This short-term fundraiser had two purposes:

1) To test our fundraising process

2) To start preparing our supporters for what was coming next

I simply wanted to know if I could do it.

This was my first fundraising campaign - and a big part of the goal was very personal. Could I plan the campaign, write the emails, set up the flow, track the results and actually bring in new monthly donors?

At the same time, there was a real campaign reason behind it.

After a change in government, rotections against animal cruelty that we had achieved in 2025 were coming under political threat. We knew that within a few months, defending them would become a much bigger fight.

STRATEGY

Less than a year after they were adopted, protections of piglets during surgical castration and the ban on keeping hens in cages came under threat following Slovenia's parliamentary elections.

Instead of waiting until autumn, we decided to start bringing our supporters into the story and strengthen our monthly donor base. The fundraising narrative was simple:

The hard-won protection of hens and piglets is under threat.  Your monthly support can help defend them.


I prepared a fairly detailed strategy before the campaign, but in practice it became more of a starting point than a strict plan. The overall fundraising case stayed the same, while individual emails explored different angles: animal stories, urgency, personal appeal, social proof and political updates.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW FULL PLAN + EMAILS & RESULTS

RESULTS

Our target was to grow from 288 to 330 monthly donors — 42 new regular donors.
We ended up acquiring 61, which was 19 more than planned.

The campaign lasted 13 days and included 8 fundraising emails, sent to an active email list of around 15,700 people.

In total we got:

• 61 new monthly donors

• €627 in new monthly recurring revenue

• €10.28 average monthly donation

• 125,907 emails delivered

• 30,354 opens

• 883 clicks

But the averages hide large differences between individual emails.

WHAT WORKED :  ONE ANIMAL, ONE PROBLEM

What these two emails had in common, was FOCUS.

Because the campaign was about both hens and piglets, I initially felt that every email should somehow include both. If I focused only on one, it almost felt like I was being unfair to the other.

That made some emails more complicated than they needed to be. And led to the main copywriting lesson I got:

The campaign can carry the full story. Each individual email does not have to.

Instead of explaining the whole situation every time, the reader only needed one concrete story and one clear reason to act.

PERSONAL APPEAL: A DIFFERENT KIND OF WINNER

The email focused strongly on the supporter: their compassion, previous actions and the difference people like them had already made for animals.

This was a useful reminder that more clicks do not automatically mean better fundraising:
Some copy may attract fewer people but attract exactly the people most ready to give.

SOCIAL PROOF ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH

This was the only fundraising email that made my biggest fundraising fear come true and generated no new monthly donors.

But I survived! Our team survived! :D

One email is obviously not enough to conclude that social proof does not work. But in this campaign, social proof seemed to create interest without creating a strong enough reason to make a recurring commitment.

My takeaway is not to stop using it, but to use it differently:
Next time, I would use social proof to strengthen an existing (emotional/political/urgent) story, rather than making “other people are doing it, join them” the main reason to give. 

ATTENTION AND FUNDRAISING ARE NOT THE SAME THING

The political update was clearly effective at getting attention. People wanted to know what happened.
But that attention did not translate into donations at the same rate.

This helped me separate two things I had previously looked at more as one:
getting someone to open and read an email, and giving them a strong enough reason to donate are not the same job.

A strong news hook can create urgency and curiosity, but the fundraising case still needs to do its own work. The copy that makes people open is not necessarily the copy that makes them give.

Next time, I would still use breaking developments - they are clearly powerful attention drivers - but I would think more carefully about how to connect the news to a concrete emotional reason to give.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Compared with our previous fundraisers, EOS26 brought in fewer monthly donors overall, but more new monthly donors per email than any of them.

The campaign was intentionally limited by our capacity at the time. Interestingly, there was no clear sign of performance declining towards the end, so one thing I am genuinely curious about is: what would the results look like with a normal-length fundraising campaign?

When it comes to copy, I spent too much time worrying about everything that should be included and sometimes kept adding explanations just before pressing send.

Next time, I want to be more disciplined about what I leave out.

I would also build more on the approaches that showed the most potential and test the less successful ones more deliberately.

SO ... DID I SURVIVE?

Can I actually do it? Will people respond to my writing? Will it bring in new donors?

Thirteen days later, I came out of it with a TRIPLE YES.
And a much clearer understanding of how I want to write fundraising copy.

Most of all, it was encouraging to see how much our supporters care about what happens to hens and piglets.
In the middle of a pretty bleak political situation, that gave me some much-needed optimism.

I genuinely enjoyed writing the campaign and now feel much more prepared and confident for all the fundraising and other copywriting adventures that come next.

Overall, I would not change the basic approach dramatically.

My message to my future self would be:
Simplify sooner, test more deliberately - and see what happens when we actually have time for a full fundraiser! :)