Building an engaged email list for a non-profit

“I had the pleasure of working with Jane when I was the Communications Director on the DVS board. As the Communications Manager, Jane is fantastic in driving new and existing projects, introducing cost-efficient technologies supporting a team with a diverse range of skills, and keeping DVS on track. There have been multiple times where Jane’s solutions, from building out audience-first approaches to automating a process, have really saved the day. She is an asset to any organization.”

- Alex Royston, Communications Director at the Data Visualization Society

Client Overview

The professional association for data visualization

The Data Visualization Society (DVS) is a 501c3 non-profit professional association with three key objectives: to nurture, advance, and celebrate the field of data visualizations (data viz). Since its founding in 2019, their community has grown to 30,000 members from over 160 countries.

Solution Overview

We increased the open rates by 20 percentage points in two years and halved the unsubscribe rate in one year.

Email is one of the top performing channels at DVS—it has consistently driven traffic to the DVS website and has shown strong correlation to conversions, such as product sales or event registrations.

Here are strategic changes I implemented to improve user experience and email engagement:

Improved the email UX by simplifying the layout for readability
Implemented a sunset policy to remove inactive contacts
Putting community work front and centre

The monthly newsletter was clunky and had too much content, and ironically, it didn't feature dataviz. I initiated a design makeover that respects reader's time and reduces clutter.

People join the DVS for community and connection, which was not reflected in the monthly newsletters. So, I converted it to a warm and inviting message by asking the Executive Director to write the introduction to each issue.

Introducing a new section in the monthly newsletter featuring community work. This section usually places in the top 3 most clicked links.

Approximately 30% of subscribers don't engage with emails sent to them. This called for a sunset policy, which means sending an email to inactive subscribers in an attempt to re-engage them. If they don't respond, they are removed from the email list. We achieved about 2% win-back rate and increased our email engagement by 25%!