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I came into this thinking email was dead. Ben Smithee and Brad Duff-Hudkins from NextAfter walked me back from the ledge with 17 million email subscribers worth of actual data. Spoiler: email is fine. You're just bad at it.
Ben Smithee is Chief Growth Officer at NextAfter. Brad Duff-Hudkins is VP of Data & Analytics. Together, they've run 8,000+ experiments on nonprofit email and published research that blows up everything we think we know about donor acquisition and retention.
Downstream donors, the ones who take almost 900 days to give their first gift, return $10.29 for every dollar you spend. Instant donors return $2.38. On a list of 1,000 new subscribers, 800 never give. But 100+ become donors over time, many jumping straight to major gift levels. The real move: donors who make a second gift within six months of their first are 40% more likely to give again in year two.
Most nonprofits don't have an email strategy. They have a blast. One email a month, then ramped-up asks at year-end. Ben and Brad tested adding a single cultivation email (no ask) on a Saturday to an organization sending one appeal a week. Result: 41% revenue lift, 13% conversion bump, 52% engagement increase.
The hard truth: 80% of new donors don't come back. But if you get them to a second gift in the first six months, you've locked in behavior change. You've moved them from transaction to relationship.
If you're managing email like a campaign instead of a relationship engine, this conversation is for you.
Important Links:
NextAfter Research Database : 8,000+ free experiments searchable by nonprofit challenge
Email Lifetime Value Study : Full report with all the benchmarks
