During today’s training you’ll be introduced to the strategies and the best practices regarding how to use email appeal campaigns for fundraising.
You’ll start with a brief overview of the strengths of online fundraising in general and how careful planning and execution can make a huge difference in campaign results. You will then explore the process of creating powerful email appeals by identifying best practices for design, layout and testing these campaign components.
You’ll then learn how to create and distribute an email appeal in a real time as we walk through the popular online email marketing solution constant contact. The same hold \s through for online campaigns. In addition, to good copy, graphics and design online fundraisers have access to additional tools like video, audio, and interactivity to help tell a captivating story. In addition, online campaign approaches can often be mix and match to include elements such as search engines and social media so that the appeals are even more meaningful and compelling.
In addition, custom-built websites and learning pages can give donors a great deal of information about a cause which can further encourage them to participate and provide them with the tools to make donations online immediately. For example, here’s a chart from M&R Strategic Services showing the average online gift for the years 2007 and 2008. According to these figures the average gift size for 2008 across all categories was $71.00. M&R also reported that for fundraisers using email the average response rate was .12% for all of 2008. So let’s say that you have an email list with 45,000 names then based on this formula you may expect to get 54 donations by multiplying that number with a $71.00 average gift size you may expect to raise almost $4,000.00. Then that email will fail to serve its purpose. For example, a quick scan of an unanswered email list can contain messages from a number of different senders including friends, newsletter subscriptions and even organizations the recipient supports. However, it can also contain vendor pictures for other things as well as unsolicited messages that may or may not be relevant to that recipient.
Here, the Humane Society of United States has created a clear value link for the recipient of this email. Not only is the value of the video made clear but there’s also attached link that clearly tells the person what they need to do to get involved. The emotional appeal for this email is obvious. However, the intellectual appeal is also well defined as the email reports on the past clients of the organization and how the generosity of previous donors have allowed the Humane Society to take action on important issues about animals.
By the way, if your organization does have access to original video content and many don’t, you may want to visit www.YouTube.com/videovolunteers. This is a new channel on YouTube which encourages people with video production skills to assists small nonprofits in the creation of original videos that they could use to promote the organizations will be of greater value than a donation made tomorrow. For example, this appeal from the environmental defense fund makes it clear that every dollar donated during the next three days will be matched.
Note that this is also an emergency gift which adds an additional layer for urgency to the appeal. It’s also worth pointing out that this particular email does a terrific job, not only of staying topical but current. At the top of the email is a quote taken from a speech that President Obama gave to the House of Representatives on June 23rd. The date the email was sent out was June 24th. Not only is this information current for the recipient but it’s timeliness adds a little more urgency to encourage the recipient to respond as quickly as possible.
A lot of the big advantages that caused in contact offers its clients is the it provides pre-built email templates, which they can modify and use for their campaigns. For organizations that have their own layouts and designs already they can provide their own HTML code if desired. The basic setup may include the dividers another block that Tom Mayer may not want. He starts by going down to the blocks and deleting those which have no significance to his current campaign needs. Likewise, if there are features that he wants to add to his email he can click on the add blocks link on the left hand side of the screen to see a list of blocks he can chose to add to his layout.
Again, you need to be careful when creating email messages and special attention needs to be paid to the subject lines of those emails. Good subject lines are not only important for increasing open rates and leadership of an email but can also prevent an email from being flagged as spam. Most who provide a test email with a composite spam score and will offer suggestions on steps to take if the score is higher than desired.
Well checking a message spam score adds an extra step to the campaign, its time well spent and can make a market difference in the fundraising outcome of a campaign. It is strongly encouraged that anytime you chose to collect an email address you use a double-opt-in method to do so. Double-opt-in means that before that supporter’s email address is added to the database, they first need to respond to an email sent to that address by clicking on a link. This way they have opted in twice. Once when they provide their email address and click on a submit button and second, when they respond to the email and click on a link.
As you have learned, email is a powerful way for nonprofits to increase their fundraising efforts even on a limited budget. By following simple best practices and avoiding potential pitfalls even the smallest nonprofits can harness the power of email to dramatically increase fundraising efforts and make a larger impact.
We hope that you enjoy and have benefited from this training. Please be sure to look for future training on similar fundraising, a nonprofit marketing topic at CharityHowTo.com.
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