July 7, 2016 at 10:55 am
The staff at Habitat for Humanity of Omaha would rather focus on building and renovating homes for low-income families than spend its valuable resources managing a Microsoft Exchange Server. For years, the nonprofit organization paid an IT consulting firm a monthly fee to host and manage its email server. But at roughly $2,000 a month,…
July 7, 2016 at 10:22 am
How many emails did you wake up to this morning? If you’re like me, it was a lot. Dozens, maybe even 100 or more. But how many did you really read? Unfortunately, communication from nonprofit organizations—even those we support and really care about—can end up quickly deleted. There’s simply too much going on in our lives to treat every piece of communication equally...
June 28, 2016 at 12:34 pm
On June 21, supporters on Trump’s mailing list received the first fundraising email the campaign has ever sent with the subject line, “The First One.” Well, they were supposed to. According to Ad Age, nearly 60 percent (59.3 percent, if you want to get specific) of those emails went straight to the spam folders. Only 12 percent of recipients opened the email and 6 percent of recipients deleted it without reading...
June 24, 2016 at 9:49 am
Last week, my wife received an email appeal that demonstrates that fundraising professionals continue to make stupid email and direct mail mistakes. I’m not talking about fundraisers who have failed to use cutting-edge techniques. Instead, I’m talking about folks who have made s-t-u-p-i-d mistakes when it comes to the fundamentals of making a simple appeal.…
June 15, 2016 at 9:00 am
Picture a year-end appeal. The goal isn’t met. Time is running out. Your appeal urges donors to act right away, or bad things may happen. "Can’t we keep it upbeat? You know, focus on the good stuff?" a board member will ask. "We know that’s more effective, right?" Well, I don’t think I do know…
June 10, 2016 at 12:46 pm
How much is spam costing your nonprofit? According to a new study, it's no small amount. In its "2016 Email Deliverability Index," nonprofit CRM provider EveryAction examined email deliverability data for 55 national nonprofits with "substantial email programs" and compared findings to last year's data. The study found that the monthly spam rate for email sent in 2015 was 7.03 percent. And all those undelivered emails add up...
June 2, 2016 at 10:29 am
If the way forward for fundraising is not how to get money out of me, the donor, but how to inspire me to tell the organization's story and engage my network, then we, as fundraisers, should really be after those "opt-ins." And if someone is feeling so annoyed by charities contacting them that they want…
June 1, 2016 at 9:37 am
At Turnkey, we explore other fields of study to improve fundraising success. The field we draw the most from is social science. Not only do I use it from my chair as CEO, but our bright young minds in production use it as well. Julian May, our senior content editor and ace account manager, let me in on his social science-bolstered copywriting method...
May 25, 2016 at 12:13 pm
Recency, frequency and monetary value (RFM) are the ruling troika of segmentation-land. And like one of the old Soviet troikas, they brook no challenge to their rule (e.g., Leon Trotsky was murdered on Joseph Stalin’s orders with an ice ax). But they are simply not good enough alone anymore. I tried to be civil about…
May 25, 2016 at 10:11 am
No, email is not dead. And it is not dying either. Despite the number and popularity of mobile tools and social media channels, old fashioned email remains widely used across demographics—even with those elusive, hard-to-reach Millennials. Email appeals continually get nonprofits the highest return on investment of all online fundraising channels. According to online fundraising…
