How to use email effectively in fundraising

Email is one of the most cost-effective ways to stay in touch with supporters and to keep them involved with your cause. Yes, many charities tend to exploit this communication tool effectively to increase donor engagement and to fundraise online. 

Have a look below and see how you can improve the effectiveness of your charity's emails: 

Start segmenting your email list. If you are running a robust direct mail programme you are probably segmenting your database and sending different asks to different donor groups. So, why send everyone in your email list the same fundraising ask? Now is the time to customise your email campaigns based on how you acquired the email addresses and the relationship you have with them. 

A good place to start is to divide your list into some broad segments and determine some source codes for future email segmentation.

 Integrate your direct mail appeals with your email appeals. Follow up your direct mail letters with email appeals a few weeks after sending out the paper appeal. Share the appeal stories and fundraising asks in these special emails and encourage the supporter to give online. Send a second round of emails to past donors who have not responded to the appeal or the previous email.  

Test the marketing mix of your emails frequently. You can take advantage of the simplicity of A/B tests and the low cost of email testing to test the creative mix, the key messages, the fundraising offers etc with different email audiences. You can see very quickly how donors respond and then re-launch the emails that have performed better than others. 

Create easy and simple to navigate landing pages. You can send out some great emails and link them to your website but if donors have to click three or four times to get to the donation page then you would have lost most of them.  So link your emails to landing pages that tell your charity impact story, ask for a donation and allow the donor to complete the giving transaction without clicking through to another page. 

Add links to podcasts or videos  in your emails. Many donors want to experience your charity's work in one way or another and videos or podcasts can help them to see your work for themselves and to meet the people whose lives them are impacting with their gifts. 

Make it easy for readers to share your messages on social media sites.  Place social media buttons prominently within your e-mails and encourage your readers to share the stories or photos.

Become more intentional in gathering email addresses. Incorporate a request for email address in various printed communications, if you are offering resources etc make special offers available online, think of something of value that you can offer to supporters in return for their email address. 

Make your emails mobile friendly. These days probably half of your donors are checking and reading their emails on their mobile phones. So keep your content short and the design of your emails simple. 

Use email to turn contacts and one-ff donors into regular givers. Design a set of three emails that focus on converting non-donors or one-off donors into regular givers. Share a strong impact story and emphasise why and how regular gifts can change lives. Use these emails at regular intervals with different segments of your email list. 

Please feel free to suggest other ways of using email effectively for fundraising and marketing your charity's cause. 

Making friends for life: practical insights to help you retain your charity’s donors

What is the primary purpose of fundraising? – To raise enough money for our charity’s work – you might say. Wrong answer!  

Let’s approach this question in another way. Sure your charity needs money to carry out its programmes but where is the money coming from? – From donors, individuals, trusts, wealthy people, churches etc. So, what a fundraiser or a fundraising team does is develop and implement a fundraising plan to engage with individuals, churches, businesses or trusts and invite their support.

In this context of engaging with people and organisations - the primary purpose of fundraising is to help you find and keep your charity’s donors!  

Once an individual, a church or a business has made a gift to your charity it is vital that they renew their support in the future. You probably know from experience that finding new donors is a costly business so the only way a charity can benefit from such new donors is when most of them give again and again and again.

Many fundraising advisers, including your boss, would tell you to work hard at retaining donors – by doing this you wouldn't have to acquire new ones very often. At face value this seems like the right advice but, when you take a closer look at the return on investment (ROI) from your donor retention activities you
are likely to discover that retaining donors can be harder and sometimes even more expensive than acquiring new donors.

Over the years, working with a variety of charity clients I have noted that retention rates can be affected by many factors including:

• the quality of the newly acquired donors and their propensity to keep giving, 
• the timing and frequency of a charity’s appeals, 
• the efficiency and warmth of thank you letters, 
• the content of appeals,
• the presence or absence of a regular giving programme, etc.  

Another factor that has a huge negative impact on retention is the assumption that the majority of donors are not going to renew their support because they have received too many requests for money! In my opinion, the opposite is true – a decrease in retention rates represents a failure to ask donors in a compelling
and inspiring way to make another gift to your cause. Here is a simple truth: if you are not grabbing a donor’s attention you are not going to get their gifts!

If you want to retain 60%, 70% even 80% of your charity’s donors and turn them from one-off givers to long term friends consider some of these insights.  I have already seen client’s retention rates moving in the right direction by doing the following:

1. Thank your donors within 48 hours of receiving their donation.  
2. Make time to call as many of your charity’s donors as possible - not to ask them for a gift, but simply to say ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ for their support.  
3. Re-use a fundraising package that you know works well to ensure that your first time donors make that valuable second gift. 
4. Develop and implement a regular giving programme inviting donors to make monthly contributions to your cause. 
5. Strengthening the impact of direct mail appeals by using follow up emails. 
6. Don’t let donors disappear into thin air! 
7. Incorporate ‘soft’ fundraising asks in your newsletters.  

But be aware, that whatever you do you are not likely to retain all of your charity’s donors – some of them will stop giving and you will never know why. But, rather than trying to guess why they stopped giving you can focus on acquiring new donors and on implementing some of these insights and other ideas that can help you retain your charity’s donors.

Finally, make sure you are always measuring the impact of your retention activities and are learning from your successes and your mistakes.

Why generate fundraising reports? - Part One

Measuring your fundraising performance can help you identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current fundraising activities.


Many charities carry out several fundraising activities in the course of the year including: fundraising appeals, new donor acquisition campaigns, fundraising events, major donor appeals, legacy campaigns, email campaigns, etc. Often fundraisers doing these activities tend to measure only two things: how much money they got from each activity and how many donors gave.  


Few fundraisers are prepared to drill deeper into the data by asking the right questions and generating the fundraising reports that can show them which fundraising activities recruited more new donors,  larger donations or, which activities brought in more donors with a greater lifetime value than others, etc. But, those who do measure the performance of their fundraising activities often reap better results from their future fundraising activities.  


A case study 
  
As part of our Fundraising Fitness Test for one of our clients we calculated the Return on Investment (ROI) of all their fundraising and non-fundraising (e.g. newsletters, educational materials, etc) packages mailed to the database in the last three years. And, we noted that their charity’s bi-annual newsletter was the best vehicle for converting contacts from the database into first time givers. 


So, we recommended that the charity increased the frequency of their newsletter from twice a year to four times a year and strengthened the fundraising ask in it. The result - in the last 18 months this charity has seen a steady increase in the number of the first time givers through this tool.  


On another occasion, we helped a client to start measuring the financial contributions from new donors coming from different sources. A few years ago they were investing in getting new donors at exhibitions, regional events, inserts in the Christian press, donors introducing the charity to a friend, offering a free book in return for a modest donation and radio advertising, etc.  


Today, they are investing only in three of new donor acquisition activities described above. Why? – Because, our fundraising reports helped them to identify the activities that bring in the majority of donors who are likely to give again and again to this charity. 


To find out how your charity can benefit from our Fundraising Fitness Test email: redina(at)mcconkey-johnston.co.uk