One Group’s Approach to Soliciting Big Gifts Via E-Mail

Many nonprofit organizations have been the lucky recipients of four-digit online donations, but the Human Rights Campaign has devised a strategy to actively solicit them.

For the last three years, the Washington advocacy group, which focuses on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues, has run a series of e-mail campaigns to recruit new members for its Federal Club, a donor society for people who give $1,200 or more annually.

The Human Rights Campaign has learned that it’s important to identify donors who won’t be put off by a request for a large gift, according to a new case study that discusses the group’s e-mail campaign. The case study was published by M+R Strategic Services, a consulting company in Washington.

Over time, the advocacy group has developed its criteria for who should receive the appeals:

• People who give more than $50 monthly.
• Monthly donors who stopped giving but were donating $75 or more before they quit.
• People who have given a total of $200 or more in the past 12 months.
• Contributors who have made at least two gifts of more than $100 in the last three years.
• People who bought a ticket for a fund-raising event in the past three to nine months, or who have ever made a donation at an event, in addition to the price of the ticket.

The authors of the case study stress the importance of sticking with a campaign, even if the initial results are less than promising.

During the Human Rights Campaign’s inaugural Federal Club e-mail campaign, it sent its first message to 8,910 people but brought in only two gifts. The second message garnered four donations, but the third and final message of the campaign spurred 20 contributions.

Altogether the three appeals brought in $41,288.

The organization also promoted the campaign in two of its e-mail newsletters, giving people who fell outside the group’s appeal criteria the opportunity to respond.

Those additional mentions resulted in seven more gifts, an additional $8,700.