Future Fundraising Now

3 boring ways to dramatically improve your email open rate

Email is a difficult way to raise money. Open rates are low. Response rates are often microscopic. You can improve your chances by doing three rather unexciting things with every email you send, from How to Boost Your Email Open Rate on the Shortstack blog:

1. Focus on the Subject Line First. The subject line has more impact on open rate (and thus response) of anything you do in email. Spend about half of your writing time writing the subject line. Always make a list of 5 to 10 or more and choose the best one.
2. Your Preheader Text Comes Next. The preheader text is visible under the subject line in many email clients. It's a chance to expand on the extremely limited space you have in the subject line. If you don't write a preheader, people will likely see some kind of default that has no power to get the message opened.
3. The Sender Name. All recipients look at the sender name as they decide whether to open, ignore, or trash an email. Make sure what they see is that it's from a real person at a real organization.

6 ways to drive donors away from your website

Reality check from The Daily Egg: 6 Ways to Make Your Prospects HATE Your Website. It's aimed at commercial marketing websites, but these things apply very well to nonprofit websites too:

1. Make Your Website Go Really Slow.
2. Make Sure Your Forms Crash Regularly.
3. Don't Talk about How You Help People -- Focus on Numero Uno. Bragging is not fundraising -- it's boring and unconvincing!
4. Make Baseless Claims. Remember that donors are mainly older people who weren't born yesterday. They are suspicious of hype, or even things that seem like hype.
5. Bury Your Most Important Information.
6. Write All of Your Content for Search Engines. SEO is great, but make sure your writing sounds human.

10 ways to make your nonprofit website more effective

If you want to make your website more effective, a lot of what you should look into is pretty undramatic -- making it work better and serve donors more directly. Here are some great tips for commercial websites you can use to improve your nonprofit site form the Duct Tape Marketing Blog at 10 Things to Consider About Your Website in 2019:

1. Kill the Sliders. (They're bad user experience.)
2. Start With a Promise to Solve a Problem. (In fundraising, show how the donor can solve the problem.)
3. Bring Whitespace Back.
4. Provide Fewer Choices. (Too many choices leads to a lot less action.)
5. Put Strong Calls to Action in a Number of Places.
6. Build More Landing Pages. (The more specific and relevant the page people first land on, the better.)
7. Create Hub Pages. (Like quasi-homepages around specific things your donors are interested in.)
8. Consider Mobile First. (As much as 80% of your viewers are their via a mobile device.)
9. Assess Load Speed for Pages.
10. Address Security Concerns. (Make sure people aren't getting security notices when they visit.)

3 things that can improve your fundraising emails

Raising funds by email is tough. But important. Here are some tips from Constant Contact that might help, at 3 Email Trends to Ensure Success:

• Personal, relevant messaging reigns. (This might mean segmenting your list to more narrowly define what donors are interested in.
• Automation is becoming standard. (Emails automated by donor behavior -- such as cart abandonment -- or donor timing -- birthdays, anniversaries can meaningfully improve engagement. Also, resend to non-openers to boost your open.
• Referral marketing continues to grow. People are more likely to take action based on recommendations from friends or family members. Just ask.

Digital fundraising crash in December?

This might be disturbing. For the first time in a long time, December online fundraising was down, at least for many.

M+R Lab notes What the heck just happened? Riding the December digital fundraising rollercoaster: exciting, scary, a little nausea-inducing!:

December was not quite the celebratory, champagne-popping, record-breaking year-end digital experience that many nonprofits have grown used to over the past few years.

Was it down for you?

Some possible explanations:

• The new tax law.
• The stock market.
• Political fatigue and/or noise.
• The increased focus on Giving Tuesday.
• Technical challenges, especially email deliverability.
• A return to normal after a very strong 2017.

Or some terrible combination of these things. Or something we don't even know about yet?

If you experienced a weak December, you are not alone. Stay tuned as the number-crunchers work on this!

How to thank your online donors so they keep on giving

We're getting smarter all the time about how to treat donors who give online. Here are 7 Best Practices for Donor Thank You Emails from the Nonprofit Marketing Blog:

1. Say Thank You Within a Week of Receiving a Gift
2. Send From a Recognizable Name (not a sender that seems to be a bot!)
3. Make Your Subject Line Specific (say "thank you" or something like it)
4. Keep the Focus on the Donor (don't brag about your org)
5. Acknowledge Previous Gifts
6. Share the Impact of the Gift (with a story or testimonial)
7. Say Thank You More Than Once (you can't say thank you too much)

Let me add one more: If you have the donor's postal address, also send a postal thank you. This can go a long way to encourage multi-channel engagement, which gives you the best of both worlds: The high average gift of online and the superior retention of offline.

5 reasons fundraisers should never buy an email list

What are you doing to grow your email list?

I'll tell you one think you should not do: Don't buy an email list! Don't even think about it!

Here's why, from the Daily Egg, at Why You Should Never Buy an Email List:

1. You won't get qualified contacts.
2. You'll increase the chances of get marked as spam.
3. Your contacts won't be exclusive.
4. The engagement rate won't be high.
5. Bought email addresses might have a negative impact on brand awareness.

There are ways to build your list. But they aren't easy. You have to go through the hard work of figuring out what people actually want and then brilliantly offer them (the right group of them!) exactly that.

You can't get there by buying the names!

Here's a cool way to use email sender names

Here's something I saw among the political emails that flooded by inbox last week: Personalized sender names. That is, my name was worked into the sender's identification that shows in the inbox.

Here's one, with my full name "via" a specialized sender:

And here's another that paired me up with President Obama, as if we were buddies:

We've known for a long time that the sender name matters, and that if you're using a system-generated name life like emailbot@organization.org you're not optimizing your email.

The logic of getting the recipient's name into the sender address escapes me. But I bet it works!

Let us know in the comments if you have any experience with this!

How to make the most of Giving Tuesday this year

Are you ready for Giving Tuesday?

This year, it's on November 27. It might be a very big deal for you.

(I've expressed my mixed skepticism and wonder about Giving Tuesday here.)

To help you get ready, here's a post from npENGAGE, Creating a Giving Tuesday Strategy That's 'Just Right':

• Tell your donors specifically what their dollars are supporting. (Just because it's Giving Tuesday doesn't mean you shouldn't do the normal, proven things that work in fundraising every other day ... like including a strong, specific fundraising offer.)
• Engage donors who gave last year. (People who gave on Giving Tuesday last year -- regardless of what they've done or not done since -- are your best bet.)
• Target donors. (As opposed to nondonors.)
• Don't treat Giving Tuesday like every other day. (Send several emails. Send emails a day or two before. Send followups.)
• Plan much sooner than you think you need to.
• Don't forget humanity. (Your donors are all living, breathing human beings. Even on Giving Tuesday.)
• Set realistic goals. (Don't expect a gold strike. Unless you got one last year!)
• A thank you is more important than an ask.

Until Giving Tuesday stops working, you should keep doing these things!

Free online workshop: 5 Steps to a Wildly Successful Bequest Fundraising Program with Christiana Stergiou. October 17 and 18. A must for serious fundraisers ... and it's FREE.

5 ways to improve digital fundraising with emoji

I didn't believe it at first, but it's true: Using emojis in email subject lines almost always improves open rates. Go figure.

I didn't like this troublesome fact at first. Emoji annoy me. But that doesn't matter, does it? (Had to look it up: the plural of emoji is either emoji or emojis.)

Here are some great tips for using emoji in your fundraising from the Nonprofit Marketing Guide, at BEYOND CUTE: Why Nonprofits Should Try Emoji In Their Digital Marketing:

1. Use Emojipedia to find the latest emoji.
2. Make Sure It Works (Test it to make sure it displays properly in email).
3. Know Your Tone (Four words: Smiling poop ... probably not!).
4. Don't Go Overboard (a little emoji goes a long way)
5. Words Still Matter (all-emoji subject lines are a challenge).

I personally find emoji annoying; maybe you do too. But that doesn't matter. If you like open rates, use emoji.