Fundraising Everywhere - Legacy and In Memory Conference, September 2026

The cost of e-mail

Howard Lake | 21 December 1998 | News

Piles of envelopes or email. Image: sumall.com
Stack of envelopes or emails.

E-mail can certainly help to reduce administration costs, but it does carry cost implications itself. Webspace magazine this month reports that this figure can become quite high.

“Anecdotally it costs a company £5 to answer an inbound e-mail which can take up to 12 minutes to understand and sort out an appropriate reply to, and up to £12 if a supervisor gets involved.” While those figures are unlikely to apply to charities, it is important to consider the costs involved in answering supporters’ e-mail enquiries.

If it ever gets too much one of the top-end solutions to managing large quantities of e-mail is Brightware, which uses intelligent agent software to “understand” the contents of an e-mail message and route it to the correct staff member. More information from Brightware.

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