
The End of the Campaign
For more than two decades, digital fundraising has been organized around the campaign. A nonprofit identifies a need, develops an appeal, selects an audience, and sends the same message to thousands – sometimes hundreds of thousands – of people on the same day. The model works. Email remains one of the most productive digital channels in nonprofit fundraising, and its revenue continues to grow. But the same benchmarks that confirm email’s value also show how hard relevance is to achieve at scale: the average fundraising email now generates a direct response from roughly one recipient in two thousand.