You’ve got a compelling story, a strong match, and a clear call to action. Your team has spent weeks getting the campaign right.
Then your email lands in spam.
That’s a scary outcome for any nonprofit especially heading into Giving Tuesday and year-end, when email has a significant job to do.
Deliverability can feel like something that lives with IT or your email platform. But it belongs in your fundraising strategy. Your audience decisions, send frequency, acquisition practices, and content all play a role in whether supporters see your messages.
Before year-end, give your technical setup, audience strategy, and sending plan the same attention you give your creative.
Here are five places to shine a flashlight.
1. Get your authentication skeletons out of the closet.
SPF, DKIM, and DMARC aren’t the most exciting items on a fundraising agenda, but they help mailbox providers verify that your organization authorized your emails.
Gmail and Yahoo require all 3 for bulk senders. Ask your IT team and platform partner to confirm that authentication is configured correctly and that messages actually pass.
2. Don’t resurrect your entire inactive file.
Year-end pressure makes it tempting to pull every available address into the next appeal. More names. More opportunity. Right?
Only if those supporters still want to hear from you.
A large audience with little recent activity can introduce delivery problems and complaints. Before expanding, look at where those names came from, what they signed up for, and when they last took a meaningful action.
3. Avoid a monster-sized jump in volume.
If you’ve been sending at a steady pace, suddenly increasing volume and adding dormant audiences deserves careful planning.
With your year-end cadence in place, focus on optimization. Evaluate audience engagement, identify opportunities to increase touchpoints, and adjust campaigns based on what's resonating.
Monitor performance closely and use those insights to inform future expansion. Let performance guide the next step.
4. Let supporters escape easily.
Nobody should have to navigate a haunted maze to unsubscribe. Legally, every list email needs to include a way to unsubscribe from communications — so you may as well ensure it's the best ex-donor experience possible.
Make the link visible. Keep the process simple. Offer frequency and topic preferences where useful but make a full opt-out easy. An unsubscribe helps you understand what someone wants. Making it difficult can turn that decision into a spam complaint.
5. Investigate before the numbers get frightening.
Don’t wait for a missed revenue goal to review deliverability.
Track complaints, bounces, deferrals, authentication, clicks, and conversions alongside revenue. Look for changes by audience and mailbox provider.
Google recommends keeping its reported spam rate below 0.1% and avoiding 0.3% or higher. Yahoo requires a rate below 0.3%. Those provider measures may differ from the complaint rate in your email platform.
Create a rule on what triggers an investigation, a smaller audience, or a pause in expansion.
Year-end fundraising already comes with enough surprises. Deliverability shouldn't be one of them. A little preventative work now can help ensure your carefully crafted appeals avoid the spam-folder graveyard and reach the supporters who want to hear from you. Before the busiest weeks of the giving season, take time to inspect what’s happening behind the scenes so your campaign is set up for success.
On the search for a partner to help boost your email program’s deliverability? Connect with us here!
About the Author:
When she isn't training for a marathon, Nancy is working digital magic as Fuse's Senior Vice President of Digital Strategies. With more than 25 years of experience in the nonprofit industry, Nancy has a wealth of knowledge and insights that she leverages to optimize strategies for our partners and grow their email and paid media programs.