The two nonprofit emails below arrived in my inbox last week. Guess which is more likely to entice me to give up my hard-earned cash?

Hint: It’s probably the one that is more likely to entice you to give up your hard-earned cash.

EMAIL 1. Subject line: Celebrating The Campaign for the [Organization]’s second year

bad nonprofit fundraising email

EMAIL 2. Subject line: Change a summer. Change a life.

Nonprofit email newsletter that follows best practices

Which one is the hard-earned-cash grabber?

Email 2, of course.

Why? Let me count the ways.

  1. The subject line is a call to action directed to the reader. Email 1’s subject line is just confusing, and it’s not even a tiny bit audience-centered.
  2. The images show people – kids, in fact – looking happy. Faces draw eyes. Animals and kids work best, but any faces are better than pretty but generic graphics like Email 1’s.
  3. The Give Now button is prominent. Email 1 doesn’t have a donation link anywhere, not even in the part I left out. (Both emails are truncated.)
  4. The text makes an emotional appeal – several, actually. [Organization] also changes lives, but you wouldn’t know it from Email 1.
  5. The text is audience-centered. The first word of Email 2 is “you.” Operation Shoestring also incorporates the reader in what “we” can do “together.” ​

I could go on about what’s wrong with Email 1: the impersonal personalization of “Dear friends,” for example. What else do you see that makes Email 2 stronger than Email 1?

But really, we’ve got enough to go on already. If you want your emails to grab hard-earned cash, just follow Operation Shoestring in using tactics 1-5.