Event Fundraising Blog

One of my favorite things about the holidays is receiving cards from friends and family and hearing what everyone has been up to.

While not as heartwarming, the yearly deluge of holiday emails that land in my inbox is certainly interesting for a marketing professional like me. Reviewing these festive missives inspires both admiration (Wow, what a great opening line!) and horror (Oh no, typo alert!). It's always an instructive exercise.

This morning, when I opened my email, the first two messages I read were transactional emails (emails facilitating, competing or confirming a previously agreed upon transaction). The first was a post-event email from a fundraising walk I had registered for, and the second was from an airline about a recent flight I had taken. The email from the airline had a compelling subject line, excellent personalization, interesting content, a strong call-to-action, strategic use of graphic design, and easy to find social icons. The event email, well, didn't.

The Clinton Bush Haiti Fund, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit formed to economically assist Haiti after its devastating earthquake in 2010, tested two different landing pages for their online giving page. One had a prominent photo, the other didn’t. One landing page raised 10.2 percent, roughly $1.2 million, more than the other landing page.

Martin Memorial Hospital Center used two separate direct mail fundraising letters to send to their supporters. One of those letters increased donations by 307 percent.

How can you determine which test is better?

Despite what you may think, higher unsubscribe rates for your email lists can actually be a good thing. In fact, higher unsubscribe rates directly correlate with increased fundraising: those who are uninterested in your cause unsubscribe, and those who continue to receive your messages are interested in your cause and are more likely to donate. Either way, both groups have been exposed to your message.

Hubspot’s Dan Zarrella doesn’t spew “unicorn and rainbow” advice. In his webinar, The Science of E-mail Marketing, he used raw data to compile a comprehensive list of best practices for e-mail marketers. His counterintuitive findings are relevant to e-mail communication with your donors. Below are the three top takeaways from his presentation:

The American Red Cross is one of the premier emergency response organizations in the US. The Triangle Red Cross (TRC) serves as a regional hub in North Carolina area for the American Red Cross, delivering support to their local community. In addition to the domestic disaster relief services, it provides services for collection, processing and distribution of blood and blood products, and educational programs promoting health and safety programs. The organization is frequently assessing how it can better reach current and potential donors to communicate its messages to drive awareness and support life saving initiatives.

Would you think of sending a text-only version of your email newsletter instead of both text and HTML?  Surprisingly, many event fundraising organizations still send text-only transactional emails to their event participants and donors.  In addition to making it hard to track open and click through rates, text-based transactional emails provide your supporters an inconsistent brand experience at the point when their affinity with your organization is highest: right after they've just made a donation or registered for your event.

A/B testing (or split testing) is a classic direct mail fundraising tactic that has been widely adopted by online marketers to track constituent engagement and find out which version of a web page prospective donors (or event participants) connect with most. You can test layout, graphics, colors, copy, headings, and any other elements of your page, to see the effect changes have on the time on site on pages, or completion rate on donation forms.

You’ve seen the headlines: "9 Reasons Why Email is Dead," Why Email No Longer Rules….And What That Means for the Way We Communicate," or "Nielsen: Email Use Drops 28 Percent in One Year." With the seemingly endless reports about the death of email, it’s no wonder that the commonly-held myth of decreased email usage exists.

For many nonprofits, building the base of contacts is the holy grail. More people to communicate with means more donations, right? Not if you're not talking to them about the right things.