• by Dianna Dilworth , Staff Writer, April 25, 2014

In the keynote at Email Insider Summit this morning, Katie Bisbee, CMO of DonorsChoose.org discussed how her nonprofit is using email to help crowd fund for underserved public schools across the U.S. Teachers can go onto the site to create a desired project for their classroom, be it buying dictionaries for all of the kids, buying science kits or going on field trips.

The company will deliver $60 million in donations to schools this week, $10 million of which is generated through email marketing efforts. As a nonprofit, the marketing staff is lean, so they have to be creative about how to fundraise. One strategy is to turn teachers into marketing advocates. The company discovered that many of the donations came from friends of teachers, and so they created a system in which teachers could email their contacts in order to get funding for their own projects.   

Once a person has donated to a project, they are entered into a lifecycle email program. They receive progress reports on the project, as well as social sharing emails. Once the project has been funded, the donor gets an email with photos of the project in action.