2014 Gold Awards Fundraising Excellence Email $10 Million & Over Winners

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

Email ($10 million and over)
30 Days of Giving Email Campaign
National Park Foundation
(Submitted by RobbinsKersten Direct)

The Numbers (based on the email series)
Recipients: 350,000 (3,125,873 over seven emails)
Response rate: 0.05 percent
Total cost: $3,500
Income generated: $133,564
Average gift: $92.47
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.026

Short and sweet. That’s what our judges liked most about this seven-email, end-of-year campaign for the National Park Foundation.

But they also found it funny and refreshing, and full of nice touches that seem to have made quite an impact on recipients. Among them: multiple opportunities to give, a holiday e-card and a giving thermometer to allow recipients to monitor progress.

“The overall campaign on both email and the website had a $500,000 fundraising goal,” explains Polly Papsadore, vice president of marketing at RobbinsKersten Direct. “The emails included a giving thermometer and included different segments for offline donors, online donors and nondonors. The overall 30 Days of Giving campaign surpassed that $500,000 goal by 10 percent. Email contributed 24 percent of the revenue.”

Additional Email ($10 million and over) Winners
SILVER: The Wilderness Society — Online Renewal Campaign (Submitted by ABD Direct)

The Numbers
Recipients: 181,241
Response rate: 0.53 percent
Total cost: $4,688
Income generated: $47,652
Average gift: $49.95
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.10

The goal of this campaign was to reinstate lapsed and soon-to-be-lapsed online donors, and it focused on emotional, mission-based language while testing a new subject line to lapsed donors in the first three emails. The new subject line, “Your 2013 Membership Card (Pending),” used a more straightforward approach than the previous campaign’s “Show Your Commitment to Wilderness.” The following two emails used a rollout of the (Pending) subject line, and results improved with each subsequent send. The second email in the series was a duplicate of the first message, and the final email utilized a “forward” technique to allow a third usage of the extremely successful creative.

In the end, the subject line test saw unprecedented results for The Wilderness Society. Open rates increased by 46 percent, clickthrough rate by 40 percent and revenue by 109 percent. The ability to roll out with a test subject line during the campaign allowed the series to rival year-end email campaign performance. Through the series, response rate increased with each send from 0.36 percent, to 0.55 percent and finally to 0.68 percent. Plus, 6 percent of the campaign donors became sustainers.

BRONZE: The Wilderness Society — Year-End Email Campaign — (Submitted by ABD Direct)

The Numbers
Recipients: 181,241
Response rate: 0.53 percent
Total cost: $4,688
Income generated: $47,652
Average gift: $49.95
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.10

In 2013, The Wilderness Society set out to increase revenue without degrading its file through donor fatigue or spiked unsubscribe rates. The organization increased emails from two to three in the final days of December, but it employed a number of techniques to keep recipients receptive, including:

Targeted messaging with variable copy based on the recipient’s 2013 donor status;
Emails segmented by recipient time zone; each recipient received a personalized message with increasingly urgent copy focused on the midnight deadline; and
A Dec. 31 landing page with a countdown clock tied to the viewer’s local time zone.

The campaign was sent to the full email file, including low-, mid- and high-level donors, activists and prospects (but excluding sustainers and previous 30-day donors, who each received customized versions of the Dec. 31 morning email only).

The campaign resulted in significant year-over-year gains, with clickthrough rates increasing by 41 percent, 37 percent more revenue and 30 percent higher average gift. And … the unsubscribe rate actually decreased by 18 percent — proving that your supporters really don’t mind hearing from you often, as long as you have something to say.