194 Newsletters Later, I Am Somehow Both Right and Humbled

When I began working with a fundraising consulting client of mine in late spring 2024, I inherited a newsletter built by a founder who is, without exaggeration, brilliant and a master communicator.

Her voice was never the problem. The problem was scale. Prospective clients kept asking the firm for more than fundraising tips.

In so many words, they wanted fundraising counsel. As the firm grew to meet that demand, its voice, its communication, and its audience all needed to evolve alongside it, which is a sentence that sounds simple and is, in practice, the marketing equivalent of changing a tire while the car is still moving.

That's the part people miss about growth. It's not just more clients or more services.

It's a firm's own audience maturing in its leadership, and a newsletter that has to grow up just as fast to keep speaking to who those readers were becoming.

So I architected a content strategy shift. It was a well-informed call, but not yet a proven one, which is a polite way of saying I was fairly confident and also willing to be wrong in public.

I believed that a newsletter built for a consulting firm shouldn't read like a fundraising tip sheet. I believed the content needed to sound like the advice this firm actually gives clients in the room, not a watered-down version meant for mass appeal.

Three years and 194 newsletter issues later, the data backs it up. It also handed me a plot twist I did not order.

The Hunch I Refused to Shut Up About

In 2023, before I began to lead marketing, roughly a third of this firm's weekly newsletters were foundational, the kind of "What Is a Major Gift and Why Does It Matter?" content that serves a broad audience but doesn't say much about the firm's actual expertise.

By 2026, that foundational bucket had disappeared entirely. In its place: diagnostic, consulting-level content that reflects the real conversations this firm has with clients about major gifts, campaigns, boards, and organizational strategy.

That wasn't an accident. It was a deliberate move away from generic education and toward content that positions the firm as consultants, not just a source of fundraising tips.

And the numbers say it worked, which is always a relief, because "trust me" is not a metric anyone's board wants to see in a report. Open rates climbed from 42.1% in 2023 to 53.0% through the first half of 2026.

The more diagnostic content is also earning the strongest opens of the three content tiers we tracked: foundational/101, tactical/practical, and diagnostic/consulting. I'll take the win.

Here’s Where it Gets Interesting

I expected that as the content got sharper, the audience would get more senior right alongside it.

That's the story marketers like to tell themselves: better content attracts better people, roll credits. The data didn't cooperate.

The share of contacts holding senior or leadership titles has stayed in a 55 to 62 percent band since 2018. What actually improved was our data collection.

Only 27 to 44 percent of contacts added between 2018 and 2023 have a job title on file. For contacts added in 2026, that number is 87 percent.

In other words, we got much better at knowing who's on the list. We didn't necessarily get better, yet, at making sure the right people are on it, even as those individual readers themselves kept growing into more senior roles within their own organizations.

This is the kind of finding I'd rather report accurately than spin into a win, mostly because I've read enough marketing case studies claiming a straight line between "we posted more" and "revenue tripled," and I refuse to add to the pile.

Content strategy and list strategy are two different disciplines, and improving one doesn't automatically improve the other.

That's exactly why an integrated approach matters. A newsletter can be brilliant and still be reaching the wrong 6,000 people, politely and consistently, every single week.

The Numbers Behind the Numbers (Bear With Me)

A few other notes, because a strategy is only as good as your ability to explain what's actually driving it, and "trust the process" is not an explanation (even though I sure did try that technique for many years).

The list mailed each week got smaller as the database got healthier, dropping from nearly 11,700 average recipients in 2023 to roughly 6,000 in 2026.

Yes, the list shrank on purpose. No, that is not a typo or a crisis. A smaller, cleaner list mechanically improves open rate, since dead addresses no longer inflate the denominator. And there were a lot of dead email addresses just hangin’ on by their bony, dusty fingers.

Here’s the thing, though. Our engagement went up. Way up. And our average engagement lag dropped by about 85 percent. For those who don’t speak marketing (cheers to you), “Engagement lag” is the average number of days between when a contact last did something (opened, clicked) and the next time they did something again.

Translation: people used to go dormant for months at a time between interactions. Now they're engaging with this firm's content roughly every three weeks instead of every TWENTY WEEKS. That's not a vanity metric. It's the difference between a list that's on an IV drip and a list that's paying attention.

Bounce rate and complaint rate are the two numbers that determine whether your emails land in the inbox at all. These, in the grand tradition of things nobody thinks about until they're a problem, deserve more attention than they get.

Bounce rate tracks how many emails hit dead or invalid addresses; complaint rate tracks how many recipients hit "mark as spam." Both sit well under our platform's at-risk thresholds right now, which matters because internet service providers use exactly these signals to decide whether this firm's future emails go to the inbox or the spam folder.

A clean bounce and complaint rate today is what protects deliverability tomorrow. Nobody throws a parade for good deliverability. But they should.

None of this came from one lever. Database cleanup, more consistent content, and better day-to-day list management all happened together. I refuse to hand the credit to a single tactic like it's a magic trick. It isn't. It's just upkeep.

Click Rate Had a Bit of an Identity Crisis

Click rate is a trickier measure now, and that's by design, not by accident. This firm's 2026 format puts more content inside the email itself, so readers often can get the message without ever clicking through to a website.

That was a deliberate trade-off, one I considered with great care (often at 3 a.m.). We weighed the value of a website visit against something I'll call click fatigue: the growing, entirely reasonable reluctance of a reader who has already opened your email to then go click somewhere else, load a page, and keep reading.

In a lot of inboxes, that's simply too much to ask. We decided giving people the full value up front, right there in the email, mattered more than protecting a click-through metric.

So a dip in clicks here doesn't mean a dip in engagement. It means the metric stopped measuring what we actually wanted it to measure, on purpose, and it's a good reminder to keep questioning your own dashboards instead of just reporting whatever number went down.

Why Not Both?

Here's my one caution with this approach. While I am a fan of reducing the number of clicks it takes for someone to see your expertise, favoring newsletter content over blog content has a real trade-off.

A newsletter is a push strategy. It reaches people who already know this firm exists and already said yes to hearing from them.

A blog post is a pull strategy. It's built to be found by people who don't know the firm yet, whether that's someone Googling a question about capital campaign readiness or, increasingly, someone asking an AI tool the same thing.

That second part is only going to matter more, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of struggle bias. As generative AI reshapes how people search for answers, the content that gets surfaced and cited tends to be substantive, well-structured, and published somewhere crawlable, not a paragraph living quietly inside someone's inbox where no search engine or AI model will ever find it.

A strong blog post can keep working for years, showing up in searches and AI-generated answers you'll never see happen. A great newsletter, no matter how sharp, mostly just lives and dies in that one send.

Both formats build authority. Only one of them can be discovered by someone who has never heard of this firm. So in the words of one of my favorite memes: why not both?

The Guardrail Nobody Sees

None of this content shift happens cleanly without content pillars and a clear sense of who you're actually writing to.

Deciding what counts as "diagnostic" versus "foundational" helps create a framework. And boy, do consultants love a good framework. For our purposes, we have set our content pillars as the following: revenue diversification and major gifts, campaigns, and high-performing teams and boards. I have been a little maniacal about making sure we stay focused in these areas, with the exception of signal boosting our lovely media placements, such as those features our experts receive in AFP, the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and NonProfit Pro, among others.

Last, knowing which reader you're picturing when you sit down to write, not a vague "our audience," but an actual person with an actual title and an actual Tuesday, and actual hopes and worries, is what kept three years of newsletters from drifting into whatever felt interesting that week. That happened by virtue of our persona development.

Content pillars and persona development topics are worth their own post, so consider this the trailer. While these guardrails are not the fun part of strategy, they are the reason the fun part works.

Where This Goes Next

The content direction is working. The next phase isn't "better content." It's making sure the growing list is built with the right people on it, and giving new subscribers something more intentional than a slot in next week’s send.

That usually means a short welcome series, more deliberate list-building through the channels where this firm's ideal audience already shows up, and tracking what happens after someone opens the email: replies, webinar sign-ups, consulting inquiries, and where new subscribers actually came from.

This is the work I find most satisfying. Not the launch, but the clear-eyed look back that tells you what to build next, even when what it tells you isn't what you were hoping to hear.

If you're sitting on years of marketing data and wondering what story it's actually telling you, I'd love to help you find out. Send a message. I promise to tell you the truth about what the numbers say, even when it's not fully the story I expected.