New strategies like social media and mobile marketing receive so much attention these days that one could easily be distracted from focusing on the workhorse of online fundraising: email.

Don't.

One relatively simple new email marketing tactic raised nearly $200,000 for the Arthritis Foundation's Jingle Bell Run/Walk in 2010, according to Director of Core Events Sara Orrell.

Sara and her team were frustrated by the high percentage of participants who never even visited their customized online fundraising home pages, let alone use them to generate emails.    Perhaps supporters were intimidated by the technology or felt it would eat up too much time.

"We wanted to give them a tool that would make it very easy to start fundraising right away," Sara explained.   "Based on the number of jokes we all receive online, we knew that people knew how to forward emails."

This year, as soon as people registered to participate, they received a personalized, trackable fundraising email that they could simply forward from their email account to anyone in their address book.

The results:  Forwarded emails yielded $192,123 in revenue, 88% in the form of donations and 12% in registration fees.    Programming costs to generate this six-figure bounty: Less than $3,000.  

That's what I call ROI.

David Hessekiel