Using E-mail to Engage

Jan. 10, 2006

By Abny Santicola, associate editor, FundRaising Success

What's the best way for fundraisers to engage prospects in the online world? If you ask Sheeraz Haji, chief executive of GetActive, a Berkeley, Calif.-based provider of online relationship-management solutions for membership organizations, he'll tell you straight up, "It's e-mail."

If you think about the Internet as a venue for direct marketing, Haji says, e-mail is really online direct mail. As such, nonprofit organizations should be considering things like the size of their databases and metrics and looking at how their lists are responding and growing. But maybe most importantly, nonprofits should be using e-mail as both a recruitment and engagement tool, building relationships, and beginning two-way conversations with donors and prospects.

E-mail offers faster, more comprehensive statistics and analytics reporting on how recipients engaged with the e-mail than direct mail does.

"When a client sends out 100,000 messages through GetActive, they can actually see how many [recipients] opened the messages, how many people clicked on one or more links, how many people got to a transaction page and how many of those people actually converted and completed the transaction," Haji says. "So the level of data that you can see is significantly higher than in direct mail, and that's very powerful to a marketer because then you can look at those stats and see, well, where can I optimize? Is it on the conversion rate? Is it because my transaction page is just too cumbersome and got too much text on it that I'm not able to complete the transaction, or is it the e-mail itself that isn't compelling enough?"

What's more, Haji says he's observed that roughly 80 percent of people typically act on an e-mail within the first 24 to 48 hours. So, rather quickly, an organization garners meaningful data on both response rates and basic donor preferences.