How Giving New Subscribers More of What They Asked For Increased Donor Conversion by 920%

There’s a strange thing we sometimes do in fundraising.

Someone raises their hand and tells us exactly what they’re interested in.

And then we immediately start talking about ourselves.

They download a guide. Sign up for a resource. Register for a webinar. Subscribe to receive something useful.

Then they enter our welcome series and suddenly the conversation changes:

Here’s who we are.

Here’s what we do.

Here’s why our organization matters.

And, eventually: Will you make a donation?

There’s nothing inherently wrong with introducing your organization to someone new. They should understand who you are, what you do, and why your work matters.

But years ago, our team conducted an experiment that made me reconsider what the primary purpose of a welcome series should be.

Maybe the first thing we should do when someone raises their hand isn’t explain ourselves.

Maybe we should listen to what they just told us.

The Problem We Were Trying to Solve

The organization in this experiment was beginning to build its online acquisition program.

We were using digital advertising to promote downloadable resources to prospective supporters. Someone would see an ad, visit a landing page, provide their email address to receive the resource, and then enter the organization’s email program.

At the time, the organization didn’t have a large library of content offers available to promote.

So, the original welcome series did something pretty logical: it introduced people to the organization.

The emails shared stories that demonstrated the organization’s impact, including stories about notable alumni. The series would eventually transition into a direct fundraising appeal designed to invite these newly acquired subscribers to become donors.

On paper, that makes complete sense.

But over time, we developed more content offers that we could use to engage prospective donors.

And that gave us an opportunity to ask a different question:

What if, instead of using the welcome series primarily to tell new subscribers what we wanted them to know, we used it to give them more of what they had already told us they wanted?

That distinction became the basis of our experiment.

What We Tested

We compared two fundamentally different approaches to welcoming a newly acquired subscriber.

The control was the organization’s existing welcome series.

Its basic progression looked something like this:

You downloaded something → Let us tell you about our organization → Here’s evidence of our impact → Would you consider supporting us?

The treatment took a different approach.

Instead of immediately shifting the conversation toward the organization, we continued promoting useful content offers that were similar to the resource that caused the person to subscribe in the first place.

In other words:

You downloaded something → You found that useful? → Here’s something else you might value → And here’s something else.

The fundraising objective didn’t disappear.

We simply stopped making our objective the center of the relationship.

Our hypothesis was that continuing to provide relevant value to these newly acquired subscribers would build a stronger relationship — and ultimately produce more first-time donors than immediately transitioning into an organization-focused welcome series.

The Results

The difference was enormous.

The offer-focused welcome series produced a +920% increase in donor conversion rate, with a reported level of confidence greater than 99%.

The experiment included 34,096 people, giving us a substantial sample to evaluate the difference between these two approaches.

But donor conversion wasn’t the only thing that changed.

During the study, the offer-focused approach also produced:

• +86.1% increase in email open rate
• -42.0% decrease in unsubscribe rate
• +1,091.4% increase in revenue

We also observed a +2.8% increase in click rate, although that particular result did not reach statistical significance.

Think about that for a second.

We asked for less attention for ourselves — and people became dramatically more likely to financially support the organization.

But There’s an Important Caveat

Before turning this experiment into a universal fundraising “best practice,” there are some important details about how this study was conducted.

The treatment ran for roughly 45 days, while the reported control data covered a much longer period. During the overlapping period, about 89% of new subscribers entered the control and only 11% entered the treatment.

And here’s the particularly interesting part:

The treatment audience may actually have been the less motivated group.

The groups were separated using a pre-checked checkbox on the signup form. People who left it checked entered the control. Those who deliberately unchecked it — effectively signaling that they didn’t want additional communication — entered the treatment.

Yet that smaller group still significantly outperformed the control.

So, I wouldn’t look at this experiment and conclude:

“Offer-focused welcome series always increase donor conversion by 920%.”

That’s not what one experiment proves.

I think the more useful lesson is much bigger than that.

Your Donor Just Told You What They Want

Consider what happens when someone downloads a resource from your organization.

That action contains information.

They’re telling you:

I’m interested in this.

And yet our natural instinct as fundraisers is often to respond:

Great! Now that I have your attention, let me tell you what I want you to know.

That’s backwards.

Imagine meeting someone for the first time.

They tell you they’re interested in gardening.

And you respond by spending the next 20 minutes explaining your résumé.

You might be fascinating.

But you’re not having much of a conversation.

A good relationship requires listening.

Fundraising shouldn’t be any different.

The Welcome Series Isn’t Really About Welcoming Someone to Your Organization

This experiment changed the way I think about the purpose of a welcome series.

We tend to think:

Someone joined our email list. Now we need to introduce them to us.

I’d encourage you to think about it differently:

Someone just started a relationship with us. How can we serve them well?

Those aren’t the same thing.

One starts with the organization.

The other starts with the person.

And when you start with the person, you can still introduce your mission. You can still explain your work. You can still demonstrate impact. And yes, you can absolutely invite them to give.

But you’re doing those things within the context of a relationship where you’ve already demonstrated something important:

We were paying attention to you.

Value Before Extraction

There’s a temptation in digital fundraising to look at every new email address primarily for its potential economic value.

We acquired 10,000 names.

How many can we convert?

What’s our cost per donor?

How quickly can we recover our acquisition investment?

Those are important questions. I ask them too.

But there’s a danger when those questions become the lens through which we see the people behind the numbers.

Because the person who just downloaded your guide didn’t wake up that morning hoping to improve your organization’s donor conversion rate.

They wanted the guide.

They had a question, interest, concern, need, belief, or passion that caused them to engage with you.

So serve that first.

Ironically, that’s exactly what produced substantially more donors in this experiment.

The Takeaway

If you’re acquiring new email subscribers through content, don’t immediately assume your welcome series should be a crash course on your organization.

Start by looking at the relationship from their perspective.

Why did this person raise their hand in the first place?

Then ask yourself:

What could we give them next that would make their decision to engage with us feel worthwhile?

If they downloaded a guide, perhaps there’s another resource that naturally follows it.

If they signed a petition, perhaps there’s information that helps them understand the issue more deeply.

If they watched a video, perhaps there’s a related story they’d appreciate.

If they registered for an event, perhaps there’s something useful you can provide before asking anything else from them.

You don’t need to hide your organization.

You don’t need to avoid fundraising.

And you certainly don’t need to be afraid of asking someone to give.

You simply need to remember the order of the relationship.

Listen first. Serve first. Build trust. Then invite someone deeper into the mission.

In this experiment, an organization-focused welcome series converted 0.02% of subscribers into donors.

When we shifted the focus toward giving people more of what they had already demonstrated they valued, donor conversion increased to 0.19% — a +920% relative increase.

That’s an impressive fundraising result.

But I think the more important lesson is what produced it.

We didn’t become more aggressive about getting what we wanted.

We became more intentional about giving people what they wanted.

And sometimes, better fundraising really is that simple.

All the best,

— GC