Free webinar . June 24, 2026
Reaching the Inbox: Email Deliverability Essentials for Advancement.
Your donor appeals deserve to be seen. Join fundraisers, marketing and comms leads, and IT teams for a hands-on look at what blocks emails from reaching the inbox. From copywriting pitfalls to DNS configuration — plus the concrete fixes you can ship this quarter.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
3:00 PM ET . 60 minutes
Live on Zoom
Hosted by Fundmetric. Featuring deliverability experts from Mailgun by Sinch
Your speakers
Practitioners with hands-on experience.
A working session with the people who deal with deliverability in higher ed advancement every week.
Matt Estrada
Mailgun by Sinch
Matt works with senders pushing serious volume into the inbox at scale. He'll translate SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and the rest of the alphabet soup into things you can act on tomorrow.
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Francis Brideau
Account Manager, Fundmetric
Francis is an Account Manager at Fundmetric who works closely with clients on the day-to-day realities of email deliverability. He'll bring the patterns, pitfalls, and practical fixes he sees come up again and again across advancement teams.
Rachel Crosbie
VP of Strategy and Operations, Fundmetric
Rachel is VP of Strategy and Operations at Fundmetric, where she sees firsthand how email deliverability shapes the strategic goals of the advancement sector. She'll bring the questions that come up most often when marketing, fundraising, and technical teams try to work together.
For the marketing and comms team
Deliverability isn't just an IT problem.
Even with your DNS records configured correctly, half of what keeps your email out of the inbox comes down to the words you wrote, the images you used, the links you embedded, and the cadence you sent at. Marketing has more leverage here than they realize.
The words that trip filters
Subject lines screaming URGENT, ACT NOW, and FREE still get filtered the way they did in 2015. We'll share the modern trigger phrases that quietly hurt advancement appeals, the ones your spam checker won't flag.
Content patterns that hurt placement
One-image emails. Link shorteners. Mismatched display names. Heavy attachments. We'll show the structural choices that quietly move your appeal from inbox to promotions to spam.
Personalization that actually helps
Not the merge tag kind. The kind that drives the opens, clicks, and replies that ISPs read as engagement signals. Better engagement metrics, better placement, better revenue.
Stories from the Field
Real teams. Real inbox wins.
We'll walk through real deliverability moments from higher ed advancement teams. Each one a case study in spotting the issue, working the fix, and getting back to clean inbox placement. Before and after, what to do, what to avoid.
Partnership in action
A Microsoft-wide filtering shift, handled quietly
Deliverability stayed above 98 percent — even as a Microsoft AI filtering shift rattled inboxes industry-wide. This is the story of how a major university foundation, Fundmetric, and Mailgun caught the anomaly fast, escalated directly inside Microsoft, and executed a domain consolidation plan that turned a vendor-wide disruption into a non-event.
Fast diagnosis
Gmail Rejection, Diagnosed Fast
When a state university foundation saw a sudden spike in Gmail rejections, Mailgun traced the cause within hours: a single-character DNS misconfiguration at the institution. Matt prepared a clear technical brief, Fundmetric routed it to the right IT contact, and delivery returned to normal within a day. Speed of diagnosis, strength of partnership.
List hygiene
From 76% to verified 93% email deliverability
A regional university foundation lifted inbox placement from 76 percent to a verified 93 percent by combining list hygiene, segmentation, and the right IP warmup sequence. Smaller list, cleaner sends, much better placement — and real lift in revenue.
Agenda
An hour well spent.
Three short content blocks, a working Q&A, and a self check you can run on your own domain before you log off.
5 min
Welcome: The current state of deliverability in an email saturated world
Setting the stage and why inbox placement has become the make or break for advancement teams.
10 min
Why your email does not reach the inbox
What's actually happening between 'send' and the inbox, and why so much email never makes it.
10 min
The technical foundation in plain English
SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI without the jargon. What each one does, and what happens when they break.
10 min
What you can control today
List hygiene, send cadence, segmentation, and domain repair when things have gone wrong.
15 min
Moderated Q&A
Bring your messiest deliverability question. We will work through as many as we can.
8 min
Deliverability self check
A walkthrough so you can audit your own domain before you sign off.
What you take with you
Things you can use Monday morning.
The deliverability checklist
A one page audit you can run against any sending domain. Sent as a PDF to every attendee after the session.
The full recording
Can't make it live? Register anyway. We send the full recording to everyone who signs up.
Direct access to the speakers
Your unique join link lets you ask questions live and follow up afterwards.
Stop guessing whether your emails are landing.
Reserve your seat now. Free, 60 minutes, built for advancement teams.