Invite your email subscribers to be a part of the relief efforts in Haiti. Emma’s endlessly talented graphic designers put together a suite of donation badges that are yours to add to your next email campaign. Here’s how it works:

1. Download the badge that suits your style.

2. Add it to your email campaign.

3. Link it to this donation page we’ve put together with the help of the fine people at Network for Good:
http://www1.networkforgood.org/emma-haiti-relief, or pair it with your own program.

There you have it, and here’s to doing some good with our email campaigns.

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Every year, we award free Emma email and survey service to small, deserving non-profits that our customers tell us about.

Today, the nominations are in — over 100 fantastic groups doing fantastic work around the world — and we’re asking *you* to vote for your five favorite groups anytime between now and the end of January.

Vote now at www.myemma.com/emma25, and tell folks you know to get involved in the giving back good times, too.

Here’s to sending some email and doing some good!

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When we say it’s the most wonderful time of the year ’round these parts, we’re talking about Emma 25 time. It’s the annual program (now in its sixth year) where we team up with our customers to award free Emma service to deserving non-profits — 25 around the world, and 25 in the cities Emma calls home (Nashville, Portland, Denver and Austin).

If you’re an Emma customer, why not nominate your favorite non-profit for free email marketing and survey services from Emma? It’s a fantastic way to help those groups use email to stay in touch with volunteers, find donations, send newsletters, manage events and more.

Come early January, we’ll post all the eligible groups and invite the whole world to vote for their favorites. But for *your* favorite group to be an honoree, *you’ve* got to nominate ‘em.

It just takes a few minutes, and you’ll have that warm, fuzzy feeling that no amount of delicious gingerbread lattes can rival. Go on and get to nominating!

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At Emma, we plant 5 trees for each new customer that joins us. Readers of this blog decide where the trees should go, and for June you told us that we should plant trees in California. And we thought that was a lovely idea.

Thanks to the new customers who started in June, we’ve got 1,770 trees to work with. Our tree planting partner, Plant-It 2020, will choose an equatorial region for half of the trees. The other half will soak up the sun (and occasional water) in the Golden State.

It’s a new month, and more tree-lovin’ states are lined up for your vote. Pick one, won’t you?

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We’re sending a batch of trees to Vermont.

Last year, Emma started planting 5 trees for each new customer who joins us for email marketing and communications. The states where we plant the trees come from a list provided by our tree-planting partner, Plant-It 2020. Vermont was the only state on the list not to receive trees from Emma, but we “fixed” that last month by making Vermont the only possible choice.

Now we’ve got a fresh batch of tree-lovin’ places up for a vote. So where’ll it be?

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Emma plants 5 trees for each new customer that joins the community for email marketing and communications, and each month we award trees to a state chosen by readers of this blog. The states where the trees go are from a list from our tree-planting partner, Plant-It 2020. Only Rhode Island and Vermont had never received trees since we started planting trees last year.

Until now.

For April, you chose Rhode Island in a narrow decision (54%) over Vermont. Thanks to 399 new customers in April, half of the 1,995 trees will go to Rhode Island. The other half will go to the equatorial region chosen by Plant-It 2020.

That leaves just Vermont. Help us reforest the Green Mountain state, won’t you?

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During this year’s SXSWi, Emma asked participants to help decide which 40 classrooms to help through DonorsChoose.org, an organization that helps fund classroom projects that fall outside public school budgets.

One such request came from Ms. F., who teaches math, science and reading to 44 sixth-graders in Wisconsin. In her classroom, there are two pencil sharpeners, one of which doesn’t work well, the other of which just doesn’t work. It takes two students to sharpen a pencil here, as one holds the broken sharpener steady while the other turns the crank.

Ms. F. appealed to DonorsChoose.org, asking for a pencil sharpener. Her students, she wrote, have great potential despite many obstacles: they’ve run out of glue for science fair boards, they don’t have enough graph paper to practice graphs in math and have no poster paper for group presentations. Plus, they share a limited number of pencils.

“The truth is, I teach in a rough neighborhood,” wrote Ms. F. “My students put up with more disappointment than they should have to and I would love to provide everything for them but, unfortunately, that is not possible. What we’re asking for is a working pencil sharpener and a few other basic supplies that will make our day run just a little bit more smoothly.”

Emma and others helped fulfilled her $276 request. Here’s what she wrote in response:

“Thank you SO much for funding my project! These resources are going to greatly enhance the learning in my classroom. Not having to send students to other rooms to sharpen their pencils or try, desperately, to manipulate our broken pencil sharpener is going to be wonderful. You don’t realize how amazing a working pencil sharpener is until you don’t have one.

“People like you who are so willing to help out students in need truly amaze me. There are so many people in these students’ communities and lives who are not even willing to support them and here you are, strangers to them, and more than willing to put their needs in front of your own. I hope you know how much your generosity is appreciated.”

Working with DonorsChoose.org is just one of the ways Emma gives back. Click here to learn more. See the full list of classrooms we helped fund here. And learn how you can sponsor your *own* classroom project here.

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Last week, we had a little fun on Arbor Day, crafting, um, totally fake notes from a few of the 28,000 trees the Emma community has helped plant this year. In reply, a few of our (always stylish) customers let us know of a few great tree-related programs in their *own* worlds, and we thought we’d share a couple of them with you now:

From Meryl Dorey at Fountain of Beauty Cosmetics in Bangalow, Australia:

Dear Emma folk,

This is not a support request - just a thank you! When I signed up for Emma (only a few days ago), I had no idea of your involvement with planting trees - but what a lucky coincidence. My husband is editor of the Big Scrub Rainforest Landcare newsletter and has spent the last 20 years planting about 15,000 rainforest trees native to the far North Coast of NSW where we are (the Big Scrub). I thank you for what you do to help the environment of North America - my home for the first 30 years of my life - and am very glad to have joined an organisation that cares for nature as well as providing such good service.

And from John Spady at Countrywide Community Forums in Seattle, WA:

I wanted to draw attention to a project that my 86-year-old father has been managing for over 10 years! The “Plant a Tree for Citizenship” project is sponsored by the Bellevue Overlake Rotary Club in District 5030. Here is a short blurb about it from their club site:

One of the most memorable and impacting hands-on project that is ongoing is our Plant a Tree For Citizenship program led by Dick Spady. Plant a tree involves elementary students growing evergreen trees from seeds and conducting a tree planting ceremony a year later.

Just another good story from an Arbor Day / Earth Day perspective!

Fun editorial note: Dick Spady, the man who started the program (also, John’s dad), is the same Dick Spady who started Dick’s Drive-In, the famous restaurant chain in the Seattle area. Burgers *and* trees. Clearly our kind of guy.

Thanks to Meryl & John for sharing their stories (and lives) with us, and here’s to all the great work being done around the world on behalf of our tall, leafy friends. Cheers!

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In honor of National Arbor Day, we decided to send an email campaign to the stylish Emma community highlighting all the trees they’ve helped us plant through our 5 Trees program. (We plant five trees for every new customer who chooses Emma as their email marketing service.)

Since the program began back in December 2007, we’ve planted more than 28,000 trees. And we decided to feature thank-you notes from 5 of those trees. Here’s an example:

See how pine, hackberry, apple and cypress trees say thanks, too. The full campaign is online here.

Oh, and Happy Arbor Day!

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Every time a new customer joins the Emma community, Emma plants 5 trees. Our tree-planting parter, Plant-It 2020, does the actual planting. And usually you, blog reader, do the actual deciding where the trees should go. But this this time around, we’re taking matters into our own hands. Somehow or another, March zipped  right past us, before we had a chance to ask folks to vote on where that month’s trees should go. So we’re just going to award the trees to Oregon.

Why Oregon? Well, we like Oregon. We like it so much we have a 4-person office in Portland, all of them working hard for the Emma community on the West Coast.

There were 431 new customers who joined Emma in March, so that means 2,155 new trees to plant. Half will go to Oregon, while the rest go to an equatorial region.

Plant-It 2020 keeps a list of states where they plant, and the only ones that haven’t gotten trees from Emma are Rhode Island and Vermont. This month, something’s gotta give.

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