Anatomy of awesome year-end fundraising emails

It’s #GivingTuesday—the magical day of giving that follows Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you donate to nonprofits, your inbox is probably on fire. And if you work in development or fundraising, you are probably crossing your fingers and hoping that today kicks off a great month of donations to your organization. (In fact, last year many nonprofits received 30% of their funds from individuals in December—with ten percent coming in the last three days of the year!) So what can you do to maximize this moment? Well, in a recent webinar I led for Gail Perry’s Fired-Up Fundraising series, I explored how nonprofits can leverage email to raise money.

Truth be told, I’m a fan of the multichannel campaign approach where you develop a strong campaign with a consistent theme and apply it across a number of communications channels: direct mail, website, social media, video, in-person events, and yes, email. Multichannel campaigns work best when you focus on the reader/listener (aka “audience”) and reinforce the same message tailored to what works best for each channel. For this training, I focused on what you can to do improve how you use email to renew support from existing donors and perhaps even attract donations from prospects. I was also happy to share the emails from a year-end fundraising campaign we managed last year for Cure SMA, a nonprofit dedicated to the treatment and cure of spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), the number one genetic cause of death for infants.

Watch the video and let me know what you think. How will you use email this year to communicate with donors raise money for your organization? Share your ideas and tips in the comments below.