Name: Winning Donor Acquisition: Strategies to Attract, Track, and Retain More Donors in 2025
Uploaded: 2025-02-03T20:30:11.955Z
Duration: 57 min 40 s
Description: Winning Donor Acquisition: Strategies to Attract, Track, and Retain More Donors in 2025

Transcript for "Winning Donor Acquisition: Strategies to Attract, Track, and Retain More Donors in 2025": Hey, everybody. Welcome to today's webinar. We are really glad to be with you. We have people jumping in right now. So hello to all of you who are jumping in today. We are glad that you're here. I'm gonna ask, that you share where you're watching from. So go ahead and just, you'll see the chat, on the side here. Go ahead and say where you're tuning in from. I'm gonna do that as well. This is Scott from the Chicago area. Welcome, everybody, man. We got people tuning in from all over Dallas, North Carolina, Winnipeg. We got Ontario. We got Phoenix, Houston, Washington, Cleveland. I'm a I can keep going. Hey. One of the things too I love about Goldcast, which is what we're watching this on, they did not pay me to say this, but you can throw your favorite GIF in the chat. So go ahead and find your favorite hello GIF. I have a go to webinar hello gift that I'm trying to find right now. It's my favorite one. Forrest Gump giving the wave from the boat. So feel free to share that as well as we are getting going. Jonathan, I love it. Oh, man. We got some good ones coming in. Hey. We're so glad that you're here today, and we are super excited to spend some time together. Today, we're gonna be talking through winner donor act winning donor acquisition. So what does it look like to, attract, track, and then retain more donors in 2025? So, we are, pumped to dive into that. A few housekeeping, things before we get going. You already see the chat going. So go ahead, Make sure you're interacting there. We wanna hear from you. We have a couple different things. You can put q and a into the chat, or you'll see the q and a tab right above there. So you can actually submit questions. We're gonna be monitoring those, and make sure just kinda interjecting throughout to be able to answer those. Then we'll have a little bit of time at the end as well if there's some additional questions that we don't get to to make sure you're leaving, hopefully, as, educated and as, filled up as possible. So go ahead and leave your q and a. Also, we are gonna have polls that pop up as well. So you're gonna see those. We'll call those out. We just love to kinda hear from you where you're at, and so make sure you use those. And then also you're gonna see in the docs tab there, that you can download the slide deck from today. So 2 common questions we get on webinars. 1, can I get the slide deck? The answer is yes. You'll get that by downloading it there or in an email that we sent out. Number 2, are you gonna record this? The answer is yes. We are recording it now. We'll send this out as well for those of you who might have to go. So why don't we do this? Love to introduce who we have on today. And so, love to introduce you to to Ben and to I almost said Brynn. It would be you guys' names together. Brad and Ben. I'll toss it to Brad just to introduce himself, and we can go from there. Yeah. Thanks, Scott. Glad to be here. Brad Davies. I'm vice president of, digital ministry growth for the Salem Media Group. So, Salem owns a variety of media properties, radio stations, websites, and so I'm in charge to helping our specific, ministry clients grow their their leads and their donors, with our media and help them be successful. So that's me. Awesome. Ben? Absolutely. Great to see everybody. Seeing some familiar faces, familiar names in the crowd. If you don't know me, my name is Ben. I'm on our solutions engineering team here at Virtuous, and I get to talk with nonprofit teams just like you pretty much every day talking about sort of some of these strategies that Brad's gonna go over today and talk about how to execute that with your tech stack, within your CRM, and sort of implement those strategies with those resources that you've got. I've been at Virtuis for just coming up on 2 years now. Before Virtuis, I was over at Blackbaud, so always like to kind of joke nonprofit CRMs are really my bread and butter and really excited to show you some of these tools that we can, execute these strategies with. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Brad, do you mind going to today's agenda? We can show that slide here. Just gonna talk through kinda what to expect. So we're gonna start with what does it look like, to attract the right donors the right way. We're gonna look at taking donors from acquisition to nurture, dive into why reporting is the most impart important part, and this might be a little bit out of order compared to where we go, but this will give you a bit of the the overview. Why focus on digital, as a primary acquisition channel? We're gonna look at some welcome series, donor series, do a bit of a teardown, dissect, look at what what works, all of that, and and, of course, have q and a. Now I mentioned those polls, and so we're gonna actually open up our first poll. We'd like to ask this on every webinar just to kinda understand where, you are coming from, that's kinda tech stack you use. And so, we're gonna open that. You're gonna see the poll option open up above the chat there, a little red dot. And we just love to know what CRM you're currently using. And so there'll be a handful of options, that you can actually select live in the poll. So go ahead and select those right now. And if you don't see what represents your CRM, you can just post it right here, in the chat as well. And so we'll leave that up for the next, minute or 2. So go ahead and, go ahead and give us those votes and let us know kinda where you're coming from today. Regardless, we're really glad, and and we've talked about the content today to to make sure that you can really walk away with value regardless, of what you're using. And so we're really glad that you are here. And, I'm actually gonna go ahead and and toss it over now to Brad who's gonna, kick us off talking through what does it look like to attract the right donors the right way, and we're gonna jump in today. Awesome. So here we go. And, again, any questions from the chat, we'll try to stop down if it makes sense to do it, but we'd rather answer your questions than, than talk, to ourselves on this stuff. So, what we wanna cover here is, donor acquisition, lead acquisition. And so what the kind of the the meta concept here is, I believe and I think you'll see at the end of this that how you attract a person is critically important to relationship and what that looks like going forward. And so you don't want just leads. You want leads to turn into engaged people, and, ultimately, you want people that become donors. And so we spent a lot of time with this group, and and I do typically just thinking about what's that look like for for any type of nonprofit organization. How do you do this? And so I'm gonna cover off these three things. 1st is just how you do it is important. How do you find the right offer, or how do you start that relationship off in the right, direction? And then using what I call feedback loops to help you improve the process overall so you know, are we getting the right kind of people that will engage going forward? Are we not? What happens if we need to change? What's that look like? And so I'm gonna walk you through some of those pieces and, and do that. Now there's a lot of ways to acquire donors, and what we're gonna focus on today really is is what I call mass media. So, you know, if you're saying, oh, well, we do relationships, like, obviously, that's a great way to acquire donors when you can do relationships. Events for me fall into similar things where you can have, your board of directors or other constituents invite other people so you have this relational be kind of connection to what you're doing. Those are great. I am not trying to take away from those at all. What we're gonna cover today is mass media. Oftentimes, if you really wanna grow, right, there's only so far you can your relationships can take you even with major donors. You would every eventually, most nonprofits have to break out of that and develop this kind of mass media approach to to attracting donors if that's kind of what they're in for. And so I wanted to talk about that specifically because there's a lot of nuance on that. But I don't I love these other ones. But today, we're gonna focus just on this and really on digital, and we'll talk a little bit about why digital. So what might this look like? What when I talk about, hey, using media to attract donors, the the kind of the concept or the way we've been doing this or the one I like is to have an offer. An offer is any resource that a person that might be drawn to your nonprofit would find valuable or relevant immediately useful. And so what it might look like would be on the left is a a banner ad that's talking about something that that might be interested that also is dotted line connected to what you do as an organization. The the the mission you fulfill, the products or services you deliver, You want a connection between the offer and then what you do. It could also look like an email is what is in that second spot. And then ultimately, you wanna grab and grab their contact information. First name, last name, and email is usually my minimum. And then quickly wanna move them to what we call an immediate upsell or a chance to give. And so we find most gifts happen in this type of digital donor acquisition on right after they've given us their their name. And so that's the key, and this is a process. It's it's not new. It's not novel. It's a it's a pretty, common digital marketing practice. People have called it different things. Maybe it's a a trip, a trip funnel or a lead magnet, some of the stuff, but this is kind of what we're gonna do with this concept. And so if you're not familiar with it, this is it. If you are familiar with it, I'm gonna show you some nuance in in some ways we've utilized this. So I think this is kind of a great way to do it. At first, it gets people to raise their hand, like, I'd be interested in that. And if it comes from your nonprofit or nonprofit that they might not know about or potentially could, the resource needs to connect with what you do. So I wanna walk through what does a great resource look like, and it's gonna have 5 characteristics. And and what you're wanting is something that's high perceived value, something that people will are willing to give up their email address for because ultimately, they're giving up their time. So we want something that's, again, valuable and something that's like, yeah, I would give up my email. I wanna know about that topic. I think that's a resource that's valuable to me as a person. I'm I'm willing to give you some, modicum of personal information to get this, and so that's what it is. It's gotta start there. If you don't have something that's valuable or and usually, you get great feedback because no one wants your resource. Oftentimes, this looks like, oh, we'll send you updates about our nonprofit or to stay in touch. That's not a valuable offer in terms of the email sign up, and so you wanna set it up where there's, hey, there's a lot of value here, and it's gonna be something you're gonna be interested in. And we talk about the benefits. You wanna talk about the benefits of personal receive when they get this type of a resource. In addition to that, I loved when it solves a very specific problem. And so it's a pain point that they have or it's something they wanna achieve or aspire to. And so it needs to hypercede value and also solve a specific problem, then we're onto our way to a very good offer. Right? Oftentimes, a great offer is gonna have all 5 of these characteristics. You want something that's quicker instant. I love digital, offers for this, so they can get it right away. They could get it via email. They could get it via text. They can get it and consume it. I you know, there's a lot of physical offers that you can do for folks. There's added cost. It's there's a bit of a delay. When I'm testing or just looking at initially, is there traction on this? I love to do digital for those other reasons we just chatted about. Finally, easy to consume. So you want these to be, checklist templates, guides, mini courses, short video. You want it to be something that they feel like can they can do. Oftentimes, where I see groups get this wrong, it's like, oh, yeah. We have an 8 part video series we'll give you access to. That just sounds like homework. Unless I have a, like, a burning desire to learn that, that just feels like that's too difficult to consume, and so you wanna chop that up. You know? Example would be a 50 page ebook. It could be very valuable, but I don't know how last time I read something that was 50 pages on my phone, which is normally how people are consuming this. And so you wanna bite that down to where it's like, oh, here's the first chapter of this ebook, or here's a summary of all the chapters, and then you can, like, upsell to a bit of everything. So that's something to keep in mind around that. And finally, you wanna have a very clear and compelling call to action. You wanna say, you know, get this today. Download now. These are all the kind of aspects around, a great offer. So with that, I wanna show you potentially what one looks like. Right? So this is a client we did this for, and so we had a, a guide that was a journey of motherhood, and then we had this other one around marriage. It's 9 questions to ask your spouse. And so we put those out into the wild, as we say, and try to see what got us feedback. And so when we do this, we get feedback because people click and they give us their name or they don't give us their name, and pretty quickly we understand which one is the more attractive offer. So I always like to start off with 2 offers, never just one. I like to start with 2 offers because immediately I wanna start to test and see are we dialed in in terms of an offer that the audience really likes? And this gives you a sense for that because oftentimes, we don't know or what our guts tell us may be wrong, and so I love to test initially this offer. So when we went this to, the folks the audience that we had available to us, we said, hey. No. We'd much rather get the 9 questions to ask your spouse than journey to motherhood. And that makes sense because, a lot of these folks were married. Not everyone is essentially in a in in their motherhood season, And so we this is much more broad. It's not as specific to this, but it worked because it was around specifically how to help people with their relationship and marriage. And so that was a better offer that we started with. So I wanna talk you through a little bit of what this looks like potentially for your organization. Right? So if you go from, oh, we just ask people to sign up to we wanna start to create an offer that we think they'll sign up for. I wanna show you my own example of what we did here. And so this is on a Salem Media website that we had access to, and we would say, hey. Here's free resources. Why don't you get this from this client? And then I said, you know, when I came on and started working for Salem, I said, what if we just offered a PDF instead instead of saying, hey. Get this thing free because we said so. What if we actually, again, offered something of value, high perceived value, something that was relevant, solved a specific pain point? What happened? When we did that, we saw essentially a doubling of the number of people that filled out the form. And so we went from a 0.43% conversion rate to 0.85% conversion rate, and then I knew we were onto something. And this is probably me walking around the office if we were in the office. I was looking for a lot of validation, just like Tom is here, and no one was getting us. Like, why why are you excited? I'm like, no. Because we're onto something here. Like, we just found a better way to engage the audience and give them something they want. And so I said, okay. Keep going on this journey with me. Like, it's not done. This is a great way to get going. And so then we said, okay. Great. What if we take this offer though and make it more about the group that's doing it? This is coming from, we had a speed an image here of the actual writer of the book who is very well known to the audience if they care about this type of stuff. And so we said, okay. What happens when we use his image instead of something that was relevant to the offer? And we saw again a big increase, like, almost a doubling, a tripling again of the effectiveness in terms of, oh, yeah. People saying, yes. This is the offer I want. We just change the image, and all of a sudden, we're onto something. So we got someone started to get some enthusiasm around this whole thing around it, a valuable offer that people exchange info for. This works. Okay. So let's keep going in this process. And so we went from something that was like this to something that we called it considered a hot topic. And so we had the control there on the left, and we started talking about, a resource they had around tolerance. So this was the summer, where, where there was the George George Floyd riots, and there's a lot of stuff going on in terms of race relationships, race relations. And we said, what if we use something specifically geared for this audience around that topic that he might be concerned about? Well, big increase, essentially a doubling, and we're already doing much better. So we got a big lift in terms of more and more people saying yes to it. And so now we're we're physically pumped. Right? Just like Carl Weathers and Arnold here, we are pumped about what's happening in terms of understanding the audience and how to create an offer that aligns with them. So we kept going. Then we moved into something that was real advanced, at least for us at the time. We went from let's give them a free PDF resource to actually asking them to take a poll or take a survey. And so what we had found is when we let people dial in and say, no. I'm interested in this topic. Don't just give me this. Don't force me into something like this. Give me some options, and so I can do it. When you do that, when you create some autonomy for people in terms of the offer, you're gonna see it improves the response rate. So, again, like, how do you attract donors the right way? Once providing something of highly value, the next iteration of that is letting them even tell you what they want and then being able to deliver on that. And so when we ran this test, you can see there these results. We went from a a a 1.7 percent conversion rate off of free PDF to a 5 question survey to a 1 question survey. We're converting nearly 5% of the audience that saw this survey into giving us their email address and then getting this resource. So big, big lift. Now I'm not gonna say it was easy. It was hard fought just like this beach volleyball game, back at the top in the top gun, but it was well worth it. And we were well on our way to having a super high performing offer, at least in concept, that I think you can take and apply to all your organizations. I don't think there's any group that couldn't move from a high perceived PDF into something that, like, says, hey. Which one of these 3 would you like or which one which topic would you like us to give you content around? And so all of this works. So when you looked at our stop beginning to the end, this entire process there, you can start to see the increases we were getting, and, ultimately, we increased the conversion rate around a 1000%. What's great here is there's that's just more effective use of media. Right? So you have traffic to your website, and if you could get 10 times the number of names without increasing the amount of people coming to your website, that's a big win. Right? It's basically found money. We're just finding a better way to get people to say, yes. I mentioned that, raise their hand, and then start to communicate with them. And so that's a great way to start to use media to move people into a tighter relationship with the organization and then get better results without even having to buy media, but potentially just off your website. Right? This is a way to do that in this process. So I wanna stop real quick and talk about testing. So that little dude, the little, trash pandas I affectionately call him is, one of my kids, and, these are my hot takes on testing. And I think these 4 things now this is almost not even on topic, but I think it's I'm talking about testing. We're talking about improving offers. Here's what I wanna say. You wanna learn any more than a lift. Right? You wanna learn what your audience wants more than you want the arrow to say, oh, yeah. We increased or we doubled our our results. You what you wanna do ultimately is you're trying to learn how do we better market or communicate to the audience that cares about what we do in understanding their needs and understanding solutions that fit them. That's what you wanna know. The testing and the if you win or lose is kinda besides the point. The product what you're trying to really do is understand your constituents and how to communicate to them better. Then the next thing I would say, if you're not gonna document your tests, don't run them because you're just doing the same thing over and over again, and you're never going to start to build this kind of mountain of knowledge that you have and say, oh, yeah. We already did this, but here's here's the nuance to that. Or, oh, we've tried that before. It was okay. We're willing to try it again. But you wanna develop that kind of knowledge, base that you can stand on so your results get better and better and better. So if you're gonna test and not document, save yourself the trouble because you're gonna just keep running the same kind of test, but just document. Have a have a repository of sorts that is shared organization wide that lets you to do this. The other piece would be start at the top of the funnel. The biggest difference you can make is probably at the bottom where we're gonna talk about doing donors and getting people to do that, and we're gonna talk about it here in a second. But when you wanna start at the top, you wanna start it. What's the traffic to my website that I can improve so they become more engaged with us? That's where the easiest part to stop to start, and you likely don't need a ton of traffic to do that. You don't need paid me to do that. You can start to learn right away what works. And finally, and this is so true for me, I learn more when we get it wrong than when you get it right. You almost wanna wanna have you wanna say, oh, no. My gut is is gonna be this way, and then it's not because it really forces you to rethink your assumptions around why and how. And so I always learn more when I I make myself pick and then I choose 1 and if I when I get it wrong, I'm like, yes. Because now I get to learn more. That's what you're looking for. You're looking to learn more about your audience. So all that said, we're talking about offers. We walk through a lot of different pieces in the offers. But what I wanna talk about now, and I'm gonna hand this over to Ben, is the key here is it's not enough to just get these leads and put them into you have to follow-up with those people. You have to understand, okay. Great. We got these leads. They're not very valuable to us unless we get them into our CRM and start to talk to them and create some other input or around some other flows, welcome flows, automations, unless we get into the CRM in the right way. And that's what Ben's job is, and he's gonna show you how to do that. Yeah. That's awesome. Ben's gonna jump in a minute. Brad, I just had a couple questions, though, that some people have asked in the chat or mentioned that I just wanna get your your thoughts on before we jump in there. So someone asked, they're assuming this has to be done through Google Ads or Facebook Ads. Would you just speak to that and kinda clarify some of that for people? It can be done like that. You could also do off your website. Right? You're just looking for traffic that's coming to your that you own or control that you that allows you to try to secure more information from them. Now it's probably easiest to do it off Facebook, Google because that's paid, and, you know, make sure you're getting traffic, but, also, you could run this type of stuff just off your website. Right? If you have people come to your website that you don't have relationship with, this is a way to create an offer that would hopefully make it sticky enough that they'd wanna give up their email address so you can talk to them in the future. But, yes, at the end of the day, yeah, paid media is the easiest way to do this. And then, there was also a question around, like, kinda developing the right lead magnet when your donor target. So in this situation, adults who would give, is disconnected maybe from the mission, which is helping at at risk youth. So any advice to that just in in direction to go to kind of draw those together? Yeah. So even on the example you gave, right, or it was given. So adults give, but you're you're an at risk teen, you know, focused organization. So what I would say there is people who care about at risk teens are likely have at risk teens in their life. And so even talking about 5 principles to know if your teen is okay or on the wrong track or how to start to talk your key teens about these types of topics or understand those are all still relevant right and so even when you serve a constituent that's different than your donors your donors likely care about those that you serve and there's a way to connect them so for us when we're dealing mainly with a Christian audience is what we spend a lot of time with that's where a lot of our media is geared geared towards We know anything that can help a person's relationship with God or Jesus is a great is a great connection. That's a great offer, and so we can connect the dots that way. If you're focused again at at risk teens, I still think you can do parenting tips or conflict tips or or ways to manage their social media that's still valuable to your donors even though it's not geared at your the constituents you serve. I hope that makes sense. I always think there's a way to connect it. You might have to think a little bit more creatively, But ultimately, what does the donor care about that we do that provides value that we can, like, at least talk about? Nice. And then last one, then we're gonna kick it over to Ben. What what's kind of the time frame for some of those steps that you were talking about or some of that testing? Yeah. So how do you know when you have a good test, or how do you move off of that? So there's without getting statistical analysis, I usually you know, just if I have it and I don't have a lot of traffic, meaning I don't have a lot of web visitors, I'm looking for a 100 conversions or at least 500 people to view what I'm doing. That's kinda like if you if you get away from all that other stuff, like, has have a 100 people said yes or have at least 500 people check this out. I don't like to call a test before that happens. That at least gives you some insight into are we even close? If we're not if we have 0 conversions and we've had 500 people view it, we got a problem. We're not even in the right ballpark. So those are kind of big numbers on the low end. There's also other tools that would help you essentially validate this. Right? So it's like, do we have a statistically reliable test here based on number of people who have seen it and number of conversions, and we can chat about that. The one tool I like, and I'll just mention it, we can put in the notes, would be Winston Knows. Winston Knows is a, actually a a partner of Virtuous and one that we use a lot, next after. They've developed a testing repository, and so they will do the math for you when you put a test in and tell you is this a valid test or not. And so it'd be a tool I would say was gonna help with this, at least your thinking around. When do I stop? When do I know if I have a good lead or not? Yeah. That's awesome. Alright. We'll keep the questions coming. You can submit them in the q and a tab or in the chat, and we'll, we'll make sure to be those along the way. Ben, we'd love to kick it to you. Excellent, my friends. Let's get the party started here. We'll get my screen shared for us, and Where we want to start is in that origin point that Brad's talking about. Really, we can boil it down to what he mentioned with where is that traffic coming from. As we're exploring this, I want to actually start us really with a framework that's going to focus more on as donors enter our our orbit just because that's gonna be our most straightforward kind of use case. But then as we go, we're gonna kind of broaden that to capturing those other names. Right? Hey. What if someone is engaging with us through volunteering or through coming to an event or through that online traffic where maybe they are saying yes to some sort of call to action or some resource, that we're providing, or maybe it's even a smaller ask. And we'll get into some of those examples here as well. So starting with, we wanna think about what that indicator is gonna be. So if I'm looking at one of my, not just donors records, but one of my people's records, right, we're thinking here about those tags. So we're gonna look at a couple of these, but, again, we're thinking about not just their affiliation, not just the type of engager that they are, but what was that origin point. So while this person, this family might be tagged as, you know, a lapsed donor, hey. They're a major give, gift prospects. We're also gonna see this option that they were a new donor in 2023. Okay. We're gonna see how this kind of gets sliced and diced, broken down into that more specific level. But really what I want us thinking about to start with here is the scale of specificity. Okay? As Brad's talking about these different tests that we might be running, the scale of specificity is gonna be crucial to think about in terms of how we're documenting it on the CRM side. So I'll give you an example. I'm gonna build a tag right here for a moment. Let's actually even look, ahead just for a second. Right now I have this tag for, like, new donor 2023. We're gonna see in a moment new donor 2024, and I'll build for us new donor 2025, but that's a fairly specific and what we're gonna think of as a long term tag. Right? Someone is a new donor in 2023. Right now in 2025, I can still look retrospectively and say, hey. This is when they became that new donor. But additionally, as we look forward a little bit, I might have ones that are a little bit more broad and also more transient. If I'm thinking about, say, a new donor welcome series, well, the fact that someone is currently a first time donor, again, that's gonna be significantly more transient. I don't want that to persist because someone might have been a first time donor last year, but this year, they're no longer. It's gonna be more of the fact that we see here someone who gives that first gift, bam, that tag is automatically added, but later down the line, they give that second gift. We did successfully retain them. That remove tag kicks in and that tag is no longer on their record because they're no longer that first time donor. Very different, kind of the opposite side of the coin of what we're thinking about at this year, specific new donor tag. So when I'm saying that, right, let's make that tag for new donor 2025 right now. I'll just make this a group. We'll say new donor 2025. As we're thinking about the types of tests like Brad was talking about that we might want to be running, we're gonna be thinking, is this tag something that should be more evergreen? Right? Again, it doesn't matter what year down the line I'm referencing it. We always want that there. Or is this a type of test that I'm gonna be running where maybe I only want that on, hey, current new donor, right, this year's new donor. In which case, I might want to have some sort of expiration there, maybe something like, hey, it's gonna be that static expiration where that does automatically get kicked off at the end of the year, so December 31st. But for now, I'm just gonna leave that as that new static tag. We'll say new donors in 2025. Now that I have that, I can start building that into those other automations and those other sequences that we're going to have. So since this is my welcome series for this year, I might add that action not only tagging them as that current first time donor, but also with that more evergreen tag, we're gonna say, hey, it doesn't matter when we're referencing that. They're always gonna be tagged as that new donor from 2025. And then in the moment until we've retained them, they're also that first time donor. And I'm showing us both of these being used in conjunction because again we're thinking about what tests we're going to be running. This is what's giving us that option to maybe run an analysis on everybody who is that first time donor who hasn't been retained yet, so who has that transient tag, But now with the evergreen one, I can run that into something like queries, broader reports for new donors from that specific year. Right? Here's 2023, here's 2024. Then I can consolidate all of that together in a broader report that's gonna show me that year over year performance, and I'm getting that comparison. So again, this is just our starting point. Like I said, the ownership is really the most straightforward example of this. But if we're broadening this in a moment a little bit later, we're gonna see some examples where we're saying, hey. What if someone is that new volunteer or that new subscriber or engaging in some other way? And this is where those calls to action that Brad was referencing come into play. One of the common things that I often suggest to teams is to say, hey. Let's utilize a form in Virtuos as that piece of traffic, right, as that interjection into our orbit, into our network that we're controlling and able to really set the data points that we're capturing from this. So in this case, I might have a survey form. It's just a lead form I've created here in Virtuous to function as a survey. I'll create a custom set of fields to track program interest, area of interest. Again, this could be broad in terms of what they're interested in that we're providing, the types of impact stories they might want to see, or just the types of follow ups that we can provide there. Then based on those answers to that survey, I'm getting a couple of different pieces of data. For one, that might kick back over to their record and I can say, well, based on that program interest survey, what information do I have? How can I use this to segment them into to further follow ups, and I'll show us some examples of this as well? But additionally, how can we use this to say, okay. What is our follow-up? Brad's talking about maybe providing, like, a PDF reference. Alright. Well, based on their program of interest or whatever that interest might be in your use cases, say, okay, they're going to get this follow-up resource or they're gonna get that follow-up resource. So that's kind of our framework, our groundwork. I'm gonna kick it over to Brad again. We're gonna go over a couple more things, and then we'll circle back into Virtuos and see what some of those follow-up sequences might actually look like. And, hey, as as we do that, it seems like the theme is in in the in the kicking back and forth is where I get to jump in. And so on that theme, Ben, we got a question. Can we just query can we just query on new donors by selecting the 1st gift in the query? Is this not possible? That certainly is possible. By having it as a tag, it's just giving us that extra indicator, that extra bucket that we can manage in additional ways. So in certain cases, we might wanna say, hey. When was their first gift? But we also might want to apply additional criteria that isn't only based on that first gift. And this is also where we're thinking more broadly. Donorship just being that really basic example, we're also gonna be applying this to other types of engagement. Right? 1st time form submission, 1st time, volunteer, 1st time, subscriber. So broadening the scope into beyond just someone giving that first gift. Awesome. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate that. Absolutely. Yeah. We'll, we'll toss it back to Brad here as we we do the, screen share dance, and then Brad continues this on, today. Yeah. And then on that to Ben's point, we like tags versus just queries because tags can be more specific. It's easier to pull it, and you can, layer them. Right? So if they came in off of, you know, not just did they donate last year or last 6 months, but off on what form, potentially what source. We can start to add in all these things and start to quickly see, okay, if we acquired a lot of donors this year, we the tags will quickly let's see what were the sources and were they you know, how quickly did they give a second gift. Did any of those people become monthly givers? And so the tags kinda help simplify the querying so you get better kinda consolidation of your data and can look at it across the entities. So that's where we like tags rather than queries. You can do it both ways, but sometimes tags are easier. Where I see people mess up on kind of this mass market, mass media, donate donor acquisition is they don't have this piece. They don't have the tagging, the querying set up so they can say, oh, yeah. We got all these leads, and we're not sure actually what happened to them. Why is you know, like and so they're, like, kinda chasing their tail to kinda figure that out. Like, you wanna have this stuff set up on the front end so that as the people come in, you start to see that's again that feedback loop. Are they converting? Are they giving us gifts? And this is why we like digital because digital does this fast. Right? There's there's a cost to it. There's other ways to do this. We like digital because it also can help improve all the other marketing efforts we have going on. So if you realize, hey, when we talk about this this this, campaign in this language, we find, you know, a lot of people will give their second gift off that. Right? So we we set that up and we understand the tagging. We understand the messaging. Well, that could then fit into okay. Well, then maybe at our next big event, we're gonna talk about this as the big donation ask rather than something else. And so digital allows gives you that feedback, gives you that instant way, to to see what's how how the constituents how your kinda core group is reacting, how they're interacting with it and then also it gets into the CRM easier. So that's why we like digital for this and it also scales you can go up or down with your budget and you can still get some good sense for what's happening with the offer and then ultimately wake with donations. So what we wanna do here now is so Ben said. Hey, this is how it potentially looks like an automation. We've tagged those people. I wanna show you why this next step is so crucial to making this making donor acquisition work, especially at scale And so when you look at the typical open rate click rate for, welcome series, so it's so person's initially on your email file, what's that open rate look like and compared to your nonprofit benchmark? You can see engagement is wild is much higher in the 1st week 2 weeks that a person comes on your file. So this is like it. This is like your best window to engage them and drive them to certain things or really make sure that you solidify the relationship and and get that 1st gift or get that 2nd gift or really engage them in what you're doing. This is it and so you wanna spend a lot of time here. There's I know ongoing communications is like you know never any treadmill. It just keeps going but like if you can focus and spend time thinking about what's the 1st week? What's the first five touch points? Look like it can really set the direction for the rest of everything that's going on in your email communications and your donor communications. So this is a critical stage and you wanted to spend some time on it. This is what we've developed if you were to come and do acquisition with Salem, we potentially put you through a system like this. I'm just using it as an example of how you wanna think through the different touch points and so we usually like to do 0 5 to 6 touch points after a person's given us the name that we provide a value. Add offer that we provide a survey that we do other things to show the impact the organization's having and then if they give a gift, we're also then it's very specific and very intentional about what that looks like where we we thank them. Obviously we actually call and thank them. We want to stand above the rest of the groups they're giving to by making sure that they feel that they're we're very grateful for their gift and then also we wanna start to talk about the impact of that gift often times groups wait too long to start communicating back to new donors with the impact not pressing that hard enough that you know they made a great decision to give to your organization and here's why here's tangibly why and then also wait. Here's ways to go deeper and so often times I see groups wait too long and start to talk about a second gift or recurring giving. They're like Oh, no. They just gave let's give them a break like no no no now is the time to do it again back to you know the open rates. This is when they're opening. This is when you have the best chance to get in front of them and so you wanna take advantage of that window and push them into that. And so we get 2 what we're calling email tear downs for what's a new name series look like and what's a new donor series look like so this is a client we've been working with even just last month and so with the new name series what I'd like to do an email one is I like to talk about. Hey, here's the resource you requested and we have some more stuff coming up coming. After this right, so we wanna forecast. Hey, there's more communications coming from us, but here's what you ask for right away. We usually can see you know if we do this right a 70% open rate a 50% click rate on this first email. It's the money one. It's where everyone's saying, okay, I ask for something or you had something of value. Again, high perceived value offer. Here's where I deliver it, but then I'm gonna say, hey, there's more coming. And then so we like to do one email a day for 5 to 6 days and you're like, oh, no, that's way too intense. I'd say, well, the stats say it's not. The stats say the open the unsubscribe rate does not drop or does not go up the opens and clicks do go up in terms of over the course of the series. So I would challenge you if you say, Oh, that's too. That's too intense. Just to look at the stats. Let the data be the diplomat and tell you if it is wrong or if it isn't. Oftentimes the the email engagement drops because the content is not relevant. But as long as you're delivering on what you said you would or again what they care about, you're gonna see really high engagement especially in this 1st week or so. And so in this specific series so we did with that. We welcome them and then we gave them another resource. Now actually in this case it was a resource that we tested that didn't do as well as the initial offer that we ended up pushing forward, but it was still a nice value add piece. We had already created it. We said, well, let's just give it to him in day 2. So in day 2, we said, hey, you already got this other resource, but here's something else. It's very. It's similar. It's a little different that you also might be interested in And so that's a great way to again start to stack the value for the constituent around stuff that they care about that doesn't take a it does a lot of different work. Right? So if you start with 2 offers and they pick 1, I would say give them the other offer right away to say, hey, there's more value here. And then I love the survey or some people. And so you might go, okay, what's that look like? So here's actually what the survey looks like, and here's the results. So we say we want some basic demographic info, and this is where you can do all kinds of stuff. We say, hey, what's your gender? It's always nice to know are we talking to more, males and females or other way around. What's your age range? We usually do it by decades. Are we talking to 20 30 year olds? Are we talking to 60 7 year olds? That changes potentially the creative. It changes potentially the topics. It also tells us a little bit about comms going forward. We say then what would you like to learn more about? What that we potentially do do you care about? So that's a great again, this could become another tag in your database. Say, oh, this person, they want to hear more about our overseas programs. Oh, they want to hear about our after school program. Whatever it is. So you want to ask them, hey, what do you want to learn more about? And then we love to ask an open end question. And then so this one we said, hey, what's the biggest challenge you're facing in your life right now? We take that open ended question. We put that into AI. We turn around and we say, hey, summarize all these responses and then stack rank the common themes and tell me what's going on here and this this turns into pure gold in terms of your constituents telling stuff that they're feeling in their life that you can potentially address in the further in future communications or you can change the offer and say, Oh everyone's telling us they're dealing with a lot of anxiety. What if we created an anxiety offer if that made sense given what we do in a way to then feed that back. So what's this look like? It looks like this. It's super simple. You're asking 5 questions. Yes, no. And then you're you're sucking this in your CRM, and it becomes a data point that you can action off of that. So there's that. Here's what potentially what would you like to learn more about? And this is great info back in terms of, oh, yeah. They really care about this resource or that resource. So in this case, this organization, they said, hey. We wanna know more more resources about personal and small group spiritual growth. Well, that was fits perfectly to what they do anyways. So it's a really good connection. It tells us we're acquiring the right kind of people that wanna engage with the communications going forward. This is a feedback loop. If you get this wrong and like, oh, no, I really wanna hear more about how to where you know the next event is, but we don't even talk about events in this series. Well, then we know Oh we need to add that in or we need to change what we're doing so we're aligning with what they wanna hear and what we're sending right. This is the biggest miss in most communication series When they're likely to open, we wanna get that feedback so we can inform what we're doing going forward. It's not super hard, but it's so valuable in terms of what you can learn from it. So that's usually step 3 maybe day 3 in the conversion series. So then we then talk about for this group. They had a bunch of online courses, so we offered them a choice of hey, we'd suggest you check out these 3 online courses. We had another book that they potentially could give a gift for to get as a thank you. So we did that and then we started talking about their podcast and then we test all these things. So initially on the podcast email, we listed their top five. What we found is people weren't clicking on it. It felt like it's too much work. There was too much content with it. So we tightened it up to 3 and we increased the click rate by 10%. And so it's all these little nuances and dials and changes that you make to get better and better results from the welcome series and learn more about your people in the process. So these are the stats from the series right so you can add the email 1 through 6, you can see 57% of open rate on that first email. Oh, that entire series, if you look at that as a cohort, we had 74% of people opening the email and 43% clicking into it. Right? That's very engaged. So that tells us we're grabbing the right kind of people on the front end. Now if this were to be 30 and 10, I would say we got a problem. We're not aligning we don't have an offer that's tight enough, and we don't have content that follows up with it that they're looking for. And so therefore, they don't see value on our emails. And this is the time that we have to deliver on that, and so we got a problem. So we need to pause and and re recraft. We need to do that. Here's what a potential donor series could look like. So, initially, let's say they give a gift off of the name acquisition. And so they say, Oh, yeah. I'll give you 5 $10. Here's $100 so then I like to immediately say great. Thank you. They get a receipt. I'm not counting that as part of the welcome series, but definitely they're gonna get a receipt and then I'm gonna serve them Now I want to I want to know the same stuff that we knew about the new names as I as I do about the donors. I want to still know what's their what's their, age group? What are the things do they want to care? Do they care about hearing? That's a crucial piece. So stick the survey back in your new donor series and then start to talk about the impact. A lot of times people assume that donors understand all the impact that they have to their gift and I think that's that's a bad assumption. I think we need to really press into here's the impact your gift made today. Here's why you are such a change maker and what your dollars enabled. They really want to know about the impact of that and so we we we start to send that. We also love to send a a reply to email. Right? So we're worried about inbox deliverability going forward. And so the best way to prove that people engage with your emails is to make sure that they're replying to those emails. And so we say, hey, we'd love to what do you think of this series? Just reply to let us know. In this case, it's a spiritual organization. It's a Christian organization. They say, hey. How can we pray for you? That's an easy way to get replies to and let them go through the process. And then we start to then talk about the impact of the gift and what's going on there. And then. With this, I wanna talk about personalization so again back to Ben's point about tagging. Why would you wanna tag this? Why do you need to know all the nuances around this because when we deliver emails, it's not obvious here but the that people request. Right? So back to the one question survey. Do you wanna get a more info do you wanna get a resource around topic a, b, or c? And we we give that to them. We find the open rate goes up 15%. The click rate over the course of the series goes up 10 to 15%. And so we see big lifts when you customize communications based on how they initially came into you. You can't do that though if you haven't got that data in your CRM. And this is where we wanna get back into what Ben was talking about. It's like, okay, great. How do we then move this into something that's actionable and really engage these people going forward? Scott, any questions, though, before we do that? You know, we've had a couple in the chat, but Ben's been answering those, some more kind of virtuous specific. Some, you know, were kinda answered by some other folks. So I think we're good to to toss it to Ben, and, I'm sure some more questions kinda will arise, and we'll, we'll get to those after. Awesome. Well, yeah, in that case, let's get back into the system here. Exactly like Brad was saying, I think the next step to build on top of this is just saying, okay, what are these sequences going to look like? We've created these tags in, we said scaling of, that that that specificity. Right? Some are gonna be more transient, some are gonna be more evergreen. But in both cases, how are we triggering the the subsequent follow-up? So again, we're gonna start basic and then just broaden it a little bit here. Right? We're looking at that new donor welcome series. That's probably the you know, I I Brad, I love that you brought up sort of that that, increase in not just open rate, but engagements. I always call them, like, the billboard metrics. Right? It's things like we get an increase in retention rate. We get an increase in lifetime value when we're engaging back with people in that honeymoon period. We wanna make that investment on the front end so that we're getting that return in that deeper relationship on the back end. So if we're thinking about, okay, a donor welcome, right, yeah, we do wanna have that initial sequence not spaced out too far. Right? Maybe starting with that email at the very, very beginning, but then continuing to warm up that relationship over the next few days. Right? We don't wanna really extend that timeline too far beyond at the very latest that first, 30 days, if not those first couple weeks like Brad was saying, because that's where the impact is gonna be most significant. I would be remiss if I didn't throw in a reminder here. You do wanna keep that multi channel element. We're doing those emails, we're doing that AB testing here as well. But in any cases where we can, we wanna throw in things like that direct mail, like those text messages. Of course, a really personal touch point like a phone call never hurts to add into. Now again, donorship being like the entry step. Right? Square 1. Generally speaking, depending on the type of fundraising initiatives that you're doing and the type of engagement that you're seeing with your network, we also wanna broaden that to things like, yes, a new volunteer welcome series, yes, new event attendee welcome series, new subscribers. And generally speaking, again, back to that idea of just traffic we can control, not just new subscribers to our email lists, but also new engagement when people are submitting those forms to us. And those forms can be surveys. We've been over in chat talking about surveys in a couple of different ways. But I also want us thinking about, Brad mentioned it earlier, what can we provide in return? We've had a lot of questions like, hey. You know, thinking about the different things that I can provide back, well, how can we make that continue to be a streamlined process? When someone submits that form, right, whether it's a survey, whether it's a question as they're subscribing, it doesn't matter, We can go back and create a follow-up sequence that will provide that resource. Right? And we can make it a part of a larger donor journey or journey for whoever that might be in whatever way they're engaging with us. So this is one a little bit of a variation that I was building with a conservation organization, basically saying, hey. When people engage with us, they're generally people who are interested in the outdoors. Their resource was saying, we're gonna provide a camping tips PDF. Well, beautiful. What that sequence does is it, 1, adds a tag to say that this was a web engaged donor. If we're thinking about that scale of specificity, maybe that's gonna be web engaged to start. Maybe it's gonna be something that is more broad. Hey. This is someone who does engage with us online, generally speaking. We've also got a tag here for new non donor. This is generally one that I would recommend is that transient tag. Right? Once they give a gift, of course, we want to remove that non donor tag, but it gives us that origin point. What is or who is this person in terms of how they're engaging with us? We're getting a couple of different data points that we can then use to segment as we go forward. Now beyond that, we're seeing an additional welcome series starting with that impact email, going into that subsequent impact email, finishing off maybe a larger ask, but we began by delivering our promise, delivering on that resource that we told them we would, and we're increasing engagement through there. Now again, as a bit of an asterisk, remember that you can actually attach files to or I should say, not necessarily attach, but link to a downloadable file in your virtuous emails. So that is also a component that can be automated. That doesn't have to be sort of an additional manual step for your team. Just saying, hey. Send off this email. It's got a link to that camping tips PDF here. Now again, opening that up. Right? We're talking about surveys, capturing preferences, capturing interests. This is a a single branch. We can additionally open that up to branch off with some of that if then logic. So this was again a little bit of a variation of an automation I was building with a faith based organization here, and they had 2 initiatives running. 1 was really for more focusing on church development. 1 was more of that pastoral development and mentorship there. So that so we said, hey. We're sending off that survey sort of getting to know you. The survey, again, can be either on your website or linked in an email. So you've got some flexibility there into opening up those paths for folks to engage like that, then saying, alright, based on their answer, they're gonna get one of 2 separate sequences. They're very similar. Right? The tool itself is really the same, but we're saying, okay. These impact stories, that promise on our call to action, on the resource that we said we'd give is specific to what they themselves said they were interested in. And, again, if it was x, y, or z, we would have those subsequent branches there. So that's where I wanted to pause for now. Really, again, our main thesis here, our big idea is saying, hey. How are we capturing that level of specificity, both micro and macro in terms of that first time in gap, and how are we using that to then segment our our additional follow-up? I'm gonna kick it back over to you. Did we get any other questions Yeah. Yeah. We did. So so we're gonna we're gonna have some additional, questions here. Before we jump to those, though, I would love to kinda share our next poll. So let me go ahead and actually share, this, and we are going to open up, our next poll, which is if you want to, get a view of Virtuos and actually see a demo. And so I know we have some people who, you know, are currently using the software, which is awesome. We hope this is enlightening for you to jump in more to utilize the tool. But if you aren't and you're exploring or you're curious or you would like to, to talk to our team to explore if it might be, the the time for you to to make a change or to see if this might fit your needs, we'd love to kinda have those conversations. So I'm gonna leave this up for a little bit here. But one of the questions we got that I would love to, to bring up and to have Brad and Ben speak to. How might you attract new donors to your digital resource? All of our email contacts are current donors. So I'd I'd say kind of what we're talking about is, like, offer something of free to people outside your current circles on Facebook, potentially buying media, Facebook ads. There's other ways to find access to new constituents and say, hey. We'd love to send this to you. And then, you know, we can keep sending you stuff after that. Right? So it's there's a little bit like because I know other groups will just put donors in their CRM. In this case, Virtuous is built to do more than that. It's built to handle leads and donors and give you the ability to talk to them in this intelligent way where you can start to customize it, curate it for what they're interested in. And so that's it. I think it starts with a high perceived value offer, and then you move them into talking about different things you do and then the ways they can have an impact, through your organization. Yeah. That's awesome. Alright. Ben, this one might might come to you, but, Brad, you can speak to it as well. What point is it better to use segment codes versus tagging in terms of tracking acquisition origin and other metrics, for communication? I love that. I love that. So I would start with talking about segment codes there. Right? We're talking about segments. We're really thinking, okay, what is the solicitation that resulted, that prompted in this donation? So I almost approach that as really more from like, we're looking at our fundraising efficacy. Okay. Did this solicitation or this strategy work over an alternative that we ran? Now that's not to say it's necessarily totally unrelated from a tag that we might apply in conjunction with that. If someone is giving online, we might follow that up with like you know a web engaged tag or an online donor tag. If someone is giving to a specific, a specific solicitation that was funding a specific project or fund, we might also want to accompany that with a tag that says, hey, this donor is interested in supporting this type of project. They wanna support this type of initiative. So I would say that is really the biggest dichotomy in my mind. The segment is used to say, this gift came from this ask. And we're back to Brad's talking about, like, hey. We wanna make sure these are reporting. The segment is what we'll use for reporting on efficacy of that fundraising and of our revenue through that. But the tag is gonna the tag is gonna be used to report on more of, like, those qualitative aspects of the donor. That's great. That's fantastic. Brad, would you mind, just giving people kind of, a next step if they wanted to connect with you further too? You've just I know you both have been so helpful. Ben, I think they know how to how to find you. Just jump on one of our webinars. But, also, yeah, Brad, we'd just love for you to kinda share that as we wrap up today. Yeah. So I I put my email in here. I put my LinkedIn. I would say, if you wanna send offer ideas by me, I will do that for you. Email it to me, and we'll we'll have a quick discussion on that. I'd love to connect on LinkedIn. That's a great way also to to have this conversation. So, yeah, happy to help on on some of that stuff. I've realized it's, there's a lot of there's a lot of nuance to it. There's a lot of little decisions and a lot of little things that make this work out. And so if I can be a resource to you, let me know. Awesome. So appreciate that. Just share your your LinkedIn in the chat as well for folks. So, hey. Listen. We're so, grateful for you all being here, and, yeah, we hope that this has been helpful. I mean, our our goal, like we said, kind of from the beginning, was, for this to add value and to be something that, you know, regardless of the the platform you're using or or where you're at, that this would really serve you, your organization, your mission. So we really hope that that's been the case. Again, recording will be sent out. Slide deck will be sent out, and, we look forward to connecting again and hopefully providing more resources and content that are super helpful for you. So, Brad's email is actually in the slide deck, so you can grab that, Natalie. I saw that question and then put his LinkedIn in there. So hopefully that will be helpful. Thank you again for being here. We appreciate it, and we will chat next time. Thanks everybody. Bye all.