E-mail

NTEN Webinar Roundup: Stepping Up Your E-mail Marketing, Part 4
June 10, 2009

Part 4 of the NTEN webinar series — Evaluating Your Email Marketing Efforts for Success! — featured Lauren Miller and David Leichtman, senior strategist and director of e-mail programs, and director of analytics and technology, respectively, for Blue State Digital, the firm highly recognized for its work on President Obama's campaign, sharing tips on evaluating e-mail marketing efforts.

NTEN Webinar Roundup: Stepping Up Your E-mail Marketing, Part 3
June 10, 2009

In Part 3 of the NTEN four-part series of seminars — Storytelling Via Email — Heather Fignar, a managing partner with NPAdvisors, began by going over her top three "four-letter words" of e-mail marketing: blast, monthly and newsletter. 

The Five Basic Steps to Acquiring Donors Online
May 1, 2009

Sure, raising money online is a bit more 
complicated than renting a mailing list and testing various packages on the names to see what works and what doesn’t. For starters, in the spam-challenged online world, you need donors’ permission to continue communicating with them. And to be sure, your organization can raise serious cash online without sending a single e-mail, particularly during December when many donors seek you out. Heck, you can even raise a few dollars (but only a few) on Facebook these days.
But eliminate all the jargon and the steady 
stream of innovative ideas, and you’ll find that acquiring donors online boils down to five key steps.

VerticalResponse for Non-Profits Sends 25,000,000 Free Emails in Its First Year
April 14, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO, CA, April 14, 2009 — VerticalResponse, Inc. (www.verticalresponse.com), a leading provider of on-demand email marketing, surveys and direct mail solutions, today announced that VerticalResponse for Non-Profits has provided more than 25,000,000 free emails to non-profits ranging from national organizations to local schools, saving the organizations millions of dollars in materials costs, postage, and cutting paper waste drastically to further the company's commitment to the environment.

Tips for Growing Your E-mail List
March 31, 2009

In a free webinar last month titled "It's All About the List! How to Grow and Cultivate Your Most Valuable Online Asset" sponsored by Network for Good, Justin Perkins, director of nonprofit marketing strategy at Care2, an online community that allows people to sign and send petitions and take a variety of actions on behalf of nonprofit organizations, offered advice to charities interested in building their e-mail lists.

E-Mail Tips From the Obama Campaign
February 17, 2009

Tips about wildly successful fundraising and awareness strategies will continue to be culled from the Barack Obama 2008 presidential campaign for months to come. If you have passionate constituents, tasty pieces of breaking news can be effectively delivered to supporters’ cell phones, and you can leverage these numbers to activate your grassroots support — maybe even with mobile phone fundraising (“text to give”).

To the Point: Keep Your Year-end E-mails Off the ‘Naughty’ List
December 1, 2008

I have a really good piece of advice for you. Send a fundraising e-mail the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Dec. 30 and 31 are the biggest online days of the year, in my experience. All those generous procrastinators are just getting their acts together, so your timing is perfect if you send a last-minute reminder at year’s end. But make it a GOOD e-mail. How do you know the difference? We have a great new e-mail partner at Network for Good called Emma, and that company’s experts have agreed to share 10 big e-mail no-nos, based on their time in the

The Real Costs of Online Fundraising
September 1, 2008

What are the real costs of e-philanthropy? Coming from a direct-mail background, my experience has taught me that every, single component has a specific return on investment and is measured for value. Unfortunately, the words “return on investment” ring hollow in many development conference rooms these days. If one more person says, “Just send an e-mail — it doesn’t cost anything,” I’ll scream. Wake up and smell my energy drink — it costs plenty. As I started to pull my notes together for this article, I went to what was safe — let’s see — five costs that every fundraiser needs to consider for

2008 Gold Awards for Fundraising Excellence: And the Winners Are …
September 1, 2008

Judging for the Gold Awards was a little more low-key this year, it seems. (We think it might be because the ASPCA’s Steve Froehlich couldn’t make it. But please … don’t tell him we said so.) Also, there was no hotly contested tie for Package of the Year that had us seeking tiebreaker after tiebreaker like last year. But the competition was just as fierce.