How to Piss Off 2.1 Million People — and How to Make It Better
By Marah Lidey
We made a mistake. A beluga whale of a mistake.
Here’s the story: every other week, my team broadcasts a text message to our members, activating them to take action on DoSomething.org campaigns. a few months ago, we sent this (seemingly innocuous) message:
Hey Can-tributer! Together you donated 510,543 items! Wow! Want to meet Jewish teens who make a difference like u? You can w/ BBYO! Visit bbyo.org/partne…
Why was this so bad? First of all, it assumed that everyone who received was a) familiar with BBYO (a Jewish youth org) and b) a Jewish teen. To make matters worse, that message was supposed to go to a segmented list of 4,000 users who completed our Can-Tribute campaign. Instead, we accidentally sent it to our entire list of 2.1 million users. Yeesh.
While that Wednesday wasn’t my fav hump day of 2014, it actually wasn’t all bad — because our team learned a lot. Here are some of the those valuable lessons.
- Nothing beats one-on-one conversation.
We had 11,543 members respond to the text. Most were confused or amused, but others were outraged, spewing anti-Semitic and other hateful comments.
At first, we considered opting those people out of our list. But one of the things that makes us the number one org for young people is that we exist for all young people. And those angsty, angry, or confused teens are sometimes that ones who we can matter to most. With a little one-to-one conversation, we’ve seen members turn from ignorant to activist in minutes.
One of our team members responded to a racial slur from a young person in our inbox with this awesome joke: “What did one butt cheek say to the other? Together, we can stop this shit.”
Once he realized that we were real people (with real corny jokes) he began a real dialogue with us. Beyond that, he tackled one of our racial discrimination campaigns and continues be an active member.
2. Respond quickly and with humor.
Within hours of our mistaken message, one of our brilliant team members, Alysha, came up with the idea of sending the 11,543 responders an “I F’ed Up” playlist. Here is that message:
Alysha here. Proof I’m human: I messed up & sent u a text about being Jewish. To say sorry, I made you an “I F’d Up” playlist. Listen here:http://doso.me/2p
It included songs like “Apologize” by One Republic and Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time.” We wanted to send our members something that felt like a genuine apology, that showed them that we were real people (who make mistakes) and to give them something of value — at least entertainment value.
The result was pretty incredible. We saw the highest click rate on a link we’ve ever seen via text, with 1 in 3 users who received the message clicking through to listen to the playlist. Members responded to that message too, and almost every response was positive, saying things like “Ha, I forgive you Alysha” and “Wow — I respect the honesty DoSomething.”
3. Our process could be better.
This situation was 100% avoidable, poking holes in our systems and showing us the value in (double) checking ourselves. So we created a checklist of things that needed to be validated before sending a broadcast:
- Language: Bottom line: we should never send out a message to any one person on our list that we wouldn’t want our whole mobile list to see. Now we make sure to run all broadcasts (even the small ones) through our content team.
- Settings: We’ve now put checks in place so that a single person doesn’t have to bear the weight of broadcasting to 2.1 million people — which can feel like pressing the red button to end the world. Now, multiple people check that the transmission was set up correctly.
- Context and Segmentation: These two things work hand-in-hand. We should always keep the context of what’s going on in our users lives in mind, and segment accordingly. That text was sent a few days after Thanksgiving, when many of our members would’ve been on fall break, yet it didn’t mention that or anything else that might have been going on in their lives. We also didn’t segment according to activity or demographics. Superusers and new users would have both received that message, and we just know that is not a best practice.
Originally published at blog.dosomething.org.
Marah Lidey is the Director of Mobile Product & Messaging at DoSomething.org. She loves a good murder mystery novel, spontaneous travel, and is constantly waging an internal battle between her affinity for green juice and cinnamon sugar donuts. Marah tweets here.
