Case Study: DonorsChoose.org achieves $25M annual donor revenue and higher email engagement with SendGrid

DonorsChoose Grows Teacher Philanthropy with Twilio SendGrid

DonorsChoose is a nonprofit that connects teachers with donors to fund classroom projects; email accounts for about a third of its donor revenue, so reliable and flexible messaging is critical. While its transactional emails were already performing well, the organization’s promotional email platform lacked automation, segmentation and personalization, forcing engineers to build each campaign and limiting engagement.

DonorsChoose moved promotional messaging onto Twilio SendGrid’s Email API, creating an automated, segmented and personalized program that reduced engineering burden. The change lifted promotional open rates to about 30% (from roughly 18–20%) and click rates to ~3% (from ~2%), drove transactional opens to 60–70% with 3–5% clicks, and helped grow email-driven revenue from roughly $10M to over $25M annually.

DonorsChoose.org

Jasmine Penny

Email Program Manager