Video: Breaking Down Silos: Boost Team Collaboration and Transparency with Virtuous | Duration: 3588s | Summary: Breaking Down Silos: Boost Team Collaboration and Transparency with Virtuous

Transcript for "Breaking Down Silos: Boost Team Collaboration and Transparency with Virtuous": Alright. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you may be coming in from. I am Eric Thomas. We are super excited today to connect with all of you out in the virtual world. I'm here with my good friend, Kath. She's Kath, where are you coming in from right now? I'm in San Diego. It is it sunny and bright there? It is. It is. But I haven't been outside yet today, so I haven't enjoyed it yet. So I'm coming in from the road. I'm here in Northeast Pennsylvania. I'm in Scranton Wilkes Barre, if you you know of it. It is 45 degrees here, Kath. So I am standing inside with some some some sweaters. So well, if please, if you'd have to participate in this this webinar that we do, we've loved this platform. The community that is around us. Please share where you're coming in from, what organization you're representing. We at Virtuis want to talk with you and we want to be able to have a conversation. Woah, it's 94 degrees. Oh, my gosh. I'm jealous of both of you. That's crazy. They will see the dialogue in a community 1 on 1 together. So please share where you're coming in from and if it's nice and warm and weather. Yes. The if you have not used this system before, please know that the chat is available. We're gonna be able to communicate all in there. The session, yes, the session will be recorded. We're gonna be able to share this out immediately after this event, so that we can be able to get the conversation going. There's emojis, there's GIFs. There's GIFs. Whatever way you wanna call it to be able to play around in here. Super excited that you're here. Thank you, Thomas. Wow. It's high eighties here. Man, you guys are all I gotta get out of Pennsylvania. Like, everyone's warm weather right now. Like, I don't know if I'm ready for the fall or the winter. But, no, get back to work here. Kath, introduce yourself. Please tell us who you are and and what you do here at Virtuous. Yeah. Of course. Good afternoon, everyone. Good morning if you're on the Pacific Coast, but my name is Kath. I'm a solutions engineer here at Virtuous. So my role is really to be the technical expert of our product and to really help organizations to find a best solution for for their team. So, I'm excited to kind of lead you through a demo today. That's really my my job here. I see we have people coming in from all over the place. So, Alejandra, hopefully, the Bay Area has cooled down. I know that there was a big heat wave there recently. So our our thoughts are with you. And, yeah, just excited to to lead today's session. I was at that heat wave. I was in San Francisco last week. It was super hot downtown San Francisco and, absolutely. But glad that you all are here. Absolutely. I if you don't know who I am, I am Eric Thomas. I I consider myself a recovering fundraiser. I've spent the last 20 some years on the front lines fundraising, getting to know what they're visiting with donors and building generosity and relationships. And I have the great pleasure representing us out in the field of presenting in conversations of what we're doing here because I understand the nonprofit side, and now I'm on the tech side, and I get to help be that linguistic between Kath and everyone. Right? Because so, super excited that we're here. But before we even get started, I let you know, just jumping into this, I wanna talk a little bit about how we're gonna break down our silos, but we really like, one thing I love doing when I do presentations is starting with this baseline of generosity of let's take a breath. Let's take a moment. Let's identify where do we learn about generosity and where do we grow we want to grow and actually get called into fundraising and working in nonprofit and supporting our communities. Personally, it was me with the Boy Scouts. You know, I grew up in the you know, from the entire program from, like, Tiger Club to to Eagle Scout. I've served on our our local board, our national board. I've even served working at the organization. I firmly believe it's who I am and who brought me into it because it's all about love of humanity and community and helping one another. Growing up in Pittsburgh where I got to watch mister Rogers on the weekends and be able to say be kind and be generous. Those are the things that drove me to to fundraising. And really, I think that's where it's true for all of us. I everyone has that one story. My path is a little different than all of ours, but we're all here together. And I really love this quote here that just kinda encompasses all of it, is from our friend, Egalany Jebb. She's the founder of Save the Children, and her quote says is if we have to devise the means of making known the facts in such a way as to touch the imagination of the world, The world is not ungenerous, but unimaginative and very busy. But I think through my own personal experience, and we'll talk a little bit about this with the not just the silos inside our own organization, but what the silos are of our personal lives. Right? Like an average person receives 400 emails on a daily basis, and how do we break through that mindset of getting their our communication directly to our donor, our giver, because these things matter. And so what was busy to us in 2024, like I said, I'm in Pennsylvania. It's a state contentious with politics right now. So I'm getting a whole bunch of noise both sides of the parties. Well, how do our donors and our nonprofits gonna be able to get communicating about giving at the year end? And, you know, I think through her, this quote here is a 100 years old. Right? Like what was busy then is way different than what it is today, but it's still relative. Our donors aren't on generous. They're just busy and we need to get through that. And at the end of the day, we're facing this challenge. And you guys, if you've seen anything with Virtuis, you understand that this challenge that we see is coming up here is the fact that we've been focused our attention as nonprofit leaders so much on this traditional approach, the lagging donor retention. We're getting away from the you're seeing giving trends going down. You see volunteers and going down, church attendance going down. All these things are moving into the same direction because and we're doing the same thing to combat it, getting the same results. And we at Virtuous believe we need to do things differently, and that's through this idea of responsive fundraising. And we can do this in a whole host of different matters. This is the methodology that drives all of our technology, which Kath will showcase here in a in a bit. But when you do responsive, you're gonna increase your average gift. You're gonna increase your retention, decrease our staff time, and see an enormous amount of growth and opportunity across the board. And at the end of the day, I think our donors are gonna want that experience. We're used to it, believe it or not. I mean, like, you think through, like, right, with the I skipped ahead too quickly. The world around us is changing. Right? Like, Netflix is upon us. Right? The whole idea of watching a TV show and it's listening to our personal what we just watch, and it's gonna suggest another series. Or, you know, the the the fact that Amazon and Google know when we're our shopping techniques and our tactics and what we're gonna be doing. They're doing these two way behavior with our with our customers. Why aren't we doing that with our donors and our givers? Because at the end of the day, giving is intrinsically personal, and we want to help those nonprofits. I wanna hear from my nonprofit on my birthday. You're right. I mean, don't you, like, don't you wanna, like, just be a thank and appreciate on your anniversary of your gift, whatever it might be? And, like, that's where it intrinsically we need to be getting into. It's harder to harder to raise dollars from from donors today. We need to be actual to break down in there further. Right? And I think this is what we've done, and I get it. I mean, 92% of nonprofits are less than $2,000,000 revenue organizations with 2 to 3 employees doing all of the work, and it's hard what we do. And so taking this mindset of, like and I did this when I was in the space. I would take another acquisition list, and I would put them in a marketing communication calendar and hope my team would communicate the same way to the same people at a mass scale. Just add update the gift ask array just a little bit because when we need to raise more dollars this year. And what happens is you see 76% of folks are opting out of that communication immediately. Right? We're only retaining 24% because at the end of the day, we as nonprofits, we're talking at our constituents instead of with them. Right? Like, especially right now where we have year end fundraising, You know, we I mean, I come from the Boy Scouts, so it's popcorn season time. Right? And, like and then it's giving Tuesday, which in my mind is nonprofit hunger games where we are just all competing against each other, and we're talking against each other and said, why don't we start communicating effectively and become two way and have this learning opportunity there? What's even worse, I mean, this is statistically proven is, you know, donors are consistently opting out of giving to our organizations on a on a larger scale, and this comes from doctor Adrian Sargent's work with the Giving Institute and the IUPU and Lilly School. And you're seeing 50% of donors are turning over on a regular basis because inappropriate asks and lack of messaging and lack of transparency and all those things really do matter. Like I said, giving is intrinsically personal, and we need to break that. And really, like and I'm gonna pivot for a second just because I wanna go to another area. And if you've seen us speak and you've seen this in the past year, I'm gonna lean into right now part part of, not all of, but part of our responsive maturity model. And I would love Lauren, you can put a quote or the the the model website on the in the chat as we get through it to be to download the entire report, but I'm gonna go high level with it, is the two problems that we've really traditionally seen in our fundraising systems right now is this first one is this unresponsive one to many experience. Right? Like, this mass marketing communication that I outlined briefly, we're talking at at so many people. We're getting and then in your daily lives, we're getting 400 average emails. I saw a stat that it was, like, 45100 sponsored ads on a daily basis in your world, like a billboard or a digital ad or whatever it is. You know, the the individual that created the infinite scroll on our phone, you travel about 8 miles a day just scrolling your phone. Like, these are the things that we but like I said, giving is personal. How do we get through that and help our organization grow? And that's through this way. Right? And I'm gonna skip over this here, but the the second challenge we see is this silos that we have throughout our entire organization. Right? Unresponsive teams across the board. Right? We share walls with our and I'm I'm in a nonprofit organization. That's why I'm, like, pointing around. We share walls with our colleagues, but we don't share goals and missions. And so our fundraising team isn't talking to marketing. Our marketing team isn't talking to program. No one really talks to finance. Right? We they just keep us all in in check and in order. But, like, at the end of the day, our our goals are all completely different too. Right? Like, marketing's goals are more interested in, you know, impressions and likes and opens on emails. And what the website does it look good? Does it feel good? Whereas fundraising, we need to focus in on our donor dollars with the revenue because at the end of the day, program is the most important thing that we do in supporting of our organizations, and we need to be able to get them engaged with everything that we do. Right? Plus our goals are separate. We don't use different sys we all use different systems and programs and campaigns and communicate differently. You know, it's just it it's a mess, and it's like, how do we break all of these down? And you would be not be here if you didn't know how to break down silos. Right? Like, this is why we're here. And that's where I wanna share into is we wanna have this more responsive model for generosity as we grow because it's an idea. And if you know anything with Virtuis, you know who we are. You know we believe in this idea of responsive fundraising, and it's a real simple framework and is what I kinda like to break it down as. Whereas we want to listen to who our donors and our constituents and our givers are, we wanna build relationships with them. We wanna build authentic ones. Right? Like, when when someone says they're interested in a program, let's talk to them about that program and continue the journey around the way. And that's the key area. Right? Like, god gave us 2 ears and one mouth for a reason. We need to listen twice as much as we speak to our givers and our donors and our individuals, learn what's interesting to them, and then take it to that next step of connecting with them personally. Let's create those automatic touch points to be able to, like, meet them where they are, meet our donors where they are. If they're choosing to be you wanna be a tech or tech or text or a mail or a face to face, whatever it might be, we need to be able to connect with them based on what we heard previously. Then we wanna suggest that next step. You know, not all the time we we as fundraisers, we will always year end, and I get it. We're gonna have to ask everybody for a gift on every single appeal and set and message it out there, but it's not always ready or the right time to ask for a gift. It might to be like to download a report or get a tour of our facility or come and join and participate in a program and volunteer. These are the appropriate next steps on that donor journey. And the last one is the learn where we wanna continually to test and optimize and make sure we're doing the right things for our organization on a regular basis. And at the end of the day, we want to be able to I mean, just because we did it last year doesn't mean we have to do it again this year or even continue on the process this year, like maybe testing control to see what are those things that were happening. But that's the entire donor experience piece. And so when you do that, you are able to take individuals down in a complete path and have these dynamic campaigns so that when we acquire a new prospect through an event or mail or peer to peer, they all have their own individual journey. And that's what I talked about earlier is that's gonna increase our retention, increase our average gift, and most importantly, our engagement with our within our organization. And let's take that model and start communicating it to our silos. So now let's have that responsive team experience where marketing and finance and program and fundraising are all working in collaboration with one another so that we can start sharing data, start sharing our insights, start having that key performance indicator alignment so that we can focus on our north star of where we want to go. Right? I mean, we're all over the place and, right, we gotta break each one of those down. And so like I said, I wanna start over here. I'm gonna go to just 2 session, 2 segments of the the maturity model. Kath, I wanna go through the first two if you you're good with that. Of course. Really, I think with with the my thing, it when I look at the maturity model, I think the most important factor of the entire model that we have put out is really the data health and reporting. Right? Like, if we have data, let's look at data, but if all we have our opinions, let's go with mine. How many times have you heard that from a CEO or your leadership? Right? Like, hey. I had an idea. Let's go do this. Let's do this process. It's to your end. Let's try it. And, you know, just go raise money. Let's go to we have to have the data. Data's gonna drive the strategy, which drives our creative, which creates our results. And we need to be able to go down that path into in harmony, and have that data centric. This is the piece where it's also I always share is, from a tech standpoint, from an ERIC standpoint, I take a different approach when I say the term data. It's not just about numbers. These data points are humans. They are donors. They are givers. They have purpose. They have interest, and they have buy into our nonprofit. So let's listen to the data. Let's listen to what they want and drive that process on where we want to go. Right? And so it's interesting that, you know, I I love looking at reports and, like, trying to identify the analysis of what's out there in the space and everything else. And, you know, there's a CCS report that they did last year, that said 66% of the nonprofit leaders do not trust the data that's in their current system. And I'm not shocked by that. Right? Because how many of us I my wife and I just my wife donated to an organization a couple weeks ago, and they thanked me instead. And it's like, how many times does that happen on a regular basis? Because the way our systems are set up, the way we process gifts, the way we have our procedures, whatever it might be. Maybe we misspelled my name in a gift or an opportunity where it says Eric with a c instead of Eric with a k. Right? We don't have confidence, and we need to have confidence in our data so that we can have that communication out there to be able to have those conversations. We need to have a coverage across all our contact info. We need to focus on upgrading and updating our phone, our email, our home addresses. You know, we change our email address on a regular basis when we go to a new job. So do our donors, so do our givers. You know? So but people still have the same cell phone number for the last 10 or 15 years, yet we're still communicating them in traditional ways instead of doing a multichannel approach. And at the end of the day, with this new dataset and having a good opportunity for data health, we can start now having team wide visibility into those trusted goals, actual numbers, real numbers, where instead of having all these shadow databases, let's get it all into 1 umbrella on one house, one situation so that we can see a complete reversion of everything out there. The, oh, my screen kinda keeps dropping down. The, the other piece that I wanna share talk through is the idea of data health and reporting. Right? Data health and reporting and NCOA and email hygiene, all of these things matter on a regular basis because we should be doing an NCO report on a on at least twice a year. We and with this new dataset, we're able to have multiple conversations and KPI reporting and shared insights. And, you know, I've I think about this, Kathlyn, the other day. It was, like, 20 years ago. I this data wasn't available to me as a frontline fundraiser. I had to wait a while to be able to get it, inside the system, but, like, now it's such more impressive, and it's more up to date. I can be able to see what is out there to get these weekly KPI reports. And if I would start somewhere, I would start here. I would start at these three critical areas to be able to start the the journey of what what I'm looking at for my KPIs. The giving revenue by tiers, that's just the modern approach to the giving pyramid. Right? I wanna say, like, hey. Here's our top tier donors. Here's our mid level donors. Here's our annual fund donors. That's what my landscape for my givers and my organization looks like. That middle one is all about, like, when the giving is coming to our organization. Like, is it forecasting on the front end of the year? Are we giving in the back end of the year? Maybe it was a direct mail appeal. Maybe it was a special event, whatever it was. But I think the most critical one for me is this third one, which is all about donor retention. And I getting folks in the habit of giving to be able to break those silos and have that conversation and seeing the strict the the percentage of 1st to second or second to third or third to 4th matter at the end of the day. That's the data side. Now I'm gonna jump into the second side before we go into the system and show us a little bit of Virtuis and how we can help with that. But I think the other critical factor of all of this to be able to focus on these news breaking down these silos is having integrated tech, having integrated teams, having everyone in alignment on the right thing on where we wanna go. I'm a big believer. I never even heard of g 2 until I came to Virtuis, and I'm a big believer in g 2. This is where I we saw this on g 2, and I don't we don't even know who this Monica person is, but she log up there. G 2 is a great resource. It's kinda like the Yelp for restaurant reviews for techno. You can use it for nonprofit. You can use in your personal life. My wife is an interior designer. She used it to identify new technology platforms for her business. Like, it's just a really good tool to start looking out there, seeing what what what is available and everything else. But this top eleven reason from David Letterman, right, is we had Monica shared her top things that she saw was higher employee productivity when you started integrating your tech and your teams. You could actually have a 3 60 degree view of your customer. So imagine now, like, your volunteer database, your giving database, your marketing database, your grateful patient database, all of these things, your alumni and your students, like, where I'm at a university. So all these different things are all now can be holistically around the table and see everything, and it can increase our efficiencies, reduce this or improve security and reduce the risk, reduce our cost because it's all shared pieces. All of these things matter to be able to do that. And now we can have, like, the opportunity to have integration in Teams. Now our marketing department can see what fundraising is doing. Right? And and vice versa. We can take all of that data and text and web visits. We're all used to going online, right, with the accepting of cookies. That's, like, human nature to us. So why can't we, as donors and nonprofits, do the same and start tracking and listening to where our givers are going on their website and have it inform our marketing team or our program team or whatever it might be internally and have that the piece of program outcomes and volunteerism together integrated. I think these things matter for us, and that's what we do here at Virtuis. Virtuis is that middle point. Right? We have a boatload, I wanna say over 70 native integrations that live within our platform, as well as how we have an open API, and we're connected to whatever system that also can be connected through an API or a Zap or Zapier or whatever it might be. But when you have the CRM and the marketing and the email and the giving and the volunteer and the program and everything else altogether, that's when you can start creating real goals, real values, real focus, forecast, and being able to get there. And one thing that I love sharing, I'm gonna take a few more seconds, and I wanna kick it over to you, Kath, is the, this idea of generosity ops coming from nonprofit. I never even heard of the idea of a revenue operations team, And, like and this is a thing in the for profit space specifically in tech. And what our rev ops team does is they identify what technologies we should be using that integrate with everything else. How do we inform our marketing team on how to communicate out to the market? And how do our sales team be able to stay focused on their numbers and where they're going? That's rev ops. And I'm not saying we as a nonprofit industry need to hire more account because that's the last thing we we need. We don't have the budget. We don't have the ability. We don't have the staffing. But what I would love to see if a nonprofit would lean forward on is creating this idea of a generosity ops leadership team. Right? Think through all of those silos that we have, and if we take 10% of everyone's time on a quarterly basis at the baseline. Right? Small small amount. And to get them to come together where they can sit down on a monthly or quarterly basis and actually streamline all of what I just shared, where everyone has it like, you take your different technologies, your different databases, your different strategies, your different goals, your different KPIs, and you get that generosity ops team together. So now we have shared insights. Now we know where we're going. Now we know what's gonna happen. And you know what's gonna happen? Your revenue's gonna go up. Generosity's gonna go up. People are gonna be more engaged. Our givers are gonna get engaged more. Our staff is gonna be happier because they're not gonna be competing with each other, and it's gonna be a really grateful piece. Because at the end of the day, donors are gonna continue to give when they feel connected and they have confidence in organization and a cause they care deeply about. And so with that, obviously, my answer is the solution, the big the big moment should be responsive fundraising is the way to break down these silos and be able to use the technology and the solution that's out there. We are gonna be able to do that. Can't wait to have Kath here show all the things that we can do within our platform and our solution, having that two way behavior driven mindset. And that's where the the framework comes in talking about listen, connect, suggest, learn. Going through the idea of doing, and we're gonna talk about it briefly here is just this idea of doing dynamic campaigns. Right? Like, so imagine when Steven now attends an event, marketing event. Let's say if marketing puts on an event in our community or whatever it might be, an hour after the event, he gets a thank you email with a survey in it. And based on that survey, he gets a phone call the next day saying, hey. I wanna you know, how did you like the event, everything else from someone on our team. And on that survey, 2 days later, he gets a text message based on the results from that initial email and that survey. He went on to the website he gave, and now 2 weeks later, he actually has a postcard in the mail closing the loop and saying thank you. Right? It's all about timing. It's all about intent. It's multichannel. It's hyper personal. Our entire team around the board is actually working collaboratively because hopefully at this point, our marketing team is helping build some of that content. And it's the same thing here. Like, we can get taken to the next level where let's say Barnabas has a new donor journey in welcome series. Right? That's where we're gonna need our marketing team to help create new awareness structure on when someone gave to our organization. We have so many great programs that we're supporting. Let's use marketing to be able to communicate that new donor welcome series. We have to communicate differently to to Courtney because she's she's already given. We just have to reengage her. She's a last year, but not this year, a lie bunt where we need to be able to bring her back into the fold maybe with some newer stories or program outcomes, whatever it might be, and that's where we can have those conversations. And we have Neil who's a major gift prospect. Now we can wealth screen him and have the opportunity to identify capacity. And then Jenna, like I said, we always track cookies. Right? We're used to all of this in our own personal lives. And how many times do we put something in our own Target cart or Walmart cart online? And like All of this matters, and you're able to grow generosity by having individual paths and journeys and event coming from different areas, and that's where the opportunity is. We at Virtuis work just more than as a CRM, so we're a responsive fundraising platform and a solution that's gonna help you grow generosity. We do all of those things, giving, the volunteer, the signals, the automation, the events, the CRM, all of those things in one. And I'm gonna take a breath because this I'm super excited, Matt. Like, this is incredible. I'm so excited to kind of nitpick some of the things that we're doing. If you wanna get a demo, there's a QR code. My my producer here, Lauren, will put a link into the chat as well. We're here. Ask the questions. Get involved. I cannot wait to deep deep dive with you. Awesome. Well, thank you, Eric. I think that was a very insightful presentation. I appreciate you kinda, like, framing up what today's conversation is really about. Because what we're really trying to dive into today is how do we start to break down those different silos that do exist in nonprofit organizations and really help to start bringing the team together so that we can better collaborate, and ultimately bring more donors into our fold, have better relationships with all of those people. So what I'm gonna do today is I'm gonna dive into some different parts of our platform and really try to highlight those different areas where Virtuis helps to provide that visibility into your team. So there's a lot of different ways that we do this. We probably won't get through everything today but really just wanna highlight a few of the things that come to mind first. So Eric actually had shown in that presentation that one of the first pieces of really getting your teams aligned is making sure that you have some different reports and KPIs that can be tracked across the team. So how are we making sure that we're marching towards singles? First thing that comes to mind for me is that we have reporting that is easily visible between different teams. So you can see here that I actually have this responsive dashboard that comes with Virtuis. So these are not reports that I've had to build out myself. This dashboard is actually going to be built for you as soon as you log in to the product. And really, this actually came from a direct need of our CEO and founder, Gabe, because Gabe sits on the board of multiple different nonprofits. And often in those, like, board review meetings or annual review meetings, him and other board members were looking to understand these different parts of the organization, but realized that a lot of times, this data lives in different teams. And it's really hard to pull that information together. So this is really helping you and your team to have that snapshot across all of the different silos, and then high be able to give that information to your board members as well. So you can see here, it's looking at great financial data. Okay. Let me see an average gift size. Maybe I wanna see total giving month over month. But what this is also doing is it's starting to pull in non financial information as well. So it's not only looking at, okay, what does development and maybe finance look at for their metrics, but what does marketing look at as success? Is it how well people are being engaged? How many website visitors we're having? So really making sure that again we're looking at that full picture and not looking at data in different silos here. Kath, what I love about this too, like when you scroll up to the top, my favorite part, some of that statistics that I would have to do would take my team weeks or months just to come up with. And, like, to have it here at my fingertips at the second, I could be able to see all of it. Plus the silo piece, I can see the marketing data, the website data, the giving data, all in a key key area. Exactly. And I think a lot of times, like, maybe your board members want a report of this. So great. I could take a screenshot of this. Then we do also have other ways to build out even more customizable dashboards where you could schedule reports. So again, making sure that you have easy access to information. When we think about reporting, another thing that comes to mind is that there are again shareable dashboards. So let's say that we did want to have a report that we create for like our our major gifts team. This is giving me that flexibility to actually say okay what reports should we be measuring against? This is still giving everyone the flexibility to come in here and drill down into their own information. So if they just wanna look at that their portfolio, great. They can do so. But it's making sure again that we are all measuring towards those same KPIs. Also helping leadership to make sure that everyone is marching towards those same goals. So again, thinking about, like, visibility here and to Eric's point, that the data is easy to pull. It's not taking me weeks to get to this amount of information, but these insights are almost instant for me. Couple other things that I think about, on our dashboards that are really gonna be helpful for bringing all of your team members together are that there is a full task manager in the product. So what I'll show you here is that there's different ways that you can view the tasks that are outstanding for the organization. So right now, I'm filtered in a view for just myself. But what I love is that you can also expand this out and look at, okay, the entire organization. So I can do this in, like, a a list format or also more of, like, a project management format. And, again, here, I have the ability to filter down. So if I'm in leadership, I don't just wanna see what one individual person has to do. Maybe I wanna get an understanding of what all of the outstanding tasks are. And what's also really nice about this is that you can even assign tasks out to a teammate. So, again, providing that flexibility to have that cross collaboration and not having to necessarily, like, walk over to their desk and ask them to maybe do something, but actually assigning a task in the CRM that provides visibility into our projects and really what we have outstanding. Well, Kath, I mean, the reality is, I mean, a lot of us are already doing, like, using an Asana or some other different platform. Yeah. And, like, just keep it all in the same spot because my favorite line my my favorite and worst line I ever heard is, like, if it's not in the CRM, did it happen? Right? And so, like, these that's why this here matters. Absolutely. And I think that's a lot of the different things that we'll highlight in today's demonstration is that that, historically, a lot of organizations are doing a lot of tracking in Excel. It's on sticky notes or maybe data's living in your head, which is really common as well. So we wanna make sure that we have all that information in the CRM because if there's ever staff turnover, or you reshuffle portfolios, we wanna, again, make sure that we're never losing information about our donors and our organization. Awesome. Okay. On that dashboard, the last thing that I do want to highlight here is that you will also have this section where I'm actually getting a list of best calls to make today. So this is where Virtuos is really leaning in that idea of responsive fundraising that Eric just reviewed. And this is really saying, okay, how do we make a suggestion based on the person that we're actually interacting with? So we don't wanna just have that one blanket approach of, okay, let's reach out to everyone on Giving Tuesday. We're gonna prospect them for a $100. We really wanna start to cater and personalize our different ask. So this section here is giving you all of that information upfront. What I love about this is again that it's giving your team visibility. So it's allowing everyone to come in here and see, okay, who are the people that we're focusing on today? But there's flexibility here too. So if you do have, like, a portfolio management style, it's easy for your major gift officers or individual fundraisers to filter this view down. So again, having that option to either look at data, like, at that that full view or filter this down for just people that I'm in charge of working with. I think what's also nice about this is that you have that thank you call section here. So a lot of times I'll hear that like leadership maybe jumps in, maybe sometimes board members, and they wanna make some thank you calls. Right? They wanna have some personal touches on donors. Again, this is giving you that one consolidated look at, okay, who are all of the recent donors that made gifts that we we might wanna reach out to and have leadership help out with. So it's giving you that visibility and allowing me to check off when I've completed an action, so that we're never duplicating those efforts. Because we don't wanna have 2 different people reach out without realizing it's really, again, allowing you to see everything in one place. Okay. What I'm gonna jump into next, is an example of a contact record. And as Eric kind of showed on that previous screen, Virtuis is really much more than a CRM. Right? We have the ability to be a donor management system, marketing is integrated, events are integrated, volunteering is integrated. So again, our focus is making sure that your teams can be fully aligned and have all of the information that you need in one source of truth. So the first thing that I think when we think about silos that's really important to call out is this activity feed right here on the right hand side. This is showing me everything that is happening with this household. So because marketing's integrated, you can see that I can actually view, okay, did someone click on an email? Did they click a specific link in an email that we sent out? Where if I'm logging any, like, interactions, that interaction is automatically syncing back to Virtuis as a contact note. So you're not having to, like, work in your CRM and then jump out to a marketing tool, compare and contrast information. All of that information is gonna be in one place so that your team knows what is the most recent interaction that happened with this person. I e the first pillar of responsive fundraising, which is listen. So we wanna listen to what they're doing, what they're engaging with, how they're engaging, and be able to engage it back into our system. Absolutely. And this isn't only pulling in marketing data. You'll see that it's also logging, okay, what are all of their recent gifts? Maybe I had an in person meeting with Ryan Mandy Butler, and I logged a note here. So, again, it's really giving me that full picture of the events that they're coming to, the volunteer hours that they're logging. It's really easy to see everything that's happening in one place. Mhmm. Again, you do have flexibility to filter this down. So let's say you are on marketing and we really just wanna see communications. Great. I can filter that down to my own view. So it's giving you again that flexibility to say, do I wanna just look at the information that's really relevant to my role right now, or do I wanna have an overview of all of that data? So you have that flexibility. Couple other things that you'll see here, on the left hand side, up in the left hand corner, you can see I can easily identify if someone is in a portfolio. So again, it's helping our team to know who might be in charge of managing that relationship. And I know I'm jumping around a little bit here, but similarly, this important note section, These are some different ways that your team can get a quick snapshot of what is the most important information that I need to know if I'm interacting with these donors. Or, prospective donors, maybe they're volunteers. So again, having that ability to say, okay, if someone's gonna reach out to Ray and Mandy, please do not reach out before or after 4 PM. They've asked us multiple times. We need to preserve that relationship. Yep. And I love that. You know, it's like one of the original features in Virtuous. I don't know if you knew this, but, like, that red box was, like, the first thing that we did, and it's never gonna change colors. Like, it's like it is the perfect. It's on every record, so everybody can see whatever it is specifically to that record. Yeah. I did not know that. That's good to know. And you can log multiple important notes too. So it's not like you're limited to say, okay, we can only say one thing is important about this donor. You do have that flexibility to add multiple notes in here. And what I also mentioned is that, like, we have everything in one place. So we went through a little bit of marketing. What I do wanna show you again is that you have the flexibility to view everything about this supporter. So if I quickly toggle over to our events tab, it is showing me what events Ray and Mandy have been invited to, did they RSVP to, and then whether or not they actually attended that event. Same thing for volunteering, we have the ability for you to have opportunities online and the ability for people to sign up for specific shifts, and all of that data is being logged back to their record. So I I've worked with a lot of organizations where they're losing using different softwares that don't speak to each other, or maybe volunteering is being logged in, like, an Excel spreadsheet. We wanna be able to understand that full picture of someone's involvement because maybe they're not a large donor right now, but they've been volunteering tens or hundreds of hours. That still deserves recognition. Right? So we wanna make sure that we are recognizing all of the different the different ways that someone could be involved with our organization. What I think I like about this too is, like, not only that, we we as nonprofit leaders, we only look at year over year numbers. We only like say, hey. How many hours someone donate or they volunteer this year? They're only a $100,000. They gave this year a $100,000. We haven't given the previous, so we're not gonna invite them to other events. We need to look at lifetime value. We need to look at cumulative giving, lumber of volunteer hours because all those things matter in the course of the piece. And that's what I love about all of this too. Yeah. That's a great call out, Eric. And I think some other things to mention is that, like, your view of these different widgets is also customizable. So again, if I'm, like, on the volunteer team and I wanna pull in a quick snapshot of their volunteer hours, it's allowing you to really customize what data is important to you and your role. But still giving the flexibility to other teams to pull that information as well. Mhmm. It's great. Awesome. Okay. And then as we're, like, kind of on that topic of being able to to see everything in one place and really understand the way that someone is involved with our organization, I think what's important to call out too is that you have a lot of flexibility to customize a record. So if you wanna come in here and add in some custom fields about, like, alumni information, great. I can easily do that. Again, it's allowing you to to see that overlap of they're a donor, they're a volunteer, they're also an alumni. So that's really gonna inform how I reach out to this specific person. Same thing, you can do that through tags. So if you're kind of trying to, like, break out different segments, this is allowing you to quickly do all of that segmentation inside of Virtuis. So again, I'm seeing that that full picture of their involvement. Great. Awesome. Okay. Couple last things that I do wanna call out on our contact records are that there are a lot of ways that you can start to, like, even enrich your data further. So a lot of that was kind of relying on, like, what do you know about your supporters? But there are ways that Virtuis takes it a step further and says, okay, how can we help to inform additional information about your people? So that's where our our integrations and different aspects of Virtuos are really coming into play. You'll see here that I have a native integration inside of Virtuos. So again you're never having to like build out a list, export it, import that list to another tool, and do another re import, which is very common. Again, a lot of disconnected tools has been like the historical the norm. Right? But here, you could actually run a screening inside of the tool. So you're I'll I'll just jump in for one second. Sorry to interrupt. When you do all of that components, it goes back to the lack of confidence in the data because we have more opportunity for risk, more deduplication, more name changes, additional records. So, like, of course, to your point. Yeah. And I think the other thing to call out there is that, like, not, like, not believing the data as you put it. It could also be just, like, out of date. Like, if we run a screening 5 years ago and the information hasn't been updated, that's not the information that we wanna use to reach out to these supporters. So allowing you to just run an automation, allow you to update this data. And then you can see here again, it's pulling in all kinds of information that I can use then to really segment my outreach. Yep. You'll also see, similarly, we have the ability to do social insights. So what donor search is really looking at is, like, capacity information. Right? We're mainly looking at finances and understanding, okay, could this donor potentially be a major donor? Could we level them up to the next tier of our giving societies? But again, coming back to that idea that we wanna really make sure that we're looking at the full person. Not just, okay, what could they give to our organization dollar wise, but really what could their involvement or impact be on our community. Mhmm. So this social insights piece is, again, allowing you to do some research inside of Virtuis. So this is using their email addresses that you have on record and pulling in great information like their different social records, any organizations that they're affiliated with, all in one place. So your major gifts team that might be doing this in Google and in LinkedIn or spending a lot of time researching in every individual, you could just run that screening and have that populated for your team. K. Couple of last things on the contact record itself. I mentioned that marketing is fully integrated. So if I were to be engaging with Ryan, Mandy, and let's say, okay, I I just found out a bunch of great information about them, and I wanna communicate with them. I can actually just send a text message directly from here. So I don't have to go into a different platform or send it off of my personal line. I can actually just text them directly here. Again, that'll log back to the record. Same thing with an email. I can come in here, and this would give your marketing team or your development team the ability to build out different templates. We have merge tags available, so it's already, customizing your outreach for you. And again, this is syncing back to the contact record automatically. So all you have to do is BCC Virtuous on any of your interactions, and it will link to the contact record. So you're not having to jump into different tools, or you're not having to copy and paste those interactions back into the tool. So that okay. She goes back to the earlier point that you shared was, like, when our staff leave and they go on to new career paths, like, I mean, I remember sitting in the chair and going into everyone's inbox and saying, hey. What were the communication? What were the relationship? What did they say to our donors? And it wasn't in the database. And, like, to have an ability to be on carbon copy, I would have my entire volunteer program and development and every all those different silos, everyone can communicate. So now we can have that complete dialogue. Yeah. And that's a really great call out. And I've seen that even, like, at for profit companies too. Right? It's people had interactions that they didn't log into the system, and then you have no idea what happened in that conversation. So let's make sure that we're not losing any of that history or any of that context. The last thing that I will call out, on the contact record itself is that we do also have a mobile app available. So when I think about, like, really breaking down those barriers to entry or barriers to, like, communication, I think the mobile app is also really powerful. Because a lot of times, we will say, okay, we print out a list for executive director of, okay, who are they meeting with today? We write up some profiles on them, and then they're working off of, like, a a Google Doc or a spreadsheet. What if you could actually just assign some tasks to them inside of Virtuous where they can click directly on those those individuals' profiles and get the snapshot in the database? So it's really effective at, like, when someone needs to pull up information on their phone, great. They can do so. We also you could use your your phone speak to text functionality to log notes back to the system. So, again, you're not having to remember, okay, I had 5 donor meetings today. I'm gonna get them all mixed up, and I have to try to log my notes at the end of the, the meeting. I could just do that directly after I I wrap that up, have all of the information streamlined for me. Okay. I love that. I I used to do that back in the day, when I did donor visits. I would, like, streamline. I would do use my my it was called dragon dictation back in the day. I don't know if you remember that, Kath. The, and I would do it and I would send it to my, note. But, like, to have the ability to have it very easy and accessible now is incredible. Yeah. Definitely. Makes it a lot more streamlined and make sure that, like, you don't forget to log your notes too or forget what happened in that interaction. Right. Yeah. Well, why we're kind of on that topic of, like, major gifts or, like, maybe connecting with people, for those larger opportunities, another thing that I want to highlight here quickly is just that you have the ability to create, like, a major gift as pipeline. So as we think about really giving visibility into your team and to your leadership, this is actually allowing you to provide a more streamlined forecast for leadership. So in a skip to task pipeline, essentially, what I'm doing is I'm tracking all of those different solicitations that I have out, and I have the ability again to filter down this view. So if I'm in leadership, I probably wanna see everything that's happening. So I could also come in here and say, okay. I just wanna look at my own portfolio. Mhmm. So allowing you to also drill down into a specific time period. But what you'll see here is that this is all drag and drop. So this forecast is actually updating for me. As I'm progressing these opportunities along, I can provide an accurate forecast to our board members, to our development director. Instead of having that data live outside of the tool and the manager having to kind of ask each teammate individually, I have that actual data living in the system. So, again, just providing some more of that that visibility into, what you have out. Awesome. Okay. Anything to add there, Eric, before I kinda jump into automation? No. I think automation. We've got a few more minutes left. I would love automation is the game. That's internal, external automation to be able to help break down some of these conversations internally. Yeah. That's my favorite part. Perfect. Well, what I really wanna dive into is that automation is extremely powerful to to Eric's point. There are a lot of different things that you can use automation for. So really any process that you can think of is something that you can likely automate inside of Virtuis. For today's session, I I know we really wanna focus on, like, breaking down data silos. Right? So how can we make sure that automation is helping us to align different teammates? So I have a few ones that I want to share specifically, but I do just wanna give you a quick preview into, like, how automation works and what practices, or templates that you have. So you can see here, in every area of Virtuis, we really strive to take the legwork off of nonprofit organizations. So there are different templates that are already gonna be built into the tool when you come in. So you could see here, it could be something like a birthday celebration. Maybe after an event, our events team wants to have some different kind of follow ups. It could be, okay, let's break down the people that came to our event and the people that did not come to our event. We have different communications going out to those communities. What this is also doing though is that you can see there's a lot of giving information in here, but this is where, again, we're breaking down those silos because I have volunteer data in here as well. So if I wanna have an automation that runs on, okay, everyone that has crossed the threshold of volunteering over 10 hours, great. That could send them an automated notification, maybe it's an email saying, hey, thank you for all of your support. Maybe our volunteer coordinator also gets a task notification to call that volunteer directly and thank them. So again, it's really allowing you to make sure that all of that information is living in one place. Couple automations though that I do want to show you just a little bit deeper into how these actually work is I could build this out for something like a a major donor qualification. So what you can see here is that we have an automated workflow where there are essentially 4 different columns. Each of these columns essentially represents a different step of the workflow. So this is where you can actually start to create the logic of, okay, if this happens, we want this pathway to happen. Yep. If something else happens, we want them to go through this pathway. So the reason that I thought this one would be a good, example to show is that it's really showing you how in one automation, I can have actions happening for different teammates. So right now, Ashley has a pathway for her major, major donors, and then I have a separate pathway for my own major donors. Our processes could look very similar or they could be very different. Maybe I work with a portfolio of, like, our mid level donors, so I have more people. Right? I have to automate some more of those touches. Whereas, maybe Ashley is working with, like, our highest tier donors, and she doesn't wanna have any kind of communications going out automatically. So that's really allowing your team to kinda customize exactly what's happening. But you can see here, all different types of actions can be automated. So maybe we do assign out those tasks. Maybe we are sending out an actual email through automation. Really allowing me to kinda customize that journey, but allowing me to do it for multiple teammates at once. That's what I love about all of this. It's the fact that, like, it's, you know, we wanna do these broad things, and we keep talking about mass marketing and mass communication, but how do we make it drill it down to be personal and connected and individually focused? And this is the end to all of that. How do we make it easier for us to get to the boots on the ground and do what the process we wanna do? Because I hate saying it. It's like all nonprofits, we all believe we're all special unicorns, you know, and we all do things differently, but the reality is we don't. We do we need this type of process in this place, the best practices, and make it our own way and and pieces. Yeah. I completely agree. And I think in every conversation that that I have, it's like there are organizations that are doing things similarly. There's also organizations that are doing things very differently. So it's helpful to, like, kinda just chat through, like, all of the possibilities, but, really, automation can be used to to power any of those things that you're doing repetitively. Let's free up some time for for your team and your staff. Yes. But I wanted to show one more example here. We won't dive into, like, every single action that's happening. But what this is showing is that you could also break things down for, like, different giving societies. It could be for your volunteers. It could be for your events. So, again, these are gonna be usable for every different team. But you can see there's different assignments happening here. So even within one, like, step of a workflow, I could still have emails or tasks that are going out from different teammates. So it's allowing us to really collaborate, and have that that full interaction that we want to have with our supporters. So good. Awesome. Okay. I know, we have about 7 minutes left. So what I wanna give you is just a really quick sneak peek into email marketing, and then we'll talk a little bit about the integrations that we have with Virtuos. So I won't go through for this step by step, but what I do want to call out again is that there is marketing fully built into the product. So you've seen SMS texting. We also have an option called letters on demand. So what that allows you to do is actually have letters or postcards that you would design out inside of Virtuous, but then a vendor is actually printing, stamping, and mailing those on behalf of your team. So really effective for, like, a new donor welcome series. Maybe after an event you want to send a thank you letter, maybe for everyone's birthday you want to send a postcard in the mail. So making sure that again you're meeting your donors where they're at and having that full multi channel approach here. When it comes to the emails itself, when we think about, again, breaking down those barriers, one, your marketing team can work directly inside of Virtuis. So a lot of times, those are 2 completely different things. We have a CRM and a marketing tool. Let's bring everything into one place. As you saw, those can be powered in automation. So I can design out really branded emails and then have those go out through automation. So it's really creating those different journeys that we have. But what I really wanna call out here some other ways that this is helping us to, have additional insights is that within our body of our emails, because this is built into your CRM. Yep. I have all different options for how I can personalize my outreach. So I have all of those great contact details, which you typically probably do have in your email marketing tool. But as I scroll down further, what you'll see is that now this is giving me the ability to pull in all of our giving information. What I also have here is that any custom field that you are tracking is also something that I could pull into an, an email. So I know a lot of organizations like animal shelters. Okay. Let me pull in their current pet's name. Or if you are an organization that has alumni, okay. Let me pull in their class year. It's really allowing you to make that feel like you took the time to come in here and write an individual email out to that person, but you're actually doing it in mass. So having that personalization, but allowing you to do it more quickly. So good. I mean, how many of us have, like, separate systems in marketing and Mailchimp or Constant Contact and, you know, that list might get undeliverables, and these things are just talking to his first name, last name, and email address versus actually listening to our givers and our constituents. So good. So good. Yeah. I think a couple other things to call out about this is that a lot of times you're having to, like, essentially create a list and then push it over to a marketing tool. So there can be some disconnect there of, like, oh, I have to create a new audience or maybe something doesn't sync correctly. That's, again, the power of having everything built into one place is that, 1, you'll build out your email list inside of Virtuis. So you can see here, okay, I'm choosing who to communicate with. But if I wanna get more specific in who I'm targeting with this, I could also just build out a query. So I could say, okay, let's include an additional group or let's exclude a certain group. So I could send out okay, let's send out an email that is reminding everyone to register for our event, But let me exclude anyone that has already RSVP'd. So having all of that information in one place means that I can report out on it and then use that to actually send out communications as well. Alright. Last thing with marketing that I wanna highlight here is just that you will have the ability to view different statistics. So a big focus I know of today is really like how do we have that data that's accurate, that we trust, that we can also take action upon. So inside of every email send that you do, you'll have the ability to come in here and view all of those statistics. It's also going to live on everyone's contact record as well. So if I clicked into Jesse's record, great. I can see that he well, he didn't click on it, but I okay. Let's see. Doctor John, I can see that he opened and clicked on that email. That'll show on their record. And again, I can use this for, like, okay, let me look at everyone that opened our September newsletter, and maybe we start to, like, break down again different segments for how well our people engaged. And the people that are really engaged already, maybe we start cultivating them into into donors or sending them more types of communication. So allowing you to again use all that information. Okay. I know that's a lot of information, in short period of time. I won't have a chance to actually dive into some of our other tools today, but what I do wanna again highlight is that you could use Virtuis for events, for volunteering. Eric, what else am I missing here? Marketing, news management, grant, all the different components there. Yes. Grants. I mean, everything that we do as givers and as managers of our nonprofit organization. That's what I love. The integrated tech, integrated teams, the idea, to be able to help push generosity. And I'll say this, the other side is if we don't do any of that, what you outlined earlier is these integrations and the native integrations or the open API, the connector Zapier, we have the best in class partners that are out there that then be able to take it to the next level, with our organization. So Yep. That's kind anything else, Kath? Sorry. I was gonna say a couple of quick things that I forgot. We do also have online giving, so very engaging forms. So you could do all of that through Virtuos. And then we also have a Virtuos BI product. So if you're looking for, like, more advanced reporting and you don't wanna be exporting your data and manipulating it outside of the tool, Virtuous BI is also a really big value add. But, yeah, I just wanted to also show that integrations page. We can link this in the chat too. So you can kind of see how Virtuous fits in with the rest of your tech stack as well, and to Eric's point too, also an open API. So there's also the possibility to build out a custom integration too. Friends. We spent the last hour together, so now everyone's a friend. We're all family, and we're all part of this. If you do wanna learn more about Virtuis, there's a link in here that Lauren shared about going deeper, why do a demo. She also shared our upcoming events webinars. We're doing multiple webinars on our on our regular cadence now. I'm really excited about that. We just launched our benchmark report earlier this month. Feels like it was like a long time ago, but it was actually like 9 days ago. We have a whole host of great webinars. I wanna go deeper, wider, talk about some of those benchmarks. We're gonna continue this conversation with Kath and her friends and my friends to be able to go deep dive and show more of our solution and our product. We're out there on the road. Please connect with us. Learn more about Virtruis. Kath and I are always available, so feel free to send us an email or connect with us on LinkedIn. We wanna be able to help you on your journey. So, Kath, any parting words for our friends here? No. I think that was a great great wrap up. Again, there's a lot more to to show with Virtuis. So if you are interested in having, like, a customized demonstration, definitely feel free to to reach out to Eric or I, or to to use a link in the chat. But other than that, yeah. I think that's all everything. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The recording will be sent afterward, and we appreciate you guys dedicating about an hour to us today, and we can't wait to continue this conversation. Thank you all. Alright.