Using E-Newsletters for University Fundraising Campaigns

Many universities are using e-newsletter marketing to enhance and diversify their fundraising campaigns. There are some unique advantages to this increasingly popular method of communicating with current and potential donors.

Direct marketing through an e-newsletter has multiple benefits. First, the costs are usually far less than regular mail campaigns, allowing the university to realize considerable savings on print and postage fees alone. That doesn't mean e-newsletters should completely replace regular mailings; however, by complimenting traditional communication channels with a well-managed online effort, the university creates an opportunity to greatly increase its outreach efforts to prospects and donors while avoiding a similar increase in its marketing budget. For this reason alone, many universities have opted to reduce the frequency of the paper mailings in favor of more frequent e-mail campaigns.

Another measurable benefit to this method lies within its tracking capabilities. Most e-newsletter services enable the university to view and analyze the performance of an e-mail immediately after it has been sent. Some of the most important criteria include: how many people opened the e-mail, how many people interacted with the e-newsletter by clicking on one of the links, and how many e-mails were deemed 'undeliverable.' The marketing data provided by these services is easy to extract, while giving the university a much clearer idea of their donors' interests and needs.

Forwarding is also another function that enables the reader to easily pass the newsletter along to a fellow alum, a friend, or a potential student, and creates an opportunity for it to go viral.

Marketing e-mails that unexpectedly arrive in an inbox can be treated with suspicion or indifference. But potential donors are much more likely to open and read an e-mail from a friend or someone they know. This forwarding capability at one click of a button provides the university with an ability to organically allow their e-mail contact list to do the donor acquisition for them. This is a cost-free method of building new leads and contacts for future university fundraising campaigns.

Another way to leverage this technology is to capture e-mail addresses from visitors to the university's website. Whether it's through a pop-up window that prompts the visitor for a name and e-mail address, or just a box with open fields on highly trafficked pages, this is an easy and inexpensive way for a university to enhance its e-mail list.

Another source of cost savings is directly tied to the donations procured by e-newsletter distribution. Whereas traditionally received donations require a certain level of hands-on processing, it is much more efficient and less expensive to automatically accept and process small to moderate donations through online contributions. With this marketing method, donors simply have to click a "donate now" button that can be embedded in the e-newsletter itself.

E-newsletters offer universities the ability to reduce costs, increase giving, increase efficiency, and more accurately track donor response. While it's not likely that e-mail marketing will completely replace traditional direct mail campaigns altogether, it is something that has become a necessary component to university fundraising and outreach.


Author is a freelance copywriter. For more information about University fundraising, please visit http://www.nexusdirect.com/.