From manual to modern: How Brophy streamlined nonprofit email communication — Case study
Summarize
Very often, nonprofit organizations have so much on their plates that they simply don’t have the time, energy, or resources to create polished and professional email communication. They may do incredible work in their field yet still send donor thank-you messages as plain text, typed by hand.
This case study explores how Brophy, a nonprofit supporting youth and families towards a better future, used Stripo to transform its email communication into high-impact, inclusive messages, despite limited resources.
Expert
Meet the company
Brophy Family and Youth Services (Brophy) has served South West Victoria, Australia, for over 50 years as an independent nonprofit organization. It was established in 1974 to address the lack of local support for vulnerable youth.
Now the agency has hubs in Warrnambool, Portland, and Hamilton and serves as the lead organization providing a wide range of services to built resilient families and inclusive communities. At its heart, Brophy’s mission is to deliver practical support that creates real, measurable improvements in the lives of children, young people, and families.
To fulfill this mission, Brophy adopts a trauma-informed, client-first framework that prioritizes empowerment, dignity, and inclusion across its mental health, housing, foster care, and education services.
The challenge: Bridging the gap between professional impact and limited resources
Communication and email provide the vital link between Brophy’s professional services and the diverse community it supports. The nonprofit ensures organizational transparency primarily through email communication covering a wide range of areas and audiences, from donor thank-you messages and community newsletters to confirmations and updates on various inquiries. In specialized programs such as foster care, email communication provides carers with all necessary information and support, which is essential to the entire network across South West Victoria.
The biggest challenge in Brophy’s email communications was the gap between their high-quality professional work and a public image hampered by limited resources. The organization wanted to dispel the belief that nonprofit communication is inherently less polished or modern.
The Brophy team’s goal was to implement the enterprise-level communication standards common in the corporate sector, yet without the large budgets that corporations typically rely on. A significant issue for nonprofits is that government funding is allocated primarily to frontline services and staff wages, leaving almost no budget for modern IT tools. As a result, NGOs often have to find creative workarounds and partner with companies willing to support their mission and initiatives.
The organization faced multiple challenges:
- Slow and manual processes
Processes were slow and largely manual, as the organization lacked both the necessary tools and the expertise to use them effectively. For example, when Brophy received a donation, someone had to physically record it in their system and then open Outlook to type a plain-text confirmation email, which looked basic and didn’t reflect the organization’s quality.
Now, everything looks different. Brophy has established a system that records each donation, notifies the team, and automatically sends a professionally designed thank-you email. What used to be a tedious chore has become a seamless, positive experience for both donors and staff.
- Complex weekly newsletter management
The most difficult type of email the team had to manage was the weekly newsletter. This was not a single general update. Brophy delivered a weekly community newsletter, regulatory updates, referral information for professionals, targeted updates to kinship carers, and separate newsletters for foster carers in different locations.
Coordinating this flow of information every week without adequate tools was a major challenge. Each email required its own layout and tailored content, creating a heavy workload for a small team.
(Source: Email by Brophy)
- Limited resources for email production
Adding another layer of complexity, the team was already stretched thin with other responsibilities. Without the right tools or technical expertise, wrestling with email design became a major operational bottleneck. They simply couldn't afford the time stolen from their core mission: solving real client issues.
The team found itself trapped between the need to keep everyone informed and maintain consistent communication and its reluctance to sacrifice meaningful community support in order to produce more polished, presentable email campaigns.
The solution: Selecting a tool that simplifies email design without advanced coding skills
When selecting an email builder, Brophy’s key criteria were an intuitive interface and the technical ability to export designs as clean HTML.
An easily used drag-n-drop builder with a wide range of thoughtfully constructed nonprofit templates would enable the team to create professional emails quickly, without extensive training. At the same time, HTML export would let them integrate these designs into existing workflows, including tools such as Power Automate and MAKE.com.
Affordable pricing was also an important factor in the decision-making process.
Stripo stood out thanks to its strong balance of professional, ready-made templates and reasonable cost. Its editor enables teams to produce high-quality emails without having to start from scratch every time. Brophy’s final decision was also influenced by its communication with Stripo’s customer service team.
With Stripo, Brophy implements digital innovation to automate and streamline internal processes, such as digital form (HR/Finance) submissions and approval workflows.
The transition from plain text to polished, professional HTML emails has significantly enhanced the recipients’ experience. By ensuring accessible, responsive communication and offering features such as dark mode, Brophy upholds its commitment to professionalism and inclusivity, delivering a high-quality experience for both the staff managing programs and the clients who depend on their services.
The workflow: Streamlining high-volume, multi-audience email communication
Email communication at Brophy Family and Youth Services reaches a broad audience:
- foster and kinship carers;
- donors and community supporters;
- professional partners for service referrals;
- children, young people, and families who use the organization’s services;
- internal staff across all regional hubs.
This represents a consistent audience of over 750 subscribers, including around 200 staff members, over 500 carers and clients, and 20 local regional hubs.
(Source: Email by Brophy)
Because the email design is integrated with Brophy’s website and Power Automate, approximately 100–150 emails can be sent each day. Such a volume of communication demands high-quality, professional emails, whether automated notifications or manual staff updates, without further burdening the team.
Email production is handled jointly by the communications coordinator and the business systems coordinator, who conduct a collaborative review to check the design and content of each email before it goes live. Once the template is perfected in Stripo, the HTML is exported to the internal system to configure dynamic content and automation flows, guaranteeing a professional and reliable outcome.
Note from Stripo
Email export is a powerful feature that saves time when creating email campaigns. Stripo makes this process as simple as possible, without requiring technical expertise.
Stripo offers several HTML export options, so you can choose the one that best fits your needs: HTML file, archive, or raw HTML code.
The Brophy team actively uses saved modules to maintain consistency and save time when building newsletters and staff updates. A key priority in email communication is ensuring that all stakeholders, including clients, staff, donors, and partners, have permanent access to their emails and a positive experience with them.
For this reason, the team focuses on elements and features that guarantee professional-looking design and reliable performance across different email clients and devices.
Modular elements help the organization maintain brand recognition across all email types and audience segments, for example, by using the same headers and footers in every email. This approach allows the team to introduce new, relevant content while preserving a unified layout and cohesive design system.
The use of saved modules yields unique, timely newsletters that nevertheless remain clearly aligned with the brand, ensuring recipients always recognize who the message is from.
Note from Stripo
In Stripo, you can create and save diverse email elements as modules and reuse them whenever needed. By saving modules, you ensure that a specific section of an email, such as the header, footer, and email signature, remains identical across every campaign you build.
A module preserves the entire structure, including background, images, text, and fonts. Once saved, it will appear exactly as designed in all future emails.
You can also synchronize modules. For example, if the organization’s phone number changes, you can update it in one module and click “synchronize” to apply the change across all other emails where that module is used.
The results: Professional, accessible emails that engage community and staff
After moving to Stripo, Brophy observed significant changes in how both the community and staff perceived email communication.
Key results of using Stripo:
1. Greater satisfaction among staff and email recipients
Many team members expressed their appreciation of the new, professional designs, and overall engagement improved.
2. Improved email design and content clarity
Clear, visually appealing designs make it simple to prioritize information, producing emails that capture attention and are easily understood.
3. Simplified email production and reliable rendering across devices
Brophy maintains a crucial focus on accessibility and responsive design to be confident that its messages are inclusive and reach everyone, regardless of device or other factors. This approach also simplifies the organization’s production workflow, as Stripo does all the heavy lifting with the coding. The team now has total confidence that anything they build in the editor will render flawlessly across all platforms.
4. Effortless newsletter creation
The modular approach and ready-made templates make it easier to produce multiple newsletters efficiently without compromising quality.
Brophy described a use case that shows how Stripo elevated a high-priority communication:
(Source: Email by Brophy)
Wrapping up
Brophy remarkably improved their email communication with Stripo. The organization sped up email creation through a modular approach that’s easy even for a staff without deep technical expertise. Ready-made templates and improved layout hierarchy help emphasize key information and capture readers’ attention, making communication clearer and more effective. Feedback from both the team and the community highlights the value of these changes.
With Stripo, which supports and enables nonprofits like Brophy to easily produce high-quality email campaigns, the organization now benefits from professional-looking communication. As a result, the team can dedicate all their time and effort to what truly matters: providing real support to people and the community.