Soapbox Engage Blog

Email remains one of the best-proven methods for reaching a broad audience and cultivating long-term relationships with partners and donors. Conveniently, email also has one of the highest returns on investment of all the online marketing options!

In our last blog, we discussed how to go about choosing an email service provider that best fits your nonprofit. Now that you’ve got everything set up, it’s time to fill that email list with some fantastic current and potential donors!

Table of Contents

8 Proven Ways To Grow Your Donor Email List

1. Add an email sign-up form to your website/a>
2. Make it easy for people to share your newsletter
3. Look at your existing donor list
4. Leverage some of your valuable content into gated content
5. Add a sign-up option to your donation and event registration forms
6. Put social media to work growing your email list
7. Use petitions and e-letter writing campaigns to grow your email list
8. Blogging and content creation

What is a Donor Email List for Nonprofits

An email list (sometimes called a donor list or subscriber list) is a collection of email addresses from people who have said, “Yes! Please stay in touch with me!” They’re current or potential donors, supporters, volunteers, or just curious followers who want to receive information, updates, and other content from your nonprofit.

Your list is dynamic--meaning it grows and shrinks as people unsubscribe and others join.

Why email lists are so valuable for charities and nonprofits

Just to offer a quick recap, email marketing is one of the most effective ways to engage and connect with your current and potential donors. It’s such a powerful marketing strategy that most marketing experts very strongly recommend that businesses develop an email marketing plan (with very few exceptions).

How many people do you know without an email address? You can probably count them on one hand (if you even know that many people). A Pew Research study revealed that about 92% of adults in the United States use email, and 61% say they check and send emails at least once per day. That represents so much opportunity to interact with your donors regularly!

Most industry experts say your email list is far more valuable than social media followers because it is a more reliable and effective communication strategy. Emails usually have a higher click-through rate than social media posts.

8 Proven Ways To Grow Your Donor Email List

One of the most important parts of email marketing is growing your charity email list by collecting people’s addresses. In business marketing, this is called “lead generation.”

Businesses and nonprofits use various strategies to collect people’s contact information and grow their email lists. We’ve rounded up eight of the easiest and most effective ways to grow your donor email list (in no particular order).

1) Add an email sign-up form to your website

At the risk of being overly obvious, let’s start with the simplest way to get more subscribers on your charity email list. Adding an email sign-up form to your website is free, and people who are reading your website are already at least a little interested in your nonprofit--, so they’re your target audience!

Place the sign-up form on high-traffic pages of your website, like the homepage.

Make it very obvious what people are signing up for in the form. Do you share inspiring stories? Provide updates on projects or financial needs? Tell them what kind of information you share in your emails.

For greater success, only ask for the bare minimum information. Asking for too many details up-front can scare people off or make it too time-consuming to sign up for your email list. Really, all you need are names and email addresses. It’s better to ask for only a few essential details and fill in the rest later.

If you already have an email sign-up form on your website, make sure your opt-in form is very prominently displayed. Many organizations minimize the email sign-up form and show other options (like social media icons). Your email list is far more valuable than social media contact lists.

2) Make it easy for people to share your newsletter

Just like peer-to-peer fundraising invites your supporters to help you fundraise, empower your loyal readers to share your email newsletters by adding buttons that link to social media and an “email a friend” link in your email.

Making your content easy to share is a simple way to care for your supporters. Don’t make them work hard to share your content with another potential donor!

Bonus tip: add an email sign-up button to your email! Assume that not everyone who reads your email is on your email list. Maybe a friend forwarded it to them, or they found it on your social media account. Make it easier for new readers to sign up by adding a “Join the Mailing List” link to every email you distribute.

3) Look at your existing donor list

Don’t overlook low-hanging fruit! Go through your donor database and volunteer list to ensure everyone is signed up for your email list. Don’t forget to ask your friends, neighbors, and other community members to consider signing up, too! This is an easy way to kickstart your list growth, especially if you’re early in the process of building your donor email list.

4) Leverage some of your valuable content into gated content

Gated content can’t be accessed until the viewer pays or enters their contact information (name, email address, and other details you’d like to collect). This is an effective and appropriate way for both businesses and nonprofits to grow their email list.

What kinds of content might people be willing to share their information to access? Interviews with notable figures, update videos, educational content, e-books, whitepapers, and other valuable content that’s relevant to your cause. Many businesses and nonprofits make this gated content downloadable so the reader can freely access it at their convenience. The key is to make sure the content is “worth” people’s information!

5) Add a sign-up option to your donation and event registration forms

You’re probably already asking for quite a bit of information on your donation or event registration forms. Why not encourage your supporters to opt into your email list to stay updated on how their money is making a difference!

You likely won’t need to ask for any additional information, so just add a check box to the form to keep things simple.

6) Put social media to work growing your email list

Don’t just leave your social media followers hanging! It’s critical to develop a relationship with your fans and followers away from social media. This will give you a more reliable way to connect with your supporters and followers on your own terms.

Put an email sign-up form on your Facebook, Twitter, or other social media pages. Some email service providers have an app that lets you do this with just a few easy clicks!

Some organizations get extra bold and use their Facebook cover photo to call attention to their email newsletters. This is an easy, eye-catching way to let followers know they can stay in touch via email.

A slightly more subtle way to get Facebook followers to sign up for your email list is to use the call-to-action button.

7) Use petitions and e-letter writing campaigns to grow your email list

Petitions and e-letter campaigns help you accomplish advocacy goals, and they’re great ways to grow your email list with people who are passionate about your cause.

Invite your existing supporters to share petitions and other action opportunities you’re expanding your network and gathering more contact information.

The Soapbox Engage Petitions app lets you create beautiful, custom forms that match your brand and help you advocate well while capturing valuable contact information!

8) Blogging and content creation

Creating blogs and other valuable content is a great way to get found when people search for things on Google (or other search engines). This is actually a proven marketing strategy that works for businesses and nonprofits of all shapes and sizes.

Blogging is also a great way to create conversations with your audience. When you start gathering regular readers, offer the option to subscribe to your blog so you can email them when you publish a new blog post.

This is where segmenting your email lists is really important. People who subscribe to your blog might not want to get ALL your emails. As you grow your list, it becomes critical to make sure people receive relevant content. A blog subscriber might be interested in very different email content than a major donor. And, of course, some people might fall into several lists or categories.

Now that your email list is set to grow throughout the year, here are three more resources to boost your fundraising efforts.

• How to Add a Donate Button on Facebook and Grow Your Fundraising: Facebook recently added a feature that allows charities and nonprofits to add a “Donate Now” button to their organization page. This packed blog post covers the pros and cons of this fundraising strategy and step-by-step instructions on how to add this button to your nonprofit’s Facebook page!
• The Online Fundraising Software Buyer’s Guide: Now that you’re building a robust email list, it’s time to make sure you’ve got the right fundraising software, apps, and tools to help you stay organized and on top of all your contacts. Head over to this blog for some guidelines to help you assess your current tools and software and choose the right upgrades for your nonprofit.
• 9 Must-Have features for Your Nonprofit’s Online Donation Page: Online giving grew 6.8% in 2019, and that number is sure to keep growing. That means your donation page is a foundation for all your fundraising efforts. While you’re growing your email list, pop over to this blog to make sure you’ve got all the right bells and whistles on your donation page for the best fundraising outcome!