If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice is a national reproductive justice organization that uses legal advocacy, policy work, and direct services—including a Repro Legal Helpline and Defense Fund—to build power and defend reproductive autonomy. With 92% of revenue concentrated in institutional funding, the organization is working to diversify its revenue streams and deepen its grassroots donor base.
The team believes that intentional testing of email elements—subject lines, send times, ask placement, audience segmentation—combined with systematic reflection will reveal which messaging resonates with different donor profiles, enabling more tailored and effective fundraising. Success means higher engagement rates, increased donor conversion, and a documented best practices guide that frees staff capacity for relationship-building. The experiment runs through 2026 across six targeted campaigns, tracking engagement patterns, donor segments, and messaging effectiveness to create a "plug and play" email toolkit for 2027.
The experiment uses a three-phase approach: establishing baseline metrics from 2025 data, deploying emails with intentional testing and real-time reflection, and developing messaging guides and donor personas. The team is testing send times across time zones, subject line directness, button language, email length, and "topper" formats with embedded donation asks. A $20,000 Civic Shout list acquisition launched in July to test engagement with new audiences; of 5,023 contacts acquired, approximately 3,100 remained subscribed after initial communications.
Early campaigns are revealing distinct donor behaviors. The Repro Legal Defense Fund (RLDF) campaign generated strong open and click rates but a conversion rate of 0.03—below the 0.05 benchmark—pointing to the post-click donation page as the primary bottleneck. Grassroots messaging and front-loaded asks are outperforming longer, expertise-forward emails. A rapid-response Texas midwife email raised $750 from 9 donations, with two $250 gifts representing two-thirds of the total. Most notably, an influencer partnership with Reb Masel raised $66,000 from 1,397 donors—almost all new to the database—with 266 setting up monthly recurring donations and an average gift of $47, nearly double typical online averages. The majority of RLDF campaign donations came from lapsed and non-donors rather than active supporters, shifting the team's strategic focus toward reactivation and first-time donor conversion.
The team is building Salesforce dashboards to track engagement by donor segment and will launch a metrics working group to standardize data storytelling across the organization.
The end-of-year campaign launch meeting is scheduled for October 8, with learnings from the helpline campaign informing final strategy.
After nearly five years of tracking email data, If/When/How now has the infrastructure and organizational buy-in to make strategic, evidence-based decisions about when—and when not—to send emails to specific audiences. This experiment is modeling a data-driven approach that development leadership hopes will influence cross-organizational culture and demonstrate how audience insights can inform not just fundraising, but communications, programs, and policy work. At a moment when institutional philanthropy is reaching capacity limits and the reproductive justice landscape is under sustained attack, building predictable individual giving revenue is essential for organizational resilience.