How our new email series is helping people raise more online

Paul Taylor March 21, 2022

We get pretty geeky about analysing donor behaviour at JustGiving. And with thousands of people choosing JustGiving to fundraise or donate online each week, we’re constantly testing and rolling out enhancements to our donor journey to help people raise more online.

Our email journeys are a testament to just how much we care about data-driven recommendations. Last year our CRM team rolled out a new email series to the people that donate to fundraisers on JustGiving. One year on, we’re excited to share the results with you and the impact it’s having on the money raised online for good causes.

Quick recap: a new email series for people giving to fundraisers

This email journey is a smart and tailored experience designed specifically for people donating to fundraising pages on JustGiving. It aims to do two important things:

Encourage donors to share their chosen cause with friends, family, followers and beyond

Engage donors and make them feel valued

The email journey contains 21 personalised and segmented email variants, with donors receiving emails that best match the timing of their donation and the content of the fundraising page that they’ve given to. They include smart, data-driven recommendations that encourage them to keep rallying behind the person they’ve given to. Here’s a peek at what they look like:

And here’s what we know about donors:

40% of donors say they are open to sharing a fundraiser’s page after donating. That includes sharing on Facebook, WhatsApp, SMS, Twitter.

When a donor shares a fundraiser’s page, it can help them to raise up to 7x more.

As a result, ‘Share this page’ is a key CTA (call-to-action) that we encourage in the email series.

What are the results?

Since launching these emails for donors, we’re excited to show off the impressive figures we’ve seen:

The journey improves fundraising page value by up to 3%.

On average, that means for every 10 fundraisers you have on JustGiving, you’ll get a £90 income boost to your charity without having to lift a finger.

Over 55% of donors open and read our wrap-up email, highlighting the page owner’s journey and thanking donors for their support

Our two most clicked emails are –

Our pre-event notification – which encourage donors to share the fundraiser’s page to help them hit their target.
Page update notifications – which let donors know when the fundraiser has posted an update to their page.

Want to know how you can improve your email stewardship with data-driven recommendations?

Many of the things we’re learning at JustGiving can also be applied by charities in the emails you send out to your supporters.

If you’d like to learn some simple, but effective, tips for taking a data-driven approach to improving your email stewardship, we recommend watching a recent webinar by our Head of CRM, Amy Leighton . In it, she shares a case study from JustGiving on how we drove a 16% improvement in donations by improving one, single email journey – plus some tricks you can apply to your organisation’s emails. Watch it here.