This week’s “How the fuck does this make money,” is a transition. It’s about why I stopped doing what I used to do to make money, and why, beyond “I need to make money,” I’m going to start doing it again.

It’s long and I’m gonna be honest: if you aren’t obsessed with digital strategy already, you might find your eyes glazing over. I won’t be offended if you skip it — next week kicks off the interviews. Have a wonderful week! — H

Lately, I’ve been trying to stop doing new things.

I’ve been trying to not jump on wild schemes that require me to build new websites, establish new social media platforms, create new “brand identities,” or spend money I do not have. And yet. This time, I went full throttle with a new idea.

In spite of the fact that it was a new idea.

It’s called FWD:Soapbox, and it is a email marketing business.

An email marketing business sounds like the type of thing I would make fun of in this newsletter.

So bear with me for a second.

FWD: Soapbox is part of me making my work financially sustainable.

Which means doing more group support than I have over the last few months. 

But I’m also genuinely excited about FWD: Soapbox, enough to write about it here.

That’s because it feels like the solution to a lot of problems I’ve had doing digital strategy for political groups over the last 8 years.

Problems many people on this list have also struggled with.

So.

Who cares about email?

The groups I work with have been very different in their political aims, vision, staff, resources, even their technological capacity. But they all had 2 things in common:

1. A strong political vision,

1. Very few resources to move towards that vision.

So they all had the same problem over and over again. 

Let’s be real: some of those groups had a lot of other problems with overall culture, politics, conflict management.

But when I started doing contract work I realized many groups I admired, with strong values that showed up in their day-to-day, had the exact same problems as the “toxic work environments” I had been in previously.

They all had the same problem! 

Doesn’t that suck?

Since all these groups had the same problem, when I realized I couldn’t solve that problem effectively, I thought about leaving digital strategy work forever. 

Admittedly getting a PTSD diagnosis around this time didn’t help.

But feeling unable to solve this problem was a big part of my overall “burnout” story.

Here’s what the problem is: 

Most small organizations with limited resources have information gaps.

What is an information gap?

When the right information is not getting shared with enough of the right people.

Information gaps are incredibly frustrating. 

They are rarely anyone’s “fault “, and being aware of them does very little to solve the problems they create. 

Here are two examples:

When I was working with Means TV, they were constantly putting out content that took a lot of anxious and sleepless nights to make, on top of raising 20K in a month, managing all of their legal paperwork, keeping the lights on, etc. 

There were only two people doing all these things. I wanted to help, but I was not making decisions day in and day out. To be honest, as much as I believed in their vision, the incredible work that they were doing, I was lazy. I didn’t have the capacity (or, at that time, the knowledge) to help them without getting as in the weeds about their work as they were.

There was an information gap. 

And because there was an information gap, a lot of my marketing suggestions and ideas were… not that helpful.

I had the capacity, but I didn’t have the information. 

They had the information… but they were exhausted, and they had 3000 other things to work on every single day.

The problem wasn’t burn out, or bad management, or any of the 3000 other things you see at a dysfunctional nonprofit. 

It was just that we didnt’t have a way to bridge our information gap that was meaningful or interesting. 

Another example.

Now that I am inviting other people into writing Working 2050, I am constantly beset by information gaps.

 In my head I’m like “yeah, everyone knows that the capital of the American Union is in Cleveland, and the political situation between Cleveland and Umoja Moon is fraught after the 2039 Amazon Accord,” but guess what!

They totally don’t, because I literally made up all of that up.

It lives exclusively in my brain.

I often end up sort of awkwardly asking people to read Google documents that they didn’t know existed in order to finish writing the fiction part of their episode.

Because I am working with really thoughtful and talented people, they are down to do this.

But it also means the show is moving really slowly.

I’ve been working on finishing the last six episodes, a backlog only on me, for six months.

And the people who want to help can’t do much because they aren’t able to get inside my brain.

There’s an information gap.

This isn’t ideal, but the bigger problem is people who actually listen to the show don’t have all of the information: I haven’t done a great job of promoting the show episodes themselves, and lots of people who read the original scripts reach out to me and be like “hey… does this show actually exist?“. Whoops.

Information gaps don’t only happen on teams: in fact, information gaps are most insidious when the gap is between those doing the most and people who want to do more but don’t know how to get involved. 

For a long time, I had no way of fixing this problem. I just figured if there was an information gap at an organization or on my project, it was inevitable, and we just had to deal with it.

Until now.

So: how do you freaking solve an information gap?

An effective solution to an information gap includes the following:

1. It’s realistic: It’s not a one pager no one is ever going to look at, or a checklist that will work perfectly for a week and then fall apart the minute there’s a crisis.

2. It actually solves the problem: it’s not like hey, this is really hard, so I guess Joe our head of staff is just going to do everything forever from now on. have fun answering emails at four in the morning Joe!

3. It’s routinized: Ideally it’s routinized with a little give, so if you miss it for a week because everyone went into crisis mode, your entire organization doesn’t go back to the way it was before.

When I was despairing about information gaps, I was like, “this is an impossible problem to solve — it’s about resources, and the right will always have a bazillion dollars more than us, which allows them more time, energy, and emotional space. We’re doomed, the end, I wonder if it’s too late to become a physical therapist”

That was a little dramatic.

Because it turns out that the solution to information gap problem is incredibly simple.

Like, “you’re reading the solution to this problem right now,” simple.

It’s having a cohesive email strategy.

“a cohesive email strategy” sounds neither sexy nor particularly “social justice”-y.

But it solves 90% of the information gaps issue I struggled with while doing digital strategy.

It’s wild. 

When I was working with groups on building a sustainable and useful digital strategy, most of the time I encouraged them to pick a message and pick a medium and go from there. When I tried to be a consultant for a hot second, I would often choose the best medium and message FOR them, with a lot of different exercises and trainings and meetings and blah blah blah.

But most groups I worked with needed to focus on consistency above all else — so “just pick something” was not the empowering option I thought it was.

For the people I was working with, it was like… Oh my God… Another obstacle, another decision. 

Inevitably they would pick nothing, and either I would keep soldiering on working on something ineffective, which sucked, or… quit in a bout of resentment a year later. (I know. I had boundary issues. Again, the information gap is not always the problem.)

But what I should’ve been saying rather than “just pick something!” was “let’s start with your email.” 

Your email matters.

Even the crustiest most anti-technology organizer and their out of touch boss knows you need to send emails.

The massive kind of emails you send it to hundreds or thousands or more.

We’ve all gotten them. Maybe you got them when you canvassed for Bernie, a series of increasingly urgent requests for $12.95. Or maybe you signed up to get emails from a dog psychic, and the next week you got five emails describing every tip the psychic knows about working with anxious dogs (maybe that’s just me). 

Here’s why email solves the information gap:

By writing them, you as a team, not just the frantic person who knows too much, or the person with lots of energy but not a single clue, but BOTH of you, have to sit down and talk about what’s going on, consistently.

And guess what? 

A lot of the times, the information your people need to know (via email) is also the information people on the team need to know themselves — even if they don’t know it yet.

With an email strategy, you create a method to share information systematically that actually works for you.

That won’t collapse when you have your first crisis situation next Tuesday.

Seriously, this works. It freaking works.

And the reason I am so excited about email strategy because it solves the problem groups I actually care about are facing: how to make things easier to do when you have a lot of freaking things to do.

A cohesive email marketing strategy gives people the information they need to make decisions.

It helps you get your team on board while thinking deeply about who your people are, and it helps you build consistency, authenticity, and usefulness in whatever you’re doing to tell people about your work.

So… when it comes to building stronger, bigger, less chaotic social justice groups, maybe we’re not doomed after all. 

Anyway, that’s what FWD:Soapbox is about: working with groups to help them build email strategy that solves their information gaps.

I won’t “plug” this business in Notes on Feednet, or talk about it here much.

But I wanted to mention it at least once because… I’m excited. And I thought you nerds might be too.

Because for the first time, I see how you can tell true stories with the people you want to connect with in a way that defies organizational chaos.

If you are struggling with any of the things described in this email, and you want to talk more (for real, if you want to talk more, not “if you want to pay me money to talk more,”) let me know. 

Either way, good luck with your information gaps and your burn out, and talk to you soon.

— H