Email remains one of fundraising’s most important channels, but reaching supporters is becoming increasingly complex. Getting an email technically “delivered” is no guarantee it has reached someone’s inbox – let alone been seen, read or engaged with.
At F&P Fundraising Forum 2026, HomeMade Digital’s Meredith Dwyer unpacked what fundraisers need to know about deliverability, content and the changing rules of email. Here’s what I took away from her session.
Email isn’t going anywhere
Meredith began her session – If Your Email Lands in a Forest, Does Anyone Read It? – with a question worth asking: does email even matter anymore?
It does.
Traditional communication channels are changing. Just look at Denmark, which in 2025 became the first country in the world to end its state-run letter-delivery service. At the same time, email has become an increasingly important way for charities to stay connected with supporters. Research cited by Neon One found that 48% of donors preferred email for receiving updates and appeals, ahead of Direct Mail, social media, text messaging and phone.
So Meredith’s message wasn’t that we should be moving away from email. Quite the opposite. Email remains hugely important, and it needs to be part of a digital-first fundraising approach.
But if email is going to do so much heavy lifting, we need to get better at it.
That means being nimble enough to respond when there is something timely to say, rather than sending an “urgent” email after a lengthy internal approval process has rendered it anything but. It means training teams to understand what good email looks like. And it means using evidence to understand whether the emails we keep sending are actually working.
Because before we worry about subject lines, beautiful creative or compelling calls to action, there is an even more fundamental question to answer.
Are your emails even reaching the donor’s inbox?
Delivered doesn’t necessarily mean seen
Meredith shared the example of a charity whose email platform was reporting a delivery rate of more than 99%. On the surface, everything looked fine.
It wasn’t.
HomeMade used an inbox placement testing service, which sends an email to a seed list of email addresses across different providers and reports where it actually lands. The result for Gmail and Google Workspace addresses was alarming – in that particular test, 100% landed in spam.
There are caveats here. As Meredith stressed, the seed list was “cold” – those addresses had no previous relationship with the sender – so the results represent something closer to a worst-case scenario than what you would expect among engaged supporters. Further analysis showed that open rates among warm Gmail subscribers had however fallen by over 30%.
More commonly, HomeMade’s analysis across a wider group of clients found an even broader issue with emails landing in the Promotions inbox, and being overlooked.
Gmail accounts for around 38% of all email users in Australia, with Google Workspace even more. Gmail now looks at a range of factors in deciding if your email is Spam, or more commonly routing it Gmail’s Promotions tab, including your lists engagement with your emails over the last 90 days.
But the example illustrates an important distinction – deliverability and inbox placement are not the same thing.
Your email platform may tell you an email has been successfully delivered. It cannot necessarily tell you whether it landed in the Primary inbox, Promotions or spam.
And that means fundraisers may need to look beyond the reassuring “delivered” number in their email reports.
The technical stuff is fundraising stuff
I’ll admit that acronyms such as DMARC, DKIM and SPF were new to me when they appeared on Meredith’s slides. And that’s ok – we don’t all need to become email technicians, but fundraisers do need enough understanding to know what to look for – and what questions to ask the people responsible for their systems.
Your email service provider (ESP) can affect your sending reputation. Most charities send email through IP addresses that are shared with other organisations using the same provider (an ‘IP pool’), so how well that provider manages its sending environment matters. Your own domain reputation matters too, and Meredith recommended Google Postmaster as a free tool for monitoring both domain and IP reputation.
Authentication matters too. DMARC, DKIM and SPF are technical settings that help email providers such as Gmail and Yahoo verify that emails really are coming from your organisation. You don’t necessarily need to understand how to configure them yourself, but it’s worth checking with your IT team or email service provider that your sending domain is properly authenticated.
And make sure your emails support single-click unsubscribe – if you don’t, Gmail and Yahoo will block you automatically. A preference centre can still give supporters more control over what they hear from you, but it doesn’t replace the need for an easy one-click way to unsubscribe.
And then there is inbox placement itself – in other words, where your emails actually end up once they have been successfully delivered. Are they reaching supporters’ main inboxes, landing in a secondary folder such as Promotions, or being filtered into spam? As I’ve said, a high delivery rate doesn’t necessarily tell you the answer. Meredith recommended periodically running an inbox placement test, which uses test email addresses across different providers to show where your emails are landing. It’s particularly worth doing if you see an unexpected change in metrics such as open rates.
All of this points to a broader shift in how we need to think about email performance.
It isn’t just about what we put in an email. We can spend hours perfecting the copy, subject line, design and call to action, but a brilliant fundraising email is of little value if technical problems prevent supporters from seeing it.
Your list matters as much as your email
Technical setup isn’t the only factor outside email content that matters. Take segmentation, which we tend to think of as a way to improve relevance and response. But Meredith explained that it can also affect whether your emails reach an inbox.
Email providers increasingly look at engagement history. If you continually send emails to large numbers of people who never engage, that can damage your reputation as a sender. Meredith’s advice was to segment contacts according to how recently they have engaged with your organisation, and monitor how different groups respond rather than continuing to email everyone indefinitely.
That doesn’t mean automatically abandoning older supporters. In one example, Meredith segmented supporters into different cohorts, expecting to find a point at which engagement dropped away – only to discover strong engagement in some unexpected groups. The point is to test, monitor the results and let those results guide your decisions rather than making assumptions about who will – or won’t – engage.
There are practical implications for acquisition too.
If someone responds to a lead-generation campaign, don’t collect their details and then leave them sitting untouched while they wait for a phone call. If, for example, a supporter has just provided their details through a Meta campaign, Meredith recommends sending an email immediately, while that interaction is still fresh. The email should connect directly to whatever prompted them to provide their details in the first place, rather than dropping them straight into your organisation’s usual email communications. You can also use these early interactions to encourage new supporters to add your usual sending address to their contacts or move your emails from Promotions to their primary inbox – both of which can help future emails land where they’re more likely to be seen.
In other words, good stewardship and good deliverability are becoming increasingly intertwined.
Design for the inbox your supporter actually uses
Once your technical foundations are sound, it’s time to turn to the email content. Here, seemingly small decisions can undermine the performance of an otherwise strong email.
Don’t build an email as one large image. Balance images with real text. Watch your file sizes. Design mobile-first. And test in dark mode – something Meredith was particularly keen on. An email that looks beautiful against a white background can become unreadable when a device changes its colours, including making your all-important donation button difficult to see.
Accessibility should also be treated as a priority, not an optional extra. Meredith recommended real text rather than embedding key content in images; clear hierarchy; simple, preferably single-column layouts; left-aligned copy; generous font sizing and line spacing; good contrast; ALT text for images; and buttons and links that are large enough to clearly see and easy to tap on mobile.
Then there is the increasingly crowded space at the top of an email. Subject line, preview text, banner copy, headline and opening sentence should work together rather than simply repeating one another. And add to that another, more recent, complication – AI-generated previews.
Email clients such as Apple Mail are changing what supporters see before they even open an email. For example, with Apple Intelligence enabled, Mail can generate a short summary of an email and display it in the inbox beneath the sender and subject line, rather than simply showing the first few lines of the message. In other words, AI may be deciding which parts of your email a supporter sees first. That makes it even more important not to bury the most important message halfway down your copy – and to test how your email appears across devices and platforms.
The principle running through all of this is straightforward: design for the experience your supporter will actually have, not simply for how the email looks when you build it.
Are we measuring the right things?
Email performance is getting harder to measure.
For years, open rates have been one of email fundraising’s most familiar metrics. But Meredith cautioned against relying on them too heavily.
That’s because an ‘open’ no longer necessarily means a person opened and read your email. Features such as Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection limit a sender’s ability to track whether and when an individual opens an email. They can automatically load the tracking pixel used to record an open – meaning an email may register as opened even if the recipient never actually reads it. As a result, the open rate reported by your email platform can be artificially inflated.
That has a knock-on effect on click-to-open rate (CTOR), too. Because CTOR measures clicks as a proportion of recorded opens, it becomes less meaningful when the open figure itself isn’t reliable.
Click-through rate (CTR) remains useful, although it isn’t perfect either. Email security systems can automatically scan or follow links to check that they’re safe, creating what are known as “machine clicks”. These can sometimes be recorded as clicks even though the supporter hasn’t actually clicked the link. It’s therefore better to measure what happens after the click using reliable UTM tagging – did the supporter donate, register or complete whatever action you were asking them to take?
Ultimately, conversion is the measure that matters.
That doesn’t mean throwing away every other metric – Meredith’s measurement list included unsubscribes, spam complaints, deliverability, inbox placement, list growth, heat mapping and scroll depth alongside opens and CTR. Rather, it means recognising that the numbers we have traditionally relied upon may no longer tell us quite what we think they do.
“Human first, human last”
Of course, no Fundraising Forum session about digital communications in 2026 was going to get away without talking about AI. And Meredith’s approach on this topic was refreshingly pragmatic.
At HomeMade, her team uses Jasper, an AI tool that can be trained on brand voice, key messages and email best-practice rules. The team writes the email first, then uses the tool to help check consistency, tighten copy and bring individual writers closer to the organisation’s agreed brand voice. A human then reviews the result.
Meredith summed up HomeMade’s approach neatly: “human first, human last” – with AI adding value somewhere in the middle.
It’s a philosophy that applies beyond AI too. There are more tools than ever to help us test inbox placement, preview emails across platforms, analyse behaviour, automate journeys and optimise content. Meredith’s own list of email trends to watch included interactivity (which enables users to click, swipe and fill out forms directly inside their inbox without opening a web browser), animation, personalisation, automated journeys and AI-generated previews.
But none of them removes the need for fundraisers to understand what they are trying to achieve – or the person at the other end of the email.
And perhaps that was my biggest takeaway from Meredith’s session.
Email is not dead. Far from it. But doing email well in today’s world requires more than good copy and an attractive template. We need to understand the technical environment our messages are travelling through, pay attention to the quality and engagement of our lists, design for the way supporters actually consume email and become more discerning about the metrics we use to judge success.
Because the most beautifully crafted fundraising email in the world can’t inspire anyone if they never see it.
About HomeMade Digital
HomeMade Digital helps charities raise more money through modern fundraising strategies, digital acquisition, supporter journey optimisation and technology. Its work spans email and SMS, donor and participant journeys, campaign strategy, marketing automation and digital fundraising products, with a focus on using data and testing to improve supporter experiences and fundraising performance.
To better understand email best practice and ensure you’re getting the most out of your supporter emails, download HomeMade’s ‘The anatomy of an effective eDM’ guide here.
