418. Building Effective Email Marketing (spoiler: small nonprofits are killing it!) - Tim Sarrantonio

Hey friends, we want you to join us for free at the sector's premier professional development virtual experience for growth-minded impact chasers like you. We're partnering with our friends at Virtuist to host this year's Responsive Nonprofit Summit on May 9th through 11th and we want you there. Friends, this is the most accessible, inclusive way to learn about what's working right now in the sector. Bring your whole team because have we mentioned it's free. We'll be hosting the conversation stage with 36 epic leaders, past podcast guests and friends that you've come to know, love and trust in this community. So join us live May 9th through 11th and if you can't make it, that's no problem. When you register, you get access to both the live event and all the recordings afterward too. Sign up for free today at weareforgood.com slash RNS. That's weareforgood.com slash RNS. Hey, I'm John. And I'm Becky. And this is the Weareforgood podcast. Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world. We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories all to create an impact uprising. So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world. So let's get started. Becky, what's happening? Our good friend is in the house and now you are outnumbered by Italians, John. So our friend is bearing gifts for all today. I mean, this is like such a fun conversation. We are having our repeat guest and friend, Tim Sarantonio in the house and you probably know him, you probably have seen his post on LinkedIn because we've met a lot of people on this journey, but it is very clear and very evident after spending time with Tim to just in person, he loves this space. He loves the people of the space. He is fighting for equity and inclusion and diversity, like at every corner of this space too. He is technically the director of corporate brand over at Neon One, but Tim's heart is in this work. You know, he spent more than 10 years working and volunteering with nonprofits. He's raised millions of dollars for different causes along the way. He spent his spare time, you know, just as a vice chair of the fundraising effectiveness project and we're going to talk a little bit about that today. But if you're not tracking that, it's this incredible, truly incredible data set available for free to all of us to participate in, to understand what's happening at the pulse of retention and donors and acquisition and all of these sorts of things. But today, Tim, I'm going to say it was probably about a year ago. We're catching up with our buddy, Tim, and he's like, my next project, I'm diving into email. I feel like nobody's doing this. Nobody's talking about this incredible asset that we have. And he wanted to create this gift, not just to neon one customers, but to the entire sector to say, hey, email is this huge opportunity that we should understand more and leverage more for our missions. And guess what? That report is now here and Tim is here to gift it to the entire sector. And so it is our delight to welcome back to the podcast. Tim, San Antonio, get in this house, my friend. Well, hello and thank you for welcoming me to this house. This is always a happy house to visit. For you, you know, who are out there working as one, two, three person shops and you are spinning all the plates, that's why we think accessibility and democratization of this data has got to be quick enough that people can understand what are the high level insights. And so before we dive into this email report, which is fascinating, I kind of want to bring it back to this fundraising effectiveness project report. Yeah, I think that's a good start. And because we need to do some tone setting here and, you know, we try to keep it hopeful. We try to keep it light here, but we also got to be realistic about the places that we're at and we got to talk about generosity and we got to hit it between the eyes because this latest report is pretty darn sobering. I mean, we're seeing donors decline by 10% new donors that are given 2021, you know, decline by nearly 27% and just donor attention has fallen. And I think there's a lot of reasons and we could wax philosophical about that forever, you know, whether the pandemic bubble has sort of subsided or where's the just sort of the rate of giving and generosity going. And so I would love for you to just kind of set the tone with that report as someone who's been so integral of understanding how those findings are developed. And tell us, you know, some about the industry benchmarks and what surprised you. So a little bit of too long didn't read on fundraising effectiveness project. It was founded in the early 2000s as a general initiative to try to understand metrics like donor retention, which were not heavily tracked in the pre 2008 stage. And so what if you what happened around the pandemic was that giving Tuesday had been working on a much larger data commons for generosity and research, crowd funding, foundation giving, impact data, all this, all these different things and all these different partners. And fundraising effectiveness project is the largest data set of individual giving in the world. And Becky, you, you summed up the data at the high level. The big canary in the coal mine here is that typically the narrative is dollars are up, donors are down. That means rich people are giving more. And what's happening is that they're starting to waver even. They're getting tired and they are very beholden to the stock market, which is going to be weird this year. So so I still have hope. I don't think that this is the quote unquote end of the nonprofit sector. This is not doom and gloom, but we need to change what we're doing and get back to what our core point is, which what happened in my opinion is the last 10 years, especially we've transitioned toward a consumer approach to donor engagement. It's a service model. And that's not actually it. It's not what you do is you shift toward that's a transactional engagement with like, you know, nice services around it. And instead we need to look back and connect with people on a meaningful way on in a scalable way of tech. But at the end of the day, you got to start with people first, not the money. Yeah, I agree. And you know, there was lots of chatter about this report because it just dropped when we were at AFP icon. It felt like everywhere we turned our almost talking about it. But I'll say, you know, something that I just want to share with the audience is that, you know, this is a marker that we can look at and so thankful that we have those. But at the end of the day, it's also a calling to say, do you even know what's happening in your own data? Like, well, you know, it's happening in your own file because that's what we need to really pour into and use our, you know, brain power to solve of what can we really control around us. But be a good partner. So we have those metrics, you know, I think all of us can lean in to be good partners to get the data. I think that's a great point, John. And Michael Buckley, who's also part of the initiative and is a member of the AFP Foundation as well. I love talking about like, look, FEP is great. I love FEP, but it's not telling any small nonprofit anything that they don't already know. And the real thing that we need to shift to is the lifeline of what am I supposed to do with this information? These are all very solvable things. But at the end of the day, if we know new donor retention is just awful and you lose money and it costs you money by losing those people. There. Well, this feels like a good transition because I mean, you've poured so many months into bringing this email report into existence. So give us, you know, kind of walk us through just setting the tone for what's inside. I mean, it's out there now, but what can we expect and what kind of drove you all to do this research? So the email report, if folks remember me coming on last year, I was doing a discussion about donors understanding the future of individual giving. That was a great report. The problem with the report is that I'm the one who wrote it. And so this year, we did things better and Abby Jarvis on our team actually wrote the happy. So the genesis of the email report was I knew that communications was an under researched area within our sector. I said, okay, there's a lot of transaction stuff. So if we're really truly under trying to understand the core of what drives and motivates people, there was research done by data axle during the pandemic that showed that 48% of donors prefer email as their communication channel, regardless of generation, by the way. So email is a really good one. And neon one has put a lot of effort into its email tool. So when we looked at 2022 data, we had tens of thousands of campaigns. We had actually 70,000 campaigns that we started with above that, about 72, if I remember correctly. And it was like, you know, we have 6,500 nonprofits that use neon ones ecosystem. But what we said is, well, we can't do that. Because there was like a few, a bunch of emails turned out 40,000 emails were to lists below 250 people on the list. But a lot of it was like a vent invites and stuff like that. And so we said, okay, below a thousands important though, because the other benchmark is Mailchimp. And they're the only ones that had at scale insights onto nonprofit email. Here's the problem. They cut their analysis at a thousand on the list or above. So, I mean, you're making the case that this has been an underrepresented part of our sector. But this is the first time we're giving lens like what's actually working for those groups of people, for those organizations that are small. It's really compelling and interesting. We do have three main takeaways from the report that I can share. So takeaway number one is the benchmarking themselves is that nonprofits need their own benchmarks. So this may be cheating because I might have told you this, but for your listeners, I am going to say the question out loud and I want the listeners to say their answer out loud. Okay, we're going to try to participate even if this is a recording. When is the optimal day of the week to send a newsletter? Something like a newsletter and appeal. I'm not getting into the specifics of the content. It's just something you're sending 250 people or more. I know the answer. John, you. John, I got it wrong. When I bought the first time I heard it in my head. John, do you remember? It's my guess Friday because I feel like that's when we get the fastest response on stuff. Wednesday and Friday. Okay. Wednesday and Friday are the best performing days. Most sector data cited previously. Just Google nonprofit email benchmarks and you'll probably get stuff from campaign monitor or MailChimp or whatever or like another vendor blog quoting those things and that's why they're ranking on SEO. Well, here's the reality. Tuesdays and Thursdays are not the best days for nonprofits. It's Fridays. And so when I told people this and we were doing this roadshow game that had basically a combination of jeopardy and bar trivia and when we would get to the section about that, people would cheer when I would talk about this and say, we need our own data and we need our own data for donations. We can't reference consumer behavior. Next after has a whole video called sparkline of a donation that covered this 10 years ago. Why this is the wrong way to think about it. And so we need our own benchmarking data for everything and especially then when you get into that small versus large, either revenue or contact size or whatever, we need those nuances. We need those nuances. But if we had to start with something, an average across everything, fine. So let's take away number one. Take away number two would be that small nonprofits actually outperform larger organizations in many key metric areas, specifically money and engagement. Click through rate for small list organizations was 10.24%. Wow. That's stellar. Yeah. I mean, I would have never guessed it's that high. John, was it like three or four percent? Yeah, click through, not open rank. That was incredible. I had to quadruple check that number. I mean, I remember when we get it at three or four percent and feel thrilled about something like that. So go tiny nonprofits. And then dollars raised per email contact on file, $6.12 I believe. And then the average for the large nonprofits is 88 cents. The average across the entire data set was $1.11. That means that small nonprofits are raising basically $5 more per email contact on file than large nonprofits. Do they raise the same amount per campaign? No, they do not. They raise less. So we can learn stuff from everybody. Yeah. But I also think, Tim, don't you think that there's application, even for the bigger nonprofit is that don't chase the vanity metrics either. Like just having a big email list is not the win. It's like you got to be emailing the right people too. So I think having a clean list is part of it. And personalizing and knowing like as a marketer, we would sit there and say like segmentation is key. And I mean, we keep saying this on the podcast, knowing and making that one person feel seen and when you drop them in a massive list and you group people, it just requires you to speak more generally. And so I would love to hear your feedback on this because there's some obvious takeaways to us, but maybe the data doesn't support that. No, I think generally not a lot was too surprising. I think it was just validating. There's like nuggets. And that gets into the final takeaway, which I think is the one that most applies to what you just brought up, which is what you say matters and how you say it matters. And I guess we can make an extension of who you say it to matters. One of the first, the first principle of generosity experience design, which is kind of the way we think about things at neon one is a focus on people, not money. And so this flared out, for instance, in a Julia Campbell session at the nonprofit technology conference in Denver where somebody asked, how do I align my content with where they are in the donor's journey? And many people in the crowd started with, well, you can segment them by Cybron, Liebron, you know, think about this bucket gift, that bucket gift. And I think that gets already off base because you're looking at the transaction first. You can absolutely add a filter to say, okay, I want to be able to reference people who gave in this size or this, you know, time of the bucket for monetary stuff, but focus on who they are first segment your list. Okay, if you're an animal organization that does adoptions, do you ask people or flag people by have you adopted from us? Yes or no? Like it's that simple. That's an identity thing. We found because we actually partner with Cheerian Koshi. Oh, hi Cheerian. We love Cheerian. Because he actually built a tool that does generative language, artificial intelligence work using the open AI stuff, the same thing as chat GPT when you get down to its root to analyze emotional sentiment. What words, what feelings engage people better and gratitude, of course, was one of the top ones, if not the top one, like empathy. These are things that like you're not trying to make people feel bad. You're trying to invite them in to solve a problem. So there are some fun things that were surprising. If you want to write the worst engaging email possible, then use the phrase in your subject line, reminder, member meeting. News letter works. That's one of those little nuggets that like a lot of people are like, don't put the word newsletter in your thing. It's like, you know what, in a crowded inbox, it turns out that people like it. So we found going back to the Friday thing, I found the quote unquote most engaging email of 2022. Oh my gosh. Okay. Share. I need to have this. Yes. Give us this case study. It was sent by Science Olympiad in October, I think October 7th. I had to look up the date specifically if that's a Friday, then I nailed it. If not, it's whatever Fridays around there. And they sent it to the criteria that I arbitrarily defined for the most engaging email of 2022 was sent on a Friday to the largest list with the highest click-through rate. And this had like an 11,000 list and a 34% click-through rate. Holy smokes. Holy smokes. And it was a newsletter. It was a newsletter. Have you, have you called them to tell them this? You should totally. I reached out and I said, you are the most engaging email of 2022 and I plan on sending them if it works out. And I've already talked to them about this. So I'm not saying anything I can't promise. I want to screen print the email on a cake and send it to their staff. My wife came up with that idea. We're going to do it. We're going to do it. We actually broke it down. So Abbie and our team and product marketing interviewed them. It's a case study that's on the website you can read about. And it was all about that you build value. You build that bridge on why somebody should kind of situationally care that you've asked them to give to getting something where it's part of your core identity. Yes. Is why you support that organization. And I want to just double click on that because it feels like a common theme that we've been talking about this season. I think one of our 2023 trends was we have to humanize the digital experience. And this is what is going to separate us from, I want to say, the Neanderthals, but really AI. The things that AI cannot do is that level is adding that level of humanity and empathy into it. And when you can find a way for your email, and I'm not just saying email, I know we're talking about this in the context of email, but in the way you engage digitally, if it's human, it's going to have the capacity to be better engaged. And that's what I really like about your findings, Tim, is that you all really hung your hat and said, this is really about engagement. And that's what's trending here. And I love that it's such a great cross multiplier looking at 1500 nonprofits. You're looking at 150 million emails in this report. And I love that you're saying, avoid words like reminder or member or meeting. You need imagery in your emails for higher engagement. Emojis, we don't know. Like preview text, absolutely use, right? Like there's little things like that. The way that we do things here is very community driven, just like you folks. And so even during the report, a concrete example was, I got really excited about preview text like early on. And I drive my team baddie by doing this, but we have a Slack community. I pop in there. There's a channel called Data Drop. And I just use it to be like, here's some ungated information. Like here's a PDF of a report that came out or here's like a graph. We're here some insights that we got from our stuff. And I dropped like preview text being wildly better at engagement. And one of our leaders in the community, a guy named Kieran Johnson from Huntington Arts Council is like, this is great. But what's preview text? And I'm like, oh, Kieran's like savvy. And it helped us go, let's pump the brakes and actually define like a lot of the work that we've been doing lately. And that was an important step, even in the design of the report. The very first thing that meets people is here's a anatomy of an email. And here is actually what we're talking about. So you can contextualize this for your own work. And that's really what benchmarks should do is start the conversation, not end it. You have to look inward. You can only know what is going to work for your community of generosity. The final point I want to make on this is that it goes to what you're talking about, Becky, about human elements and AI. And while I am a big believer in artificial intelligence and the power that it has, something I learned in the last year of reflection to help drive the future of neon ones ecosystem is nonprofits are especially small to mid-size organizations are very proud people. And they don't want to have it implied the technology like there's here's a tip folks if you have your tagline, our mission is your mission. Non-profits hate that. They actually feel it disenfranchises them. And so when we were designing our evolution and messaging, what I realized is that we don't make the magic. The nonprofit makes the magic. The technology is just there to actually enable them to do that. They know what's magical for their donor base. We're never going to know. No AI is ever going to do that. It can queue it up. But you live in those details in those gray areas that only human connection can bring. I mean, such a great point. And I hope that empowers you listener who is really trying to get your head around this moment and this data and what it means for you. And I go back to what John said, which is what is such a great pro tip. It's like the best interpretation is your own data and looking at what's going on in your own shop. And so I want to break this down and get really tactical for those who are taking notes and saying, what can I take away from this conversation? You share five tips in the report around how do we create effective emails like break those down for our listeners. There's a few things that people can do. Actually starting with audience design is a really good starting point. Who are you actually speaking to? And so when we kind of got down to some of these things, subject lines are very important for that. So positive emotions and subject lines actually do really well. So that's a very tactical thing. Like relief actually was the top one. Gratitude was second. Now that I'm taking a quick look at it. So top performing subject line emotions in order, relief, gratitude, pride, excitement and optimism. That's a pretty wide spectrum. That's a pretty good spectrum for any type of mission. And we actually even define what we mean by those. But there's also words that you should avoid. And so things that might impact open rates, click throughs, et cetera, stuff that sounds like work basically. Meeting. Things that sound like work. I love it. Meeting. So that's an interesting one. Imagery helps. Imagery helps. Canvas made this a lot easier. We're actually running for donor gratitude week in our community. A Canva design contest for postcards. We're going to actually buy the postcards for the top winning design. Things like little stuff like that to get people feeling like they're designers. I think that's building the confidence there. But salutations matter. Julie Cooper actually did a great job for us on writing about salutations. And really we looked at the number of times that nonprofits use the word you in their copy. I enjoyed doing that. And I asked them, I said, can you look at this? And can you look at how many calls to action that people have to forms and things like that? And then make it scannable. Make it scannable. You can break up the actual thing. If it's a big block of text, people's eyes are going to glaze over. The eye is lazy in many ways. It's drawn to white space. And so if you have a big block of text, people actually, they disassociate with what you're saying. So break it up and have a solid call to action, a clear call to action. Always try to include something. Even if it's not an appeal, have a next step. Have a point. Make them feel that they can be involved. Those are, I think, some of the top tips to make this actionable. And any size nonprofit can do this. You have imagery. You know how to use the word you. Use it. The top performing email used it 10 times. That's cool. So it validates things that copywriters in the nonprofit marketing space have been saying for years, there's actual data to validate this now. And that's what I'm excited about this because if it told us a weird story, we'd have to probably go back and ask if we did it right. But it's very close enough to what we're seeing, but it's different enough that says, okay, we need our own stuff. And so this is the beginning of a conversation. I think that there's a beautiful, beautiful world out there. And I also hope it drives other vendors to approach it this way too. Yeah. But I love what email can unlock and even your affirmation that newsletter still had a great open rate in saying that because I think as we move beyond money, this is signaling. When someone consistently opens a newsletter, it's showing that they're in it with you. And how can we channel that? How can we think 2.0? So as we kind of round this conversation out, I love that we're going to come back to the word effectiveness because we started with FUP and when we're kind of rounding out how can a nonprofit really start to build an effective email program today, kind of gathering all this thought that you put into this in research? One, I'm not a fan of the let's bring business efficiency to nonprofits. That's why I like the word effective versus efficiency. I think it's a loaded term and effective engagement always starts with people. It's not the bottom line. And so if you start small, such as make your base newsletter and copy it, just copy it and split it and change at least even one element and do one list of people who've donated and one list of people who've got to it. Yeah. That's that's a be testing. You don't need to set up an automated, you know, zap your top that that that that that no, just map it out, map out the journey that you want people to take and design around that. And you could start with with people who are new to you, people who have been introduced to you and people who are big fans of you. That's three simple groups. Define that as you will. Doesn't have to be monetary base to include volunteers here, include board members and their extended networks. Like there's generosity is not money. And so the experience of design around it needs to be holistic as well. Thank you for just talking about engagement in the context of this. I mean, we just had a great episode with Ashley Budd and we really dove into what Cornell has done to completely reimagine engagement through the lens mostly of email and through digital engagement. And I think, you know, we have these conversations on the podcast and so much of it goes back to the exact same principles of make people feel seen, give them value in what you're saying. And I do think that there are some really good tactical tips here that just like as a writer, I appreciate so much and the way that you can break up your texts, the way you can add emojis, the way I mean, even bolding certain things in sections. I mean, there is literal data that show people who have some level of neuro diversity mind gravitate toward bold writing more and it draws the eye out. So I think that there's a lot to be learned here in terms of what we can do tactically on the black and white side. And also what we can do to just see the human being, make it personal and don't give up on your email. I just think email is so iterative. It is moving and changing all the time. And I think we've got to commit to it, which is why we value that you have put this report out so much. So thank you, Tim. It's the most cost effective thing that you can do at scale. It's very flexible. Even the platforms that might have email built into it and it's not amazing. It's still better than not doing anything at all. You can design text based emails that are very engaging. They don't have to be some work of art many times, actually, the more authentic, gritty, personable style that where you're talking directly to somebody, that performs better. So there's a lot to learn here, but at the end of the day, this is very achievable for everybody. And that's why we've put this out for the sector and we're going to continue to invest in other free resources. So a digital only version should be available very soon. So you don't have to download a PDF printed and you can just click around in our website and not leave whatsoever that's being finished right now. And we're going to continue to add things. I have some really ambitious ideas around where we can go with our research. Well, we can't wait to watch this unfold, Tim. I mean, I just want to give everybody out there some encouragement and say, you know, as a long play, it is a play. And we understand that it takes a lot of time to build these things. So little pro tip is syndicate that email because not everybody's hanging out an email. Take that content, put it on your social channels, fold it into your direct mail, put it everywhere because these messages are important and we need to be omni-channel in the way that we think about it. So Tim, you've been on the podcast before. You know that we end all of our conversations with a one good thing. So how can you roll up something that we could glean from this email report that people could take away today? What's your one good thing? And I mean, we're recording on Tim's birthday. So this is like life lesson day from Tim. How did we not even talk about this? I mean, we're not going to seem to the public. We did sing a little bit to Tim when he came on. So what I am going to do for my birthday, what I always do is support a nonprofit. And so one of the things that I'm learning is that there's different interpretations of wealth. We even started talking about that very early on in terms of the difference between cash and wealth. And if we look at the landscape of black entrepreneurship in America, for instance, there's a huge gap. So for my birthday, I'm encouraging people to donate to Black Connect Incorporated. And so it's a fantastic organization that supports black entrepreneurs to get access to that wealth, access to that ability to create something for their communities. And what I know is that they're able to do that because of great connections, great storytelling. It's a fantastic organization. So that's what I'm going to use my space to do is lift that up. Thanks for your commitment to just democratization, to accessibility. And that feels so core to your value setting, your ethos. Every time we talk to you, there's a way that you take this curiosity and you just share it with people around you for good. And that is just one of the reasons that we adore you. And we're just so glad to be in alignment and in friendship with you, Tim. Yeah, I mean, we want people to be able to connect with you and with this incredible report. So just round it out. Tell us where to find you, where to follow you and where to get their hands on this report. I'm a great follow, I think, on LinkedIn, Tim Cerrantonio. I have a weekly newsletter where I talk about data and connecting fundraisers and donors together. But neon1.com, where you can find the report, we could throw stuff in the show notes too. And yeah, download it, get it. It's free. We put a lot of effort into it. It's beautiful. And same with Fundraising Effectness Project. This does not cost you anything other than the time that it takes to learn and understand and apply. But that's our job is to help you apply it even further. So looking forward to doing that. Thank you, Tim. Appreciate all that you do, neon, FEP. Just keep going, keep diving into the research and elevating the sector for us. Great. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Hey friends, thanks so much for being here. Did you know we create a landing page for each podcast episode with helpful links, free bees and even shareable graphics? 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