Email As Your Ultimate Year-Round Donor Stewardship Tool

We all know year-end giving isn’t going anywhere. In fact, M+R reports that most nonprofits raised 10% of their revenue during the last week of 2025 alone.

However, if you’re waiting until the end of the year to engage and steward your donors through email, you’re missing out on additional donation opportunities and seriously hindering your relationship building.

Instead of just asking them for an end-of-year gift, you can build stronger retention rates through year-round emails that invite your donors to be a part of something larger.

The State of Nonprofit Emails

The good news: nonprofits are seeing significant opportunities with email right now.

In 2025, revenue from emails increased by an average of 16%. And organizations raised an average of $2.40 per subscriber, which was up 28% from 2024.

These emails weren’t all squeezed into the last quarter of the year. Nonprofits sent an average of 50 emails per subscriber – 62% of which included fundraising messaging.

If you haven’t already set up a year-round email program that nurtures donor relationships and invites them to participate in ways beyond financial giving, now is the time to act.

Why You Should Send Year-Round Emails

It might seem obvious, but it’s true: donors give because they want to be a part of your mission.

If all they hear from you is one thank-you message and a year-end appeal, they aren’t invited in to be part of your organization’s journey. And they’re less likely to feel like their gift mattered, which means they’re less likely to give again.

Consistent email outreach, on the other hand, leads to greater engagement, which can increase both your retention rate and the amount of donations you receive throughout the year.

And it pays off: 33% of donors report that email is what inspires them to give.

How to Manage Year-Round Donor Stewardship Emails

If your email calendar gives you a sense of dread, this section is for you. Maybe you think you don’t have the capacity to send regular emails. Maybe you think your quarterly newsletter does enough of the heavy lifting for you. Or maybe you’re just not sure what to send out.

Here’s how to turn the idea of year-round email outreach into a reality.

1. Simplify what you send

Take some pressure off by simplifying your outreach.

Not every donor email needs to be polished and highly designed. In fact, plain text emails – the kind you send to your teammates – can sometimes outperform HTML-designed emails.

Simplified emails feel more personal and direct, and can even earn better inbox placement.

Additionally, consider ways to simplify the content to make regular emails an easier lift for you and your team.

Throughout the year, your emails should:

• Educate donors about your activities and what their gift supported.
• Invite donors to participate in other ways, like volunteering or signing a petition (more on this in a bit).
• Share exciting news, like new partnerships or grants.
• Tell interesting stories that demonstrate your impact.

Once you identify the types of things you need to send out to donors, planning to create and repurpose content becomes easier.

2. Follow frameworks that work

You can’t copy the emails other nonprofits send to their donors. But you can rely on tried-and-true frameworks to benefit from what has worked for other fundraisers.

For example, Lee O’Connell, a nonprofit strategist, shares her preferred framework to build supporter connection via email: write from a person, write to a person, and write about a person.

This framework ensures your writing stays focused on people, which leads to deeper engagement and more memorable communications.

This simple three-step framework ensures your email is grounded in humanity and connection, increasing your chances of engagement.

3. Make different kinds of asks

As I mentioned earlier, fundraising emails made up 62% of all emails sent by nonprofits in 2025, according to M+R. That means the remaining 38% weren’t asking for donations – they were providing other types of value.

One thing you can do to steward donors and make them feel more involved in your cause is to ask them to get involved.

Invite them to a donor appreciation event. Encourage participation at your next volunteer day. Send them surveys to get their opinions on important issues.

The goal here is both to understand your donors better (and therefore build stronger relationships) and make them feel like a valuable partner.

4. Automate, automate, automate

Connect with donors more frequently through automated (but not generic!) email outreach.

Darrin Cook, founder and Chief Architect of My Mogul Media, argues that smart tools like automation protect your energy.

“Automation is often misunderstood as a threat to human connection,” he writes. “In reality, well-designed systems can protect empathy by removing friction and creating space for presence.”

Some examples of automated series you can leverage include:

• A welcome series to onboard new donors
• A reengagement series for lapsed donors
• An engagement campaign around your impact report

Create thoughtful content for your automated series to simplify your workload and keep building those donor relationships.

Summer Stewardship Series Example

During the summer months, also known endearingly as the Summer Slump, determining what to send donors can feel even harder.

But with the tools outlined above, you can create an automated engagement series to galvanize those supporters and stay in touch.

Here’s an example of the cadence and messaging you could automate to nurture donors during the summer months:

• Early June: Send a donor survey asking what issues they’re most concerned about, relevant to your cause.
• Mid to Late June: Share a story about a volunteer and encourage donors to sign up.
• Early July: Share a story from your impact report and encourage donors to download your report to read more.
• Mid to Late July: Share a story about a beneficiary to demonstrate impact and include an action like signing a petition or clicking a link to learn more.
• Early August: Showcase a specific program you offer and link to a donation form to collect donations for that program.
• Mid to Late August: Begin building momentum for your year-end or Giving Tuesday campaigns.

Note: To ensure donors don’t receive too many emails, set up triggers based on email behavior. For example, you might want to send a follow-up email to someone who didn’t open your previous send (use this sparingly!), or you may want to send specific content to someone who clicked a specific link.

Looking for a platform to make automating donor outreach easier? Donorbox CRM’s Email Marketing tool allows you to automate workflows from the same place where all your donor data lives. That makes it easier to segment donors, track their history, and create branded emails all in one place.

Learn More About Donorbox CRM

Final Thoughts

Email is not a one-and-done solution. Used correctly, it’s a powerful tool to steward donors throughout the year, leading to more donations and even increasing participation in those year-end campaigns.

So, create a strategy focused on building relationships, and seek out powerful tools to streamline the process and make it work for you.

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Lindsey Bower

Lindsey Bower is a writer and nonprofit consultant with a background in digital marketing, membership management, and education. Currently, she serves as the Content Marketing Manager at Donorbox, where she shares her expertise with fundraisers through blogs, newsletters, podcasts, and more.

The post Email As Your Ultimate Year-Round Donor Stewardship Tool appeared first on Nonprofit Hub.