TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 3
PART
ONE

Building your contact list

1
Consolidate your contacts 5
Reactivate dormant subscribers 11
Keep your lists clean 13
PART
TWO

2
Fundraising

Engage subscribers from day one 16

Differentiate fundraising campaigns 20
Success Story: Solidarités International 26
THREE

Communicating
PART

3
Invite your donors to events 29
Keep your subscribers engaged with 32
newsletters
Confirm donations with transactional emails 34
INTRODUCTION

Dear reader,

Sendinblue’s mission is to connect all organizations with their customers, and

non-profit organizations are no different. Just like any other business, you
also need to foster strong relationships with your donors and
volunteers in order to pursue your mission.

However, marketing as a non-profit also comes with its very specific set
of use cases that differ from all other industries, such as building a clean
contact list when data has been gathered from various sources or raising
funds with a deadline in an emergency.

We’re proud to support world-renowned non-profits and help them tackle

their challenges. We’ve created this guide based on the experience of our
clients in this industry to help other organizations in their efforts to build an
active contact list, raise funds and communicate using email marketing,
the most profitable marketing channel.

To help you achieve your mission, check our special offer at the end of this
ebook, specifically designed for non-profit organizations.

Enjoy the reading!

Guillaume Rieu,
Chief Customer Officer at Sendinblue

Our clients
PART
ONE
Building your contact list
Consolidate your contacts
To communicate with your donors using email, your starting point
should evidently be a contact list. Building a solid email contact list is a
process that can take a considerable amount of time to achieve, but
chances are you already have numerous contact details from street
fundraising, events etc. that just need some nit-picking and
cleaning. Once it’s done, the work doesn’t stop there! To maintain a
good engagement rate and to ensure high deliverability of your
campaigns, you need to have a clean email list at all times.

If you’ve been doing fundraising for a while, chances are you’ve gathered
contacts from numerous sources, such as street fundraising, cold calling
or events. Perhaps you’ve even bought a contact list (we don’t
recommend doing this!). Where multiple sources of data are
involved, the quality will inevitably vary, which can make it tricky
to have a uniform contact list that you can use for email marketing.
As such, your first step should be cleaning your contact list to ensure
you’re communicating only to valid email addresses.

Unify your existing contact data

Build a single source of truth

All your contacts should be stored in a single place. The Contact

Management system in Sendinblue is the perfect solution as it will
automatically identify any existing contacts and assign them to different
lists as well as automatically blacklist hard-bounces (emails that couldn’t
reach the receiver because the email address didn’t exist).

5
To get started, import all your contacts from different sources into
Sendinblue, we have great tutorials in our help center that make it easy to
do this. Where you will find a lot of added value in our contact
management system is in the many actions you can take with your contact
lists. Editing details is as simple as viewing the different campaigns they’ve
received. This can be really helpful to evaluate marketing pressure for
example, or deep dive into reasons for unsubscription.

Another great point of the Contacts app is that you can add as many
attributes as you want for your contacts, allowing you to retarget
them using those as conditions or filters. For example, if you operate
globally, knowing the language that your contact speaks will be useful to
send them the right campaign.

Check you’ve gathered contacts’ consent

Beyond data protection and GDPR compliance, ensuring you’re only

messaging contacts who have agreed to receive your communications is
key to deliverability.

Deliverability is closely linked to the compliance with data protection

regulations and, above all, the recipient’s interests. Because if emails are
perceived or marked as being spam, this negatively impacts your
reputation as an email sender and thus, the deliverability of all your
future campaigns. In other words, if you email people who haven’t explicitly
consented to it, chances are they’ll block your email and if the more this
happens, the less spam filters will allow your emails to go through,
including to contacts who have actually consented.

The rule of thumb is simple: if you don’t have their consent, don’t send
the email. And moving forward, always ensure you have explicit consent
when signing up a new contact.

Want to explore the world of deliverability further to ensure

your campaigns land in the inbox? Don’t miss our complete guide!

6
Collect more contacts
Make the most of every opportunity

A phone call? A meeting? A visit to one of your web pages? Social media?
There are so many occasions to gather new contacts! The trick is to
make it a guiding principle to always ask people to be added to your
newsletter. It’s for a good cause, so they’re likely to say yes as it’s not a
commitment for them.
Now, if you’re going to continue
gathering contacts from both
offline and online sources, you
must remember to implement a
double opt-in process to ensure
that your new subscriber is
engaged (check our “Welcome”
section for more info on this).

Use pop ups on your website

Another very common contact

collection method is pop ups.
Sendinblue partners with
WisePops, a leading pop up
provider in the market, which
allows you to very easily add a Check Wisepops’ guide on how to create
pop up form to the web pages an Eye-Catching Video Popup
of your choice.

The results are quite impressive, with websites using popups collecting
three times more contacts on average! To attract new subscribers, we
recommend offering them access to exclusive content or event invitations
on the pop up, and of course, make your signup form super simple and
catchy!

7
Automate to upload new contacts

To avoid typo errors, manual upload of new contacts should be banned!

Online, it’s very easy as you can simply use a sendinblue form for the
process of adding new subscribers to a list in Sendinblue and add it
directly on your website or landing page. Offline you could actually also
duplicate this process and go paper-free! As an example, for your street
fundraisers, you could very easily equip them with a dedicated online sign
up form, which they could access from their phones or tablets. You can set
this up in just a few clicks using Sendinblue and your contacts will
automatically be added to your chosen list.

The important point to bear in mind here is that all contacts should be
gathered using a form that has the same fields and then automatically
added to Sendinblue so that they can be used in subsequent campaigns.

To set up a form in Sendinblue, start by navigating to the “Contacts” tab

on the left menu, then click on “Forms”. From there, you can follow the
steps to create a new form. We recommend always selecting the double
opt-in confirmation process.

Check the complete article on how to create a subscription form on our Help Center

8
Divide and conquer
Keeping in contact with your subscribers at a good frequency is
important in order to keep them engaged with your cause. That being
said, you don’t want to send emails too often, since that can be
annoying to your users and generate complaints. But sporadic emailing
can take subscribers by surprise, increasing the likelihood that your
emails will be blocked and reported as spam by people who have
long since forgotten that they had donated or even given their email
address in the first place.

Demographic Psychographic
To maintain regular segmentation segmentation
contact efficiently, it is
important to tailor
your campaigns to
different groups’
preferences using
segmentation. List
segmentation refers
to the process of
Geographic Behavioral
dividing an email segmentation segmentation
contact list into
smaller “segments”
according to certain Learn more about How to Segment Your Lists for
Targeted Email Marketing
shared
characteristics,
to create more targeted and relevant content based on the interests of
each segment.

The benefits are:

● Increased engagement and conversion rate

● Stronger donor loyalty
● Better campaign deliverability

9
Getting started with segmentation

● Demographics is one of the easiest and most common ways to start

targeting. Country location, age, gender, language preference are
some of the criteria you could use to personalise your content.

● Segmenting contacts based on the channel through which they

found your organization is another excellent strategy. These
segments can have very different interests or needs. A few examples
are: event, social media, blog article, street fundraising, partnerships.

● Engagement data comes particularly handy to segment

contacts. Can you identify who’s opening and clicking through?
Then you can make this into a great opportunity to reward these
subscribers for their engagement. How do you define what an
engaged user is? Establish your own criteria. For example, you
can check if they made a donation once or multiple times, or
whether they always donate to the same type of campaign.

● In addition, the Sendinblue Contacts app allows you to create lists

of subscribers that you will then easily be able to search
through. This is really powerful as it’s completely unlimited, your
contacts can of course be included in multiple lists. You can even
create folders to place certain lists together based on an attribute or
a certain campaign.

Tip: It’s a good idea to layer different segmentation criteria to increase

performance, enabling you to create an even narrower audience that is
easier to address in your campaigns. For example, combining acquisition
channels and engagement can lead to a very finely targeted email
where your subscriber will be more compelled to donate as they’ll feel
more connected to your campaign.

10
Reactivate dormant subscribers
Expecting unengaged contacts to become interested in your
communications just by sending them your regular campaigns won’t get
you the results that you expect. A low engagement doesn’t necessarily
mean that recipients are uninterested in your charitable initiatives in
general, it’s also dependent on the quality of your campaigns and their
frequency. To assess this, you should send a specific reactivation
campaign to evaluate subscribers’ interest based on their response to
your message.

The first step is to define the criteria to

identify unengaged users depending
on your organization profile. You
could base this on email opens or clicks,
or even on whether they’ve recently
made a donation or attended a
fundraising event. Once you’ve decided
on your conditions, you can create a
segment.

Then you need to plan and design your

reactivation campaign. You could start
by gaining your subscriber’s attention
with a message of a reconfirmation or
re-optin email to see if they stay. In
addition, unengaged subscribers can
sometimes be lured into activity with Don’t miss our complete guide
a reminder of a benefit to them such about Reactivation Emails
as tax deductions, or exclusive
content, for example a case study of
how the funds have been used and the
impact they’ve made.

11
Tips for sending a successful reactivation campaign

Plan several touch points. If a subscriber’s engagement

has dropped it’s likely to take more than one email to win
them back. Use a series of emails to gradually re-engage
them.

Be creative with your subject lines. Instead of generic

ad-sounding words and many capital letters (since these
can easily trigger spam filters), use personalization to
appeal to the emotions of the recipient. Remember to
include the core of the campaign in them, and use
action-oriented verbs to give a sense of urgency!

Match the right content for the right audience. Consider

the target audience and their reasons for disengaging in
the first place. That way you’ll ensure the email content
matches their needs.

Know when to stop. If a subscriber still isn’t interested, let

them go. Reactivation emails should also help you identify
truly inactive subscribers who should be removed from
your list.

Make the most of Sendinblue functions. Don’t forget to

check the option ‘don’t send to unengaged contacts’ at
the last step before sending your campaigns with
Sendinblue. Use of the “Send at best time” function to
make sure you are reaching subscribers at the best time.
This will increase engagement and reduce complaints.

12
Keep your lists clean
Even if a subscriber has opted in to receive your communications, that doesn't
necessarily mean that they will read and interact with said message. If you
assume this, you may be missing things that are affecting your deliverability
and hurting your engagement rate. Remember that contact lists can change
quickly: around 66% people switch jobs every year and customer data such
as email addresses or phone numbers, can decay at a rate of 30% per year
for the B2C industry, and almost 70% for the B2B industry!

Benefits of cleaning your email lists regularly

● Reduces costs, since investment in emails sent will be done properly and
concisely, only for contacts that are interested in your organization.

● Avoids negative effects on your sending efforts such as emailing spam

traps, invalid email addresses, leads that sign up with non-deliverable
domains, or simple typos.

● Enhances your email deliverability, since it reduces bounces from bad

email addresses, which improves your sender’s reputation

● Speeds up delivery. A bad list can slow your delivery rate to the end
recipient, as receivers can throttle your email or completely block you.

● Increases the overall engagement rate of email marketing which helps

you build a more meaningful relationship with donors.

● Helps you identify and create a more targeted list of engaged

contacts truly interested in your communications

● Allows you to create content that satisfies your subscribers’ needs

and interests.

● Increases ROI and helps you achieve a higher conversion rate and a
more engaged community, which equates to more funds raised and
increased overall customer satisfaction.

13
Best practices to clean your lists
● Analyze your results by regularly checking your campaign reports, your
sender score, and by assessing your deliverability.

● Filter your lists to remove bounces, generic email addresses, and

delete all contacts who have not subscribed to your communications.

● Define your criteria to identify unengaged users and plan and design a
reactivation campaign for those contacts.

● Set up a double opt-in confirmation process and use a real-time email

verification to check the email addresses.

● Include an easy-to-find unsubscribe option in your emails and use a

one-step opt-out process.

● Use marketing automation to clean your email lists and keep them tidy
by setting up rules to delete addresses that bounce and unengaged
contacts.

Keen to find out more about how to keep excellent email hygiene?
Check out our dedicated ebook!

14
PART
TWO
Fundraising
Engage subscribers from day one
As donors increasingly expect an end-to-end digital process when giving,
and at a time where non-profit organizations are looking to reach younger
audiences, it’s becoming less profitable to rely solely on volunteers and
street marketing to raise funds. Nowadays, the act of making a
donation is actually quite similar to an e-commerce transaction and
as such, people expect the user experience to be just as smooth.
Email marketing is the most profitable channel in the market, with a
return on investment of $44 for every dollar spent! As such, it’s the ideal
solution for budget-conscious nonprofits to raise funds.

Getting a new contact added to your subscriber base should be treated

exactly like getting a new prospect, meaning you’ll want to get this contact
engaged straight away and get them to a point where they’re ready to
make a donation. There are two fundamental elements to implement:
ensuring that you have consent from the new contact as a starting
point, and onboarding new contacts with an excellent experience
from the beginning.

The importance of a double opt-in and an email

verification process

On average 80% of invalid contact data is simply because of human error.

Especially when people are using mobile devices and even more if
contacts are being entered by a third party, such as a fundraiser, who may
easily misunderstand the spelling of an email address.

16
As a best practice to keep your contact list clean, you should set up a double
opt-in confirmation for new subscribers. You can easily achieve this with
Sendinblue with the forms feature under the “contacts” section.

When you create a new subscription form, select the option “Enable GDPR
fields” before moving onto the design step of your form. This way, the
platform will automatically add an opt-in mandatory box as well as a disclaimer
that includes a link to the terms of use.

On the 4th step of the form creation, select the option “double confirmation
email”. Here you can also select the confirmation pages and final confirmation
emails on your automated sequence. By using this option from the feature,
you will avoid misspelled addresses from being added to your subscriber
base, and ensure that you are only getting quality people on your email list.
You can also use a solution for real-time email verification to check the
email address before you accept it. This way if the user made an accidental
typo they will see an error message and will have a chance to correct their
mistake before moving forward.
17
Onboarding opt-in contacts
through a welcome journey
The first contact that you make with a potential new donor is essential to
convert them into an actual donor, and even better, a recurring one,
further down the road. In marketing speak, we call this onboarding.

If a new member signs up directly on your website, it’s the best opportunity
to forge a strong connection at a time when they’re most interested in your
cause and message.

With marketing
automation, you can
easily automate this
welcome message and
have it sent to any new
client immediately after
they sign up on your
website or speak to a
fundraising agent.

Welcome emails lay

the foundation for
your donor
relationships and give
you the chance to
introduce yourself, all
while learning your
donors’ needs and
preferences.
Template for the automated welcome email
automation workflow

18
To be effective, your welcome
message should:

● Make readers want to

explore more about your
organization or cause

● Encourage engagement with

future email campaigns

● Guide the reader on the next

steps they should take

Depending on your cause, there

are multiple options available to
onboard your customer:

● Confirm newsletter
subscription and send
previous two

● Collect data to personalise

future offers

● Tutorial on product use

● Send relevant content

● Welcome promotion

To illustrate our points, above is an example of onboarding journey, which

can be automated in a marketing platform such as Sendinblue.

19
Differentiate fundraising campaigns
Depending on the type of organization you run, you may wish to differentiate
your fundraising campaigns depending on the urgency or the frequency
and even the amount of the donation you are trying to get. Innovative
messaging and look & feel will go a long way towards keeping members
engaged, and so will highlighting how your various fundraising activities are
helping your cause. In any case, we strongly recommend that you do not mix
calls for donations with newsletters as this would dilute your messages
and reduce conversion, and instead stick to dedicated email campaigns for each
activity.

Emergency appeals
When natural disasters or conflicts
hit, nonprofits who operate in this
space must act fast to start collecting
funds as soon as possible. Email
marketing is your strongest tool
here as campaigns can be very
easily set up to go out to your
contact base and will drive to your
fundraising page.

This is a stressful time but a bit of

planning may help alleviate some of
the pressure. By defining a
contingency plan to refer to in the
wake of an emergency, you’ll have
a basic email campaign plan ready
to go with some clear ownership of From the blog: 10 Giving Tuesday
each task, which should make things Email Examples That’ll Make Your
easier and more efficient. Donation Drive a Success

20
Here is some practical advice for a successful appeal campaign:
● Define the key stakeholders who will need to be involved such as the
decision maker, the campaign manager and the person in charge of social
media. Ensure they know they are the fire marshalls in these situations.

● Prepare your templates ahead: if you already have your email template
and landing pages ready, all you’ll have to do is update the content, making
you more nimble. With Sendinblue, you can design and save your email or
landing page templates, ready for you to publish when needed.

● Pay attention to your subject line, this is the one email that they
absolutely need to open. For example, it’s a good idea to include the
person’s first name, which you can do directly when setting up your subject
line in Sendinblue. Consider including action verbs and conveying the
sense of urgency. However, please ensure that your subject line is short.

● Target frequent or recurring donors, they’re more likely to be willing to

give if they’ve donated before.

21
● Stick to a single call-to-action, preferably above the fold to avoid any
scrolling

● Be mindful of the mobile experience. Chances are your supporters will

read your email from their phone, so the experience must be impeccable to
ensure good conversion.

● Your message should be focused on

explaining the current emergency
situation and how it’s impacting the
population. Don’t hesitate to build
your authority on the matter by
reiterating the work you already do
in the area (or the work of your
partners). Highlight how a donation, no
matter how small, would help
specifically and providing clear
examples is key for the supporter to
understand how their money is used.

● Be prepared to send chaser emails

in the following days. For donors, we
recommend that you update them at
least once on the progress of your
campaign as well as any impact their
funds may already be making. This will
keep them engaged for future
donation.

● For people who haven’t donated on this occasion, it’s worth chasing them
and trialling different subject lines or call-to-actions. You may wish to
use Sendinblue’s A/B testing feature for this.

● Beyond the email campaign, ensure the payment process is secure and
very easy. You want subscribers to be able to donate in less than three
clicks.

22
Recurring donations
Whilst you may have succeeded in getting a one-off donation for an
emergency campaign, getting donors to commit to giving on a recurring
basis is more challenging. One way to approach this is to encourage
existing donors you’ve gathered during emergency campaigns to give
monthly.

We recommend this
strategy as a starting
point, before analysing
the results to replicate
the most successful
campaign to subscribers
who haven’t given yet.

Again, email marketing

campaigns are the
most effective way to
drive monthly gifts as
you can build an
automated nurturing
scenario which will
trigger a number of
emails with different
content until your
contact has set up their
direct debit. Here is an
example of an
automated scenario
for a teenage shelter
charity:

23
Some additional tips and tricks based on our clients’ experience:

Be clear on what the impact is for donors by breaking

down clearly how their help, no matter how small, is going
to make a difference to your operation. For instance, for a
medical treatment organization, you may wish to highlight
why you need a specific donation amount, for example to
go towards providing vaccines for a disadvantaged
population. Don’t hesitate to provide a lot of statistics
and numbers to reinforce trust.

Highlight heavily the potential tax benefits: a lot of

countries allow donations to be tax-free, which can be an
excellent reason for people to donate as it will virtually
cost them less. Again here, it’s important to mention
numbers and give an example of how a donation of a
certain amount would benefit the donor on their tax
return. And if you operate globally, make sure your
contacts are segmented into lists by country so that you
provide accurate tax information!

Offer something in return, for example if you run an

animal rescue charity with a sponsorship program, a
donor can “sponsor” an animal of their choice for a certain
duration. This will help in reassuring the donor that
their gift is being used for something specific and it can
help build a very personal relationship with them by
providing updates on the animal’s welfare.

Think beyond the donation! You want your supporters

to stay engaged, or they might simply cancel their direct
debit. If they don’t hear from you regularly, they’ll
think their gift isn’t making a difference so check out
our section 3 on tips to communicate with your members.

24
B2B donations
Philanthropic giving benefits both the nonprofit and the business donor.
It’s good publicity for a company to make charitable contributions and
these gifts are generally larger than individual donations, making it a great
source of revenue for the nonprofit.

Here again, email is ideal to reach out to corporations. Depending on the

size of your organization, you may also prefer to leverage local businesses
but in this case, we recommend sticking with an in-person approach (where
possible) as small business owners are more likely to respond to a
face-to-face approach. If you go down the email marketing route, we
recommend that you target companies with a Corporate Social
Responsibility program as B2B charitable acts will often come from this
initiative.

When reaching out to CSR stakeholders, we recommend that you:

● Spend some time researching how your organization fits their

program

● Personalize the email content to their activity, not yours!

● Highlight the PR benefits as well well as the increase in employee
engagement
● Emphasize the tax benefits, similar to individual donors
● Offer volunteering opportunities as CSR programs often include one
or two days of paid leave for employees to contribute to charitable
causes

Campaigning B2B personas via email can be tricky as people change jobs
often and it’s not always immediately obvious who the right person to
contact is. The advice given in the first section of this ebook about keeping
your contact lists clean and accurate is therefore even more important in
this case. Similar to B2B fundraising, it’s a good idea to keep emails short
and straight to the point, and instead plan to send several emails in an
automated workflow to nurture the B2B potential donor, each highlighting a
different benefit of contributing to your cause.

25
The story of Solidarités International:
How the organization doubled open rates and
digitized their fundraising process

Solidarités International is a French non-profit

organization that operates global humanitarian actions,
mainly to facilitate access to drinking water. Fundraising
is a permanent challenge to bring an essential income
to their activity, both with recurring donations and with
emergency fundraising campaigns for natural disasters.
The NGO relies on Sendinblue’s expertise in email
marketing and best-in-class features to digitize their
fundraising process and increase donor loyalty.

The organization was raising funds using channels such as

telemarketing or street fundraising. It became necessary to
adapt the fundraising methods to meet the expectations of
donors, who increasingly prefer an end-to-end digital process.

The fundraising team manages both one-time donations

such as emergency campaigns, as well as regular direct
debits, sending personalized messages as appropriate.

Regular newsletters are also sent to donors to inform

them of the humanitarian actions carried out thanks to
their donations.

“We were reassured by the knowledge of the business right from the
solution evaluation stage. Sendinblue was frequently featured in my
search results and it looked very professional, which encouraged me to
trust the company.”
- Matilde Touzalin, Fundraising Manager at Solidarités International

26
5
In just two months of using Sendinblue, the organization has already
doubled its open rates and is now exploring the possibility of connecting
Sendinblue with their database as well as with their online donation page,
which would allow them to use the platform for transactional emails,
simplifying their processes even more.

“Setting up a workflow or a
dynamic list can be done easily.
If someone stops opening emails
for a predefined period of time,
they are automatically listed as an
inactive contact, without us
needing to do anything manually.”

The fundraising team has already implemented five marketing automation

scenarios related to petition management and the journey of a new donor.

Looking to capitalize on the new segment of donors acquired during the

health crisis, Solidarités International is now ready to accelerate the
digitization of fundraising to reach out to a young audience willing to
support them over time and thus increase the individual collection as an
important part of all of their resources. “Our CSM is always there and his
presence changes everything. His support covers not only the technical aspect
but he also gives us advice. Everything is set to make it easy for us to be
autonomous quickly” concludes the fundraising manager.
PART
THREE
Communicating

28
Invite your donors to events
Loyalty is a big challenge for non-profit organizations. It’s easy enough for
someone to give once, especially in the case of an emergency relief
campaign but getting the same people to donate again or make it a
recurring donation, is a different story. This is why it’s very important that
you communicate regularly with your contacts in order to remain top
of mind. Keep them informed of what’s happening with your cause, invite
them to events and more importantly, ensure that any donation is
confirmed in a timely and trustworthy manner.

Events are without a doubt a core part of fundraising activities.

To maximise attendance to your events and get potential donors excited
about them ahead of time, we recommend that you leverage the power of
email campaigns to communicate with your supporters.

Segment your guest list to target the right audience

In the first section of this ebook, we provided some basic tips to get started
with contact segmentation. Once you are comfortable with the guiding
principles of contact segmentation, it’s easy to go further and start using
the data you’ve collected about your supporters to target the right
audience for your event.

Indeed, you want to invite people to your fundraiser that are more likely to
attend and actually make a donation. As such, you should consider
targeting contacts based on the following criteria to avoid wasted effort:

● Location: if your event is on the East Coast, chances are that

supporters from Los Angeles won’t be able to make it.

● Past donations: has your target audience donated before? If so,

they might be more inclined to do it again so it’s a good idea to
prioritize them.

29
● Past attendance: people who have attended (and enjoyed!) your past
events are also more likely to want to attend the next one, and they might
even be keen to invite their friends.

● Topic of the event: understanding what interests your audience will be

helpful in offering events that are attractive to them and if you know
that a specific part of your audience is more interested in a certain topic,
then it’s best to only target them.

Just like the other attributes mentioned in the first section, you can add this
data to your contact list in Sendinblue using attributes. And of course, if
you run very few events or have a small contact base, you’re welcome to invite
everybody. We simply recommend tailoring your messaging as much as
possible to avoid wearing your audience out with too many “blanket”
communications.

Generate excitement
Your event is a big deal to you, right? So make it a big deal for your supporters
too! You can easily create an automated sequence of emails using Sendinblue
that will send out multiple communications about your upcoming event. Some
examples of what you can say about the event across different emails:

● A teaser to inform that something

big is coming

● Confirm speakers at the event with

a short bio or the event agenda

● Set up an online fundraising page

specifically for the event (you can do
it using Sendinblue’s Landing Pages)
so that people can start donating

● Offer a raffle or a tombola where

people can buy tickets prior to the
event.

30
Use Signup forms to collect RSVPs
Not sure how your supporters can confirm their attendance? We’ve got you
covered! With Sendinblue’s Signup Forms, you can design
professional-looking forms in minutes using our intuitive platform:

● Choose colors and create text that matches your brand and encourages
your supporters to sign up to your event.

● Add as many different fields to collect the information you want

from your contacts, e.g. text input fields, radio buttons, dropdown lists,
and more to give yourself a chance to increase your donor knowledge for
future campaigns or events

● Show off your new form anywhere you want! Use the embeddable
HTML code to add it to your event page, fundraising page and of
course, link to it from your emails and social media profiles.

In addition to collecting RSVPs in the simplest way, using a signup form can
also be the perfect occasion to add new contacts to your database. For
example if you get some of your partners or speakers to advertise the event,
their followers might be new contacts to you, meaning you can add them to
your base. Sendinblue allows you to remain GDPR-compliant on signup
forms, by giving contacts the chance to opt in to receiving different types of
emails from you according to regulations using checkboxes for each list. Go
even further by selecting the option for adding a double opt-in confirmation!

31
Keep your subscribers engaged
with newsletters
Beyond fundraising campaigns and events, it’s crucial to keep in touch
with your supporters regularly and newsletters are the perfect way to
do that. In terms of frequency, there’s no perfect recipe, the important
thing is to have something to say, so don’t feel like you have to send a
newsletter just because it’s the right time of the month, if you don’t have
any actual news to share!

Where you can make a difference is in your content and how you
communicate your content visually. Innovating in terms of format,
subject lines and personalisation, will go a long way towards
encouraging both opening and clicking your emails. The more you surprise
your subscribers with new content and attractive subject lines, the less
they’ll become tired of your campaigns and the more your engagement will
increase.
We’ve said it before, personalization is
key! Make sure you’re using the first
name of your contact both in the
subject line and the body of the email
and more importantly, tailor the
content to the readers’
preferences. There’s no harm in
building several newsletters aimed at
several audiences, even if this means
that you can only send one campaign
per month due to capacity limitations.
It’s much more effective to send a
single email that is finely targeted
with relevant content, than multiple More on the blog: Why email
campaigns that won’t resonate with marketing for nonprofits is an
absolute must
your audience.
32
Sendinblue’s drag & drop email editor is very user-friendly and allows even
beginners to design professional-looking emails. Our Service Lab is also
available to support custom template designs. Therefore all you need to
focus on is the relevance of your content! Why not communicate about the
latest progress of some of your endeavours? Knowing their gifts are making
a difference is really important to donors and if you can make use of
video content, you will engage them even more.

Besides, we cannot stress enough the importance of tracking your

performance. Sendinblue’s detailed statistics and reporting allow you
to understand at a glance how your audience is responding to your
message and where you can optimize future campaigns.

Get a better understanding of how the KPIs fare in different

industries from our Email Marketing Industry Benchmark

The core KPIs to look out for are the open rate, the clickthrough rate, the
bounce rate and the unsubscription rate.

33
Confirm donations with
transactional emails
Send your confirmation emails with confidence! No more worrying about
whether your gift confirmation email will make it to your contact’s inbox
thanks to our transactional email feature, which is very popular amongst
our nonprofit customers. Even if you use a separate fundraising
software, you can now send on-brand confirmation emails to your
donors and monitor that they’ve been received in real time.
Similar to newsletters, you can get the
look you want with a
professional-looking template using
our acclaimed drag & drop editor, as well
as personalize the content with
dynamic content like contact
information or payment parameters
that you pass from your website or
fundraising platform programmatically
using our templating language.

Our email deliverability experts are

constantly at work optimizing the
reliability and speed of our
infrastructure. As such, you can choose
from API, SMTP Relay, plugins, or
marketing automation to connect
your donation data to the Sendinblue
platform, depending on what makes the A confirmation email template that
most sense for you. Even better, we can you can customize in Sendinblue
help you choose the most appropriate
technical setup to help you differentiate
your sender reputation based on transactional versus promotional email. Our
transactional feature is also available should you wish to send text messages
to confirm payment.

34
At Sendinblue
we’re proud to
support
non-profit
organizations
And we offer a special discount to
contribute to their efforts:
Apply now to a 15% discount
for non-profits on the Enterprise license fee

Accelerate your growth with Enterprise by Sendinblue

Book a meeting with an expert today!

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Ready to boost the email strategy
for your organization? Let’s go!
We hope that reading this guide has helped you realize the great
benefits of having a solid email marketing strategy and how important it
is for any non-profit to use email as a channel to accelerate their results.

Get started with Sendinblue to increase the effectiveness of your email

campaigns and to improve your donors’ experience today.

Don’t hesitate to share with us your thoughts on email marketing for

nonprofits. We also invite you to check out our further resources to
deepen your knowledge of how you can make the most of our solution!

If you have questions, our dedicated customer care team is standing

by to help! Send us a message at [email protected]

This document is protected by copyright laws. Only copies and reproductions for strictly private and
non-collective use are authorized. Any other representation or reproduction, partial or as a whole, of this
document without Sendinblue’s consent is illegal and would constitute infringement of Sendinblue’s
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