Email remains one of the most powerful tools in a nonprofit's communications arsenal—and for good reason. Nearly half of donors cite email as their preferred method of hearing updates and appeals from the organizations they support. That's not changing anytime soon. But the environment email operates in is getting harder to navigate, and organizations that rely on it exclusively are starting to feel it.
Over 16% of nonprofit emails either go to spam or never get delivered at all. Inbox providers like Gmail and Microsoft are paying closer attention to whether people open and click—if you're sending to your full list every time, you're training the algorithms to treat you as noise. That means even well-crafted emails from well-intentioned organizations are increasingly fighting just to reach the inbox.
The answer isn't to abandon email; it's to stop asking email to do everything.
Text messaging is the most direct complement to email outreach available today—and the numbers reflect why. Open rates for text messaging sit at approximately 98% compared with 25% for email, and text messaging has a response rate of 48% compared with 2–4% for email.
The story here isn't that SMS is replacing email. It's that multichannel is winning. The organizations getting this right aren't running email and SMS as separate programs—they're coordinating them. Texts boost email open rates. Emails drive SMS opt-ins. It works both ways.
In practice, this looks like using email for the full story—your campaign narrative, impact content, and detailed appeal—and mobile messaging for the moments when urgency and immediacy matter most: a text reminding a donor that your year-end deadline is tonight or a follow-up to supporters who clicked but didn't give. These are things email can technically do, but text does better.
EveryAction's Mobile Messaging tool lets you build and manage this kind of coordinated outreach directly within the platform, using the same donor data driving your email campaigns. That means your segments, your giving history, your engagement signals—all of it informs both channels without requiring you to maintain two separate systems or two separate strategies.
Learn more about Mobile Messaging in EveryAction here