Youth Education Nonprofit · Email · Website · Social · Ongoing
Case No. 03Day & Knight Chess Club
A marketing department, built from the first move.
Day & Knight Chess Club is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit using chess as a vehicle for developing confidence, resilience, and critical thinking in young people. We built the organization's complete marketing infrastructure: a CRM and email program that grew their subscriber base by 219%, a website rebuild that cleared 100% of accessibility errors, and a social presence that reached 30,000 accounts in the first month without a single dollar in paid spend.
- Email subscribers
- ~7002,232
- Emails delivered
- 76,74599.8% delivery
- Accessibility errors
- 380
- Accounts reached
- 30,000month one, organic
The fog
A growing community. No owned channel.
As Day & Knight expanded its programs (after-school enrichment, academy classes, tournaments, and community outreach), the organization had no reliable system for directly reaching the families and supporters who made those programs possible.
Announcements, registrations, fundraising, and program updates relied on social media visibility and fragmented communication. Any algorithm change could disrupt reach overnight.
- Lower repeat participation without consistent reminders
- Missed tournament registrations due to poor reach
- Reduced fundraising visibility without a direct channel
- Overreliance on social platforms for family engagement
Community growth
From 700 subscribers to an owned audience of 2,600.
The most durable outcome is not a campaign metric; it is a communication channel Day & Knight fully controls. The organization can now directly contact over 2,600 students, parents, volunteers, donors, and supporters whenever needed.
A single email can fill a tournament bracket, announce a new program, or launch a fundraising campaign to every one of those contacts at once.
Campaign performance
76,745 emails sent. Every one of them counted.
Volume without engagement is noise. The numbers show a list that was consistently receiving, opening, and acting on what they were sent across 12 months of campaigns, with a 16.2% click-to-open rate.
Bar widths on a log scale so every stage stays visible. Figures are exact.
List quality
Tripled the list. Kept the quality.
Growing an email list is the easy part. Growing it while maintaining exceptional deliverability requires disciplined list management at every stage. Despite tripling the subscriber base, Day & Knight's sender reputation remained healthy across every major indicator.
- Delivery rate
- 99.8%
- Bounce rate
- 0.19%
- Unsubscribe rate
- 0.26%
Fewer than 2 in every 1,000 failed to arrive.
Well below the 2% industry threshold.
A well-targeted audience that wants to hear from them.
Before the rebuild
What the old site asked of families.
The old site required up to 10 clicks to complete a tournament registration and had a newsletter form that didn't actually add users to the mailing list. These directly cost the organization registrations, donors, and subscribers.
Tournament registration
Required up to 10 clicks
Class registration
Required up to 9–10 clicks
Membership flow
Required excessive scrolling
Newsletter signup
Did not add users to the mailing list
Website results
Technical debt cleared, measured at launch.
The rebuild addressed years of accumulated technical debt before launch, with audit data to prove it: the measured difference between the legacy site and the rebuilt version.
Technical SEO
Every tracked category improved.
The largest gains came in markup quality (+61 points) and internal linking (+15 points). The rebuild also established crawlability and AI search health scores from scratch, categories the legacy site had never been measured against. As more families use AI tools to find local programs, these scores become increasingly meaningful.
Google quality scores
A perfect score where it counts.
95
Accessibility
was 86
100
Best practices
was 54
91
SEO
was 69
Social results
Zero paid spend. Tenfold reach.
Social management launched in June 2026. The first month established a consistent content rhythm, a professional presence on Instagram and Facebook, and organic reach within the local community, without a single dollar in paid promotion.
Instagram drove 98% of total views: where Day & Knight's parents, students, and local families are most active.
Instagram views
62,335 · 98%
Facebook views
1,262 · 2%
Platform by platform
Every metric moved. Without spending a dollar.
Conversations (direct messages from families and community members) are the highest-value social action, and they grew 133%. Month-one results are a baseline, not a ceiling: organic reach compounds as the algorithm learns the account.
Change vs. prior period
Results are specific to this client and period, from client-provided or platform data. They are not typical or guaranteed; outcomes depend on your business, market, budget and other factors.
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