What speaks to your donors? Emojis, GIFS, smoke signals?

Have you ever received a snail mail, two-sided, front and back, end-of-year appeal from your alma mater? Most likely it is written by a student receiving financial aid demonstrating the impact of how your gift makes a difference. The tone of the ask, coupled with the feel-good nature of the holiday season, is a win-win. Or is it?

At Calvert Hall College High School, a private, 9-12, all-boys college preparatory school in Baltimore, Maryland, we scrapped the long-form letter to try a four-part e-mail appeal campaign. Short is sweet, but would it pack the punch needed to convert the action of making a gift?

A/B Testing on Steroids

We emailed the “Tis the Season Campaign” to all living alumni with an active email in December 2023. In years past, we would send one email to this group on December 28 as a gentle nudge to donate before the end of the calendar year. For 2023, we wanted to test our theory that shorter emails produce better results, so we sent four emails over nine days. Each email had a separate theme, but all had the ultimate objective of soliciting donations from alumni. 

All the of three shorter emails (40 words or less) also included a fun visual to match the tone of the email and provided specific facts about donations. The one longer email (163 words) featured a more serious photo of our string orchestra performing on the campus overlook and contained particular details about our scholarship programs. 

Contrary to what I believed to be popular opinion, the longer email generated a higher click rate on the giving link. We gave all four emails the same subject line. When the individual opened the email, it stacked with the previous emails to serve as a reminder to make their donation.

Cutting Through the Clutter

If you miss checking your inbox during the holiday season, especially the promotions folder in Gmail, it could feel like trying to climb Mount Everest when clearing it out. We used short fun facts alongside Calvert Hall-inspired images to make our emails stand out in the chaos. Recognizing that the short emails might not resonate with everyone, we aimed the longer emails at those looking for a heartfelt holiday reason to give. 

The first we sent before Christmas (December 21) and the others after (December 26, December 28 and December 30). The longer December 26 email performed the best, followed by the December 21 email and then those on the 30 and 28.

Drumroll the Results

With such a diverse audience — alumni from 18 to 94 years of age — we used imagery that matched the tone of the email and included our Calvert Hall brand (e.g., logo, mascot or location on campus). Three of the four emails encouraged making a snail mail gift with the option to donate online.
Of the 7,000 email recipients targeted for this campaign, 122 made a gift using the specific link provided in the emails. Collectively, these donors gave $64,474.74 with an average gift of $528.48. The 2023 campaign resulted in $13,533.74 more than our 2022 campaign. Additionally, our 2023 campaign yielded a conversation rate of 26%, whereas our 2022 campaign resulted in an 11% conversion rate.

On the Horizon

Next up was an end-of-fiscal-year email that doubled as the 2023-2024 draft annual report to donors, serving as a thank you for their gift or a subtle reminder if they were not featured. This email also allowed donors to know in which giving circle they featured and to make a subsequent donation to move up. 

We sent the draft annual report email to 7,018 alumni on June 26, 2024, resulting in a 47% open rate and an 18% click rate. Termed “last chance” gifts, we raised $6,330.24 from donors who wished to be included in the annual report or wanted to upgrade to a different giving circle. The average gift amount was $527.52. Our team also received 25 emails from donors requesting additional information about their gifts or asking for assistance in finding their names in the report. This last-push campaign also aided our team in correcting our final annual report, which we mail to our top 800 donors each November and send digitally to all donors. 

Our board was excited to see the increase in giving over the same period compared to the previous year, and they were equally excited this appeal was executed internally. Additionally — and possibly most importantly — they gave me the green light for more experimental email marketing.