Unlocking the Potential of Nonprofit Email Communications

Since the advent of email, organizations have used it for sales, fundraising, and sharing information about their products and services. In the last decade, through the advent of laws and technology that governed and supported email marketing, the landscape has drastically changed. Nonprofit organizations seeking to use email marketing have a challenge ahead of them: how do they compete against a steadily-growing number of emails being received by users every day, and ensure they stay authentic to their message and mission. 

Starting with Your Goal

As with all great design, beginning an email marketing program starts with establishing the goals of your communications. Do you want to educate customers or donors? Recruit potential members or event attendees? Raise money? Create donor touchpoints? Each goal has its own set of strategies and tactics that a nonprofit can deploy with the appropriate support. Once you establish your email marketing goals, you can proceed onto the next step, choosing an email marketing platform. 

Choosing an Email Marketing Platform

Most nonprofit organizations will choose one of a few platforms through which they’ll send their emails. For startup organizations without large databases, typically services like Mailchimp and Constant Contact are commonly used. These are fairly simple, WYSIWYG (pronounced WI-ZEE-WIG) or “What You See Is What You Get” email marketing platforms. Instead of requiring advanced knowledge of coding, these editors allow the marketing professional to drag and drop, edit text, and place images without any advanced skills. However, many organizations require their email marketing platforms to be tied more directly with their CRM (Customer Relationship Manager). These platforms are often useful in organizations with a fundraising focus as opposed to fee for service nonprofit organizations. When choosing a platform, make sure you understand what your needs are for the next few years in your organization’s life and whether or not you will be able to move away from the platform you believe to be the best fit. 

Why and How to Segment Audiences in Email Marketing

One of the benefits of having an email marketing platform is the ability to segment an audience to send differentiated, strategic communications to each audience. Every email marketing platform will have different ways to segment, but as a nonprofit leader or marketing professional, you’ll need to consider segmenting your audience based on criteria like: 

• Donors vs. Clients 

• In nonprofit organizations that serve clients directly (e.g. hospitals, schools, or aid organizations) you may want to ensure that communications are different for each audience. For example, donors may not need to know about a change in pickup times for your services, but your clients do!

• Donor Level

• In the event you need to send donors invitations or updates for specific events or campaigns, you will need to be able to create segments for each need. For example, if you wanted to send an email to all donors for a specific capital campaign, or invite donors above a specific “giving level” to an event.

• Age

• Especially in organizations with audiences across all ages, sometimes it can be useful to segment an audience into different age groups to ensure that each age group is receiving the correct communications.

• Location

• As your nonprofit organization grows, it may be helpful to utilize location data for each constituent and subsequently segment your audience to highlight your services that are location-specific. Consider that a hospital system with locations across a city may want to send communications about a specific clinic only to those affected locally, rather than their entire email list. 

Once you are able to properly segment your audience, you’ll ensure that your emails maintain relevance to those receiving them, which will re-engage your constituents and donors.

Maintaining a Calendar of Emails 

Once your organization begins sending emails, you’re going to need to ensure that you are balancing the email communications sent every day, week, or month. When an organization sends too many emails in a day, the constituents receiving them will begin to ignore or delete the emails as they come in and negate the potential effects of your hard work. Organizations that have a thriving email program often dedicate time, staff resources, or utilize a third-party vendor to maintain an email calendar and conduct thoughtful conversations around the messaging being sent out every day, week, or month. 

Evaluating Your Efforts

Once you have sent your email, how do you know it’s been effective? Here’s a quick cheat sheet to understanding the metric you receive once you send an email blast:

• Open Rate

• This the the rate of users who opened your email versus the number it was sent to. Typically non profit open rates are about 20%-25%. The best ways to increase your open rate are to adjust your subject line and segment your audience.

• Bounce Rate/Unsubscribe Rate

• Bounce and Unsubscribe rates help you understand if the right people are getting your emails. Bounce rates show you if the email addresses you’ve collected are correct. Unsubscribe rates highlight the number of people who have chosen to no longer receive your emails. 

• Click Rate

• This measurement describes the number of people who clicked a link in the email. Tracking this rate closely will help you understand if your emails are accomplishing your goals.

It’s never easy to start an email marketing program from scratch but if you are able to follow the basics laid out here, your organization will be on its way to sending emails that engage your audience and accomplish your strategic communications goals. As your organization grows, it will be important to consider your options for increasing staff or vendor resources around your email marketing program. As you grow and increase the professionalism of you email program, your constituents and donors will gradually become more deeply engaged in your organization, increasing their participation and support of your goals.

Executive Arm is a full-service management outsourcing firm for nonprofit organizations. Our mission is to help non-profit organizations achieve greater heights through internal capacity development, executive coaching, and strategic program design. Looking to level-up your nonprofit organization? Contact Executive Arm for a free consultation at https://www.executivearm.org/.