Using E-mail to Cultivate Donors

by Nick Allen

My mom's on e-mail, and so are my brother and my three sisters. So are my Mom's two best friends.

E-mail is rapidly becoming an exciting, effective new way to communicate with your donors and potential donors, as well as the other people you serve. More than 60 million Americans - including plenty of your donors - now use e-mail every day, way more than surf the World Wide Web.

Have you surveyed your donors to find out how many use e-mail and would like to communicate that way? Some nonprofits find that more than a quarter use e-mail every day. Over-60s are the fastest growing segment of e-mail and Internet users.

How can you use e-mail to strengthen relationships with donors and potential donors? Let me count the ways:

• E-mail newsletters. You can send donors or prospects an electronic newsletter (using a "listserv") once or twice a month to update them on your activities. Different programs can offer different newsletters.

E-newsletters save on design, printing, and postage, and it costs the same to send to 10,000 donors as to 150. Your Internet service provider can set up a "listserv" for you quickly and cheaply.

• Action alerts. Working on an advocacy issue? Build an e-mail list of activists and alert them rapidly and cheaply. You can even set it up so they can click "reply" and have an advocacy message converted into a fax sent directly to an elected official or other target.

• Surveys. Want to find out what your members - or some segments - are thinking, or what they want you to do? Send an e-survey. You'll get a great response rate, it's fast, and it's cheap. You can use your own or buy sophisticated software programs from Decisive and other vendors.

• Event invitations. Complement your mail and newsletter invitations with e-mail. You can even ask for pledges via e-mail.

• Housekeeping. Members can send in changes of address, request materials, etc. via e-mail.

• Autoreplies. Mailing out the same information over and over? Having trouble keeping it up to date? Try an "autoreply" or "infobot." You can set up your e-mail system to automatically send out a file when someone e-mails an address like info@yourorg.org. In response, they'll get a message with basic information about your organization. You can set up different autoreplies for different programs. For example, dinner@yourorg.org gets information about the annual fundraising dinner. The autoreply system is build into most office e-mail systems, or your Internet service provider can help you.

• Visit our Web site. Want to get repeat visitors to your Web site to view your latest update? Ask those who visit to register, then send them e-mail updates from time to time, telling them what they'll find on the site now.

• Fundraising. Few groups are asking for gifts via e-mail, though at least one public radio station has been successfully soliciting e-mail pledges. At this point, e-mail is probably best used as cultivation, or for letting donors know you will soon be contacting them by mail or phone about financial support.

While people have to take the time to go to your Web site, you can send e-mail right to their mailbox (assuming they check it). And many people have e-mail at work, but not access to the World Wide Web.

Although many e-mails users can read "HTML mail" messages with color and different font sizes - it looks like a mini-Web page - you may not want to use it until it becomes more universal.

Most donors like to stay in touch with the organizations they support. And the more they are in touch, the more frequent and larger gifts they're likely to make.

E-mail offers a cheap, fast, and friendly way to communicate with your donors. Many find it less intrusive and wasteful than direct mail (let alone dinnertime phone calls). Keep the messages short - not more than two screens. And in every message, offer people the option to "unsubscribe."

If you're not already doing it, ask your donors and prospects for their e-mail addresses. Along with address, phone, and fax, add a question and a space: "May we contact you by e-mail?" Figure out what you want to communicate to these plugged-in donors, and start slowly. It's so easy to reply to e-mail that you should get plenty of useful feedback.

Adapted from an article in Successful Direct Mail & Telephone Fundraising, January 1997.


Nick Allen is president of donordigital.com, which helps nonprofits do online fundraising, marketing, and advocacy. With Mal Warwick and Michael Stein, he is author of the first book on online fundraising, Fundraising on the Internet. E-mail Nick, or call (510) 647-2700, or visit his web site at www.donordigital.com.

Other articles on fundraising and marketing on the Internet
• Raising money on the Internet
• Does your organization need a Web site?
• Fundraising sites worth seeing
• 10 ways to get more people to your site
• University fundraising online
• Online guides for donors