The Problem with Trying to Do Your Own Email Marketing

Web designers always bemoan online website creators like Wix and Squarespace for making it too easy to build a website and undercutting their own trade (and pricing). We’ve certainly battled with that at Harrelson Co over the years, especially given that our main client base is made of nonprofits, churches, small businesses, and generally those with very limited budgets.

However, I’ve realized over the years that the clients who complain about invoice costs and threaten to “move to Squarespace” are the types of clients I don’t enjoy working with in the first place, so it’s better to say “no” upfront and let them pursue those seemingly cheaper options (which never turn out to be cheaper).

This has become especially true with email marketing. Email is super hot right now in the online marketing world. There’s a reason every politician, church, business, NASCAR sponsor, and fast food company wants you to subscribe to their newsletter… it’s insanely profitable to have a highly engaged core group of people on an email list. Tools such as Mailchimp and Constant Contact and even SendGrid have come along to help ease the friction of setting up, desigining, and sending email newsletters to the point where it’s perceptibly “not that hard” to do it yourself.

But that’s not the whole story. Like having a poorly designed and optimized site using a “free” or “cheap” website builder, using these tools on your own or “in-house” takes not only a number of unplanned for resources, but also a level of expertise that most business owners or nonprofit directors simply aren’t aware of… and it will “cost” you much more in the long term if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Here’s a great post from the ZeroBounce team on some of the nuances of setting up and sending email newsletters… it’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking “free tools = easy” … but do your homework.

The very first condition of great marketing is to make sure your message actually reaches your audience. We know that many companies struggle to land their emails in their customers’ inboxes. If you’re one of them, you will find this guide to be a lifesaver. We used our knowledge and experience to create a complete set of guidelines to help you achieve a better email deliverability and maintain a healthier sending reputation.

Source: Email Deliverability – Complete Guide | ZeroBounce

Spaying and Neutering Dogs

Well this is an eye-opening piece that has caused me to reconsider lots of presuppositions…

In other words, to solve the problem of our unwillingness to keep track of our dogs, we do not address our own unwillingness. To address the overpopulation of unwanted dogs, we do not address the overpopulation. Instead, we non sequitur: we take brand-new dogs and introduce them into our homes by first putting them through a surgery at six, four, or even three months of age. The professed solution, in the United States, is to spay or neuter all the new ones.

Source: Opinion | Dogs Are Not Here for Our Convenience – The New York Times

On Being a Revangelical – Merianna Neely Harrelson

I always got questions from Thinking Religion listeners when I claimed to “still be” an Evangelical. Merianna explains it much better than I ever could here…

Between this statement and my partner’s parsing of the Greek meaning of the term evangelical around the dinner table, I am finally ready to say that I am evangelical or perhaps a revangelical, returning to an identity I used to wear proudly as I tried to convert my middle school friends and offer them eternal salvation.

I am no longer interested in converting people, but I am interested in continuing to accept the invitation of partnering in the wonderful, mystical, and transformative work that the Holy Spirit is doing here on earth within and among us.

Source: On Being a Revangelical – Merianna Neely Harrelson

Chernobyl on the Seine

In 1933 nuclear physicist Marie Curie had outgrown her lab in the Latin Quarter in central Paris. To give her the space needed for the messy task of extracting radioactive elements such as radium from truckloads of ore, the University of Paris built a research center in Arcueil, a village south of the city. Today it’s grown into a crowded ­working-class suburb. And the dilapidated lab, set in an overgrown garden near a 17th century aqueduct, is sometimes called Chernobyl on the Seine.

Source: France Is Still Cleaning Up Marie Curie’s Nuclear Waste – Bloomberg

I Almost Forgot How to Tie a Bowtie

My oldest daughter made a comment about how I resemble The Librarian in my mannerisms and philosophy on things, except that I didn’t wear bowties anymore.

That was good enough inspiration for me to open up my dusty drawer of memory-imbued bowties I have collected, bought, been given by students, and gifted by friends over the years. During my time as a Middle School teacher, the bowtie became my talisman and an important part of my costume that I would put on every morning (and squirrels… but that’s a different blog post). My students would voice their disappointment when they showed up to class and I had on a “regular” tie. I started receiving handmade bowties made out of duct tape, squirrel-themed bowties, and everything in between. My official portrait done by the 8th graders in art class included the bowtie as well. I taught numerous young people (of all gender identifications) how to tie a bowtie. High schoolers would come by my graduation before picture day or a school dance or graduation to have me help them tie their bowties.

So I was incredibly sad and then frustrated this morning when I went to tie one of my favorite bowties and realized the muscle memory was gone. It was as if I’d been a concert pianist for years and then I sat down to play Fur Elise and had no idea where to move my hands.

I stopped myself, looked myself in the mirror, and resolved then to never forget how to tie a bowtie. The muscle memory slowly came back, and I made a pretty good knot.

It’s time for me to get back to where I once belonged and not forget the power of the bowtie.

When you tell your daughters that you collect images of Jonah and they send you one from a Basilica

Pretty cool kids…

It’s always been my conjecture that the Dura Europos Baptistry had images of Jonah present as a representation of the 3-day Resurrection event in a Jewish/Chritian context. There were depictions of Adam and Eve in the Baptistry area (along with Jesus as the Good Shepherd as well as other common representations from the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible in places such as the Catacombs in Rome).

Here’s an image of the Dura Baptistry from the original printing of Dura Europos and Its Art by Prof. M. Rostovtzeff (1938, Oxford Press)… one of my favorite books and possessions:

The top register includes a depiction of Jesus telling the disabled person by the Bethesda Pool to grab their cot and get up and walk off (John 5). It’s a terrific passage.

The amazing (and frustrating thing) is that the register literally flows the pool into a depiction of Jesus walking on water on the Sea of Galilee and getting Peter to hop out of the boat to walk towards him (Mark 6, Matthew 14, and John 6)… which doesn’t turn out well for Peter. The depiction here actually shows Peter sinking in the waves!

Here are the two panels we have with the earliest depictions of Jesus that we know of …

Dura Europos Baptistry Depictions of Jesus Healing the Paralytic and Walking on Water

While a grad student at Yale, I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of years working at the incredible Yale Art Gallery with Prof. Susan Matheson and the talented staff there. One of my “jobs” (it was more like dream assignments) was working in the basement to catalog the Dura Europos collection with digital photography. I got to see this fresco on a pretty regular basis and we became good pals. If I knew then what I know now…

However, the frustrating part is that the water continues to flow to the next register… which has been lost to history after the sack of the (then) Roman Dura Europos in 256-257 CE by Sassanians and subsequent abandonment of the fort / town and eventual disappearance into history before the complete looting of the site by ISIS over the last decade. It’s a sad tale and I had always hoped to travel to Dura and participate in a dig where we’d uncover the other pieces of the top register in the Baptistry that would almost certainly have included Jonah being regurgitated from the fish and therefore seal my case about Jewish-Christianity extending well into the 3rd and 4th centuries. Alas.

Again, Jonah shows up quite often in early Christian artwork and imagery as a signifier of the Resurrection (the Catacombs especially), but I always wanted to see what those genius artists who designed the Dura Europos Baptistry did with the rest of the panels and the water theme as they perched between the edge of the desert and overlooking the Euphrates River.

YouTube and “Reinforcing” Psychologies

“The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize users’ engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.

Reinforce was a huge success. In a talk at an A.I. conference in February, Minmin Chen, a Google Brain researcher, said it was YouTube’s most successful launch in two years. Sitewide views increased by nearly 1 percent, she said — a gain that, at YouTube’s scale, could amount to millions more hours of daily watch time and millions more dollars in advertising revenue per year. She added that the new algorithm was already starting to alter users’ behavior.

“We can really lead the users toward a different state, versus recommending content that is familiar,” Ms. Chen said.”

via “The Making of a YouTube Radical” by Kevin Roose in the New York Times

Unexplainable Experiences and How the Church has Lost to YouTube and Netflix

“The Church” (admittedly generically speaking here) has become a community center / garden club / singles bar / country club / music venue in the modern American experience.

There’s generally little to no real examination of the unexplainable or mysterious (especially in my Baptist circles… because of job security). So people who still go to church are left to ponder those themes by themselves with YouTube or the latest Netflix sci-fi dystopian shocker or with Marvel Universe movies.

Maybe if churches were to re-engage with the mysterious and with the unexplainable and with mythologies of deep and ancient wisdom we don’t (and cannot) understand, more people would engage with the church. It’s a part of human psychology and our pull to the black monolith of mystery is repressed when churches operate at surface level Sunday-School-as-therapy-sessions…

It’s Pentecost tomorrow, so I’ve been thinking a great deal about this and how most sermons and Sunday School lessons (if people even do them anymore instead of a book study or self-help group) will be about vague and superficial terms meant to dumb down the unexplainable event that we remember and reenact still.

More than half of American adults and over 60 percent of young Americans believe in intelligent extraterrestrial life. This tracks pretty closely with belief in God, and if Pasulka is right, that’s not an accident.

Her book isn’t so much about the truth of UFOs or aliens as it is about what the appeal of belief in those things says about our culture and the shifting roles of religion and technology in it. On the surface, it’s a book about the popularity of belief in aliens, but it’s really a deep look at how myths and religions are created in the first place and how human beings deal with unexplainable experiences.

Source: The new American religion of UFOs – Vox