Black Voters Matter
Turning Grassroots Organizing into Small-Dollar Fundraising Power
Ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, Fenton partnered with Black Voters Matter to build the organization’s digital fundraising infrastructure and launch a strategic email campaign in support of the We Won’t Black Down campaign. Twenty emails rooted in BVM’s on-the-ground organizing raised more than $100,000, converted donors at an average rate of 51 percent, and became the strongest-performing email campaign in the organization’s history.
What We Did
- Email fundraising strategy and campaign development
- Digital fundraising infrastructure
- Donation page conversion optimization
- Small-dollar and new donor acquisition
- Newsletter fundraising integration
- Audience segmentation and list health management
CHALLENGE
Black Voters Matter entered the 2022 midterm cycle with a national reputation and powerful organizing programs in target states, but without a recurring online fundraising program to sustain them. The organization needed digital infrastructure built from the ground up, and it needed revenue flowing at the moment the stakes were highest.
The strategic opportunity sat in plain sight: the local, on-the-ground work happening across target states. The challenge was lifting that work up to BVM’s national audience and turning it into small-dollar support.
APPROACH
In early October, Fenton and Black Voters Matter launched an email campaign built to increase small-dollar donations, grow the number of new donors, and streamline the organization’s online fundraising. Between October and early December, the program sent 20 emails, each using BVM’s ground work and priorities as the hook.
Every send was engineered for performance. We optimized donation pages for conversion, connected each fundraising ask directly to BVM’s organizing, wove donation asks into the weekly newsletter, and applied aggressive audience segmentation to protect list health.
IMPACT
The campaign saw unprecedented success, outperforming every previous email campaign in Black Voters Matter’s history.
It also played a significant role in the broader success of the We Won’t Black Down campaign, which engaged hundreds of thousands of Black voters through donations and event attendance and drove increased Black voter turnout across the board, especially in the South.
RESULTS
In the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, the 20-email program raised more than $100,000 on its own. Donation pages converted at an average rate of 51 percent, and the emails held a steady 30 percent average open rate throughout the campaign.
