Last week, the e-Marketing team at United Way of Massachusetts Bay launched our first e-newsletter using Convio. Although we had sent our quarterly e-newsletter before, this new system allowed us to now do so with more segmentation and interactive capabilities. 

With these new tools, we were able to split our recipients into two broad groups - donor and non-donor.  In total, we sent almost 47,000 emails to a house file that was built from internal records as well as from registrations to our web site.

The non-donor version of the email - sent to folks who didn't give in our most recent campaign year, but who had given in one of the two years prior, as well as folks who had not given during all of the past three campaign years - included an ask, and an extra graphic inviting recipients to donate. 

We were delighted to not only see a fairly high average open rate amongst the two versions of the e-newsletter (just over 30%!), but also to receive a $2,000 gift from one of those non-donors who had registered via our site and was not even in our prospect file.  This gift was unexpected but very welcome, and indicated to us that our message, content, personalization and technology were inspiring folks to support our efforts.