Liveblogging 08NTC: An Intimate Look at a Successful Online Fundraising Campaign

Email Fundraising Principles:

Designed by Mr. Jeff Patrick | Common Knowledge

Email send
Sending in the middle of the week is safest. 12 noon is the best time, early morning can also be ideal. Late afternoon is not ideal. Reference your own site traffic to determine peak interest period.

Campaign Results

Withing 24 hours you are seeing 70% of your actions, 90% within 48 hours.

Typical Metrics

• Open rate: 20% is great


• Click rate:


• Conversion rate: 1-2% phenominal, start at less than .5%


• Average donation: $100 is top of the range


• Churn rate: 20-30%/year

Jeff says there is value in seperating communication between activists and donors -- that cross pollination can be bad as people only want to belong to one group.

In general, email donations average higher than the equivalent audience in direct mail.

Use yearly rate of opt-out to measure rates on individual emails to gauge progress and analyze numbers.

Women want more information to make the same decisions than men do. Women are more likely to read the totality of a piece of communication.

Call to action box on right side should have text link and graphical link to cover all bases in terms of filtering by email clients.

Email brand stays consistent across all email, but different types of communication should have subtle creative differences to provide visual cues for users.

Subject lines need to be representative of content. Interesting but unrepresentative subject lines don't lead to as many conversions.

59% of email clients default to turning images off in email.

Have representative text elements that substitute for all graphical elements which may not be shown.

Hotspot: Text at the very top of the email. Text needs to encompass call to action and branding. Link goes to action page. Message gets across no matter the email client.

Do not link "click here." Use actual text for your links. People scan the page for links, if linked text has no message, none gets conveyed. Buttons on the other hand already have a visual component so putting "click here" on it is ok. Button still needs context though in order to be effective.

Donation Form
Limit options whenever possible. Focus on the LCD for best completion rate. CVV2 unnecessary and possibly harmful (can increase dropout rate by 10-15% for the form). Carding is the only situation under which you might need the additional verification. Kintera and Convio already scan for this kind of behavior to limit issues and can initiate the CVV2 option on the backend automatically.