2014 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence Email ($10 Million and Over) Winners

Email ($10 million and over)
30 Days of Giving Email Campaign
National Park Foundation
(Submitted by RobbinsKersten Direct)

The Numbers (based on the email series)
Recipients: 350,000 (3,125,873 over seven emails)
Response rate: 0.05 percent
Total cost: $3,500
Income generated: $133,564
Average gift: $92.47
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.026

Short and sweet. That’s what our judges liked most about this seven-email, end-of-year campaign for the National Park Foundation.

But they also found it funny and refreshing, and full of nice touches that seem to have made quite an impact on recipients. Among them: multiple opportunities to give, a holiday e-card and a giving thermometer to allow recipients to monitor progress.

“The overall campaign on both email and the website had a $500,000 fundraising goal,” explains Polly Papsadore, vice president of marketing at RobbinsKersten Direct. “The emails included a giving thermometer and included different segments for offline donors, online donors and nondonors. The overall 30 Days of Giving campaign surpassed that $500,000 goal by 10 percent. Email contributed 24 percent of the revenue.”

Additional Email ($10 million and over) Winners
SILVER: The Wilderness Society — Online Renewal Campaign (Submitted by ABD Direct)

The Numbers
Recipients: 181,241
Response rate: 0.53 percent
Total cost: $4,688
Income generated: $47,652
Average gift: $49.95
Cost to raise a dollar: $0.10

The goal of this campaign was to reinstate lapsed and soon-to-be-lapsed online donors, and it focused on emotional, mission-based language while testing a new subject line to lapsed donors in the first three emails. The new subject line, “Your 2013 Membership Card (Pending),” used a more straightforward approach than the previous campaign’s “Show Your Commitment to Wilderness.” The following two emails used a rollout of the (Pending) subject line, and results improved with each subsequent send. The second email in the series was a duplicate of the first message, and the final email utilized a “forward” technique to allow a third usage of the extremely successful creative.