Sun Devil Giving Day Email Marketing Shift during Covid

Arizona State University had the largest day of fundraising planned months ahead of covid, but that didn't matter. It didn't matter that we had built out two hundred emails, set them to run based on engagement types (opens, clicks), filtered contact lists based on past donations, hundreds of graphic design hours creating assets and writers creating copy for all of those emails. None of that mattered when we found out we would be working from home for the next year. Of course we thought it would only be a few weeks. Either way, we needed to completely shut down that campaign, make sure nobody received any of our content that was going to be asking donors to find their favorite cause on our website or using data we had from previous gifts to continue to donate on our website or to become a recurring donor. When we put a stop to the Sun Devil Giving Day campaign in March of 2020, we needed to make sure our donors knew we were genuine and not just stopping communication during a time of crisis. What we did was completely shift our tone, look and feel. We needed to let our donors know that our biggest fundraising event of the year was postponed, we also needed to pass them any relevant data that we were receiving through the university's presidential office. We needed to be accountable and we were. These are the emails that went out instead. Our donors thanked and then on we started a new campaign to fund Arizona State University's groundbreaking saliva testing through our Biodesign Institute which addresses global healthcare issues.