In this guide, learn email marketing strategies that will improve donor participation. This will cover email performance benchmarks and why using emails effectively is so important for nonprofits. 

Content 

Nonprofit Email Open Rate

Nonprofit Email Click-Through Rate

Nonprofit Email Fundraising Totals

How to Get People to Open Your Emails

Having well-performing email campaigns is important for two main reasons.

It’s the number one communication channel for nonprofit donors, with just under half of donors saying it’s their preferred method of receiving updates and appeals from their favorite nonprofits. 

On top of that, it’s the most effective channel for fundraising. The 2020 Global Trends in Giving Report put out by Nonprofit Tech for Good found that it outperformed other channels, like direct mail and social media. Using emails effectively  is so important for nonprofits

Nonprofit Email Open Rate

Your open rate is the percentage of people on your list who received and opened your message. Small nonprofits really shine here: Your audiences want to read what you have to say!

Your list size is a good indicator of the size of your online community. Your open rate is a great indicator of how well you’re catching their attention and how compelling they find your email.

This is a really important benchmark to track. The average open rate for nonprofit emails is nearly 29%, which means about a third of people who receive your email will choose to open it. That may not seem like a big deal to you, but it's actually pretty remarkable—that’s about 7% higher than the open rates for for-profit companies. It gets even better when you look at the average open rate for small organizations. Almost 46% of people who receive an email from a smaller nonprofit will open that message. That is tremendous! 

If you’re worried about having a small list, I hope this encourages you. Your small list is probably much more engaged than the folks on a really huge email list, and that is really valuable. 

Nonprofit Email Click-Through Rate

Your click-through rate (CTR)—the percentage of people who open an email from you and click on a link you’ve included—is a great indicator of how compelling your audience finds your content. If you send a newsletter and include a link to an article, people will click to read more if they find that topic interesting, right? If you’re sending an appeal and people want to get involved, they’ll click on the link to your donation form in your email. 

This is another area where smaller nonprofits really shine. The average click-through rate for nonprofits is 3.29%, but it’s more than 10% for small nonprofits. Large organizations, because they have more people on their lists who may be disengaged or distracted, see click through rates of about 3%. 

If you’re looking for ways to improve your open rates, I have a few tips for you. First, make sure you include links. That might sound a little silly, but I can’t tell you how many nonprofit emails I receive that either don’t include links or include maybe one or two ways to engage. Make sure you’re giving people the opportunity to engage with you. 

It’s also important that those links are easy to click or tap on, especially for those people who are reading your email on their phones. If you can, try using a button instead of a text hyperlink; they’re much easier to click! Second, try to signal to your reader what kind of information they’ll see when they click on your link. Having a button that says “Click here to learn more” under an event description will be more effective than it would be if the button just said “Click here”

Nonprofit Email Fundraising Totals

This is calculated by looking at the number of online donations made on donation forms included in an email campaign.

Clicks are important, of course, and they’re a great way to gauge how interesting and how relevant your audience finds your content. If you’re sending email appeals, keeping an eye on the amount you raise per email campaign will also be really helpful. Before we get into this, I want to throw out a couple of caveats. There are lots and lots and lots of factors that will impact your email fundraising results. These benchmarks are meant to be just that—benchmarks. They can be helpful, yes. But what will be more helpful for you is to track your own progress over time. As long as you’re growing and your fundraising totals improve over time, you’re doing okay. Okay?

The average nonprofit raises nearly $5600 per email campaign. I’m going to throw in another caveat here: To home in on fundraising totals as much as possible, we needed a way to exclude non-fundraising emails as much as possible. We did that by only focusing on email campaigns that were sent during the four biggest fundraising days of the year: GivingTuesday and the last three calendar days of 2022. I tell you this because I want you to remember that fundraising campaigns sent during other times of year may not raise this much. If your spring appeal didn’t raise this much, don’t panic. 

This is a helpful benchmark—especially for nonprofits who are looking for ways to benchmark their end-of-year campaigns. What I think will be more helpful than this is the next stat we explored. At first glance, this might make you think that large nonprofits are more effective at email fundraising than smaller ones. But when we dug a little deeper,

we found something really wonderful. The average nonprofit raised about $1.11 per contact on their email list. But small nonprofits way outperformed larger nonprofits here: The average small nonprofit raised $6.15 per contact whereas larger groups raised about $0.88. Again, I don’t want you to fixate as much on the overall totals as much as I want to point out what this means for you.

Small nonprofits raise much more per person that receives a fundraising email than large nonprofits do! These orgs are doing an exceptional job of inspiring their supporters to give and to give generously.

Regardless of your size, there are some steps you can take to try to increase this particular statistic for yourself. Try segmenting your appeals and tailoring your ask to each group. That can make a huge impact. I’d also encourage you to experiment with making concrete asks—ask people to donate, specifically, ask for a specific size of gift, ask them to support a particular program or initiative. You may also want to take extra steps to ensure that donating is quick and easy… especially for people on their phones. Make sure your links to your donation form are easy to click or tap on, that your donation form loads well, and that the donation process is very simple and easy to complete.

How to Get People to Open Your Emails

Sending your email at the right time on the right day, of course, will have a big impact on your readers’ willingness to open, read, and engage with your message. So will the consistency with which you send relevant, interesting content! But two elements that can have a tremendous impact on your open rates are your subject lines and your preview text.

Positive Emotions Improve Open Rates

An AI analysis reveals that subject lines with positive sentiments perform better than those with negative sentiments.

If you want people to open and engage with your content, try to use a subject line that evokes positive feelings in your readers. There’s a time and a place, I’m sure, for other sentiments. But, for the most part, write subject lines that are uplifting or positive feeling. This is backed by some findings from Cherian Koshy, founder of Nonprofit Operating System. He did an AI analysis of the email in this data set, which revealed that subject lines with positive sentiments perform better than those with negative sentiments.

These are the top performers: Relief, gratitude, pride, excitement, and optimism. They outperformed subject lines that the algorithm identified as evoking less positive, like annoyance, disapproval, or anger. If you want to improve your open rates, be as positive as you can. In the Report, Cherian notes that nonprofits tend to shy away from using emotive subject lines, and this finding reiterates that positive emotions can have a great impact on your email performance. We see a ton of negativity in the news every day: Be a bright spot in your audience’s inboxes—they will appreciate it!

What About Emojis?

Less than 3% of emails included emojis in the subject line. Those emails tended to have: 

• Lower open rates
• Higher click-through rates
• Slightly lower fundraising totals

This indicates to us that there’s still lots of room to experiment with emojis.

Really, this led us to conclude that the sample size is too small to recommend any specific best practices, but there’s lots of room to experiment here. If you want to use them, try to avoid emojis that could be perceived as spam, like 🚨,🔥, or ❗, and to use those that relate to your mission or message. If you’re focused on conservation, try using trees or flowers; if you’re a pet shelter, try using a cat or dog—choose something related to your mission that will catch peoples’ attention without coming across as spam.

Use Preview Text Wisely

We also looked at preview text and its impact on email engagement. Preview text is a few words intended to help readers understand what content they’ll find in the email. If your subject line is the title of a book on a bookshelf, the preview text is the summary on the back of the book that gives you an idea of what it’s about.