DMFA E-mail Renewal Package of the Year: amfAR Holiday/Year-End E-mail

[Editor’s note: The Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association honored its 2011 Package of the Year Winners in September. FundRaising Success is highlighting some of the winning packages. View the 2011 Package of the Year and Renewal Package of the Year winner here, and the Acquisition Package of the Year here. Today we highlight the E-mail Renewal Package of the Year.]

Last week, Paul Habig, executive vice president of online nonprofit marketing agency SankyNet, provided four e-mail fundraising campaign best practices, all of which SankyNet employed along with amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research in its 2011 Direct Marketing Fundraisers Association (DMFA) E-mail Renewal Package of the Year. Here, FundRaising Success looks at amfAR’s winning campaign, the holiday/year-end e-mail.

While the DMFA’s criteria for the e-mail renewal category was for one particular e-mail, the year-end message amfAR sent was actually part of a larger multichannel campaign. Starting earlier in the year, amfAR started a campaign centered around World AIDS Day, which included e-mails, website promotions, social media, direct mail and outside advertising on platforms like Care2. A follow-up e-mail and then another e-mail were sent as part of that campaign, and in those e-mails the holiday e-card was promoted.

And this winning holiday/year-end postcard e-mail was the final phase of that cohesive multichannel campaign.

“We had a series of e-mails going out to various different segments of [amfAR’s] donor population,” Habig says. “But the final campaign, the most successful e-mail was the year-end campaign to remind people about the advantage of making a tax-deduction gift before the end of the calendar year.”

To play that up, SankyNet and amfAR created a short and sweet e-mail that had only about 40-60 words of text and a calendar with New Year’s Eve circled to highlight the importance of the year-end gift. All of this was by design. The e-mail intentionally had everything “above the fold,” so recipients didn’t have to scroll down at all and could easily scan the information — vital for e-mail.