Charities Rethink E-Mail Campaigns to Avoid Flooding Donors’ In Boxes

The future of e-mail as an effective tool

for fund raising is in peril, according to some fund-raising experts.

“We’ve been treating donors like ATM’s for a long time, and they’re starting to push back,” says Mark Rovner, president of Sea Change Strategies, a fund-raising consulting company in Takoma Park, Md.

He says that charities have been inundating supporters’ e-mail in boxes with solicitations, making those donors less and less likely to give. Mr. Rovner believes that the same problem exists in direct-mail fund raising, but is somewhat less serious there because the cost of postal appeals makes it too expensive to send them indiscriminately.

“It’s very easy to pump out fund-raising e-mail, and it seems as though there’s no cost to it,” he says. “But there is a cost to it, and the cost is loss of confidence and loss of faith on the part of the person on the other end of that e-mail address.”

Mr. Rovner and other fund-raising experts say that nonprofit organizations have found that a growing percentage of the people on their e-mail lists don’t respond to — or even open — the messages they receive from nonprofit organizations. Further evidence of the problem, they say, is the high turnover rate of people on those lists. Many organizations lose 30 percent or more of the people on their lists each year.

To remedy the problem, Mr. Rovner thinks fund raisers should use an approach to e-mail that resembles public-broadcasting pledge drives.

During two or three defined periods each year, he says, organizations should conduct concentrated fund-raising campaigns by e-mail. The rest of the year, e-mail communication should focus on the organization’s work and on telling donors how the money they gave is being spent.

Increased Competition

Decreases in the percentage of people who open the e-mail messages they receive from charities is worrisome, says Nick Allen, chief executive officer at Donordigital, a consulting company in San Francisco.

A few years ago, he says, nonprofit organizations weren’t sending enough messages to the people on their e-mail lists. Since then, they have picked up the pace, setting schedules to make sure they stay in touch with their supporters regularly.

But, he says, so has everyone else — other nonprofit organizations, companies, family members, and friends. So a charity’s e-mail messages are competing against a wide array of communications in its supporters’ in boxes.

Mr. Allen thinks part of the answer might be to mail less. For some charities, he says, one of the unintended consequences of formalizing their e-mail schedule is that the messages have become predictable and repetitious.

“To some degree it’s, ‘Oh God, next Tuesday we’ve got to send a message. What’s it going to be about?’” he says.

“Organizations should just be thinking, Am I sending out an e-mail because I’ve got something to say, or am I sending it out because I’ve got a schedule?”

Tracking Messages

Not everyone, however, thinks that e-mail is in trouble.

Karen Matheson, manager for quantitative research and analysis at M+R Strategic Services, a consulting firm in Washington, says that in the surveys her company conducts for its clients, people on the organizations’ e-mail lists consistently report that the groups send neither too many nor too few e-mail messages.

That holds true, she says, among people who are very active and respond to many of the group’s messages and those who seldom respond.

Some experts say charities don’t have a reliable way to determine how many people open their messages — so some of the concern about appeals going unopened has been exaggerated.

Marc Sirkin, chief marketing officer at International Rescue Committee, an aid and development organization in New York, notes that e-mail systems measure the percentage of people who open messages by embedding a tiny graphic in the message that is loaded and tallied when the recipient opens the message.

Increasingly, however, e-mail programs are giving people the option of not loading graphics in the messages they read.

Someone could be reading one of his charity’s e-mail messages all day long, but wouldn’t be counted if his or her e-mail program was set to block images, says Mr. Sirkin.

New Technology

But while he believes that the current concerns about e-mail’s viability are overblown, he thinks it might become less effective over time, especially as people turn to newer forms of electronic communication.

That, he says, is why it’s so important for organizations to be on social-networking Web sites like MySpace and Facebook, and experiment with other ways to reach out to new supporters.

Parsing Responses

The Humane Society of the United States, in Washington, is mindful of how often it sends e-mail messages to its supporters.

The organization’s policy is that no one should receive more than one message in any 48-hour period, or more than two messages in a week.

“There are exceptions when something’s really happening — a disaster situation is a great example, or there’s movement on one of our federal bills,” says Geoff Handy, a vice president at the Humane Society. “Then typically we’ll mitigate that by writing what we call a ‘love note’ at the top, saying, ‘Hey, we know we’re e-mailing you a lot, but we wanted you to hear this.’”

Making sure that the group is sending the right message to the right people is another tactic it uses to try to avoid alienating its supporters.

The organization is able to divide the people on its e-mail list into different groups based on their past behavior — such as opening messages or making gifts in response to e-mail messages about specific topics. In some cases, then, the Humane Society decides to send e-mail communication only to people it knows have an interest in a specific topic.

For example, when the organization conducted an online campaign that ultimately helped to persuade Ben & Jerry’s to stop using eggs from caged chickens in its products, the Humane Society sent e-mail alerts on the issue to a relatively small number of people, but ones who had already shown an interest in issues affecting farm animals.

“We want to build enduring relationships with donors and advocates,” says Mr. Handy. “With the concerns over e-mail, you want to keep the content relevant.”

It’s far too early to write off e-mail as a fund-raising tool, says Madeline Stanionis, chief executive officer of Watershed, a consulting company in San Francisco that specializes in online fund raising.

“It’s a numbers game, like anything else,” she says. “Just because half your list isn’t responsive, well, what do you know? The other half is. That’s pretty good.”