Listen Up! is a national network of more than 60 youth media organizations, where disadvantaged youth learn media literacy, production and activism. Located in New York City, the national office of Listen Up! provides key technical and organizational support to members, including web hosting and media streaming at listenup.org, national workshops and broadcast distribution support. Listen Up! also provides project-based funding for sites in its network. Listen Up! is funded by the Annenberg Foundation, MetLife Foundation, W.K. Kellogg Foundation, Open Society, Institute, and Surdna Foundation.

Listen Up! partnered with SKYLIST in 2003. At the time, Web Producer Colin Mutchler was concerned with the time it took him send his organization's monthly email newsletter and to subscribe people to the list. He was also discontent with the lack of information he had about how Listen Up's thousands of email list members were actually using the newsletter he sent from his personal email client. Mutchler hoped that SKYLIST's hosted broadcast email delivery and reporting service would assist him to address both these issues.

After sending his first newsletter campaign using SKYLIST's service, Mutchler realized the immediate value. As he recalls, "…creating, testing, and sending our content-graphic intensive email publication had never been faster or easier. SKYLIST's 'hard bounce' report also gave us a clear list of members whose email addresses were no longer valid." Mutchler wanted to find the best approach to remedying this dilemma.

SKYLIST rapidly responded to assist Listen Up!. SKYLIST's hosted service automatically changes the status of no longer valid email addresses to "hard bounces" which the system disallows from sending to in the future and consolidates into a list that can be downloaded. Accordingly, SKYLIST first advised Mutchler to update Listen Up's master database against these results and then contact the members off-line for their new email addresses. Once this best-practice was executed, SKYLIST then provided Listen Up! with campaign guidance on personalization and targeting to enhance the performance and reception of its member communications.

As Listen Up's email newsletter program has matured and Mutchler has become a seasoned email campaign "veteran", he refers to the monthly distribution as the "most informative and viral form of member communication Listen Up! has achieved." Says Mutchler, "In addition to knowing who's received, opened, and clicked on our email news, members can now forward our graphic html newsletters to a friend without any loss of quality." As a result, Listen Up's email subscribership continues to grow and response rates have been increasing as the organization has direct access to what is of greatest interest to its members. In August, Listen Up's "Summer Wrap Sheet" boasted a 90% open rate.

For more information about Listen Up!, please visit http://www.listenup.org