How to write fundraising emails that work

Email is the engine of digital fundraising. It is not the most glamorous channel, and it rarely gets the attention that social media does, but it is the one that moves money. On a Giving Day, the large majority of donations arrive in response to an email landing in someone's inbox at the right moment, with the right message, from a sender they trust. Everything else, the social posts, the donor wall, the countdown, works to support and amplify what email does. Get your email right and you have built the machine that drives your campaign. Get it wrong and no amount of clever content elsewhere will rescue the numbers.

This guide draws on Hubbub's experience of running and supporting hundreds of digital campaigns, and in particular on Kat Carter, a consultant at Hubbub, who spends much of her time writing emails on behalf of customers, giving feedback on their drafts and sending campaigns for them. She sets out the central challenge plainly: people receive a great deal of email, "about 100 to 120 every day", and most of them are not waiting to give. "People aren't usually waking up in the morning with the internal motivation to get up and make a donation," she says. "The goal as a fundraiser is to guide your supporters along this journey inspiring them to make that donation." That is the job of every fundraising email you send, and the sections below work through how to do it: from the list your email lands in, through segmentation and the craft of the appeal itself, to the sequence, deliverability, the donation form, and how you test and measure the whole thing.

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Why email is the engine of digital fundraising

To write a good fundraising email, it helps to understand what is happening in a donor's mind when it arrives. Everyone begins their day at what Kat Carter calls the status quo, "just going about our business, enjoying our day, doing our day today". Your email is the interrupter, the thing that breaks through that status quo and asks for a moment of attention. From there, the donor has to be carried up an emotional journey: engaged by the timing, the sender and the subject line, moved by the story and the words, and finally taken to the donation form to say yes.

The crucial point is that giving is not buying. "In giving the emotional high point happens before the transaction takes place," Kat Carter explains. "So in giving we often receive the benefit first." A donor gives because they feel fortunate, or grateful, or moved by a story, and the gift is the expression of that feeling. Your email's job is to create the emotional high point, then make it as easy as possible to act on. Email conversion is, in her words, "made up of many moving parts", which is why it pays to think about every one of them rather than dash off some copy and hope.

Your list and your data: the foundation

None of the craft that follows matters if your email does not arrive, or arrives at someone who will never open it. A clean, contactable, well-permissioned list is the foundation of all email fundraising, and it is the part teams most often neglect.

Start with the basics. Are your email addresses current and deliverable? Do you hold consent to contact these people, and can you evidence it? Are bounces and complaints being cleared out rather than allowed to accumulate? A list full of dead addresses and disengaged contacts does not just waste effort, it actively harms your ability to reach the people who do want to hear from you, because mailbox providers read high bounce and low engagement rates as a signal that you are not a sender to be trusted.

Then look at the data attached to each contact, because personalisation depends on it. Kat Carter is blunt about the cost of not having it: "Sometimes we see some emails where it says like dear members dear friends. If you're not collecting that data start collecting that data and then use that data." First names, giving history, the date and amount of a last gift, the cause someone supported last time: each is a lever you can pull to make an email feel personal and relevant, and you cannot pull a lever you have not collected. Treat your data as an asset you build deliberately, at the point of every donation and every interaction.

Segmentation

Once your list is clean and rich, segmentation is how you make it work harder. The same appeal should not go to everyone in the same words. A first-time prospect, a loyal regular donor and a lapsed supporter sit at different points in their relationship with you, and they respond to different things.

Two kinds of people sit in any audience, and the split matters. "In the beginning of a campaign you will get the people who have high affinity who all you have to do is ask," Kat Carter says. "But then you'll get skeptics, and there are more skeptics in your audience than there are those who are ready to go in terms of that low hanging fruit, so you got to get those skeptics on board." Your warm segment needs a clear ask and little else. Your sceptical majority needs reassurance, social proof and more than one touch before they move.

Segmentation also lets you put the data you already hold to work. For lapsed donors, Kat Carter describes putting "their last gift and date and amount into the information so that you can try and encourage them to give", a tactic that lifted conversion in testing. The principle is simple: the more specific and relevant the email feels to the person reading it, the more attention they pay. "When you get more specific, donors start paying more attention," she says. "So I would encourage you to be more specific with all elements of your emails."

The anatomy of a great fundraising email

A strong appeal email is built from a few parts, each doing a distinct job: the subject line and sender, the opening, the story, social proof and the call to action.

The subject line and the sender. This is the envelope, and it decides whether your email is opened at all. The sender deserves more thought than it usually gets. It can come from your organisation's brand identity, but it can also come from a person, "a professor, it could be you, it could be a parent, a significant person that is giving weight to the email that you're sending". A personal sender can transform open rates: in one test Kat Carter cites, moving from an organisation name to an individual's name took the open rate from 12 per cent to 51 per cent, with seven times more submissions. The subject line then has to earn the click. Ask a question, make a statement, invite participation or use the reader's name, and be specific. There is also a useful nuance of language, which Kat Carter draws from a session by Adrian Sargeant: prefer "your kindness" to "your gift", "because it is someone's kindness. Yes, they are making a gift, but it's about kindness."

The opening. Reward the open immediately. Use the reader's first name where you have it, and get to something that matters to them quickly. This is where readability counts: a personal tone, a clean design, a sensible flow, and copy that reads like a human wrote it to a human.

The story. This is the heart of the email, the part that carries the reader from mild interest to the emotional charge that makes them give. Kat Carter describes two structures worth borrowing. The first is the story of self, story of us, story of now, developed by Marshall Ganz: a short personal story, related to a shared experience, ending in a clear call to action. The three parts depend on each other. "If you tell a great story of self and story of us, but you don't include a clear call to action as your story of now, your audience will get all emotionally fired up, but without a clear direction of their next step and their energy will dissipate." The second is the hero's journey, Joseph Campbell's structure of separation, descent and return. Whichever you use, make the donor central. The lesson Kat Carter draws from Barack Obama's storytelling is the power of "you" language: "looking for ways that how can I turn a we or an I into you and making the donor central to that message."

Social proof. People give when they see others giving. Celebrate momentum, name the community and let donors hear from each other. "People like us do things like this," Kat Carter says, quoting Seth Godin, "and this is how you can start to create that culture of giving." Quotes from other donors and a visible donor wall both do this work.

A single, clear call to action. This is where most appeal emails fail. The job of the email is to inspire and enable the gift, then send the reader straight to the donation form to complete it. A soft "find out more" is a wasted opportunity. "This isn't about finding out more," Kat Carter insists. "This is about, make your gift. You need to inspire and enable that donor to make that gift in that email, and then send them on the journey to complete that gift." A soft call to action lets people drift to a page where "they're like, Oh, this isn't where I wanted to be and then they leave". One clear ask, one clear button, one destination.

A campaign sequence, not a one-off send

A single email is rarely a campaign. The skeptics, who are the majority, almost never give on the first touch, which is why Hubbub builds sequences rather than relying on a single send. "This is one of the reasons why we suggest in giving days that you send emails before the event, as well as emails on the day," Kat Carter says, "because it's getting those skeptics involved."

On a Giving Day, that sequence is intense by design. Hubbub has tested the volume: "we've, yeah, we've tested started with a lot. And by a lot I mean 12. So we've gone down to eight to 10", spread across the campaign, "maybe five on day one, six on day two". Outside a Giving Day the cadence is gentler, but the principle holds: a planned series that builds, rather than a single hopeful blast. Set expectations up front. Tell people in your save-the-date email that you will be in touch more often during the campaign, and give them a clean way to opt out of that campaign specifically. "Everything is not for everybody," she says, and the occasional unsubscribe from people for whom your campaign is not a fit is a healthy sign, not a failure.

Write the whole sequence before the campaign begins, and give each email a job: build anticipation, launch, report momentum, create urgency, make a final push, thank. As the campaign peaks, change what you can between sends to keep attention fresh. "Every email we're causing more and more people to pay attention," Kat Carter says, "we're changing subject lines we're changing who it's from we're changing the message, and we're starting to really use everything in our arsenal to get those donors to pay attention."

Design and mobile

Most of your emails will be read on a phone, and a fundraising email that looks broken on mobile will not convert, however good the words. Mobile responsiveness is, in Kat Carter's words, "really important in terms of conversions". Keep the design clean and the flow obvious, with the call to action easy to find and easy to tap.

Whether to use images is a question to test rather than assume. Hubbub has seen it both ways: in one case an email with imagery drew the bigger click-through rate, in another the plain email won. In one test the plain-text email drew more opens but a lower average gift, so the right choice may even depend on which donors you are writing to. "It's not a one size fits all approach," she says, "and you have to test on your own audience."

Deliverability: staying out of the spam folder

An email that lands in spam might as well not have been sent. Deliverability is partly technical and partly behavioural, and the behavioural part is the one fundraisers control.

The technical foundations matter and are worth asking your provider or IT team to confirm: the authentication records that prove you are who you say you are, a consistent sending domain, and a reputable email service. The behavioural side is where your list discipline pays off. Mailbox providers watch how people respond to you. Healthy engagement, opens, clicks and replies, tells them you are wanted. Hard bounces, spam complaints and long stretches of being ignored tell them the opposite. So keep your list clean, remove people who never engage, and make unsubscribing easy, including a campaign-specific unsubscribe for intensive pushes like a Giving Day. A donor who quietly marks you as spam does far more damage to your deliverability than one who simply opts out.

Asking well, and tax-efficient giving

A clear ask is more persuasive when it is concrete. Suggesting a specific amount, and showing what it achieves, beats leaving the donor to guess. Many European countries offer tax deductions or reductions on charitable gifts, and cross-border gifts can be made tax-efficiently through Transnational Giving Europe, so where these apply it is worth making the benefit visible in the ask itself. Where you have match funding, the effect compounds. Kat Carter describes one Giving Day email that used "a suggested gift because we had match giving. So we're talking about doubling the gift", to really demonstrate that you are only asking for this amount, and you hope that they can give that amount. Telling a donor that their gift may qualify for a tax deduction, and then matched on top, turns a modest ask into a powerful one. Make any tax benefit clear at the point of giving, and send a prompt receipt so donors have what they need to claim it.

Friction: do not lose them at the form

You can write the perfect email and still lose the gift on the donation page. Kat Carter notes that "typically 83% of the people on the general donation page reach this moment of decision and decide not to move forward". Friction is the enemy, and she identifies four kinds drawn from NextAfter's research: decision friction (too many options), confusion friction (forcing a choice the donor is not equipped to make), field friction (asking for too much information) and step friction (too many clicks and page loads). "Nothing is worse than a form that says step one of six." If your email does its job but your form lets you down, "that form isn't doing its job, and it should be renovated and or replaced". Do not, she warns, "let your donors get excited and then get on a bad journey and not end up making that gift".

Testing and what to measure

Email fundraising rewards a habit of disciplined testing, and the rules are straightforward. Test on a meaningful sample relative to your audience. Change one thing at a time, "don't change the from name and the subject line and the story all in one go, because you won't know which one caused the uplift". And test more than once before you trust a result, "three, five, eight times" for something you intend to roll out. Negative results count too: "knowing that something doesn't work is just as good as knowing that something does work".

When it comes to measurement, watch the funnel rather than a single number. Open rates and click rates tell you whether your envelope and subject line are working. Click-through rates, measured against those who opened rather than the whole list, tell you whether your content holds them. But the number that matters most is conversion. "That really is your most important KPI is conversion rate," Kat Carter says, "because if people are opening an email, but it's not converting, well you got them to do one part, but what happened with the story, maybe that wasn't what it needed to be." Watch unsubscribes too, as a signal of whether your frequency and relevance are right. To measure conversion properly you need to follow the donor past the inbox and onto the donation page, which is why Hubbub encourages every customer to tag their links with UTM parameters, so you can see not just which emails were opened but which ones actually raised money.

One measurement habit is the most neglected: keep stewarding after the gift. Sending often falls off a cliff the moment someone donates, which makes no sense. "Why is it that when somebody gives we stopped telling them about their gift?" Kat Carter asks. Donors, she points out, would rather hear about the good their gift is doing than receive yet another sales email from someone else. Telling them is both good stewardship and the groundwork for the next gift.

How email works alongside social media

Email and social media are not rivals, and the temptation to treat one as a replacement for the other is a mistake. Social media builds presence, reach and familiarity. Email asks and converts. The two are most powerful together, and they reinforce each other in a way worth designing for deliberately.

Kat Carter makes the point through the example of a personal sender. The reason an email from a named individual works so well is often that the recipient already knows that person from elsewhere: "they have a presence on social media and I also follow them there. So to me they're almost now becoming like friends." A senior figure who is visible on social channels arrives in the inbox as a familiar voice rather than a stranger. So use social media to build the profile of your causes, your campaigns and your senders, then let email do the asking to an audience that has been warmed up. On a Giving Day, the social feed celebrates milestones publicly while email drives the individual decisions to give. Plan them as one communications effort, not two.

Frequently asked questions

How many emails should we send during a Giving Day? Hubbub has tested this extensively and settled on roughly eight to ten across a 36-hour day, for example five on day one and six on day two, including a final-hour push before the thank-you. The key is to set the expectation in advance and offer a campaign-specific unsubscribe, so people who do not want the intensity can opt out cleanly.

What is the best time of day to send? Hubbub generally sends at 11 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon, timed to natural breaks in the day, a cup of tea, the return from lunch. For an international audience, adjust to their local 11 and 2. Better still, let your email platform's data tell you when your specific recipients tend to open, and refine from there.

Should the email come from a person or from the organisation? Both work, and it depends on the message. A personal sender can dramatically lift opens, but the effect fades if you overuse the same name, so deploy it strategically. It works best when the sender already has a presence your audience recognises, which is where your social media profile earns its keep.

What is the single most important number to measure? Conversion rate. Opens and clicks tell you whether the envelope and content are working, but conversion tells you whether the email actually raised money. Use UTM-tagged links so you can track the gift all the way from the inbox to the donation form, because many email platforms stop reporting at the click.

What is the right call to action for a stewardship email rather than an ask? Invite the donor to share their story or their reason for giving, by replying to the email if you have no other facility. It is a low-pressure ask that people enjoy answering, and it gives you the donor content that is otherwise so hard to gather.

Does this only apply to fundraising appeals? No. As Kat Carter notes, the same tactics work "for events or alumni events or mentoring or anything that you are going out to people and asking for their attention". Any email that needs to break through the inbox benefits from a strong sender, a specific subject line, a clear story and a single call to action.

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