Capture Donor Emails With This One Simple Solution
	Posted by Guest Blogger at May 14, 2014 07:01 AM CDT

This article was written by guest author Shelly Hudson, director of digital media, and Miriam Moser, digital media specialist -- both from Amergent.

Ongoing analysis of nonprofit donor databases, and our own testing, confirm that when donors communicate with you across multiple channels, they renew at better rates and make larger gifts. Getting donors to cross over to another channel willingly, however, can be a challenge.

Say you have a lot of direct mail donors and you want to connect with them online, but you don’t have their information. There is a solution -- the Email Append! The e-append takes known customer data (first name, last name, and postal address) and matches it against a vendor's database of known email addresses.

Maybe you already know about e-appends but are skeptical. Quiet your inner skeptic with data from our case study:

Case Study: Health and Human Services Nonprofit Wants to Increase Email List

One of our clients in the human and social services sector was looking for ways to increase their email list and convert their direct mail-only donors to multichannel donors. We suggested they run an e-append on their 0-36 month donor file. Rather than just adding the new names to the already robust email stream, we created a welcome series to ease them into the messaging.

The first two welcome messages provided opportunities for the direct mail donors to become more involved online and increase their comfort level on the web. The third message was a newsletter that covered a variety of timely topics about the nonprofit.

Messages were sent 10-14 days apart. Then these donors were added to the general email audience. We kept an eye on their unsubscribe rate to make sure we weren’t sending them too much. Twenty-two donations came in during the first general campaign.

Within the first year, the ROI for the e-append was 4 to 1. Our client saw both increased donor engagement and regular, subsequent giving from these donors.