Email Works! Best practices in building and growing an engaged email list for fundraising

Your nonprofit’s email list is an invaluable resource for your nonprofit, and it’s more than just a tool for sending newsletters. Email is the best digital direct response channel and it’s time for non-profits to start seeing it for the powerful tool it is. From running powerful fundraising campaigns to prospecting for legacy donors to building relationships with major donors, there is incredible potential for email to enhance your fundraising program.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin is a fundraising consultant and email fundraising copywriter at The Storytelling Non-Profit. A digital fundraising veteran, Vanessa has helped clients raise millions of dollars and build robust email programs. Her clients have included: BC Women’s Health Foundation, Win Without War, Variety BC, Burnaby Hospital Foundation, and Amplio. Vanessa is also the author of The Storytelling Non-Profit: A practical guide to telling stories that raise money and awareness.

More at – www.thestorytellingnonprofit.com 

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to this episode of the Nonprofit Exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, your host, and I’m founder and president of SynerVision Leadership Foundation, where we develop group synergy because we’re very clear on our vision. And we have a wonderful guest today who’s knowledgeable about a topic that’s awkward for a lot of us, but it’s a key topic that it’s important to learn more about. So the title of today’s episode is Email Works. best practices in building and growing an engaged email list for Fundraising we got two topics there that are important. My guest today is Vanessa Chase Lockshin So Vanessa before we get started on this great content Tell people a little bit about who you are your background and what’s your passion for doing this work?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Well, thank you so much for having me on the show today, Hugh. It’s really great to be here with you and everybody else. Yeah, my name is Vanessa. I have been in fundraising for over 15 years now. It seems like a long time for me. But basically, my entire career, I have spent in direct response fundraising, either in direct mail early on and then moving into digital fundraising in the last 12 years or so. And what I’m really passionate about is helping organizations have great email programs. Email programs that not only raise money, but actually do significant relationship with their donors. And I think one of the best examples I have of that in my work was in my clients over the years, working with one called Variety BC, which helps children with special needs here in British Columbia. They started working with me and had no email program. They worked with lots and lots of families throughout the province, and they had a good direct mail program. They had an email list, but they weren’t really emailing them more than like a handful of times a year. It was quite few. And within a year of working together, they had an email program that was raising $1.5 million. and had donors telling them that they felt so informed about the work. And I always just think about how the fact that they got unsolicited advice and feedback back from their donors about how informed and connected they felt to the work really spoke to me about the power of email as a relationship building tool. I think a lot of us think that it’s just like, oh, it’s like nice to have thing in our fundraising program. Donors don’t really take it seriously. It doesn’t matter. It does. People read your emails and it can have an incredible impact. on the long-term relationships that you have with donors. So I’m always excited to talk to people about what email can do in their fundraising programs and hopefully help you feel a little bit more excited about it and also about writing the emails that you’re gonna send to your donors and your community.

Hugh Ballou:
Oh my, we got a lot of topics to open up here. It’s a challenge. So we have these. We’re going to deal with some of the details of the how-tos. But first, what are some of the myths about email?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Yeah, I think that one of the big myths is that you can email donors too often, that you can only email donors like once a month or once a quarter. I’m here to tell you, no, don’t do that. Organizations who only email donors, you know, like I would say four to 12 times a year are often organizations that have really disengaged email lists. And that’s because they’re not communicating enough for people to actually know that they’re an email sender and to be regularly engaging with those emails. In fact, when you send too infrequently, like let’s say you send a quarterly email out to your list, you’re actually more likely to have people unsubscribe because they forgot that they signed up or they may be signed up. And it’s been two months until they first receive an email from you. And then they’re like, who is this? I don’t remember signing up for this. So there’s some negative impacts on that. That said, you know, there is kind of a good sweet spot between communicating more frequently and veering into spam territory, which none of us want to do. That’s not good for any of us or the sector as a whole. But you can probably reliably email your list every one to two weeks with updates. And you’re probably going to see more traction in your fundraising because you’re giving more people opportunities to engage more frequently. And you’re going to keep your list healthier overall, which is great for the times when you get to your fundraising campaigns.

Hugh Ballou:
One of the fundamental principles of leadership and fundraising is relationship. You mentioned relationship. I just didn’t want to let that slide by. Talk about building relationship, maintaining relationship, and this thread, this email thread.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Yeah. Yeah, like I think like going back to your original question to like kind of the midst of email, I think a lot of times people think of it as like the E news, right? Like it’s just a newsletter that you send out on behalf of the organization. And it’s really not email is tool that you can use in a variety of different ways. And I think organizations start to see a lot more benefit from email when they start to shift their mindset about what it could look like to send an email. So maybe your emails are segmented emails where you send really great impact stories to your donors, or you have a targeted campaign to people who have been longtime donors and you want to start to cultivate them to become legacy donors in the next five to 10 years. There’s so much that you can do with the content of your emails. And when you kind of move past, everybody has to get the same thing and it’s just a newsletter, you can really start to be strategic with using the content to build those relationships and move people in the direction that you want them to be in. I think a lot of it comes down to impact content so being able to share the impact of what donors are a part of. But I think the other really important piece of content that can be useful in relationship building is the social proof content and so sharing the voices of your donors. Think back to a really successful campaign I had with a hospital foundation client of mine around legacy giving and being able to share the stories of donors who were already legacy donors was some of the best marketing that we had to help people see that people like them decided to become a legacy donor to this hospital. And figuring out who had those stories and being able to share those stories with a really targeted audience was one way that we could start to cultivate those relationships better.

Hugh Ballou:
We forget that people who donate find joy, especially when they hear these stories about what’s really happened. We’re telling people we’re being good stewards of their money. We’re multiplying, taking the money, and we’re translating it into impact for people’s lives. So you talked about the rhythm, the frequency of email. Talk about a little bit the length And is there a calendar or schedule, the length of it? And do we have to schedule out in advance what topics we want to? How do we be creative with this? I guess is where I’m going with it. So the length and how to be creative with the ideas.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Yeah. One of the ways that I think about this is I like to have a medium-term vision and a short-term plan. And so looking out in the future, I would say about 90 days, sometimes six months, What am I working towards in terms of fundraising campaigns or other kind of important opportunities in relationship building that we’re moving donors towards? And if I can kind of identify what that goal is, or that North Star kind of a little further down the road, I can think more strategically about what content I can send donors that will prepare them for that next upcoming thing. And I always think about that as it’s us really strategically building a narrative arc and so getting people from one point to the other in a way that really makes sense. And I think it also helps to prevent that. phenomenon that so often happens with nonprofits where it seems like we just sort of like flip the switch and suddenly we’re just like doing this random thing or suddenly it’s giving Tuesday or suddenly like the house is on fire because some other big thing is happening. Instead, we’re really intentionally kind of planting the seeds and building the momentum in our messaging leading into a campaign. And so I think if you can kind of have that vision, it becomes a lot easier to plan. And I think it also helps nonprofit professionals in that it gets you out of the reactive mode of, oh, what are we going to send this week? Or we have to send an email next week. Like, what are we going to put in it? Instead, it’s like, well, here’s our plan. Like we’ve kind of charted out the next 12 emails that we’re going to send leading into this fundraising campaign we have in the fall. And now we just have to like work on those emails, write the emails and get that done. I think that that can be hopefully a less stressful approach to doing it and also help you ultimately be more successful with what you’re presenting.

Hugh Ballou:
You mentioned Giving Tuesday. I’ve seen organizations, oh, it’s Giving Tuesday next week. We have to think up something to put in it. Now, if we’ve been following the discipline that you suggest, you’ve already got them reading your emails, and they’re looking for the next one. So I get some newsletter-type emails from organizations, and they’re way long. How long is too long?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say for it always depends on the type of email you’re sending. So if it’s an ask email, where you are directly asking for a donation, like fundraising email, my emails I write tend to be somewhere in the ballpark of like 150 words to probably about 300 words max. It’s short, it’s to the point, we know that currency online or on people’s phones is like the currency is attention. And so we need to be able to get to the point quickly in those type of emails. rather than like meandering and writing 1000 word essay on what’s going on, and then hoping that convinces people. You know, I think, though, in other types of emails that you send, again, you know, you do want to get to the point you want to tell people what you want to tell them and get them to where you want them to go, probably you want them to click over to something on your website. And you don’t necessarily need to beat around the bush on that. Sometimes we just need to say what needs to be said. without a ton of preamble. And I found in testing probably hundreds of emails at this point in the last few years, the more effective emails that I send tend to just have one call to action. So rather than having like, five things in a newsletter-style email, we break that out into two or three or four emails where we can send just the standalone story that we want people to really focus on and actually see. And then we can send them the update about something that’s happening with a new program we’re rolling out and really have a conversation with them about that. I think that that, again, just gets people to focus a little bit more on the one thing that we want them to know about in that email. And also, it sometimes lets us send slightly shorter emails that avoid that like endless scroll of maybe people won’t see what’s at the bottom because they didn’t make it all the way there.

Hugh Ballou:
Yeah, above the fold is my motto. So in all of that, so suppose I’m doing a campaign and I’m going to send something out every second Monday and get people’s attention and tell them, I’m going to talk about stories and tell them what’s going on. How often should I ask for money or should I always have a donate footer? And is the money ask separate from the story ask?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Yeah, I think that having kind of people often refer to that donate button at the bottom is like the soft ask, it’s kind of the PS, it’s the afterthought. I think that a lot of organizations do that, right. And, you know, they don’t always see a ton of donations coming in, because it’s not really direct. If somebody has read something at the top of the email, maybe they archive the email before they even got to the bottom. Or maybe they read it, and they thought, that’s great, and then kind of moved on to something else in their inbox. Um, I think that from my perspective and my philosophy on email, it’s better to save those asks for when you really need it and to really put that in front of people at a strategic time. And so, you know, giving Tuesday, for instance, like I would rather. Be direct in that kind of week and day around giving Tuesday, then send emails year round with the donate ask at the bottom. I’d rather instead of focus my emails on. you know, the storytelling, the impact content, and getting people over to the website to, like, look at something or read something or watch something, then maybe have them click on that donate button year-round. But going back to your question just about, like, how frequently should we ask, I think a good cadence is to think about, like, somewhere between two to four campaigns a year that are really well thought out campaigns, not just like one email that you send one time that asks for money, but maybe an email series that’s like two to four emails where you follow up with people multiple times to encourage them to participate in the campaign. And I think that that kind of cadence of campaign frequency over 12 months gives you lots of other space in your calendar, your email calendar to do other things, to talk about the programs, to share other upcoming events, to share stories, all of those other good things, and not overwhelm people with just constant asks for donation.

Hugh Ballou:
That’s really good. So if you’re watching this and you wonder what it is, this is the Nonprofit Exchange. I’m interviewing Vanessa Chase-Luckshin today on fundraising and specifically The email communications, building relationships, communicating value and letting people know what’s going on and honoring people by not hitting them up every single time for a donation. If you tell them the story, they’re going to be ready for the donation. So let’s talk about the delivery system. Do you recommend using a platform to deliver it in so you can measure the opens and the click through rates and that kind of stuff?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Yeah, absolutely. And I would say that in the last year as well, inbox service providers like Google and Yahoo are penalizing people who do not use an email tool, something like MailChimp or Constant Contact or the tool inside Razor’s Edge. It’s really important that you use a tool. There are lots of reasons for that. But part of what they do is often flag people as spammers if they are just like, blind carbon copying a bunch of people on an email. or sending out the same email from their individual email. It’s really important, and this is a more technical aspect of email, but if you want your emails to actually be getting delivered and reaching your inbox, there are things you have to do as a sender to comply with the rules of inbox service providers. One of that is to make sure some of the technical hosting records are set up correctly, but also using a tool and having a list that you are allowing people to unsubscribe from if they want to is a really important part of that. In terms of the tools, most of the tools are pretty similar in terms of what they offer. They offer list management, the ability for people to opt in and opt out. They have like email setup tool. You can track and manage segments within there. I think my advice to people is always that you have to pick a tool that you’re willing to use for the long run because switching between tools is always a hassle. And I would also say, look at it from a perspective of, minimizing headaches from getting your email tool to talk to other tools in your toolbox. So for instance, if you use a database for your donors and you’re managing your donors within a CRM, which hopefully you are, you might just want to go with the email tool that’s in there rather than going with something like MailChimp that lives outside of your CRM. You’ll probably have less work to do in terms of moving data back and forth and tracking everything. But sometimes organizations have good reasons for going with the tools that they’ve gone with. I had a client years ago who had been using MailChimp for years, and they had a list of 50,000 people, and it just made sense for them to stay there, and they had a good way of managing it, and that worked for them. But ultimately, I think it’s looking at your needs and what else you’re using and trying to figure out what can best work within that set of tools.

Hugh Ballou:
So maybe my emails are ending up in people’s spam or junk folders because I sent a large group of emails, and some of their email providers flagged me. So using a tool. Yeah, I learned that just now. Come on. I’ve been doing this a long time, but there’s still so much to learn. So juggling the design elements and the content elements. Now, those email tools you mentioned let you put in images and stuff. Is that a good idea or you just want text only or is there a mixture?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
I have found that for fundraising emails, text only emails tend to perform better, which people are always surprised by. I think a lot of people think like, oh, it’s got to be a highly designed, really beautiful looking email to raise a lot of money. It doesn’t. And I think in some ways this kind of mirrors the principles we know with direct mail letters which is that it doesn’t take a fancy letter to be effective. And in some ways like the underdesigned like ugly letters tend to outperform the ones that are really nice looking. There’s a couple of principles that I think about with images and emails. One is that we don’t want to rely on the image to do an overabundance of communication. I remember a number of years ago, I received an email that was just an image. It was a graphic with a call to action on it, and then there was a donate button below it. But if that image hadn’t loaded in my email inbox, which sometimes they don’t, there wouldn’t have been anything there for me to respond to. There would have literally been no information. So we have to kind of weigh the pros and cons of using images with like whether or not, you know, Outlook will download the image automatically in somebody’s inbox. Sometimes it won’t. And then the other piece too, which is really important for us all to be thinking about is accessibility. People use screen readers if they have difficulty, if they can’t see, if they have vision impairment. And so if you’re going to use images in your email, make sure you’re putting alt text in the image file so that if somebody is using a screen reader, It’s not just blank there, and the screen reader just says image. They can actually know what the image is, and maybe it can add some value to their experience with the email because it described what the image is and what’s there. But yeah, in terms of images, I tend to use images more in kind of stewardship emails and cultivation emails than I do fundraising, just because of my own experience of what has worked well in terms of converting more people into donors with fundraising emails.

Hugh Ballou:
Enlighten us on cultivation a minute.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, so cultivation is kind of similar to stewardship in some ways, where we’re developing the relationships, we’re cultivating the relationships with donors. I always think about this as sort of, cultivation to me is kind of like the pre-fundraising campaign phase of relationships in some ways. And I always think that all donors are in that again, leading into fundraising campaign. where we are still appreciating them and thanking them if they’ve made a gift before, but we’re also starting to educate them about the issues. Like I think about like, well, what’s kind of at the heart of the next fundraising campaign? Like, is there a topic we’re going to talk about? Is there a certain program we’re going to discuss? How can we start kind of moving the conversation in that way and educating people about what’s going on, what sort of problems there might be out in the community? you know, what some of the solutions are and starting to kind of plant those seeds so that when we send them a fundraising email, it’s not like the first time they’ve heard about this. Hopefully it’s something they’re already developing some familiarity with over time.

Hugh Ballou:
So it occurred to me that the similarities between a marketing campaign for a business and this campaign, you know, there’s an emotional piece of this. When I come back from the grocery store and unpack the bag and my wife said, why did you buy that? And I go, I don’t know, just jumped in the cart. You know, there’s an emotional piece to us that we make a decision based on emotion. So I guess we’re telling stories that move people emotionally without manipulation. So talk about the emotional buy-in that people have to wanting to donate.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Yeah, I think that’s a really great point, right, is that part of what’s compelling about stories for, I think, for all of us as fundraisers, as marketers, as executives, is that there is that emotional piece that we know moves people to kind of get off the fence and make a decision. And I think part of what’s compelling about the emotional appeal of stories is the values that we see in that stories. For so many of us, I think we know like philanthropy is values and action. It is us giving into things we believe in, a world that we want to see, some sort of value that we see in organization and community that’s important to us and to our families. And so we want to put money behind that. And I think that when we can also see that mirrored in stories, it’s really compelling to donors. Like for instance, if one of my values is that everyone should be literate, like there should be, you know, 100% literacy in the world. I might read a story about access to literacy education somewhere and think, yeah, like that’s really important. Like it’s so great that that person was able to access that education and learn how to read and write. And that’s opened up so many more doors in their lives. And I think some of the work that we have to do sometimes in figuring out what story we want to tell to our donors is really reflecting on like, what do we want to hold up a mirror to for our donors? What are the values that are important to them? And what is kind of the emotional piece that we can tell through that value and through that story?

Hugh Ballou:
That would go back to the earlier topic. We talked about a relationship that you actually know the people that you’re talking to and they know you. So part of the title is building your email list. So I always try to get people, I have a lot of social media contacts, I try to get them off of social media into my list so we can have a direct communication. Do you have any advice for us in building the list?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Yeah, I won’t sugarcoat it. I think email list building is the hardest part about email, for sure. It is always a task. And I think for any of us who’ve been fundraising for any number of years, you know that donor acquisition is challenging, just like email address acquisition can be challenging. I think the key thing is to put opportunities in front of people often enough to sign up for your list and to make it appealing. I see so many organizations who will say, you know, sign up to our list to receive like updates and news from our organization. Well, like, I don’t know, is that what I want to get as a donor? Like actually, maybe I want inspiring stories about people who have learned to read. Like maybe your value proposition for me being on your email list is that you’re going to send me those stories. And so again, I think going back to what you said, Hugh, it’s like knowing what people want from your nonprofit and being able to add that into your call to action and the value proposition of your emails is going to make it more compelling for people to sign up. I think some other things that you could think about doing is making it valuable again like kind of going back to the value added piece. If you have resources. useful things that you can give people as sort of a download, that’s one way to go. Another thing that I like to do is, I call them like send a message campaigns, I find these to be really effective. So for instance, as an example, like during National Nursing Week, a hospital foundation might run a campaign through social media and through other channels, where they invite people to say like, send a message to our amazing nursing staff at the hospital this week during National Nursing Week to thank them, We’re going to put the notes up in the hospital walls and let them know how much our community loves them. People love doing things like that. And I’m sure you’ve probably seen write a note, take things, and direct mail pieces before. But you can do that in email as well. And that is a great way to acquire email addresses. And also, if you want to kick it up a notch, you can send people to a donation page after they’ve made that message and shared their email address. You can also use it as a donor acquisition.

Hugh Ballou:
That is wonderful. So there’s a strategy here that also goes back to relating to marketing called top of mind. If you’re always caring about it, I’m always distressed when one of my supporters says, oh, I gave this money. I found out they gave some money to another charity. They didn’t know I needed it. So it’s another good reason to have your presence known with people. So we’re getting close to this end of this really good interview. I want to tell people about your website. And so it’s thestorytellingnonprofit.com. Now, there’s some people listening on the podcast, so explain what they’re not seeing, if you would, please.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Sure, yeah. So I, the agency that I run is called the Storytelling Nonprofit. So if you are looking for articles, resources, also how to videos on all aspects of email fundraising and storytelling, you will find lots of that over on our blog. I also have a book that I wrote, it’s a few years old now called the Storytelling Nonprofit, a practical guide to raising at telling stories that raise money and awareness. And so if you’re looking for, I always tell people, like a portable consultant on your desk that can help you figure out how to tell great stories, this is a really good place to start.

Hugh Ballou:
A lot of good stuff here. It’s very compelling information that we need to know. And so this has been so inspiring, Vanessa. What thought do you want to leave people with today?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
Um, I hope that folks rethink and reconsider email after hearing some of this information. So if you have been on the fence about whether or not email is worth it for your nonprofit, I hope that you feel like it is. And if you’ve already been sending emails, I hope you have some new ideas that you can try in the next week or two to engage your supporters and engage your email community. There is so much possibility for email, even in this very busy, saturated digital landscape that we’re all operating in. And it’s totally possible. So I hope that you go for it and take some action on it.

Hugh Ballou:
I’m going to take action now. I’m going to develop my email plan. Vanessa, you’ve been such an inspiration today. Thank you for being my guest on the Nonprofit Exchange.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin:
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.