OK, um, we can spend more time together if if there’s more you want to say about deliverability that we haven’t talked about yet. Let’s see, I think the one other thing I wanna say is that um it’s really important to pay attention to and that means some sort of monitoring or reporting system. uh I think that it it is it can be tricky, right, because if you’re a small nonprofit, you don’t have a ton of resources, you’re gonna try to not pay attention until there’s a problem. That can be costly because then first of all you, you have a problem that you haven’t noticed for a while um and then it can be harder to fix and then you’re also trying to fix it at the same time you’re trying to figure out how can I tell if I fixed it. So I think it’s worth taking a little bit of. of time and setting up a couple of tools that will let you monitor what your deliverability is. Is it still generally better to have a mail to a smaller list that’s more engaged than a larger list with a lot of unengaged addresses? That’s a that’s a yes no question and I like to say it depends. um I think that what you wanna look at is how many people you’re actually reaching. I’m not gonna say like smaller is always better. I’m, I’m honestly more in that middle part. I wanna try and figure out how many people you can reach to maximize your program without hurting deliverability and kind of find that line and stay just on this side of it, um. Look at your actual numbers oftentimes if you’re sending to a huge list of people, the only big number is how many emails were sent and how many emails were delivered. You wanna look at, you know, we like to look at percentages, but you wanna look at like who in terms of numbers is actually opening or clicking and especially donating or taking action or signing up for your events or whatever that end goal is. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, so there’s value, you just said this. I’m just reiterating. Uh, there is value in looking at the metrics, some key metrics. I don’t know, once a month or something or maybe more. It depends on how often you’re sending email, but I, I will say not once an email. Um, deliverability can be kind of volatile. So if you’re looking at it once an email is a good way to give yourself a scare and like have a false false positive in terms of there being a problem. Uh, once a month is usually good for most people or once a campaign. Um, and just taking a look at looking at that performance, if you can looking at performance by recipient domain, so dividing up and saying what was the open rate for my gmail.com subscribers, what was the open rate for my Yahoo.com subscribers because all those inbox providers have their own spam filters, so. Even though they use the same kinds of data, their users have different data points, so a decline consistent trend with one provider compared to the others, you might have an issue with that provider web person or IT provider. Rules at that provider. I mean, if you, if it’s noticeable enough that if it’s if it’s enough of a decline that it’s, it bothers you. And if it doesn’t bother you if it’s only a couple of maybe it’s not worth spending time on that. Yes, take a step back, look at your whole program. Yeah, I mean it’s good to look at individual domains because if Gmail thinks you’re you’re absolutely peachy and Yahoo thinks you’re sketchy, why would you do anything about Gmail? Why would you cut back on, you know, maybe main fix that you have is is to send to less engaged people and more sorry less unengaged people and more engaged people and if Gmail says, yeah, no, everybody’s engaged, why would you cut back sending there if the problems with Yahoo. OK, savvy advice overall. Thank you. All right, Ann, Ann, and Pasaic, managing production specialist M and give your grandma my good wishes. I admire 92. I do plan to fundraising, so I work with 70, 80, 90 year olds and I don’t know any 90 year olds with an Apple Watch, so she’s an outlier on, on the good side. On the on the Ambitious. Yeah, in the connected. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ann. Thanks for sharing and thank you for listening as 25 NTC, the 2025 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller Consulting. Next week, healthier productivity from AI with Mika Whitlock and Jason Shim. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you. Find it at Tony Martignetti.com. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer Kate Martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy, and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. Be with us next week for nonprofit Radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out and be great.
