E-mail

If the way forward for fundraising is not how to get money out of me, the donor, but how to inspire me to tell the organization's story and engage my network, then we, as fundraisers, should really be after those "opt-ins." And if someone is feeling so annoyed by charities contacting them that they want…

At Turnkey, we explore other fields of study to improve fundraising success. The field we draw the most from is social science. Not only do I use it from my chair as CEO, but our bright young minds in production use it as well. Julian May, our senior content editor and ace account manager, let me in on his social science-bolstered copywriting method...

Recency, frequency and monetary value (RFM) are the ruling troika of segmentation-land. And like one of the old Soviet troikas, they brook no challenge to their rule (e.g., Leon Trotsky was murdered on Joseph Stalin’s orders with an ice ax). But they are simply not good enough alone anymore. I tried to be civil about…

No, email is not dead. And it is not dying either. Despite the number and popularity of mobile tools and social media channels, old fashioned email remains widely used across demographics—even with those elusive, hard-to-reach Millennials. Email appeals continually get nonprofits the highest return on investment of all online fundraising channels. According to online fundraising…

We aren’t the same people we were 10 years ago—or even at the start of last year. But the one thing we can count on is that change is a constant. The key is to embrace the change—and nonprofits have seized the opportunity...

Good use of data can help you create messages for your donors that are more relevant, interesting—and effective. But data can betray you in embarrassing ways. Like it does in this letter from an organization I support. (I'm hiding its identity because I don't want it to be embarrassed in front of its peers.) Here's…

Communicating by email is a mixed blessing. It’s fast, easy, relatively inexpensive, and almost everyone has an email address. You can quickly get a message out to a lot of people. But here’s the problem. People get hundreds of emails a day and don’t have much time to weed through them. How can you stand…

I eagerly read every new article and exhibit from the Showcase of Fundraising Innovation and Inspiration. However, the article, “9 Tips for Effective Emails,” made me pause. Oh, yes, I agreed with the author, Nick Allen, on most of the points. Yet there were a couple of tips I found missed the mark, and one in particular I thought was outright bad advice...

What could you do with a bigger email list? More donations? Volunteers? Capacity? Impact? Probably all of the above. After all, according to a recent M+R Benchmarks report: In 2015, on average, nonprofits received $44 in donations for every 1,000 fundraising emails sent. Nonprofit email revenue grew by 25 percent, faster than the overall rate of…

Yes, I know how much it costs to send out a newsletter. But I also know that done right, a newsletter is a moneymaker for your organization. It’s a win-win—more net income and more opportunities to build loyal donors. In other words, a newsletter is one of the remedies we can apply to dwindling donor-retention rates. Done well, a newsletter can be a dollop of glue to bind your donors to the organization...