Episode Transcript
Monica Pitts 0:00
Monica, hello again, and welcome back to the marketing with purpose podcast. My name is Monica Pitts, and with me today, I have one of my favorite people to interview, Jamie Fredericks, now, Jamie and I have done lots of nonprofit focused interviews over the years, and we've also worked hand in hand with a lot of local nonprofits in the Columbia, Missouri area, to help them with their year end giving campaigns. And Jamie came to me earlier this year with this idea. She wanted to do a research study. And I love research studies, and she was going to come through the data, which is even better, because I get a little lost in it sometimes without visual charts, and today we're going to discuss the findings. So Jamie, why don't you take a second introduce yourself and also like what motivated you to do this study? Yeah, thank you. Thanks
Jaime Freidrichs 0:55
for having me. So I, for the past six plus years, have been working independently as a fundraising coach, helping small and mighty nonprofits make the most of their limited fundraising time, helping them figure out what's going to give them, you know, the highest return on investment, how to be really effective and efficient and ethical in their fundraising so they get really good results. And I am so frequently asked questions like, how many emails should we plan to send at year end? And there's, I mean, there's a lot of ways you can answer that question. There's a lot of advice online that's pretty consistent, that sort of states that more email is better, or don't be afraid to email too much. And that's advice that I think you and I have both shared through the years, because truly with the way most nonprofits are stretched. They don't have the capacity to put together too much email in most cases, and so, you know, you can say pretty safely, like, you know, do as much as you're able to do, because it tends to work. But what always sort of held me back was that, although this is very much the accepted conventional wisdom that you'll see on, you know, all the marketing blogs and, you know, fundraising articles that you can find, there's really not any data driven specific thing to point to, to say, Yes, see, look, this is true. And in addition to coaching nonprofits, I also have the pleasure of teaching a graduate school course on fundraising online for Arizona State University. And my students at the first of the year were raising this very question as well that I had just heard for weeks as we were finishing up here and giving. And so I thought, well, you know, for students in an academic program, I really need to point them to something that is research driven. And so I use our excellent library system to look through all different scholarly journals and articles, which is not as difficult as it sounds, because it has very good search functionality, and I could find nothing to really say definitively Yes, this is, you know, a right number of emails. And what was really sort of driving some of their questions was feeling like they had been over reached out to in the month prior. And so I just started thinking, I wish I could answer this question and then realize that we do have this wonderful local campaign that more and more nonprofits every year participate in, and and perhaps, if we could get them to share some information with us, we could figure out an answer to share with people to this question and to see you know whether the conventional wisdom really holds up.
Monica Pitts 4:15
And I we're lucky too, because for many years, may create did gather all the website data for the campaign. And the campaign that we're talking about is como gives.com and so, you know, they're awesome. There's what I don't even know how many nonprofits are participating this year, because we actually retired from our position as webmasters this year, after I think 11 or 12 years of it. So I'm excited for them to start on their new journey. But I also think it's really cool that we got to wrap up that experience with even more like fodder for them to make decisions in their marketing. So that's pretty cool. Cool, so we know why we did this thing. And I've been only curious about it too, because for years, I've told people from about the time of November 1 until January 2. I'm going to count up the emails, 1-234-567-8910, 1112, 13, I had 13 emails written for them that they could use and plug in their own information. And okay, but this study does not necessarily say that we should send 13 emails. What does it say? Jamie,
Jaime Freidrichs 5:40
so I'll preface this by saying I don't feel like I got super definitive results, and we can talk a little bit about the limitations in a minute, but what I do feel like the data showed was that I think there was a bit of a sweet spot in terms of amount of email sent, and and I didn't ask them to think back all the way to November 1. I used Giving Tuesday as the sort of start of that campaign, because that's when the campaign started through December 31 and so, you know, about a month long period, and the sweet spot looked to be between four and seven emails. There was some evidence that sending fewer than four emails yielded worse results in some ways, and there was also some evidence that more eight or more emails started to lead to some higher unsubscribe rates, which is also, you know, behind the question that I get from a lot of nonprofits, they worry that about people unsubscribing, and that is actually not a personal worry of mine. I think unsubscribes can be really, really useful, because it hones your list down to the people who really love you and really want to hear from you. And there's a lot of good reasons behind it, but nonprofits really want to keep all the people on their list, and so if that is one of their goals, then you know, thinking about, Okay, what point do we start to get diminishing returns on the amount of email we're sending, and, you know, start to have some negative reactions? And so the study, you know, again, was not super definitive from every measure, but I think four to seven is a pretty good sweet spot, and I think that actually works really well in the month of December, because when you think about it, four to seven emails could be about one a week, with room to send a few more in those like key last three days of the year when a lot of giving happens.
Monica Pitts 7:55
Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think it fits really well. And like looking at our proposed email, the reason that it feels like we have so many is because we have three slated for giving Tuesday and three slated for December 31 so they're sick right there. And so maybe you don't need so many those days. Maybe you just need to send one on those days. And, yeah, but there was something else too that we so one of the things when we talked about planning this information is I was really interested in seeing if they sent emails throughout the year, because I I feel like the people who have the highest unsubscribe rate would be the people who don't usually email their donors, and then they are emailing them a whole lot, and their donors are not used to hearing from them and and so I feel like if you have a healthy cadence communicating with your donors throughout the year, then sending them four to seven emails in the month of December, should not turn them off. It's they knew they were going to get these emails, because you would have told them, like earlier in the year, that you're running this campaign, right? And Jamie, can you talk a little bit about what the The study found for that question?
Jaime Freidrichs 9:21
Yeah, I think that was such a smart addition to the study that you brought into it. And I think it, you know, monthly email is also valuable, not just from the standpoint of, you know, then your email list isn't surprised when they suddenly hear from you in December, but also from the standpoint of, then you have, you know, 11 prior months of sharing information about the impact you make and telling your story, and you know, really planting seeds and laying groundwork for them to know and understand and love you by the time you get to those urine masks. And so it does seem like it would be very beneficial. To have at least that level of communication throughout the year. And so what the data showed when we compared the nonprofits who said yes, we email our list at least monthly or more, versus those who said less, you know, quarterly or just rarely. It did show, for the most part, stronger results for those who had that established cadence, like you said, and who had, you know, done some of that groundwork prior to getting to year end. And so I think that's the other recommendation. I feel really comfortable coming out of the study saying is that it it is probably worthwhile to establish a monthly email communication with your supporters to help them to understand the impact that they're giving to you is making through your organization, and to feel really, really appreciated for their past support, and to just help them understand how important that philanthropic giving is by the time that you get to when, when you are in the midst of a year in campaign. And just to make sure there's not a misunderstanding, I'm not saying you should only ask at the end of the year. There will be times other times throughout the year that you will want to ask. But I also know for a large number of nonprofits, it's really all about December in their fundraising cycle, and that the study did not look at whether that is good or bad, or how you should do things. You know that that's a conversation for another time. But the reality is, a lot of nonprofits rely on December fundraising, and so that's why that was sort of the focus of how to, you know, maximize that specific thing, and specifically in the realm of online giving, which como gives as an exclusively online campaign, or almost exclusively online campaign, yeah,
Monica Pitts 12:09
the only non online donations that they take is, like big like rollover gifts from tax. Can't remember the exact words, but yeah, from
Jaime Freidrichs 12:20
IRAs, and then yeah, direct gifts from the donor, advice funds that are held within the foundation. But like, I mean, those are just like, little, like, tiny caveats the vast majority, which you know, that was the great thing about partnering with you and you seeing the back end data for so many years is that you were able to say one that email did tend to be the largest driver of donations versus, you know, one of the limitations of the study is that it didn't look at how social media impacted which social media is obviously very important to online giving. But, you know, looking historically at Como gives email tends to drive. You could see that web traffic, that email is driving more donations than social media tended to. And you know again, that that most of the donations were coming through the website, not through these other like sort of special set aside things. And so
Monica Pitts 13:19
looking at email within
Jaime Freidrichs 13:21
the context of Como gives felt especially relevant.
Monica Pitts 13:24
Yeah, every year I would go through and I would look at the data and see where my highest converting traffic sources were. So email didn't bring in the most donations, it just had the highest conversion rate of any other type of traffic source, next to direct traffic. So people who typed in Como gets.com were very highly likely to give like in the I should actually pull up the exact metrics. Want to say it was like 16 to 17% conversion rate, and then email traffic was right behind there, and social media traffic was closer to, like, the three to 5% conversion rate. And so I was include, I was encouraging my nonprofits to make sure that they're sending their emails and asking in their emails, because it has such a high conversion rate for the website and the social media is great to tell your story and to keep people updated about stuff, but the likelihood of them seeing that post is much lower because it doesn't stay in the feed forever, while that email is going to sit in their inbox until they open it or delete it, right? And so it's just the nature of the communication. And honestly, like text is has an even higher open rate, right? And I, I can't actually track that that, so I don't know. It'd be really interesting to find that metric. But yeah, so just to be clear, it wasn't the highest number of donations, like the whole highest dollars, but it was the highest, one of the highest converting types of website traffic. Yeah. Also when, when Jamie talks about benefit, she's talking about the ability of the nonprofit to reach their goal for their fundraising that year. And so, like, because, like, there were 71 organizations in the study, and some of them raised just a couple $1,000 and others raised, like, 10s of 1000s of dollars, right? And so there is a huge gap in there. And so I think that actually made the study cool, because it wasn't just, Oh, these are the people with paid staff and, like all this admin support and professional email systems and that kind of thing. It was from the little to the big organizations. And so every year we would have them set goals, and then we would track how they progress towards their goals throughout the campaign. It was like these little thermometers that automatically updated. And so that was interesting, that one of the things that we kind of bunny trailed into as we were planning this study, was, did they reach their goal that year? Did they reach their goal the year before and then raise even more money the next year? And I think that was probably the least definitive results of this study. Where did they reach their goal? That one was easier, but then the year over year goal and raising more money the next year. You want to talk about that a little bit. Jamie,
Jaime Freidrichs 16:34
yeah. I mean, that's a significant limitation. What we found in the data was that, you know, first we had to decide, okay, how, how are we going to define fundraising success and just doing it based on gross amount raised? You know, what is the total amount raised? Really didn't seem like the best measure to to gage apples to apples, because we really do have this delightful mix of organizations who participate, and some have very well established, well oiled fundraising programs that go back decades and a lot of ability to put effort into that. And others are grassroots, very, very small and raising far less money, but also maybe don't need to raise, you know, the quite the level of money. And so just looking based on, you know, the leaderboard of who raised the most, really didn't seem like a great metric of success to me. And so we didn't look too much at just total dollars raised. So the other ways you might define success are, how close did you come to achieving your fundraising goal that that come out gives required everyone to set, which was a, I think, you know, that's a great metric. That's what I tend to look at when I'm measuring the success of a fundraising campaign. We set a goal. Did we reach it by? How much did we exceed it? And then, you know, you can draw conclusions from there. The other way, you might judge success of a fundraising campaign, which is also possible to do with our criminal gifts data, is, how did you do compared to the same time last year? And what was frustrating in the study is that when I ran the data looking at how organizations did compared to their goal, I got very clear results pointing to more email, at least up to, you know, sort of a midpoint, got them closer to their goal. And in fact, you know, the top 25% of email senders were, or I'm sorry, the top 25% of organizations compared to goals. Of those who raised 96% of goals or more were the top 20, the top quadrille, and they definitely had a higher average number of emails sent and a higher median number of emails sent, and and the same was true in the lower quadrat, where it was very, very much lower. And so that seemed very definitive when I looked at the data the other way, with how they did compared to the prior year. All that went away and so, and in fact, like kind of showed a little bit of an inverse thing happening.
Monica Pitts 19:20
And so
Jaime Freidrichs 19:21
I don't know in the study which is a more accurate measure of their success, because when we started talking about these results, we realized, Oh, we don't know how they set these goals, and we don't know what changes they made between the different years. And then the other, you know, really, really significant limitation of the study, of course, is that we're making a, you know, a quantitative study that's looking at numbers, but we didn't do anything to really look at or measure for quality. The email can. Communications being sent. And I suspect there's, well, I know, because I'm on so many people's email lists, no, there is a wide variation and in the quality of a lot of these year end fundraising emails. And so, you know, we don't know how much of the differentiation in performance is due to that, as opposed to pure frequency. But I do think in terms of what makes a quality year end email, there are pretty clear best practices around that you do a great job of presenting and sharing that. I think you know, people who follow that method, I think, create really strong emails, but, but what this study was really looking at was, you know, first frequency, and then also, like, the impact of having that established monthly program. Yeah,
Monica Pitts 20:55
I was like, Man, the year over year, this is so hard because they could have gotten a completely new director. They could have just used the exact same emails as last year. They might have sent them at different times of day. They might have, like, it could be anything, right, if they some people, like, incorporated a live fundraiser one year and not the other year, right? And so, like all those things change the outcome of your campaign. You know, if you had added October fundraiser, then the amount in your year end giving campaign might be lower because they're so close together, right? But you don't know, like, I don't know any of that information. And so that was one thing. I was like, Oh my gosh, my brain is, like, hanging all over the place with variables that are inconsistent, like, consistent. And I do know that after, like, reviewing the year and giving email data for como gives year over year. I mean, for the last you know 12 years that the years that we did consistent communication with our donor base throughout the year were the years that we had better open rates on our emails and more donations made through the campaign specific emails not branded for An individual nonprofit, but for the campaign as a whole, and all of our emails for years were extremely consistent, just updated year over year or rewritten. If there was a specific email that we didn't feel like worked, we knew what we we we thought the data should be and if it didn't meet that mark, then we would rewrite the email, put new subject lines on it, and try again the following year. And then, after having that more frequent cadence, they adjusted, and they didn't send monthly emails anymore, and they changed all the emails up. And then the donations coming in through emails were not, like, it was almost none, and I was, like, watching the data and just freaking out. I'm like, who's?
Unknown Speaker 23:09
Like, there's I'm
Monica Pitts 23:11
missing 10s of 1000s of dollars right now, and it really stressed me out. But then I realized it was not something I could fix. So it was okay. Actually, I did go through my email training and send it over. That sounds terrible, doesn't it, but to the new people who were managing the email, they hadn't done it for the last like 10 years. And I was like, Okay, here's the stuff that I learned in this video. But like Jamie was said, there are some really good tactics, and the only one that I would really say you absolutely need to do is make sure that you have a very clear ask in your email up at the top with a link, if not a button, like it has to it has to be there friend just up at the top, ask Clearly it's you've done all of your like dating earlier in the year, and so now you get to ask, ask them, ask them on this date, or ask them for this proposal right now. And and just make sure it's very clear and that you can click and it's right there at the top of the email, like maybe in a button,
Jaime Freidrichs 24:19
and ask proudly, because your organization does great work and is really, really worthy of support. And so you don't need to feel shy or ashamed about being in a fundraising campaign and asking people to support it, because you're going to do wonderful things with that money. And so don't, don't hide. You're exactly right. Don't hide the ask
Monica Pitts 24:44
no and don't hide like don't hide behind the fear of the unsubscribe or like that. You're bugging people. This is not the time to do that. I mean, I, I have written so many urine giving email. Emails, and I write them from the deepest point of gratitude and joy, and I really feel like if people do not want to open up that email and have them tell me that they are wonderful human beings facilitating miracles every day, then they can unsubscribe. That's fine, because that's where I'm coming from with these emails. Like I love you so much, and if you don't want to hear my love, then you can unsubscribe. And that is fine, but, I mean, it's not gross. It's an act of gratitude, you know? And so please don't, don't feel like you're bugging them because you're not, you're you're filling their cup and allowing them to help you fill yours and that of others. So there's nothing wrong with that, nothing. And I just want
Jaime Freidrichs 25:41
to make a quick clarification about the unsubscribe data. And so when looking at that, one of the hypothesis hypotheses, hypothesis that I tested was that no organization would have an unsubscribe rate higher than 5% I picked 5% as kind of an arbitrary thing, because I think that would be the percentage where that would start to scare me, not really. I'm not a marketer, and so I probably should have gotten your guidance on that. But, you know, that's just where it felt like maybe this is a problem, and like, lower than that, I could probably live with. And that hypothesis proved to be true. None of the 71 organizations who were in the study who reported their unsubscribe rate had an had a rate that was higher than 5% no matter how many emails they sent. The I think the highest number of emails sent was 26 over the course of that campaign window, and even they didn't have unsubscribe rate of higher than 5% and so, you know, and I believe, they were one of the higher grossing organizations as well, so they
Monica Pitts 27:00
might have had A lot of emails and or maybe a lot of people on their email list that weren't really right for their email list, because that happens sometimes, you know, yeah, again,
Jaime Freidrichs 27:10
I mean, they didn't have that many unsubscribes, um, but I did, but this, the data did show that those who emailed more than eight times tended to have a higher unsubscribe rate. And when I started looking into, okay, well, what's really an acceptable unsubscribe rate for a nonprofit, it seemed like a lot of webby people were recommending around like, one or 2% is somewhat normal, okay? And there were very few organizations who even were at that level. So I do feel like you know, one hope that I had for the study was would be to help alleviate this fear that people have of the unsubscribe. And I do think, you know, it's not like you're proudly asking through email during your year end campaign is resulting in just massive, you know, floods of people unsubscribing from your email list like that didn't happen at all. And that is something I feel like this study can say very, very definitively,
Monica Pitts 28:20
and I have also told people to like, you can see who unsubscribes and if it is someone who's very important to you, like, so just go out, look at your unsubscribe list. If it's somebody who's really important to you, if it's a major donor, if it's a board member, you can ask them like, you can talk to them about it, because I think they would give you great feedback, like, it could have just been an accident, quite frankly, or it could have been on purpose. But if it was on purpose, you want to know why you want to understand, like, why they wouldn't want to get your messaging. And so it can be a great learning experience. And you can ask them to resubscribe Absolutely. You can resubscribe them
Jaime Freidrichs 29:03
well. And I think a lot of times unsubscribes aren't even about you. I mean, people just have, like, a different, like, change of life circumstances, you know, I my guess is a lot of them come from, like, people moving to different areas, and they choose to then support a different set of nonprofits, and then, and they're just not as interested in your news because it's not as relevant to them, because they don't live there anymore. Again, you know, that's nothing you did or could have done. It, just someone's life changed. I
Monica Pitts 29:28
know or like, you go, you're a traveler, right? And so you might go to a different venue or a different like, in my case, yoga studio or aerial studio, and then they keep emailing me, and I'm like, Yeah, it's really not going to be in Costa Rica that often. And so I probably don't need your email updates if all they're doing is telling me about workshops and classes, because I'm just not there. And so I unsubscribe. And it's not that I didn't enjoy the experience or I don't love the studio, it's that I am just not there. And so I don't, I think. That's a very valid point. They unsubscribe for a lot of reasons. And if you just export your list and look at the humans, and if there's somebody that really matters to you on that list, you should reach out to them, because there's a learning experience to be had there with that information. So before we wrap up, Jamie, I have to tell you a story back way back in the day when Jamie was first starting her career, she, um, worked for Woodhaven, yeah. Um, they serve people with disabilities, and she had a booth in a trade show. I'm getting chills just talking about it, um, where she had people, like, sign a wall, saying that they would stop using derogatory words to describe other people's behaviors. What because that is that's insulting to people with disabilities, and I am so thankful that you did that it changed my vocabulary forever. I still do not use any of those words, and as I hear my children starting to use them, I refuse it in my house, I'm like, No, this is unacceptable. That's not how we describe other human beings. Like if you think that they are acting like a jerk, you can say they are acting like a jerk, but you can leave all those other words off the table, because that's just not acceptable. And so I thank you. Thank you. You made a difference, and it continues. It continues. So
Jaime Freidrichs 31:24
thank you so much. I
Monica Pitts 31:25
just didn't know, like I never considered something.
Jaime Freidrichs 31:28
People don't people are don't want to be insulting. Your children don't want to be disrespectful and insulting. They just don't. If you don't have someone with disabilities in your life, you probably just don't think about how hearing those kinds of things can affect them. And so that is a great thing about the mission of Woodhaven and other providers like them, just providing that bit of education. And I was the best place I could have started my career. I'm so grateful to them.
Monica Pitts 31:58
They're doing so well. I had actually just drove out their facilities. It's like, wow, they're expanding. It's incredible. And like, even so, with the vocabulary, thought like I was driving in the car with it was all women and 112 year old boy, and he said My brother was sitting there crying like a girl. And I was like, buddy, no. Just no disparaging marks about girls in this car. Like, that was, I'm like, you can say that he was crying like a baby, but no, no, no, you don't throw like a girl. You don't hit like a girl, and you don't cry like a girl. Because those are not, it's not, that's not it. And so if you're saying that as an insult, like, yeah, not, if it's an insult, yeah, really good thing to throw, like a girl. Like, there's some, some women even throw really well, yeah, exactly like you can, yeah, you can champion the girl thrower, but don't insult the girl thrower, right? Yeah, yeah, no. So I appreciate your going out of your way to change that and and to make that I hope it impacted a lot of other people too. So Jamie, tell people where they can find you. I feel like we should probably, if you're okay with it, like link to the study results in the show notes so they can read all of Jamie's words. It's really written like a research report. It's well done.
Jaime Freidrichs 33:21
I am this, like, sort of the my road not traveled is academic. And you know, I get to, like, stretch that muscle a little bit by with the privilege of teaching. But like, yeah, I could have totally been, like, a academic nerd. And so this is my little bit of pretending to that. But yes, so the studies on my website, it's maximizing nonprofits.com it's going to be shared this week, which will already be in the past by the time this airs in my monthly email newsletter, which you go when you go to my website, you can sign up for but we can certainly share in the show notes a just direct link to the study that you can read through. And I did try to, you know, bold the key parts and then include a abstract at the beginning and a summary at the end. So if all you want to do is skim it's hopefully pretty skimmable, and yeah, and I'd love to hear from people about it too. Just like what people think, what surprised you, I will not be conducting a follow up, because I did realize that, like, there's a reason this is my path not traveled, and it was, you know, really, really hard to make time to do this work, even though I really enjoyed it and it was fun, but, you know, clients and students and family and everything else tended to come first, and so I just don't know that more of this is in the cards, but I'd certainly love to hear people's thoughts about it and continue. The conversation, because I do think nonprofits can continue to wonder and ponder these questions. And I'm grateful for all the people out there who do this kind of research. I really eat it up. And so, you know, there's a lot of out there about other fundraising related topics that are really, really helpful. And so maybe this can be like, just like a small piece in that overall mix
Monica Pitts 35:25
we will be a drop in your pond. Well, thank you so much for hanging out with me, Jamie, and thank you everyone for joining us as we geeked out about year end fundraising and emails and how many to send and unsubscribe rates and all those really weird things that you know as a marketer, you you question and you learn about. So if you enjoyed this podcast and you want to share it with somebody, you should, because, you know, that's really sweet. But then also you can subscribe, and then you'll get a notification about our next episode, because we are always talking about something strange around here, or beneficial, whatever. Okay, so with that, thank you once again, and until next time, go forth and mark it with purpose.
