115 – The Top Fundraising Email Secrets with Vanessa Chase Lockshin

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Are you struggling to make your fundraising emails stand out? Vanessa shares how storytelling can boost donations and build stronger donor relationships.

In this episode, we’re exploring the power of fundraising by email with Vanessa Chase-Lockshin. Vanessa is an expert in non-profit storytelling and email fundraising. She’s the author of The Storytelling Non-profit and has helped many organizations like VarietyBC and BC Women’s Health Foundation raise millions through compelling email campaigns. So get ready for these insights that are going to take your email to the next level.

Vanessa, thank you so much for joining on today’s show.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, thanks for having me today.

David Pisarek: My pleasure. Okay, let’s just start at the beginning here. Why is email fundraising still a powerful tool for non-profits?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, I think email sometimes gets a bad rap. We think about email spammers. We just think about it being ineffective. I think sometimes people group it together with feelings they have about direct mail being ineffective, and it’s not.

The thing that I would say about email that I always tell people is that it is the best digital direct response channel that you have to get in front of your audience with data that you actually own. Unlike social channels that could constantly change, and do constantly change, or go by the wayside, you have a lot more power, control and influence over your email list. Ultimately, when you’re trying to fundraise money, that is really important.

David Pisarek: I completely agree with all of that.

Not that long ago, we had TikTok shut down. Everybody in the US, it was like half a day, I don’t really want to get into the politics of any of that, but to your point, you don’t own your TikTok channel. TikTok owns your TikTok channel. If they want to boot you, block you, any of that, it could happen on X, it could happen on Facebook, it could happen on LinkedIn, it could happen on any of these platforms. But with email, you have direct access into people’s personal or business inboxes. Somebody is going to see that.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: I wouldn’t say it’s a guarantee that somebody is going to see it, because obviously, we do have competition, and the challenge of email is getting people to open your emails. Obviously, inbox service providers are changing how people see emails in their inboxes. But overall, once somebody opens that email, that’s their sole focus in that moment. It’s not like scrolling in a social feed where somebody can easily get away from that, or they’re seeing other things at the same time. It’s just a different environment, and I find it so much more conducive to fundraising out there.

David Pisarek: In terms of emails, do you have any tips on what makes an email maybe stand out once it’s sitting in something inbox or maybe they’re a Google Workspace where they’ve got a “Promotions tab” and a “Updates tab” and a “Spam folder”, and all that stuff.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, absolutely. I can certainly say some things about the individual email itself.

But the tip that I’d offer people before you even think about the one email that you’re sending is, the thing that’s most likely going to influence whether or not people open your email is if they think you’re a good sender. Are you known for sending emails that people want to read? Do people engage with your emails often? Are you sending interesting content? Are you in step with what people are thinking about around the issues that you’re working on and reflecting that to them in the content that you’re sending regularly? I think that’s a bigger, more philosophical strategy piece around email that not a lot of people think about.

They always just think about the individual email. We’ve got to send a newsletter, we’ve got to send the fundraising email, we’ve got to send the event invite, all of those things. But collectively, when we look at the big picture of an email program, do people want to receive your emails? Are they excited to get them? It’s the thing that I always start with and think about, because if you’re overall sending great content and people love you as a sender, that’s gold. It’s going to get people to open your emails.

However, when we talk about the individual emails themselves, the sender’s name and subject line are certainly two of the biggest influencers that we see at the top of the email funnel. Sending from names that people are going to recognize is always helpful. Brand recognition, name recognition of staff are very useful for getting those emails open. But also sending interesting subject lines, I always tell people, we want to send subject lines that are just big enough to be interesting to get people to open them, but not so far over into spam territory where people are going to feel really deceived, you just pulled one over on them when they open that email. And that’s a fine balance. I think it’s part of the art of email, sometimes figuring out what that balance is in the copy.

But I think about emails that I got, for instance, on Giving Tuesday at the end of last year. I mean, I got dozens of emails that said it’s Giving Tuesday, so make your donation today. To me personally, as a donor, I don’t find that particularly compelling, but to me as a digital fundraiser, I don’t find those subject lines very well-performing because people know what that’s about. Everybody’s Giving Tuesday emails that day.

The subject lines that I’ve had perform best on Giving Tuesday are always the ones that speak a little bit more to the impact and to the problem, and engage donors with what it is you’re going to talk about rather than that top-line opportunity that just isn’t as motivating to them.

David Pisarek: Wow, that was a huge deluge of information there.

I just wanted to go back to the first point that you were talking about: Are people happy to get your emails? What are some metrics that people could think about tracking to go, okay, yeah, people trust us, or they know us, or they like us, or obviously, you can look at open rates, right?

Anybody who’s sending emails: don’t do an email merge from Outlook or something, right? You need a platform that can track emails, and it also gives legal legislations for people to unsubscribe. So let these platforms handle that for you.

Okay. All right. So we know what makes a good sender. I’m curious. You mentioned that there are some subject lines that worked really well around Giving Tuesday versus “Hey, it’s Giving Tuesday, donate to us today. Double your impact.” Maybe there’s some donor matching that you were able to organize for your organization. But do you have any examples of a subject line that would work better?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, I sure do.

The best-performing subject line I have sent on Giving Tuesday in the last four years was one for Variety BC, and the subject line was, “Parents can’t keep up with these costs.” We were fundraising for children who had complex and special health care needs, to offset financial costs that families were having to take on, things like mobility equipment, speech and language therapy, things like that that their kids might need that weren’t covered by traditional insurance.

One of the things that really resonated with the audience was the idea that parents were just really drowning under these additional costs. All the parents wanted to do was take care of their kids, love their kids, and have their kids have a great childhood. That was something that really struck a chord with people. So, when we were putting together the Giving Tuesday email, I really wanted to think about what part of the problem here, part of the impact, really connects with donors, and how can we talk about that subject? So the subject was parents and the problem, which was costs, and we were just a little bit vague about the type of costs we’re talking about.

So, “these” costs, the word “these”, was the vague piece of that message. And that subject line to this day has outperformed anything else I’ve sent in the last couple of years. But I think it really hits that formula of just vague enough to be interesting. But it tells people what you’re going to talk about, too. I was going to talk about parents. I was going to talk about the costs that they were facing and why they couldn’t keep up with them, and really get donors into the problem, and the impact that they could be a part of, really quite quickly in that email.

David Pisarek: I love the idea about that.

Now, more than ever before, it’s easy to brainstorm around these types of things. For anybody listening, if they take that subject line and put it into Chatgpt, I want a subject line like this for this email, you’ll be able to come up with a couple of options there. Yeah, you need to tweak it a little bit and adjust it a bit, but it can definitely help you with that.

One of the other things that I think is also important, the first is, and you talked about it, but not exactly like this, is to know your audience, what drives them, what motivates them, create some empathetic reaction subconsciously that is going to make them “Oh, I need to see what this is about.”

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, and I wouldn’t even say it always has to be empathetic.

Sometimes this is about just knowing the emotional state people are in about something, whatever that might be. Is it anger? Is it surprise? Are people feeling self-righteous about something? Are they feeling sad about something? So sometimes, it’s just about capturing what the collective emotional response is that people are having in a moment. I think that’s part of the magic in copywriting, sometimes it’s being able to touch on that and figure out what that is.

But it’s hard and it takes time, and it takes practice with an email list and a donor file to figure out what that quipe is and how you can reflect that back to them.

David Pisarek: One of the things that I see a lot of organizations struggling with is, even just doing some A/B testing with some emails, figuring out, all right, what does this resonate more? Does this resonate more? One of the things that I like to recommend is if you have a list of, let’s say, 200 people, maybe it’s 2000 people, whatever it happens to be, send out an A/B test to 10% with this one, 10% with this one, whichever one gets whatever the goal is, maybe it’s click-throughs from the email, maybe it’s open rate, whatever it happens to be, and then send out whichever the winner is to the rest of the list and then see how that progresses over time.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, I think there’s such value in A/B testing, but there’s also real value in having a dashboard of your metrics over time, too, and not in the email tools themselves. Whether you use Mailchimp or Blackbaud email tools, or something else, you can see at a glance all those metrics, but having things in the spreadsheet is so much nicer. You can really see things a little bit more comprehensively.

And I find that when you benchmark yourself over time, too, you can start to see what is actually working, where were the things that really hit well with people, whether it was subject lines, a call to action within the body of the email, where you got an above average look through rate. All of those things are just really helpful data points. But I think this is something that I see a lot of my clients struggle with, especially, I would say, smaller shops, for email is something that they’re doing, but it’s not like one person owns digital, and that’s all they’re thinking about. It’s easy to collect metrics, and the spreadsheet is easy to look at data at a glance in your email tool.

I think there’s less of a practice of asking questions about that data, saying, What does this tell me? What does this tell me in comparison to what else I’m seeing? What does this say about the email that I sent? What are the trend lines we’re seeing? I think having some built-in practice around asking questions, the data fundamentally just makes it so much more useful, and you can become a much more active email fundraiser.

David Pisarek: One of the things we did with our list is we did A/B testing with day of week. Then, once we found out which one got the most opens, we started A/B testing with time of day on that day. Then, we waited for a good period, about eight or nine months. Then we started testing the time of day on different days as well. Then we locked in our, this is the best day, this is the best time, where we get the most open rates. Yeah, part of that could be because of the subject line, but we were staying consistent with that. We had the scientific methodology applied to this thing.

I think it’s possible, even if you don’t have a lot of money to do some testing like that, maybe send out a monthly email or a quarterly email. Is the start of the quarter better than the end of the quarter? I would say as a non-profit, start of the quarter would probably be a little bit better in my gut reaction because end of quarter, then you deal with end of year, and then you deal with Giving Tuesday, end of year giving, tax receipts, and all that stuff.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: I feel like I don’t see a huge variance, usually in the list that I work on.

I will say there have been a few things that have surprised me. Evenings sends tend to do well for some of my fundraising emails. We’ll send it from 6:00 PM to 7:00 PM local time. You would think that that’s a terrible time of day to send an email, but people are home. They’re not doing much. They’re on their phones, they’re watching TV. I often just try to think about the consumer, the end person who’s going to get this email. Is this a time of day when they might not be doing much? I also find Saturday, Sunday morning email sends can be pretty good as well. Again, people are at home. They’re having their coffee. They’re reading stuff on their phone. It’s a great time for us to just meet them where they’re at.

But I always tell people that Giving Tuesday is an email send day, a fine day to send an email. Every other day of the year is a good day to send an email. It’s a competitive day, and I always tell people that it’s a bloodbath. There are a lot of fundraising emails, and the high competition is not going to do you any favours.

I, over the last two years, three years maybe, with several of our clients, have tested sending other emails that week, and specifically that Friday after Giving Tuesday tends to be our best-performing email day of that week. I remember when I first thought about sending emails that day a couple of years ago, I was like, I don’t know, maybe it will work, we were just trying to meet the campaign goal because it hadn’t fully got up to where we wanted it to on Tuesday. And then, we sent the Friday email and just totally obliterated the goal that they had for it. I repeated that test a few times over the last couple of years with people. But three days later, four days later, on Thursday-Friday, nobody is sending emails. That is a great time to stand out and just capitalize on the silence in people’s inboxes that week.

David Pisarek: I love that idea.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Now you all know my secret.

David Pisarek: We won’t tell anybody. Don’t worry, Vanessa. It’s okay. I’m curious about your take on beautifully, amazingly designed emails, long form versus short form, plain-text-style emails. What do you see as things that work better?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: I think it really depends on the lists in a lot of ways, and what people are used to and what they expect from the sender.

I definitely work for organizations that send very image-heavy emails, which are beautifully designed, reflecting the level at which they operate and manage the brand, and that works for them. When I worked with VarietyBC on building their email program a couple of years ago, we raised $1.2 million in about 15 months on that email list, sending largely pretty plain-looking emails. They were really story-based emails where we focused on quality copy and engaging people with the message that we had to say, and that worked very well.

The thing that I would say about the length of email, I often see trip people up a little bit, is that the length doesn’t necessarily matter in some ways. It matters that you’ve made a sufficient case for giving, and you’ve gotten across the theory of change for giving. If you haven’t been able to compellingly tell people why donating is going to make a difference, and how that’s going to make a difference, it doesn’t matter if the email is short or long.

I think in some ways, for a lot of people, if you try to write a short email, you feel the pressure of less word real estate, and you feel like you don’t have as much time to say what you need to say, and that can be difficult. The structure I typically use in emails that I write, like fundraising emails anyways, I often write a two asks structure email where I do about 150 words, like opener, and then there’s a call to action, and then, there’s a second ask, and that second ask will be another 100 to 120 words or so, with a story or some extrapolation on the first part of the email to I always tell people that second part of the email is to convince the unconvinced. If somebody’s still reading, they care enough, hopefully, I can get them a good reason to donate by the end of that part, and then make that second call to action. I find that both having more than one donate button increases the odds that people are going to click on things, but also it just gives people enough information. 

They think there are a lot of donors who want to understand the context in which you’re asking. They have questions, and our email copy needs to answer those for them.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. So beyond, I guess, fundraising, a lot of non-profits absolutely need fundraising. There are government cuts to charities. North America is happening, not happening. Yes, no, who knows? It’s important to connect with your audience. You’ve woven this thread through everything you’ve said, which is really that you need to know the audience. What are they going to care about? How will your message fit with them? When is a good time to send to them? What is going to fit into their life at that moment? That type of thing helps get the message across.

But aside from fundraising, how can email support digital marketing goals?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, I mean, this is a great thing about email. It’s such a flexible tool to help organizations with other goals that they have, whether it’s registering people in programs, getting people to a place on your website or signing petitions. There are lots of ways that you can use it.

I think the thing to think about with your email list is, what are your goals for the list? Who is on this email list? I work on a lot of lists that are 80 to 95% donors. I know people who are on here, or people who want to donate, have donated. That’s their relationship with the organization. I’ve also worked on a lot of lists where there are no donors, they are engaged with the organization in some capacity, maybe from signing petitions, going to events, things like that. Part of the goal of email is converting those people into donors, and that’s some of what has to happen there.

I think you just have to step back and think about what are your goals for your email list? How do you want it to help support your digital marketing goals? Then, think about how that matches up with who’s currently on your list?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Do you have the existing audience to make that happen? Do you need to grow the audience in new ways, or do you need to convert your current audience, going from non-donors to donors? That sort of thing. I would say in some ways, nothing is impossible with email. You have to think about what the goals are and who’s there, and how we can start to bring those pieces together a little bit more.

David Pisarek: Just a little bit further to that, for everybody listening, you need a digital marketing strategy, and email needs to be part of that. Perhaps, having a separate strategy around email instead of having it all lumped in together, but getting clear direction and knowing, all right, this is the purpose of who we’re sending to when we segment the list this way, and here’s if we segment this way.

I think it’s important to make sure that you’re tagging the people who are on your list so that you can target them. That sounds really harsh, but really, that’s what we’re doing. We’re targeting these people with this type of message because X, Y, Z, and the outcome we want is this. I think that would really help move you forward in terms of creating positive change in why you’re emailing, when you’re emailing, and what you’re emailing.

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, I think that’s a really excellent point.

I think in some ways, your ability to reach your goals with email and with digital marketing is only as good as the data is. If your goal is to fundraise, if you don’t have a lot of data mapped to your subscribers about their giving history, what segment they fall into, it’s going to be harder to make the right ask.

I think about some of the low-hanging fruit that my clients have seen over the years from segmentation, one of the biggest groups is mid-level giving. I regularly send emails where there is a 1,000 to $5,000 ask in the email itself that then goes and asks people to make that donation. Those emails convert really well for me, and generally are a really big part of those organizations’ digital fundraising programs because it’s a big group of donors who often donate quite a bit of money. But if I didn’t have that data map to subscribers to know who are these people and how can I reach them, how do I want to talk to them and what ask do I want to put it in front of them, I’d probably be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Those people might go to a landing page where the gift array is $25 to maybe $500, and maybe they would put in another option of $1,000, but maybe they wouldn’t. Who knows? Being able to have that data just makes you that much more effective.

David Pisarek: For maybe a smaller non-profit, a startup non-profit, or somebody that is a little bit more limited financially in what they can afford to spend on email or the digital marketing side of things. Do you have any practical ways that they can start with email if they haven’t already?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, absolutely.

The first thing I always tell people is to figure out how to be consistent with sending emails. Part of what works well with emails is just being a consistent sender so that people get used to receiving your emails and have that relationship with you, as a sender. You do not need to send every day. You don’t even need to send every week. But figuring out a frequency schedule that’s going to work for you, your organization’s capacity, or whatever stage you’re at, start there and maintain that schedule for a while.

I think a lot of organizations tend to be really conservative with email and under-send as opposed to over-send. They over-correct for being like, “Oh, we don’t want to spam people, so we shouldn’t send any emails. We should send one email a quarter.” I always tell people the problem with just sending one email every 90 days is that inevitably, you’re going to get who signed up, and then the first email they get is a month or two later, and they’re going to forget that they signed up. They have subscribed. Or there’s going to be people who have been on there a while who are going to feel like, I’m not getting a lot out of this email on the on subscribe. So, thinking about how we can work up to sending a little bit more frequently, at least once a month, it’s always a good place to start from.

Then I see the other thing that’s really helpful in just getting started with email is the practice of thinking about email as more than just your e-newsletter or your newsletter. Email is so much more than that. And thinking, just a little bit bigger picture about what email can do? How can email complement programmatic work we’re doing, fundraising work we’re doing, other communications work we’re doing, and building some of those goals into your emails?

So, using email to market your programs that maybe you’re trying to fill as a startup non-profit, or using email to drive traffic somewhere on your website or to another digital channel to engage your audience. But those are all really great things you can do with email that don’t cost a lot of money and can help you, as a smaller non-profit, to get more of that digital ecosystem in place.

David Pisarek: Awesome. Vanessa, your insights on email fundraising, very valuable. So many little gold nuggets, a little bit of your secret sauce in there for everybody listening as well. Your focus is on using storytelling to help donor engagement. If anybody does want to get in touch with you, what’s the best way?

Vanessa Chase Lockshin: Yeah, you can find me over at my website, thestorytellingnonprofit.com. My email is [email protected] if you want to get in touch with me directly. Then, if you’re looking for some additional resources around email, I have some free tools that you can download, including an email fundraising campaign toolkit. Inside that, I have a brief to help you actually see through the different parts of your email campaign and what goes into it. Then I also have in there a spreadsheet, which is an email calendar and performance tracker, which is the same one I use with our agency clients to track and manage emails. If you would like either of those things, you can download them over at thestorytellingnonprofit.com/toolkit. They’re both free.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Thank you again for sharing that. So much, Vanessa, for joining me on the show here. It’s been a pleasure learning some of these things from you. I’m going to deploy them in my agency, as well as talk to some of our clients about this. And yeah, thanks for coming on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast.

To everybody listening, if you’re interested in the link to Vanessa’s website, the toolkit or email address, and any of the resources and things that we’ve talked about on the show, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details as well. If you could take a moment and give us a little rating, that would help us out a lot with promoting the podcast out there.

So until next time, keep on being successful!