Marketing & Growth

How to launch an email marketing campaign as Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams

Marketing & GrowthFor Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Your four-person ops team sends donor update letters, program officer outreach, and grantee check-in emails out of whoever's personal Gmail that day. There's no master list — your contacts live partly in a Salesforce instance configured by a consultant who left, partly in a shared Google Sheet, and partly in someone's head. Drafting a campaign for your annual spring appeal means pulling addresses by hand, writing three versions of the same letter for different donor tiers, and praying nothing lands in spam. Mailchimp exists, but nobody has time to segment a list, write sequences, and QA the merge fields when board packets are due the same week.

Build this on Starch → See the apps used

Marketing & GrowthFor Foundation and Nonprofit Ops Teams2 apps11 steps~22 min to set up

Outcome

What you'll set up

A donor and grantee contact list pulled live from Salesforce and enriched with recent email thread history from Gmail, so you're not mailing people who already replied last week

AI-drafted campaign emails written in your foundation's voice — segmented by donor tier, grant stage, or program area — that your program officer reviews and approves in one sitting

An automated follow-up sequence that tracks who opened, who didn't respond, and flags lapsed major donors for a personal outreach from your ED, with no manual list-scrubbing required

The Starch recipe

Apps, data, and prompts

The combination of Starch apps, the data sources they pull from, and the prompts you use to drive them.

Apps used

CRM Email Agent

Data sources & config

Salesforce is connected from Starch's integration catalog and queried live when the CRM app or outreach tracker needs contact data. Gmail is synced directly by Starch on a schedule, so email thread history and reply status are always current. Any donor portal or foundation-specific giving platform that doesn't have an API is automated through your browser — no API needed.

Prompts to copy

Build me a donor outreach tracker that pulls contacts from Salesforce, shows their last gift date, last email thread, and program area, and lets me tag them as Spring Appeal 2026 / Lapsed / Do Not Contact

Draft a three-version Spring Appeal email — one for donors who gave over $25k last year, one for donors between $5k and $25k, and one for first-time donors — using the tone of the attached 2025 annual report letter. Pull first names and last gift amounts from the CRM.

Set up a follow-up automation: seven days after the Spring Appeal send, check who hasn't replied, draft a short personal note from the ED for anyone in the over-$25k tier, and add a task to my inbox flagging them for a phone call

Run these in Starch → or paste them into your favorite agent

Walkthrough

Step-by-step

1 Connect Salesforce from Starch's integration catalog. The agent queries it live to pull your full contact list — donors, grantees, prospects — with whatever fields your consultant left behind.

2 Connect Gmail so Starch syncs your email thread history on a schedule. This lets the CRM surface who your team has actually talked to recently, so you don't send a Spring Appeal to someone who emailed you last week with a problem.

3 Start from the CRM app in the Starch App Store and describe your segmentation: 'I need to tag contacts by donor tier ($25k+, $5k–$25k, first-time), program area (education, health equity, economic mobility), and whether they're flagged for the Spring 2026 appeal.' Starch builds the view.

4 Export or review your segmented list inside Starch before writing a single word of copy. Catch the obvious problems now — board members on the mass list, grantees mixed in with donors, duplicate contacts from two Salesforce imports.

5 Open Email Agent and prompt it to draft your campaign emails by segment. Give it your 2025 annual report letter as a tone reference. It writes three versions pulling first name and last gift amount from the CRM.

6 Your program officer reviews the drafts in Starch — not in a Google Doc, not over Slack — and marks each version approved or flags specific lines for revision. One sitting, one decision.

7 Set your send schedule inside Starch. Starch queues the emails through Gmail — no third-party email platform required for a campaign this size — with each segment going out on the day and time you specify.

8 After the send, Starch syncs Gmail reply data on its regular schedule. You can ask the CRM: 'Which $25k+ donors haven't replied to the Spring Appeal email as of today?' and get a live answer.

9 Trigger the follow-up automation: for non-responders in the top tier, Email Agent drafts a short personal note from the ED's voice, flags it in Email Triage for one-click review, and adds a call task to your tracker.

10 For any donor portal — community foundations, DAF platforms, giving days — where you need to check submission status or log an acknowledgment, Starch automates that through your browser with no API needed.

11 After the campaign closes, ask Starch to summarize response rates by donor tier and program area. This becomes the one-page campaign recap your ED presents at the next board meeting — pulled from data already in Starch, not assembled by hand.

See this running on Starch

Connect your tools, describe what you want, and the agent builds it. Closed beta is free.

Try it on Starch →

Worked example

Spring Appeal 2026 — Education Program Donors

Sample numbers from a real run

Donors $25k+ (education program)	14
Donors $5k–$25k (education program)	67
First-time donors (education program)	43
Flagged: lapsed (gave in 2023, not 2024–2025)	11

Your education program officer sits down on a Tuesday morning with one goal: get the Spring Appeal out to 135 education-focused contacts before the fiscal year closes April 30. She opens the CRM app in Starch, which is pulling live from Salesforce, and sees the segmented list already built. Fourteen contacts are in the $25k+ tier — she recognizes eight names immediately and spots two who emailed the foundation three weeks ago about a renewal. She tags those two 'Do Not Contact / Active Conversation' and removes them from the blast. The Gmail sync caught the thread; she didn't have to search for it. She prompts Email Agent: 'Draft the Spring Appeal for the $25k+ education donors. Tone should match the attached 2025 Impact Letter. Include their first name, their last gift amount, and one sentence about the Northside Literacy Initiative we funded this year.' Four minutes later she has a draft. She edits two sentences, marks it approved. The $5k–$25k and first-time versions take another twenty minutes combined. Starch queues all three sends — $25k+ goes Thursday morning, the other two go the following Monday. Seven days later, she asks: 'Which $25k+ education donors haven't replied?' Three names come back. Email Agent drafts personal notes from the ED for each one. She reviews them in Email Triage, sends two immediately, holds one because she knows the ED wants to call that donor directly. The whole campaign — from list-pull to follow-up — ran without touching Mailchimp, without a consultant, and without a single exported CSV.

Measurement

How you'll know it's working

Reply rate by donor tier (not just open rate — replies signal real engagement for a foundation)

Lapsed donor re-engagement: how many donors who didn't give in the prior fiscal year responded to the campaign

Time from campaign brief to first send (target: under two working days for a team of four)

ED personal outreach conversion: what percentage of flagged lapsed major donors scheduled a call after the follow-up

Campaign-attributed pledges as a share of annual fundraising goal

Comparison

What this replaces

The other ways teams handle this today, and how the Starch version compares.

Mailchimp

Good at email delivery, but you'd still need to manually export your Salesforce list, clean it, segment it, and re-import it every campaign — Starch keeps that loop closed automatically.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud / Pardot

Deeply integrated with Salesforce, but licensing and configuration costs are sized for a development team, not a four-person ops shop; Starch gets you 80% of the capability at a fraction of the setup overhead.

Bloomerang or Blackbaud eTapestry

Purpose-built for nonprofit donor management, but they're standalone databases that duplicate the contact data already in your Salesforce instance and require yet another system to maintain.

Manual Gmail + Google Sheets

Free and familiar, but merge fields break, there's no reply tracking, and the 'system' lives in one person's inbox — not survivable across staff transitions.

On Starch RECOMMENDED

One platform — crm, email agent all running on connected data. Setup in plain English; numbers stay current via scheduled syncs and live agent queries.

Try it on Starch →

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

We already have Salesforce. Does Starch replace it or sit on top of it?

Sits on top of it. Starch connects to Salesforce from its integration catalog and queries it live — your Salesforce data stays where it is, your grants-management workflows stay intact. Starch builds the surfaces you're missing: the segmented outreach view, the campaign tracker, the follow-up queue. You don't migrate anything.

Can Starch actually send emails through Gmail, or does it just draft them?

Both. Starch syncs your Gmail data on a schedule (thread history, labels, reply status) and can send through Gmail as well. For a foundation-sized campaign — a few hundred contacts max — this works well without a separate email platform. One honest note: when you first connect Gmail, the OAuth consent screen currently shows the name of Starch's verified client rather than 'Starch' — that's a known issue on the roadmap to fix.

Our donor contacts are split between Salesforce and a Google Sheet someone built two years ago. Can Starch handle that?

Yes. Connect Salesforce from Starch's integration catalog for the live CRM data, and connect Google Sheets the same way. You can describe a deduplication and merge view — 'show me contacts that appear in both, flag duplicates, let me pick the canonical record' — and Starch builds it. You don't need to clean the data before you start.

What about donor portals or community foundation giving platforms that don't have an API?

Starch automates those through your browser — no API needed. If you can log in and click through it, Starch can read submission status, log acknowledgments, or pull giving records from it. This is how Starch handles platforms that purpose-built nonprofit tools still don't integrate with.

We're worried about donor data security. Is Starch SOC 2 certified?

Not yet — SOC 2 Type II certification is not currently in place. That's an honest limit worth knowing before you connect a major donor database. If your foundation's data governance policy requires SOC 2 for any vendor touching donor PII, Starch isn't there yet. It's on the roadmap.

Can Starch write in our foundation's voice, or will the emails sound like ChatGPT?

Give it a sample — your last annual report letter, a donor acknowledgment you're proud of, a program officer's update from last quarter. Prompt it explicitly: 'Match the tone of this letter. Avoid jargon. Write like a person, not a press release.' The output will be closer to your voice than a cold-started AI draft. Your program officer still reviews and approves before anything sends — the AI writes the first draft, not the final one.