Maximizing digital donor engagement for year-end fundraising

Ann Fellman: And the doors are open — welcome, everybody, welcome back if you’re rejoining us from yesterday. Thank you, thank you. What I love to do is ask where in the world you’re joining from — sometimes we get people from all over.

I’m Ann Fellman, Chief Marketing Officer for Bloomerang, and I’m in Minneapolis again today, where I live — it’s kind of overcast, doesn’t seem to know what it wants to do weather-wise. Where are you in the world, and how’s your weather? I saw someone from Indiana — hopefully you’ve avoided the bad flooding there the last couple of days, that’s been rough. Vanessa, where are you based?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: I’m on Vancouver Island, and it’s very balmy — like sixty-six degrees today.

Ann Fellman: What? Very nice!

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Sounds terrible, basically.

Ann Fellman: Alright — well, please join us. This is a thirty-minute quick hit, you’re in the right spot — it’s Fundraiser Focus Week, and like I said yesterday, this is my favorite week of the quarter. We do it once a quarter, covering all kinds of topics, and today we’re talking about maximizing digital donor engagement for year-end fundraising. I think it’s a really important topic, and with me is Vanessa Chase Lockshin.

Before we get started, a couple of housekeeping notes, since we always get questions: yes, we’re recording, and yes, you’ll get the slides afterward. Here’s how today works — post your questions in the Q&A tab, not the chat tab, at the bottom of your screen. We’ll save those and answer them Thursday, when all of this week’s guests join for a roundtable. Yesterday we had Alice Ferris, today it’s Vanessa, tomorrow it’s Gail Perry, and Thursday, Rachel Muir facilitates a really lively discussion covering all your questions — so make sure you come back Thursday to get yours answered by Vanessa too.

This is a hot topic. If you’re not familiar with Bloomerang, we build fundraising software, donor management software, and volunteer management software — what we call the Giving Platform — all working together to help you raise more and strengthen donor relationships, whether you’re attracting new donors or nurturing existing ones. It’s a really important time of year as we head into the giving season.

One more plug: GiveCon is a great conference for nonprofit fundraising professionals — you don’t need to be a Bloomerang customer to attend, and there are CFRE credits available. Save the date for May 3rd through 6th, 2027 in Atlanta — tickets are available now.

Vanessa, thank you so much for joining us — you’re with The Storytelling Non-Profit. I’m going to stop my screen share, and the floor is yours — thank you for being here.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Thanks for the welcome, Ann, I’m really excited to be here with everyone. I always say it’s a great day for me whenever I get to hang out with nonprofit professionals and talk about my favorite thing — email fundraising. This should be an interesting conversation, because we’re going to look at digital donor engagement and how it intersects with email list engagement specifically, since that’s probably how a lot of you are reaching your digital donors these days. I’m curious — drop in the chat what ways you’re engaging digital donors: digital ad buys, email, social content strategies, whatever it is.

Christine, a monthly email with an impact story and video — great. Cheryl, email and social media. Others: emails, phone calls, monthly newsletters. Interesting — and Christine, targeting donors via social media too, I bet you’ve got great things to share there.

Let’s dig in. Sounds like most of you have an email list — say you’ve got two thousand subscribers, give or take. How many of those are actually engaged subscribers? Do you know what portion of your list is genuinely paying attention to what you send? This is such an interesting question, because I talk to people all year who tell me their list size — “we’re reaching thousands of people” — and then say, “so we should be raising a lot of money, Vanessa, we’re emailing twenty thousand people and it’s not translating.” That’s usually because not all twenty thousand — or two thousand — are actually paying attention.

I see some of you sharing your engaged subscriber rate already, which is great — some saying sixty percent, some thirty. A lot of you are using opens as your engagement indicator — let’s talk about that in a second. Open rates can be useful, but they’re becoming notoriously unreliable these days, since more inbox providers, like Apple, now auto-report opens regardless of whether someone actually looked at the email. When I audit email programs, I actually look more at conversion rate — how much money did this email actually generate — as a better success indicator. But we’ll come back to that; first, let’s define engaged versus disengaged segments.

This really comes down to email list health. If you’ve managed an email program for any length of time, you’ve probably thought about this — and if you’ve never considered it before, welcome, glad you’re here. List health, alongside creating great content, sending emails, and growing your list, is another core piece of running an email program. The term we use for this is “churn rate” — how many subscribers become inactive over the course of a year. Industry averages put that at twenty to thirty percent annually; for a lot of my clients, it’s more like thirty to forty percent. It really depends on how you define things and your specific situation.

Your total list size doesn’t tell you the nuanced story behind your results — understanding who’s actually paying attention informs both your content and fundraising strategy. One of my current clients, for instance, is an affiliate of a national nonprofit, so they have donors who came in through the national org’s list, donors who gave directly to them, past program participants and their families, and a catch-all bucket of other supporters who signed up. Looking at engaged versus disengaged across those different segments is really useful — are certain segments disengaging because we’re not sending the right content, or not having the right conversation over time? And conversely, where are we doing a genuinely good job engaging people?

Here’s the bottom line on why this matters: disengaged subscribers and donors on your email list have effectively become pre-acquisition targets — they’ve stopped paying attention, so you’re really trying to re-acquire them, which comes with its own challenges even though you already have their contact information. The added wrinkle for email specifically is deliverability — large disengaged segments can drag down your deliverability, since inbox providers like Google, Yahoo, and Hotmail keep rolling out new anti-spam requirements. Those rules are good for the ecosystem, but they add work for us. And disengaged people who suddenly open an old email and think “how did I even get on this list” sometimes unsubscribe and report it as spam — not common, but it happens, and it’s worth being mindful of.

So, how I define these segments: an engaged email subscriber is someone who’s opened, clicked, or taken action within the last ninety days. I know that’s a short window — you might ask, what about someone who made a gift in the last twelve months? That’s one valid way to define engagement, but for email specifically, we want them engaged in the channel where we’re actually talking to them, and recency of action is one of the best predictors of future action. If someone opened my last email, they’ll probably open the next one; if it’s been a month since they opened anything, that’s much less likely. Conversely, disengaged subscribers are anyone who hasn’t opened, clicked, or acted in ninety-plus days.

If your organization does other engagement work — petitions, advocacy actions — you might fold those in as engagement markers too, depending on your use case. Once you’ve defined these segments and identified who’s who in your CRM, the simplest way to manage them for re-engagement is a basic tag or group system — I tag the disengaged people specifically, so I can target them separately, and as they reactivate, I remove that tag and fold them back into the main list.

In case you need more convincing that this is worth the effort: email fundraising is largely a numbers game. I’ve worked in digital fundraising for sixteen years, and the truth is, the more people you reach, the more clicks and opens you generate, the better your results. A fifty-thousand-person list can outperform a five-thousand-person list, but whatever size list you have, maximizing how many people are actually paying attention is the single best thing you can do for your bottom line.

So, how do we make that happen? I’ll cover three specific email tactics — and for those of you doing paid social, you can also upload disengaged subscriber emails into your ad platform to run targeted ads, which costs money and time but is another lever outside the inbox.

First, the low-hanging fruit: resend your best-performing emails. You might think, “we already sent these once and they ignored them, why resend?” The logic is that these are the emails that performed best — the most opens, clicks, and actions — so it’s proven content worth serving again to people who still want to hear from you. I go back through analytics from the last six to twelve months and pull evergreen content — not an event invitation for something that already happened, but story-based emails, impact updates, programmatic news that people responded well to. You might need light copy edits, but the goal is not reinventing the wheel with brand-new, unproven content.

Pick three to five of those emails and resend them to your disengaged segment over seven to eight weeks, tracking who reopens, clicks, or acts with each send, and moving them out of the disengaged group back into your active, re-engaged list. If you want to get fancier, tailor those resends to specific sub-segments — for one client, we have three disengaged segments (donors, past program participants, and an “other” bucket of unclear relationships), and for the donor resend specifically, we lean into more donor-centered language: “because of your support, we’ve helped people like so-and-so.” That extra segmentation has produced really good results for that client.

Second: segment out your donors specifically and focus on stewardship. If tackling your whole disengaged list feels like too much, start with donors alone — that’s your first hurdle. Story-driven stewardship emails consistently get the best open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement. Build a short series of three to five emails — “meet Sarah, a client in our physical therapy program,” or “meet this family you helped this year” — with the goal of making donors feel genuinely connected to the impact of their last gift. They might ultimately give again through another channel entirely, but reminding them of that impact via email still helps re-engage them there too.

Third, and a bit different: use a survey — not a twenty-question survey, just something short and pointed, either a poll embedded in the email or a one-question survey. This serves two purposes: getting a click, and capturing information that informs future content. If you’re stuck on what else to try, ask your audience directly — “which area of our work are you most interested in?” is a great one if you have multiple program areas. That can help you build new segments and custom content going forward.

I’d love to hear what one question you’d ask your own donors or subscribers — drop it in the chat. One example I’ve used before, outside of pure re-engagement, is a planned-giving prospecting question: “are you interested in leaving a planned gift to this organization?”

Some of the questions coming in are great — “what inspired your first gift,” “do you feel we’re grateful for your gift” (a really interesting user-experience angle from Kathy), “how often do you want to hear from us” from Jennifer, a very mission-specific one from Deborah about having a plan in place for a pet, “do you still care about making a difference,” and one from Gabe about connection to the organization — I love that one too, since understanding what brought someone into your community can shape how you engage them going forward.

One tip on phrasing these questions: avoid asking for a long written answer. You want multiple-choice options so you can sort people neatly. What I typically do — and I should have included an example slide for this, sorry about that — is put the question directly in the email body with three or four answer options as clickable links. Say the question is “what inspired your first gift to this university,” with options like “I was a student,” “I’m an alum,” “I’m a parent of an alum,” “I care about research here,” or “I’m a sports fan.” Each option links to a landing page that just says “thanks for sharing” — no extra steps required, just a quick click.

Before I wrap up: as you track your re-engagement campaign results, I use a plain spreadsheet — nothing fancy — to see what’s working, since I run these campaigns multiple times a year and want to repeat what’s performed well before. I track basic email analytics, plus the number of subscribers re-engaged — for pure subscriber re-engagement, that’s people who reopened an email; for donor re-engagement, it’s people who actually gave as a result. On a separate tab, I keep a running list of the actual email addresses that re-engaged, as a record.

Bigger question: what do you do with people who don’t re-engage? I get this all the time — “we’ve got two thousand inactive people, should we delete them?” It’s an uncomfortable conversation, since a shrinking list size can worry a board or an ED. But I’d still say: consider removing them. Beyond the deliverability issue we covered, if you’ve made a real effort to reach someone over several weeks and they still don’t respond, they’ve likely tuned out completely — and that’s not a reflection on you, it’s just a fact of email marketing. Removing them improves deliverability and gives you a far more realistic picture for goal-setting — instead of “we have ten thousand addresses, we should easily raise X,” it becomes “we have this many actually active people, and here’s a realistic target.” That said, don’t go scorched-earth — keep the addresses on file, ideally in your CRM, just stop actively emailing them while you keep building strong content for the people who are genuinely excited to hear from you.

As we wrap up, I’m curious what one tip you’ll take from today — maybe it’s simply investigating how many disengaged subscribers you actually have. If you want more email fundraising resources, I have spreadsheet trackers and campaign briefs I use for building these campaigns, free to download at thestorytellingnonprofit.com/toolkit. Great to be here with you all — go send some amazing emails, and re-engage some people.

Ann Fellman: Awesome, thank you, Vanessa, that was great — so much engagement and so many questions. Make sure you put any remaining questions in the Q&A tab; I saw a lot of you answering each other’s questions and supporting one another too, which was great to see. Surveys, stories, engaged, resend — those are my little takeaway nuggets from today, thank you.

Before I let you go — today’s fifty-dollar Uber Eats gift card goes to Juliana Vasquez, we’ll email you about that. There’s another fifty dollars tomorrow, and two hundred fifty on Thursday, so make sure to answer the poll if you’d like to learn more, and keep logging your questions. Same time and place tomorrow — Gail Perry joins us to talk do’s and don’ts for your own year-end fundraising.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, everybody, for joining us — and Vanessa, thank you so much for your insight and knowledge, and for helping this community raise more. I hope you all have a fantastic day.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Have a great day — bye!

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