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Weekly UpdatesIf you wait four weeks to call someone for a second date, you should rethink your strategy. And if you have the same philosophy for contacting email subscribers--you might not have a second chance to woo them into reliable donors.
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There is about a 30-day "honeymoon period" with email subscribers, according to Jeff Patrick, president and founder of San Francisco-based consulting agency Common Knowledge. "I thought, 'Wow--that feels like a human behavior that probably translates to the nonprofit world,'" said Patrick.
He made these comments during a session at the Bridge Conference in Washington, D.C. and in a subsequent interview.
During those 30 days, email subscribers are engaged with the cause or organization and show increased open and click through rates. Nonprofits need to take notice of the online retail industry practice--online subscribers have the highest affiliation during the first 30 days of the subscriber relationship. Common Knowledge has developed an emailing program called Rapid Donor Cultivation (RDC). The 45-day system sends out 11 emails, two emails a week for a five-week period, after the subscriber first signs up. Some nonprofits might balk at the numerous emails, and probably think that more emails will annoy subscribers into opting-out.
"Almost everybody says, 'Oh my gosh, you are talking to people this often?'" said Patrick, who said some organizations email just once or twice a month. "That was a conservative approach. But through necessity and innovation we started emailing more. We wouldn't do this every day for all stages of the relationship. And we never just trust--we test," said Patrick, who warned nonprofits to constantly monitor unsubscribe rates as a benchmark for the program and that the rates stay in a normal range.
Each email contains a specific issue and a call-to-action to stimulate the subscriber and engage them with the organization. Each email must provide high-value content with a specific action to keep subscribers interested in the correspondence. Patrick recommended using blogs, photo galleries, podcasts, e-petitions, and emails rich with multi-media elements to appeal to subscribers and increase click-through rates. Patrick also said implementing comment features helps subscribers interact with one another and gain a peer-to-peer experience.
The high volume of emails should solidify brand recognition to the subscriber and keep a consistent scheme even when dealing with different topics. The emails should touch on various subjects the organization deals with to get a broad representation of what the organizations does. With each email, the organization is building a connection with the subscriber and bridging the divide between mission and action.
"We were a little nervous, but we had done some surveying and that survey came back that [subscribers] weren't overwhelmed with the email and we could increase without any direct hits," said Cassandra Koenen, director of online campaigns and marketing for International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) based in Yarmouth Port, Mass., the first organization to implement RDC. After testing three time frames--90 days, 60 days and 30 days, IFAW decided to roll out a 45-day RDC program in the United States, Canada and United Kingdom.
The United States IFAW saw an average open rate of 21.3 percent--with the highest open rate for the first fundraising appeal at 26.3 percent. The donor conversion rate was six times greater for IFAW than a comparable group not using the RDC. from 0.19 percent to 1.2 percent. Common Knowledge compared the results of the RDC program with subscribers during the same months as the year before. The IFAW results saw an increase in subscribers to donors, an increase of subscribers to activists and an increased first gift. And, it slashed the time to the first gift by 17 days. After going through the RDC cycle, subscribers are entered into the organization's general subscriber pool.
"What surprised me was that people weren't resistant to an ask after a fairly short amount of time. The fact that we were able to engage a supporter that quickly was really quite exciting for us," said Koenen, who has worked with the system for over a year now. IFAW will begin to look at if subscribers were receptive to giving a second gift while in the regular subscriber stream, and plan to test the emails more before translating the communications in nine languages for its 16 sites this fall.
Creative design and copy writing might take some time up front--but after the system is worked out, donor management software often has automatic email deployments that do most of the work. But organizations must always be aware of abnormal unsubscribe rates. Patrick recommended using "evergreen" emails--issues and topics that can be used year-round. He also encouraged organizations to revisit the topics every two or three months to ensure the topics hold the same vibrancy and that a more pressing issue has not cropped to add to the system.
"Organizations like ours have a broad base of campaigns and some of these supporters could have come through one issue. We do so much more and we try to give them the breadth of what this organization does in a short amount of time," said Koenen. "I think one of the things we realized as a dynamic organization--nothing is that 'evergreen.' We've had to spend a lot more time making sure actions stay as fresh as possible," said Koenen, who has made it a priority to revisit the emails every quarter. Now IFAW is analyzing if subscribers would respond to a soft ask in the middle of the correspondence and a sustaining monthly ask at the end.
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