By far the most successful method of maintaining relationships on the internet is email, being more effective in communicating than a website, and offering an intimacy that social media cannot. By 2000, 93% of the 106M Americans who spent time online were using email. The benefits of developing and maintain email relationships include its speed and scalability. The utility of email has been proven by large corporations who use it daily to keep relationships active with customers. Nonprofits actually have an edge over corporations in the email environment, due to the causal element of the work that these organizations provide – users are more likely to trust a nonprofit than a corporation.
The best methodology for using email for donor cultivation and fundraising always includes the first step of acquiring new recipients, and this can be performed in a number of ways, including the aforementioned platforms. There are many stable email and newsletter online platforms available including AWeber.com, ConstantContact.com and MailChimp.com, and they all offer similar stability and features to achieve successful email campaigns. They all typically include a mechanism to install a few lines of coding to display a signup form to entice users to join a mailing list, installations can occur on websites, public social networking sites and private social media sites – any location where the organization’s web developer has access and rights to change page coding. A popular recent method of encouraging users to take the action to sign up for a newsletter is to offer a “freebie,” that is a product for free that can be downloaded after submitting email information to receive the gift. Gifts can include free e-books, articles, advice, tips, videos and webinars as well as free trial periods. This method is usually undertaken by online retail outlets, but can be adapted to nonprofit needs with a little creativity.
