You ran the campaign. It worked. Revenue’s up, and leadership is thrilled.
Then January hits, and you’re staring at a file full of people who gave once, for reasons that have nothing to do with your mission.
Sweepstakes donors. Emergency donors. Giving Tuesday one-timers. They came in hot, then went cold.
The National Park Foundation knows this problem well. Their “Adventure Awaits” sweepstakes raised $1.57 million, building on a previous sweepstakes that brought in $1.47 million.
The campaigns were hits: 70% of Adventure Awaits donors were brand new to the file. The hard part came next.
An email-first retention bet
Digital ads drove 67% of sweepstakes gifts, with email at 11% and mail at 16%.
Early testing showed that these donors weren’t direct-mail responsive. So NPF and their agency Lautman Maska Neill & Company went email-first.
Every sweepstakes entrant was tagged and segmented from day one so the team could track this cohort’s behavior separately.
Eight months of offer testing
From October 2024 through May 2025, NPF tested six offers against the sweepstakes cohort: non-match appeals, match offers, one-time gift premiums, monthly giving premiums, and repeat sweepstakes.
One-time premium gift offers pulled the strongest response rates, outperforming match offers by roughly 2-3x.
A straight non-match appeal with no incentive barely registered.
But the real finding: when NPF sent another sweepstakes offer, response rates jumped to 4-12x higher than any other ask type.
These donors came in for a chance to win something, and they responded best when given another chance to win something.
The logic makes sense once you see it. A match is abstract: “your $25 becomes $50.” A premium is concrete: “give $25, get this hat.”
Sweepstakes donors gave because they felt like they were getting something in return, so tangible incentives beat abstract ones.
There’s also the ethical dimension that many emailers are wrestling with: unless your match is backed by a real commitment from a real funder, you’re manufacturing urgency.
Premiums don’t carry that baggage. The donor gets exactly what you promised.
What kept them on file between asks
NPF monitored unsubscribe rates for the sweepstakes cohort against their regular donor and non-donor segments.
The rates were basically identical, around 0.1% across all three groups. That gave them confidence to keep communicating at a normal cadence instead of pulling back.
Between asks, they ran cultivation emails: impact stories, surveys, and content connecting sweepstakes donors to the actual mission.
The goal was to gradually shift people from “I entered to win a trip” to “I care about national parks.” Some sweepstakes donors are now responding to non-sweepstakes offers, which suggests it’s working.
What’s next
NPF isn’t stopping at email offers. They’re also reworking the donation form itself: promoting annual recurring gifts, attaching premiums directly to the form, adding transaction cost coverage options, and building in social proof.
If the offer testing taught them what motivates this audience, the form changes are about making it easier to actually complete the gift.
How to apply these learnings to your program
Tag acquisition cohorts from day one. This is essential data hygiene.
You can’t learn anything about donor behavior if everyone’s lumped together.
Sweepstakes donors, emergency donors, and mission-driven donors have different motivations. Treat them that way.
Test offer types against transactional donors separately. If you’re defaulting to match offers for reactivation across your whole file, you might be leaving money on the table with segments that respond better to premiums.
Pro tip: premiums don’t always have to be physical! I love this idea from the International Rescue Committee — offering their sustainers a recipe book featuring dishes from refugee clients.
The bottom line
NPF could have written off their sweepstakes donors as low-quality and moved on.
Instead, they kept their heads down, tested six offer types over eight months, and found out what actually worked.
Industry events
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Quick hits
Validity’s 2026 Email Deliverability Benchmark Report finds global inbox placement rates rose in 2025 and breaks down deliverability by industry — useful for nonprofit email teams looking to benchmark performance, protect sender reputation, and keep fundraising and advocacy messages out of spam.
UK-based email strategist Beth O’Malley argues that underperforming emails are usually a psychological problem, not a design problem — prioritize visual hierarchy, reduce cognitive load, and align your subject line promise with the email content so readers can process your message quickly instead of tuning out.
The National Domestic Workers Alliance is hiring an Email and SMS Director to own broadcast email, SMS, and P2P texting calendars end-to-end — driving organizing, campaigning, and fundraising goals. Remote, $102,861 - 105,969.
‘Til next time!
Sara