Good Marketing Brief

Protect your sender reputation before year-end hits

Rachel Burris Rodriguez on Sep 10, 2026, 8:15:00 AM

Before your year-end campaigns can do their job, they need to reach the inbox. Sender reputation, list hygiene, and email authentication aren't the most exciting things to think about in September, but they're the foundation everything else is built on.

A damaged sender reputation heading into GivingTuesday is harder to recover from than a late campaign launch. This week is about getting that foundation right: What inbox providers are evaluating, which list hygiene habits to tackle now, and how one small nonprofit built a new revenue stream by finally putting the right digital infrastructure in place.

The take-home template

Getting your authentication right before year-end is one of the least glamorous but most consequential things you can do for your campaigns. Media Cause's deliverability guide covers the 2026 standards now enforced by Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, the 0.3% spam rate threshold worth monitoring, and a five-point checklist to run through before GivingTuesday.

Snackable snippets

6 steps to protect your sender reputation 📖

Every inbox provider runs its own ongoing evaluation of your sender reputation, weighing your authentication setup, sending consistency, and how recipients behave when your emails land. A damaged reputation can take months to rebuild. Two things worth doing before year-end that most teams skip are running your domain through a blocklist checker like Spamhaus and being cautious about repeatedly emailing inactive members who never open your emails.

What determines your sender reputation score 📖

Inbox providers evaluate your sender reputation using a handful of metrics that are worth understanding before your biggest campaigns go out. Hard bounces, spam complaints, and consistently low open rates all work against you, while clean lists, double opt-in, and genuinely engaged subscribers work in your favor. Purchasing an email list is the fastest way to damage your reputation, and landing on a blocklist is the hardest consequence to come back from, all of which makes list hygiene one of the more important things to get right before GivingTuesday.

Why one org started questioning its database practices 📖

Robin Kuehn, Database and Technology Senior Associate at the Wolf Conservation Center, came back from bbcon with one question worth asking of every process your team has settled into: why do we do it this way? At a conference session, she was pushed to look beyond "we have always done it that way" and consider whether the database practices her team had inherited supported donor stewardship and made important information easier to use.

For your inspiration folder

Mid-Fairfield Community Care Center had spent years running on foundation dollars and federal grants, a model that worked until it didn't. When that funding started shifting, they needed individual donors and the digital infrastructure to reach them.

Through a combination of retargeting ads, email campaigns, peer-to-peer pages built for board members, and payment options like Apple Pay and Google Pay on donation forms, they brought in $27,000 in donations and 92 new individual donors in a year, while growing their audience by more than 7,500 net-new contacts.
Topics: Nonprofits

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