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Email Marketing Best Practices for Nonprofit Organizations
Engage Your Community With Storytelling and Personalization
Nicola Vaughan
May 29, 2025
Marketing for nonprofit organizations is often put on the back burner. While this may improve short-term expenses, it can make driving awareness virtually impossible.
Luckily, email marketing can save the day! With an ROI of 28.5% compared with 7% for direct mail, email drives higher returns than other marketing channels, making it ideal for nonprofits with tight budgets (Campaign Monitor).
This guide will provide tools to build a successful email marketing strategy for your nonprofit organization. You’ll learn methods for increasing engagement rates, plus how personalization can increase donations by improving relevance.
Table of Contents
Understanding Email Marketing for Nonprofits
As a nonprofit organization, marketing may seem impossible with a small budget and limited time to dedicate to it.
This is where email marketing can make your life easier. So why does email marketing matter for nonprofits, and what results can it achieve?
Why Email Marketing Matters for Nonprofits
Email marketing can be an integral element of a growth strategy for nonprofit businesses, delivering a cost-effective way to speak directly to supporters.
This not only builds relationships with existing donors but can also be a measurable way of driving new supporters.
With new supporters and an engaged audience comes increased donations and a higher awareness of the impact of your organization's mission.
Here are some key benefits that make email marketing super important for nonprofits.
Cost-Effective Growth
For every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made, according to a study carried out by Campaign Monitor. This is a huge return on investment for any business, but particularly for nonprofit organizations where your marketing budget may not be as big as you’d like it to be.
Founders of nonprofits are always looking for cost-effective ways to drive exposure, and email marketing is one of the cheapest ways to do this.
Easy Donation Platform
Sending out regular emails promoting online donation platforms can significantly increase donations, making it super easy for donors to contribute to fundraising opportunities.
With a predicted 4.89 billion email users by 2027 (Statista), someone’s inbox is one of the best places to reach a loyal supporter ready to donate.
Rallying Volunteers
Driving volunteers to help your nonprofit organization is almost as important as increasing supporters, with so much to do and limited resources to achieve your goals.
Email can be used to recruit new volunteers, giving your nonprofit the manpower it needs to drive donations and run successful events.
Scalable
One of the key benefits of email marketing is that it is scalable, making it easy to increase or decrease marketing efforts depending on available resources/funds at the time.
This is different from other marketing channels, which are more “all or nothing”. Email marketing can be scaled up when you have a big event on the cards or scaled down when things are quieter and you need to protect resources.
Thank You’s and Updates
Running a successful nonprofit organization is more than just driving new growth. Thanking your supporters and showing you value them is integral to nurturing your audience, ensuring that they know how important they are to your brand.
Keeping supporters happy not only improves the chances of them donating over a long period of time but also increases the chances of them shouting about your brand to their friends and family.
You can also use email to issue updates, keeping donors in the loop with upcoming events.
Check out this beehiiv blog for more reasons why email marketing is the way forward for nonprofits and some newsletter ideas to get you started.
Building an Effective Email List
The main sticking point that people tend to worry about with email marketing is how to build an engaged list of subscribers. What’s the point in sending out an email campaign if you don’t have a full room of interested people to send it to?
Let’s discuss how to build an effective email list of the right people and how to ensure proper consent is always achieved.
Attracting the Right People
A robust email list of highly relevant people is super valuable to a nonprofit, providing a plethora of opportunities for growing donations and exposure.
Here are some key strategies for attracting the right people to your email list:
Collection from Events: People attending your events are likely highly interested in your nonprofit, making them great candidates for your email lists. Keep in touch with event attendees by collecting email addresses either at an event or when they purchase a ticket.
Online Sign-Ups: Make sure you’re giving website visitors the chance to sign up to your mailing list. You could even give them an incentive, such as a discount code for your latest event!
Donation Forms: Integrating with donation forms can be an easy win when collecting email addresses, with users already entering their email addresses when they donate. Make sure you use these platforms to gain extra email addresses for your lists by including an opt-in field to join your mailing list.
Ensuring Proper Consent
Obtaining explicit consent from your subscribers when growing a mailing list is super important.
This ensures that your organization is compliant with regulations such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), avoiding hefty fines and reputational damage.
It’s also important to receive consent to maintain high engagement rates. If a subscriber isn’t interested in hearing from your brand, they’re not likely to engage, which isn’t great for your overall stats and may result in subscriber dissatisfaction.
It’s best to ensure proper consent to build a list of engaged users who are excited to hear about your brand’s journey, rather than disengaged users who may be quick to unsubscribe or complain.
Creating a privacy policy can help your nonprofit be transparent about how it collects, stores, and uses supporters’ data. Check out this blog for tips on creating an effective email newsletter privacy policy.
Crafting Compelling Email Content
Curating email content that will strike a chord with your supporters is key for nonprofit organizations.
You want to instill passion in your subscribers with your content, encouraging them to support your cause and ideally donate.
Check out the sections below to take your email content to the next level.
Personalization and Relevance
Personalizing your email content and making it as relevant as possible to your supporters is key to driving engagement. We receive an average of 121 emails a day (Email List Verify), so a personal email is more likely to stand out in a user’s inbox.
Relevant content is also effective for building trust with your subscribers, showing them that you understand why they subscribed in the first place by showing them content they’re interested in.
Here’s a top tip: Use data such as subscriber interests or behavior to tailor content to supporter preferences. You could do this by sending updates of a new event to subscribers who have attended a similar event in the past, showing that you remember their past support and want to make sure they know about upcoming relevant events.
Storytelling
Storytelling is a powerful method for nonprofits to connect emotionally with supporters, motivating them to take action.
This typically involves featuring real people who have been affected or helped by your organization, humanizing issues, and putting a face/voice to the people benefitting from your charity efforts.
Storytelling also allows you to showcase the impact of your nonprofit, thereby encouraging supporters to take action and either get involved or make a donation.
You could create a donor spotlight campaign where you feature a donor or supporter each week/month, sharing their journey with your organization and the impact their donations have had.
Designing Effective Emails
Design is just as important as content when it comes to effective email campaigns. If your email doesn’t look right or reflect your brand mission, it can make your brand seem unprofessional, undermining your marketing efforts.
Here are some best practices for email design and some tips for using templates.
Best Practices for Email Design
When designing a powerful email template, make sure that you always:
Include A Clear CTA: Consider what your CTA should be and where it should be placed. Emails with a high conversion rate always have a clear, obvious CTA that drives users to complete a goal, such as “Donate Today” or “Become A Volunteer”.
Use Compelling Images: Your email should include dynamic images that are emotive and connect with your supporters. Images should be optimized for fast loading and include alt-text to improve accessibility.
Utilize A Mobile-Friendly Design: Using a mobile-friendly template is a no-brainer in 2025, with 50 - 60 percent of emails being opened on a mobile device (Audience Point). Your email template should be tested on different devices to check that it’s optimized for a range of screen sizes, with images and buttons loading correctly.
Balance Text with White Space: While text and images are important, don’t forget about white space in your emails. This makes your content easier on the eye, creating a sense of balance and clarity in your template.
Consider Interactive Content: Interactive content can be effective for increasing engagement rates and making your email stand out. Consider using polls and surveys to engage with your supporters and understand first-hand what they think of your content.
Using Templates
Consistent email templates give your marketing a uniform, professional look that aligns with your organization’s branding.
Some other benefits of using templates for your emails include:
Productivity: Using an email template can save your employees time, allowing them to compose emails quickly and efficiently rather than creating an email from scratch every time.
Easier Testing: If your email has the same template each time, you can more easily decipher what works and what doesn’t when you test out different features.
Improved Customer Experience: Emails that are consistent with their formatting and messaging generally evoke a more professional feel, providing your supporters with an elevated experience when they read your emails.
Accuracy: Email templates reduce the risk of typos and mistakes, as content that has been pre-written will have already been proofread and approved.
Why Listen to Me? I have been working in the digital marketing space for nearly 10 years, predominantly helping brands with their email marketing and online presence. I now specialize in creating great content for beehiiv to help people nail their email strategies!
Segmenting Your Audience
Audience segmentation is a method of dividing an audience into smaller sections based on specific characteristics or behaviors.
This can be highly effective for nonprofit organizations, giving them more targeted audience sets to market to.
Benefits of Segmentation
Some of the benefits of audience segmentation include:
Improved engagement rates: Segmenting audiences helps drive engagement by sending specific emails to a receptive audience instead of using a blanket approach.
Higher conversion rates: As with engagement, relevant content is more likely to lead to users completing a desired action.
Enhanced marketing efficiency: Focusing on users who are engaged with your email campaigns can make your marketing more efficient overall, discounting users from certain topics/demographics if they don’t apply to them.
There are many different ways that you can segment users, with some of the most popular methods including demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral segmentation.
For example, you could segment an audience by location and send all users in a specific segment information about an upcoming charity event in their area.
Users who live far away from the event location are unlikely to engage with an email advertising this event, so it’s worth removing these users to avoid sending them irrelevant content.
Implementing Automation
Automation can be a highly effective technique for sending timely and relevant emails based on support actions. These could include welcome emails for new donors or follow-up emails after popular events.
Benefits of implementing automation include:
Time-saving: Setting up automation and workflows can save you and your employees a lot of time/effort. For example, instead of manually sending an email every time a new donor supports your organization, you can trigger this to happen automatically, saving time and improving efficiency.
Higher conversion rates: Automations can lead to increased conversions, allowing you to nurture a lead over a series of automated emails and making a user more likely to convert at the end of the process.
Cost-efficiency: Emails take time and funds to set up. A series of automated emails is a more cost-effective way of sending out small updates rather than manually coding HTML templates every time you need to send one.
You can implement automation using the following email marketing features.
Triggers
Triggers in email automation is an event that activates a certain action, such as a subscriber signing up to a mailing list/event or making a purchase.
Once someone has completed an action, the automation is triggered. This could be a welcome series for a new subscriber or a reminder if someone has bought a ticket for an event.
Workflows
Workflows are email sequences that are triggered by specific actions, allowing time-saving and the right emails to be sent at the right times.
An example of a workflow could include:
First email: Thanking the user for signing up for an event
Second email: Reminding the user of the event in advance
Third email: Announcing the event has begun/is due to start
Fourth email: Request for feedback on the event
Workflows ensure efficiency when engaging with supporters and improve engagement by interacting with them at specific, relevant moments.
Personalization
Emails can be personalized more easily using automation tools, giving supporters a more unique experience via email communication.
For example, if a subscriber has specifically signed up to hear about certain elements of your organization, automation can ensure that they receive updates at the right times, with the correct information.
The more information you know about your audience, the more you can use automation to personalize a supporter’s experience.
Measuring and Analyzing Performance
Measuring your email campaigns as a nonprofit is particularly important, as it's in the interests of your brand to maximize resources and performance of your campaigns wherever possible.
Let’s discuss the key metrics that you should track to effectively measure results, plus the importance of continually analyzing and making adjustments to your campaigns to improve future performance.
Key Metrics to Track
Important email marketing metrics for nonprofits include:
Open Rates: The percentage of users who have opened an email after receiving it. This indicates whether your subject line is compelling enough and if your subscribers are drawn to your email in their inbox.
Click-Through Rates: The percentage of users who have clicked onto another page from your email. This shows the success of your CTAs and the engagement levels of your campaign.
Conversion Rates: The percentage of people who have completed a set action from your email. This tells you how likely your emails are to result in a conversion/completed goal.
Unsubscriber Rates: The percentage of users who have unsubscribed from your mailing list after receiving an email. This indicates how many people are unsubscribing from your lists and, therefore, the relevance of your emails to your audience.
More key metrics can be found in beehiiv’s 3D Analytics platform or via this blog on the top 12 newsletter metrics you should be tracking.
Continuous Improvement
It’s important to regularly analyze email performance, making data-driven adjustments to improve future campaigns.
You may think a campaign is tried and tested; how could it possibly be improved further? The reality is that subscribers change, systems change, and we need to keep testing to make sure that emails are maximized to achieve the best results they can.
Check in on your campaigns regularly to see how they appear on different devices. You could also carry out feedback sessions/polls with your supporters to check that your campaigns are providing what your subscribers expect and need from your brand.
Conclusion
We hope that this article has clarified email marketing for nonprofit organizations, helping you maximize your available resources and create a strategy that works for your brand.
To summarize:
Build an effective, consented email list that is relevant to your organization via past events, donation forms, and online sign-ups
Create compelling content that is personalized and relevant, and uses powerful techniques such as storytelling
Craft beautifully designed templates that prioritize CTAs, white space, and a mobile-friendly interface
Segment your audience to trigger relevant automations that lead to higher conversion rates and engagement rates
Measure and act on results to ensure continuously improving campaigns
We strongly encourage nonprofit organizations to implement these marketing strategies to enhance engagement rates, increase donations, and achieve their missions.
Why not set up a free trial with beehiiv to try out an email marketing platform that is built on user experience, audience segmentation, and conversions? You can use a free 30-day trial of all beehiiv’s key features to see how our platform could work for your nonprofit to drive supporters and keep your loyal subscribers engaged.
Get started today - we can’t wait to see what your organization achieves next!
Google’s People Also Ask Questions
How can email marketing be utilized by nonprofit organizations?
Email marketing can be used by nonprofit organizations to send a range of communications to supporters.
Some examples of ways email marketing can help include:
Building a loyal donor audience
Promoting fundraising campaigns
Sharing updates and news
Announcing events
Thanking supporters
Nonprofits tend to gravitate towards email as a marketing channel because it’s scalable, cost-effective, and allows businesses to reach supporters using a wide range of devices.
Is Mailchimp good for non-profits?
Mailchimp can be a good email marketing platform for nonprofits as it offers a free plan, making it useful for small organizations or those with small marketing budgets.
For nonprofits looking for a more in-depth system that provides capabilities such as audience segmentation, advanced analytics, and monetization, beehiiv is a great choice.
Sign up for a free 30-day trial with beehiiv today to start promoting your nonprofit organization.
What is the best email hosting for nonprofits?
There is a range of email hosting companies that nonprofits can use to host business emails.
Some of these include:
These are trusted email providers that offer different tools to make communication as a business an easier process. These tools include calendars, meeting platforms, cloud services, and document sheets.
How often should a non-profit send emails?
Nonprofit organizations should send emails when they 1-3 emails per week or once a month for monthly newsletters/fundraising appeals.
It’s important to strike a balance between good engagement and oversending to ensure supporters are regularly updated without incurring email fatigue.
Reaching out to subscribers and asking them directly how many emails they’d like to receive per month/week is a good idea for assessing the volume of emails you should be sending on a regular basis.
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