Jeff Patrick, President, Common Knowledge

Online fundraising – specifically email appeals – is successful when you manage to bundle the long list of fundraising best practices into one package and send it on to your e-supporters.

Using a real campaign – conducted by the Breast Cancer Fund – I’ll unravel two important best practice components – the email envelope and body – and highlight key tactics and benchmarks to give you a bucket of new tricks for your next email fundraising campaign.

The Organization: Breast Cancer Fund
Breast Cancer Fund (BCF) focuses on breast cancer prevention. It has an annual budget of $3.5 million and 22 employees. The audience is 95% women, aged 20 to 65 years old, who have been touched by breast cancer in some way. Importantly, their email list consisted of just 7,000 e-subscribers at the time of this campaign.

The Campaign: Heinz Challenge = $10,000 in 10 Days
A $25,000 matching gift ($10,000 allotted to the online campaign) from the Heinz Foundation provided the motivation for the campaign.

This led to the first important campaign decision: to inject urgency into the effort by setting a concrete, measurable goal of raising “$10,000 in 10 days”.

When setting a goal like this, it’s important to establish a baseline. With just 7,000 prospect e-donors, BCF could expect, realistically, $1,750 to $3,500 from the campaign. Given a 0.5% to 1% donor conversion rate, typical of online fundraising appeals for an organization like BCF, you can do some quick math:

How, then, could BCF get to $10,000, or 3x to 6x greater results than the expected results?

The Answer
BCF achieved their $10,000 goal – with just two emails sent four days apart - by doing many things right. They got the online fundraising fundamentals correct, and two of them in particular: the email envelope and the email body.

 
The email envelope – e.g. From, Subject – appear at the top when the email is open.

Email Envelope
The email envelope consists of the sender’s identity (From) and the Subject of the email. The only goal of the envelope is to encourage the recipient to open the email.

To sell the From, try a key executive’s name + the organization’s name. It personalizes the message and identifies the organization. This makes your message stand out in the recipient’s in-box because it is rapidly “scannable”. BCF used:

Jeanne Rizzo, Breast Cancer Fund

Make the Subject line programmatic (core to your mission), personal (how does it affect the recipient), timely (the world at large is talking about it) and urgent (a reason to open the message now). And it never hurts if the Subject is humorous, controversial, or off-beat to get the recipient’s attention. BCF went with:

BCF: Help Us Meet the Heinz Challenge

You need to empower the Subject line. Programmatic means your email is supported by your broader branding and marketing, and timely leverages the wider press, making your message top of mind for recipients. Personal gives the recipient a second good reason to open the email (the first is their interest in your organization), and urgent – a fundraising basic – motivation to open now, not later.

 
A good ‘From’ and ‘Subject’ makes your message “scannable” and stand out quickly when the recipient checks their inbox.

Email Body
The email body does the bulk of the work: it conveys the ask, and points the way to the giving form, and ideally, no more than this. Your only goal for a message of this type is to get readers to click through to the giving form.

The message body is tailored to email including the tone, style, length, and hotlinks.

What tone and style should be used for the Message Body?
The message body should be direct, less formal, and bulleted, with white space, short sentences and a simple sequence of logically connected points. It will be read quickly, if at all, so make it easy (but worthwhile) for the reader.

How long is the body copy?
The body copy should be shorter than a direct mail piece, probably four to six paragraphs. You can make it longer if you’ve got a really good story and you want to take a stab at being the exception to the rule.

Where should we link to the donation form?
Early, midway, and at the end – in other words, often. It’s hard to link too often, but make sure you hotlink meaningful phrases, not full sentences, and not “click here”.

Do I need a special graphical call-to-action or just text?
A prominent Call-to-Action box is critical. Insert it in the upper right section of the body, visible in Outlook preview mode, and incorporate a combination of attention-getting graphics and text. The text ensures the call-to-action is visible even if Outlook or Gmail decides to suppress the display of images in emails.

  

Should I use images in my email?
Sure: images look nice, help convey your message, often assist with the emotional tug, and add visual texture. Test your list for the size that works best: small, medium or large. Hotlink the images to the giving form and give them logical captions that reiterate your basic call-to-action.

A Successful Conclusion
Breast Cancer Fund met their fundraising goal of raising $10,000 in 10 days despite the relatively small size of their email list. Their focus on email appeal best practices resulted in a high response rate and an above-average gift of $92.29, significantly better than the projected $50 per gift estimate.

Learn and apply best practices to maximize results, and above all never stop experimenting with new tactics.