Email Marketing Campaigns for Nonprofits: 7 Do’s and Don’ts

Email marketing is a powerful channel for nonprofits, offering a direct, personalized line of communication with supporters that helps you build relationships, boost engagement, promote campaigns and events, and drive donations.

However, like any tool, email marketing’s effectiveness depends on how you use it. To help you embrace best practices and avoid common pitfalls, we’ve rounded up seven do’s and don’ts of email marketing campaigns for nonprofits:

Do: Use an Email Marketing Platform
Don’t: Let Data Silos Form
Do: Analyze Your Audience
Don’t: Only Send Donation Requests
Do: Follow Email Subject Line and Body Best Practices
Don’t: Forget to Examine Metrics
Do: Align Your Email Approach With the Rest of Your Marketing Strategy

No matter your nonprofit’s specific goals for leveraging email, you want to ensure you’re sending messages that catch and hold your supporters’ attention. The advice in this guide will put you on the path to email marketing success. Let’s begin.

1. Do: Use an Email Marketing Platform

An email marketing platform, also called email marketing software (EMS), allows nonprofits to create and track their email marketing campaigns so they can communicate with supporters at scale and improve campaign performance over time.

There are two options for taking advantage of email marketing tools:

Invest in a popular EMS like Mailchimp, Constant Contact, or Hubspot, and integrate the tool with your existing technology stack.
Leverage email marketing apps or features within your existing donor management or fundraising tools.

The second option allows you to critically examine your organization’s current technology solutions and ensure you’re taking full advantage of your tools' features. This process ultimately allows you to see a higher return on investment (ROI) for those solutions.

For example, say you use Blackbaud Luminate Online as your organization’s primary fundraising and marketing tool but haven’t used it for email yet. You discover that Luminate Online allows you to easily design personalized, targeted email campaigns for different audience segments and automate various types of messages. You can also capture data from your emails and A/B test your campaigns to help improve your strategy over time.

2. Don’t: Let Data Silos Form

If you decide to use a third-party email marketing platform, ensure it integrates with the rest of your technology stack. Integrations are essentially bridges between platforms that let data flow smoothly between them. Without integrating your software, data silos can form.

Data silos occur when information collected by one system is inaccessible from other platforms, making it more difficult to gather and analyze. Data silos slow down communication, can cause information to go overlooked, and generally make your technology stack more cumbersome to use. In the context of an email campaign, supporter engagement data may get trapped in your email platform and not update supporter profiles in your CRM, limiting your ability to build relationships.

To integrate your software, partner with a technology consultant. Consultants can help set up integrations and develop middleware solutions—software that acts as an intermediary between two systems—that allow for many complex platforms to sync with one another, preventing data silos and allowing you to view all of your email marketing data in one place.

3. Do: Analyze Your Audience

Your supporters are more likely to open and engage with emails that are relevant to them. When planning your email marketing campaigns, it may be tempting to create content based on your end goal, like securing donations or boosting event registrations. Instead, consider what your audience is interested in first. Then, consider how you can channel that interest to help your nonprofit’s goals.

Specifically, try analyzing your audience based on the following data points:

Demographic data. Divide supporters based on their age, location, education level, occupation, income level, or any other useful information. For example, you might segment your donors based on age and have different messaging for college students and older adults. Your message to the college students may promote more volunteer efforts and low-cost ways to get involved, while your messaging to older demographics with more stable incomes may focus directly on fundraising and growing support.
Engagement history. How do your supporters like to engage with your work? For instance, if a supporter gets onto your emailing list because they interacted with your advocacy content, send them messages about advocacy rather than defaulting to donation requests.
Email communication preferences. Similarly, how often do your supporters like to hear from you, and what types of email content do they best respond to? Some segments may prefer weekly updates on your work, while others prefer more targeted, one-off messages about your most important campaigns and events.
Interests. The more you interact with supporters, the more you learn about what parts of your cause interest them. You can collect this information in several ways, whether through one-on-one touchpoints like phone conversations or broader efforts like sending out a survey. Use this data to share blog posts, impact stories, and engagement opportunities that encourage them to build relationships with your nonprofit. Also, consider how you can weave their personal interests into your strategy for interacting with them. For instance, maybe you learn that many of your donors love pickleball. You could set up a pickleball tournament fundraiser and promote it via email by providing playing tips and selling pickleball-related merchandise branded to your organization.

If there are supporters in your database for whom you do not have email addresses, try engaging with them in other ways. To keep them involved, you can contact them through text messages, direct mail, and social media posts. You can also purchase an email append to acquire their contact information and add them to your emailing lists.

4. Don’t: Only Send Donation Requests

Donation requests are arguably the most important part of an email marketing campaign. After all, they’re what pushes supporters to follow through on donating. However, only sending donation requests can negatively impact your ability to build relationships with supporters, limiting their potential to become long-term donors.

Diversify your strategy by sending supporters a variety of content, including:

Monthly or weekly newsletters: Share organizational news, program updates, and general information about your cause to keep supporters in the loop.
Event invitations and reminders: Promote upcoming events, provide information about registering and attending, and tease exciting aspects of the events, such as items that will be available at your auction or information about your keynote speaker.
Volunteer requests or updates: Send out information about your volunteer opportunities and needs and how to get involved in your program, and provide updates to current volunteers on shift changes or thank-you events.
Impact stories: Showcase how donations, volunteering, and other forms of support have made a tangible difference to those you serve by sharing impact data and stories or testimonials from your beneficiaries.
Advocacy emails: Encourage your supporters to take action on specific issues they care about related to your cause, whether that means signing a petition, attending a rally, or contacting their representatives.
Thank-you and appreciation messages: After events or donations, send personalized thank-you messages to remind your supporters that you appreciate their support.
New merchandise alerts: If your organization sells branded merchandise, notify supporters when new items or designs are available.
Educational and news content: Provide valuable and timely content related to your cause, such as research, blog posts, or news articles.
Holiday greetings: Send out festive messages on major holidays to keep your organization top of mind and foster goodwill among your supporters.

When it comes to the types of emails your organization can send, the possibilities are truly endless. Consider what you know about your audience to decide what types of messages they will find valuable and worth reading.

5. Do: Follow Email Subject Line and Body Best Practices

Email marketing strategies have evolved over the years, and nonprofits should stay up to date on best practices to ensure their emails are engaging, professional, and modern. By following these standards, you increase the chances supporters will view your emails as trustworthy, open them, and interact with your content.

A few best practices to follow include:

Create engaging subject lines. Subject lines are your primary method of attracting readers to open your emails, as 64% of email recipients decide to open emails based on their subject line alone. Keep your subject lines short (approximately 40 characters) to avoid getting cut off on mobile view. Additionally, rather than bluntly stating your email’s purpose, consider how to frame it to interest your audience. This might include asking questions, emphasizing the message’s urgency, or even issuing a challenge to supporters. For example, a subject line for an email promoting an environmental group’s upcoming silent auction might be “Auction for Earth: What prizes will you win?”, “[Donor name], bidding starts in 3 days,” or “Support the planet, win prizes!”
Use email formatting templates. With many organizations competing for your supporters’ attention, ensure your emails stand out with professionally designed graphics and formatting. Choose an email software platform that offers customizable email design templates.
Leverage AI when you outline and draft email body content. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are becoming more ubiquitous in nonprofit work, and for good reason. Specifically, generative AI tools, solutions that can create text or images based on users’ prompts, can streamline hundreds of tasks. Use AI to outline and draft email messages, personalize messages at scale, and more. A word to the wise: Always apply human oversight when working with AI. You know your organization and supporters best, so editing any AI outputs to better reflect your organization’s brand and voice will always help your emails stand out.
Send emails when supporters are likely to check their inboxes. Ensure your emails are at the top of your supporters’ inboxes when they are likely to open them. Research shows that the best time to send an email is between 9 AM and 11 AM, but engagement with email also peaks around 1 PM-2 PM and 5 PM-6 PM. Some email marketing platforms can even track your supporters’ locations so you can send messages at specific times based on their time zone.

To give your emails additional flavor, incorporate multimedia elements. Photos and videos can help your organization stand out and break up text-heavy messages—just be sure you don’t include too many so your load time stays low.

6. Don’t: Forget to Examine Metrics

When rolling out a new email marketing strategy, keep a close eye on core metrics. This data will allow you to measure its success in real time and course-correct as needed.

For email, consider tracking these metrics:

Click-through rate: The percentage of individuals who click on the links included in your emails
Email conversion rate: The percentage of recipients who complete the desired action (such as donating or taking an advocacy action) after reading one of your emails
Average amount raised per email campaign: The typical amount of money your organization pulls in from each email campaign, which is especially important for fundraising-focused email campaigns
Unsubscribe rate: The percentage of email recipients who unsubscribe from your email list after receiving an email

Your email marketing software and website analytics should help you track these metrics and estimate what percent of your website’s traffic comes from emails. For example, you might create a new event landing page and promote it through email, social media, and a direct mail campaign. Your analytics allow you to see what links people are clicking on that lead them to your landing page.

Be conscious that there is a margin of error for supporters who search for or go to your website directly instead of clicking on a provided link. However, even with caveats, metrics allow you to get a general idea of how well your email campaign is performing, what strategies work well, and what approach you should take next time.

7. Do: Align Your Email Approach With the Rest of Your Marketing Strategy

Email marketing works. In fact, 68% of nonprofits use email to promote their work, and 48% of donors say it is their preferred form of communication from the organizations they support.

However, email is only one part of a holistic nonprofit marketing strategy. You likely have other channels you use to keep in touch with your supporters and encourage engagement, such as:

Your website
Direct mail
Text messaging
Social media
Google Ads
Word-of-mouth
Physical marketing materials, like flyers or posters

It’s important to use more than one marketing channel. This way, you can reach more people on their preferred channels and share your organization’s messages in new and exciting ways.

This doesn’t mean you always have to reinvent the wheel, though. For instance, say you design an email marketing campaign promoting your volunteer program. You can repurpose that content into a series of Facebook posts and incorporate it into a new blog post for your website.

In addition to repurposing content, look for ways to get your marketing channels to work together. For instance, you might encourage website visitors to follow your organization on social media or include a QR code on an event poster that leads people to your event web page. Connecting your channels can guide supporters to take the actions you want them to and encourage further engagement!

Email marketing campaigns are excellent for getting the word out about your cause, connecting with supporters, and encouraging involvement. Use our list of do’s and dont’s above to design or revamp your organization’s current email strategy, and remember to continually monitor your campaigns’ performance so that you can improve your efforts over time.

Special thanks to Carl Diesing for the expert advice, Carl is the Managing Director – Carl co-founded DNL OmniMedia in 2006 and has grown the team to accommodate clients with ongoing web development projects. Together DNL OmniMedia has worked with over 100 organizations to assist them with accomplishing their online goals. As Managing Director of DNL OmniMedia, Carl works with nonprofits and their technology to foster fundraising, create awareness, cure disease, and solve social issues. Carl lives in the Hudson Valley with his wife Sarah and their two children Charlie and Evelyn.