How Much Should a Nonprofit Pay for Email Newsletters?

Fair warning: this one is a plug

This is part two of our series on reviewing nonprofit spending. In part one, we looked at survey tools and the hidden cost of matching responses to your own records.

We will be upfront: this post is a shameless plug. OpenCommunity includes mass email for newsletters and notifications right in the platform, and we think that is worth talking about. But the math below holds whether or not you ever use our software, so stick around even if you are allergic to sales pitches. We promise to keep the pitch to one section.

What a separate email tool really costs

Sending a newsletter to a few hundred members from a regular inbox does not work well. Messages get flagged as spam, there is no unsubscribe link, and you cannot tell who received what. So most organizations sign up for a dedicated mass email tool.

For a small to mid-sized community organization, those tools typically cost $10 to $50 a month. Mailchimp is a common example. At the time of writing, its free plan covers only 250 contacts, and paid plans start around US$13 a month for 500 contacts, rising to about US$45 to US$60 a month at 2,500 contacts. Mailchimp offers a nonprofit discount, and alternatives like MailerLite and Brevo are often cheaper, but the pattern is similar across the market.

• $10 a month adds up to $120 a year.

• $25 a month adds up to $300 a year.

• $50 a month adds up to $600 a year.

For an organization running on grants, $600 a year is a meaningful number. It could cover snacks for a weekly family drop-in, bus tickets for participants, or an honorarium for a guest facilitator.

Why the bill grows with your community

Most email tools charge by the number of contacts on your list, not by how many emails you send. That sounds fair until you notice what counts as a contact. Depending on the tool and plan, people who have unsubscribed, never confirmed, or have not opened an email in two years may still count toward your tier.

Growth is the goal for most community organizations. A successful summer program can add a hundred new families, and that success can push you into the next pricing tier without anyone deciding to spend more. Reviewing your list once or twice a year, and removing contacts who have unsubscribed, can keep costs in check.

The quiet cost of a second contact list

The subscription is the visible cost. The less visible one is keeping your email list in sync with everything else. A parent updates their email at reception, but the newsletter list still has the old one. A new participant registers for a class, but nobody adds them to the mailing list. Someone unsubscribes, but staff keep emailing them from a different spreadsheet.

That drift matters for more than tidiness. Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) expects you to have consent for commercial electronic messages and to honour unsubscribe requests promptly. When consent lives in one tool and contact details live in another, it gets harder to show who agreed to what, and when. Our CASL basics for community organization email lists walks through what to record.

The promised plug, kept short

Here it is. OpenCommunity includes mass email for newsletters and notifications in the same place you manage participants, programs, and attendance. That means:

• No separate monthly subscription for a mass email tool.

• No exporting and importing contact lists between systems.

• When a participant updates their contact details, your next newsletter goes to the right address.

• Notifications, like a room change for Tuesday's English conversation class, go out from the same system that holds your participant records.

Plug over. If you already pay for an email tool and it works well for you, that is fine. The point of reviewing spending is to know what each tool costs and what it saves you.

A five-minute email spending review

1. 1

   Find your last 12 months of email tool invoices and add them up, including currency conversion.

2. 2

   Check how many contacts you are billed for, and how many actually opened an email in the last six months.

3. 3

   Count how many places your organization stores participant email addresses.

4. 4

   Estimate how many staff hours a month go to exporting, importing, and fixing lists.

5. 5

   Ask whether any tool you already pay for includes mass email.

In the final post of this series, we tackle the line item that is easiest to miss because it never arrives as an invoice: payment processing fees on donations.