How to Build Real Engagement for Your Email Newsletter

Joe Waters

Founder & Blogger, Selfishgiving.com

October 5, 2023

By: Peter Panepento

Joe Waters is one of the OGs of nonprofit email newsletters.

Waters, a consultant who advises nonprofits on building effective corporate partnerships, launched his Selfish Giving newsletter during the early days of email marketing in 2004 and has been entertaining and informing readers – by the thousands -- ever since.

I subscribed to Selfish Giving back in its early days when I was covering nonprofits for The Chronicle of Philanthropy and was subscribing to dozens of newsletters that provided information and advice to those in the field.

Many of the others that I was following back then have long since faded away. And I’ve stopped subscribing to many others.

But I keep opening Selfish Giving every Wednesday morning because it still delivers fresh insights with a friendly, approachable tone.

And contrary to its title, Selfish Giving works because it’s generous. Every week, Joe aims to provide insights and advice that can help his readers navigate their world and make smart decisions.

Not many nonprofit and foundation newsletters do that.

So how does he do it — and how can nonprofit and foundation communicators create more engaging and thoughtful email newsletter content?

I recently caught up with Joe to find out. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.

You’ve built a successful newsletter by curating content and adding your own unique voice to it. How does that model work?

Curation is a vastly underused strategy for a lot of organizations.

To be the go-to source of information on something, can be a really valuable thing, but it takes time, energy, and effort. Not everyone wants to spend every day going through a couple of hundred emails and reading a bunch of articles and reading half a dozen newspapers and using all these other sources. But it turns out I like doing it.

One of my favorite things about my newsletter is finding things that are a little bit different and then kind of adding my own spin to it. I’m not always looking for the traditional nonprofit stuff. I’m but looking outside of that.

A couple of weeks ago, I included a poem from Emily Dickinson called, “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” And I talked about how that's a really great way of saying nonprofits need to tell things from a from a perspective that people will understand.

I’m always looking for ways to draw lessons and examples from outside of the nonprofit world and apply them to corporate partnerships.

So you read a lot of newsletters, including nonprofit newsletters. What advice do you have for nonprofits on creating effective email newsletters?

I wish they would stop talking about themselves.

So many nonprofit newsletters are inward focused. But they need to be more focused on what their reader would be interested in. A lot of their readers are interested in what the nonprofit is doing. But they are also interested in things that are connected to the nonprofit’s mission but aren’t directly connected to the nonprofit.

If another nonprofit uses their newsletter to introduce me to their accounting manager, I'm gonna scream. I think introducing employees in a certain venue is important, but I don't think it's reader centric.

What nonprofits are doing a good job?

I love the Mark Twain House newsletter.

They could go on and on and on about Mark Twain and the house and what he wrote and stuff like that. But they don’t do that. It turns out they have a fantastic book club newsletter that goes out to people that talks about current books. It's related to Twain, but it's not directly promoting the Mark Twain House.

That is a really smart strategy, and I think more nonprofits should think in terms of ‘How can we be the go-to source of information on a particular topic?’ opposed to just being like, ‘Oh, we can only talk about ourselves.’

Another thing that makes your newsletter unique is how you manage your list. Can you talk about your approach and why you do what you do?

Corporate partnerships are a very niche topic. And even within that topic, my goal isn’t to get people from corporations to subscribe. I’m writing it for partnership people in nonprofits. I’m very focused on bringing that audience in and keeping them interested.

But I really want an engaged audience, so if you don't read my newsletter for six weeks in a row, I throw you off my list. I've thrown my wife off the list four times because she won't read it.

By keeping my list small, I have a high open rate and a high click through rate and when I hit that send button, I know I’m sending it to people who are reading it. I think a lot of nonprofits and organizations are not thinking that way. They’re not thinking that ‘These people need this information and they’re looking forward to this newsletter.’

If you don’t think people are actually reading and waiting for the information, it doesn’t provide you much of a motivation to be creative and keep going.

It’s not about having the biggest list. It’s about reaching and connecting with the right people.

I really believe a nonprofit can be really successful in raising money to sustain itself with a list as small as 1,000. Because if you have the right people on the list, those are the people who really care and are going to want to contribute.