Mailchimp success story · Public media nonprofit

How South Florida's public media station earned a 632% return on SMS spend during a fundraising drive.

Name: Overtop Media Digital Marketing
Address: 933 Louise Ave Suite 101-18, Charlotte, NC, 28204, US
Telephone: (704) 237-0707
Price range: $$

WLRN, the PBS and NPR affiliate for South Florida, had reached the ceiling of what email alone could raise. Adding text messages to its email appeals, on one Mailchimp platform, raised an extra $34,450 in a single fall drive.

Business: WLRN
Market: Miami, Florida
Goal: More donations during fundraising drives

The results.

The extra donations compare the fall 2025 campaign with SMS added against email alone; the click-through rate is compared with the average Mailchimp customer.

632%return on SMS spend
$34Kmore in donations from adding SMS
47%higher SMS click-through rate than the average Mailchimp SMS user

Fall 2025 fundraising drive. The station credited more than $100,000 of its $1 million fall drive to Mailchimp. Figures as reported in the story; Mailchimp does not publish how they were measured.

The challenge.

WLRN never charges for its journalism, so it depends on underwriting and two major fundraising drives a year. As traditional funding tightened and audiences moved to social and streaming, those drives had to work harder.

By 2024, email had hit a ceiling: open rates were flat and donations had plateaued. Email also lacked the urgency a live drive needs. The station’s previous email platform did not offer text messaging at the time, and outside SMS vendors were slow, expensive and hard to connect.

Merge the listsEmail and SMS subscribers become one audience.
Segment the donorsHigh-value donors targeted, recent donors left out.
Send email and text togetherEach appeal reaches supporters in both channels.
Test and refineSubject lines, SMS formats and images tested for clicks.

What they did.

SMS marketing · Email · Segmentation · Embedded forms · A/B testing

One audience, two channels: The station merged its email and SMS lists into one audience and planned every message in one place, using Mailchimp SMS alongside email.
The right ask for each supporter: Segments targeted high-value donors and automatically left out people who had just given, so the extra messages during a drive did not wear out loyal supporters.
More sign-ups: Embedded forms on the station’s pages brought in more contacts to reach during the next drive.
Testing what works: A/B tests tuned subject lines and SMS formats. Text messages with an image drove more clicks than those without.

Why it worked.

Our read on the decisions behind the numbers, and what any business can take from them.

Text creates urgency: A drive has a deadline. A text is read within minutes, which is exactly what a time-bound appeal needs and what email struggles to deliver.
SMS added to email, not instead of it: The gain was measured against email alone. Supporters who ignored one channel answered the other, so the two together raised more than either would.
Respecting donors keeps them giving: Suppressing recent donors meant more messages did not mean more annoyance. Relevance protects the list for the next drive.
Pay as you go: Buying the minimum SMS credits each month and topping up during drives kept costs in line with the station’s uneven sending.

How we would run this play for your business.

You do not need a national budget to use the same ideas. This is how Overtop Media Digital Marketing puts them to work in our mailchimp email marketing.

Plan the drive as a sequence: Announcement, reminders, matching-gift moments and a final push, across email and text, with dates set before the drive starts.
Segment donors by value: Major donors, monthly givers, lapsed donors and new subscribers each get their own message and frequency.
Grow the list between drives: Forms, landing pages and Meta lead ads build the audience you will need for the next campaign.
Report in dollars raised: Every message is tied to donations, so you know what each channel and each send was worth.