How email helps this nonprofit make a national impact (without a marketing team)
Karen Tran, Assistant Director - Bay Area at education nonprofit SERP Institute, has achieved huge results for her organization with email, despite not being a professional marketer and having a plate full of other tasks to do.
With MailerLite’s easy-to-use tools, she’s packed out events like a webinar with 1,000 registrants, encouraged people to try new products like a high school version of their most widely used educational tool, and even helped secure the team a coveted spot at the upcoming SXSW EDU conference.
Her brand’s email list gives her an outsized advantage. It helps her consistently and efficiently reach a large audience that engages with her content.
We couldn’t reach such a large audience without email marketing. We have around 38,000 people on our email list and just a fraction of that on all other channels combined.
We sat down with Karen to understand how she uses email marketing to reach the SERP Institute’s goals.
SERP Institute: Solving education’s toughest problems
Based in Washington, D.C., SERP Institute acts as a bridge between educational researchers and the classroom.
Over the past 20 years, the organization has worked with schools and school districts to solve relevant problems of practice and, through those partnerships, created 15 tools for educators.
These solutions to real classroom challenges include STARI, a literature-rich intervention program working to solve the adolescent literacy crisis, and Word Generation, a program that uses compelling topics to help middle schoolers develop the academic vocabulary they need to understand their textbooks.
Karen manages the organization's email strategy despite not having a marketing background. Because email is a secondary part of her role, she relies on features that are easy to use and don't require technical expertise.
Like many nonprofits, we don't have dedicated marketing resources, and I'm wearing multiple hats.
Here’s a look at the core MailerLite features she uses.
Karen builds professional, engaging newsletters with the editor’s help without any design experience.
She tracks how readers engage with her email content, analyzes her email strategy, and updates as needed.
This helps her send emails based on when her readers are active and are most likely to read them.
Connecting 38,000+ educators with email
The SERP Institute uses email campaigns to keep educators, researchers, designers and other stakeholders informed about developments and success stories.
She also uses the email campaign to ask for feedback from the field and drive uptake of other channels, like their podcast, SERP Stories, and blog.
People join the email list when they sign up for a SERP product or opt in at a professional learning event. This ensures the audience consists of people who are already invested in the organization's resources.
Email helps us build community, keep teachers engaged, and make them feel they're part of something meaningful.
Education transforms and thanks to the engaged email list, SERP Institute can not only support educators by increasing their agency and access to high-quality instructional materials and research-aligned solutions to their everyday challenges, but can be part of the solution by sharing these best practices through the reach of their 38,000+ email recipients.
Additionally, this robust email list supports timely communication about product expansion. For example, it can encourage teachers to use the latest learning units as soon as it releases them.
Our email list enables real-time updates about new learning units, helping teachers capitalize on current events while student interest is high.
As a small nonprofit, without a dedicated sales and marketing team, the SERP Institute also uses its email list to share opportunities for continuous professional development and encourage stakeholders to attend synchronous and asynchronous, virtual and in-person learning events.
Email was the main way we promoted our professional learning events. Attracting over 60 attendees during the summer months.
Securing massive exposure at a national event
SERP Institute used its email list to grab a coveted spot speaking at the upcoming South by Southwest (SXSW) EDU conference.
This was a massive win for the organization, as the SXSW stage provided significant name recognition outside of the education sector.
The SXSW stage amplified our message and significantly expanded our community.
To get accepted as a speaker at the event, organizations must participate in the SXSW Panel Picker, where part of the score is determined by public votes. By asking its subscribers to vote in the panel picker, SERP Institute was able to generate the necessary support to secure a spot.
Karen noted that attracting these votes would not have been possible through social media platforms alone.
Email outreach to our list drove substantial votes, far exceeding what we could have achieved through social media.
Recruiting for research studies with smart segmentation
SERP Institute is committed to research to advance teaching and learning and MailerLite helps SERP Institute in the recruitment process for these rigorous studies.
This past year, Karen developed an email strategy to reach out to potential study participants and successfully recruit 60 schools for a study of their adolescent literacy intervention, STARI. Previously, recruitment efforts required them to attend expensive conferences and hope they would meet the right people.
When the team needs to recruit schools for research studies, they can now simply filter their subscribers by state and send targeted emails to teachers at schools in the right area.
For study recruitment, email outreach delivered better results at a fraction of the cost of conference attendance.
The ability to exclude or include specific groups ensures that Karen only contacts the educators for whom the study is relevant, protecting her list health and maximizing interest.
We segmented our email list by state to target specific downloaders. This approach generated significant interest and meeting requests with minimal effort.
Using click maps to deliver content that resonates
Since Karen doesn’t have an email marketing background, she wasn’t sure what types of content to send when she started.
But with MailerLite’s click maps feature, she can see exactly what email content people engage with, removing the guesswork about what her audience is interested in and ensuring that every email provides real value.
Click tracking has been invaluable. Without a background in email marketing, I rely on data to guide my strategy—it shows me what resonates with our audience and drives engagement.
A perfect example of this data-driven approach was when Karen saw the engagement on an email about whether cell phones should be allowed in schools.
The engagement data was an immediate signal to the team that they had hit on a topic of high importance to their community.
We sent an email about a unit on cell phones in schools. The open and click rates immediately showed this was a topic that resonated strongly with teachers.
SERP Institute then used that data to make decisions about future emails and sent out communication about other units with equally compelling topics, and results.
Reaching subscribers when they’re most likely to read
The time you send an email can impact whether people read it. This is a problem when your audience is spread across the country, and globe, like SERP Institute’s.
Karen gets around this by using MailerLite’s deliver by timezone feature to automatically send the email at the same time in every location. It ensures that a teacher in New York City sees the email right as their day begins, even if Karen is hours behind on the West Coast.
Scheduling is a lifesaver. With users across the country and world, I can hit optimal send times for the East Coast without waking up at 5 a.m.
Lessons from SERP Institute’s mission-driven journey
The SERP Institute’s journey demonstrates that you don’t need a massive marketing budget or a dedicated design team to achieve national-level impact.
By using a platform that is "intuitive, fun, and approachable," Karen has turned a part-time responsibility into a powerful growth engine.
Looking ahead, the team is already planning to deepen their use of MailerLite by integrating it with their new download center and exploring the blog feature to further streamline their content creation.
For Karen and the SERP Institute, email is more than a marketing tool—it’s the foundation for a community that is solving the future of education, one inbox at a time.
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