Blueprint Fundraising

As I sent out various holiday messages at the end of 2006, I found emails to friends getting bounced back by zealous spam filters. Clever filters are making it more difficult to get legitimate messages out to groups of recipients — a hassle for fundraisers who want to keep in touch with donors and prospects via email.

You aren’t sending spam are you? Of course not. Neither am I. So here’s a nice list of tips for helping your emails make it through, via Guidestar. Some of the most common items that receive points from spam filters are:

• Images accompanied by little or no text
• Very long list of recipients
• Large or very long messages exceeding a recipient’s limit
• Attachments
• Colored backgrounds
• Large fonts
• Colored fonts
• Messages created with Microsoft FrontPage
• Punctuation in the subject line
• Words in ALL CAPS in the subject line
• Trigger words or phrases in the body or subject line, such as “click,” “free,” “guarantee,” “limited-time offer,” “urgent matter”

Related Posts:

• Quotation: It is possible…
• Tip of the Week: Visit AFP’s Seven, No, Eight Blogs
• Procrastinator’s Guide to Year-End Fundraising
• Counter-intuitive rules for success in 2008
• Tip of the Week: Event accounting

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.