Case Study: Building a Donor Base Through E-mail, Part 2

[Editor's note: This part 2 of a two-part series about the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview working with KMA, the branch of full-service fundraising agency Pursuant Group, to build a donor base through e-mail. View part 1 here.]

Monthly giving incentive
After KMA and the Colson Center confirmed that the long-form e-mail would remain the control, they looked for ways to get even more commitment out of donors and supporters. As it turns out, the Colson Center produced a really compelling, engaging ethics DVD series called "Doing the Right Thing."

"This is a really cool product. It has tremendous application to this audience," says Tim Kachuriak, senior vice president of innovation and optimization at Pursuant Group. "[The Colson Center] said, 'Let's offer this to our members and our e-mail subscribers for a special price.'

"We said, 'We should probably do that, but let's first use this as an opportunity to get people to sign up at a higher level.'"

That led to the creation of a new membership level that KMA and the Colson Center dubbed the Sustaining Membership Program. The six-part DVD series was used as a catalyst to get people to sign up for this monthly giving program. It was offered as a premium for signing up to the Sustaining Membership Program, which required the donor the make a monthly commitment of at least $25 per month. "Doing the Right Thing" was the gift donors received for signing up, which Kachuriak says has about a $90 value.

Then, as a follow-up, donors who did not sign up for the monthly giving program were offered a one-time opportunity to purchase the DVD series at a special price, bringing in more money and keeping non-monthly donors engaged.

"We were able to get significantly greater value for the ministry in terms of member donations by offering the DVD series as a premium as opposed to offering it purely as a product," Kachuriak says.