Video: How Responsive Fundraising With Virtuous Drives Donor Engagement and Increased Generosity | Duration: 3320s | Summary: How Responsive Fundraising With Virtuous Drives Donor Engagement and Increased Generosity

Transcript for "How Responsive Fundraising With Virtuous Drives Donor Engagement and Increased Generosity": Alright. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you're coming in from. If you look at where I'm at right now, I'm coming in from a hotel in Chicagoland right now. I am Eric Thomas. I'm our chief evangelist here with Virtuous. If you see me out there on the road or seen a webinar, you know that I am a recovering fundraiser. I am really excited for this conversation, come from the space. I'm here with my good friend, Ben. Ben is one of the best solutions architects we have here at Virtuous. He's gonna deep dive everything on Virtuous here in a second. But I we're excited about our conversation today. We're gonna talk about how responsive fundraising with Virtuous will drive donor engagement and increase generosity. You can see this platform. If you participate in anything with us before with Virtuous, I am really excited about this platform because Ben and I don't wanna talk at you. We wanna talk with you. And you can see my friend here, Scott, is already chatting in here. Please let us know where you guys are coming in from. It's fascinating Scott and I are in the same city, but we're in 2 different areas right now. So let us know what organization you're coming in from as well as what your what what organization you're do you're a part of, and we're excited. Ben, tell me a little bit about yourself, man. Absolutely. Thank you, Eric. Great to see everybody. As Eric was saying, my name is Ben. I'm one of our solutions engineers here. I'm gonna help go through some more of the technical side of our conversation today around Virtuis, around responsive fundraising. Again, if you've seen me around, you know I am joining in from Richmond, Virginia. Cut my teeth in the world of blackbaud. So very familiar with the world of Raiser's Edge, Raiser's Edge, NXT, handful, of course, of their other platforms. Generally like to say that nonprofit CRMs are my bread and butter, so really excited to talk with you all today about where Virtuus fits into that. I love it, Ben. Tanya, David, Zed, Fiona, nice to see you at and Canuck Place. I love that organization. The, random question, Ben. So, like, in the chat, you can do, like, emojis and GIFs. Do you call it GIF or GIF? I am a GIF man. I know that is not technically accurate, but I can, I can apologize in advance? Yeah. But I think we need to get some folks that are attending our session right now to use a GIF or a GIF. Oh, there we go. There's Scott on on cue. There we go. Love it. So we wanna be a part of this. So if you have questions throughout this whole process, we wanna be able to include you, you know, and ask the question. We'll continue to keep this going, conversation going. We're gonna kick it off with a poll, and and my man Scott, our executive producer, is gonna put it up here on the stage. But the main question I wanna ask you is, which CRM are you currently using right now for your nonprofit organization? Are you using our friends at Bloomerang, Raiser's Edge, DonorPerfect, Virtuous, Salesforce, or something else that that might be out there? Please include that in the chat. It will be actually it will help drive some of the conversation that we have here shortly. David, well done. I haven't seen that GIF in a while. I love that. And the poll is here, perfect so much. So thank you so much. And so we're gonna get started. Ready, Ben? We're gonna rock and roll. Let's go. So here at Virtuis, what we believe ultimately is giving is personal. And you start thinking through an average person seeing much noise in the space and everything else is happening, but they today's donor expects a personal connection to causes they care deeply about. And I'm gonna share just a small second of my story. Right? Like my I come from the nonprofit space, but St. Jude matters to my family and my and my and my mission is in in support that organization. My goddaughter was a patient at St. Jude many, many years ago. And if you know the story of St. Jude, if your child is sick, you send them to children's. Your child is dying, you send them to St. Jude. And Anna passed away when she was 12 years old. And every year, we still contribute, and we're a partner in hope. We're a monthly donor to this great organization. But, ultimately, our donors want to hear from the organization on a regular basis. This isn't a bill pay. This isn't something that we do on a regular basis. This is something that we give out of our heart. And, ultimately, here at Virtuous, we ultimately believe giving is personal. We need to be able to drive that generosity and to what matters. But the problem that we're seeing across the entire landscape is the fact that the the nonprofits are using impersonal systems, right, because we're handcuffed by using the old legacy tactics and legacy issues, whether we inherited a team and inherited campaign, inherited a project. We do things the same way all the time and we expect different results and it doesn't work. You see here, we have siloed teams and siloed data. Right? Tell me in the in the chat, do you have silos in your organization? Right? Like, we share walls with our teammates, but we're not working collaboratively with one another. We don't have lack of data insights. I'm here at a conference, and we just actually had this conversation. We have all these data points all over. We have a volunteer database over here. We have a marketing database over there. We have our CRM and our donor database over here. None of us are talking together. And the hard thing about it and I'm I'm curious. And if you if you're in an organization that has less than 3 employees, then raise your hand. Like, let us know because multiple organizations there's a multitude of women. We have to do these manual processes, and we're doing the same thing over and over again. We're not getting need to need to visit with our donors and hearing those personal stories that matter to our organizations. And I think through at my time is like when I was in my organization, we think through this legacy and personal model. Here's a great example of it. I would go to an event, whether it's a rotary or a chamber or whatever it might be. I would acquire a new list, and what do we do? We put them in a marketing communication calendar. We talked at them. We talked at them. We said the same thing to everybody because it was easy to just change. It was like I hate the phrase spray and pray, but really that's what we did. We just added a level. We added a 3% gift ask array on every email that we sent out or a mailer that we sent out. And I come from the boy scout, so we said, it's popcorn season time. You know, it's year end fundraising. It's day of giving or coming up is giving Tuesday, which I call nonprofit hunger games, where we're all fighting against each other, but we're talking at our people instead of with them. And the challenge is as you start keeping going through this in, like, I'm a part a member of the giving institute as well as all these different things, we're seeing a decline in giving across the entire landscape right now. Not that generosity is going down, but philanthropy is harder to raise money right now. Right? And the reason is we see this turnover. We're seeing 50% of turnover a year over year. And when doctor Adrian Sargent did this study, he came back, and he identified it's because of lack of impersonal messaging, inappropriate asks, not acknowledging and appreciating what matters. And at the end of the day, as a I'm a Lilly School graduate and I love Dean Oona. Here's a great quote from her is that donors not only want to understand the impact of their gifts, but value organizations that intentionally foster meaningful relationships with their donors. That matters into that supine mindset of where we are connecting with our givers and our volunteers and our donors to our organization. And so you think about this. I joke about it that we have these legacy siloed softwares. Look at what we had to deal with, and we're used to it. We accept it, and it's we have to evolve in this new way at having a modern technology. And, honestly, that your donors expect personal connection, but they lack that technology and playbook to further respond. Right? And we're seeing this. Right? So I'm saying here in a Marriott I travel often, if you don't if you don't know, but I'm used to this. The world around us is changing. This television, when I checked in last night, it said, welcome, mister Thomas, on the TV, and I was okay with it. Netflix is listening to us. It's a great analogy in the fact that Netflix consistently watches us. Right? Like, when I watch a TV show, it's gonna listen to what I just watched, and it's gonna suggest a series based on my personal preferences. And that's the two way behavior that we need to get into, and that's responsive fundraising. Right? We wanna start start up here in this top left corner where we wanna listen to what matters to our donors and to our givers and our volunteers. I think, you know, God gave us 2 ears and one mouth for a reason. We need to listen twice as much as we talk at our givers and at our donors. And so listening to why people are getting involved, why are they coming to our website, why are they getting get donating to our organization. We wanna connect with them personally and connect, meet the donors where they are. What's the best channel and create these personal and automated communication efforts. And then suggest that next step, right? Like always, we think through this, we always have to ask for money, right? It might not be an ask. It might be to volunteer or get a tour of our facility. Maybe they just wanna start learning more about our organization and getting them in that engagement. And then finally, the last point that we don't do enough of is learn. We don't test and validate. Like I said, we always do things we always did in the past, but it might not have worked. So let's change it up and try something new. And I love the analogy here of of Netflix because I think through this on I keep and I keep double clicking on this analogy and the fact that I'm a comic book nerd and I love Marvel, so I watch notes. Netflix knows I'm always gonna be watching a comic show. But if I wanted to change my mindset and go to documentaries, Netflix will inherently change their listen and learn from that. Right? And so It's dynamic. Right? It's dynamic. And I think through this, we're like donors come in to support one issue or one program, and maybe they just had a family and they wanna change their mindset. Now they're focused on the kids. Right? So but they're still supporting the organization, and we just continually put our donors in these buckets. That's why I like this new concept with the the Netflix. But we always wanna listen. And then the other side is we wanna break down those internal silos and start having a dynamic responsive team experience. Right? Like, let's get marketing. Let's get finance. Let's get program. Let's get fundraisers. Let's get all of us together in the time that we all do the same stuff, the duplicative work, and then start working on these automated processes to be able to do that. And, folks, you guys are probably here like, okay, Eric, Ben. That sounds really great and all, but, like, at a high level and a strategy level. But, realistically, what does that do, and how can I do this on a tactical level? Well, we have an automation. And so what this is this take a step back and imagine just for a second that we've got Steven here who just attended an event, and an hour after that event, he gets a thank you email saying with a small survey, do you wanna learn more? Do you wanna get engaged? Do you wanna volunteer? Whatever it might be. And then it to say thank you so much for joining us at our event. Really appreciated it. And then 2 days later, he gets a text message based on what he clicked on on that website on that survey response the day previously. He goes to the website. He makes a contribution, and then 2 weeks later, he gets a postcard in the mail saying thank you, acknowledging, and appreciating, and doing all the right things. Multichannel. It's hyper personal. It's all about timing, and the only time a human was involved was when our gift officer made that phone call the day after. I've seen this in action here and, Ben, I didn't even told you this story. I took my wife to go see Hamilton in Pittsburgh, and I was, you know, I was in bed at after the show, and I'm sitting there on my phone, probably not I got yelled at by her. But I'm scrolling through, and I got an email from the Pittsburgh Theater Company saying, hey. Thanks for coming to the show. Here's our upcoming events. And it was impact the next day. And it's a member. It was a ticket. It wasn't even a donor. And you could do these things automatically, and we don't think through it. And, yes, David, follow-up is key and personal, and we need to be able to figure out how to drop these manual processes and utilize technology as a level up. Right? You can do this on all different journeys. Right? Like, not every single person's gonna come in and have the same pathway and be dynamic in that mindset. And when you do that and you have these responsive fundraising through dynamic campaigns, it's gonna increase our donor retention. It's gonna increase our average gift. It's gonna decrease staff time, and we're gonna get more engagement from our donors and our givers and our volunteers. Virtuous is that. We are the holistic package. We put together all the technology together. Our home base is our nonprofit CRM. We have a giving platform. We have a marketing platform. We have a volunteer platform. We have signals, which is basically like looking at insights of where folks are giving and their consumer and social and wealth data, and we have an event package. All of that marries together in the middle with automation, which is responsive fundraising. We are a partner for your success. We come from fundraising. Both Ben and I and most of our entire company, we were built by fundraisers for fundraisers. We do focus on training and certification and going through all different pieces, but we wanna be a partner for your success because, ultimately, we do want to grow global generosity. That is our focus. That is our north star. We wanna help nonprofits. Enough of me talking. Let's just get under the hood and take a look at what we got here, and let my guy, Ben, could go through there. Any questions so far, please include in the chat, and let's get that rough conversation going. Awesome. Let's see. Eric, I might need you to stop sharing your screen before I can do mine. There we go. And my friends, as we are thinking about how we're progressing through our look into Virtuous today, our look into responsive fundraising, I want to be thinking about a couple of main things that Eric had brought up earlier. Right? We're thinking about that reduction in manual work. We're thinking about me and being more efficient in order to be responsive, and you'll you'll hear us say this a lot. It kinda comes down to saying, alright. Hey. We want to give everybody the major donor experience. Right? We wanna make sure that, like Eric was saying, hey. I'm not even a a donor per se. I'm just a member, and I'm still getting this really personalized outreach, this personalized thought from the theater. We want to give everybody that level of attention, that level of personalization. And in many ways, that's kind of impossible if you're always relying on just manual team labor. Right? The team does not have enough bandwidth. The team does not have enough hours in the day to functionally execute that purely manually. So what we're gonna be seeing, just to Eric's point, is how all of this, separate engagement, right, all these different ways that we're connecting with folks and learning about them and and finding out what matters to them, all of that's gonna get tied up into automation, and that's gonna be our force multiplier. Okay? That's where we're gonna see, hey. Our system is taking this information, responding dynamically to it, and that's gonna be adding that extra layer of personalization. So if we're looking at Virtruis super, super, super bird's eye view right now, everything in the ecosystem, whether it's people engaging with events, engaging with forms online. Right? That might be a donation form. It could be signing up for a newsletter, filling out a survey that we've set up. It could be how they're engaging with our marketing. Right? We sent an email. They're clicking on this link or they're clicking on that link or they're opening this one, but not that one. We're taking all that data, consolidating it, and then using that to trigger that next step of automation, of personalization. Okay? So with that in mind, really how I want us to to kind of walk through that system right now is thinking about almost like the life cycle of data. Right? When someone engages in that touch point, whatever it might be, all those things we just mentioned, where is that capture happening? How is that being personalized? How is that responding dynamically? Where is that entering the system? Where is it being paired with other, key data points? And then what is that actually triggering from the automation point? So we're gonna start in one of the many, different ways that a donor might first engage with us, and that's just gonna be on a simple online donation form. So we're saying, hey. We've got this form online. Someone's landed on the website. Maybe they're already part of our mission. Maybe they're just investigating. Maybe they're they're kind of reaching out, casting a net, saying, hey. You know, what can I support that that's gonna be something that matters to me? And so they land on our form here. So first thing first of all, right, learning, responding from what we learn, we're looking at providing a personalized ask amount. Eric was talking earlier about saying, hey. One of the biggest reasons that we're not retaining donors, that that giving is actually decreasing year over year, It's not because the generosity is decreasing. Right? People are still passionate. They still want to give, but it's inappropriate how they're being connected with. Right? Maybe it's an ask that is in that bull's eye. Maybe it's a little too low. Alright. Sure. They'll throw a 10, but there might be a lot a lot more money on the table. They might be a lower tier donor, and we're throwing in, like, a 150, $200 ask, and they're saying, hey. You know what? That last $50 gift that I gave, that was pretty big for me. And so they're gonna be alienated because they're saying, hey. You know what? They're looking for these larger gifts. That's maybe a little bit outside where I'm aiming to support. So they land on this page. This ask array, we call that our smart ask array. It's a dynamic set of gift suggestions using we call it the responsive listener. Basically, it's on your website looking at, hey. Who's landing here? It's saying, okay. Is this a new donor? Is this an existing donor? What's the right amount for them? So maybe Eric has been giving to this organization years years years years. Eric has been giving $500 gifts over and over again. Well, it's gonna say, hey. You know what? That 5, 10, $15 amount, not appropriate for Eric. That might jump up to a $500 amount, a $7.50 amount, a $1,000 because we're tailoring it to the donor. Maybe I'm landing here. To the donor. It is the first pillar of responsive fundraising is listening. I love that piece there. Right? Exactly. If we're not listening, we're gonna be missing the mark. We're not hitting that bull's eye. Same thing. I'm a new donor. I've never given to you before, or start me out at that amount appropriate for a new donor that we don't recognize. Hey. 5, 10, 15, etcetera. Let's say I'm that one time giver. Right? I'm saying, you know what? Again, maybe dipping my toes in the water. I'm not ready for a recurring gift. Maybe just yet, I'm gonna give once. Maybe you know what? I'm gonna go for that $50 gift. Alright. Let's go. We can add that interruption. Hey. Really appreciate the gift you're about to give. Would you consider at a lower amount, perhaps a recurring donation? We can have some additional storytelling here. Here's the impact that recurring giving does for us. Here's actually what that is gonna have, the effect that that's gonna have on our mission, on our community. And we see a huge statistical conversion just with that little interruption. Right? Just with a little bit of extra storytelling from those would be one time donors to a recurring support. So right off the bat, right, we're saying, hey. How is this person engaging with us? How can we engage back in a way that is going to deepen that relationship with them? First steps to the door, and we're already doing what we can to strategically cultivate the relationship. Now we're not gonna go through the rest of the donation form. Don't worry. I'm not gonna torture you by plugging in all my information here. Let's say I've given that gift. It's entering the system. Here's the Well, I want to go back to it one second. Can I say one second free advice, go back to this page? If you're going to do a giving page, make it as frictionless as possible. What you see here is easy as possible. All we're asking for is a gift amount and then their contact information, their credit card payment. I see so many giving pages that has hundreds and hundreds of responses and forms and fields and full programs and funds and all the things. Just make it make it easy like you can buy a pizza. That's it. Absolutely. We don't want it to be a chore. We want this to be, hey. I'm inspired to give. Awesome. Let's make that as easy as possible for you. Our mission here is to make it easy for you to support your mission through us. Right? Easy as pie. So, again, we we make that super frictionless experience. Right? They've supported. They've given. They're in our wheelhouse now. How is that data actually getting digested? Here's where we're gonna get a little bit more into the data nerd stuff. I promise this is still gonna be fun, still gonna be exciting, honestly, because this is where we're making your life easier. Okay? So if we're thinking about automation, right, the way we think about that is that a prerequisite for automation to be used effectively is that the data has to be clean. Right? The data has to be accurate, healthy as it's entering the system. Because let's say, you know, maybe I'm giving a gift to you. You've got me in your system as Ben Harney. I fill out an online donation form that day. I don't know what comes over me. I put Benjamin Harney. I'm just using my full legal name that day. Maybe Eric's given a gift. You've got Eric's, personal email down on your files. You know what? That day, Eric's working off his work laptop. Hey. He plugs in his work email. We wouldn't want that little discrepancy, Ben versus Benjamin, Eric's work email versus his personal email to not be matched, right, to not be registered. And then suddenly, maybe we're getting a new donor welcome series. We're saying, hey. Thank you for your first gift to the organization, and we're sitting back going, I might have given you a 1,000 and 1,000 of dollars before. What do you mean my first gift? Right? Why aren't you recognizing me? We're probably gonna have some negative repercussions for that relationship. So that's a long way to say this has to be accurate. Right? It has to be matched to the appropriate records saying, hey. Which donor is this actually coming from from the get go? So that's where we see our gift and contact import tool. Now I always like to say, no. Don't worry. These aren't the only two things that Virtuos can import, but because those are in many ways the bread and butter record types, they get their own little special corner. And, really, what's happening here is wherever this new information is coming from, it's going through this process for data health and data screening. You'll often hear us joke. We always call it, like, customs at the airport. Everything that enters has to be screened to make sure it's not gonna mess anything up, to make sure it's gonna support the ecosystem of Virtuos. So like I said, every single gift, it could be someone filling, that online donation form out. It could be us having that integration, a connection from somewhere else. Hey. Maybe we had, like, some event where we didn't have Internet access. We're actually jotting down gift information on, like, a spreadsheet. Hey. You can upload your CSVs. You can kinda mix and match, plug in some gifts manually. Maybe it's through an integration. Maybe this is just donor information right through that survey or through that newsletter sign up we talked about. It's all going through here. And what Virtuos is doing is actually sorting it into these 3 categories. Right? I'm gonna move our little screen share to the side. It's sorting it into these 3 categories, these buckets you see at the bottom, match needed, update needed, ready for import. Okay? Ready for import is all your low hanging fruits. All of the information entering the system that Virtuos matches 100%. We've got someone like Teresa here. Everything that Teresa put on that form, whatever it might be, aligns 100% perfectly with what we already have on file for Teresa. There is no doubt that this is the donor that that gift came from. Golden. There's nothing that you or your team has to do. The computers handled it. Now we might get into those more intricate, more nuanced scenarios, right, where there might be a few discrepancies in the data that we're working with. Let's say we do have someone who is truly a new donor, a 0% match. Nothing's lining up. Alright. Well, hey. That is a totally new donor. We can create all those new donors in bulk. You don't have to do it 1 by 1, but it is still gonna skip a couple of folks in a few different scenarios. And that's really where we say, hey. This is new information. Right? This isn't information we have, but there's something on the table that makes us say, this might be someone that's associated with someone that we already have. So for example, we've got Luke and Victoria here. Victoria has given us a new gift. Pretty much none of her information aligns with what we have on file, so she is effectively a first time donor, a new donor. But, hey, you know what? That email actually lines up with someone we do have. Should Victoria not be made as her own separate donor? Should she be added to that household as Luke's spouse? Or, you know, is this some other scenario? Maybe, you know, let's say, a a college age student giving, for the first time, they're using a a parent's email, something along those lines, we are gonna have her as our separate donor. Right? Saying, hey. You know what? You don't have to review every little thing that's entering the database, but here's gonna be the things that a human should review, again, to make sure it is accurate. And you might also say have, like, 5 John Smiths. They all live in New York. There's not enough information for the computer again to accurately distinguish, is this the right John Smith, or is this the right John Smith? It would similarly say, hey. Here's some new John Smith information. Here on the right is gonna be all of your possible results. Are one of these the right John Smith or no? This is the new John Smith, and we're actually gonna add that new record to our system. Love it. Now the middle parts. Right? This is where things kinda get fun. Those examples I was given earlier, Ben versus Benjamin, Eric's 2 different emails, this is where we might need to make an update. This is kind of in the center of that spectrum of data match. It's saying, hey. Most of the information, if not all of the information, it is lining up, but there's a little bit different. Right? We've got Ken here. Ken maybe filled out a form and put Kenny, his nickname. Well, okay. We're saying this is a existing donor, but what should we do with that new information? Right? Are we ignoring it? Are we updating it? Right. We're gonna actually use his preferred nickname going forward. If it's the example with Eric's different emails, maybe someone puts in a different phone number, a different mailing address, just the same. We're gonna say, hey. Should we ignore it? Should we update it, or should we update it and make it their primary contact information? This is the main email or phone number or mailing address that we should use going forward. So it's giving us that intentional pause. Right? We're still capturing that information automatically. We're matching it to the records it needs to go to. But what should we do when we get this new information to make sure that we're still connecting with that donor as effectively as possible throughout the next steps of our relationship with them. That's great. So that's our little pod. Oh, please, Eric. I think this is, you know, it's interesting is like, so I like data. I like looking at all the different thought leadership stuff that's out there in our space. And the CCS report. They did a philanthropic pulse report last year and they looked at and they asked of surveyed a whole host of development directors and fundraisers, a whole host of questions. The one question that stood out to me was 2 thirds of nonprofit leaders do not trust their data that's in their CRM. And And I think this is the reason why. It's duplicative. It's does not spelled right. People are not needed to all the different nation in these donor journeys because they're scared of their data not being correct. And I think this is such a foundational piece of everything for all nonprofits. Just having clean data matters. And and I hate even saying the term data because we said we said we're data nerds. We're also nonprofit nerds. But data to me, these are donors. These are people. These are givers. These are humans, and we need to treat them with respect as much as, as we can. Absolutely. And, Eric, I totally know what you mean. Right? We're always talking about data, but at the end of the day, that data is to make sure we're connecting with people effectively. So to me, I always say, you know what? Yeah. We're data nerds, but the data is what's fueling our relationships. It's what's enabling us to actually make that really, really human connection. And if the data is not good, that machine is not running. We're not able to build those relationships. We're not able to connect at that personal human level. So that's why this is so important. I want to make every donor feel like a major donor. I want every donor to feel like I'm connecting with them, that, like, they give me a $1,000,000 every year. We can't do that if we're saying, hey. You know what? I can't trust the data that I have. I'm not a 100% sure who this person is. I'm not a 100% sure how I've connected with them before or how they've connected with me before. If that's not there, we simply don't have a relationship or excuse me. We don't have a foundation for the relationship that we want to build. I love that. Ben, I've got 2 questions. Before I get to the questions from the audience and the team, if you're interested to learn more and if you're if you're if it's like it's the bottom of the half hour, you we're gonna put a link in the chat to be able to schedule a demo to go deeper and wider and learn more about Virtruis, be able to do that. Please do so. The 2 questions I have, and I kinda answered the first one, which was, is this platform, for individual donors or can it be utilized for organ? It's, we do have a foundation piece. You can actually marry the you have a contact record. You have a giving. You have corporate. You have foundation. We do gaps, in kind, all the different things. Like I said, all the good things are there. So that is there. The other question when I lean into you, Ben, I'm not sure if you wanna show it, but is can we track donor activity and likes? Oh, beautiful. And what's important to that specific donor? So that's the listen component to that. So think through when we go to the contact to go deeper there. Absolutely. Yeah. First of all, thank you to whoever asked that question. That is gonna tee us up perfectly to look at the contact record here. And, candidly, that is the basis of what we want to have on this contact record. Right? We're thinking a lot about, of course, more classic fundraising data. Right? What's their giving history? What are they responding to? All of that good stuff. But we also wanna make sure that we have those nuances captured as well. To Eric's point earlier about Netflix. Right? If someone is engaging with us and we have maybe 3 different kind of areas of action that we're working with and we're saying, hey. You know what? They're really passionate about this one. That is their main passion. That is their main interest. The other 2, you know, they support, but it's not maybe their their top of mind item, their their priority. We wanna make sure that we are connecting with that person through that critical line. Right? We don't wanna be going towards the b tier and the c tier connections. We wanna be hitting that top priority, that a tier every single time. So that is 100% huge. We'll start on maybe tracking activity around them. Right? How are they connecting with us? How are we connecting with them? Couple of ways that happens. For 1, every donor is gonna have this activity feed here, and this is kind of multifaceted. You'll often hear us talk about capturing a 360 degree or, like, a holistic view of our donors. This is where we kinda get that as soon as we land on the donor's record. So this is functioning really in a few ways. Like I was saying, one, all that activity is happening here. We're seeing that some folks are opening emails. They're clicking links in those emails. We'll see when they give gifts, when they attend events, when they volunteer with us. Right? All of that is landing here. And this is additionally helpful, not just for saying, hey, maybe I wanna look at the Ackerman family, see how they're engaging with us. But maybe I'm a marketer, and I wanna see, hey. What is fundraising been doing with this person? Maybe opposite. I'm a fundraiser, and I'm saying, hey. How is this person, engaging with our marketing content historically? We're removing those silos not just in our data, but we're moving, those silos between our team to say, hey. Everybody gets that visibility into how our donors are engaging with these other teams as well. Now beyond that, just, again, a little bit of perhaps the data nerd item here. This is also functioning more like a a digital paper trail, a little bit like an audit log. You'll see, hey. I've made some changes. Let's see if I can find one that I've done. But if someone has updated something, added a note, added an address, that will also appear in this list. I'm gonna go back to that next next analogy because I think it it the gig works. Right? Like, my wife and I have one household account for for Netflix, but there's 2 different personas underneath it. Right? Like, I talked about how I'm a comic book nerd. She's an interior designer nerd. Right? And so she's not gonna see my stuff and I'm not gonna see her stuff. And that's why I like the contact record where we also have husband and wife and kid and spouse and whatever else underneath that household record here. Absolutely. And that is where we get a ton of that flexibility. We'll bring this back when we start talking about their likes and their interests. Mhmm. Right? We've got our contact, the household, and to the previous question, right, that could also be a foundation, that could also be an organization, but then we have the people in that household or in that organization. Right? So we're saying, hey. Maybe here's data. Here's activity at that higher record or at that level for the group, but then we're also gonna have specific details for Ken, for Mikaela, for their daughter. All of that can be tracked separately, but we also get that single source of truth with the whole household here. Let's go back to our engagement. Right? We're thinking about how we're we're touching base with our people. We'll see the marketing engine in just a moment, but additionally, as we're reaching out to folks doing a little bit more prospecting, fundraising, personal personal touch points, we can send text directly from the database. We can send emails directly from the database. Awesome time saver here when you send an email. So, like, if I'm sending maybe Makayla a quick template here, of course, you could type it up directly. When I click compose email, that kicks you over your inbox. It's gonna be c c virtuous. That email thread is gonna be looped back to their record. You don't have to copy and paste it. You get a record of it directly on them when you're looking at them. We'll see things like web history. We were talking about how the donation pages are actually responding to which donor it is, saying, hey. We're gonna have a higher gift amount for Eric. We're gonna have a lower gift amount for Ben, so on so on. We can also say, hey. When they're visiting our website, what pages are they looking at? How much time are they spending there? What actions are they taking? Are they filling out forms? If so, what type of form? We can see the preview details and say, okay. Specifically, what pages were they looking at? Again, saying when I'm gonna reach out this person, maybe on a phone call, maybe on a meeting, I can actually say, hey. I I, you know, are you interested in this volunteer opportunity that you are researching on the website? Anything along those lines. Hey, Ben. While you're here, I got I'm gonna ask you to go to the give giving because I want we have Richard about donor advised funds and how we do restricted. But I'm gonna go back one second. When we talk about the the mobile or text or email functionality, I think through this is how many folks have left a job in the last year or 2 and has a new email address. The e we keep emailing everybody, but we're not getting any responses because frankly no one's responding because they have this old email addresses. Yet on the other side, how many of us have a cell phone number for the last 20 years that hasn't changed it? Right? And so the I heard a statistic the other day at a conference that 90% of text messages are open in the first three minutes. And I think we need to start connecting with our donors. And I go back to it because you're gonna love me because I'm the frontline fundraiser. You're the database administrator. It's like, if it's not in the system, it didn't happen. Right? Like, so these my heart sing, Eric. Right? Like, these texts and these emails automatically log back to the record, which helps Ben and his team make data informed decisions. So that off my soapbox, let's go to donor advised fund, Ben. Absolutely. Absolutely. So when we're talking donor advised funds, I will generally say of course, we'll we'll talk, you know, broadly speaking, oftentimes, one of the biggest cans of worms in just tracking that in the database. Right? Okay. You know, we've got this donor advised fund here. Alright. Okay. Where are we gonna give that credit to? Are we gonna use soft credits to kind of track who that's connected with? Okay. Or how are we gonna divvy up those soft credits? We don't want total giving to be, you know, perhaps skewed in certain scenarios. I'm being a bit theatrical. Again, it's just a big can of worms when we talk about how it gets tracked. This is one of my favorite quality of life improvements in Virtuis as to how we solve for this. The answer there is gonna be pass through gifts. So, basically, how this works, let's say in this case so let's say this arts association here. Let's say this is the Ackerman Family Foundation. Instead of saying, okay. We're gonna do a soft credit in some capacity. We're gonna have this big set of policies to indicate when and how much a credit should be in this instance. We simply have it as a pass through gift. So that family foundation, they might have given that $1,000. We give Ken and Mikaela, the actual Ackerman family, $1,000 of pass through credits, and these are always considered separate buckets. And the nice thing is when you get to querying, when you get to reporting, we can always choose, hey, which bucket do we wanna use? Do we wanted to use effectively hard credited giving, the gifts that they actually signed the check on or that they gave us that envelope of cash through? Do we want to just use pass through gifts? And I always describe this as where they might have influenced that gift. Right? They had the intention to give, but some other taxable entity actually signed the check, or do we want to do both? So then if we are reporting on say, hey, all families with the family foundation, what's the total or the average maybe year over year that we get from those families plus to their foundations? Right? We just use the combined metric. If we're just looking at, hey, direct hard credit to giving, we can do that. If we wanna see just that past due giving, we can do that. So we have the flexibility, 1, to report, to query on that however we want, but also to track it in a way that's intuitive and doesn't require kind of figuring out that can of worms to just manage something that is pretty common and kind of should be pretty straightforward as well. Right. Right. Let's see. Eric, do we have any other questions on that? No. That we have all those questions. I think we've covered everybody. Keep them coming, people. This is great. I love the questions. I love the interaction. We we make this live and interactive and and as as informative as we can. We value the time that we're here, so that's why we will make this informative for you guys. Beautiful. Well, in that case, I think the one question that we haven't tied it back to yet is getting back to those likes, those interests, those passions. We're gonna scroll down to tags. Tags are gonna be one of the biggest sources of fuel for what we're gonna look at next, which will be automation. So, you know, depending on what database you're coming from, this could take a lot of different, you know, analogies. Right? This is gonna capture different ways that folks are affiliated with you. Right? Are they a volunteer? Are they an event attendee? Are they an employee? Are they a a foundation fund holder? Right? How do they actually connect with us? What's that look like? This is also gonna capture maybe specific giving groups. Hey. Are they a major donor? Are they a prospect? Are they a lapsed donor? It's also gonna capture communication preferences. Hey. Someone might prefer text messages versus phone calls. Someone might like to actually meet with you once a quarter, anything along those lines, but it is also going to capture those likes, those interests. Now where we see the force multiplication, the extra mileage here is when we're thinking about how these tags are dynamically added, dynamically removed with automation in response to how they engage with us. So let's say we have that survey form on our websites. Maybe one of those is, hey. Why did you get involved with our organization? Right? What's important to you? What are you passionate about? We have a list of options. Alright. Someone chooses one option, someone else just chooses a different one, they might automatically be tagged accordingly, interested in x, interested in y, automatically be placed in the corresponding email list for those, automatically be placed in, corresponding drip campaigns to kind of let them know, hey. They're the, these are the projects that we have going on with the specific cause that you're interested in, the one that actually brought you through our front doors. So we'll see this, also kind of apply to those different giving levels, major donor, mid level donor, perhaps a prospect. We'll also see it apply in how we can effectively cultivate with our people. Again, think about it like this. Maybe someone, someone attends an event. Alright. They're gonna get tagged as an event attendee. But, again, maybe it's a event that is actually pertaining to a very specific cause with our organization. Just because they connected with that event, they could get the corresponding tag there as well. So let's actually jump into the really, really fun part, which is going to be the automation. Yeah. To Eric's point, this is really where we are gonna be light years, light years, light years difference than pretty much any other CRM that you're gonna be able to look at. Depending on what other platforms you might have used, I do just like to set the expectation that Virtuis is going to be, probably wildly different from from what you might have seen elsewhere. I'll do a quick one. Back. Before we jump in, I'm gonna go back and just share, like, the personal experience. I'm gonna let you get a drink of water. The, the idea is, like, the world out there is changing. Right? The world is using automation. We don't even recognize it. I had a story the other day where it's, like, on my birthday, I got a text message happy birthday from my eye doctor, you know, and it's like and that's automation. We're hearing from the eye doctor, our realtors, our financial planners, like and we just accept it. But at the end of the day here at VirTra, we believe giving is personal, and our donors want to hear from us on those important milestones for us. And letting automation do that effectively and correctly matters. I Eric, that's the perfect example. I love the birthday example because it is something so theoretically simple that we just kind of in great magnitude missed the mark on with legacy platforms. Right? Like you're saying, the eye doctor, the gym membership. We're getting a day of birthday email, right, from those businesses saying, hey. Happy birthday, Eric. Hope it's a great one. We don't wanna be lagging behind the gym in building these relationships with our people. Right? So, you know, the it's the it's the tales oldest time, you know, nonprofit's gonna say, hey. Beginning of the month, we pull our query, our report, everybody who's got a birthday that month, might put some letters in the mail, might do some emails, hey, hope you have a great birthday month. Awesome. If your birthday is, what, December 1st, that's gonna work great next week. Yep. If it's December 31st, you're missing the mark by a whole month. It's not gonna have the same impact. We're diluting it. So we are victim of death for 15 years. I did that for 15 years. Like So how can we beat the gym? Right? How can we beat the eye doctor? How can we beat the dentist in that level of engagement, in that level of personalization? And this is where automation is giving us that extra mileage. Right? So, again, just to just to pull it back to the technical building blocks of what we're doing. Right? We're we're not just saying, hey. This is gonna automatically create a to do list item for you to send Eric an email on his birthday. We've got 2 types of actions building these automations. The first is external. Right? And that is gonna be things being sent out of the marketing engine, automatic emails, automatic texts. We can even do automatic direct mail. So we call it letters on demand. Basically, we work with the National Mail House In these dynamic sequences, it's Eric's birthday. Alright. The birthday celebration automation might look a week into the future. Hey. It's Eric's birthday a week in, from now. Let's automatically slide that birthday postcard in the mail. 7 days from now, it'll probably have arrived by his door. We're within days of the birthday with a physical piece of mail that Eric can look at and say, hey. My nonprofit was thinking about me. Not just in my email inbox, but literally in real life on my doorstep. So all of that together and asterisk there, when I'm talking about that automatic direct mail, that's being triggered through that mail house. You're not stuffing an envelope. You're not going to the post office to do that. That is happening entirely hands off for you and your team. So if that's the external action of it all, the internal action is where we're gonna see a ton of the data kinda keeping itself up to date in a lot of ways. This can actually internally update fields on your records. It can add and remove those tags we were talking about. It can shift people between email lists, automatically add folks to portfolios. Hey. Eric gave a gift. Eric's up in Philadelphia. I've got my fundraiser who handles that that state. Awesome. Eric's automatically added their portfolio. Maybe I've got a few folks there. Eric has added to the specific portfolio of the giving level that he is connecting with. So all that together. Right? All that together is where we're putting together these workflows. It's helping our donors. It's helping us. It's hands off. So I'm gonna show us 2 examples here. The first is gonna be a new donor welcome series. Eric already knows that I'm gonna have to kinda cut my tongue here because I could talk about new donor welcome series all day. They are literally my favorite fundraising strategy, Honestly, because as a data nerd, there is so much research out there, an absolute gold mine. This is one of the best investments you can make with your new donors. I was called the bill for the do this right now. Stop everything. New new new donor new donor welcome series now. It is a gold mine. I I always call the billboard metric, but your donors who are engaged in the 1st 30 days after their first gift, on average, 300% greater lifetime value than a donor who's not engaged in those 1st 30 days. So take advantage of the honeymoon period. Right? Make sure that we're making that connection. We make that investment upfront. It's gonna pay dividends on the on other side. And if it's automated, it is also taking zero effort from you and your team. So let's look at what is actually going on here. Right? There's kind of a couple of things going on. The first thing you probably see are these different tracks, and this is basically, conditional logic, right, for your workflow. Saying, hey. Each of these are gonna be powered by a query or a set of filters. When someone lands in that query group, that's gonna trigger them into that branch of the automation. So here we have someone give their first gift. They're queried on first time donor, automatically tagged as a first time donor. Awesome. So for all of our analyses, for any communications that we're sending out, we don't have to remember, hey. This is supposed to be for my first time donors. When was the last time I maybe did a global update or a global ad to indicate those are my first time donors? Right? We're we're kinda chasing the ball there. We're we're running on a lagging indicator. This happens when they give that gift. I'm not worried about making that change myself. Likewise, when they give their 2nd gift, they're kicked over to a different branch. That tag is automatically removed. They are no longer a first time donor. They're retained. So again, all of my analyses, whether it's looking at first time donors, whether it's looking at time between that first and second gift, it's automatically responding to data that I didn't have to update. Well, very similar example. Let's tag them to say, hey, they're currently receiving the welcome series. I'm doing another email blast. I want my new donors focused on the sequence that I have curated to be the best first impression possible. I don't wanna divide their attention to something else. Let's just filter them out of my recipients based on the fact they're currently getting that welcome series. Don't have to worry about them being erroneously filtered out later down the line because that's gonna get removed as soon as they finish the welcome series. So again, it's always reflecting accurately what's happening with that particular donor in their trajectory with us. Wait a minute. Did you say it automatically removes tags? Like, isn't that a manual thing we do on a regular basis? Exactly. Right? Again and thinking about saying, hey. You know what? This is sometimes those those global updates, a pretty effortful task. Right? Whether you're database admin or whether you're helping with that data management, it's not gonna be a quick and easy thing. It's generally something that you're gonna say, hey. I'm gonna take maybe, you know, 30 minutes, an hour, maybe longer to actually perform. It's time out of the day that isn't insignificant. So by taking that off our plate, suddenly our band is saying, hey. I'm gonna do these higher level, these more strategic, these generally more impactful changes and updates in my database so that the whole machine is more effective, more efficient for everybody. Well, and I go back to the piece I said earlier about data health. It's like data health is doing it inside the system. Instead of a manual update, it's clean inside the system as well. It it's a huge difference. Exactly. And a lot of the time, you know, if if we are only doing that effortful task on an every few days basis, every week, every other week, whatever that might be, inherently, just because of our what is a good policy to do sing things frequently, but inherently because that's not an every day, every minute thing, we're always having at least a portion of that data being objectively inaccurate. So that's what we wanna avoid here with this. Now in the middle is where we're getting that outreach, right, our external actions. First of all, before those even kick off, we're running a wealth screening. Hey. Someone's given a gift, automatically wanna know, broadly speaking, what is their giving capacity look like? What is their historical philanthropic giving look like? Based on that, maybe they shouldn't be getting this more everyday personalized donor sequence. We're gonna kick them over to the first time major donor branch. They're not getting personalized anything. They're automatically landing in my portfolio. We're kicking that off with a personal phone call from me as the fundraiser saying, hey, Eric. Really appreciate that gift that you gave us. I'd love to stay in touch. How do you prefer to be contacted? You know? Are you more of a text guy? Would you prefer I give you a phone call? Hey. Would you wanna set up a meeting even? Right? We're starting off with saying, hey. This is a high value donor. Let's make sure that we're approaching with a little bit more strategy. For everybody else who might not get kicked over there, totally fine. They're still gonna have that personalized outreach. They're getting that email. They're getting that postcard. They're getting that text message. Again, because everything is in the same ecosystem, we're not doing that import export dance to do a mail merge or to have something at worst case say, hey, friend. Right? Definitely wanna avoid that. It's still gonna say, hey, Eric. Thank you for your $50 gift to our annual fund. Really appreciate that. I'm gonna love staying connected with you. Here's maybe an upcoming list of our projects, of our events, of our upcoming volunteer opportunities. Now, of course, just to flag this, the one thing that the computer can't do at least yet is give someone that personal phone call. So that will still be tasked to our fundraisers, but it's still happening automatically. When the time comes after those delays, after those other outreach elements are sent out, then only then am I gonna get that task to say, hey. Let's give that new donor a phone call to say hi. So cool. You're right. This is kind of a very big picture one. Like Eric and I were saying earlier, this is something that's probably gonna benefit everybody. Having that new donor welcome series and making it so that your team really doesn't have to do 99% of the process, but we're still keeping it optimal, still keeping it efficient. You can also have them really simple. I always call these virtual executive assistant, automations here. It's not actually gonna be doing any communication, but this is I always use the same analogy. It's helping us find the needle in the haystack. We're not on our hands and knees digging through our data trying to say, hey. Here's something really important happening here. Here's something really important happening over there. I've burned half my day just figuring out what that is. Alright. Well, now I guess I have less time to actually execute on it. This is just looking out for those critical opportunities for me. This is finding the needle for me. So if this is looking at just all my major donors across the board, a lot of the time like we're talking about silos earlier, if all the teams are functioning, functioning really separately, I might have someone who gives a ton of money and they're also volunteering and they're also attending events, and I don't have visibility into those different ways that they're connecting with us. Right? It's total blind spots. So here, it's all very simple. All that it's doing is saying, hey. Got major donors. Soon as they RSVP to an event, bam. Give me a tap on the shoulder. Let me know. Hey. They volunteer with us. Bam. Tap me on the shoulder. Let me know. Hey. I've got a major donor who we've actually we're getting a little bit cold on, haven't contacted them in at least 90 days. Of course, you can edit the time frame there, If I haven't contacted them in a while, same thing. Tap me on their shoulder. Let me know. Gathering dust on this relationship. Probably want to reach out to them to to spruce that up a little bit to connect and say, hey. Wanna make sure you know you're still on our minds. So my friends, that is where automation fits in. I still wanna emphasize this is the tip of the iceberg. The sky is the limit when it comes to automation. You could talk with me and Eric all day about different ways that this gets utilized, different ways it saves the team time, but this is what we're talking about when we say we're being responsive. Right? We're treating every donor like the major donors. The thing I love about automation is not only like the external piece, making it easier, like sending out a bit birthday postcard or an email or whatever it is. It's the internal stuff. Like, I I I remember sitting in the chair running a couple of nonprofits, and it was, like, putting, like it was drinking water from a fire hose. I was trying to, like, stop this. And then a board member calls me, and I'm over here, and I'm dealing with the donor situation where a program issue and, like, all these different things. It kept my life organized. It's like Asana internally. Right? Like, so these are the things that matter to make us focus on what you said, Ben, what what is right. Let the manual process be automated so that we can get out there and focus on those relationships, focus on our program, focus on giving and everything else that we're doing. This isn't gonna replace our jobs. It's gonna enhance it, and it's gonna help us. And I think it's just just a modern approach to how we want to fundraise. Absolutely. Absolutely. My friends, that was pretty much everything I had on the docket. Did we have any last questions that we wanted to hit before we, started wrapping things up here? I didn't see any other questions. Folks, please get you. This has been a very engaging crowd. We have a good amount of questions that came in. We would love to continue to support and help you. If you see up on the top of your screen, it says schedule a demo. As well, I'm gonna share this cool hey. Ben Ben, are you fascinated with the rise and fall code? The QR code has been around for about 10 years. It's died a couple times, and it's now back. It's like And now it's back. And it's replaced restaurant menus more than anything in my experience. It's It's fascinating. And what's great about it is this is frictionless. Please, if you're interested to learn more, you'll get to visit with Ben and myself 1 on 1 learning more about your our solution to help you drive global generosity, utilizing our methodology which is responsive fundraising. Again, that's listen, connect, suggest, and learn. You can see it through all the automation. We have one question from Richard Martin coming in. Does Virtuis have a setting to alert us of a large donation that may require immediate attention to the donor? Ben, I'm gonna let you answer that. Yeah. Absolutely. I'll put it this way y'all. We've got those big, fun, fancy, nuanced automations. You also have what I call bite sized automations. You don't even have to build a workflow for that. In a task, so the full task manager in Virtuous, you can just build a task that says, hey. Let me know when a gift comes in that is above x amount, that's above 5,000, which is above 10,000. Whatever that might be, you don't have to have that full workflow running. It's just one single task. And again, taps you on the shoulder. Hey, Ben. New $10,000 gift came in. Just letting you know that's landed on my to do list. I can follow-up with that however I need to. So that is probably one of the easiest, easiest things to set up in Virtuos. Oh my god. I would love to be alerted, the know all that stuff. Even like the alert of, like, the lifetime giving amount or year to date. If someone hits a threshold of $10,000 in a year, I wanna be alerted in at that moment instead of year end when I do that report. Right? It makes it very, very, very easy. David, Brandon, Shelley, who else do we have in here? We've got Scott. We've got all the people in the room chatting it up. Thank you so much for being here. We appreciate the hour you spent with us in the middle of end of year fundraising, Giving Tuesday. We salute you. We want you to do well. We are excited for you to end the year strong. We are here to help. Come talk to us. See you at the next event, folks. Thanks, Ben. Thank you, Eric. Talk to y'all later.