From the Nominator

"Dartmouth launched The Call to Lead campaign in 2014 with an audacious goal: raise $3 billion and have 60 percent alumni participation. To reach those goals—particularly to keep our 65,000-member alumni audience informed and engaged with the campaign—our team created a monthly email newsletter that related stories of impact, highlighted key priorities and giving opportunities, and featured Dartmouth alumni who lead in the world.   

Over the course of the past five years, the newsletter has generated 724,637 pageviews and 334,814 site users for the campaign website. However, alumni were unsubscribing from the newsletter and other communications at an alarming rate. In 2021, 850 people unsubscribed to all Dartmouth communications after receiving the campaign newsletter. 

Because our alumni audience is finite, we developed a new distribution approach to reduce unsubscribes while maintaining site traffic and online giving. We moved our email newsletter distribution to Hubspot to better track respondents’ actions, did a deep dive into reader behaviors, and reframed our newsletter as a highly-targeted publication to selected audiences every other month. Each audience received unique visuals, subject lines, and giving opportunities for each newsletter version based on their proven interest in a subject on the campaign site.   

The results were extraordinary. We reduced the total number of unsubscribes from our campaign newsletter by 249% in 2022 compared to the previous year, increased our average open rate by 27%, our click through rate by 8%—and increased campaign dollars raised monthly through the website by 185% over the previous year."

From the Judges

The nominated monthly email newsletter stood out for its ability to effectively relate impactful stories, highlight key priorities, and provide giving opportunities. It excelled as a great email newsletter, capturing readers' attention with its compelling content and eye-catching design. The campaign successfully engaged the audience and effectively communicated its message.