How an Email Welcome Series Can Help Cultivate, Retain Donors

By Kalie VanDewater

First impressions are the basis of any good relationship, so when a new supporter enters your nonprofit’s community, a series of welcome emails can help you start off on the right foot.

“You want to make sure, first of all, that you welcome them right away, and that it's prompt, that it's personal and that, in some way, it's powerfully indicative of the impact that their contribution is making,” Claire Axelrad, principal at Clairification, said.

Beginning to foster these relationships right when supporters join your community may help you fight the continued challenges with retention the industry is facing.

“In the nonprofit industry, we have a really low retention rate — it's around 40% to 50%,” Katelyn Baughan, nonprofit email marketing consultant at KB Digital, said. “That means 40% to 50% of your donors are going to come back again next year. It's hard to retain donors, and [with] a donor welcome series, the goal is to help retain them and to cultivate them.”

Introduction to an Email Welcome Series

Email welcome series are designed for anyone new to your organization, whether they’ve made their first donation, subscribed to one of your newsletters or signed up for monthly gifts.

“If you can automate these journeys by having a series of emails unfold over a few weeks, you can make the people feel seen — like they're making an impact, like their donation is helping you to solve the problem that they want to help you solve,” Baughan said.

Additionally, Baughan noted that keeping your welcome series lists separate from other email campaigns is crucial.

“Make sure that if people are in the welcome series, they are not put into your house file or your general list until they're complete [with the series],” she said.

For the welcome series itself, Axelrad suggested sending three to five emails before making another ask. However, Baughan explained that the more you can send, the better. Some nonprofits may think they don’t have the capacity to do extensive welcome series, but leveraging evergreen content can make multi-email welcome series more attainable.

In terms of frequency, Baughan said that one email every three days is a good cadence.

While some organizations may want to shy away from sending emails this frequently, Baughan and Axelrad agree that this is the best way to build your reputation with new supporters.

“This is the time that people are most receptive to you, and they're probably going to open your email a lot more than they will six months from now, when they'll have forgotten that they even gave to you or gave you their name,” Axelrad said.

Emails to Include in a Welcome Series

New donors and new subscribers have different entry points into your email list, so the emails you’re sending must align with their specific journeys. But since the end goal for both is to encourage greater engagement, some of the emails you send them will be similar.

Baughan and Axelrad shared these guidelines for what types of emails should be included in your welcome series.

New Donors

When someone donates for the first time, they should automatically receive a confirmation email with a tax receipt and transactional information. You should also send a separate thank-you email around the same time to let them know why their gift matters and how it will be used to further your organization’s mission.

This is also when you want to give them an idea of what to expect for the rest of the welcome series, in terms of what information you’ll be sending them, Axelrad said.

In the third email of your series, you can share more information about your organization, including its mission, values and the community it serves.

The next email in the series should be a content offer, if possible. While Axelrad said you should give supporters a “gift” throughout the welcome series, a content email is one of the best places to highlight what you bring to the table.

“The little gift should be related to your mission, so that you're connecting the dots for them,” she said. “If you're a senior services agency, it could be 10 tips on how to keep your seniors safe. Or if you're children's services, how to safetyproof your home.”

Next, Baughan suggested sending a survey to learn more about your donor. This should be followed by an email with an impact story that reiterates your mission and how the initial gift has helped move the needle.

Finally, you’ll want to make another ask — and potentially ask them to upgrade their support to a monthly gift.

“It's not until the very last one in the sequence that you should make another ask,” Axelrad said, “because the research shows that the time that people are most receptive to being asked again is within the first 30 days of giving. If you don't do that, you're missing out on when they’re most likely to give again.

Axelrad said that this ask should be slightly different from the one that prompted your donor to give in the first place, so they have a new reason to give.

She offered this example: “Lots of organizations right now are reaching out to their constituents to say, ‘Our funds have been cut off in this area. We need to replace funds to sustain this program, to keep our doors open,’ whatever it is.”

New Email Subscribers

Baughan said the series for new subscribers is essentially a condensed version of the new donor series. First, new subscribers should receive an automatic confirmation of their subscription to welcome them into your community and point them toward helpful resources.

The next email should be a survey that can help you understand what kind of newsletter content your supporters might be interested in, as well as gather more information about them personally.

The third email in this series should feature an impact story to highlight your organization’s work.

Finally, the welcome series should end with an email about what your subscribers can do next. This is where you should make an ask, but you can also encourage subscribers to follow you on social media to engage with more of your content — and become more entrenched in the community — and to share your mission with people in their circles.

The Role of Automation

Automation tools have become widespread throughout the nonprofit sector. However, Baughan hasn’t seen too much uptake of these tools for email campaigns.

“Even the big [nonprofits] have small teams, and everyone's stressed and stretched thin, and they're wearing multiple hats,” she said. “What I love about automation is, yes, it's work up front, but once it's set up, over time, it really saves you that hassle of feeling like you need to be communicating consistently on a one-off basis with donors. It will help with all of those pain points if people would incorporate it more.”

For welcome emails specifically, automation can help manage your series to make sure all new members of your community feel appreciated.

“You should definitely set up your email welcome series on autoresponder,” Axelrad said. “Otherwise, you're not going to do it — it's way too much work. If you have lots of new donors, it's impossible to try to remember every single person.”

Axelrad said you should continue to personalize your emails in some way (e.g., with the donor’s name, the campaign they donated to, etc.) to prevent them from seeming like boilerplate. This is especially important if you’re using artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

“If you're using AI, be very careful, because AI tends to write those generic welcome emails,” she said. “They look good at first blush to you, but you need to step in and think from the perspective of the person who's receiving this: How is this going to make them feel? What is it going to make them think about us? Is it going to make them feel like they are important, they are cared about and we are grateful to them?”

At the end of the day, while you may receive a donation as a result of your email welcome series, it’s possibly more important to focus on cultivating your donors through the emails than to attribute gifts to the campaign.

“It's almost like dating,” Baughan said. “You wouldn't ask someone to marry you on the first date. You would take them on dates, make sure you're calling them, you're showing up to things that are important to them. … It's the same thing here, and if we're not focusing on relationship-building and trust-building, then you will not get donations when you have those fundraising campaigns.”