How MSF-USA raised $11M+ by fixing its approval chain

A disaster breaks overnight. 

By morning, the social team is up with posts, and your executive director has done a press interview.

But the emergency appeal in your email inbox is still waiting on approval from two department heads.

Blue State estimated that gap was costing Doctors Without Borders (MSF-USA) millions of dollars a year. 

Why email was the bottleneck
Blue State found that MSF-USA’s international teams published emergency content on social within hours of a disaster, but that same content routinely took days to reach a fundraising email.

The problem lay in how fundraising emails moved through the organization. 

Social posts and press materials lived in workflows with fast approval paths.

So they restructured the workflow so email could move as fast as every other channel: 

This was the kind of rapid-response pre-planning that most organizations only discuss during post-mortems.

The test
On February 6, 2023, a catastrophic earthquake struck Syria and Turkey. MSF-USA activated the rapid-response plan early that morning.

Email drafts were waiting for review before East Coast offices opened. A 45-person cross-team meeting at 10:00 AM aligned the full response around the same messaging and assets.

Fundraising emails were live that same day, less than 8 hours after activation. 

In under 7 days, MSF-USA raised more than $11 million in digital revenue, a 9X increase compared to similar disaster response moments.

How to build this process before you need it
Map your approval chain for an emergency fundraising email. Write down every person who needs to sign off and find where the delays live.

Ask yourselves: Does the person who drafted the statement that your email pulls heavily from need to see it?

If your communications team can post to social in an hour but your fundraising email takes two days, the gap is process, not people.

Pre-build email templates with your agency or design team. Load up a rapid-response email template with placeholder blocks for crisis-specific imagery, copy, and donation page links.

Set the layout, branding, merge fields, and segmentation rules before a crisis hits. 

When the moment comes, your team is swapping in copy and images instead of building an email from zero.

Try a dry run of an emergency moment. Pick a hypothetical rapid-response scenario and gather everyone involved in getting the email out the door.

Walk through the full sequence: Who writes the first draft? Who approves it? Who handles segmentation and scheduling? 

Estimate how long each step takes to set a baseline for the full process.

The bottom line
If your team is building a fundraising email from scratch during a crisis, you’re already behind. 

Operational prep — mapping approvals, pre-building templates, dry runs — is the unglamorous work that makes rapid response possible.

Check our events list for more or reply to this email to submit one for consideration.

‘Til next time!
Sara