Winners of the 2014 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence

By Margaret Battistelli Gardner

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.