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With 38% of online donors worldwide saying that email inspires them the most to give, this mode of communication is still a vital piece of the fundraising puzzle. (Mobile Cause, Multichannel). So how do we make the most of it? Because it’s been around for a while, experts have analyzed a lot of data on email fundraising and distilled it into best practices.  Here, we’ll look at those around setting email campaign goals, audience segmentation, writing and design effective fundraising emails, creating branded website donation pages, supporting email fundraising with activity on other channels, and following up with a well-orchestrated donor thank-you strategy. As always, we’ll try to relate this advice with the small nonprofit in mind, giving you strategies you can implement now and providing resources for taking a deeper dive later.

A. Setting Email fundraising goals

While raising money effectively via email is an important and worthy goal for any small nonprofit, it makes sense to think broadly about subsidiary goals that show how the organization is doing in engaging new prospects to take any action, including donating, and in retaining current donors. In addition to total dollars raised, these subsidiary goals might include:

• Adding a specific number of new donors
• Achieving a certain percentage of donor retention
• Upgrading a certain number or percentage of existing donors to higher giving levels
• Transitioning a certain percentage of existing donors to a monthly giving program

Remember that whenever you are establishing goals, they should be SMART, i.e., Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound.

b. email fundraising & audience segmentation

Whatever the goal, it is important to understand that segmentation of your donors and prospects is the key to engaging them. Segmentation involves, tailoring separate emails to distinct audiences within your database so that your appeals are meaningful to prospective donors. One commentator notes that doing so yields 50 percent more clicks than would be the case without segmentation. (Hubspot).  And you don’t need to have a huge email list to be able to start segmenting it.  Hubspot notes that:

You can start small with segmentation. Take a look at your audience, and see if there are any stand-outs or natural differentiations. Even the slightest segmentation can increase your email success rates. (Hubspot)

Ultimately, the best segmentation criteria are those based on what you know about your audience. Sample segments include volunteers, blog subscribers, donation frequency, donation amount, campaigns to which list members have donated, channel from which donors were acquired. (Classy). Thank about the goals you’ve set and who hold the key to your success. Then segment your list accordingly.

c. email fundraising composition & design: some best practices

In the list below are recommended best practices around email fundraising, ranging from general precepts to more specific advice on how to compose an effective email fundraising message. Looking first at more general advice, experts recommend that you:

• BE CONCISE: Make your case for giving concise, ideally 20 lines of text or less. (Network for Good). Too many emails suffer from giving prospects too many choices, containing too much content, and having too many images. (MobileCause, Secrets)
• BE CONSISTENT: A first rule of thumb has to do with ensuring that your email communication with your donors and prospects is cohesive, which has to do with making consistent use of your logo (ideally at the top of the email), color scheme, email signature, fonts, voice and tone to build trust with readers and make your brand memorable. (Classy)
• CREATE A SENSE OF URGENCY: Make your request sound urgent by setting a deadline, using actionable language (e.g., give now, act today), being brief (link to a webpage with more details if necessary), and leveraging scarcity/immediacy (e.g., only 5 tickets left, just 24 hours before the matching offer expires). (Classy)
• APPEAL TO EMOTION: One authority suggests that:

An effective appeal is equal parts emotion and urgency ….You want to pull people into your message with a compelling story about your donors, volunteers or beneficiaries, and then push them to act with a specific, clear, and urgent call to action …. One powerful photo can go a long way in stirring emotion. Pick a clear photo of one person or animal looking straight at the camera. Where possible, make the appeal about that one, relatable person or animal, rather than about the masses (Network for Good).

• MAKE SURE IT’S MOBILE READY: One source suggests that more than half of all emails are now read on a mobile device and that  80% will delete and 30% will unsubscribe from an email that doesn’t look good on mobile. (MobileCause, Secrets)

As for specific advice on drafting the various elements of an effective email, authorities recommend that you:

• THINK ABOUT WHO THE EMAIL IS FROM: At least one commentator suggests that the “from name” is the most important factor in getting your email opened. (The Secrets to Nonprofit Email and Mobile Messaging). You want to instill trust; so, ideally, the email should come from a real person or an organization and not from a sender such as donotreply@XYZ.org. (MobileCause, Multichannel)
• CREATE SUBJECT LINES THAT MAKE PEOPLE WANT TO OPEN & READ YOUR MESSAGE. They should be short (4-7 words and not more than 50 characters altogether), relevant (use You or Your) and compelling. Some specific strategies for creating good subject lines include:
  • Asking a question to rouse curiosity, such as “Can you do more to help?”
  • Using alliteration, i.e., repeating the same letter to help the eye identify patterns, such as “Seven Simple Solutions Save Season,” or “Friday Fun for Families and Fellowship.”
  • Use of allusion, i.e., referring to pop culture or famous lines, such as “Let Them Eat Cake, and Brownies” or “May the Farce be with You.”
  • Chunking, i.e., breaking the rules of construction, such as “You, Plus Us, Awesome,” or “Help Others, Feel Amazing, Share”
  • Using numbers and lists, e.g., “Seven Ways to Help Your Pet,” or “Five Ways We Break the Rules to Deliver”
  • Adding Emoji to Your Subject Line
• PREHEADER: This is a second subject line made available by most email marketing services to provide additional context.  It should be no more than five to eight words in length.
• SALUTATION: Use the recipient’s name and not a generic substitute like “friend” or “colleague.”
• IMAGE: One source notes that engagement rates for emails with images are 650% higher than for those without them. (Secrets). It is a good idea, therefore, to include an attention-grabbing image (600 pixels wide for the best mobile experience) that pulls the reader into the body of the email. Add a hyperlink to the image that takes the reader to the same destination as your call to action. (MobileCause, Secrets)
• BODY
  • USE DARK SIMPLE TEXT that is either centered or left-aligned to aid readability and avoid using multiple fonts. (MobileCause, Secrets)
  • LEAD WITH A STRONG HEADLINE that conveys your core message. (MobileCause, Secrets)
  • CREATE AN EMOTIONAL OPENING: Either open with a vivid emotional image illustrating the impact of a gift or show supporters the difference they are making for a single individual. (Network for Good)
  • SEND A CLEAR MESSAGE: Include an actionable, specific “call to action (CTA),” such as “donate now” that explains how the reader can help. That CTA should have a button that is at least 44 px x 44 px and that button should “pop,” i.e. be in a color like “red,” which has been shown to draw more clicks than other colors. (Classy)
  • SHOW HOW DONATIONS WILL BE USED: If the audience consists of past donors, tell them all the good that has come from past donations as well as what good will be accomplished and impact achieved with new gifts. Try to do so without making eyes glaze over with mind-numbing facts and figures, e.g., “Your gift of $100 will mean one student like John will be tutored every day till graduation this school year,” or “Your donation will help us buy sonogram machines and vitamins to ensure every mom and bay is healthy.” (Network for Good)
  • CLOSING: Thank the reader for their time and attention and sign a real person’s name, along with complete contact information.
• POST SCRIPT (P.S.): Reinforce the sense of urgency, e.g. “Remember, you are our best partner in advocating for abducted children. Please give now so we can train 600 police this year.” (Network for Good)
• FOOTER: Include all of your contact information, website URL, and links to social media pages in a footer. (MobileCause, Secrets)

Network for Good’s The Ultimate Donor Appeal Lookbook, offers 12 examples that convey many of the principles outlined above. While the examples portrayed are largely drawn from well-established nonprofit organizations, the resource is valuable for getting a sense of how the pieces – story, image, call-to-action – can be arranged to create a compelling appeal.

d. branded donation pages that support email fundraising campaigns

A good way to summarize the role played by email in fundraising is that “[it] is not the destination, it’s a billboard for the destination.” (MobileCause, Secrets).  What we mean by this, of course, is that email should drive prospects to a branded donation page on your website that does “the heavy lifting” of your campaign. That page should:

• Be concise
• Be branded, i.e., match the voice and tone of your campaign
• Have a single call to action: Donate!
• Be easy to read
• Offer the option for recurring gifts
• Be easy to share

(MobileCause, Secrets). For more information on what goes into an effective donation page, check out this post.

E. Enhancing email fundraising with a multichannel strategy

When used in conjunction with email, print material (often called “snail mail” and “direct mail”) and social media strategies can increase response rates by up to 37 percent. (MobileCause, Multichannel). Doing this well requires that your channels are “synced,” i.e. that all of the content that you provide across the channels is working for you toward the same goal.  Syncing content across channels means doing four things well, according to MobileCause:

1. Creating Brand Identity: This involves ensuring that the voice and style that you use to communicate your unique values are in accord. Using the same keywords, shortcode, hashtags, and logo versions across all channels are ways of ensuring a consistent brand.
2. Using Design Elements Consistently: This involves using colors, fonts, shading, and formatting uniformly across channels.  One source suggests that color increases brand recognition by 80 percent. For this reason, it is important to keep colors the same, even through the holidays. (The Secrets)
3. Speaking Consistently: The overall tone and voice with which you speak to your audience also needs to be consistent across channels.
4. Conveying Impact: Stories about the organization’s impact, and the role donors play in helping to achieve that impact should be shared across all channels, through images, videos and text.

(Mobilecause, Multichannel). This strategy obviously argues for including social media sharing buttons within emails. It also includes placing a call-to-action on your Facebook page to subscribe to your email list and ensuring that it provides clear benefits for doing so.  Finally, it requires thinking broadly about fundraising campaigns by mapping out print mail, email and social media content so that messages from various media dovetail with one another. Mobilecause provides some excellent examples of how this might play out in practice:

• • If you’re sending an email about a fundraising campaign announcement, consider following up via social media with an announcement video from a board member or beneficiary, campaign goals, deadlines, and hashtags.
  • If you’re sending an email about reaching a fundraising milestone, consider following up via social media with personalized and fun thank you videos, inspiring quotes about success, hard work and collaboration, images or video of your fundraising thermometer, and a detailed shoutout to major fundraisers. (Mobile Cause, MultiChannel)

F. Following email fundraising with donor appreciation

Citing a recent survey by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, Network for Good notes that “103% of donors gained by nonprofits were offset by lapsed donors,” i.e., for every 100 donors successfully recruited, 103 left. For someone who once spent a lot of time worrying about college student attrition rates, those are terrifying numbers.

What does a well-planned donor-appreciation strategy entail? First, it means thanking donors as soon as possible, typically, at least initially, with an automatic thank you and receipt generated by fundraising software program. Second, it means following up to let donors know about the impact of their donations.  Finally, and, perhaps, most importantly, it means ensuring that your thank you is sincere and memorable. For more information, check out this post, which provides a lot more detail on how to craft a proper thank-you message.

G. CONCLUSIONS

Email remains an effective fundraising strategy and one that can be successfully employed by a small nonprofit, especially if certain best practices around audience segmentation and design and composition are followed. Combining email with print solicitations and social media can enhance response rates and following up with donors to thank and let them know what impact their gifts are making can go a long way toward retaining them.

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Resources

Classy. The Beginner’s Guide to Email Appeals. (Available at: https://go.classy.org/nonprofit-beginners-guide-email-appeals)

HubSpot. The Complete Guide to Optimizing Email Marketing for Conversions (Available at: http://cdn1.hubspot.com/hub/53/archive/docs/ebooks/the_complete_guide_to_optimizing_email_marketing_for_conversions.pdf?_ga=1.57045740.759400716.1409929923)

MobileCause. Multichannel Fundraising Strategies: Leveraging Email, Text and Social Media in Your Campaigns (Available at:  https://go.mobilecause.com/multichannel-fundraising-strategies-ebook-19)

MoblieCause. The Secrets to Nonprofit Email and Mobile Messaging (Webinar, 9/15/2019) (Available at: https://go.mobilecause.com/secrets-to-nonprofit-email-and-mobile-messaging-webinar-19-rp?utm_campaign=Communications%2019&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--eYKYMyWjFYTJFDFL2gCHbBGz3FXMvuUAMZ6YSG02bGKfsv6HUvk5l3VOF3a5-qxa2GHPZN7nC8fDs5Tdnp3NW9XYQ1EYTjgCioCPk8iW1yCBW9XQ&_hsmi=74760039&utm_content=74760039&utm_source=hs_email&hsCtaTracking=7f811be5-c412-4c2a-a5bb-4a6c8b575a2e|f5462665-7a86-488b-9b6e-a150232be5dd)

Network for Good. Step-by-Step Guide to Fundraising Campaigns:  Raising More Money with a Targeted, Planned Campaign That Wows Donors (Available at: http://www.networkforgood.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Fundraising-Campaign-eGuide-2017-1-1.pdf?mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiT0dVME9UaGlZakJpTjJSaSIsInQiOiJsKzRXNnZVRW1maUR3NFwvZUk1ckV2czRwWVJPdktvcXlJT1wvakI3ZlNiOE5RRkVtcGZEaTZ1NjdXU21qZXRzdmxLSGN3WUN3OFMzYmpqUWUzNjI3Y3hCXC9LdThGZWVwSWtVZUg2ckpEMk5IMlNSOFFlb21NdDJhMHFCOE9FcE13WSJ9)