SPN 147: Email & SMS –> How to Win in AI-Operated Inboxes

Plus, Adtech and Influencers; and, plenty of Jobs

Apr 06, 2025

A very warm welcome to all the new subscribers.

You’ve joined a community of 2k+ marketing and fund raising operators at mission-driven Org’s. I’m thrilled to have you as readers and truly appreciate your feedback and support.

In this week’s SPN:

Full funnel influencer impact
The case for creative (CreativeX)
Inbox engine optimization
and, plenty of Jobs & Opps that took my fancy this week.

Let’s jump in!

UNICEF USA raised $3M in incremental revenue as a direct result of having Fundraise Up’s Monthly Giving Upsell Feature turned on.
Three. Million. Dollars 💰
In fact, UNICEF’s team take full advantage of Fundraise Up’s platform capabilities, leveraging other features like:
AI to dynamically personalize ask amounts for each donor
Reminder Elements to save would-be donations from being forgotten
Community-driven fundraising to empower donors to fundraise on their own
Talk about a multimillion dollar donation success story!
It’s your turn to land some incremental revenue by virtue of just using better technology. Reach out to Fundraise Up to learn more.

AdTech + Influencers

Every ad platform has to balance your Org’s demand for the best inventory with their need to monetize the duff stuff too.

On TV this happens through cost reducing spots (the remnant space you get donated) and in radio the “total audience package” usually does the job.

In digital, AI buying already manages to include enough prime inventory to deliver against your paid objectives. Like it or not it’s also padded out with inventory against less attractive audiences.

All the learning around which creative assets work best and how, is captured by the platform. And the value of this learning is considerable. I read a CreativeX paper called “The Case for Creative” this week, which went deep on how brands are leveraging creative effectiveness to help every media dollar drive impact AND efficiency. There’s a solid example in it that talks through how one brand managed over 10% in annual savings while investing 7-figures on digital media. Pretty wild and a good read.

Creative X also explored the use of influencers in their paper. Did you see this week that the incoming CEO of Unilever intends to recruit an army of them and pledged to spend half his ad budget on social?

He talked of needing so many influencers and social media posts to pull it off, that he’d build “a machine of content creation very different from the one we have had in the past.”

This level of ambition is exciting: “There are 19,000 zip codes in India, there are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them. In some of them, I want 100.”

Recent conversations have given me confidence that Org’s are moving in the direction of reviving true donor relationship management thinking. So, related, wouldn’t it be better for Unilever to find loyal brand fans and amplify their voices? That way their advocacy is earned rather than bought..?

The same approach is valid at an Org. Modern fans of your mission will use modern forms of media, so lots can be used for social - but I’d argue the influencer term isn’t helpful here.

Side note re influencers/creators: YouTube is changing how it counts views on YouTube Shorts to give Creators a deeper understanding (so they say) of how their short-form content is performing. Shorts views will now count the number of times a creator’s Short starts to play or replay vs a view meaning a Short viewed for a certain number of seconds. Note to self - you’re going to see much higher view counts on your content moving forward so be sure to track “engaged” views.

Given Unilever made a big push into CleanTok the last few years I’d imagine they have seen some success to justify this switch of strategy to social heavy.

But is the idea of influencers valid here? Don’t people know their support is bought? Top creators in whichever niche can give you reach and everyone knows it’s a commercial deal.

The good news for Creators is: Agencies are touting some interesting data points, including that creator marketing is multiple more times effective than the way the industry is tracking it. This sort of claim requires some seriously good Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM).

Thinking this through more. MMM can measure the underlying change in “business” metrics (e.g. fundraising revenue) with respect to various marketing metrics (e.g. influencer reach, CTV spend, paid social and paid search activity, seasonality etc)
From those MMM outputs you’d get a view of the fundraising revenue uplift from the influencer reach.

Something to chew on - by extension, clicks only measure a small fraction of the real value. Most of the value is in people who see the content but don’t click. The same way that broadcast advertising has been working for decades.

The Creator Economy is maturing and as it does, more scrutiny from CMO’s and CDO’s on the true value impact of Creators in our space should be being asked.

Jobs & Opps 🛠️

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute: Assistant Vice President (AVP), Integrated Philanthropy Marketing

United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC): Director, Fan & Market Insights ($112,550 - $142,939)

American Heart Association: Associate Vice President, Development (AVP) ($98,300 - $131,000)

Malala Fund: Chief of External Affairs ($206,000 - $232,500)

American Kidney Fund: Director, Digital Fundraising ($120,000 - $125,000)

World Central Kitchen: Enterprise Technology Director ($150,000 - $170,000)

Feeding America: VP, Brand & Content ($188,000 - $193,000)

FoodCorps: VP, Marketing & Comms ($205,000 - $235,000)

Milken Institute: Community Manager, Social Innovation ($70,000 - $92,000)

→ More jobs at SPN sister site www.pledgr.com

Inbox Engine Optimization

AI is becoming a reading tool. And that changes everything.

Apple iOS now summarizes messages. With Gemini in Gmail or Outlook's Copilot, donors likely don’t read your great campaign email series (written by that HubSpot extension your Org just paid for!).

Instead they’ll read a machine-generated summary, a preview line, or just a row in their “daily email summary.”

To win in these “AI-generated inboxes” - both in Email and SMS - Org’s must cater to the needs of two readers:

Donors looking for relevance and emotional resonance; and,
Their “Agents” looking for structure, “gist,” and clarity

Novelty aside, the impact of these AI Agents on Email and SMS is no different from what Google Search was for Websites. “Search Engine Optimization” came to the rescue then, so…below are 7 “Inbox Engine Optimization” tactics for your Email and SMS programs.

EMAIL

1. Think of the Summary, not the Subject Line.

AI Agents are trained to save reader’s time. They are spam filters. They deprioritize fluffy emails and highlight those deemed “important” – or those that can’t be deemed “unimportant.”

Human readers did the same for a while, using the Subject Line as the filter and the first thing they saw. AI Readers process more information faster – the first paragraph is the new headline. If it’s specific and impactful, it gets highlighted. If it's fluffy, it gets deprioritized.

Make it strong, specific, and impactful. Above all, make it short - don’t give the filter enough information to deem it unimportant. An example would be “Your support delivered 97 life-saving vaccines last month. Thank you” instead of “Your donation last month was generous and valuable. Thanks to you, we were able to meaningfully contribute to tackling under-vaccination in remote areas of Tanzania.”

2. Use the Preview Text as a summary that YOU want to tell.

The first 40-70 characters of an email are essentially a summary you want to tell, not what the agent extracts - use it as such. Just as SEO crawlers use H1 and H2 header tags, AI reader agents give more “weight” to what’s in the preview than to what is in the body of an email.

Use it for a summary e.g., “Tobes, completing your gift will help two kids get back to school.” Also, don’t leave it to “View this email in your browser”!!

3. Structure for Machine Readability.

Gmail and Copilot’s prioritization tools rely on the “markup” of the Email to make sense of it and decide what’s important. Despite their very fast advancement, we’re far away from “Artificial General Intelligence.” These tools don't make sense of text; they deem importance based on how important emails usually “look.” Use bullet points, numbered lists, and short, actionable paragraphs with present-simple tense.

4. Personalize by Relevance.

Google and Microsoft’s agents have access not only to a reader’s inbox but also to the entirety of their interactions with the device and browsing history. To an extent, these LLMs are the new “cookies” - they track everything we do.

An LLM is much more likely to prioritize an email about a donation to a climate-related topic if a person browsed the climate webpage on your Org’s site a day before. Tag every donor with a “topic” in your CRM – and test sending them emails that talk only about that one topic instead of the entire breadth of your Org’s mission.

5. Being Human is On-Trend Again.

AI Agents reading emails written by AI personalization tools is a picture straight from a new episode of Black Mirror. Data shows that 53% of consumers hate AI customer support and chatbots – consumer-side AI agents are picking up on that.

In a weird twist, these models are more likely to prioritize emails that look less automated. A simpler layout and the addition of a “reply to this email to get in touch” line at the end increase your chances dramatically.

SMS

6. Make it a Survey, not a Mini-Email.

Most Orgs mirror their Email strategy in SMS but make it shorter. Instead, consider using SMS as a “survey” tool. Send a text like “Would you rather support nutrition or education programs? Text A or B” and use their response as a flag in the CRM system to personalize fundraising emails going forward.

Text summaries are even shorter than email ones - your donor is much more likely to click on the “Org is asking you a question” line than the “Org is asking you to increase your donation” line.

7. Use more Questions, period.

SMS is a personal space – most of us use it to converse with people we know. Text messages generally tend to have more question marks than emails (informal vibes, quick and conversational). The opportunity is to mirror the conversation tone of the medium with donors and lead with questions.

Wrapping Up

Just like in the early days of SEO where H1 tags, meta descriptions, and page hierarchy had to be set manually, the structure of your email matters more than ever.

Think of your headers, preview text, and opening lines as the modern markup: they tell the machine how to treat your message. Let AI generate the variable content within that structure but define the scaffolding yourself and keep experimenting with it.

We've been here before. We learnt how to write for the SEO algorithm so donors could find our websites. AI in Email is the new filter, and your Email is the new landing page.

To succeed, we’ve got to adopt the same mindset: write to pass through the machine layer AND speak to stir a human response.