10,000 subscribers now for UK Fundraising News
Howard Lake | 9 February 2005 | News
UK Fundraising News, this site’s free fortnightly email newsletter, now has 10,000 subscribers.
The email newsletter, which provides links to all new additions to the site in the previous fortnight, reached its 10,000th subscriber this morning.
The newsletter celebrates its fifth anniversary this week: it was first published on 7 February 2000.
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The membership growth is still rapid: one year ago, after a period in which the newsletter had not been promoted, membership stood at 6,200. This year, we have enjoyed a 62% increase in subscriber numbers. Today, in the five hours since the 10,000th subscriber signed up, we have had eight further subscriptions.
We remain confident that our subscriber list is the largest and most current email list of fundraisers and related staff in the UK.
Given that the number of fundraising staff in the UK is estimated to be between 24,000 and 34,000, we really are communicating regularly with a large swathe of the fundraising profession. Of course, many of our subscribers are employees of fundraising consultancies and other professional agencies or voluntary sector staff whose responsibilities cover other areas as well as fundraising. Nevertheless, we know anecdotally and from our newsletter statistics that many subscribers forward copies or edited highlights of the newsletter to one or more colleagues or contacts. So the total readership will be even higher.
To put the readership in context, we now have nearly two and a half times as many subscribers as the Institute of Fundraising, with its 4,000 members.
The only promotion we undertake for our newsletter consists of a promotional box at the top of each page of the website. We don’t even employ the best practice of offering a blank text box for new subscribers to enter their email address in. Instead, we offer two graphic buttons which link to a separate subscription page.
The next edition of our newsletter will be published on 15 February 2005. If you haven’t yet subscribed, do join your peers and colleagues.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.