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How often is too often for a small nonprofit (budget of ~ $1,000,000) to send out email appeals?
Do donors get fatigued with too many emails with asks?
First and foremost, start by respecting your readers when constructing e-mail correspondence. For fund raising campaigns, e-mail messages should be made sparingly. A good rule of thumb is to send messages no more than once or twice a month. Don’t include too many graphics-rich images so that recipients can open your messages quickly. Always give users the option to unsubscribe from your mailing list if they wish.
Additionally, when considering any e-mail marketing and fund raising strategy, consider using newsletters as a relationship-building tool that can also be used to solicit funds and build email lists. Find out what your readers want through surveys and analysis to give them control of their preferences. (i.e., email frequency, content, interests, etc.)This ensures your readers receive targeted information that engages them in the ways that work best. By focusing on individual interests, you will also experience greater success in both on line and off line fund raising since the recipients will be more engaged with your cause and your organization.
For additional information, refer to the following article by Nick Gleason who offers the above insight along with other on line fund raising best practices:
http://www.fundsraiser.com/aug02/email-fundraising-best-practices.html
Additional resources:
Four Principles for Making Your Newsletter a Powerful Fund Raising Tool:
http://www.fundraising123.org/article/four-principles-making-your-newsletter-powerful-fundraising-tool
Email Newsletters by Nonprofits & Other Organizations:
http://www.coyotecommunications.com/enews/enews.html
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Tuesday, 04 August 2009
There’s no set formula for how often you should ask for money, but there’s some guidelines. First off, it’s certainly possible to ask too infrequently – at least if you want to optimize your fundraising and relationship with your supporters. It likely makes sense to have at least a couple of appeals a year. Define useful, concrete reasons for an appeal – they don’t need to be urgent, but they certainly shouldn’t be imaginary – and ask your supporters for help. If you have a solid core of supporters, and you’re asking as part of a well considered email strategy that includes not just solicitations but also ways to volunteer, learn more, act, or spread the word, your supporters will likely be happy to know how they can help.
If you have an urgent need or a cause that will be very compelling to your donors, then you can and should do an appeal at that time. Even if you’ve just finished another campaign, your supporters will want to know and to help with something that’s time critical and important.
When you start to look at doing appeals more frequently than that, you’ll need to be careful to keep an eye on your metrics and think about building your community of donors. The more you ask, the more you’ll get – but the more potential there is to alienate your community. Are you really trying to engage people in your work, or just treating your supporters like ATMs? That might work in the short term, but will erode your support for the future. Watch unsubscribe and response rates carefully to understand if things take a turn for the worse.
If you have deeply passionate users and a cause with a lot of momentum – like, for instance, the Obama campaign – and take care to build a relationship and community by doing more then asking for money, very frequent appeals might make sense. But this is the exception rather than the norm. Ultimately, ask yourself: is this an appeal that my donors would want to receive?
- Alia McKee, Sea Change Strategies http://seachangestrategies.com