Fundraising Email Marketing and Web Donations

Email Fundraising for Web Donations using a Fundraising Contact Database

How to execute a nonprofit email fundraising program to allow people to make web donations using a fundraising software database with the ability to create the fundraising email lists and report on email donation responses. Email fundraising can be a sustainable program to raise funds quickly when you have the ability to use email and web donation templates with an integrated fundraising contact database.

The Email, Web and Contact Database Fundraising Plan

We need a structure to allow us to send fundraising email, update our website with donation pages and fundraising email related content, and report on donation results on a regular basis.

• Define the goals and message of the fundraising email program
• Create the fundraising email to be sent
• Create a donation webpage to be able to accept donations
• Support fundraising credit card donations online
• Create the fundraising email subscription contact list to be sent the email
• Make sure new donors and subscribers are added to the email list
• Make sure people who do not want to be sent fundraising email are not in our list
• Send thank you to fundraising responders
• Report results of fundraising email response and new subscribers recruited to management

The Email, Web and Contact Database Fundraising Challenges

• Our current fundraising emails take too long to create
• There are too many people who must be involved in the fundraising email process to be timely and effective
• The current fundraising email software has too many steps to go through to send an email
• The fundraising emails do not always have the proper brand
• We often do not have the required items in our fundraising emails to stay off spam blocking lists
• The donation webpage software to support the email takes too long to get online
• The fundraising email subscription list updates are not current because it is a manual process to export/import new subscribers and responses
• The donation thank you acknowledgement software process requires manual export/import and is too slow.
• Fundraising email response results and new donor subscriber reports take too long to collect and report to management.

The Email, Web and Contact Database Fundraising Requirements

1. Fundraising email creation needs:
   • One template for all fundraising email that is already approved
   • Fundraising email template is designed to support the brand
   • Make sure the proper fundraising email functions are included on every email to avoid being blocked as spam
   • Ability to cut and paste the fundraising donation message into the email template
   • Ability to test the fundraising email to the internal subscription list
   • Ability to collect and report fundraising email clicks to the webpage, unsubscribe, opens and email forwarding
2. Donation web page creation needs:
   • Ability to add a donation web page
   • Ability to add a pledge web page
   • Ability to add a gift web page
   • Ability to have personal fundraising pages
   • A webpage system that allows us to modify the donation pages without programmers
   • A template for the online fundraising newsletter
   • The ability to define new fundraising and donation templates as needs arise
   • An acknowledgment page for each donation type
   • A page test environment to test the fundraising email and donation web page
   • An approval process for control of publishing new donation pages
3. Email fundraising contact list creation and results reporting needs:
   • A single place to gather all fundraising donor contacts and responses to emails sent
   • An easy fundraising email subscriber list creation process
   • Automatic update of fundraising contact database email lists with un-subscriber and new subscriber information
   • Real-time fundraising results reports that are automatically created without having to do manual export/import
   • Graphical email fundraising and web donation summary reports for management and stakeholders

The Email, Web and Contact Database Fundraising Solutions

The problems in executing email fundraising are caused by having several different tools that do not automate email execution and donation web page publishing and then integrate the email contact list and web donation results into the fundraising database. Bernard Data Solutions suite including Data Management, Email Marketing and Web Management provides an integrated approach to email marketing.

The fundraising email system and donation web pages did not have the ability to automatically update our contact database with responses and results

• Our contact list for email had to be manually imported and exported to and from our email system into our master contact database
• Bernard Data Management had the ability to collect all forms of contact information in a single database with built-in automatic updates to the email contacts without manually importing or exporting data from the Bernard Email Marketing system.
• Bernard Email Marketing has built in connections to Bernard Data Management to automatically collect the email results and responses in particular un-subscribe requests, clicks to the webpage, and email forward to others.
• Bernard Web Management is also integrated to the Data Management and Email Marketing system to automatically collect the email responses on the web pages and show the results in real-time management reports without manual import or export of data.
• Our contacts are now all in one place with one tool to see the results, create an email list and update our email list with new subscribers.

It takes too long to create the donation webpage

• Now we publish new pages to support email in less than 2 hours.
• Bernard Web Management is a template based web content management system that let us create a donation template one time that we could use over and over.
• The template page looks and operates just like any page in our website.
• The publishing tool let us cut and paste new messages and then submit the page for review.
• The review process lets us have multiple people review the page before making the page available for public viewing.
• Now we can publish a page within minutes of starting the process without having any designer or technician involved.

It takes too long to create the fundraising email

• Now we can create a donation email quickly
• The fundraising email and donation web templates make it easy
• You create your basic fundraising email template once and use it over and over only changing the message
• The fundraising email template includes all of the proper email features and functions to stay off spam blocker lists
• The automatic update of our fundraising contact data allows us to be sure people who don’t want to be sent email stay off the email list
• The donation webpage created can be specific to the fundraising email message
• Using the fundraising email templates we cut and paste our message into an already formatted email that is already designed to match our look on the donation web page
• No need to test the standard fundraising email template functions because we use them over and over and already know they work
• Send to a preset fundraising email test list for the final check of the message and sign off to send the email
• Sending the fundraising email to the subscribed members is easy

It takes too long to send a donation acknowledgement to responders

• Now donation and new subscriber acknowledgement is automatic and immediate
• Using a donation web template an automatic personal thank you is done on the donation thank you webpage
• Donation thank you pages offer the member the opportunity to send the fundraising email to others they know
• All new subscribers are automatically added to the fundraising database

It took a full day to run all the reports and export them to excel then gather them and create a summary report on the results of email marketing

• Now it only takes minutes to run the email fundraising management reports
• All the fundraising tools work together using built-in automation to gather the results
• Real-time collection of fundraising email clicks, forwards, opt-out and views in our database
• Automatic updates to the fundraising contacts in our single donor contact database
• Automatically collects donation web responses and reports them in our single fundraising database
• Real-time donation results in management summary and detail reports
• All fundraising information is collected in one database with one data management tool

Implementing the Bernard integrated suite of template based web donation and fundraising email tools along with the automated integration of the donor contacts using Bernard Data Management system has saved time, money and made us a more effective fundraising mission.

The Costs of Fundraising using Disconnected Email, Web and Database Marketing Tools

Cost of doing business the way we had been executing email was people and process intensive

• Days spent managing the design and technical people needed to execute the online fundraising process
• Scheduling time
• Getting turn around
• Gathering people to review in a timely manner
• For both web page changes and the email itself
• Hours and hours of gathering data from different web, email and database fundraising reports
• Importing reports into spreadsheets
• Summarizing the results
• Creating the graphical summary reports for management and stakeholders
• Web designers and HTML programmers had to be involved in every email appeal
• Writing HTML for both email and web pages
• Loading web pages
• Designing layout and brand
• Testing
• Manually managing the email list
• Constant complaints from members who asked not to be emailed
• Manual import and export of lists from our email system to our database
• Manual import of data from web responses into our contact database
• Lost opportunity to expand into relationship 1 to 1 email because the process is too hard to make it valuable
• Email marketing takes a full time person just to manage all the people involved in the process

The Savings of Fundraising Using an Integrated Email, Web and Database Marketing Suite

Savings of integrating our fundraising email with web donation pages using our single fundraising contact database has resulted in faster execution and frees our marketing people to focus on the message.

• Doing faster execution of email appeals to raise more money
• Spending more time writing effective fundraising messages for people who care about the issues and needs of our mission
• Free to find new ways to expand the number of people we can reach with fundraising email
• Creating new value messages with newsletters that have more depth of information for our constituents
• Sending multiple targeted email messages out to more targeted groups of constituents
• Making the fundraising email more personal for each of our constituents based on their interests
• More people forward our email to others who join our cause and respond.
• Raising more funds
• Building better and deeper relationships using email with our members
• Supporters feel more involved and informed
• Have time to figure out what “twittering” could do for us

The Costs of Fundraising using Disconnected Email, Web and Database Marketing Tools

Cost of doing business the way we had been executing email was people and process intensive

• Days spent managing the design and technical people needed to execute the online fundraising process
• Scheduling time
• Getting turn around
• Gathering people to review in a timely manner
• For both web page changes and the email itself
• Hours and hours of gathering data from different web, email and database fundraising reports
• Importing reports into spreadsheets
• Summarizing the results
• Creating the graphical summary reports for management and stakeholders
• Web designers and HTML programmers had to be involved in every email appeal
• Writing HTML for both email and web pages
• Loading web pages
• Designing layout and brand
• Testing
• Manually managing the email list
• Constant complaints from members who asked not to be emailed
• Manual import and export of lists from our email system to our database
• Manual import of data from web responses into our contact database
• Lost opportunity to expand into relationship 1 to 1 email because the process is too hard to make it valuable
• Email marketing takes a full time person just to manage all the people involved in the process