Building better nonprofit emails: How Canine Concierge Corporation uses Stripo to engage its community

Imagine regularly putting together complex email newsletters with articles, photos, videos, event announcements, and other content that play an important role in keeping your audience informed. Now, add a small team and limited resources to the mix.

That’s the reality for Canine Concierge Corporation, where email is an important part of staying connected with its community.

In this case study, we explore how CCC uses Stripo to create engaging emails more flexibly while keeping its visual identity consistent.

Meet the company

Canine Concierge Corporation (CCC) is a U.S. nonprofit organization with 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status. The organization was founded in 2023 in Northern Virginia. 

Its mission is to expand access to ethical and effective therapy-dog and animal-assisted services. Its main goal is to help communities understand how properly trained therapy dogs can support people’s health and emotional well-being, as well as educational processes and social connections. One of its educational initiatives is the monthly email newsletter, DaVinci Digest.

A big part of that work is making connections. Access to therapy-dog services depends on building connections between people who may never have found each other on their own. These include organizations that need support, qualified dog handlers, volunteers, community organizations, and people who want to learn how therapy-dog programs work.

Email gives CCC a practical way to keep those connections going. DaVinci Digest serves as a monthly platform for sharing knowledge, advocacy, and news about therapy dogs, as well as information about volunteer opportunities and local events. Targeted email campaigns help build relationships with organizations and partners. For CCC, email is more than a marketing channel. It is part of the infrastructure that supports their work.

The challenge: Time-consuming email production and the need for consistent design

Before using Stripo, the organization’s biggest challenge was creating professional emails because the information deserved that level of presentation. CCC wanted their emails to look good and be simple to create, without turning every issue into a large HTML development project.

The most difficult types of emails to prepare were educational emails and DaVinci Digest.

Creating the digest took a lot of time because it included editorial content, photos, multimedia, different useful resources, event announcements, and legal or advocacy information. All of this also had to follow the organization’s brand guidelines. Making sure the design looked consistent on desktop and mobile devices was another time-consuming task.

For small nonprofits, an efficient production process is particularly important. The team wanted to spend more time creating meaningful content instead of fixing layout issues.

So, creating professional emails consistently and reducing the time spent on the process were the two main challenges for CCC.

(Source: Email by Canine Concierge Corporation)

The solution: A flexible email builder for professional, multimedia-rich emails

CCC decided to move away from the MailPoet plugin and rethink how it created and distributed its digest. Their goal was to separate professional email design from subscriber list management.

The team split the process between two tools: Stripo for email design and development and EmailOctopus for sending. This gave CCC more creative freedom and more control over workflow. 

With Stripo, Canine Concierge Corporation was able to:

• build and reuse modules;
• design branded elements and maintain a consistent visual style across all emails;
• develop visually rich and customized email layouts;
• preview how emails look on different screen sizes;
• add multimedia files to emails.

CCC communicates with a diverse audience that includes:

• healthcare and rehabilitation organizations;
• senior communities;
• behavioral health organizations;
• therapy dog handlers and prospective handlers;
• trainers;
• volunteers;
• organizations that provide resources for people with disabilities;
• educational institutions;
• donors and supporters;
• members of the Northern Virginia community interested in therapy dogs.

To communicate with such diverse audiences, the team adapts the content and tone.

The DaVinci Digest has to work for all of these audiences at once. It should feel professional enough for specialists while remaining easy for general readers to follow. Stripo helps the team create that visual hierarchy. Clear headings, sections, images, and content blocks make longer issues easier to scan and help readers find what matters to them.

The workflow: Planning, designing, testing, and sending emails with a lean team

DaVinci Digest is published monthly for an audience of around 550 people. When needed, the organization sends additional targeted messages to specific audiences.

Despite the small contact list, the digest reaches a much larger audience because each edition is also published as a web version and promoted on social media. Every month, Facebook and Reddit together generate more than 10,000 additional views. The same content designed in Stripo reaches email subscribers and a much wider community.

The email preparation workflow looks like this:

1. Planning and collecting information. Each digest starts with editorial planning and research. The team uses several AI-powered tools to help with research, drafting, and creating images and multimedia content, including ChatGPT Plus, Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Adobe Firefly, and ElevenLabs. CCC also receives information and photos from external contributors to include in the digest. 
2. Editing the content and building an email in Stripo. Once the content is ready, the editor brings everything together in Stripo. The email follows CCC’s visual style and includes reusable blocks, navigation elements, images, and responsive layouts. Before moving on, the team checks the edition for accuracy, visual consistency, accessibility, working links, and proper display across different devices.
3. Testing and approving the final version of the digest. CCC checks the digest at several points before it goes out. The first check happens in Stripo, using preview mode and responsive emulation features. The team then sends or opens an actual test email in Outlook and manually reviews the rendered results, image scaling, spacing, alignment, navigation, links, and readability.
4. CCC also publishes a Facebook Preview Edition around the 15th of each month, providing an additional real-world public preview before the full Digest launches.
5. Exporting the email and sending it through EmailOctopus. Once the DaVinci Digest is finalized in Stripo, the team exports the completed email as HTML and uses that HTML in EmailOctopus. EmailOctopus handles the subscriber list and email distribution, while Stripo remains the design and production environment. 

Because the team is small, Executive Director Michael Stokes also handles the main editing, design, and final approval for each digest.

In day-to-day work, the CCC team relies on Stripo’s visual editor, reusable modules, responsive controls, desktop and mobile previews, multimedia-friendly design, and row-level customization. 

The preview link is especially useful. The team doesn’t actively use the collaborative editing features. Still, contributors can use the preview link to see their content in the actual digest layout, with headlines, photos, CCC branding, and the final design, without needing access to the organization’s Stripo workspace. It gives contributors a simple way to review their content and see how it fits into the finished digest.

The results: More efficient production, consistent design, and stronger audience engagement

The clearest change for the team is that email production is easier to manage. Reusable structures reduce repetitive work, while responsive design tools mean fewer layout problems to fix. The team also has more control over how each email looks. 

Today, CCC’s email communication feels like an extension of the organization itself. The DaVinci Digest has a recognizable visual identity, bright images, and space for serious educational content and engaging community stories.

CCC founder Michael Stokes sees a good presentation as a way to signal that the content deserves attention.

Michael shared one example with us: A couple who had recently moved to Northern Virginia and had dogs certified by the Alliance of Therapy Dogs. After discovering CCC, they told the team how much they enjoy DaVinci Digest and expressed interest in volunteering with the organization.

That is the kind of response CCC hoped the digest would encourage. It was designed first and foremost as a way to build relationships rather than simply as a newsletter.

(Source: Email by Canine Concierge Corporation)

Wrapping up

The value of CCC’s email program goes beyond how its emails look. DaVinci Digest provides the organization with a way to share knowledge, showcase community stories, and connect with people who want to support its mission.

Stripo makes this communication easier to produce and keeps each email consistent with the organization’s visual identity. That leaves the team with less time spent on email production and more time to work on content that brings people closer to CCC.

For CCC, these improvements support a bigger goal: using email to educate its community, encourage participation, and build stronger connections around its mission.