What is a nonprofit newsletter for?#
To make a supporter feel inside the thing they pay for, and then give them a next step. Those are the two jobs, and the order matters. An email that asks before it tells is why a list quietly leaves. An email that tells and never asks is why a board thinks the newsletter is not working.
Most organisations search for a template because writing feels like the hard part. It is not. The hard part is deciding what you can honestly say happened, and then asking for one specific thing because of it.
What are the three emails a small nonprofit sends?#
| The update | The appeal | The volunteer brief | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who it is for | Everyone on the list | People who have given, or who were asked and said yes | The people who show up |
| Its job | Prove the work is real | Move money by a date | Cover a shift and a task |
| What it must contain | One story and one number | The cost, the date, the link | Time, place, who to ring, what to bring |
| How often | Monthly or fortnightly | Three or four times a year, not every month | Weekly in season |
| The mistake | Eight stories, no ask at all | An ask with no story, or two asks | Sent to donors as well, and resented |
Write the name of the email at the top of your draft. If you cannot pick one of those three, you have written a fourth thing that nobody is asking for and cut it.
How do I write a newsletter for a nonprofit organization?#
Start with a person, not a programme. Not this quarter our youth service reached many families, but Marcus, who has been coming on Thursdays since March and now sets up the chairs. The specific is what a reader remembers and repeats to somebody else, and the repeat is how a small organisation grows a list without buying one.
Then one number that traces back to your own records, then what the money or the hours did, then the ask, then the practical bits. Five paragraphs and a footer. If the draft is longer than that, you have written two newsletters and should split them.
Should every issue end with an ask?#
No, and this is where a small nonprofit burns its list. A reasonable rhythm is an ask in about one email in three, so the ones that carry no request feel like news rather than the front of a queue. A list that is asked every fortnight learns that opening you costs them an argument they do not want to have.
One ask per email, and one only. Two asks in one message is not a wider net, it is a reader who takes neither and feels managed.
What numbers are safe to publish?#
The ones you can point at in your own records on the day you write them: meals served, houses retrofitted, calls answered, animals rehomed, hours volunteered. Counted from something, not estimated from a feeling.
The unsafe ones are the borrowed numbers. A sector benchmark, an industry average, a percentage remembered from a conference slide. A supporter who checks and finds the number was not yours loses more than the number was worth, and a funder who checks is worse still. If the honest figure is small, print the small figure. Twelve families is a truer and more moving sentence than hundreds of people served.
Say the date range on the number too. Six hundred meals, January to September tells a reader something a bare six hundred meals cannot.
How do I put a donate link in an email?#
A link in text, in the same place every time, with what the amount buys beside it. Two hundred buys a week of the after-school club, ring-fenced and named, reads differently to Donate Now.
A graphic button is a file the reader downloads, invisible when images are blocked and meaningless to a filter, and the phrase donate now inside a picture is precisely what a bulk mail system cannot read. Use the giving page your organisation already has. Nothing here needs to replace the system your finance person reconciles, and a tool that cannot link out is the wrong tool.
How often should a nonprofit email its list?#
Monthly is the honest floor for a small team, and fortnightly once the writing takes twenty minutes rather than three hours. Weekly needs a calendar, two writers and a photographer, and most organisations that try it quietly stop by March.
The end of the year is the exception. Individual giving concentrates in the last weeks of the calendar year, which every small charity discovers in December and then fails to plan for in October. If you are going to send four times in five weeks, say so in the September letter, and make the first two of those sends news rather than asks.
Do free nonprofit newsletter templates work?#
The free sets give you a masthead, three columns and a placeholder for a photo of somebody else's beneficiaries. On the day they look like an organisation with a communications budget. In an inbox they break the same two ways everything designed for print breaks: the columns sit sideways on a phone, and the pictures do not arrive, because a template file carries them as references to documents on your own computer.
The version that works for a small nonprofit is a single column, one hosted photograph, your own words at a readable size, and a link that costs nothing to send. It also happens to be the version a volunteer can maintain after you have gone, which is the real requirement in an organisation where the person who built the newsletter leaves every three years.
Do the anti-spam and fundraising rules apply to us?#
Two separate questions, and neither is answered by a blog. The anti-spam rules in the United States are written about commercial messages, and a request for a charitable donation is not obviously one of those; our CAN-SPAM checklist works through what the rules require of a sender who is commercial, which is worth reading anyway because two of the requirements protect your reputation either way.
The other question is solicitation law. Many places require a charity to register before it asks for money there, and the paperwork and exemptions differ by state and by country. That is a conversation with your regulator, your lawyer or your national body, and it is a cheap one before a mailing versus an expensive one after. Nothing on this page tells you that you are exempt.
How do I handle donors and volunteers on one list?#
Tag them, or keep two lists. The volunteer wants the shift cover and does not care about the appeal; the donor wants the impact and does not need the rota. Sending each other's email is the fastest way to make both groups stop opening, and it is a five-minute job in any tool that can hold a label against an address.
New supporters are the third group and the easiest to serve badly. Whoever has given for the first time should get something within days that is not another ask: a receipt, a sentence about where the money went, and a name. What a welcome email should do is on its own page.
What about donor privacy in an email?#
Never put the list in the To or Cc field. A donor who sees eleven other donors' addresses has now been told who gives to your cause, which in some work is not information anybody should have. Send one copy to one address, let the person leave on their own, and do not pass addresses to a committee member who wants to email the gala.
And name the person in the tribute rather than the family's address. In memoriam sends are the ones that get read, and the ones that get remembered when a detail is wrong.
What subject line gets a nonprofit email opened?#
A true, specific, unshouty line. The name of the thing, or the number, or the person. A subject line written to look urgent trains the reader that nothing from you is urgent, and the year you need them to open it is the year they have stopped.
| Instead of | Try | Why |
|---|---|---|
| URGENT!!! We need your help | The roof is fixed. Here is what it cost | Urgency spent on an ordinary week is urgency you cannot use in December |
| Our November newsletter | Twelve families, and the week that changed | A number and a fact beat a label the reader files as internal |
| Please help us continue our mission | Two hundred buys a week of the club | Says what happens, at what price |
| FW: board update | What the audit found, in three lines | Forwarded-looking subjects read as a scam, and board business is not a reader's news |
| Donate now | Marcus has been coming since March | A named person is a reason to open; a verb is a reason to close |
How do I know the newsletter is working?#
Three numbers you own and nobody can argue with you about: how many people gave after opening, how many left the list, and how many of the addresses still take mail at all. Opens alone tells you a subject line worked; it does not tell you whether anything happened next.
Published benchmarks for the sector exist and will not help you, because they average a national organisation with a communications team and a six-figure list against your twelve hundred names. Compare your send against your last send with one thing changed. That is the only comparison with information in it.
Campaign Kicker will hold your supporters, label them, and send each one their own copy with an unsubscribe and a postal address in the footer. The free plan mails 5,000 emails a month and holds as many addresses as you have, and a December appeal can be written in October and scheduled for the day. If the whole list comes off in a CSV one Tuesday, it is still your list.
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