Spaceship Broken – Need Parts
I’ll bet most fundraisers — together with each and every commercial marketer on the planet — will send out more email solicitations in 2009 than you ever have before. The email In-boxes of prospects and donors will be inundated as never before.
How can you help your email campaigns penetrate the e-chaos and be more effective?
Here is one of the best tip lists I’ve seen, from Chip House at ExactTarget, a firm providing email and one-to-one marketing services. Chip’s advice:
1. Differentiate to survive — stand out or else … I stole the title of this post from his opening illustration.
2. Honor the subscriber — offer your donors options and preferences … then honor them.
3. Leverage the "unmarketing" — keep in mind that every e-communication should be helping to build a relationship.
4. Engage or cut bait — analyze response (and non-response) of all kinds, and tailor further communications accordingly.
5. Leverage email marketing technology — your e-marketing tools should permit robust analysis, tracking, personalization, etc with which to fine-tune your targeting and offers. Use those tools.
But read for yourself.
Tom
P.S. Can’t get enough? More email tips from Whitney Hutchinson at Razorfish. And more tips from Chad White at Smith-Harmon. If you’re still not sure about online fundraising (Eeek!), read Debunking Five Myths of Online Fundraising by Thon Morse at KIMBIA.
Behavioral Science Q & A
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Based on what we know from existing data, those renewal notices can actually be pretty effective in getting people to donate. They tap into our psychology – creating a sense of urgency, reminding us of past support, and using personalization to make the message hit home. They’re playing on our natural tendencies to feel obligated […]
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There’s just one thing to consider when designing a supporter journey: the supporter. More specifically, you need to take into account: Who the supporter is i.e. their identity, which is the reason they support this cause, and their personality, which describes the way they “see” and process the world. These will determine the kind of […]
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I’m not an expert in this but a quick search surfaced this article on the effect of tax reforms on 2019’s charitable giving. The researchers didn’t find a reduction. Actually, they observed an “increase in charitable contributions in 2019, even with the lower tax rates and the dramatically smaller number of taxpayers who itemize their […]
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