9 Extraordinary Tips for your Missionary Newsletter
In this article and video, I’ll share with you my favorite tips for making your missionary newsletter help you retain patrons for longer, and keep them engaged in praying for you and the work you are doing.
If you are a missionary I have some incredibly important news for you. A missionary newsletter is incredibly integral to your support raising strategy. It may even be considered the most important tool to have in your toolbox.
When I was raising support overseas, our missionary newsletter was without a doubt the greatest tool we had. Now, as a digital marketer, I have learned that it is even more important that I originally thought.
I am excited to share with you my favorite tips for taking your missionary newsletter to the next level.
Missionary Newsletter Video Tutorial
Below is a video tutorial talking through some of my favorite tips for your missionary newsletter. I would love for you to check it out! I hope you enjoy it.
9 Tips for your Missionary Newsletter
If you are a missionary, you know that your newsletter is one of the greatest tools for communicating with your patron. A missionary newsletter gives patrons the ability to see the work they are giving to in a way we have never been able to in the history of sending missionaries. Here are some of my favorite tips for enhancing your missionary newsletter.
1. Start a Newsletter
I meet with people often who are wanting to enhance their missionary fundraising strategy and one of the first questions I ask is, do you have a newsletter? That is the first thing I encourage people to do once they begin fundraising.
I am not talking about sending emails to a lot of people at once, but using email marketing software to start sending newsletter updates. This could be mailchimp, prophetize, active campaign, or another option. Go sign up and start sending missionary newsletters now.
2. Be Consistent
Consistency is incredibly important. This was something we learned when sending our missionary newsletters. I later learned even more about it once I became a digital marketer.
This absolutely speaks to frequency, but I am also talking about timing. It helps people know when to expect an email newsletter from you. This builds anticipation, excitement, and expectation.
3. Incorporate Visuals
We live in an incredibly visual world. In marketing, we try to make everything we do have visuals. For social media posts, newsletters, ads, and website designs, we try to make everything as visual as possible.
This is also extremely important in your missionary newsletter. Put time and effort into making the newsletter as visual as possible. Take time designing it, and brainstorm how you can put in other digital content as often as possible.
4. Be Creative
Research different ideas you can use to incorporate into your missionary newsletter. In our time fundraising, we would use a few different ideas in our newsletters.
One idea was, we created a graphic with boxes on it, that were numbered 1 to 100. We asked people to choose a box (or multiple) and that was the amount of money that they would give each month.
5. Always Share Prayer Requests
In missionary fundraising, it is always important to be communicating with your patrons and those praying for you.
Traditionally, missionary newsletters were sent infrequently. Sending emails 4 times a year doesn’t keep patrons up to date on how to pray for you regularly.
One of the most common things people said they loved about our missionary newsletter emails was the clarity of knowing how to pray for us. At the bottom of every email, we put bullet points highlighting different ways people could pray for us.
6. Get Feedback
Sending a missionary newsletter every week can definitely be hard. Some weeks we had plenty of things to talk about, and some weeks we didn’t have much.
We lived in Asia, so the culture was incredibly different from the US. We would often talk about some of the differences in our newsletter, and regularly ask what people were interested in knowing more about.
If you work in the same culture as the majority of people on your newsletter, you can still highlight what a day in your life typically looks like, and things along those lines.
7. Look at the Data
Another perk of using an email marketing software for your missionary newsletter is you have the ability to look at the data. Specifically, you can see who opens the email, and even who clicks on links in the email
When you see these things, you can begin to make adjustments based on what you see attracts more people to open your email and click on links. It could be something as small as putting an emoji in the subject line encourages 5% more people to open your email.
8. Dedicate Time
Oftentimes, people say they do not have enough time for fundraising. Every Time somebody tells me that I push back. We tend to not realize how much time we actually have to give to something like this.
Not only that, but if you are able to dedicate time to your missionary newsletter, you will become more efficient in the time you give to editing it. It will be worth it in the end, because it will help you to retain patrons longer.
9. Plan Ahead
As a missionary, your schedule can be unpredictable at times. There can also be a lot of traveling. When we were overseas, we were on a tourist visa. This caused us to have to leave the country every 60 days.
This easily could have been an excuse to skip some newsletters. With email marketing software, you can schedule your newsletter weeks in advance.
This helps you to keep consistency with your missionary newsletter.
Learn More Missionary Newsletter Tips
Interested in learning more missionary fundraising tips like these? Check out some of these resources.
We also release content every week on our blog and YouTube channel.
Learn Missionary Fundraising Tips
We created a course to help teach you a ton of missionary fundraising techniques are sure to drastically change your support raising strategies in an amazing way. In this course, we will walk you through the best way to set up a missionary newsletter and regularly utilize it. and that is only one week of the course. Check out the course and join the waitlist today!
If you have any tips for a missionary newsletter, feel free to share them below! Also, if there are any videos you would like to see let us know! We would love to help in whatever way we can.
Good luck on your missionary fundraising journey!
