The digital fundraising landscape is changing. How are you navigating it? If you get your digital engine room (Meta, Google and Email) in order, then you can continue to get value out of digital, despite the ongoing restrictions put on charity advertisers looking to grow their share of voice and share of money.
Join Josh Leigh, Director at Hynt in this session that will equip attendees with practical strategies and tools to navigate the ongoing changes in digital advertising: charities need to know WHY they exist, and work in the middle of the marketing funnel to bring it to life.
Key learnings from this session:
Participants will understand how the ongoing restrictions on digital advertising are affecting charities.
You will learn how to create effective campaigns that leverage your charity’s value to grow consideration and create deeper value through digital retention.
Are you ready to gain actionable insights and tools to implement immediately?
Don’t forget to join us at our Digital Fundraising Conference, happening on the 9th July 2026, learn more here
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And thank you to our friends at JustGiving who make the Fundraising Everywhere Podcast possible.
Transcript
Jade Cunnah: Welcome to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast, your go-to place for fundraising tips and inspiration. Love what you hear? Get more insights straight to your inbox. Subscribe to our email list for exclusive fundraising resources, early access to training, special discounts, and more. Just head on over to fundraisingeverywhere.com/podcast to subscribe.
Jade Cunnah: Now, on to today’s episode. Enjoy.
Josh Leigh: is getting your digital engine room in order So looking at how Meta, Google, and email can work together and how by bringing together your comms team, fundraising, donor marketing, bringing all the teams together, you can actually do even better marketing. So we’re going to be looking at really, really tactically what integration can look like for your organization.
Josh Leigh: But just to get us started, I can already see that some of my animations aren’t gonna work, so bear with me for today. Um, I’ll tell you a really quick bit about Hint. So Hint is a digital marketing and fundraising consultancy based here in London. We work with charities across the UK, across Ireland, and internationally across Europe and North America.
Josh Leigh: As a char- as an agency, we’re made up of a team of people who have worked charity side, agency side, and we’re bringing all of that expertise together to help charities do better digital fundraising. However, both myself and Sarah and, and a lot of the team have got experience in other areas of fundraising as well, so we can really talk about that full kind of picture of integration.
Josh Leigh: When it comes to what we do as an agency, we do digital fundraising, so digital fundraising strategy, ideation, all that good stuff. We’re through and through. We are fundraisers’ … Uh, fundraisers’ fundraisers. We’re very, very much about fundraising, income generation, but also mobilization and action. We do campaign delivery, so we can run campaigns for you.
Josh Leigh: We also do training coaching, and I will say this is the really critical part of why me and Sarah got together and created Hint was we want to make sure that the digital fundraising space within the sector isn’t just a bunch of agencies doing the work for you but also teaching you and bringing you along on that journey.
Josh Leigh: Our goal is to make sure that everyone gets better at digital fundraising and really we don’t- we want you to stop calling us. We kind of want you to be so good you don’t need us anymore. That’s literally our goal as an agency and as a supplier in the sector. And then of course we can do innovation and diversification, so that final little bit there as well.
Josh Leigh: But what I’m gonna cover in this short session is what is the digital engine room? There were a lot of questions in that last session, people kind of saying, “Yeah, but what does this look like? How do I get started? I’m a small charity or a big charity. What is the core things I can do, the first steps I can do to better integrate my different areas of my program and start to kind of mobilize supporters around a single cause?”
Josh Leigh: And what we’re gonna look at there is your engine room. So just tell you what’s in the engine room, some of the channels and how they work. We’re gonna look at specifically Meta, Google, and email, and then I’m gonna give you a cheat sheet for how you can plan your budget projections based on all of the activity I’m gonna talk about with you today as well.
Josh Leigh: This is the cheat sheet. So there’s gonna be a freebie. In approximately 25 minutes, you are going to get a QR code to download a freebie or, um, my email address so you can send us an email. But there’s a, a, a budget planning template I’m gonna give out, which is gonna help you bring together your organic social, your paid social, your kind of email marketing, your hand raisers, your direct recruitment, your fundraising, your donor marketing.
Josh Leigh: Bring all of that into one place, put a budget together, and get that approved for you to start doing a bit more of the program, like what Anya was describing as well. So I’m gonna get us started. What is the digital engine room? This is a terminology that myself and Sarah have developed over the last couple of years when we talk about the bare bones of a good digital fundraising program.
Josh Leigh: It’s ironic to call it an engine room given that Sarah and I know nothing about cars and we are not mechanics. But- We call it the digital engine room, and what we mean by that is the core channels that you should focus on first, core channels, core programs that kind of are going to be the bedrock or the foundation for everything else you build on top of that.
Josh Leigh: So I’m gonna teaser Meta, Google, and email. If you can get those three channels working in harmony and integrate them all together through some automation, some clever creative work, you can then build countless ideas on top of that, that are fueled by the different work that your comms and policy and fundraising and donor marketing teams are doing as well.
Josh Leigh: So the trifecta of platforms that we call your digital engine room are Meta, which is Facebook and Instagram. Heard of it. Biggest company in the world. It’s Google Ads, which, uh, probably is the biggest company in the world, but that’s, uh, your search ads, it’s things like YouTube, it’s Performance Max we’re gonna talk a lot about today.
Josh Leigh: And then email marketing, which I think is the unsung hero of the entire digital landscape. I think it’s, it’s, um, some of the bigger charities that have cottoned on a little bit or even some of the smaller charities, email’s their first port of call When they think about communicating with supporters in an effective income-generating or action-driving way, they think email.
Josh Leigh: And I think there’s a bit of a lag in some of the other organizations or charity causes picking up on that opportunity there as well. We’re also gonna talk a bit about the marketing funnel today because I think when we think about fundraising, and marketing, and policy, and comms, we do need to think about it through the perspective or through the lens of the marketing funnel.
Josh Leigh: So some of you will be familiar with this, some of you maybe not, but the marketing funnel is essentially awareness, consideration, and conversion. You make a lot of people can be aware of you, but very few people are gonna convert. When we think of historical fundraising, when it was just fundraising and we didn’t really tie in brand, or comms, or policy, or those other things that people can do for you, those rich opportunities to support you, we were really just doing conversion.
Josh Leigh: So sending out sort of a DM pack or door drops inserts, press ads, even, uh, tube car panels, DRTV, telephone. All of that is about conversion, and it doesn’t really acknowledge that actually a lot of people won’t know who you are already, so they’re not necessarily gonna convert as well as you think they are, and they would never even consider giving to you.
Josh Leigh: You haven’t really built up any awareness of who you are or consideration in supporting you. So what we’re gonna do is look today at how the use of meta, Google, and email can serve the marketing funnel and actually kind of bust some of the former ways that we’ve been doing it and explain why that’s kind of shifting in that landscape as well.
Josh Leigh: When we think of the funnel, these are some of the ways that you might, Oh, sorry. Nikki’s just said in the public chat, by the way, ask me questions throughout. I’m highly distractable. I will read the questions, and I will answer them for you as well. So ask any questions you’ve got as we go. But when we think of the marketing funnel, there’s just a couple of things on screen about how you measure different parts of the marketing funnel, but I’m gonna move straight on to talk about what goes into the different parts of the marketing funnel.
Josh Leigh: And then I’m just gonna talk for a second on the engine room and why it’s so important. So at Hint, one of the biggest things we do for our clients is an, a strategic approach to their digital fundraising. So we do what we call an audit and a road map, and it’s not quite a strategy. It’s more like a plan.
Josh Leigh: So what we do is we come in, and we wriggle in, and we get to know your team, and we get to know your culture and your skill set, and, and we kind of survey the team to understand their confidence around fundraising and digital and, and kind of marketing fundamentals. So often people come to us and say, “Our program is perfect, and we’re ready to scale outwards.
Josh Leigh: We wanna innovate. We want new product development, new audiences. We wanna tackle the 18 to 24 demographic.” And we say to them, “Let’s just take two big steps back and look at phase one for a second, which is your engine room actually in order? Is your Facebook and your Instagram ads running so effectively that you can turn away from them and they’re still gonna run without you?
Josh Leigh: Is Google Ads actually running?” So few people are using Google Ads, and I’m gonna talk a lot about that today. And are you actually using email? So a lot of charities will, will kind of come to us and say, “We wanna generate a, a big chunk of cash through digital. We wanna run some Facebook ads.” And we’re like, “Actually, Facebook ads doesn’t generate cash.
Josh Leigh: It’s an acquisition channel. Email generates cash. Are you doing email? How often are you sending email? What kind of content are you putting in those emails?” I’m just gonna say Clara’s asked, “Would you say that having a brand awareness campaign going alongside the leads campaign in Meta is a good way to build that audience and awareness?”
Josh Leigh: Clara, did you read my deck ahead of time? Yes. It’s coming up. I’m gonna explain exactly why that’s the perfect way to, to approach this. But yes, our engine room is the first port of call. It’s where we really wanna make sure that you- you kind of get all of the engine room in order, then scale upwards, and then scale outwards.
Josh Leigh: So I’m gonna move on to the first part of the engine room, which is Meta. As I said, that’s your Facebook and your Instagram falls under Meta So you’ve got the three parts of the funnel. You should know the three parts of the funnel. Talked about them a second ago: awareness, consideration, conversion. When we think about what Meta can do for you or what Facebook and Instagram can do for you, historically, and some charities are still doing this, people just think digital acquisition is Facebook ads asking for cash.
Josh Leigh: They might do that at Christmas. They might do it throughout the year. Maybe they’ll ask for regular giving. And what they’re not necessarily doing just yet is thinking about what else Meta can do for your, in you, in your engine room, and the fact that Meta is actually less and less effective at getting that immediate conversion.
Josh Leigh: So to answer Clara’s question there, we would strongly encourage you to start using Meta at the top of the funnel to get awareness and at the middle of the funnel to get con- consideration, which i- is called lead generation or hand raisers or petitions or digital value exchange. So I’m gonna start by talking a bit about awareness, and Clara, I think there might be some stuff here that you might wanna steal.
Josh Leigh: Sarah’s in the chat answering your question in a much more coherent way than I have just said it, talking about algorithms and such, so please do keep an eye on the chat. Sarah’s … It looks like Sarah’s gonna be hanging around, answering questions as well. But when we think about the top of the funnel and what you can do on Meta to build awareness about your work, historically that might have been organic social, for example.
Josh Leigh: However, organic social is, as anyone who’s on this call who might be from the comms team probably knows, organic social is not getting you the engagement rates it used to. It’s not getting you the reach that it used to. One of the key reasons for that is that Meta is building out the paid side of their product, so the advertising side of their product.
Josh Leigh: Many years ago, you might have been looking through your Instagram feed, and there might have been an ad every six, seven, eight posts. It’s now every four. So every fourth post you see should be a piece of promoted content that someone has paid to put in front of you. They are reducing the availability of organic sp- placements and actually increasing the advertising space- spaces on their products.
Josh Leigh: And what this means is you do actually need to invest at the top of the funnel. You can’t rely on organic social as much anymore. But your comms team or the comms people on this call, I guarantee you are producing some of the most amazing content in the world, and all you’ve got to do is put a budget behind it.
Josh Leigh: So on screen right now, you can see some examples of how we do this with our cha- our charity clients. On the left there, you’ve got Humans of New York. Raise your hand in the chat if you know what Hum- Humans of New York is. I’m raising my hand. I imagine you’re all raising it as well. It’s an amazing Instagram account where someone goes around, photographs people in the streets of New York, and collects a long form version of their story.
Josh Leigh: This is a, it’s a, a highly sought after account. People love it. People follow it, and then they then make books of their content, et cetera. We basically steal that idea and use it for our active awareness raising campaigns. So when we run these campaigns for clients on Meta, we grab rough and ready raw content from your storytellers and campaigners or your storytellers and, and, um- Service users.
Josh Leigh: And we grab their, their direct quotes and we write really long cap- captions to tell their story, and we put it under a really rough and raw and authentic photo or a home video. Like, home video really shot on an iPhone. I’m saying, like, I want a thumb in front of the camera. Really rough. That stuff works really well on paid social media, and if you put a budget behind it at the top of the funnel, you will get significantly higher engagement rates than you would if you were just doing it organically.
Josh Leigh: So organic social gets, let’s say, between 1% and 4% engagement rate. Paid social with a video will get you about… Paid, sorry, paid social for engagement will get you about a 55% engagement rate. One of our clients is up at the 70% to 75% level at the minute, and that’s with really solid engagement content running at the top of the funnel with a paid budget.
Josh Leigh: In the, um, the cheat sheet I’m gonna give you today, I’ve put all of the benchmarks in there so you can put in an amount of money you want to invest in that, and it’s gonna tell you everything you’ll get for it. What we do see is if you re-target these people with a cash ask, for example, you can typically get a lower CPA and a higher conversion rate because someone already knows who you are and they’re willing to understand a bit more about what you do as well.
Josh Leigh: Oh my God, Claudia has asked, “How do we handle the middle of the funnel?” Claudia, did you read my deck as well? Let me jump ahead. But you’ve asked, “How do we handle the middle of the funnel if our account on Meta has been restricted by Meta due to mention of health? We’ve been struggling with any remarketing or lookalike audiences.”
Josh Leigh: Sarah, do you wanna jump into the chat and answer Claudia’s question as far as restrictions? But I’m gonna talk a little bit about the middle of the funnel and how it can help you navigate some of those restrictions. So those restrictions affect conversion tracking and conversion optimization on your website.
Josh Leigh: So as many of you might have seen, last year some new restrictions were introduced by Meta that if you are advertising around health or several other social issues, you will not be able to track conversions as well as you used to be able to, which is the bottom of that funnel there that I showed you a second ago.
Josh Leigh: What you can do is shift up into the middle section of the funnel, which is consideration, and start to use consideration to build that pool or that prospecting pool of people who might become donors. So lead generation is what we call it. It’s about collecting that email address first or that telephone number first, and it’s very much like a first date.
Josh Leigh: So a lot of the world doesn’t know who you are and, to be honest, doesn’t care. They don’t know who you are or what you stand for. They’ve probably not woken up that morning and thought about your cause at all. In the middle of that journey, we’ve got active engage- actively engaged in your mission. So someone who’s probably raised their hand and said, “I believe in your values.
Josh Leigh: I want to sign that petition.” And then finally, supporting you financially. So the only reason anyone goes on a first date these days is to find a husband who’s gonna support them financially, or at least that’s why I’m in the game. If you’re rich, drop your details in the chat. Let’s have a chat. But this is why lead generation works very much like a first date.
Josh Leigh: It takes someone from not knowing who you are to knowing enough about you to consider a second date. That’s lead generation, my friend. That’s the middle of the funnel. In the, the first chat in this room, for anyone that was joined, uh, joined our panel conversation, we talked a bit and Sarah talked a bit about the algorithmic changes that mean that lead generation is the way forward.
Josh Leigh: So we would really encourage you to start thinking with Meta, getting your engine room running, is to start using Meta at the top of the funnel to build engagement, get impressions, and really address your comms team’s objectives and the middle of the funnel to build up that prospecting pool. That prospecting pool is this big pool of email addresses of people who’ve actively said they’re interested in your work and they wanna fund it or they want to engage with it or sign more petition actions, et cetera.
Josh Leigh: Those people are perfect for every other product you have. If you’ve got community and events, in-member, legacy, retail, you just want to do cash asks, regular giving asks, memberships, sponsorship products. Those people who’ve already put their hand up and joined your email funnel and said, “I’ll consider supporting you,” they’re the best prospects for that.
Josh Leigh: Not this bottom of the funnel activity, which is increasingly more expensive on Meta and harder and harder to do. I’m gonna show you some examples of hand raisers or lead generation. So these are some examples from Liberty, and this really ties in with what we were talking about with Praxis earlier today as well.
Josh Leigh: If we see a piece of news, we will go into … We’ll talk to the charity, and we’ll mobilize around it. So we’ll bring that news into the, into the campaign we’re running. We get a lot of people then considering your charity in the middle of the funnel. They can join your file. So they’ll join your email file, and you’ll have the ability to segment them, communicate with them, and, um, speak to them through email, which I’m gonna talk about in a second.
Josh Leigh: You can get really low cost per leads. So in the projections tool I’m gonna give away for free today, there’s a cost per lead baked into that and all of the calculations to help you benchmark what you could invest and how many email addresses you would get and then how many email … how much income you’ll get from those email addresses.
Josh Leigh: So stay tuned. It’s all gonna be in the projections document I’ll give away. Because these email leads do give you a donation. So, uh, just for a bit of context, if you were to run a campaign on Meta at the bottom of the funnel and say, “Give me a cash gift today,” you would expect to get about P back for every pound you invest, so 30 to 40 P back for every pound.
Josh Leigh: That’s a loss because acquisition operates on a loss. With this two-step model or the middle of the funnel, you can still get those donors. Every new person who’s joins your file, you wanna be making a financial ask and ask them to support you financially or ask them to do something else for you or ask them to leave a legacy.
Josh Leigh: They could generate a 0.5 return or 0.6 return, so that’s 50 to 60 P for every pound you invest. We’re currently running a campaign for another client where their lead gen program is paying itself off pound for pound or euro for euro, in that case, at the point of sign-up. So you can run campaigns at the middle of the funnel that actually perform better than the bottom of the funnel simply by shifting and integrating across your teams in the way that you work as well And with Meta, some of the biggest advice I can give you if you are gonna continue operating at the bottom of the funnel is to start rethinking how you’re approaching that advertising.
Josh Leigh: So the st- the strategic targeting has changed, the creative has changed, the approach to that has changed, and we really need to tap into audience motivations more than into what our objective is. So for example, Sarah again mentioned on the, the panel earlier, you need to know why you exist and why supporters might wanna support you.
Josh Leigh: And it’s not just because every September you do a campaign about inoculate, or like in- inoculations or, or vaccinations, which some charities, every September is the vaccination appeal. The supporter doesn’t know or care that September’s your vaccination month. What you wanna do is tap into why they might be supporting you and build that into your creative as well.
Josh Leigh: So, if you are interested, we’ve got some additional resources on creative dive- di- creative diversification and, uh, Meta’s new advertising algorithm called Andromeda. I’m not gonna cover it today because it’s a really big word and I don’t know how to spell it. But we can share those resources if anyone reaches out.
Josh Leigh: Our email address is at the end of this deck. That’s it for Meta. Goodbye, Mark Zuckerberg. Hello, Google. Let’s talk about Google a little bit. So I am gonna ask another question. Who’s running Google Ads in their program? A lot of charities for some reason aren’t running paid Google ads. They might have the Google Grant, which does have a lot of restrictions on it and isn’t necessarily cost-effective as far as income generation.
Josh Leigh: But if you’re not investing in Google Ads, I’m about to tell you that you should be. So Google Ads is very different to paid social for a couple of different really specific reasons. But when we think about Facebook advertising, so Facebook, Instagram advertising under Meta, we are interrupting someone.
Josh Leigh: We’re trying to get their attention. Whereas if we are advertising on Google, we are reacting to someone’s intent to support you or intent to do something with you. Oh, I’m seeing some thumbs up. Matt’s given a thumbs up. We’ve got Jenny. So a lot of people are on Google. Hailey from BDC Mind is only on the grant, which is restricting your ability.
Josh Leigh: And then we’ve got Liz from St. Michael’s Hospice who have just started trying YouTube, which is fantastic. So YouTube is part of the Google Ads family. So when we talk about Google, Claire has just given a sideways sassy look. Not sure why. Power to you, Claire. But when we talk about Google, we’re talking about Search, we’re talking about YouTube, we’re talking about something called Performance Max, and I’m gonna talk about that on the next slide.
Josh Leigh: But essentially with Google Ads, you’re tapping into this huge audience that have expressed an interest in what it is that you’re promoting. So Google Ads can look at someone’s search history, it can look at their email inbox, it can look at everything that they’re up to and create a, an advertising profile based on that.
Josh Leigh: Very restrictive on the grant, yes. Whereas when we look at Meta, we’re actually targeting people based on who they are and we’re interrupting their life. So we’re kind of just getting a distracted audience to pay attention to you, whereas with Google Ads, you’re getting someone who’s already in market to support you and you’re just kind of pulling them over to you.
Josh Leigh: So two different approaches, but Google Ads can, a- as a result of this algorithm, can be incredibly lucrative if you invest in it. So when we think about where Google Ads can sit in, in the funnel- A lot of people, I think, initially start by running brand Google ads, which is a really good thing to do.
Josh Leigh: You do wanna be running brand terms. What that means is if someone searches for HBDC, H- uh, BDC Mind, so Hayley, if someone searches for BDC Mind, you wanna make sure that you’re surfaced. Your competitors, the other charities, are probably bidding on your term as well. So at the top of the funnel, you do wanna be doing brand search.
Josh Leigh: You wanna make sure that if someone searches for your brand, they find you. At the bottom of the funnel is where Google is really, really effective, which is if someone searches for you, put them into d- get them to a donation checkout as soon as possible. Get them into a page that builds an emotional reason to support, a tangible exchange of what that, that gift can do, and gets them to give you that donation.
Josh Leigh: So Google Ads at the bottom of the funnel generates some of the lowest cost per acquisitions we ever see and some of the highest return on investment. Google Ads can r- can pay itself off and then some at the point of sign-up. So for example, you could pay 10 pounds for that supporter and get 15 pound donation.
Josh Leigh: That’s a 1.5 return on investment. Is that good maths? That’s good maths. So really, I would encourage you to investigate Google Ads. Think about how you can invest a budget into Google Ads. The grant is good for certain things, but unfortunately there are so many limitations on it, it just does not let you break into the space of getting donors through Google Grant.
Josh Leigh: Uh, through to, through Google Ads. PMax, Performance Max- Sounds like a really cool product, and it is. It’s got a cool name. I’ve seen a few people in the chat say they are currently investigating or using Performance Max. WTF is PMAX? That’s what I’m saying. What is PMAX? Let me tell you. Performance Max is a targeting or kind of a strategic ad product in Google Ads that allows you to load in several different images, several videos, several HTML files, some copy, some headlines, some text, some URLs, and you just have to trust Google to mix and match those and put them onto th- whatever part of their network is gonna perform best for you.
Josh Leigh: This is a really fundamental part of modern digital advertising. You can’t really control it like you used to be able to, including on Meta. Meta and Google are asking you to trust the algorithm w- when it comes to strategy. So trust them to find your audience or find the right group of people. You can put in some parameters.
Josh Leigh: So for example, we like to put in a minimum, minimum age and say that we kind of strong assumption that a, a 19-year-old probably isn’t ready to do a £9 monthly gift. But what we do wanna do is otherwise trust these really solid advertising platforms to find the right audience for you and not try and micro-engineer that.
Josh Leigh: Put all of that thought and affection into your creative. However, with Performance Max, it is gonna mix and match your creative because ultimately the algorithm does know better and the audience will respond to what they wanna respond to. So you do have to do a degree of trust here. PMAX will place your ads in YouTube, Display, Search, Discover, which is that app on, uh, if you’re on an Android device, it’s the Google app, it’s that feed there, Gmail, Maps, et cetera.
Josh Leigh: So, um, PMAX is really just, I wanna put all this creative into all of these placements, and I trust Google to do it for me. This gets some of the best results we see as well. Shelley, you’ve asked about what budget would be good for PMAX. The budget planning sheet I’m giving away for free today is gonna give you a bit of a steer on that as well Finally, I’ve got about seven or eight minutes left, I think, Nikki, so I’m gonna talk about email.
Josh Leigh: Email. Who’s doing email? Everyone must be doing email. But, and I saw Alex Fearon mention this in the chat, if you’re doing an email newsletter, careful not to mention it in the chat. And by that, I mean sending one quarterly newsletter that’s got, like, 17 stories in it. If you put in the chat that you’re doing that, Alex Fearon is gonna come to your house and smack you right across the face.
Josh Leigh: I promise you that. So just be careful. But with email marketing, this is the conversion channel. So email is, it’s retention, it’s stewardship, it’s income generation. Hailey from BDC Mind, my new best friend, says, “Mailchimp.” Yes, Mailchimp, a great platform to start. Email is conversion. Email gets actions.
Josh Leigh: Email gets income generation. It gets, it’s, it’s, it’s … You wanna prospect that email pool. If you want people to sign up to an event, the best place to go is people who already know who you are. They will consider supporting you, and they’ve already joined your mailing list. They’ve probably already taken a few actions as well.
Josh Leigh: They’re the ones who you can ask to join and register to run the marathon, and they’ll probably raise more money. So we need to be, really be thinking about how we’re using email as a channel. You own that data. You own that channel. You can say kind of whatever you want in email. Meta and Google have really tight restrictions on political advertising, and those are only getting tighter.
Josh Leigh: Anything you do on those platforms is controlled by how Mark Zuckerberg woke up that morning. Email is a very different story. Email does have other restrictions you need to be aware of and other changes happening. But ultimately, Nikki’s gonna take a nap and let me crack on. I can host the rest of the day, Nikki.
Josh Leigh: Don’t you worry about it. Ultimately, email does have one of the highest return on investments for anything that you do as part of your engine room. When it comes to email and planning what goes into email, I’m just gonna share one creative example and then wrap up. But email isn’t just a place to say, “Give me cash, give me cash, give me regular giving.”
Josh Leigh: Email is a place for you to actively engage with your supporter and, in some ways, put the cheeky cash ask behind an engagement ask. So there are so many other ways you can use email. Don’t put your DM pack into an email. If I ever see this again, I will come to you. Me and Alex Fearon, we’re gonna jump on a Megabus, and we’re gonna come to your house wherever you are in this country, and we will find you.
Josh Leigh: Do not put a DM pack into your email. Think about how you, you can eas- u- use email in the most effective way creatively. At Hint, we’ve got entire training courses on this. We can help you with this. It’s really brilliant. So come to us if you wanna talk about email, but I’m just gonna give you one really good creative idea before we wrap up.
Josh Leigh: When it comes to asking people for money in email or asking someone to take an action, you don’t just wanna go out and say, “Sad story, problem, solution, action, tangible price point, prompt one, prompt two, prompt three,” every single time. Emails like that can get you a really good, oh, Haley, direct mail pack.
Josh Leigh: DM is a direct mail pack. Um, email can get you a really good cash average gift if you do that. But if you really wanna activate people, you need to speak to them in a, a slightly more human way and potentially lower barrier asks as well. So a really good example, the email list you have to get on is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the senator from the US, AOC, as she’s called.
Josh Leigh: AOC’s team sends out literally three cash asks a week. Those are updates based on what’s happening in the press, what’s happening in AOC’s life, what’s happening at constituency, case study stories, storyteller stories, people running the marathon, whatever. Uh, the three times a week they’ll send an ask that’s got a cash ask in it.
Josh Leigh: That is mobilization. It’s usually a $5 ask. It’s nice and cheap. A couple of years ago, AOC got engaged, and instead of sending a cash ask, they asked people to sign her, her engagement card. And people clicked through, signed the card, and then they were asked for cash. So they nested the cash ask behind that engagement ask.
Josh Leigh: We stole this idea shamelessly, and we’ve done this a couple of times with one of our clients, Dogs Trust Ireland. So they re-home dogs in Ireland. Um, and we said, “Well, why don’t we do a housewarming card for one of the dogs you’ve rehomed?” So we took Shane, the wonderful little Shane, and we put him in- into an email.
Josh Leigh: The first email we sent I think was sometime in Q3 last year as a test. And we said, “Will you sign Shane’s housewarming card?” Thousands of people, thousands of dog lovers across the great country of Ireland signed this housewarming card, and hundreds of them gave donations. This generated actual tangible income, and it really gave people more than just
Josh Leigh: You weren’t just going to them and say, “You’re a, you’re a, um, you’re a piggy bank. I need cash.” It said to them, “We want you to be an active part of the work that we’re doing,” really engaging with the future of dog rehoming in Ireland. This can only happen if the rehoming team and the policy team and the dog team and the fundraising team and the marketing team and the email team and digital team are all one team.
Josh Leigh: You need to think of yourselves as one team, and as Sarah said in the previous chat, you need to know why you’re there. You’re there for the dogs. So it doesn’t matter if the dog team d- if someone in the dog team hates someone in the fundraising team. Kick that silo down. You can do really amazing, really, as, as Haley said, top-tier fundraising and marketing, animals do always win, when you break down the silos between those teams.
Josh Leigh: So what next? Thanks, Jess from the RSPCA. Cornwall says she’s- loves this, and I fully expect RSPCA to send out the exact same email but with an RSPCA dog in it. Do it, Jess. Steal with pride. I fully encourage it. So I’ve got a couple of minutes left. I just want to introduce you to a free projection sheet that we are giving away.
Josh Leigh: As I said at the top of this, Hint, me and Sarah created Hint because we want to leave the sector better than the way we found it when it comes to digital fundraising. In line with that, we speak at these conferences, we sponsor these conferences we kind of help Nikki and Simon bring this conference to the market, and we give everything away for free.
Josh Leigh: We do training, we do items, we do whatever you need. What I’m gonna give you today is a free benchmarking projection sheet. So it’s a Google- it’s a, sorry, an Excel spreadsheet. It’s got several different tabs. Each tab has got a different area of marketing and fundraising that you can be doing. So, for example, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, active engagement, lead generation, direct conversion to cash, direct conversion to RG telephone lead generation, email lead gen.
Josh Leigh: So all of that are all the different sheets. Someone asked about recommended budget. If you put your, um, recommended bud- you put your planned budget into each of the sheets with the amount of money you might have available, the summary sheet on the first page is gonna do a bunch of maths, and it’s gonna tell you how much money you could generate based on current industry averages.
Josh Leigh: And I’ll say those averages are from Hint’s work, so they are, they’re quite good averages, I will say, and a mix of, um, M&R benchmarks from Rally and M&R benchmarks as well. So we pulled it in from benchmarking and from our own work, but we’re just giving this away for free. We create these projection tools when we work with clients on our strateg- strategy projects.
Josh Leigh: If you do need strategic support, please reach out. We’ll do one of these projections with you. But this is a starting place. You put all the numbers in, it tells you what you could achieve, and then it tells you with email. Scale up the amount of email you’re sending, and this will tell you how much money you’ll generate from email.
Josh Leigh: Then it spits out one big total and one big return on investment. So input your budget, campaign timings, get a rough projection of lead generation, donor recruitment, and income through digital retention. This was meant to be a GIF of a cat furiously typing into the projection sheet, which is, I imagine, what each of you is gonna do when you get it.
Josh Leigh: So that projection sheet, as Nikki has said in the chat, it’s in the delegate bag. So there should be a button somewhere about downloading delegate bags. But if you want to send an email to hello@hint.studio, you can get that we’ll send it straight away to you. Sarah’s in the chat as well, so Sarah can reply to those emails now and get that out to you.
Josh Leigh: If you scan that QR code, you can join our mailing list, and I think it’s in, I, I’m gonna add it to the mailing list as well. So we’ll add, like, an email that sends out that projections document. Jump on the mailing list, grab all the freebies. We give away digital freebies all the time. The email, like, email three has got a ton of free stuff in there.
Josh Leigh: So steal with pride. Take everything we’re doing. Steal that idea from AOC. I want every charity in the co- I’m not gonna rest until every charity in the country does a housewarming card or a get well soon card or whatever. But thank you so much for joining me, and I hope that’s been really helpful. A really tactical understanding of what your digital engine room can look like to bring fundraising, marketing, policy, comms, et cetera, together in 2026.
Alex Aggidis: Thank you so much for listening to the Fundraising Everywhere podcast. If you’re enjoying this podcast, why not share it with a fundraising friend? And if you would like to give us a little like or subscribe, it really helps more fundraisers like you find us. Thank you so much. See you next time