Crafting Your Initial Fundraising Email

• Make sure your Call to Action (CTA) adds clear value.

  • To help you do so, think about answering the following questions in your email copy:

    • How will this fund help solve the problem you’re talking about?

    • Why does your audience have to donate now?

• Use your fundraising page to double down on your impact.

  • If you’re talking about a new topic, try creating an fundraising page about that specific issue, with language that brings home why they should donate

• [ActBlue-specific] Be sure you’ve added your refcodes.

  • Refcodes will help you track which link is generating donations

    • You can see the refcode in the URL of the ActBlue link. For more on setting up refcodes, see this page from our friends at ActBlue.

  • Each email program chooses to set up refcodes differently. There are no rules as to how you set up your nomenclature. We just recommend that you create a convention and stick to it across all sends.

  • If you have an ActBlue webhook setup, you can easily track donations on Switchboard. We also provide a robust fundraising analytics dashboard in-tool for free!

• [ActBlue-specific] Try splitting your audience into high and low dollar donors.

  • Try testing higher donation asks for high dollar donors, since they’ve shown a higher capacity and willingness to give.

  • Use different refcodes for each email so you can see how much of the total is donated by high-dollar vs low-dollar donors.

• [ActBlue-specific] Try using ActBlue express lane links or buttons so people can select how much they’d like to give within your email

  • You can generate ActBlue express lane buttons within your ActBlue account (not on Switchboard). Be sure to include the ActBlue disclaimer language included with those buttons.

• Best practice dictates keeping the first few sentences above your CTA short and to-the-point. This space is often called “above the fold”. The average person only spends 7-8 seconds reading an email, so it’s best to get to the crux of your argument rather quickly.

  • When creating your “above the fold” content, here are some questions to consider:

    • Why should they take your action NOW?

    • How will this action help this campaign?

    • Why do they care about helping this campaign?

• Try setting a fundraising deadline or goal you’re trying to hit. Switchboard’s visual editor even has an easily embeddable countdown clock you can customize to fit your brand.

• Try explaining where the money is going to go, and why. In other words: why should they donate to your candidate instead of another one who emailed them recently?

Subsequent Fundraising Emails

• If you included a deadline or fundraising goal, you probably won’t achieve that goal from a single email. As a result, many programs will follow-up with 2-3 emails (3+ days after the previous email), letting their audience know how close they are to the goal or remind them of the time limit.

• To improve donor relationships, some programs will remove donors who give to their fund from these subsequent emails – this can protect the donors from churning and build goodwill.

• When sending these follow-up emails, many programs choose to dive deeper in a particular topic or approach the topic from a different angle.

• Many campaigns send a thank-you note to all their supporters when they hit the goal.

• When you’re sending these emails, avoid subject lines that contain terms like “fwd:” or “re:” as they have been known to trigger spam filters.