Email Marketing for a Charity Organization
Aside from regular clients, our company values working with nonprofits and we’d like to tell you about how email marketing was used in this kind of project. We’ve been working on email marketing and automation for the Charity Foundation “ZHIVI” (“LIVE”). The messages of the foundation matter to support the subscribers’ loyalty.
Email marketing helps us get people acquainted with the foundation’s work, how much money is spent, what it is spent on, and who exactly they help. The main purpose is to increase trust in the foundation so that people wouldn’t be afraid of donating, and to keep in touch with those who have already helped.
How we gain subscribers
Through Mailchimp we’ve set a subscription form that offers users to subscribe to the foundation’s news. The form is sleek and simple, we didn’t need a complicated design.
This condition was chosen because the front page is short, but it has a slider. It allows the user to get acquainted with the info and the form doesn’t pop up too soon.
What emails we send
Despite the fact that this task is not that difficult, we had to use three types of emails at once: regular mailings sent manually, automatic funnels of emails, and trigger emails. All in all it looks like this:
Automatic funnels of emails
We’ve divided the subscribers into several segments and set various automatic chains for them. The subscribers get them by subscribing to the newsletter or by making a donation. We have three segments:
- ordinary subscribers;
- donors — the people who have donated at least once;
- recurrents — the people who have applied for an automatic monthly donation of any sum of money.
All emails contain information about the ways we spend this money and about our successful cases. People need to know this, so that they can understand where their money goes and they can trust us.
Emails for ordinary subscribers
The awareness of the foundation’s work varies for the groups of subscribers. Ordinary subscribers may know nothing about the foundation, so we’ve set three emails telling them how the foundation works with the ask for a donation at the end of the sequence.
Emails for the donors and the recurrents
Those who’ve made at least one donation know more about the foundation. Both the donors and the recurrents get six emails containing detailed information about the people they helped. These chains consist of the final part only: we offer the donors to become recurrents and we thank the recurrents for their help and tell them about volunteering opportunities.
Even though the recurrents are in the same list with the donors, they have their own separate tag that allows us to trace what emails a person opened, so we don’t have to send them again. E.g. a person was a donator and got three emails and then became a recurrent. Mailchimp will start sending them the chain for recurrents, beginning with the fourth email.
Trigger emails
There is only one trigger email in the system that is sent if the payment on the site was unsuccessful.
To make that possible, we’ve paired Mailchimp with the payment system. If the payment was unsuccessful the script sends the person’s email to a special list and sends them a trigger email.
The Digest
We send the digest to all of our subscribers once a month. We use it to tell about the things the foundation did during this period of time. It is a small report for those who are interested in the foundation’s work.
We’ve also created an HTML template and put it intо Mailchimp drag-and-drop editor so client’s employees can send the digest themselves. Now it is easy to edit without knowing how to work with a layout and it will still be correctly displayed in all email clients.
Another thing we’ve done is create four types of banners — each for one of the seasons of the year. These banners are stored in the platform file storage.
Event emails
We’ve developed a number of emails that are sent to all of the subscribers on the dates important for the foundation. For example:
- International Day of Charity;
- The foundation’s birthday;
- World Leukemia Day;
- International Childhood Cancer Day;
- International Volunteer Day.
We’ve also made the emails that are sent when the subscriber stays with us for half a year and a year.
As you can see, email marketing solves tasks not only for commercial projects, but for charity as well. It is interesting that even such a simple-to-use platform as Mailchimp allows us to set rather intricate communications. It turned out that we could work with segments, set payment integration, and we also could make the foundation’s workers’ jobs as easy as possible so they can send the newsletters on their own.
More about us on https://emailsoldiers.com/
