GlobalGiving is a charity crowdfunding website that

provides social entrepreneurs and non$-$profits the chance

to raise money for community causes worldwide.

One$-$line summary

GlobalGiving website increased engagement by $10\backslash$times using personalised email.

The problem

GlobalGiving was sending more than $3\mathrm{.}5$ million emails per year, but they were getting

decreasing marginal returns from each send, finding it more and more difficult to catch

the attention of donors due to email fatigue $($Marketing Sherpa, $2016).$

The solution

The brand decided to personalise and customise content and make sure it was getting

to the right people.

They worked with an ESP to make sure their emails were certified and created an entirely

opt$-$in email list. Using tracking, they identified a handful of domains and sub$-$segments of

donors that were reporting abnormally high spam rates, which they decided was due to

regional differences $$ their campaigns worked well in the United States, but not in each of

the $180$ countries to which they were sending emails. For example, non$-$English$-$speaking

countries reported higher spam rates. They suppressed these domains from their list and

automatically unsubscribed anyone who reported an email as spam.

Next, they created a personalised recommendation email using a recommendation engine

similar to Netflix. Rather than looking at watching habits, they looked at users$$ past giving

habits. GlobalGiving used this information along with a matching offer and a time$-$bound

appeal for users to donate by a certain deadline.

They followed this with constant A$/$B split testing to ensure that their recommendation

engine was working. They also tested subject lines, content, appeals, and more.

The results

The team saw a tenfold increase in engagement from email:

$$ Their recommendation emails dramatically outperformed the emails that sent random

projects to donors.

$$ When factoring in the donor$$s giving history, using projects they had supported in the

past, they saw a $20\%$ boost in engagement as well.

They also created a carefully set up email program focused on improving the brand$$s

reputation in the long term.

after reading above case, answer the following questions in one$/$one paragraph

$1.$ What do you consider are the most important changes GlobalGiving made to its email marketing program? Why?

$2.$ How could GlobalGiving encourage viral advocacy of their donation campaigns within their emails?

$3.$ What advice would you have for GlobalGiving regarding the management of email send frequency for its customer segments?