Okay. Hi everyone.
Thank you so much for being here and for doing that
technology check for me.
I am so appreciative of you all being here, and I am
going to jump right into things because as we're gonna cover a
lot of ground about how to write effective email appeals
in a very short period of time.
So if you're not familiar with me,
hello, my name is Abby Jarvis.
I'm part of the team over at Neon One.
If you're not familiar with us,
if this is kind of the first time you've interacted with us,
we're a software platform that provides fundraising tools and
donor management services, lots of other tools to nonprofits.
So we have a number of different,
different products, but I wanted to reassure you two things.
So I see some familiar names here.
If you are a Neon One user,
everything you learn here today is gonna be applicable
in Neon CRM.
It but if you're not a Neon. One user, that's phenomenal.
We are so happy you're here.
You're gonna be able to use everything we talk about today
at your own organization regardless of the tools you're using.
So just a couple little housekeeping things because
these questions always come up.
Please do ask me questions.
I want this to be as good for you and is useful for you as possible.
So use that q and a box to ask questions.
And I'm encouraging you to use that q and a box because I also
love it when people talk to me in the chat,
and I'm gonna ask you to do that today.
But when that happens, the chat can move really quickly,
and it can be hard for me to catch all of the questions.
So if you have questions, put them in the Q and A box,
it will be much more likely that I'm able to see them and respond to them.
And if you need me to stay a little late to hit a lot of
those questions, that's okay.
We can do that.
The other question I get every time is are you recording this
webinar and can I have the slides And the answer is yes?
I am recording this webinar,
and I will give you the slides and even a transcript,
and some other goodies,
in a follow-up and that will land in your inbox tomorrow morning.
So if you need to revisit this or if you wanna share it
with someone no problem.
You can forward it to whomever, and,
and you'll get that tomorrow morning.
So
my picture is not showing up, but hello.
There I am.
Okay.
So if you are wondering who I am and why I'm talking to you
about email appeals, my name is Abby,
but I covered that already.
I've been in the nonprofit tech industry for a little over
eleven years now,
and I've gotten really passionate about understanding
what donors love when they interact with their favorite
nonprofit, why they behave the way they do,
and how you can use data about your donors to reach them more
effectively and inspire them to be involved with your cause.
So that's who I am.
The research that I'm gonna pull on today,
I hope you will be able take back to your desks.
I assume you're already at a desk,
but apply this to your own email appeals.
So
before we really dig into it, I wanna ask you,
how comfortable are you with writing and
sending email appeals?
Is this something that you're an old pro at and you're just,
like, looking for some maybe updated best practices?
Is this not your favorite thing?
Which is understandable.
Writing appeals is is really intimidating.
Let me know in the chat how you feel about,
writing email appeals,
because I'll kind of tailor what I talk about today a
little bit based on what your experiences are and what you're interested in.
So Eric is in between the two options.
Eric, I feel like a lot of people are in your shoes.
Could do this all day, update the best record.
Now my favorite thing. We have a pretty pretty good range.
Oh, someone's in grant writing.
If you can write a grant, I promise you can write an overview.
Okay.
Perfect.
This is really helpful.
And I am going to pro at sending,
but learning the writing parts.
That's a really good call out.
So the reason I ask is because we are gonna have a little bit
of new best practices and,
some interesting data that you can use.
But some of you sound like you're very familiar with this topic.
And if you see any or if you have any, like,
pearls of wisdom that you would like to drop in the chat,
I highly recommend you do so. Okay. Whoops.
For those of you who are interested,
I did put together this checklist that you can use
during your next appeal.
I'll also make sure this is on the page that I send you to,
and when I send you the,
when I send you the recording,
and I did wanna call out this comment from Lily Stark,
because I feel like it's really important.
I often feel like this is a way or it's a waste of time to be honest.
We don't get a ton of donations based on emails mostly direct
communications and written appeals.
And I think that is fascinating, and I think that is fine.
If that is the way your donors love to support you,
I encourage you to continue on that.
But this is a perfect segue into the next, and I'm before I
segue into the thing.
I'm gonna drop y'all a link.
If the QR code isn't working for you,
I've just dropped a link in the chat to where you can download
this, this thing.
Anyway,
I love that Lily added that because
we found some really interesting,
data around donor preferences,
but Lily's comment about the fact, their her donors,
their donors mostly give through other channels is
fantastic because this
just proves that this statistic that we found is not
necessarily applicable to every non profit every time.
So we looked, a couple of different things.
I believe this statistic forty eight percent of donors site,
email as a preferred communication method.
That comes from, a resource from nonprofit tech for good,
which if you're not familiar with Heather over at nonprofit
tech for good, I highly recommend you check her out.
She is phenomenal.
But when when she pulled this together,
she found that almost half of donors prefer email,
both for receiving updates and for receiving appeals.
And that beat out direct mail and social media and then other
things like texting and phone calls.
But as as Lily's comment kind of brings up, not
every donor base has the same preferences as everyone else.
So As we run through this, take what you can from this.
You know your donor base better than anybody else does.
So take what you can from this presentation
and maybe some of it will be applicable to direct mail appeals.
Maybe some of it will get you more excited about writing email appeals.
So now I'm gonna kind of throw a lot of information at you in
a short period of time, but I hope it's gonna be absorbable.
I want to call out for a lot of you.
I have encountered a lot of fundraisers who have a lot of
trepidation almost around sending emails especially email
appeals because they feel like they may be pestering the
people on their lists or maybe they're being
intrusive And I want to remind you that, again,
that half of donors have told us that their preferred
communications channel for interacting with you is email.
And when you are sending someone an invitation to give,
when you're sending them an email appeal,
you're communicating with them through their preferred channel,
And you're inviting them to support a cause that they've
already proven in some way that they care about.
So that's an important thing.. You're not annoying them.
You're inviting them to do something that already
indicated that they love.
So that invitation is phenomenal.
But it's even better when it is presented to them in a nicely
designed email appeal, And your email appeals design can make a
big impression on people, right, when they open it.
So here are some design tips to keep in mind as you prepare
your next appeal.
You're gonna see a number of screenshots throughout this.
So I wanna call out where these screenshots are coming from.
To illustrate some of these best practices,
I'm gonna use this appeal, which was sent to my colleague,
Tim, from IPH. They are a non profit that is local to him.
They serve New York State,
and they did a fantastic job with this appeal.
And I'm gonna use it as an example for a lot of what we're
gonna talk about.
I feel like it's better than a silly one that I came up with.
So when people open your email, they should recognize
you And that means using
signals, design elements that they will associate with your organization.
Typically, that includes at least your organization's brand colors and your logo.
And I say typically because there are some exceptions And
this email is actually one of those exceptions.
This is a Valentine's. Day appeal.
So IPH used a color scheme that's slightly different than
their organization's overall brand colors.
But I did wanna point out, and I did hear
that in two places,
so both here and their header and then down here in their
footer, they still have their logo in their brand colors.
And that lets people know, subtly who this email is coming
from even before they actually read the body of the email.
You may also want to use some other branding elements too.
You may be able to explore using some custom fonts, and
I'm gonna get into fonts more in a minute.
And you will also want to try to choose images that line up
with your organization's visual identity.
So a simple example,
if you tend to use a lot of black and white photos
on your site or in your appeals,
maybe you wanna use black and white photos here.
Or if you like using lots of bright colors, you may
wanna continue to use bright colors in your email appeal
because people have kind of. They use that as a marker to
understand who you are and,
that those branding elements are hard to quantify,
but they do make a subconscious impression on people.
Now I'm gonna clarify.
These two images did not come from, from IPH.
They also did not necessarily come from the on one users are
images I pulled from appeals I myself have gotten from other organizations.
But I pulled these because when we're talking about imagery,
a really important best practice is to look for images
that are people centered.
And you'll notice this asterisk here by people because this is
another rule that has exceptions.
Animals and other characters,
especially if they're anthropomorphized.
So, like, given human characteristics can also work in these images.
Your goal in any imagery you use in an appeal is to
show your readers something that they can establish a
personal connection with.
People are more likely to be able to connect emotionally
with a person or a pet or something else with human characteristics,
then they would be able to connect with
a simple graphic design or even something that's in real life,
but isn't an in an animate object like a building.
So I included these two images here.
I love this cat in particular at the bottom,
because he's making eye contact with the reader.
And so your the reader will be able to make a connection with that cat,
and then it's kind of reinforced by the text in the image.
She was rescued just in time.
So I hope these examples are helpful.
But, again,
there are opportunities to experiment.
This header from IPH does not work to connect with the the
reader with a person.
Instead, they use the header to reiterate their appeal.
This image isn't people centered,
but it is specific to their campaign.
It matches the design of the rest of their email and is very impact centered.
And that that last point is really important.
Your imagery is a powerful way again to help people understand
who they will impact with their gift and the text on this image
does the same thing.
I hope that kinda makes sense.
So if you if you're choosing imagery, start with a human or
a character centered image that connects donors to who they
will impact when they give.
If you choose not to do that,
if you need to go a different route,
make sure you're still using that header to reiterate the
outcome that someone will make possible with their donation.
Now I alluded to fonts a little earlier,
but I wanna spend some time talking to you about them
because they are very important.
How many of you just let me know in the chat.
How many of you use custom fonts at your organization.
At Neon One, for example, we have several.
We use one called Montserrat.
We use one called Fira Sans and a number of different
iterations of that.
We have one called. Roboto that we use.
Let's see.
Some use Montserrat.. Awesome. We use a mix. Okay.
So the reason I mention this is because regardless of how you
use your fonts, you want to make sure that the ones you use
primarily for the body copy are simple
and easy to read.
So if you ever have a custom font with like lots of serifs
or script fonts, those might not be the best choice for an email.
You also want the font you use to be large enough to read if
you've ever found yourself squinting,
at a phone.
You know how frustrating that can be.
And you do also want them to be high contrast.
So they show up easily against a background.
So, keep this in mind, and you want
this to apply to all text,
including text on images like. IPH had on the last screenshot,
in the body of your appeal and on your buttons.
So I've included some examples here.
This top text, very easy to read.
High contrast, simple font. You can read it.
This script font is a lot harder to read.
But it could work if it was much larger, maybe on an image,
like IPH did.
And this gray text on a blue background is a simple font,
and it's large enough but the contrast is low.
And it's the same with this font, at the bottom that's
that's laid over this graphic.
So make sure you're checking,
the fonts that you use,
probably on a multitude of different devices,
mostly because it can render differently in different areas.
The folks at IPH, again, did a great job here.
Their email appeal uses fonts that are very simple,
They stand out well.
They used a white background,
and they used a red background for for the buttons,
you'll notice that they changed the font color on the red background.
If you remember also,
they did use a different more complicated font they used a
cursive font on the header,
but it was large enough that it was easy to read.
And I did see someone allude to this,
and I'm gonna and add a note here.
Something I have learned from painful experience is that if
you try to use a lot of custom fonts in your emails,
be prepared for those fonts not to work in different email
clients, outlook in particular hates
showing custom fonts.
So if you can, either choose a font that is use system wide.
Ariel is a safe one.
Or a lot of email systems give you the opportunity to choose backup font.
So if your, custom font doesn't render for whatever reason,
there's a fallback.
And I would also encourage you to test your emails,
especially if you're using custom elements like fonts,
so you can see how they work in different email clients and
even on different devices.
Okay.
So your design makes a big first impression on your readers.
It's the first thing they'll notice when they open their your message.
But your copy though is really what's going to inspire them to donate.
So, I'm gonna give you some tips on how to create some some good copy.
My first couple of tips though, are content related,
but they don't relate to the body of the appeal itself.
And my first tip is to use a sender name that is
a real person, not a generic name like AGlo Nature
Center or much worse, something like no reply at
organization name dot com.
You may have noticed this when you got the invitation to this
webinar if you registered that way.
Whose email are you gonna be more likely to open? Are
you gonna open an email from. Abby at Neon One?
Or are you gonna open an email from Neon One webinars,
or just Neon One, or even no-reply at Neon One?
The reason this works is silly, but it's simple.
Again, people love interacting with other people.
Donors love knowing that their support goes to help real
people And those donors are going to be more likely to read
and interact with emails when they come from real people.
Your donors probably know reasonably that you're not
actually sending them an individual message.
They know that this is coming to them through Neon CRM or
Mailchimp or Constant. Contact or something.
But they do like seeing that name there.
You can try experimenting with this,
see what your engagement metrics look like when you use
a person's name instead of a generic send account.
I bet you will see better engagement with,
with that, that personal name.
We've noticed using a name in the sender email picks up as
spam, so we use contact that interesting.
And, that's why I love experimenting.
We noticed the opposite so and this is why Gabriel,
this is a perfect example of why you should be testing this
kind of thing and tracking your performance because that is
that is a real danger, that can happen.
Quite a few of our donors respond to our emails and texts
as if they're really from members of our team,
which is wild to me.
But that's so cool because that means that you're doing a
really good job not only of building those connections with people,
but also writing content like you're a human being talking to
other human beings.
And not a nameless faceless nonprofit organization
addressing a multitude of donors.
That's fascinating.
Okay.
I could talk about that for a long time. Alright.
My second tip is to spend a lot of time on your subject line.
I write a lot of emails. I am off full at subject lines.
I will frequently spend as much time writing a subject line as
I will writing the email itself.
I'm also gonna encourage you to use preview text.
So let's get a little bit into these these two elements.
When you are writing your subject lines, I would
encourage you strongly to try to write a subject line that
elicits a positive emotional reaction.
We did some research in the email performance last year.
And we used AI to analyze,
a bunch of different subject lines,
thousands of subject lines,
and analyze the emotion
of the subject line and how that emotion lined up with the
overall email performance.
What we found is that positive emotional sentiments in those
subject lines elicited higher interaction rates just kind of
across the board.
So these were some of the highest performing positive sentiments.
What I want you to take from this is that One,
it's not a bad thing to try to elicit an emotional response
from your readers.
That's okay.
I know there's a lot of fear,
some people can be very uncomfortable intentionally
trying to elicit re emotional reactions from people,
but it it works.
And the reason I think it works,
I can't back this up with data. This is purely anecdotal.
We get a lot of emails.
I think the average and get something like a hundred and
twenty emails a day.
A lot of them are negative.
There's a lot of bad news out there,
or it's really aggressive sales pitches,
or shopping notifications.
When we see those positive uplifting emotions in our
inboxes, they're a bright spot.
For us, and they're probably gonna be a bright spot for your donors too.
So try doing that.
Try intentionally writing subject lines that
evoke positive feelings.
The other thing I would encourage you to do is make
sure you're customizing the preview text of your email.
Your preview text if you're not familiar with what that is,
that's the little snippet of of content that you'll see next to
a sender and the subject name or subject line in most email clients.
I can't think of one that doesn't show you your preview text.
If you don't add preview text,
You don't have a ton of control over what happens.
Sometimes you'll see something like organization logo dot ping
there instead of instead of some good content,
but your preview text helps your readers understand what
they're going to find when they open your appeal or whatever
email you're sending.
So try try helping them understand what they're going
to find when they open your appeal by using preview text.
They had when in our evaluation.
Those had hired, open rates.
They also had higher fundraising totals.
I suspect some of that is because organizations
were using preview text more for appeals than they were for
other kinds of emails.
But it's something to experiment with.
See if that gets you, more engagement there.
Okay.
Now after you've caught your
reader's attention with that personalized name and a
positive feeling subject line,
you've shown them some preview text They understand what
they're gonna see when they open your appeal.
You want to use the content of your email to establish a
connection between the reader and the impact they're going to when they give.
Nancy, it's a great question.. CTR is your click through rate.
So one of the most immediate ways you can establish a
connection with your readers is to use their name in the salutation.
Humans are hardwired to respond to our names.
Using someone's name here instead of using something
generic will make it easier for you to catch someone's
attention and inspire them to keep reading.
Now that said,
we've all probably seen it happen where the
personalization tag doesn't pull in properly or something
happens and you don't have a piece of data for that donor,
maybe you don't have their first name.
I suggest having a fallback salutation.
I like using hay there as a fallback.
I've also seen some really cool ones from nonprofits that,
allude to someone's connection to their cause.
So one I've gotten recently was Dear animal hero.
They didn't have my name.
I had just signed up for their newsletter.
And they use deer animal hero instead.
And that's much more endearing and attention grabbing than
something like, dear friend or the worst one I've ever gotten,
which was dear valued donor.
Nothing makes me feel less like a valued donor than calling me,
dear valued donor.
So as you're writing your copy,
you will often want to tell a story that leads up to your appeal.
And just as do you wanna use imagery that connects your
readers to people you'll want to tell a story that connects
your readers to people.
Instead of focusing on statistics or broad statements
focus on fostering that personal connection between
your donor and the people they're gonna help with their gift.
So a common one say you're a food pantry and
you're asking someone to donate to help provide lunches to
students, during the summer vacation.
Telling them that their gift will help feed students like
Jeffrey is going to be more effective than saying our
organization feeds fifteen thousand students every year.
Please join us.
Jeffrey is more compelling.
So focus on those focus on those individual stories as if you can.
Whether you choose to tell that story it's not always necessary.
This example from IPH is proof that you don't always have to tell a story.
Make sure you you do tell your donor why they should give and
what they're going to accomplish when they do give.
This sounds silly.
I know that that we're talking about email appeals,
but you would be amazed.
At how many emails I've gotten that ask me to give but don't
tell me why they don't tell me what the money is gonna be used
for and they don't tell me like anything other than just
telling me that I should give.
Oh, they I y'all check out the chat.
There's some really good ideas.
One thing that I do love here is that. Giselle asked if we use a salutation,
do we need to include a signature line in the email closer?
I would actually encourage you to use a signature line anyway,
and I would encourage you again to have that signature line be from somebody.
Even better if you can add like a little image of the person
that's getting it.
Again, that just reinforces that personal connection between the
donor the person asking for support and the people that
support will, will go toward.
So definitely try doing that.
Thoughts on making up a story if and when we can't really
capture stories easily.
This is one of my favorite topics,
and I've got five minutes left go over this next bit.
So I'm not gonna get super into it.
But what I will tell you,
if you have a hard time capturing stories or if you are
in an area where you can't safely
share stories about the people you serve.
There are a lot of missions in which that's the case.
You can absolutely make up stories or make up
composite characters.
That said I would be very intentional about telling
your reader that this is this represents maybe clients of
yours or you've changed details to protect people's identities.
There are ways you can do that.
You just need to make sure you are not lying if that makes sense.
The yeah.
You can you can certainly get creative with the stories you tell.
But you just you wanna make sure you don't lie.
Or even lead people to believe that that's a that's a true story.
So, okay.
This bit is important.
Everything you write in your your copy is going to be
supporting your call to action.
Your call to action,
if you're not familiar with that very marketing specific
phrase, is the thing you ask people to do after they read your email.
When you get the email from me tomorrow with this,
one of the calls to action is going to be click here to get
the recording and slides.
So you wanna nail your call to action.
This is important.
And on that front, I have two tips for you.
The first, it's gonna sound silly, is to include a very
clear, very specific call to action.
Ask people to give.. Ask them to donate.
Use those words.
If you are worried about that,
I can tell you that when we did that AI analysis of,
words in subject lines that inspired or words and subject
lines for, for emails.
Some of the most effective ones included the word donate and
included the word support.
You may even ask people to donate a specific amount.
That is what IPH did here.
In this case, it was a donate five dollars or more that that was their ask.
Donate five dollars or more.
But make it very specific
very clear when you are asking someone to do something.
People scan emails all the time.
If you hint you want them to donate,
a lot of people are not gonna pick up on that.
And then when you ask people to donate, I implore you to link
to a donation form and not only linked to a donation form,
but linked to that donation form multiple times.
In our research last year,
we found that the sweet spot was about six links,
to a single donation form in a single appeal.
This has they have a link in the header image.
They have a link in the first paragraph, a link in the second
paragraph, a link in the last paragraph, and then a link at,
a button, at the bottom.
So this might seem silly, but think about it this way.
Imagine you're reading an appeal on your phone and you
read this third paragraph and something about the story just
hits you right in the heart and you immediately wanna give
but then you have to scroll up and down through the email
looking for the button that you get,
to to get you over to the donation form.
It's not a very good experience.
So your goal isn't necessarily to just, like,
inundate everyone with all of these links.
You don't have to use six if you're writing a short appeal,
IPH didn't.
But you do wanna make it really easy for someone to get to your
donation form from wherever they are in the email.
I would also encourage you to include a mix of link types
like IPH did here.
Use linked images, use buttons and use those in addition to
those text hyperlinks,
clicking on this button at the bottom of the IP email would be
much easier for a mobile user,
probably than clicking on some of the text hyperlinks.
Couple little things,
we really wanna make sure we give our donors good experiences.
So here are some steps you can take to do that.
Let's see if my computer loads this. We love what's happening.
Okay. So make sure your appeal loads quickly.
And displays properly.
And you're gonna wanna do this on multiple devices.
If you notice maybe that your images are not loading quickly,
you can try compressing them.
You can you just search image compressors they'll give you
smaller file sizes that load more rapidly.
You can also try removing custom fonts.
We've talked about that already,
but those custom fonts sometimes
can really slow things down.
And then if you have lots of different design elements or even,
like, old code in your template.
You can try removing those to see if you can get those load times better.
Make sure as you're testing this,
that you look at these on mobile devices too,
more people access email on mobile devices than anything else.
So, check on your phone, bonus points.
If you look at both an. Android and phone phone,
because sometimes things will just work differently based on the device.
Okay.
We also wanna make sure that any images you use include alt text.
So you should be able to see where that where you can
include that in your email service provider.
When you use alt text, alt text is,
text that doesn't ne necessarily display in an email,
but it describes what happening in your images or what your images include.
Including that is an important way to make your email
accessible to people who are using screen readers.
And then you're also gonna wanna make sure you use an you
have an unsubscribe link and that it is easy for people to
unsubscribe from you.
Don't need to worry about your unsubscribe rate.
If people are unsubscribing from you,
really that means that they're not going to be invested in
your mission and that's okay.
They're not your people.
You want most people will look for your unsubscribe button at
the bottom of your email, new requirements,
Now say that you must have an unsubscribe button in the at
the top of your email.
That is a requirement that will be in effect in June.
That's from Gmail and I believe Yahoo.
And, we've had this question before,
so I'll just head it off now you're a Neon One client,
that is already updated in the system.
So that that you don't have to worry about that unsubscribe link there.
Okay.
I have seen some good questions rolling through.
We went a little more slowly today than I would have loved
due to some technical issues on my end.
Thank you for being patient with me.
I'm going to scroll through some of these,
questions.
Oh, I love this one.
Have you found increased opens when using little emoticons,
like arrows, music icons, hi fi icons, etcetera?
So, Mark, we don't.
The short answer is we don't know.
So we did analyze emoji usage in subject lines in the
in the report.
I believe I included a link to that,
both in the handout that you all got today and in the email
you'll get tomorrow.
Some fewer than four percent of people included emojis in their subject lines.
So that's not a large enough sample size for me to give you
any kind of of answer on that.
What I will say is that you totally can experiment with
using emojis and subject lines.
However,
if you do choose to do that,
look for emojis that are kind of related to your mission.
And avoid emojis that show up a lot in, spam.
So if I look in my spam account,
I see a lot of like the rotating, like,
red siren lights I see a lot of flame emojis.
I see a lot of the two emotion or the two exclamation points.
I think in unicode, they're called Bang Bang.
So experiment with it for sure. Avoid spammy ones.
Look for emojis that are more closely, like,
aligned with your mission.
So If you're a nature conservation organization,
maybe use a tree or a flower,
or if you're an animal shelter,
use one of the animal emojis.
I would I would try there.
Okay.
Ask them to give how many times.
How many asks would be going overboard?
That's a a good
a good question, Tim.
So a general rule that I would encourage you to do,
and this is something I'm pulling from my marketing background.
It's not necessarily fun in the background.
As a general rule,
someone should know within the first couple of sentences that
you want them to give.
And then you can reinforce that give throughout.
I would encourage you again to make it clear,
and I want you to remember that most people who read your
emails are not sitting down and doing a close reading.
They're scanning your email.
So I would ask several times throughout the body of the email.
A good rule of thumb is to have one early one in the middle of
your appeal, one toward the end,
and then believe it or not,
a lot of people look at post scripts,
so add a PS underneath your signature block and reiterate
your appeal there.
But just space those appeals out throughout the email.
If it's a really short appeal,
you may you may ask two or three times.
If it's really long, you may ask six or more.
So there's not a perfect number.
It's more the perfect density.
Like, it needs to be sprinkled throughout.
What is a custom font? Okay.
So a custom font is a font that I can I can hear
my designer watching this and be like that's not what that is?
A custom font is a font that you download.
And and use on your own computer.
This is opposed to a system font which are fonts that
already come preloaded in everyone's machine.
So,
some system fonts that you're probably familiar with.
Ariel is one Calibri is like the default,
font for windows, I believe.
Helvetica is usually available on on available on everyone's computers.
Some custom ones are things like we use,
we use Fieracinths.
We had to go download that to use it.
So that's not available on everyone's computer.
So I hope that's clear.
That's the difference between a system and a custom font.
Cindy, sometimes emojis show up as different ones.
A heart showed as a horse.. That's one, hilarious.
And two, a great reminder that we should be testing testing our emails.
Raven asked how often do you recommend sending out donation appeals?
And I'm gonna give you the most annoying answer, which is it depends.
I would certainly
send them fairly regularly.
You don't want to send people one every week, probably.
But one thing that you can do to make sure you're not over
soliciting your donors is to build segments of donors
So maybe you ask people fairly frequently, say you
send, and I'm making this up.
Say you send an appeal once a month.
But you wanna make sure that you filter out people that
donated two days ago.
You can you can ask more frequently if your asks are
tailored to the person that's receiving them.
And then this is an important thing.
So how many of you I'm just at let me pull the chat back.
How many of you have heard the phrase,
donor fatigue or get worried about fatiguing your donors?
Because that happens a lot.
Okay. Yep. Donor okay.
So here's what I'm gonna tell you about donor fatigue.
Someone who's much smarter than me, his name is Mark Pittman,
told me almost a decade ago.
The donor fatigue is not real.
Donor fatigue is real when they are constantly asked
for money, but don't know what it was being used for and
what was accomplished the last time they gave.
So if your donors know. Hey, since the last time we
ask for your support, we've, like,
worked with our donors to achieve x, y, and z.
You gave forty dollars.
You helped reach this important milestone.
We were able to feed. Jeffrey and his friends.
Six thousand meals this summer.
Can you
help us do this new thing?
I always joke about it.
Like, think think about having I don't have kids,
but pretend you're. Niece or whatever,
asks you for money.
She needs help, with her college tuition.
And you give her some money,
and you never hear back from her until she emails you a
month later and she's like, hey,
can I have some more money?
You probably wouldn't really want to give her any more money.
But if she had asked you for helping, for for tuition,
and then she emailed you a week later, and thank you.
She got registered for classes. She got her booked.
She's gone to the first week of school.
You'd be much more likely to help her.
So instead of worrying about how frequently you're asking,
I would focus on making sure you're constantly communicating
with your donors and helping them understand
what is going on.
And how their gift has been used.
Oh, love this one. So good question from Lily.
Do you have recommendations for choosing text to bold in the
body of your email,
and any limits or best practices for how many
different links to include, read the story on our blog,
follow us on social, etcetera.
So when it comes to,
choosing the texture gonna bold,
I would recommend this is something I learned when I
first got into marketing,
whether you're bolding font or hyperlinking font.
The phrase that you bold or hyperlink should be a complete
phrase that can be read and understood on its own.
So if you wanna say,
Students like Jeffrey need your help,
you can make a difference.
That's terrible, but I'm making it up off the top of my you know,
bolder highlight,
you can make a difference for students like Jeffrey or use
that as your hyperlink.
You wouldn't, like,
you could probably bold or highlight and make a difference.
But when you're bolding or hyperlinking anything in your
in your copy, what you're looking for is to highlight or
bold phrases that people will catch as they skim over it and
you want them to get a feel for what you're wanting them to do
or what you're telling them out.
So go for complete phrases and choose phrases that help them
understand what's going on.
I am going to answer, I think, maybe one more,
because we are ten minutes passed,
and I wanna be respectful of your time.
Greg asked a fantastic question.
How can we structure emails so that they are read easily on
desktop and on a phone?
So many emails can't be read on a phone easily because you have
to scroll side to side.
What
Without knowing what system you're using,
there shouldn't be the option for you to build emails that
are immediately responsive.
Believe that's pretty pretty standard.
If they aren't, I would go through your settings and check
And then if you can't find any in your settings,
I would look for some support articles or or talk to someone
about getting that set up.
Most email clients.
So when I say email clients, I mean,
platforms or services used to create and send emails should
have that as a default option.
If you're not seeing that in your own emails,
I suspect there's a setting somewhere that maybe has been
missed or a setting that you can turn on And if there's not,
I would really encourage you to talk to your support team
because that that should be available for you.
It may just be a funny setting that's hidden somewhere strangely.
Okay.
Eighty five of you are hanging on still,
and I am so proud of you for being here with me a full
eleven minutes after time.
Thank you so much for being here.
Thank you for being patient with me as I navigate running
this on a completely inappropriate machine.
You guys have been stars.
Do keep an eye out on your inbox. It will come from me.
Abby at Neon One probably.
It won't come just from a a generic email.
It's a good best practice.
Keep an email an eye out for that email.
It will include a link to the page, and that page will have
the slides, the recording, a transcript,
and a link you can use to download that checklist for email appeals.
You all are fancy tactic, whether you are an old pro at
writing these emails or whether they're about to do your first
one, you're gonna do an amazing job.
Thank you for spending time with me.
I will talk to you all tomorrow. Bye.