How to Make Sure Your Nonprofit’s Email Makes It to Supporters’ Inboxes

It’s not enough to send email appeals to your organization’s supporters. To raise money, you have to make sure the messages actually get delivered.

One out of every eight nonprofit emails doesn’t make it to the recipient’s inbox, according to an analysis of the messages sent by 55 national nonprofits with email lists of at least 100,000 addresses. The study estimated that organizations could increase the amount of money they raise via email by roughly 14 percent by increasing their delivery rates.

At the 2015 Nonprofit Technology Conference, email experts recommended steps that charities can take to boost the chances that messages will make it to their intended recipients.

Build your list the right way

People marking messages from your organization as spam is a sure way to get on a service provider’s bad side.

“Spam in email is all in the eyes of the individual,” explained Brett Schenker, email deliverability specialist at EveryAction, a company that provides fundraising technology for nonprofits, and author of the 2015 Nonprofit Email Deliverability Study. “They might have signed up for your list, but after six, seven, eight months, they might be bored.”

Nonprofits can reduce the likelihood of spam accusations by having a two-step process for signing up to receive emails, a practice that’s often called “double opt-in.” When people sign up for the email list, they then receive a message that asks them to click a link to confirm their request.

Asking people to take that second step will depress signups by 10 to 20 percent, but it will also cut down on spam complaints, said Trung Nguyen, deliverability specialist at Salsa Labs, a technology company whose products help nonprofits raise money, communicate with supporters, and advocate for their causes.

If people aren’t willing to confirm, you don’t want them on the list, said Harmony Eichsteadt, evangelist at NationBuilder, a company that provides an online platform to help charities raise money and recruit supporters: “It’s OK to put a couple of obstacles in the way, because you want people who are going to be excited to be on your list.”

Being able to show an email service that the recipient took two steps to join the list is also powerful ammunition if your nonprofit ever has to defend itself against spam allegations.

Having that paper trail is especially important for nonprofits that work on contentious causes where adversaries might seek to torpedo the group’s ability to communicate with supporters, said Laura Packard, a partner at PowerThru Consulting.

While groups may want to make it a little harder to join their email lists, the opposite is true about leaving. Best practice is to include a single-click unsubscribe option in all email messages, in part so that subscribers don’t have to resort to a spam report.

Keep a clean email list

Another factor that leads email service providers to send nonprofit messages to the junk folder: having too many people who delete the group’s messages without opening them.

To keep their messages from getting stuck in email limbo, nonprofits need to regularly cull people who don’t open messages or take action, Mr. Schenker told conference participants.

Organizations may want to do one last push to win back people who aren’t opening email messages, but they should drop recipients who have been inactive for a year or more, he said.

“You sent them 300 emails,” said Mr. Schenker. “I’m pretty sure the three hundred and first isn’t going to get them to open. You just have to accept that.”

But don’t make big changes all at once.

It’s better to review your list regularly and remove inactive email addresses in small batches, recommended Mr. Nguyen.

“You want to make sure that you ramp down your volume at a consistent rate,” he said. Delete too many people at once, and “that starts to send red flags to Gmail.”

Win buy-in from management

Charity leaders love to boast about the size of their nonprofit’s email list, so arguing that the organization should take people off the list probably isn’t going to be popular.

One way to win over decision makers is to give them proof, advised Ms. Packard.

“Segment out the inactive folks on your list — don’t delete them — just send to your best people for a week or a couple of weeks, and show how much better the stats are,” she said.

With the nonresponders out of the mix, the organization will get a more accurate picture of how supporters are responding to the messages. “Then maybe you can make the case for removing the inactives,” she said.

Be smart about sequence

Email services are constantly resetting the filters they use to determine which messages to deliver to users’ inboxes and which messages end up in the spam folder.

Mr. Nguyen told the audience most service providers reset hourly, but that Gmail resets roughly every minute, based on how many of its users open, click, or respond to a sender’s messages.

With the changing algorithms in mind, nonprofits should send emails to the most responsive people on their list first, recommended Mr. Schenker. Their activity paves the way for other, less-active people to receive the message.

If nonprofits don’t segment by activity, the order in which the message is sent will be random, he explained. If it goes to inactive list members first, their failure to open and click could mean that by the time the email goes to active folks, it might end up in their spam folder.

Said Mr. Schenker, “By sending to the best performers first, you’re basically putting your best foot forward.”