It’s easy to see donors as nothing more: just sources of funds. But as responsible leaders in the nonprofit sector, we need to humanize our donors first and foremost. These donors are supporters of our causes and advocates for our missions.

Let’s learn how to bridge the gap between nonprofit and donor.

How do you keep in touch with the backbone of your nonprofit?

While there are so many avenues by which nonprofits can advertise their missions and updates, very few of them offer direct communication with the donor. Except for email correspondence.

Mailing lists are tried and true forms of one-on-one marketing, but it’s important to understand a few key points before jumping into the art of mass emailing.

• First, a mailing list, or a list of people you’d like to keep in contact with, is a living thing. If some donors are unsubscribing, don’t be discouraged! Perhaps those subscribers were just passive recipients taking up valuable storage space. Change is a good thing; it’s important that mailing lists never become stale.

• Second, good communication is a two way street. So, if you are asking for donations, think about how you’d like to say thanks to your donors. 

• Do they get a free copy of your e-magazine? 

• Are they invited to the annual appreciation banquet?

• And lastly, use strategy to maximize on your target audience. Don’t just blindly send out mass emails over and over again – find out what type of person was most likely to read your email and click through it, and then clone that person. 

• Are middle-aged folks more likely to give? 

• How about those working in a certain profession?

How do I create a good email template?

There are a number of valuable nonprofit resources available about email templates. 

• Here’s a cool article by The Balance

• Here’s one from Nonprofit Megaphone

Of course, now that you have a good template, you just need someone to send it to. 

Alhamdulillah for the Feeling Blessed platform! Any user that donates to your charity (and consents to email marketing) will be saved onto your admin dashboard. All that is left to do is export that data into whatever mailing service you are using.

How do I export donor data from Feeling Blessed?

1. Login to your nonprofit Admin Dashboard at https://www.nonprofits.feelingblessed.org/ 

2. On the left menu, select “Donors.”

3. Click the “filter view” icon near the top right of the screen and make sure “Email Consent” is selected.

4. Now, click the blue “Export” button in the top right and save your data as you like.

• Most mailing services, like MailChimp, prefer CSV or Excel files.

5. Login to your mailing service, import these new Feeling Blessed donors, and start sending emails!

If you’d like a walkthrough of these instructions, watch the video embedded into this article. Still have questions? Contact someone on the Nonprofit Success team.