The email fundraising gap: Why your list isn’t raising more

Dani Cluff: There we go. We’ll give it just a second as people get logged in this afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us. I know between fall events, year-end prep, GivingTuesday, giving days, there’s so much happening this time of year, so we greatly appreciate that you take the time out of your schedule to join us. Christina, where are you logging in from today?

Christina Edwards: I am in Atlanta. And it’s the beginning of fall. There’s a breeze, even though it’s 80-something, 90 degrees outside. There’s a breeze, so that’s where I’m at.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. I’m in the Boston area for a conference this weekend. First time in Boston. I’m loving the weather.

If you are in the chat and chatting with your peers right now, drop where you’re logging in from. I’m always curious to see all the different places people log in to our webinars from.

But I want to make sure we’re respectful of time, so I’ll kick us off with a few housekeeping notes before we get started. My name is Dani Cluff. I’m on the partner team over at Bloomerang, and I am joined by the wonderful Christina Edwards today, who’s going to be talking about an incredibly important topic this time of year, which is your email fundraising. I’m super excited to have Christina joining us today.

The webinar is being recorded today, and we will be following up with a link to the recording as well as a resource from Christina herself. If you have any questions as we’re going through the webinar, there’s that little Q&A box on your toolbar if you want to go there and add your questions. You can add those into the chat, but sometimes it gets a little busy, so the best place for you to leave those is going to be the Q&A area. Use the chat to talk amongst your peers on the webinar, to talk with Christina and me. We’d love to have some interaction as we go through today’s presentation.

If you’re unfamiliar with Bloomerang, we are a giving platform built for purpose for nonprofits to help you optimize your fundraising efforts, your donor retention, your volunteers, all in one house. If you want to learn more about Bloomerang, we’ll have a poll at the end of the webinar where you can opt in to learn more about Bloomerang, and you can also opt in to receive communication from Christina after today’s webinar.

And, of course, I will hand things over to Christina, the one you’re really here to hear from today. I’ll just let you take it over and share the important information.

Christina Edwards: Amazing. Hey, everyone. How are we doing? While I’m getting my slides up, I would love to hear how you feel about email. How often are you emailing? Where does email sit for you in your fundraising strategy? You could even drop in one word: “I feel blank about email.” Let’s check in on that.

So you’re here for the email fundraising gap. We’re going to dig into email today. Email and year end are peanut butter and jelly, very, very important. If your list isn’t raising as much as you think it should, or you wish it would raise more, you’re in the right place. Maybe you have a CRM already. Maybe you’re a Bloomerang user. You have an email tool that you’re using. We’re going to talk about why some organizations turn that asset, an email list, into reliable, repeatable revenue, and some just keep getting wildly inconsistent results. You guys ready?

If you see the barcode right here, you can scan that. I also forgot to mention, I’m the host of the Purpose and Profit Club podcast, so you can scan that to subscribe and listen, where I dig into email and year end and all sorts of marketing and fundraising strategies. Okay, I love that somebody put “email overload.” Yes. Love a good email. Love-hate. Mixed bag. You can steal my belief today, y’all, which is: email can change your life. It has changed my life. It has changed so many of my clients’ lives, who are in this work as fundraisers, executive directors, comms staff. It can change your life.

Today, we’re going to cover why email might feel unpredictable for your organization, what high-performing nonprofits do differently, and the three shifts that make donors ready to give. This is really important. You’ll leave understanding why email revenue might feel random and what stronger organizations are doing differently than what you’re doing right now. These are things you can implement right now, before year end. Sound good?

Here are some signs you’re in the right room, and I love the chat, so keep engaging with me. It’s really helpful to see what’s resonating with you. If email revenue feels random, or if you or your team has ever said, “We emailed them last week, I don’t want to annoy people,” maybe you’re having debates on how often to send. You’re sending newsletters and appeals, but donors rarely reply, click, or give. You can’t plan results. It’s very much a mixed bag. You know, or wish, email could work harder, but you don’t want to annoy people. Do you worry about that? Yeah, you’re worried. I’m seeing a bunch of no’s in the chat, but I see it’s in response to an echo. So sounds good. No one else hears an echo. Amazing.

Here’s what changes when email works. When email works, it stops being another communication task, and it starts becoming part of a fundraising engine. I really wanted to pause here and talk about that. If you’re treating email like a task, the way you might think of social media, you’re doing it wrong. We’re going to change that today. Email should be the backbone of your digital fundraising strategy. It is the backbone. You shouldn’t treat it the same as social or some other platform.

What changes when email starts working is that it becomes consistent. Revenue doesn’t depend on one or two giant moments a year, your spring event, your fall gala, your annual appeal, those tentpole moments that feel very make-or-break. It becomes connected. Donors recognize you, respond, stay engaged. They start to lean in. Donors are more connected to you and your cause. And it becomes repeatable. You and your team know how email fits in your fundraising plan.

I’m Christina Edwards. I spent nearly two decades in nonprofit fundraising and marketing, watching what makes donors move and what makes them scroll right past, what makes them click and hit donate, and what makes them go delete. I’ve worked alongside organizations, supporting them in raising over $15 million in unrestricted funding. Unrestricted. Not grants, not foundations, unrestricted funding.

I’m the founder of Splendid Consulting and the creator of a course called Easy Emails for Impact. That’s what I’m pulling from today. Hundreds of organizations have gone through that one course, and 9x and 5x results are huge from implementing it. So you’re going to hear, and steal, a lot from that course today.

Now I have a free gift for you. You can go to splendidcourses.com/gift. We’ll also put that in the replay. You want to grab this if subject lines tend to turn into a 45-minute staff meeting, or you’re just like, “I don’t know what to put there,” or open rates keep dwindling. This is a free resource for you just for showing up today: 10 winning subject lines and 10 to never, ever use again. You can scan that QR code or go to splendidcourses.com/gift.

Now let’s anchor this. Not all digital platforms are created equal. Let’s look at social media up here. Social is for attention. Social is where we grab awareness. Email is where you actually get to keep the conversation moving and where the conversions happen, where the donations happen, the sign-ups happen. You don’t own the algorithm. We are just at the effect of the social media algorithm. But you do own the asset: the inbox, the relationship you build through email. That is an owned asset.

If you’re tired of pouring time into social media, give me a one. “I am tired of it, Christina. It’s my aunt, my volunteer, and my best friend who heart and comment. I’m over it.” Right? This training is for you. And if you’re ready to use social to drive subscriptions to your email list, you’re in the right place, because email is where the donations happen. Lots of ones.

I love that Melissa said this: “We have a big social media following, but few donors from there.” And that, Melissa, is the best-case scenario, and that’s the problem. Even if you have a large following, they’re not converting. They’re not moving from social media follower to donor. However, they’re doing it on email all day, every day.

With that, let’s anchor with the big problem. The big idea I want to anchor you with is that emails between asks aren’t filler. They shouldn’t be filler. They shape what happens when you ask. Every email you send when you’re not running a campaign, when you’re not actively fundraising, is either building readiness, priming your audience, or just spending attention. It’s a waste otherwise. For whoever said “spam” earlier, who said, “That’s how I feel about email, email’s spammy,” it can be. It absolutely can be, and it doesn’t have to be. That’s a choice. That’s an option. So it’s really important to think about what you’re doing when you’re not fundraising. What does that in-between style look like? Because either it’s priming our donors ahead of time, or it’s moving people from lurkers, an email subscriber who’s not yet a donor, to donor. What happens in between those fundraising campaigns absolutely changes what happens when you finally ask. You with me?

Now I want to talk about the news-first trap. There’s nothing inherently wrong with sharing, quote unquote, “the news” of your organization. Here’s what we’ve been up to. Our latest newsletter. Meet our new board chair. New program update. The problem is when news becomes the strategy. It is a one-way conversation. You are talking at your donors, at your subscribers, not with them. So this has good intentions with disconnected results.

If you’re updating throughout the year but using a news-first strategy, and then you ask people to give a few times a year, they’re not primed and ready. If every email starts with what your organization wants to announce, the donor is always arriving second. It’s not for them. It’s very fire-hose energy.

Let’s drill in a little deeper. Why does this fail? Information alone rarely creates movement. Somebody says in the chat, “We use education.” Right, we’re educating people about what we do. But how do we get that education, that information, to create movement, momentum, action, influence, inspiration, excitement? If fundraising only enters the conversation when you need money, that one appeal has a lot of work to do. The donor, in this news-first strategy, is asked to observe, not participate. It’s very one-way. Fundraising enters the conversation when you need something.

I call this, and this is for people who aren’t usually emailing in a regular cadence, “you only call when you need something, boyfriend energy.” You don’t want to end up there. You want the donor to think, “I’m hearing from this organization throughout the year, and what I’m hearing is valuable, when they’re fundraising and when they’re not fundraising.” When you have that news-first trap, every message can be skimmed or forgotten. It’s very boring. There’s no momentum in between.

Now let’s do a quick check-in. Christine says, “Totally guilty of that.” That’s okay. If you feel called out, I know a lot of people here do too. Which one have you heard in a staff meeting? This could be something you heard, or something you personally thought. Just drop the number in the chat.

One: “Let’s just send one email and see how it goes.” Two: “We have enough to say right now. Let’s just hold off on an update.” Three: “Can we make this sound a little more polished, a little more in our organization’s brand voice?” Four: “We already mentioned this once. We don’t need to say it again.” As I was reading this, it’s really funny, the chat blew up with fours. That’s a big tell. There’s a lot of fear around frequency and repetition with anyone who mentioned four. None of these sound overly dramatic, but they are very expensive. They can sound strategic, like “Let’s just see how donors respond,” number one. They sound really safe. But the problem is that the organizations who are fundraising well, fundraising actively, are not sitting on a magical donor list. They’re doing three things differently. We’re going to dig into the different strategies, and we will address all four of those issues today.

Strategy number one, the first shift: stay visible before you need money. Who here is like, “Yeah, I need to do this better”? Give me a one in the chat if you need to stay visible when you’re not fundraising. Good. Because that frequency primes donors. Again, you do not want your donors, and your email subscribers who are not yet donors, to feel that boyfriend energy. “He only calls when he wants something, when he needs a ride.” That’s not the vibe. That’s not what we’re going for.

Most nonprofits are pitching before they’re primed. Pitching says, “Hey, we need money. Click here to donate. Make a difference.” We know that language. Priming breaks the fourth wall between you and the donor, and you can do this at scale. You can have connection with your donor at scale without picking up the phone and calling them. Your donors can feel that they are a driver of change, that this moment matters, that this is the moment for them. Bloomerang has an incredible report they released this year about giving signals. Let me tell you, donors want to know this. They want to know, “Does my gift really matter? What will happen when I give my gift? Where will it go?” All of that can happen in the priming stage.

Let’s talk about this readiness problem. The ask works better when it isn’t the first time they’ve heard from you. Familiarity is built before the fundraising email. People need multiple exposures before taking action, but most organizations underestimate how much repetition is required. You remember every email you sent, but your donor doesn’t.

I say this a lot in my coaching program: even with the emails you’re sending that are non-fundraising, just your report back, your stewardship, your “what’s been happening” emails, a lot of times you forget that somebody who made a donation one or two times isn’t entirely familiar with all your programs, isn’t entirely familiar with the problems your organization solves and addresses. Going back to the education piece, that’s an opportunity for you to educate. And repetition matters, especially this time of year, because your donors aren’t opening every single email they receive, and they’re not remembering. Think about it. They opened an email from you, which you painstakingly wrote. It’s a really great email. But they saw it in between work email, school pickup, dinner, 47 other things, bings, tings, somebody at the door. They realized they were out of spaghetti, and that was what they were making for dinner.

Versus using repetition. One email, one mention, one ask, and then we decide, “No, it didn’t work.” You wrote it. You can’t decide it didn’t work until you add in that repetition.

I want to call out that your December revenue is being built right now. Before you start fundraising, now is your priming. Now is where we start priming donors. If you haven’t been stewarding them well over the summer, great, now is the time to right-side that. It’s not too late. November and December don’t magically become more generous because the calendar changed. If donors only hear from you when the year-end appeal drops, you’re asking December to do all of the work, which is why organizations stuck in that cycle of spring, December, spring, December, with not a lot in between, see these revenue plateaus.

Now let’s talk about scalability, one of the best reasons why I love email so much. You can use email, automations, and donor journeys to work for you so you’re not disappearing between asks. You can have your CRM do these email welcome series for new donors, for repeat donors, for monthly donors. These are donor journeys. This is inside of Bloomerang. You can do this. Your whole team doesn’t have to do this piecemeal, one by one. Build the rhythm once and then let the CRM roll out the red carpet for donors as the new donors come in.

If you have set an email welcome series up, give me a one in the chat. If you need an email welcome series, give me a two. If I make a donation to your organization today, do you even roll out the red carpet? So many twos. A few ones. Great. Opportunity. Depending on the stat we look at, eight out of 10 donors give one time. You guys, that is not a good retention rate. And retention gets lost right here, and we could automate this retention. This could be such a powerful moment and a great time for you to set that up, before leading into year end, before leading into GivingTuesday.

Email is still the number one digital fundraising channel. Low cost, direct access, owned asset, no algorithm, high control, fast turnaround. You do not have to wait to see when your donor is available for lunch. You don’t have to put money behind an ad so people will see it on your social media channel. But often I see people saying, “Our donors don’t like to give on email. It just doesn’t work for us.” If email is underperforming, abandoning email makes no sense. You need to go upstream and fix the way email is being used, because email is growing right now. It grew last year.

Let’s look at some benchmarks here, and I want to hit on frequency. Email revenue increased 16% last year, and this is from the M+R Benchmarks report. I thought this was interesting. It showed that 50 emails were sent per subscriber per year, meaning an organization was sending 50 emails to their subscribers each year. I’m curious whether that’s a lot to you, or a little, or about what you’ve done. And of that 50, I love this number, and I think it would surprise a lot of people, 31 of those were fundraising. So not all 50 were fundraising emails.

Here’s the dissonance, here’s the contrast. In the chat right now, for anyone watching the replay, everybody’s like, “Oh my god, that’s way too many.” And yet the organizations making the most money from email are sending the most email. The distinction here is quality. It’s not just quantity. You cannot fire-hose your email list and say, “Christina, where’s the money?” Quality, too. Frequency. Story matters. I teach a method called the Sprint Method, where we use these fundraising emails in bursts. We use them in cycles so it doesn’t feel like too much and doesn’t feel spammy. Remember what I told you about your donors: your donors are busy. We need repetition.

This is proof. If you see a 16% lift in email revenue, but you’re over here doing a monthly email newsletter and a couple of emails with fundraising asks throughout the year, then there is a disconnect. Let’s address that disconnect, because it’s usually about unsubscribes. If sending more email sounds aggressive, I want you to look at what the data is telling us. Your fear of emailing may be costing you more than the unsubscribes. The data does not support your current cadence. It’s just fear in a costume. It’s a cute outfit for fear, and it sounds like strategy. I see this a lot: “Let’s not fatigue our people.”

I have a client. She was on my podcast, and she emails five days a week. She grew 50% year over year in her first year working with me, 30% last year. She’s going to kill it this year. She emails five days a week. Am I saying you have to email five days a week? No. But if you want strong growth and you’re not willing to have some courage and do something different, that’s a dissonance.

Okay, I have to look at this real quick. A question: “Does the high rate of email not lead to email being classified as promos in the inboxes?” Here’s the thing, Kate. Your emails might already be classified as promos anyway. Let’s just assume they are. You’re an institution. You’re an organization. They’re probably in the primary tab anyway. Now what? Not a problem.

A healthy list will have unsubscribes. Everybody, let’s hit the fear head-on. Your goal is a responsive donor list. If you had to choose, do you want a responsive donor list with 16% growth, or whatever your benchmark is? Or do you want to white-knuckle it and be so scared of anyone unsubscribing? You can’t have both. I would be much more worried about the thousands of donors forgetting you than a tiny fraction of people deciding they’re no longer interested. A responsive donor list beats a silent one.

So the fear: if I email more, people will unsubscribe. The reality is that a tiny number of people will. That’s normal. That is the cost of doing business. That’s it. The biggest risk you can have is becoming forgettable. I easily, in a calendar year, donate to 25 or 30 organizations, partly because I’m inspired, partly because it’s beautiful market research. Could I sit here on this call and tell you the 20 organizations I donated to this year as a new donor? Absolutely not. Do you know why? They are forgettable. So few followed up with me. So few connected with me in that honeymoon period. I don’t remember. That’s why it’s a blue ocean opportunity for you to get in front of new donors with email.

Look at this industry-wide unsubscribe rate: 0.23%. Y’all, why are we worried about 0.23%? I’ve had hundreds, now thousands, of people trained across my programs and webinars and courses. I have yet to log in and see somebody who has a 10% unsubscribe rate. So just screenshot this slide for your next team meeting. This is fear. This isn’t real.

I want to tell you about a founder who prioritized email over any other fundraising channel. They brought in $12,000 in recurring revenue. Their first email-only monthly giving campaign brought in 53 new donors. No social media spend. No social media content at all. This was an email-only campaign. Just emails. This particular executive director had a mic-drop quote. She says, “When I send emails, we make money.” That’s it. Her list and her open rates have grown even with the frequency increased.

I’m thinking about Wendy, another Bloomerang user, who was on my podcast a while back and shared that she increased her frequency and her open rates increased. Counterintuitive. You’d think, “Oh god, I’m going to email more, what’s going to happen?” And no, the unsubscribe rate went down. Can you imagine if your belief was “People want to hear from me. Our donors want to hear from me”? No revolt. No angry people. In fact, more connected people, more responsive people.

Let’s dig into strategy number two: sound like a person, not an institution. This is why it’s not just quantity, it’s quality. Your personal voice builds trust. Visibility gets you seen, but we’ve got to get people to care. And that sterile voice is a killer. You know the one. If this is you, tell me. It’s very polished. It’s the ominous nonprofit. It’s formal. It’s the institution. I have no idea who the people behind the organization are. Is anyone else reading these emails, writing these emails, getting these emails? It’s very hard for your donors to connect to that institutional voice.

Yes, I get told to make my emails more professional. Stop it. You can push back. You can show leadership this deck. The trends have spoken. If you are using this ominous voice, people aren’t even opening.

Let’s do a quick test. Which email would you open first? Email A: “August newsletter.” This is what we get to see, the subject and the preview. The preview says “Contents, capital campaign update.” Who is excited to open Email A? Email B: “I waited three years to go back to the doctor.” The preview text says “I don’t want you to waste...” and it’s cut off. This one in particular is a health care organization. Lots of people are saying B. A few people are very excited to read the August newsletter. Okay.

Here’s what I would do. I want you to think about what your version is. You don’t have to use first person. But when we send out an August newsletter, are we standing out in inboxes when there are hundreds or thousands of other organizations saying “August newsletter”? If B doesn’t appeal to you, Kristen, what is your version where you can break the fourth wall, from the institutional voice to the personal voice? It can be done.

Let’s look at this a little closer. Here’s a better one. You can choose between A and B. Subject A: “August newsletter.” Subject B: “Frankie almost didn’t come back.” Which one would you open? Good. And I’m glad some people didn’t like option B, because we want to repel some people so we can attract your people.

The other thing I want to highlight is that you work for the institution. You’re not your ideal donor. Sometimes I hear people go, “Well, I don’t like when people email me...” Okay, that’s your personal preference. I also don’t really like pears that much. That’s my personal preference. It doesn’t mean my grocery store shouldn’t sell pears. You with me? Alright, let’s go through this example.

A lot of times I hear, “Okay, but what should I be sharing? What stories?” You have the story. The story is there. But anyone getting pushback like “We need to sound more polished, more formal,” this is what it sounds like: “August newsletter. We’re excited to share an update from our summer programming.” I fell asleep. You fell asleep. Definitely your subscribers have moved on. Versus the subject line “Frankie almost didn’t come back.” It hooks right in. “Frankie stood outside the classroom for ten minutes before walking in.” Now I’m in. The story has a lead to it, a hook to it. This donor feels something faster. These are the same stories, but the copy is different. The way you write the email matters.

This is a big part of what I teach inside Easy Emails. This isn’t about turning you into a copywriter. That is not the goal here. The goal is knowing what a strong fundraising email is supposed to do, whether you write it yourself, hand it off to your team, or maybe even use AI. You want to know what it should look like.

So here’s a 60-second gut check. Open your sent folder. Pull up the last email your organization sent. Just the subject line and preview. Would you open it? Would you be excited to open it? Does it sound specific to your organization, or could any other organization in your cause area have sent it? Is there a clear reason to care in those first couple of lines? Wherever you winced, there’s your gap. Or if you’re like, “Christina, I can’t find my last email because it’s been so long since we sent one,” there’s your gap.

Let’s see what we have here. “Heck no. Sounds boring.” Yeah, that’s okay. And that’s the thing: if we’re not excited to read it by these one, two, three steps, they aren’t either. If we are expecting our donors, in today’s world that is more distracted and busier than ever, to not only give but give again, give more, then we can’t be boring. We can’t be sterile. We can’t be ominous. Y’all, as you’re pulling yours up, tell me in the chat. I still want to see.

I want to go through this next piece with you. There was a small-shop comms and development team I work with. They had the same list, and they had really gotten out of a cycle of emailing. We got them back into a foundational cadence of emailing, and then did an email campaign on top of that. Same audience, and from one email campaign, not one email, one email campaign, they brought in over $10,000. They secured three major donor upgrades. New approach, same list.

Who here has donors hitting reply and responding to their emails? That’s what your donors could and should be doing. A responsive email list. This particular organization had major donors saying, “Hey, can we meet? Can we do a call? Can we do lunch? Can we have coffee?” So instead of you trying to hunt them down for the meeting, they’re saying, “I want to meet with you.” That’s what your email should be doing. It should be creating a pipeline for your major gifts officer, a pipeline for your development person, a pipeline for you if that’s your job.

The other thing I love is lapsed donors. It’s my favorite way to get lapsed donors back: a comeback series. We can do this at scale with email.

The last thing I want to share is that she reconnected. This particular development person reconnected with why she does this work. No one on this call is here arbitrarily. You’re here because you have deep, deep purpose in this work, and it’s easy for that purpose to feel hard and overwhelming and to forget about it. She said, “I was reminded of how much I love to write.” When she leaned in and found her voice, as a copywriter, not as a strategist, but actually her unique why, everything changed for this organization.

Alright, let’s dig into the third shift. Let me go through the chat first. I had three responses today to my email. One was a volunteering inquiry. Good. We want more of that. Bookmark that. We want more responses. Why aren’t we getting more responses? What about a tiny nonprofit with one staff person? Then you’re the one. I want to hear your voice in the emails. I want to hear your lived experience. I want you highlighting the people in and around the organization. You can still do this.

The third shift for you is running campaigns, not one-offs. Big, big, big: every email has a job. Once your message feels human and you’re more frequent, the final piece is the structure, turning those emails into campaigns that actually lead to gifts. What I see instead is you’re putting all the pressure on maybe one or two little emails, and then it’s that energy: “We don’t want to push it. We don’t want to turn any people off. So we’ll just do it a little. Just a trickle, just a sprinkle.” This is where a lot of good writing still falls apart, because one or two emails is not a fundraising strategy.

When I say campaign, I don’t mean five versions of the same ask. It’s not five versions of “give us money, make a difference, donate.” It is a connected series designed to move someone toward a decision. This is where so many organizations lose revenue. They send the ask before they’ve created that moment. They send the ask one way and decide that’s it. True, strong, successful email fundraising comes from a series of emails that move people along. They connect the dots. You know those dot-to-dot workbooks kids have? They’re connecting the dots. They’re illuminating that image. Very important.

How many emails do you typically send in your campaigns? How many do you send for your fall campaign, for a year-end campaign, for something you do in the spring? Two, four, three. And then tell me if you hit your goal. Whatever your standard frequency is, do you hit your goal? I love that everybody just said a range from three to ten, three to six, followed by “no, no, no, no, no.” What does that tell us? What do they say is the definition of insanity? It’s repeating the same thing and expecting different results. So we have to stop repeating the same thing. If you’re doing two emails and not hitting your goal, we might have a frequency issue. Spoiler alert: we do have a frequency issue. But we also have a content issue. There are probably a lot of different leaks happening. So that’s an opportunity. Frequency, quality, campaigns.

Think about it this way. One or two lonely emails is a very expensive wish. It’s like putting a garage sale sign three miles away from your house and hoping people find your driveway. But you have turns. You’ve got to go left over here, right over here, down this little curved street. The donor can’t respond to a message that barely had a chance. And don’t forget, if you sent three emails and I didn’t open one, I only had the chance to get two. My kid came in for one of them, and then I just wasn’t moved by the second one. That’s not nearly enough touch points.

I can feel the pressure: “That’s a lot of repetition, Christina.” Repetition isn’t the enemy. Randomness is. “If I run more campaigns, donors will get tired of giving.” This is that fatigue thing. But the reality is that a good message needs more than one chance to land. Donors tune out random, repetitive asks. We do. I’ll speak for us donors. We tune out you sending us five emails that say “make a difference” or five emails that say “donate to our fall campaign.” Quality matters, but a campaign gives the repetition a reason and different angles. It also has that energy, that momentum around it. Campaigns outperform one-off blasts.

Your donors are busy. A good message needs more time to land, and every email should be delivering value. That’s the other thing my clients talk about: “Our donors read our emails whether or not they donate. They’re valuable. They’re responding. They’re exciting.” Again, not that talking-at energy.

Let’s look at this. My client Michael was brand new in development when he first went through this process, and he’s also a Bloomerang user. He nearly 5x’d his revenue with this system. Before, his best campaign brought in 17 donors, about $1,900. Then, using this system, same campaign, same list size, which wasn’t 20,000 emails or anything like that, he got 114 donors in one short campaign, about $9,000 in revenue. He says, “Before, my emails felt like they came from the C-suite. Then I changed. It was a lot more fun.” Email also doesn’t have to be so tense and arduous and serious. Your donors aren’t responding to that anyway. It’s not working for you, so we can change it. We can have some lightness to it too. It also means those 17 donors who gave to the first campaign aren’t expected to suddenly shoulder a bigger goal, when we can call in more people.

The shift I want you to think about today is to stop asking what you need people to know, what you need to tell them, what your board wants you to tell them, what your executive director wants. That’s very news-first. Or sometimes I hear, “Christina, I don’t really have anything. Nothing’s really happened,” and so you’re not going to send anything. These are the one-off sends: “I only send if I have something that’s news to say.” Then fundraising appears only when the money is needed, and the revenue feels unpredictable. Versus campaign-based: what do we want the donor to hear next? How do we want them to feel? That’s connected communication. Fundraising is built into the strategy. Revenue becomes more repeatable.

When you switch to this, one of the great collateral effects is that you start seeing donations come in even when you’re not running campaigns. When you have an engaged, responsive list and you’re sending your quote-unquote no-ask stewardship updates, you’re getting new monthly donors. You’re getting new one-time gifts. You’re getting repeat gifts coming in when you didn’t even ask, from the little button at the bottom of your emails, because they are compelled. Your story was so good. You’re staying top of mind.

So you really need to start asking yourself: what does the donor need to hear next? Not what do we, the organization, need to tell people. If anyone has an answer to that, I would love to hear it in the chat. What does our donor need to hear next? “What a difference their dollars can make.” Yes, Jen. And more specific, because we want to make sure we say more about that. Get really specific. I also want to know about the people in the organization. I want to know what an email from Jen sounds like versus an email from Tara versus an email from Marco. We want to know the voices.

High-performing nonprofits don’t have a magic list. They show up before the ask, because that frequency builds readiness. They sound like a person. They’re emailing from a person on behalf of the institution. That personal voice builds so much more trust than the ominous brand.

I want you to think about the most memorable email you ever received from a brand, from a business, or from a nonprofit, and just give me the summary. Who was it from? Or you can tell me what it was about, or why it was resonant or memorable. But it can’t be from an individual, just friend to friend. It has to be from a brand, a business, or a nonprofit organization. I’m going to give you a second to keep going. And then the third piece is running campaigns, not one-offs. Not just “when we need a little money, we send something out there,” or “when we’ve got a fundraiser going on, we cautiously send out an email or two.” Instead, every email has a job. Same list. This didn’t require you to get an acquisition list or bring in a bunch of new leads. It’s a better strategy: squeezing the juice out of the list that’s already there.

Oh, this is interesting. Thank you, Erica, for sharing this. To my question about the memorable email, Erica says, “A politician sharing a family recipe for a regional dish. It was totally a fundraising ask, but it got me.” That’s the point. Personal. Specific. You’re actually reminding me of our former mayor in Atlanta, any Atlantan might remember, who had a mac and cheese recipe that went viral. We want to know the people. And it was such a moment where people were like, “Hang on, she doesn’t have the crispy crust on top of the mac and cheese.” It was human. It was resonant.

Okay, Tracy says, “We have some of the most respected vets in the city working in our clinic, and we are so much more affordable.” That was in response to what you want people to know. So say that specifically. One story, one person. Keisha Lance Bottoms. You got it, Kay. Perfect. Let’s keep going.

Which of these three things are you going to fix before year end? I want you to pick one. Not 10 things, just one. What do you want to change this week or Monday morning? Do you want to work on your frequency? Do you want to work on your personal voice, sounding like a human, not AI beige? We didn’t really get into that today. It used to be the ominous organization, and now some of y’all have swapped that for AI beige. You’re using ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever to help you write your emails, which is not a problem, but now they all sound formulaic in a slightly different way. And the third one, campaigns. Great. Personal voice, frequency, campaigns. Perfect.

Now, knowing these things need a change and getting the support to make the change, the templates and the system, are totally different. I’m going to go through questions that have come up on this webinar. But before I do, I’m going to give you a quick little celebration and gift. If you are interested in learning and getting the full system without doing it trial and error, I’m offering, with the code BLOOMERANG at checkout, a self-paced course. You get access for a full year to Easy Emails, and you’ll get 60% off. Just put in the code BLOOMERANG at checkout. I’m going to drop that in the chat.

It’s just $399. We have a giving day toolkit. If you like templates, if you like done-for-you everything, we’ve got that. If you don’t want done-for-you, but you want more strategy on running campaigns, on retention campaigns, on engaging your donors for fundraising, it is all inside. You can go at your own pace, and it’s a perfect time to grab that in time for year end and GivingTuesday. I’m going to leave my contact info up here for a second while I go through the chat. We have a good amount of time. I always like to leave time to answer your questions.

Dani Cluff: I just went ahead and launched that poll in case people want to connect with you that way too.

Christina Edwards: I was like, “What is that?” Okay. Perfect.

Dani Cluff: Awesome. Well, we do have a few questions. I saw one question come in the chat that I put down, and somebody asked, what is a healthy open rate? But beyond that, I want to expand that out for you. What are some key metrics that you’re looking at when you’re deciding, is this performing well? Is this not performing well?

Christina Edwards: Yeah. First of all, sometimes I see people say, “Our open rate’s 25 or 30 percent,” something like that. I would like to see it higher than that. That usually means you’ve got some dead emails on there, people with old AOL accounts, people who are just not getting your emails anymore. The effect of increasing your frequency means you’re going to do some natural list cleaning anyway, which is good. But you may need to do formal list cleaning. If you think, “A large percent of our audience just isn’t opening our emails,” it’s important to remove those people from your list, because it’s skewing your data in a not-good way. You’re not getting clean data. And sometimes, depending on what tool you’re using, you’re paying for those people. You’re paying for sends you’re not even using. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is that I see people get a little precious about their open rate: “Our open rate is blah blah blah.” I do want to see a good open rate. Let’s say you tell me, “Christina, our open rate is 50%.” I’m like, “Amazing, that’s awesome.” And then I ask, “Are you happy with how much you’re raising through email?” And you say, “Not at all.” Okay. So now our problem is not the open rate. The health of the list is good in that sense, but we are not connecting the dots. Again, I’m picturing the dot-to-dot worksheet, and they’re not connected for the donor. So, likely, there are a couple of leaks happening. Campaigns aren’t happening. Messaging is missing. Or the actual friction from email to the donate button could be an issue. There are a couple of different places that people could be leaking out there.

Dani Cluff: Christina, I know you mentioned a little bit about list cleanup. We had one question come in about, when somebody unsubscribes, do you remove them from your system altogether, or leave them there, or fully clean it up?

Christina Edwards: I think it depends on your system and what you have. That’s the first thing. We want to make sure you’re unsubscribing them first and foremost, so that you’re not resending them something if they have opted to not receive messages. The second thing is, I always say, make sure you export. Remember I said it was an asset. Export that information. Put it in a CSV file. In the future, your organization is going to grow, and you’re going to come back and say, “We’re ready to run Facebook ads.” I’m going to say, “Great, grab me your last donor list. Grab me your this list.” This is helpful for creating audiences for ads. It’s a helpful asset in the future. So don’t just delete them and not have a backup, if you choose to delete them.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely.  

Christina Edwards: Yes.

Dani Cluff: I know we’ve talked a little bit about spam emails, what’s going into promotions. Are there any platforms that you can recommend to help avoid spam and junk emails?

Christina Edwards: If you have a decent email service provider, so for example, if you’re using Bloomerang, or another vetted email service provider, that is fine. It’s not that the right platform is going to make sure you never end up there. To me, it’s the strategy of what is happening when somebody is on your email list. There are a couple of things we can do to make sure you don’t end up in spam. It may also be some of the words you’re using. There may be a bigger issue happening if it’s happening across the board.

What I wonder is: is it just a fear? Is it actually happening, or are you worried you might end up in spam? Do you actually know that’s a problem? Those are two different things. And again, if you end up in the promotions folder, that’s not bad. Bombas socks is probably in my promotions folder right now, but it’s not a problem. I still buy socks from them because they are selling me. They are promoting socks. Not a problem.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely. I feel like you could probably do an entire webinar on this question, but do you have any quicker tips on how to grow your list and get people onto your email list?

Christina Edwards: Yes. That’s a big strategy. We teach that inside the club, which is my group coaching program, which is really another blue ocean opportunity for a lot of nonprofits. A lot of nonprofits are list building through the little “subscribe to our newsletter” footer on their website. That is not real list building. That is just a little passive thing. We want that there, but that’s not a strategy. A lead magnet is my favorite way. A lot of my clients are doing that. Very similar to what I just gave y’all, a free resource or something like that, that’s a lead magnet. Most nonprofits don’t have one, so I have a strategy for that. That’s a great way. If you’re out in the community, if you’re doing events, anything where you’re getting in front of people, you should be capturing email addresses, and you need to make it simple. Those are a couple of things I would do.

Dani Cluff: Yeah. Absolutely. I think a couple of questions really tie together on this one. We’ve talked a little bit about the content. Your open rates might be good, but the content is not converting to donations. Do you have any tips for, one, identifying that that’s happening, and then figuring out next steps?

Christina Edwards: Yes. Let’s say, to use round numbers, you have an email list of a thousand people on there. We’ll say they’re donors, and a portion of them are not yet donors. You’re sending out what is a strong campaign, meaning it’s converting in other places, but you’re noticing your open rate is high and it’s not converting. Donations aren’t coming in through email. So you want to audit why. Is it a click-through issue? Is there an issue when they land on your donate page? Is it that the first half of your email wasn’t good? With email, it is what’s in the email: the subject line, the preview text, what’s in the email, how it’s designed. Y’all, how it’s designed can also make or break it. It was such a good email, the subject line was great, I opened it, and then I got into it and was like, “Never mind, this is arduous for me to read.” So it could be a couple of different things along the way.

Dani Cluff: Yeah. Absolutely. I’m actually very curious about your take on this question. Somebody asked, how do we know if we are over-relying on email? They work really hard on content, but they’re just not sure that people are really reading it.

Christina Edwards: That’s an interesting question. I wonder, if people aren’t reading it, why you think you’re over-relying on it. Do you think email is our number one fundraising tool, so we just keep pouring into it, but it’s not our number one fundraising tool yet, and I kind of know we should be booking donor meetings? If there’s a question underneath that question, I’m curious about it. So say more in the chat, if you would.

Dani Cluff: Awesome. Amy, if you’re on the call and you can add some more context into the chat. But we can hop on to another quick question. Can you share more about shifting to what the donor needs to hear? Is sharing their programs and their impact different than news or updates?

Christina Edwards: There are two things. Number one is the way you’re positioning the news. Or it is deciding if the news is worthy of an update. Do your donors need to hear you have a new board chair? Sell me on it. If you say, “Yeah, I really want you to tell me why that’s relevant and really connective and moves the needle for the donor with their relationship with you,” tell me more. The answer may be yes. But oftentimes the answer is no. Or when it is yes, it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to do this spotlight for the new board chair.” You and I both know what it looks like: a headshot of the board chair, their bio, their background, and that’s all it is. So that’s one issue, what the donor needs to hear and how it’s different from the news.

The other piece is that sometimes it’s not news in the traditional sense. It’s not “we ran this program in August, we have this thing happening.” That’s not it. It is break the fourth wall. It is, “Hey, Christina, I’m sitting at my desk. I just finished up a call with another mom I added to the wait list. She’s now the ninety-seventh person on our wait list.” Keep going. Write the rest of that email. That’s what I want to hear. Tell me more about that. So sometimes it’s not news in the traditional sense.

Dani Cluff: Yeah. Absolutely. I do see that somebody was asking if you could pin the link to the course or add that to the chat really quick, and the discount code, for anybody who’s trying to pull that up.

Christina Edwards: Yep, I see. Let’s see. Over-relying: how can we be more confident they got the message? If they’re not responding, is it because they didn’t really read the email or care about what we said? Or is it because they did read it and decided no? My favorite question. I talked about this at GiveCon, which is that in for-profit sales, I would have to pull up the deck, but it’s at least six touch points before they close the sale. Six. So if you knew that your donors needed seven emails before they were going to go from “maybe” to “probably” to donate, would you do it? Great salespeople know this. Now, I know selling isn’t exactly fundraising, but I’m pushing you to think about it differently.

Even in your question, there’s a little bit of a tell, because you’re saying, “How can we be confident they got the message? If they’re not responding, is it because they don’t really want it?” What I would be saying is, if they’re not responding, what else do they need to know? What else should I tell them? And also, if they never give to this campaign, why is this still valuable for them? Think about my client who sent, y’all are going to lose it, 33 emails. Now, she’s high on volume of emails for a campaign, and she nearly doubled her results year over year. But even among the people who received those emails and didn’t donate, they still stayed on her list, because they found her emails thoughtful, valuable, connected. They were cheering her on. They were excited for her. The other thing we see happen through this process is you see people donate, and then they donate a second time in the same campaign, because they’re like me. They just want to see you win. They get super hyped just about you sending more emails.

Dani Cluff: Yeah. Absolutely. I see another question in the chat. “We only send weekly fundraising campaign emails to people who have already donated in the past. This is separate from their monthly e-news subscriber list. Should they combine them or approach it differently?”

Christina Edwards: Yeah. I would wonder why we’re segmenting out people. You’re treating all of your email subscribers who are not yet donors as, “Well, I’m just not going to ask them,” which is common, but I would say stop doing that. They will for sure never be donors if we never ask them. If we never pass the baton, why are we running this relay race separately? We want to bring them over. Good question, though. It may feel different at first, and you may want to work out what that cadence is to bring them over, but it absolutely can and should be done.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely. I’ve seen a couple of people ask, is there a date and time? Have you figured out, have you broken the algorithm on what the best times are to send your emails?

Christina Edwards: The truth is there is no one best time. There is no one best number of emails. There is no one best anything, because you and I would go to the bookstore and there would be the email book of fundraising. There’s not one best thing. Also, think about your people. Your people are different. Some of us have causes that speak more to a Monday-through-Friday working audience, and that’s how people are consuming. Some audiences love to catch up on the weekends. You want to get to know your audience, and you also want to be less scared about testing that. “Oh, well, we always send our emails on Tuesday.” Okay, that’s not a good reason to continue sending your emails on Tuesday because you always did it. You might want to try, how do people respond to a Sunday morning email? What if that’s gold for you? What if people love to dig into a Sunday morning story? Or a Sunday night story. We don’t know what we don’t know here, so you’re going to have to put on your lab coat and do some testing. And no doubt, I want to give you a caveat: leadership or a board member or somebody is going to say, “That’s different. I don’t know, I feel nervous.” You’re going to get some pushback, but you have to say, “If we want a different result, we have to try something different. So we’re going to test this out.”

Dani Cluff: Yeah. Before we wrap up, I see a question about recurring donors, so I want to ask that one. If you have recurring monthly donors and they receive a thank you email each time they give, what should that thank you email look like? Should it be different every single month because they’re recurring donors and getting it regularly?

Christina Edwards: Love this question. It could also be another conversation, a bigger conversation. What I would recommend is to sign up to be a recurring donor yourself, at any level. Put yourself through that and see how you like the same message every time, every month. See how it feels. “I’m getting a templated email.” How would you want this to be customized? That’s one way I would do it. But the short answer is you want them to feel like they’re part of something, truly part of something. The same redundant email once a month is probably not it. Now, maybe there’s an automation where that’s what your tool gives out. That’s not a problem. But what can I do to surprise and delight them? What can I do to really say, “I see you, you’re part of this community”? Again, have that two-way conversation versus that extractive conversation. It’s less than you think. It’s a little touch point, a little surprise-and-delight moment here or there. It’s not like I have to send them a swag bag and phone calls and just love-bomb them.

Dani Cluff: No. Absolutely. Well, we’re at the top of the hour, and I want to make sure I’m respectful of everybody’s time. If we didn’t get to everything today, please reach out to Christina. Check out her podcast. It’s absolutely wonderful, and she shares so much helpful information. And of course, always reach out to Bloomerang and our team if you ever need help. A huge thank you again to Christina for speaking with us. And thank you to everyone for joining us.

Christina Edwards: Thank you all. Amazing. Thanks for having me. I could talk about email forever. If I didn’t answer your question, just come find me on LinkedIn or send me an email, and I’ll reach out. Thank you for having me. Go send some emails and make them different. Change it up. You’ve got this.

Dani Cluff: Have a great rest of your day, everyone.

Christina Edwards: Alright. Bye, y’all.

Dani Cluff: Bye.