Get Started with Email Fundraising

• Define Your Strategy. This includes formulating a plan, defining your campaign goals, and identifying and listing donors you think you can count on to give, and then creating a team to implement the campaign.
• Define Your Story. Develop a compelling message to inspire people to donate. Tell supporters a story about why it’s important to support your organization, and about what their donations will support. When possible, put names or faces to the people the campaign will help, or paint a vivid picture of what the hoped-for results will look like.
• Design Your Flow of Emails. For instance, you might design a campaign with four emails. The first frames your request while the second provides a different perspective, like supporting quotes, or a client’s story. The third might encourage people to donate at the last minute with a simple, poignant quote. Use the fourth email to thank people for their support. For a more robust campaign, consider adding additional emails such as a progress report, a seasonal greeting card, or a request for recipients to forward your message or tell a friend about your campaign.
• Build an Email List. The best email fundraising campaign is useless if you don’t have anyone to send it to. Keep in mind that bigger is not always better. Make sure the people on your email list want to receive information from your organization. If you’re emailing people who did not sign up, you run the risk of alienating people or running afoul of the law.
• Write Effective Emails. Details are critical. Think of a subject line that will entice readers. They should be intriguing and motivating. A simple “Help support our organization” might not get the same response as a “Help us raise $10,000 by midnight tonight!” Include three different types of asks in an email: one in the body of the email, one as a closing P.S., and with a “Donate” button.
• Choose a Broadcast Email Tool. A number of useful and affordable broadcast email packages can make it relatively easy to email hundreds, thousands or even millions of people at once. These tools help you format emails and let recipients subscribe and unsubscribe by themselves, and help keep your mail out of spam filters. They also provide reports on how many people opened and clicked through on each email, so you can measure effectiveness.
• Choose a Donation Tool. Many donors who receive fundraising requests by email expect to be able to donate online. Luckily, a number of tools make accepting online payments easy, and most online donation tools work the same way. Online reporting tools let you see what’s been donated and export the information to another database.
• Measure Your Success. Donation results and email metrics provided through your broadcast email tool help you understand the progress of your campaign and how to improve it. Open rates track how effectively your subject line and other header information encouraged people to open your email. Click-through rates show how effectively your email copy inspired people to donate. Keep an eye on your unsubscribe rate to determine if you’re sending out too many emails. Perhaps most important of all, your conversion rate helps you track how many people actually donated.

These basic tips will get you started. For more detailed information, read the article “Getting Started with Email Fundraising,” or sign up for Idealware’s upcoming training.