The challenge
The charity's donor list had grown past 14,000 people, and few of them opened its bulk mailings. A plain email from a staff member's own mailbox reads like a personal note, but nobody could send thousands of them one at a time.
The solution
We built a sender that cleans the list first, taking out bounced, replied, duplicate and do-not-contact donors, then sends each appeal as a plain email from three staff mailboxes, paced under each mailbox's daily limit. A reply stops any further email to that donor.
The impact
After the first two appeals, 108 gifts came in from 91 emailed donors, and 54% of that money arrived within 24 hours of a send. When the three-mailbox version launched, 14 gifts arrived that day, against about 3 a day the month before.
How we counted
Gifts were matched to emailed donors from the charity's payment records, May to September 2026. This shows timing, and other giving ran in the same period. Hours count only the 15,127 emails of the first appeal confirmed as sent, at 1.5 minutes each.