A chat with our VP of Product Development, Sadie Newcombe, on the development of GA’s best email fundraising innovation: The Click Collective.
Sadie started at GA in 2021, after working on the campaign of Tedra Cobb for Congress (NY-21) in both 2018 and 2020. Her expertise has been instrumental to our product development over the last few years. Sadie and I chatted recently about the development of the GA Click Collective. Here’s the scoop:
Julia Murray: What is the Click Collective?
Sadie Newcombe: The Click Collective is a group of campaigns and organizations that grant GA access to their email CRM. We leverage that massive amount of real time data to analyze their list and help them with a number of things, including reactivating lapsed donors, which saves clients money on acquisition.
The Click Collective offers members automatic, custom reactivation and list analysis services, plus exclusive access to a pool of active email donors for acquisition.
JM: Why do you think the Click Collective is different from other email fundraising tools available?
SN: I think there has been a really big push for acquisition in the email fundraising space. People have been focused on buying new names and quantity over quality. The Click Collective puts quality in the front seat. Instead of emailing as many people as possible, we actually encourage members of the Click Collective to email less people, with messages those people will actually want to read.
Through our analysis of subject lines and email body content, we can tell which donors respond positively to what messages, which we can then use to inform campaigns and nonprofits of what their donors want to hear. This strategy is more successful than hitting everyone with the same message, and sending similar emails over and over again.
JM: How does the Click Collective cater specifically to the needs of nonprofit organizations running an email fundraising program?
SN:
Nonprofit fundraising is all about sustainability and longevity.
In the campaign world, it can be more churn and burn - with less risk - you throw everything at the wall until election day, and win or lose, the deliverability of your email program at the end of the race is not particularly a concern.
For nonprofits, it's all about building a relationship with each donor and building a relationship with the whole list. The Click Collective helps nonprofits deliver the content their list wants to engage with, while also helping with list hygiene: cleaning up their existing email list, supplying new targeted emails, and helping with overall deliverability metrics by identifying who is likely to mark as spam and unsubscribe from the list.
JM: Can you share a success story?
SN: Yes! We've seen success with programs that have less than 100,000 emails on their list, and those that have over 30 million emails they've acquired over the years. One program in particular stands out that had over 2 million emails, but nearly all their attempts to reach these potential donors were getting routed into spam. The Click Collective was able to help target this list more effectively, to bring down the number of people that were receiving emails, and increased email activity metics AND total money raised! We also helped them cater their messaging to particular segments - for example people who care about environmental issues received related environmental messaging. The ROI results reflected incredible success. It was amazing to see the before Click Collective vs after Click Collective ActBlue graph!
JM: Have you received any feedback from users that influenced the development of the Click Collective?
SN: For sure! We love feedback. When we first launched the Click Collective, we were doing reactivations by sending clients large chunks of emails, from their list of inactive emails, that we’d deemed as active and worth a re-intro into that clients email program. After feedback from clients, we learned that this process was unrealistic and not useful! The lists were too large and too hard to onboard.
Based on this, we pivoted to breaking down email reactivations by segments. We identify the top five different segments of an email list (think: “people who care about primary elections”), as well as the messages and tactics that would work well for those potential donors. This was purely a suggestion from clients! We were so happy to incorporate it.
JM: What was an obstacle for the team when launching the Click Collective? How did you overcome it?
SN: People were suspicious of a new tool! There are many models out there, such as email co-ops, that focus on acquisition and list swaps, that had users wary of something new.
The Click Collective is different from other offerings because it is first and foremost a list hygiene tool and service. Acquisition is not the core of the Click Collective; segmentation, reactivation, and content analysis are the drivers of success, and once people understood that and saw first results it became easier and easier to get clients interested.
JM: Why is now the best time to utilize the Click Collective?
SN: Election day is less than 100 days away, and the timeline for email fundraising is getting smaller! For acquiring new emails and emailing new potential donors, there is less time to get that list onboarded and donating, so using the Click Collective allows clients to target folks opening, clicking, and donating now, to specific content segments.
To make the most out of the list you already have before election day, the Click Collective helps with reactivating segments, ensuring your message stands out, and making sure your email fundraising program is using the best possible tools, innovation, and data. Now is the time to join if you haven’t yet!
SN: I want to shout out the Click Collective and data teams here at GA! So much hard work has gone into this product, and I’m thrilled it helps clients succeed.
Thanks, Sadie!
Ready to have Sadie's team dig into your data? The Click Collective is free to join.
(YES really - free! We believe here at GA that nothing short of a collective effort is needed to improve the email ecosystem for all and preserve email as the effective fundraising channel we all know it can be.) Reach out to our team here to get started: Let's chat Click Collective!
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