14 Tips for Making Your Nonprofit Email More Effective | Network for Good Learning Center – Learn how to raise money online for your nonprofit

Valuable data from the commercial marketing world that social profit businesses and organizations can use right now.  Thanks, Network for Good Learning Center!

14 Tips for Making Your Nonprofit Email More Effective |

 

online fundraising best practices – Stuff I learned at NTEN 08

Jeff Patrick of Common Knowledge gave a presentation about best practices for online fund raising that we can apply to our efforts at Dogwood Alliance. Here are the takeaways:

1. Include a “call to action” box with two links, one graphic and one text. This helps ensure that folks who don’t use html on their email can still easily identify the links. Have only one “call to action” box in the email, only one thing you want folks to do.

2. Include lots of links, in every section, top to bottom embedded in real text. Do not underline and link the words “click here”.

3. 59% of people have images blocked in their email so include text in the email “hotspot”, which is right above the banner image. This text should say the same thing as the “call to action” box and should link to the donate page. This covers your bases.

4. Seed your list with an address for each of these: gmail, hotmail, yahoo, aol. Send tests to these accounts so you can see how the email looks in each.

5. Provide the option to give offline in a less prominent but still findable place.

6. Buttons: “Click here to donate” is better than “donate”.

7. Donor forms: leave out fields you don’t absolutely need. Such as : cvcc code, country, suffix and prefix, honorary giving. Include honorary giving in the thank you email or welcome email.

8. Newsletters: The subject line at the top is the hottest story in the newsletter. Not “e-newsletter”.