In this podcast episode, Muna Hussen from Raisely will guide you through the art of simplifying email marketing and stewardship, focusing on practical techniques to maximise engagement and loyalty from your donor base.

Discover the power of segmentation to tailor your messages effectively, ensuring that each communication resonates with your audience on a personal level.

Key Objectives:

  • Learn advanced segmentation techniques to optimize engagement with your current audience.
  • Explore innovative approaches to crafting compelling email campaigns that resonate with donors.
  • Gain insights into creating smarter strategies to keep supporters engaged and excited about your cause.

    Join us at the Supporter Experience Conference on Thursday 22nd May for even more expert insights and actionable advice. You can register here. Use discount code FEPODCAST25 for a 25% discount.

    If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to hit follow and enable notifications so you’ll get notified to be first to hear of future podcast episodes. We’d love to see you back again!

    And thank you to our friends at JustGiving who make the Fundraising Everywhere Podcast possible.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Multiple Voices: Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. Fundraising everywhere. , you don’t need to add me in there.

[00:00:31] Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. In this episode, we’ll be taking a look at one of our favourite on demand sessions in celebration of our Supporter Experience Conference coming up on Thursday, the 22nd of May. If you’d like to join us on the day, you can use promo code FEPodcast25 to get 25 percent off.

[00:00:51] Jade Cunnah: Just head on over to Fundraising Everywhere. com and pop in fepodcast25 at checkout to get 25 percent off our supporter experience conference in May. Now, on to today’s episode. Enjoy!

[00:01:08] Simon Scriver: How are you?

[00:01:09] Muna Hussen: I’m very well, thank you so much. I absolutely love the hoodie by the way. I feel like I need to, I need to get a hold of one of those as well. It’s very complementary colors, Raisley and fundraising. So I think. Oh, I

[00:01:20] Simon Scriver: like that. Yeah, yeah, we’ll get a little mashup limited edition, uh, trainers.

[00:01:26] Simon Scriver: Yeah, I would

[00:01:27] Muna Hussen: love that

[00:01:29] Simon Scriver: I’m gonna hand over to you now But I will be keeping an eye in the chat box and I will be coming back because i’m i’m sure i’m gonna have lots Of questions so over to you.

[00:01:36] Muna Hussen: Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much Um, I really appreciate everyone spending the time with me the next 45 minutes i’m going to be Talking about better strategies for email stewardship um Please feel free to introduce yourself in the chat.

[00:01:51] Muna Hussen: I think a lot of you have been doing that already. Let me know where in the UK you are, but also which charity you’re, you’re representing at the moment. If you’re a Raisley client and you’ve joined us, hello! You may have chatted emails with me before. Um, but don’t worry, I’m not going to repeat myself.

[00:02:06] Muna Hussen: I’m going to go into a lot more in depth than we’ve talked about before, so hopefully there’ll be some great, um, new info and tactics for you all to use. Simon already introduced me, but I’m Munna. I’ve been in marketing and income generation for a very long time And I’ve worked with both at charities, but also with charities And the one that I’m always banging on about because I’m so proud of the work they do even to to now Even though I’m not part of them anymore.

[00:02:31] Muna Hussen: It’s the bike project. So In my tenure as head of marketing and fundraising I got to work on some awesome campaigns and I always kind of talk about them wherever I go So check them out the bike project if you’ve got an old bike feel free to donate it to them as well Um simon, would it be okay if we popped up our first poll because i’d love to know a little bit more about What people are doing in terms of, um, email, um, communication.

[00:02:56] Muna Hussen: So yeah, lots of people have said over half have said that, yes, you’re using lots of email to communicate with your donors and fundraisers. That’s awesome. That means most of you are off to a cracking start and I’m looking forward to seeing if any of the information I shared today can help you think a little bit more about, um, where you are at the moment, but also a good percentage have said that yes, but it’s limited.

[00:03:17] Muna Hussen: So again, there’ll be some really, really good, um, percentage, hopefully some good information so that percentage can feel a little bit more comfortable. Um, and there are some who have also sadly said no, but that’s totally fine. That’s why we have these talks. We can, um, hopefully work out something for you that will make you feel a little bit more comfortable with the, with the emails.

[00:03:39] Muna Hussen: Thank you so much, Simon. So, um, what I’d love to do is, um, start talking a little bit about obviously myself, I’ve already introduced myself and a quick reminder that in the delegate bag, which you can download, we’ve got quite a few goodies, it will include. These slides, and you’ll also have access to an amazing email planning document, complete with copy examples, prompts to help you get the best out of if you want to use them, AI content generators, and two complete journeys, one for donors and one for fundraisers.

[00:04:10] Muna Hussen: So please feel free to go ahead and dive into that if you’re already using email like 58 percent of you 60 percent of you said You are as a significant part of your stewardship cons then go ahead and pilfer what you like from this document But if not, then this might be a great place to start so you can download this now or after the talk All right, back to Raisely.

[00:04:31] Muna Hussen: Now, we’re a B Corp fundraising platform, just thought I’d introduce where I’m actually calling in from. It started off in Australia, but we’ve since supported charities all over the world, especially here in the UK. I’m an ex Raisely client. At The Bike Project, we used Razely, uh, quite a lot, and we still use, well, the team is still using them.

[00:04:48] Muna Hussen: See, this is how much I love The Bike Project. I still say we Um, and here at Raisely, we work with charities including MyLoma UK, ISBCC, several of the Age UK orgs, and many, many more. If you want to chat more about this, you can book a call with me via the call to action at the top of your screen, or if you want to chat about email, which is the whole point of today’s talk.

[00:05:09] Muna Hussen: Um, what do we do for charities? It’s basically a means to provide, uh, to help you build all of your community fundraising campaigns in one place with fully customizable pages. So it includes peer to peer, to appeals, to ticketing, to challenge events. And best of all, it’s completely free. So feel free to visit us at raisely.

[00:05:27] Muna Hussen: com. To learn more. But today we’re here to talk about fundraising and it does feel a little bit like I am repeating myself on every talk I’ve done in the last four years. Quite a few, which have been with fundraising everywhere. Um, but the fundraising landscape does remain turbulent. I don’t know about you, but I’d give quite a lot to go back to president and times as opposed to unprecedented times, but alas, we have to continue to roll with the punches and the times.

[00:05:54] Muna Hussen: That doesn’t mean that it’s all bad news to be honest. Yes, there are undeniable pressures But there are also some really good opportunities both, um on the public pressures on the public and us as charities and charity and individuals who work with charities Um, but like I said lots of opportunities as well So the cost of living feels like a buzzword that’s been around for a long time It is a constant pressure inflation is going to continue going up and has been continuing to going up But 73 of the public are still donating money in some capacity And yes, there is a lot of cause fatigue every day.

[00:06:31] Muna Hussen: There’s another vitally important issue that We should be paying attention to that. We should be getting involved in, but that doesn’t mean that everyone is able to get involved with everything. So the majority of individuals are choosing to focus on one cause. And finally, in a world with so many ways to donate petitions or, you know, other platforms through which you can donate, individuals are very keen to engage directly with charities.

[00:06:57] Muna Hussen: And almost half of them are donating directly through their website or through something like Email. Now, speaking of email, why email? Um, well, I think it’s really important to dive back into this channel because sometimes I think it can be a bit overlooked or it can be, um, really, um, scary, you know, as charities, we can be a little bit cautious as to how we use how we use email and when we use emails.

[00:07:24] Muna Hussen: First up, I do have to say that it does remain one of the most trusted methods of connecting digitally with your audience. I’m probably going to use this. analogy so often throughout this talk. Um, but I always think of emails as sort of the podcasts of comms. People are quite focused when they’re looking at emails.

[00:07:42] Muna Hussen: Yes, they’re going through their inbox and they’re checking different emails, but generally they tend to be on that one screen as opposed to when you are in your feed, you might be looking at lots of different things in your social media feed, or if you’re on your WhatsApp, there might be lots of different chats and so on going on.

[00:07:57] Muna Hussen: It is a method that allows you to build a natural connection to your audience. Remember that for the most part, and I do say the most part here, if we are following GDPR laws, and I know not everyone does all the time, email is an active opt in model. So people are wanting to be engaged with you, they’ve signed up with you.

[00:08:16] Muna Hussen: And email actually is also one of the channels that Performs the most strongly. So this is quite a busy chart, but the takeaway here is that social media remains really important and it has its place, but you might be surprised to learn that conversion rates are higher for direct email and web traffic.

[00:08:36] Muna Hussen: Obviously, direct and web traffic is quite obvious when someone is on your website, they are there to engage with you already. But in other words, when it comes to emails, when someone is engaging with you via these channels, they’re focused on you, your words, the call to action, and the impact that you’re putting in front of them.

[00:08:55] Muna Hussen: Social media is converting less, um, and these, the previous channels, so email, web traffic, have higher average donation amounts. So again, I don’t want to bash social media, it’s a really important tool to find your audience, to convert them to your email database. But let’s not neglect the fact that email is really where people engage with you and can donate, um, more to you.

[00:09:19] Muna Hussen: How does this break down? Well, let’s get into some of the numbers. Um, the average email subscriber in the UK receives 121 emails per day between personal and work. That’s a lot of emails for someone to sift through. And a lot of competition for you when you’re sending emails to them and trying to convert them to your course.

[00:09:42] Muna Hussen: In the UK, every single day across all different sectors, 8. 3 billion emails are sent, which sounds mind boggling. It’s not, it’s across all sectors, so not just non profit, but having said that, the open rate for emails remain really good. So an average is 20 to 40%, which means 20 percent of the emails minimum that gets sent across all sectors.

[00:10:06] Muna Hussen: And we’re going to go through the non profit details in a moment, um, get open, which is really good. Now, when you do dive into the non profits here, specifically in the UK, we can see that the numbers are actually remaining really quite high and positive. So charities have been sending an increased messaging volume on everything you’re looking at is since the, since the pandemic.

[00:10:29] Muna Hussen: So since about 21, 49 percent up in terms of messaging volume, which means we’re sending longer and longer emails. This can be a good thing, and we’re going to go into content more later, but this might be a good time to consider how long every email your charity sends is, and who you’re sending them to.

[00:10:51] Muna Hussen: Are you sending too much information in one go for your donors, your audience, or your fundraisers to engage with? This might be a good time to have a bit of a think because that messaging volume has gone up by 49 percent since the pandemic. Speaking of volume, each charity tends to send 27 emails per subscriber per year.

[00:11:12] Muna Hussen: That’s not too many, that’s two a month. That might explain why each email is so long. Again, another thing that you can pause to consider here is, is there a way you could cut the volume down by perhaps considering increasing the number of emails that are sent? One really good bit of news is that list growth has increased.

[00:11:33] Muna Hussen: So there’s been a 17 percent list growth since 2022. People are not getting tired of signing up to emails and that means that they want to hear from you. Your efforts to grow your database are working and they’re paying off because your lists are growing. Now it’s time to think about how you can make the best out of those efforts.

[00:11:54] Muna Hussen: But don’t worry, the good news is going to continue over the next few slides. For every 1, 000 emails sent in the UK across non profits, 66 is raised. Of course, some charities will do better and some are still working up to that. But to come back to my podcast analogy, I told you I was going to use it a million times Via email you’re speaking to a highly engaged individual And in fact email remains such a great channel for generating income that it’s responsible for generating four percent of all Online revenue and we’re talking All online, online revenue, which also includes e commerce.

[00:12:35] Muna Hussen: So it’s a pretty big number when you think about it. I wasn’t lying when I said that the good news continues. One reason why is that the lists are not just growing, uh, sorry, are growing, but they’re, uh, they’re not remaining, um, static because they’re, they’re growing because you actually have a very low number.

[00:12:55] Muna Hussen: of bounces and spams. So only 6 percent on average across the UK nonprofit sector, um, bounces or is logged as spam. And only 7 percent as an average are unsubscribers. which juxtaposed with that 17 percent means that there’s a steady list growth. Um, and that is resulting in a high number of retention, which basically means more consideration should be given and apply to how you communicate with this audience because they’re not unsubscribing, but we want to make sure that those numbers are not actually increasing.

[00:13:30] Muna Hussen: So it’s good news now, but we can’t rest on our laurels. At the bottom of my screen, it says, verify your domain. I do want to pause here and talk briefly about new Google and Yahoo rules. If you know what I’m talking about, feel free to put in the chat if you do know. And if you don’t know, I’m really happy to just give you a very brief breakdown.

[00:13:52] Muna Hussen: Essentially, it’s becoming ever more important to send from a verified domain. So from the 1st of February, this year, 2024. Google and Yahoo have joined forces and they’re enforcing new industry standards for email authentication, verification, and receipt. And it’s all in a bid to cut down as much malicious activity as possible.

[00:14:14] Muna Hussen: So spam, that means. That your emails hopefully will not be caught up in spam if you are verified the combination of these two providers Means that they are controlling over 48 Of b2b emails across the world, which is a huge number And it doesn’t necessarily affect every charity because it is based on volume levels And I think that most charities do not send as much of a volume, but their volume levels are based initially on a starting, um, from a starting point.

[00:14:50] Muna Hussen: They will be reflecting and adjusting the volume levels and they’re probably going to start bringing it down. So you will need to ensure that you’re using industry standard verification methods to ensure that your emails are not going to get caught up in spam. If you’re sending to either Google or Yahoo addresses.

[00:15:09] Muna Hussen: Sending emails through Raisely allows you to verify your email domain But if you have another platform, I would go ahead and double check whether you’re able to verify your domain If you want to talk through the nitty gritty and the technical details of this feel free to book a call with me Or speak to your data or web team But this is already in effect.

[00:15:29] Muna Hussen: So I do want to Just pause there and just remind you to make sure that you’re in the process of verifying, uh, your, your, um, your, um, domain. Quick reminder, check your delegate bag, make sure you’ve got that all downloaded so you can enjoy all the lovely goodies. Now, back to the emails. We talked about the great news of the growing lists.

[00:15:53] Muna Hussen: What are we doing with that list? What are we doing with the content of those lists? It’s not the best news. Charities in the UK have had a 30 percent increase in fundraising messages since 2021. Yes. It’s been a pandemic. Yes. We’ve needed more support than ever, but from the donor’s perspective. It may be quite relentless.

[00:16:13] Muna Hussen: So think about the fact that the email, the email volume message has actually gone up and in that volume message, we’re asking them for more money, more stridently. Part of what we’re going to be talking about today will not just be the basics, but also how to consider new building, building new journeys so that you’re addressing the volume, the segmentation, who you’re talking to, what you’re telling them and also when’s the most appropriate time to be putting those asks.

[00:16:43] Muna Hussen: I just want to reflect again that everything I’m going to tell you today has to be looked at through the lens of your charity. So while I’m giving you some great, hopefully great, strategies and tips, I want you to just take a moment and think about What does this mean for your audience and your donors?

[00:17:00] Muna Hussen: So just remember to look at everything through that lens. Now, first thing I love to just take stock and, um, start with brilliant basics. So some of you or most of you, um, may be doing this already, but it’s great to take stock of your stewardship learnings, how you’re communicating with existing donors and fundraisers.

[00:17:21] Muna Hussen: and how those, uh, and those new to your organizations, what’s the first thing they see or get sent? How do they get greeted? And how are they supported along the way? Well, first impressions count for a heck of a lot. So remember to pause here. Again, think about your donors and your audience. Um, Think about what they need.

[00:17:43] Muna Hussen: So don’t worry so much about industry trends. Don’t worry so much about what everyone else is doing. Um, just think about what they need and what your charity needs as well. So put yourself in the shoes of who’s reading your emails, what type of relationship they have with you and how you want them to perceive your charity.

[00:18:01] Muna Hussen: I’m going to talk about three great tips in much more detail over the next few slides. Um, sending and tracking your first comms from coordinated lists. In other words, applying the correct segment to each individual, even if your database is very small. Remember, it is easier to start as you mean to go on, rather than clean up quite a big list later on.

[00:18:24] Muna Hussen: Add the personal touch, but remember you are still representing an organization, so you do still need to reflect your brand. And keep that front and center of your comms and integrate with your data capture platform. I’m going to dive into all of these in just a moment. Um, but I do want to make sure that if you have any questions, you’re putting them in the chat.

[00:18:48] Muna Hussen: We will try to answer these at the end of it. So feel free to ask questions about any of the slides or any further clarification that you need. What do I mean by personalized comms? We’ll make sure that you send your first comms as soon as possible. Whenever I speak to charities in my day to day life, now I get to help lots of charities, supercharge their fundraising, set up their fundraising campaigns, but, and also look at emails.

[00:19:16] Muna Hussen: Um, this is the one thing that kind of comes up as something that we may not have considered. You may have a platform that doesn’t allow you to send an email instantly, or you may have a bit of a delay built into it. From my perspective, Sending and tracking your first communication from Coordinated Listing as soon as possible is probably the number one tip I can give you.

[00:19:41] Muna Hussen: Ideally, when I say as soon as possible, I mean instantly. So this could be a thank you for a donation. If someone has sent a donation, um, to either yourself or to a friend, um, and this could be a receipt or just a simple thank you. With personalization and i’m gonna dive into personalization and a bit more information in a bit in a in a bit more in a moment Um, it could also be a welcome to a fundraiser if a fundraiser has signed up you want to welcome them straight away You want to thank them at the beginning?

[00:20:12] Muna Hussen: of the journey or Go even further. Send a notification email to a fundraiser when a friend or a family member has donated to their page. That way you’re keeping people engaged within the charity throughout the journey and we’re going to talk a lot about keeping people engaged throughout the journey.

[00:20:30] Muna Hussen: throughout their journey with the charity. Balance the resources you have internally, so this is something I talk about a lot. Think about how much work you can actually, um, chew off, bite off and chew internally, but there will be something that you will be able to do, and starting with that first email is so, so important.

[00:20:51] Muna Hussen: Um, Not just for your newsletter, but also as a, as a donor. So lots of platforms do automate these, having the automated email that gets sent off. Make sure you’re removing the burden from your team, from your resources, by looking into these automation options. You don’t want to get trapped in a situation where you have to send all of these manually.

[00:21:14] Muna Hussen: Because of course you want your list to grow, but you don’t want to be making more work for yourself or for the rest of your fundraising team. Now the next tip is, we tend to use the Royal We when we speak as a charity. It has its place, of course, we’re representing an organisation, but consider how you can be both personal as well as have your brand remain front and centre.

[00:21:38] Muna Hussen: So here’s an example, going to my friend Bob. You can bring in your logo, your design touches, your colors, your tone of voice, and much more, but also personalize it. And we’re going to go into personalization a little bit more later. Use an individual’s name, you know? So yes, you can say things like, hello, friend.

[00:21:59] Muna Hussen: Hello, Um, you know, valued supporter, but those should be fallbacks in case you don’t have someone’s name. Use more details around the campaign they may have donated to. Um, name the campaign they’ve donated to. If they’re donating to a fundraiser, a friend, name the fundraiser that they’re donating to. All of this information should be captured in your forms, and we’ll go through that again in a bit more detail.

[00:22:25] Muna Hussen: Um, Maybe note the amount they’ve donated and more. Make it really chatty and informal conversation that allows you to connect with your donor. Don’t be too corporate and don’t be too sort of official, but also make sure that you’re still bringing in those touches of the brand by, you know, like I said, the, the branding, but also tone of voice.

[00:22:48] Muna Hussen: You can do that by, like I mentioned, the right questions in your form, um, or in your donation or the sign up form, so that you can personalize whatever form that is. Really look into what your current platform is offering you and push it to its limits where you can, and if it’s appropriate for your charity.

[00:23:07] Muna Hussen: Again, looking through the lens of, of your current donors. We all know the difference a personalized email can make versus something that feels like a bit of a mass copy and paste. So don’t get bogged down into too many options, but you should be able to pull data from that signup form or that donation form and put it through what we call, uh, pearls, personalized URLs into your email platform.

[00:23:34] Muna Hussen: And some of the examples you see here is the back end of the Raisley platform. So let’s have a very quick look at the type of personalization, um, you can, um, use. So it’s not just about pulling in, you know, someone’s, um, name, here we go, um, but further around the, the personalization. So let’s think about if you can capture it.

[00:23:58] Muna Hussen: you can use it. So let’s try and understand what connects and use that to help you think through how to capture what you need. So first off, like postcodes. This is a really great one for organizations that are very, very local or hyperlocal. So for example, and a great example could be your gift will go a long way to support those in SW15 or in Tyneside or wherever you need to be.

[00:24:26] Muna Hussen: Can you use pronouns if it’s appropriate? Can you use proximity to the cause? As in, are they someone who has used your services before or have they had a close friend or family member who have used your, um, uh, services before? Look at the marketing opt in. And make sure that you’re respecting data collection so you can speak to someone through legitimate interest when they have Connected with you, but of course pay attention to the type of marketing opt in that they have And is this the first time they have connected with you?

[00:25:03] Muna Hussen: All these questions can be built into your forms And you should be able to integrate with your crm So think about that journey put yourself in the shoes of an individual But again, just in the same way that i’ve i’ve said i’ve talked about balancing your resources Balance what a donor wants to fill in so think about the shape of your form so that you’re able to Capture all of this information and pull it into the email journeys as well.

[00:25:31] Muna Hussen: Now, it’s easy to get excited. I did it myself when I worked at the Bite project. I, uh, used a lot of different email journeys and built on it year on year on year. And it will come a point where you think actually it’s not worth the level of journeys that I have for the type of lists and segmentation that I have.

[00:25:52] Muna Hussen: It is really important to remember the constant relevant comms. So, just want to pause here for a quick moment and just wrap up the last couple of slides. So, again, think about the integration. I’ll go back one slide. Think about the integration that you have and the, um, the, the fact that you can pull it into your data capture.

[00:26:15] Muna Hussen: So if you have a fully segmented list, if you don’t have a fully segmented list, explore how you can have a. A CRM through other platforms. So when I talk about a list, I’m talking about your email data list and make sure that you understand the relationship that each person has with you. That’s what I mean by segmentation.

[00:26:35] Muna Hussen: Um, and make sure that donors are reflected as donors, fundraisers, volunteers. Or whatever else the segmentation is that you want. If you don’t have access to that, then there are lots of platforms out there that allow you to do this in quite a simple way. So for example, Raisley has a simple built in CRM and email platform that will allow you to track, segment, tag, and communicate with your donors.

[00:26:59] Muna Hussen: Look at your current tech stack. If there is anything like that, you should be able to start using it. So just wrapping up here, remember who you’re talking to, the relationship they have with you, and what you want to tell them. If you plan through that for every type of person, you’ll be getting off to a really, really good start.

[00:27:18] Muna Hussen: Now, remember when I said that non profits send an average of 27 emails per subscriber? It’s now time to look at the content of those emails. Um, I’m just going to actually pause here and Amy has asked what is a coordinated listing? What I meant by a coordinated listing, I may have covered this already, is your email database.

[00:27:40] Muna Hussen: So an email database is making sure that you’re coordinating who is where in what list. So if a donor signs up make sure that you’re putting them in the donor list so that when you’re sending information about, uh, for example, fundraising, new fundraising campaigns, you can send it to them as well as.

[00:28:01] Muna Hussen: Fundraisers that may be lapsed so you might want to have a different list for lapsed fundraisers You don’t want to send a a new campaign a new fundraising campaign to someone who has just just finished a campaign for you or who has Um, or who is in the middle of for example a virtual diy Campaign that’s about making sure that you’ve got those coordinated lists built and that’s about looking at your database And looking at how you can automate it.

[00:28:30] Muna Hussen: I hope that’s a helpful amy Simon, would it be possible to get our second question up on the screen if we have it? Um And that would be, then we can have a, a little bit of, um, um, questions. So what would you like to improve about your email stewardship? Wave a magic wand. Um, if you didn’t have any, um, money issues or any.

[00:28:57] Muna Hussen: Um, resource issues, what would be the number one thing, or maybe even number one, two, and three that you would like to improve about your email stewardship? Type it in, and we’ve got some participants typing already, and we will be able to maybe go through some of the details. I think that the thing I definitely want to keep coming back to here is resources.

[00:29:19] Muna Hussen: It’s so important to remember that. You know, we’re not all surrounded by a huge team at the bike project. I had a team I was very lucky by the time I was leaving to have a team of about five But I started off as a single person. So we’ve got a lot of answers coming in here Personalization i’m loving that that is the top.

[00:29:39] Muna Hussen: That’s the thing i’ve been talking about for the last 25 30 minutes Um engagement we’re going to talk about how to track engagement in just a moment um more automation I love that. That’s exactly what I’ve just been talking about. That automation exploring platforms that will give you that automation will take so much work off your team.

[00:30:02] Muna Hussen: Open rates. We are going to talk about open rates in just a moment as well and how to track that. Not just how to look at it, but how to use those numbers to really dive into, um, um, next steps and how to address that. Um, and we’ve got segmented data. Yep. Love the segmented data. It actually is. I wouldn’t say, um, easy, but it is simple to segment your data.

[00:30:26] Muna Hussen: So it does take quite a bit of work and this might be a great time for me just to pause a little bit and talk again about some of the work that I did at the bike project, which I’m now I’m using examples when I’m talking to my current clients. Um, at the Byte Project, we had quite a big list, but we didn’t know who they were and what they were doing and how, and their relationship.

[00:30:46] Muna Hussen: So I was lucky enough to work with the rest of my team to decide on a series of, of lists. But another thing that’s really important about segmentation is deciding what’s the most valuable relationship an individual has with you if they have more than one relationship with you. So, for example, often we have people who are engaged with us in more than one way.

[00:31:11] Muna Hussen: We might have a volunteer that was a fundraiser. We might have a fundraiser that’s also a regular giver. And I think it’s important to think about how you want to celebrate that individual and what relationship you want to celebrate them for. So think about your list. Think about the type of relationships that they have and start slotting people into groups Now you don’t have to go, you know crazy.

[00:31:37] Muna Hussen: You don’t have to spend a lot of time building these lists You could do it as simple as regular givers cash givers Fundraisers, that’s it three lists or you could start with donors Fundraisers or you could start with Lapsed donors, lapsed fundraisers, active, and so on. And as you build your list, as it grows with more people, you’re able to start bringing in more of those segmentation.

[00:32:05] Muna Hussen: And the more segmentation you have, the better the personalization can be. Because then you can say, Hi Jo, you took part in our campaign X in 2023. You raised Y. This allowed us to do So much work. Would you consider now donating to appeal Zed? All of these bits of information allow you to have that personal conversation with your donors on your fundraisers.

[00:32:34] Muna Hussen: Okay. Thank you so much, Simon. Going to pop back to my slides now, and we’re going to dive a little bit further into relevant comms. Just keeping an eye on the time here. Cause I want to have time for questions along the way. Now, what do I mean when I say constant relevant comms? So remember that competition for your donors attention is really, really fierce.

[00:32:57] Muna Hussen: Um, I did say that, yes, it is the podcast of comms, but we’re not just competing with other emails in the inboxes. We’re competing with Netflix. Yes, when we’re looking at our inbox, it tends to be quite focused, we’re in that one screen and you’re not scrolling through a feed, but you do have other devices nearby.

[00:33:21] Muna Hussen: You might have your phone, you might even be using social media or web WhatsApp on another platform. So remember that your donors attention will always be slightly split. And just like. Video killed the radio star back in the day. I think I’ve just aged myself. It may be time to retire the monthly newsletter.

[00:33:43] Muna Hussen: I know a lot of us still do that Or if we’re not going to retire it at least let’s look at what else we can send via communications I’ve popped a few examples in, uh, the coming slides, but all of this is meant to help you look at the various type of emails you can send, um, and also how you can actually use those emails.

[00:34:04] Muna Hussen: Again, based on personalization, based on segmentation, and how can you automate them so that it’s taking all of that work from your fundraising team. So here are some of the examples. You’ve got some emails that you can send for fundraising profile updates. If someone updates their, their, their goal or their fundraising, um, uh, um, um, income, are you able to send them an email to say congratulations or thank you so much for, for wanting to raise even more money?

[00:34:36] Muna Hussen: Are you able to send? immediate confirmations of that donation or the sign up and are you able to send the asks split by the different, um, uh, the different appeals and projects, but also segmenting who you’re sending it to so that you’re not adding to that 30 percent increase in fundraising messages.

[00:35:00] Muna Hussen: Um, not everything. Needs to land in one message. So why can’t we take our donors on a journey? Let’s have a quick look at a fundraiser’s journey here. looking at the fact that their journey begins and you can send them a welcome. So a fundraiser’s journey. So they’ve signed up, um, three days after their profile has created, do you want to send them an update that says let’s get started?

[00:35:26] Muna Hussen: And do you want to automate that so that you’re again, not having your, your team having to remember, okay, it’s been three days and I need to send that and so on. Then it can be followed by some tips on how to fill out, fill out their profile. Further on, it can be, uh, ways on how to ask friends and family to donate to themselves.

[00:35:46] Muna Hussen: Just bearing in mind the cost of living and we might all be worried to ask friends and family for money. A good rule of thumb is three to five emails per journey, but again, it’s all dependent on your audience. And back to my favorite talk Favorite word this talk Um segmentation based on their interaction with you So if they have and i’m going quite deep here again balance it with your resources if they have already taken A challenge with you previously.

[00:36:15] Muna Hussen: Are you able to talk about that challenge in their welcome email? If they are a new fundraiser, are you able to welcome them as a new fundraiser? And as part of your delegate bag, we have included some great email journeys like I mentioned That you can just use so they’re written by our amazing team We’ve popped them into a mirror board and we’ve pulled them out of the raisley system Uh back end so that mirror board is accessible for you and remember to always balance the ask with the celebration, so When as as long we As long as we are asking, we should also be celebrating it.

[00:36:52] Muna Hussen: There’s no point in consistently hammering how much help we need if we’re not also talking about what we are doing with that help. Let’s go into a little bit more detail around each segment and how we can communicate with them. Oh sorry, this is just a quick automated message journey. Like I mentioned, we’ve pulled that out of the Raisely system.

[00:37:11] Muna Hussen: This is what it looks like on the back end of the The Rosalie system and you’ll click on one of these, but they’re all in a mirror board for you. So feel free to download them. And if you don’t, you’ve got my email address at the bottom and I’ll get them right across to you as well. Now let’s have a quick look around the segments that we talked about, right?

[00:37:30] Muna Hussen: So the coordinated listing. So the first one is donors. So new and recurring should be split in an ideal world. You can send them separate emails, either welcoming them to the charity. If then, if they’re new or updating them on what their gift is helping you achieve, how do you update recurring donors?

[00:37:50] Muna Hussen: Well, if there are one off. cash giver. Um, and they have previously donated to you. Thank the fact that they have donated to you again. Of course, all of this is dependent on how long you’re keeping the data for. If someone donated, you know, 10 years ago, you may not have their data anymore, but keeping in mind that this may be someone who’s coming back quite often.

[00:38:12] Muna Hussen: If it’s a regular giver, you might want to update them on what their gift has done six months in, a year in, and so on. And if it’s a new donor, you can welcome them to the charity. Current donors don’t need to know as much about your charity as a whole. They need to know about what you’re doing now. But new donors, you do want to introduce them to your charity and talk about some of the impact.

[00:38:39] Muna Hussen: Let’s talk about fundraisers. So keeping them engaged across the journey. One of the boldest email journeys I ever saw was this fantastic organization that we worked with at the Raisely. It was a 30 day onboarding journey with an email being sent every single day to new fundraisers. That’s really bold, and I think a lot of us will probably be a bit scared to send emails every single day.

[00:39:04] Muna Hussen: But I do want to tell you that there is a balance, if that’s too much for your charity, between that monthly newsletter and the everyday. There are small ways that you can engage with fundraisers. At The Bike Project, we started off by sending emails based on someone’s activity within the campaign itself.

[00:39:22] Muna Hussen: So if they were 25 percent of the mileage or their goal there, 30, uh, 50%, 75%, with conditions built in that would skip over an email if they reached, for example, 50 percent in one day. So consider the journeys that will keep these fundraisers excited and engaged and completing their challenges That’s the point you want to get them through that journey.

[00:39:44] Muna Hussen: You want to get them to their mileage and their goals You can also send You know updates on the amount of money they’ve raised if they’ve raised 200 pounds 300 pounds. Do they get a medal? Do they get a journey? Do you want to talk about what you’ll do with their money? Celebrating the impact along the way for appeals.

[00:40:05] Muna Hussen: There is a bit of a fine line between balancing the ask and again, the celebration, but it’s really important to just have that happen, even mid campaign to keep that donor fatigue down. Cause you’re not the only cause asking for the help, even though they may be focusing on your cause at the moment. So start off maybe with a really bold ask, celebrate the win along the way.

[00:40:28] Muna Hussen: Then have a second ask halfway, you know, three quarters of the way Update them on the post campaign impact give them an update, you know, three four months later down the road Don’t just thank them at the end of the appeal and then that’s it. You don’t communicate with them again other than that. Um, monthly newsletter Now going further with data.

[00:40:50] Muna Hussen: We’re coming to the end and hopefully we’re going to have some questions I’m going to talk for about five minutes more I think it’s really important to focus on this because Just had some questions, just had some, um, sentences pop up around data using, um, the data for, you know, open rates and things like that, and I want to talk about that a little bit more here.

[00:41:12] Muna Hussen: So let’s go beyond the basics. What are the numbers that you can use to further your planning? There are some basic numbers that we can look at and that everyone looks at, but I want to take a moment here and think through what data is available so you can go through the various routes to reach your audience.

[00:41:30] Muna Hussen: First up really really simple open rates click through rates response rates and unsubscribe rates Think about what you are doing with those numbers at the moment. They’re all there every email platform Will show you these these bits of data But are we actually doing anything with them? If you’re looking at the open rate and you can see it steadily declining over the last couple of months or years What is it about your subject line?

[00:41:55] Muna Hussen: Or what is it about the? Um, the kind of, maybe the first impact of when it lands on the inbox that you’re, that you need to test. So it might be the subject line that you need to test. It might also be the time of day that you need to test it. And it might be that because you are not sending, um, Uh, emails quite frequently, you may be ending up in spams at some, at some times.

[00:42:22] Muna Hussen: Think about the click through rates. So, is someone clicking through? And if they’re not clicking through, is it because the call to action is not strong enough? Or is it because of where you’ve placed the call to action? Some websites like reallygoodemails. com allow you to look through all of the data of various sectors and different, um, um, businesses and look at, you know, some of the tests they may have done.

[00:42:46] Muna Hussen: I do know of a charity where they placed the call to action. Right at the very top similar to where your donate button would be on a website, you know top right hand side And they saw a good number of increases in that think about also the unsubscribe rates I talked about the fact that across the sector we’re doing really really well on unsubscribe rates But people do get frustrated So make sure that if you see a high number of unsubscribe rates or a sudden spike That you’re making sure to just take Take a step back and think not just what’s wrong with this email But what have we been doing along the last few months or even weeks to kind of inspire that unsubscribe rate Using utms across all links to track page completion rates is really important So make sure that you’re tracking those links So when you put a call to action in put a specific utm link in so that you can see which call to action What’s the one that worked the best.

[00:43:45] Muna Hussen: And then you can test that again, again, talking about where you’re placing the call to action and then split the data by the type of message and the type of audience. So don’t look at all of your data all at once in the same way that you’re sending different messages to different segments. Make sure that you are splitting that data.

[00:44:04] Muna Hussen: So don’t compare your donors to your fundraisers. Treat each group as their own kind of. Individual group and going even further beyond the data. Here are some examples and we are coming I think to the end of this now So hopefully there are some questions that will start coming through if you can go beyond the data You can use multiple touch points so different email journeys to engage users Based on their interest.

[00:44:32] Muna Hussen: So let’s go into the detail of this If they’ve not opened the emails, let’s say you send an email. Let’s focusing even more. Let’s say there’s an appeal. You send the appeal to your audience. You send them separately to regular givers and to cash givers. Simplest segmentation we possibly can. And you notice that 60 percent of your regular givers did not open the email.

[00:44:55] Muna Hussen: So what you then do is you send them just that group and your email platform should allow you to do this. Set up a new segment. Regular givers received campaign X. Did not open. Send them another email with a new subject line. Don’t change anything else about the rest of the email. They didn’t open it.

[00:45:13] Muna Hussen: They don’t know what’s on inside there. If they did open the email, if a percentage did open it, but they didn’t click anything, add in a new case study. So change up the content of the email just a little bit to make it fresher, or maybe even change up where the call to action is or how many call to actions there are.

[00:45:34] Muna Hussen: If they clicked, but they did not donate. So they didn’t, you use the UTM to track the page completion rate. And this is why it’s really important. And you know that they didn’t click and they didn’t donate. You want to put a stronger call to action. So maybe you want to humanize what you’re asking them.

[00:45:51] Muna Hussen: 50 pounds will allow us to do X. If 50 of you donate 50 pounds, we will be able to help 500 people or whatever the numbers are, but really going strong with that bold ask because at the moment they’re not reacting. So you may as well test it and then repeat it for a specific interaction. So again, I cannot stress enough that you need to have your donors and your fundraisers Having different journeys.

[00:46:17] Muna Hussen: So I’m giving you some really simple examples of how to segment, you know You want to segment your fundraisers your regular givers and your cash givers or just all givers and fundraisers But just having that personalization built into your segmentation gosh Buzzwords today and we’ll be able to really help you get to um, being able to build those those journeys Oh a lot of talking there.

[00:46:43] Muna Hussen: I think we are going to stop here and start asking some questions We

[00:46:49] Simon Scriver: are indeed. And thank you very much for that. Now, I’m conscious people might be have to chip off. And I think me and you are going to get carried away with this conversation. So before people leave, just to remind you, the recording will be available at the same link.

[00:47:03] Simon Scriver: So please do come back to the same link if you miss anything or you want to watch it back. And the delegate bag is there. I know people are looking for a PDF and things like that. So anything people have been looking for in the chat, don’t worry. We’ll get it in the delegate bag for you. We’ll get it there, but you can get that at the same link.

[00:47:20] Simon Scriver: And then obviously to book in some time with Muna, I imagine people want to chat more deeply with you. Um, but that’s the. I’ll leave this up on the screen while we’re chatting a bit so people can reach out to you that way. Sure,

[00:47:31] Muna Hussen: I love talking email, so yeah, reach out. Okay,

[00:47:34] Simon Scriver: good, that’s great because I’ve got some questions for you.

[00:47:37] Simon Scriver: So there’s a lot, there’s a few questions and people have been really good in terms of answering each other’s questions in the chat. So please do keep doing that people. Um, and I’ll focus on maybe some of the questions that others haven’t answered. There was one which I’ve never heard asked actually, which I thought was a really good question from Jade.

[00:47:53] Simon Scriver: And she was talking about email journeys when it comes to things like legacies, which are much longer term. You know, and you were talking about those kind of three to five steps. Um, and, and it’s very, you know, you can’t plan an email journey for multi year, presumably. But how, how do you approach someone who’s maybe on that legacy journey, but is also, you know, your day to day donor as well?

[00:48:13] Muna Hussen: Wow, that is, I actually have never heard that asked before. Yeah, isn’t that a great question? Sorry to put that, I

[00:48:18] Simon Scriver: should have asked you an easy one first.

[00:48:20] Muna Hussen: No, no, I love it because it leads me to think about, um, how you’re communicating with them about their legacy. So a lot of what I’ve talked about has been about celebrating.

[00:48:29] Muna Hussen: What donors have done for you and when it comes to legacies they’ve obviously supported you for for a very long time So it’s about looking at first of all, look at the other comms that you’re sending in them as well Are they folded into your monthly newsletter? Are they do they have a different relationship with you?

[00:48:45] Muna Hussen: So deciding which relationship they have with you is the most valuable I would say off the top of my head, I’ve not really worked with a lot of legacies, but off the top of my head, a legacy relationship is probably the most important relationship they have with you, even if they are, you know, a fundraiser and so on.

[00:49:03] Muna Hussen: I would say, I mean, what do you think, Simon? Would you not? Well,

[00:49:05] Simon Scriver: I think that’s a really interesting question and I would agree because, because of the value of them. And because someone who shows that intention, you know, they’re obviously going to be more engaged in other areas. I think that the challenge that comes to mind is you’ll have a lot of trouble getting that approved, you know, for other teams to relinquish that person.

[00:49:24] Simon Scriver: Yeah. With that longer term gain, which would, which is a really interesting conversation like something.

[00:49:29] Muna Hussen: Yeah. And I actually think you can even consider them on the same level as major donors. You know, these are people that are engaged with you for a long time Major donors I engaged major donors. I engaged with you for a lot of money But think about kind of the level of not just money but advocacy that they are supporting your charity with So really treat them as an incredibly valuable individual and think about maybe updating them Um, not just within the monthly newsletters, but also quarterly.

[00:49:59] Muna Hussen: Maybe you want to send them out a quarterly update on what their legacy is, gift is giving, and really quantify that so that they’re constantly being told this is how important you are and this is what you’ve you’ve helped us achieve manageably, which is why I’m saying something like quarterly.

[00:50:15] Simon Scriver: That’s a really good point about almost classifying them as a major donor and that makes a lot of sense and that’s it.

[00:50:19] Simon Scriver: That seems like a good simple way to start that segmentation rather than overcomplicating it. Which I guess leads on to another question where some people have been asking about where do you start with segmenting? And I know we have a lot of small charities here. who are coming away from this still, we’re still going to feel overwhelmed.

[00:50:35] Simon Scriver: Yeah. It’s going to feel like too much work to I know. Is the first segmentation you do, is that by gift amount, you know, the, the most valuable and less valuable? Like, what are the, what are the priorities that we simply must do?

[00:50:46] Muna Hussen: Yeah, definitely. And again, I’m coming back to, to talking about balancing your, your resources versus what you want to do.

[00:50:52] Muna Hussen: And I’ve done it. I’ve done it. I’ve chewed off way more, bitten off way more than I can chew and been told by like my colleagues and my, you know, the managers that I sort of looked after. Oh, you want to like take a step back really. But, um, I would say think about, um, the, the, your audience as a whole. And I would say the simplest one is splitting your donors from your fundraisers, then looking at your, um, your donors and splitting them again into regular givers, cash givers, and then splitting them into maximum three.

[00:51:23] Muna Hussen: So you want to do like maybe not to 50 pounds, 50 pounds to 150 pounds and then 150 pounds onwards. If people aren’t giving you that high of a gift, you know, come down. Yeah. You’re, you’re

[00:51:35] Simon Scriver: led by your own organization. And


[00:51:38] Muna Hussen: once you’ve split it, look at the numbers. There’s no point in running. a separate journey for a segment that has only got five people in it.

[00:51:45] Muna Hussen: So look at the data and don’t be too afraid to go in, change things and update things as you go. Nothing has to be set in stone.

[00:51:52] Simon Scriver: Yeah, I think that’s great. And I think it’s almost like you’re led by time rather than by the numbers first. So it’s like, well, how much time do I have to put into my major donors each week?

[00:52:01] Muna Hussen: Exactly.

[00:52:02] Simon Scriver: How many people can I fit in that? And that’s going to be. The people that classified into it and everyone else. So I think, I think a lot of it as fundraisers, cause there’s always more you can do. You can always be more or twice as small. So yeah, we

[00:52:14] Muna Hussen: could all use like five more people in our teams.

[00:52:17] Simon Scriver: That’s coming. Well, five more people. Well, one thing that is coming or has come that, that is almost like five people is like automations and you touched on that. And a few people were asking about that. Maybe could, you could speak to that. Where do you start with getting automations? I mean, I’m assuming a lot of tools, you know, Raley I know has, has some automations in there.

[00:52:36] Simon Scriver: Things like Zapier are available to others. Mm-hmm . What, what do you like? What, what have you seen working for people?

[00:52:42] Muna Hussen: So I think it depends on what the capacity of your current tech stack is to begin with. Um, there’s a lot of tools out there that are amazing. So if you have a CRM platform like Salesforce or Raise Edge, Microsoft Dynamics and so on, you can use that in order to.

[00:52:58] Muna Hussen: Uh through your donation form your signup form to segment people but not every charity has access to that because they can be quite expensive So it’s looking at what is your current email platform capable of are you using mailchimp. digital campaign monitor? Are you using raisley? There’s all of these Automations are available.

[00:53:17] Muna Hussen: You will need to carve out some time in your week to just switch off your inbox and have a look into the resource back resource documents at the back end of your platform and use that automation. If you don’t have any automation now, the number one thing I would ask you to start with is. Welcome journey.

[00:53:35] Muna Hussen: Thank you for signing up for a fundraiser and a thank you for the donation If your current platform doesn’t have that there are other platforms that are free that you can look into And I promise you it’ll be an it’ll it’s difficult to set it up, but I I promise you it is worth it So I would strongly encourage you to look into starting with those two automations

[00:53:58] Simon Scriver: I think I think that’s a great point and I would say You know, people have heard me say this on most things is reach out to your supplier because I know people like Raisely if you’re if you’re already a customer, for example, for a start, they they are so supportive.

[00:54:10] Simon Scriver: And I’ve actually seen like, like change features just simply because you request something. So that’s what they’re there for. But even if you’re not a customer reaching out to people like you, I’ve always found people helpful, like you. What, what’s possible and what are the steps to do? And even if you’re not a client or a customer, no, no, no good way to do it.

[00:54:27] Simon Scriver: It’s like, exactly.

[00:54:29] Muna Hussen: Yeah. Don’t be afraid to ask, drop me an email. I’m happy to chat via email or go on a quick 10 minute, um, uh, chat. I’m really happy to, to just kind of talk through where you are at the moment and give you some good ideas, um, on how to get to the next stage that you want to be at.

[00:54:47] Simon Scriver: Someone talked about, um, just ask quickly about, uh, opening rates and there was talk about emojis, you know, too many emojis and too few emojis and what open, you know, does it make a big difference on, on opens and click rates depending on your subject line. I think the general consensus was yes, there’s so much.

[00:55:05] Simon Scriver: So I guess more of my question for you is where do people go to, or where do you go to learn what open rates work and don’t work? And where do you kind of benchmark these things? Like what, what, what’s your go to cheat sheet?

[00:55:18] Muna Hussen: So my go to is reallygoodemails. com. It’s a really good website that you can, it’s a bit like Unbounce.

[00:55:23] Muna Hussen: So you can go on there and look at what’s really working because they aggregate a lot of different email journeys, which I think can be really, really helpful. And the second thing is your own data. So your, your platform should allow you to do A B testing. So most platforms allow you to send an email out.

[00:55:41] Muna Hussen: to a smaller segment with two different subject lines Before deciding which subject line was the best one and they’ll send it to the rest of your um, The rest of that that segment so I would definitely recommend try one with an emoji and then try one without an emoji I think in charities we tend to be really scared of the test and learn methodology because the learn part technically means we failed because maybe it didn’t work as well as we wanted it to, but the point is you’re supposed to be learning something.

[00:56:12] Muna Hussen: So I think it’s really, really worth testing out just using your own data, but balance it with your tone of voice. If you’re quite a serious charity, then there’s no point in suddenly bringing in emojis and confusing your current audience.

[00:56:25] Simon Scriver: Yeah, and I think that scares people sometimes, you know, you talked about being very personal.

[00:56:29] Simon Scriver: And, and that, that kind of advice I’ve heard from like day one in my career, and it’s always worked for me, you know, to like more personal, more people connect. But I know people have a fear sometimes of being like over familiar or being, you know, offending a big formal donor who maybe, you know, doesn’t want to be called by their first name.

[00:56:47] Simon Scriver: Well, what do you say to To queries like that. So again,

[00:56:50] Muna Hussen: I think looking at your audience at the moment, but segmentation will help with that So if you have an a donor a major donor that’s giving you, you know, 10 000 pounds a year You don’t want to refer to them as hey friend, you know, you want to build that kind of personal relationship So I think about start with segmentation But also look at your audience and make sure that you’re doing the work We’re getting away a little bit from emails here, but make sure you’re doing the work in understanding what your tone of voice is and how it works for your audience.

[00:57:19] Muna Hussen: But it’s all about just communicating with people based on their interaction with you and their relationship with you. It’s not really about, you know, how the relationship you want to have with them. It’s about the relationship they already have with you.

[00:57:33] Simon Scriver: Very good. That’s brilliant. I’m so, I’m so conscious of time.

[00:57:36] Simon Scriver: So I’m just going to say one quick thing. There was, there was talk of UTMs about what are they? Um, and questions around that. So I would say reach out to Muna to have a deep conversation because there’s a lot there. But essentially it’s, it’s part of the link. It’s buried within the link and it then tells your system where that person clicked on that link.

[00:57:52] Simon Scriver: So it allows you to track it back. So that, that’s essentially what it is. But there’s, we’re, we’re doing some work on that ourselves and there’s so much to do on this. So we don’t have time for that. But, but just to finally, because I find this so interesting, people always are concerned about sending too many emails.

[00:58:06] Simon Scriver: And every time we see the data and every time consultants and experts speak. It seems to imply we’re not sending enough email.

[00:58:14] Muna Hussen: We’re not sending enough emails. So, so

[00:58:16] Simon Scriver: tell me, tell me just finally, what is, what is the clash there? And why are we having trouble convincing people? And then once they’re convinced, getting approval to send more.

[00:58:26] Simon Scriver: Fundraising emails.

[00:58:28] Muna Hussen: Because I think people consider sending emails as a nuisance. They think that you’re bothering people. They think, oh, well, they’ve already donated. I’m just going to leave them alone or they’ve already fundraised. I’m not going to annoy them. But, and I say this all the time. If you’re a Raisely client, you, you will have heard me say this.

[00:58:42] Muna Hussen: If we talked about email, you’re not Deliveroo. And you’re not wayfair. You’re not sending them emails Repeatedly for stuff that they don’t care about you’re they have actively opted in They have a relationship with you either through Using your service having a family member use your service being a donor being a fundraiser And they want to hear from you a really good rule of thumb to start with is to send one email per week And see how that goes out and The more the data shows, as Simon has said, that the more emails you send up to a certain point, um, the more successful it will be because you’re not bothering them.

[00:59:19] Muna Hussen: Remember that they have a relationship with you.

[00:59:22] Simon Scriver: And you, you said earlier that, you know, people are, um, um, you know, in terms of the content that obviously you’re not going to send loads and loads of emails if you don’t have anything to say, but be led by that content. And our job as fundraisers is to generate that content really.

[00:59:39] Simon Scriver: Um, so it’s like be led up by that. If you have good content, people do want to hear from you. And I, I’ve had, I’ve had mailings from companies where, you know, when I want them and they’re interested, you can email me every day.

[00:59:50] Muna Hussen: Yeah.

[00:59:51] Simon Scriver: You’re interested in it. You know, it’s not that people want less email, they want less.

[00:59:58] Simon Scriver: It’s really interesting, but it’s a difficult mindset to go because almost we’re embarrassed sometimes to represent ourselves and our charities, but actually the person on the other end very often wants to know.

[01:00:08] Muna Hussen: Yeah, they do. They do. And don’t be, don’t be embarrassed. Try it and just keep, keep paying attention to the data.

[01:00:14] Muna Hussen: If you send, you know, if you give yourself a month or two weeks and you send, you know, an email twice a week and you realize that that unsubscribe rate is creeping up, just maybe take it back down. But don’t, don’t be freaked out. You know, your email list is growing. We’re seeing a trend of email list growing and you will be able to learn from that data from trialing new things.

[01:00:36] Simon Scriver: That was great. As always, I’m sure we’ll see you again in the near future. Thank you so much for your time. And that’s great. And, um, I hope lots of people reach out to you.

[01:00:49] Muna Hussen: Let’s talk if you want to thank you so much everyone as always. I really appreciate and thank you simon I love doing these with fundraising everywhere.

[01:00:57] Muna Hussen: It’s such a pleasure. So, thank you so much.

[01:00:59] Simon Scriver: Thank you so much. That was brilliant That was great. So yeah, please do look i’ll leave the contact details up there for a second. Please do reach out Um, but underneath the, uh, uh, video here, you’ll also see a link there to book in some time with me. So one to one time, I highly recommend that.

[01:01:12] Simon Scriver: It’d be really helpful. Um, but also at the same link, remember it will remain active with the recording. So you can come back and watch this back. And then there was a lot in there. Um, and then the delegate bag will remain active. And there’s a couple of things people have requested for, and we’ll do our best to get back into them.

[01:01:26] Simon Scriver: But if there’s anything, you know, people wanted to unpack some stats more and things like that, anything in particular that you want for your own yourself, then do reach out to me because she’s just been so generous with her time and information. So last bits for me. Um, yes, remember, you can get everything from here.

[01:01:41] Simon Scriver: That’s all great. We would love your feedback on that as well. So you’ll see that little pause button that’s still active. Um, so if you, if you want to give any feedback on there and let us know what you’d like to see. Uh in a future session or see me when I come back and talk about at a future conference, then please do Speaking of future conferences, um, our next big conference is the supporter experience conference, which I imagine there’s going to be lots of information Around that out there.

[01:02:03] Simon Scriver: So that’s on the 22nd of may And we’ve got a few other things coming up, but always check fundraising everywhere. com for those Um, you can register for them. But if you’re a member remember as a member remember as a member In December. No, as a member you get access to all that stuff. So please, um, um, if you’re a member, don’t worry about it.

[01:02:21] Simon Scriver: You get access to all this. This recording will be out at your library. You know the drill members. If you don’t know the drill about membership. Good lord. I mean, do I have to keep talking about it? Come on, come on, join the, join the fundraising ever a crew Um, but that’s it for me really everyone. Uh, it’s so lovely to see you and I can I can see some people saying goodbye So thanks ian.

[01:02:38] Simon Scriver: Thanks lauren. Uh, thanks rob fran Yeah, we’ve got some nice chat in there and some lovely lovely words for um, You know, so we’ll try and get that chat. Um, um available for everyone as well Because I know there’s some good resources shared in there. Um, but from me That’s everyone. Uh, that’s everyone.

[01:02:53] Simon Scriver: That’s everything. That’s a pretty bad sign off, isn’t it? Um, but yeah for me, that’s it. We’ll see you at a future event. Lovely to see you and uh, have a good day Take care of yourself

[01:03:03] Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much for listening to the fundraising everywhere podcast If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend?

[01:03:10] Alex Aggidis: And if you would like to give us a little like or subscribe, it really helps more fundraisers that you find us Thank you so much. See you next time

Join us at the Supporter Experience Conference on Thursday 22nd May for even more expert insights and actionable advice. You can register here.

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