The John Deere Classic puts on a PGA Tour tournament, a concert series, an October gala, and a charity program that supports nearly 500 regional organizations, all with a staff of eight. The team wanted email that could read and appear on-brand for the PGA tournament in addition to matching the brand voice of Birdies for Charity without needing to start from scratch for every communication. After switching to Emma, subaccounts and Brand Manager now hold the tournament and Birdies for Charity brands, audience controls let one person send targeted messages even during the busiest week of the year, and the segments the team cares about most have an open rate above 60%.
average open rate
charities supported through Birdies for Charity
volunteers managed each summer
“It just feels like you have more control of what your messaging is, of how your brand is represented, and then also the reporting side of things, being able to see who’s going and maybe taking action on some of these things.“
Director, Ticketing & Marketing
The John Deere Classic has been played in the Quad Cities since 1971, and the 2026 event marked the tournament’s 55th year as one of the region’s favorite summer traditions. Based in Silvis, Illinois, the tournament serves a bi-state community that spans both Iowa and Illinois, and it operates as an independent nonprofit, separate from the PGA Tour and from John Deere, which serves as title sponsor. Alongside the tournament, the organization runs Birdies for Charity, a fundraising platform serving nearly 500 local and regional charities. Together, the tournament and its charity programs have generated more than $200 million in charitable giving, supported each summer by more than 2,200 volunteers.
A golf tournament week, a concert weekend, and a charity campaign ask very different things from an email, and the team wanted each of those communications to look the part. Its previous platform had served the organization for years, though the templates on offer resembled what everyone else in the inbox was using, which made it harder to distinguish the sporting side of the organization from the charity-side. Deliverability had also become a concern, so the search for a new platform came with a clear list of priorities: more control over design, more confidence that messages are arriving in the inbox, and support the team could reach when something needed attention.
A need for prompt communication shaped the requirements as well, with player commitments getting announced and weather delays interrupting play, which means tournament communications often go out with very little notice. Sending lists built in a hurry can leave the back end untidy, and while the team knew what each list contained, the structure had grown organically rather than deliberately. Some communications were still going out from personal Outlook accounts, which worked well, but presented the organization less consistently than the team wanted.
The John Deere Classic moved to Emma to get the control and consistency they needed, with the team handling the build in-house. Templates came together in the first day or two, and were quickly ready to share with colleagues. Migrating their sizable database took longer, though the team treated that stretch as a chance to restructure its audiences deliberately instead of carrying over an inherited setup.
The organization runs Emma in subaccounts, one for the John Deere Classic and one for Birdies for Charity, two technically separate brands that share fonts, colors, and a lot of visual overlap. Brand Manager is where Emma stores a team’s approved templates, logos, and brand assets, and a tiered account structure lets central marketing share those assets across subaccounts while each brand keeps its own contacts and campaigns. For the John Deere Classic, that meant establishing the shared elements once and making them available everywhere, so a colleague building a Birdies campaign and a teammate sending internal communications to the board both start from the same approved foundation. Setting that up early meant additional senders could get to work without anyone having to unnecessarily review the details afterward.
The audience settings have become the feature the team reaches for most. Emma’s list segmentation builds audiences from data already in the platform, and because segments update on their own as contacts change, a targeted send doesn’t need to start with a spreadsheet. Including or excluding specific groups inside an existing list, without exporting or reuploading anything, matters when a message needs to go out in the next few minutes, and tournament week produces a lot of those moments. Weather updates, player news, and hospitality logistics all reach different slices of the same database, and the team can now build those sends on the fly.
Emma’s email analytics turn campaign data into clear next steps, with reporting the team can filter to whatever window it wants to examine rather than a fixed monthly view. The organization’s calendar has distinct seasons, so being able to look at custom date ranges has changed how the team interprets its data. Comparing tournament week against the lead-up and the weeks that follow has given the team a sharper read on which messages are earning attention and which audiences are acting on them.
Targeted messaging has produced the clearest gains. Sends to specific groups, including the board of directors and the hospitality audience, have open rates north of 60%, and those audiences have come to treat an email from the tournament as relevant by default. Deliverability, one of the reasons the team went looking for a new platform in the first place, has held up, with messages reaching the people the organization needs to reach. Ticketing revenue was up year over year as well, and while no single factor accounts for that, a clear, easily clickable message is part of the picture.
The way the organization presents itself has changed too. Requests that used to travel through individual Outlook accounts now go out as properly formatted campaigns, complete with the sponsor placements and marketing elements the team couldn’t include before, which has opened the door to bundling email exposure into sponsorship packages. Other PGA tournaments have noticed, and several now ask the John Deere Classic team how it approaches email and digital communications. Emma Support has reinforced their decision to switch: the John Deere Classic team reports that a year with Emma has brought better service than the previous decade elsewhere, with a real person to reach rather than a chain of phone menus.
The team’s existing communications now live in Emma, with templates and past sends easy to find and duplicate, so less of the calendar goes toward recreating work that already exists. Journeys and automation are the next step—Emma’s automation lets one setup handle recurring work by triggering sends based on what contacts do or where they are in a cycle, so a welcome series or an annual renewal keeps running without someone rebuilding it each time. For a staff of eight supporting both a tournament and a charity platform, that headroom is what keeps a growing email program manageable.
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