With no marketing team, The Adventure Project builds its donor email together in Brew

The Adventure Project funds local organizations in Africa that hire people as water entrepreneurs, community health workers, farmers and clean cookstove builders. Email is how it thanks donors, shares stories from the field and invites people into The Collective, its monthly giving community.

There is no marketing or communications staff, so email is everyone’s job. The team designed its emails inside ActiveCampaign, where it was hard to see exactly how a message would look while working on it.

Brew pulled The Adventure Project’s brand, so every email starts on brand. The team designs in Brew and sends through ActiveCampaign.

Everyone works on the same email. One person drafts, another designs, and the rest leave comments on the email itself. Co-founder and CEO Becky Straw builds emails in Brew too.

Each audience gets its own version. A personal appeal from Becky has separate versions for members of The Collective and for people who have not given yet, and an event invitation was built in four versions, one for each audience.

And it is faster. Becky drafted a five-email welcome series in one sitting, and a second series for first-time donors the next day.

In Katie’s words, Brew helps the team move much faster, and seeing exactly how a message will look makes designing and refining so much easier than working in their email platform.