Name: Old Ways Won’t Win New Donors: Exploring the Tactics + Tech to Thrive in a Digital-First World
Uploaded: 2025-03-20T19:30:39.246Z
Duration: 59 min 24 s
Description: Old Ways Won’t Win New Donors: Exploring the Tactics + Tech to Thrive in a Digital-First World

Transcript for "Old Ways Won’t Win New Donors: Exploring the Tactics + Tech to Thrive in a Digital-First World": Well, hey, everybody. Welcome to the webinar today. We're glad that you are here. Everyone's kinda pouring in. The gates are open, so to speak, and so welcome. Everyone's jumping in here. You are at Old Ways Won't Win New Donors, exploring the tactics, tech to thrive in a digital first world. And so we are thrilled to have you. Let us know where you're joining from today. And so you're gonna see the chat over there. I just posted, said welcome. Let us know where you're tuning in from and, maybe the organization that you're with. We are glad to have you here. The other thing that's awesome about this platform, you're gonna notice when you type your message, that there is a little gift box. And so you can actually search for your favorite gift. You can share it in the chat. I'm gonna do that now because I love this one. This is my go to webinar gift. Just a friendly hello that says welcome. And so thanks so much for being here. I know we have more folks kinda joining us, jumping in. And so welcome. Jackie, welcome from Charlotte. We're glad that you're here. We are gonna get going today. Again, you're at Old Ways, What With New donors, and we are going to be jumping into all things about tactics, tech, ultimately for to help you grow and to see your fundraising increase. Now I keep saying we and you're probably wondering, so who is who is this we? You see Carly and Mike, with us, and so we're gonna jump to intros today and let you know who we are. So my name is Scott Holt House, the manager of campaigns and programs here at virtuous before jumping on with the virtuous team. I spent a number of years in in the faith vertical local ministries working in that's kind of where I come from as far as the nonprofit background goes. And, and so really glad to be jumping in. I am going to toss it over today, to Carly. She can introduce herself and we'll go from there. Thanks, Scott. Welcome everyone who's joining. My name is Carly Berna. I was a ten year nonprofit fundraising and development professional. I worked at a, $30,000,000 nonprofit as their chief marketing development officer. And three years into that journey, I had to make a CRM transition and, was a seven year Virtuos customer before joining Virtuos last year. I have the privilege to be the fundraiser in residence, which means I get to bring my fundraising and nonprofit experience to Virtuous so that we make sure that our product and our messaging aligns with what customers and fundraisers really need. But excited to have Mike join us today. I'll let you introduce yourself and tell a little bit about your organization. Hi, everyone. My name is Mike Kirkpatrick. I'm a principal consultant at Heller Consulting. My primary focus is working in the strategy practice area where we help organizations work through things like technology roadmaps, operation assessments, and selections for CRMs and other digital tools. Before Heller, I spent a lot of time on the client side working in digital fundraising, digital marketing for about fifteen years in a large national nonprofit here in Canada where I'm based. And, really excited to join you here today. I'll, share a quick little bit about Heller for those of you who are not familiar with the organization. We've been around for approximately thirty years. Our focus exclusively is on supporting nonprofit organizations and higher ed advancement groups with their technology strategy, planning, and change management. We work with organizations of all size, but certainly, we worked with some of the largest organizations in The US, which really allows us to see business challenges at the largest scale. We also have practice area, to support implementations of a number of different CRMs and digital solutions. That's awesome. Appreciate it, Mike. Sorry. I was on mute. Classic webinar mistake, where you're talking and you're muted. We all do it. Right? Alright. We're gonna be talking about, a handful of things today. So I wanna walk you through the agenda just so you kind of an understand understanding of our road map. I did just put in the chat as well. We'll be recording this, and, we actually if you click the docs tab above the chat, you're gonna notice two things. One is the slide deck for today. Download that. Take that with you. The second is our CRM conversion playbook, and so we wanna give that to you as well, as a gift. Hopefully, that is helpful. So download those. The session will be recorded and sent out, and we'll also send out those resources as well. But here's where we're going. We are gonna look at first, when is it time to reevaluate your technology? So asking that question, diving into when is it, understanding when that right time is, what to look for in a modern nonprofit CRM. So understanding, okay, if we have these tactics that we want to implement, how do we have technology that supports it, how to make that transition, and then we're gonna open it up to some q and a as well. So speaking of q and a, we would love for you to submit any questions that you have. You'll notice q and a tab above the chat. Submit your questions throughout today, and you can actually upvote questions as well. So if you look in there and you're like, you know what? I'm kinda wondering that same thing. You can vote on that. It will move that to the top and make sure that we answer that for you. And we also have polls throughout today. So the polls tab, when we open, you'll notice polls open up. You see that little red dot. You see a little screen thing that says go to polls tab. And so our first one today, we wanna know kinda where you're coming from. What CRM are you currently using? Again, we're gonna be talking about tactics and technology today and how those play together. So it's helpful for us to just understand the platform that you're on, what you're using. And so go ahead, click that poll tab, fill out that, answer that poll today. We'd love to know that and hear from you. So please fill that out. We're gonna leave that open for another minute or two, so make sure you get in on the fun and select that poll. And we're gonna as we kinda continue today, Jackie, thanks for sharing there in the chat. That's awesome. As we continue today, we are gonna jump into when is it time to reevaluate your technology. Okay? So I'm gonna go ahead and toss this over to Mike as he as he takes over, for this section. Alright. Thanks, Scott. This is certainly one of the areas in my role in the strategy practice at Heller that we spend a lot of time working with organizations to understand. When an organization is thinking about making a change, it's really important to ensure that the technology you have is really aligned to your goals, particularly, with this group for things like your marketing and fundraising goals. Obviously, you'll have many other systems at play in the organization, but I think when we're, we're talking about a fundraising CRM or a donor CRM, marketing and fundraising functionality sort of rise to the top there. So one of the key questions really is, has your CRM kept up as your goals in those areas have evolved? And some things you could be looking at to evaluate in this area could be, you know, has your organization changed? Have you had organizational growth? That could be the number of staff that are in the system, using the system, the complexity of your organization. The type of data that you're working with could be getting more complex across more systems that you're trying to all make talk to one another. You may have a bigger mandate as an organization. Maybe program delivery, new restrictions that have been required. Another area besides your organizational growth could be your audience evolution. So have giving habits changed? The giving patterns, maybe people are switching from more offline to online donations. Maybe you are seeing a trend in your audience preferring to do things like events, make purchases as a way of support. So really understanding who the audience is that's key to your organization. Maybe the payment methods they like to use. There's so many available now with mobile wallets and the emergence of things like DAFF Pay. Are they shifting from one time to recurring? And then communication from a marketing standpoint. Are we seeing channel preference changes where it's not just about email anymore, but there's more use of SMS and other platforms? And finally, has your environment evolved? Compliance requirements, funding sources, maybe the vendor landscape in the area that you're in has changed as well. So these are all some questions to ask yourself to see whether or not your CRM has really kept up with some of those changes that are happening. Now ultimately, this is gonna lead you to question whether your technology is helping or holding you back. This is really one of those core functions where we work with clients to help them understand the answer to this question. Sometimes, people come to us and they've already made that determination. But there's a number of different steps you can take to really assess your organization and whether you're at that point of helping or hurting. First of all, it certainly starts with an inventory of your systems. It's not always just your CRM, but what other systems do you have? And making sure you map those to see how they're all connected. Really digging into the data for each of those systems and understanding which data is flowing between systems. You know, that will help you look to see where there might be gaps in the data points that you're getting and making sure that it's getting to the right systems where it can be acted upon. What direction is that data flowing? You can start to see where there might be breakdowns between systems talking to one another. And is the flow manual or is it automated? So this starts to identify potential opportunities for efficiency. Once you've mapped those, you might think what does an ideal state look like to get us where we want to be? How do we strengthen those lines of communications between systems and get the right data moving in the right direction? Internal conversations. We do them as discovery sessions when we're helping clients. But certainly, you can have these conversations internally. Make sure to talk about talk with all the stakeholders from the various teams that might be be in this. And make sure that you're focusing on process and people, not just the technology and how those all work together. Coming out of this, you can start to think about your requirements. Not just the requirements that align with what you have now, but thinking forward about what you wanna have in the future. And be sure you prioritize these before you start looking at at systems and how they can get you where you wanna go. And looking at your systems measurement. Are you able to use the current system you have now to even assess, how well you're doing as an organization? That can often be a big barrier as well. So there's a lot of things that come out in these discovery sessions that we have with clients that we feel are big pain points that are really holding people back. And I'm just going to go through a few of the top ones that we hear most often. So the first one is lack of visibility into donor signals and behavior. So this could be not being able to see things like your transactional data, gift data, or engagement data. You know, whether they're taking action on the email campaigns or SMS that you're sending out. And those prevent you from being able to make key decisions. So not having access to the right data points, not having it in the right system that you need it in, Or finding a way to bring all that data from multiple systems together so that you have a good view of a complete donor. So those are some of the first piece of signals that we miss from individuals when we hear some of their challenges. The second challenge is around engagement limitation. And this comes down to things like automation. Do you still have a system that is holding you back from having personalized journeys for each individual. Are you still sending the same message to everybody no matter what their giving history might be, no matter where they live, the interest they have in your cause? So there's a lot of tools that will help you grow into this area. And it's often one of the reasons people move. But it's a leading cause of what drives people away from their current system is not really being able to be advanced with the personalization and the flexibility to control the journey to make it a one to one experience. The third thing that we hear people struggle with is really the manual work. And the biggest area this usually tends to relate to is data. People spend too much time exporting data, reformatting data, trying to move it between systems because they have those data flow breakdowns. And that's a real time suck for staff. They're transforming and appending information to data before they move it into a new system. And that's just one of the biggest reasons that organizations want to make a change. And this is often emerging as a real lack of automation in the systems as well. People are looking for technology to solve problems and reduce the need for manual time. And really that's one, again, one of the drivers that move people away. And the last one I'll talk about is just data trust. And this comes back to systems not talking to one another. Certainly, people are depending on the data to be able to make decisions. And if it's not in the right place, if they don't trust it because it's not formatted the same way between systems, they don't understand. Every organization here probably has multiple systems, CRM, fundraising, marketing, volunteer management, program systems. And if you think back to that mapping exercise when we do discovery, this is where you're going to start to see things that lead to that failure of trust in the data that you've got. So I'm just gonna shift things over to Carly who's gonna talk a little bit about the future of donor relationships. Yeah. And I just wanna comment on something you just said there, which is about saving time for staff. Because I feel like sometimes when we've been using a system for a long time, we're not even sure how to imagine a new world. We're not even we don't even know that we can cut manual time. We don't even know that we can stop living in Excel jail and, you know, have things work seamlessly and have automations and all of that. So, that was a big thing for me when we made the CRM switch is we saved a lot of staff time by creating things, through internal automations, external automations, because we had technology now that allowed us to do things we didn't even know that we could do based on our technology before. Sometimes when you're constrained, you can't see what could be. So, yeah, I wanna talk about the future of donor relationships, call out to back to the future, one of my favorite movies. Scott, I hope you can find a a good meme to put in the chat there. I'm on it. Okay. But we're living in this time in the fundraising industry where we're just having this massive donor retention problem. A lot of it comes back to not having personal relationships at scale with our donors. So we are asking them things that don't make sense to their preferences because we're sending a lot of mass communications, just not being as transparent even within our own teams. So we're facing this huge donor retention problem, but the world that we live in has really changed. Right? Like, most of us have services that we pay for like Apple, Amazon, Netflix that it understands our behavior, it understands our interests, and it responds to us and gives us personalized experiences based on our interests. And that's what our donors are expecting too. I think giving has become a very personal act. Just a personal story, I went to Pepperdine and, with every year they have something called Step Forward Day where you can volunteer and just really get engaged with the community. So I have a super personal connection to this organization. And so when I donate, I definitely expect them to know who I am. I mean, I lived on the campus for multiple years. I graduated. Like, they should know what school I graduated from, what things I was interested in. Like, it's a very personal connection based on my experience there. And that's what we're seeing in the fundraising landscape right now is that donors are really expecting that personal connection and, having confidence in that organization that they care about. So we're focused on creating this more responsive model for generosity. We're gonna talk a little bit more about what that means a little bit later in the webinar. But first, I wanna talk about, what that means when thinking about your CRM. So you want to have a modern CRM that allows you to have this type of personalization at scale, but there's some specific components that allows you to do that that really are kind of the the opposite side of the pain points that we just talked about. So the first is this idea of a full view of your donor. I know I, at one point, had multiple CRMs, like I call multi tool chaos, where we were uploading Excel sheets between different, systems. I just didn't have a full view of what was happening to the donor. I could see what was happening online in one system and offline in another system, and then, the volunteer team had another system. So I couldn't really see what was happening to one donor from a totally three sixty view. That information can really help you, figure out how to talk to donors in a way that's personalized, that makes it feel like that real relationship is there. So that's, the first point. The second is multichannel engagement. So like I just mentioned, when you have all of that information in one place, you want to be able to engage with them on all different channels. Now the best way to engage is the channel that they want to engage with. So if they are someone who likes to respond to text, then you focus on text. But, again, pay attention to their channel preferences. I would engage them, especially digitally, on multiple digital channels, email, text, websites, behavior, if they are offline donor like direct mail or television, radio, events, those types of things. You just want to focus on having that same message across, multiple channels. But, again, making sure that you understand which channel they prefer to engage on is, again, another preference to pay attention to. So it feels like, hey. We know that you really love getting direct mail, and so we're going to talk to you that way because that's your personal preference. Third is this idea of marketing automation, which really was what I was talking about before for me. It was really an unlock. I couldn't even imagine life with automation because I didn't have automation before. So it wasn't like, oh, man. I can't wait to get automation because I really didn't know what it was going to do for us. But, once we were able to automate so many things, it just allowed us to grow this idea of personalization at scale without, the workload. So, for example, we had thousands of mid level donors. We could have hired many, many people to have a caseload for those mid level donors, or we could have used automation to really personalize, the outreach to those specific donors in a way that felt like we knew them, that it was personal, like a rep was reaching out while still having a human interaction. The other thing that automation does from an internal perspective, is you can use it to set up processes that you're doing manually right now. So for example, when I would log into the CRM, I wanted to see all of the donors who gave, a $10,000 gift or above in the last twenty four hours so that we could have our CEO personally thank them. That used to be something where I'd run a report, pull it down, you know, look through the list, assign it to the rep, all of that. With internal automation, that's just done automatically for you. You just get a little task at the top that says, you know, John Smith gave $10,000 yesterday, and you can you don't have to do that manual work. Now that's one example, but think about that on, a tenfold level of all the different processes that you might be doing, reports that you're running that could be automated, and that information is just given to you. You're not having to dig for it. Next is this idea of segmentation. At Virtuous, we talk a lot about reaching the right audience at the right time. I'm sure as someone who, buys and is a consumer, sometimes it feels like you get the something you're looking for at the exact moment you're looking for it. That's the same thing we want to do from a nonprofit perspective. We wanna reach that donor with a message that is relevant, with an ask that is personal, which might not be financial. It could be a volunteer ask, or an advocacy ask. But having that behavioral information so that you can segment your donors and, talk to them in a way that feels very relevant and personal to them allows you to build that relationship with them and then ultimately, help that donor retention number we talked about in the beginning. And lastly, just this idea of built in analytics. Everyone has reporting in their current CRM, but being able to look specifically at campaign performance, looking at how much you're spending versus what the ROI return on investment is for each campaign is extremely important. Measuring up with each of them, just paying attention to donor retention and lifetime value and recurring giving and first to second gift conversion, all of those really basic nonprofit fundraising metrics. Really important to look at those. Otherwise, you might be doing a lot of fundraising, you might be putting a lot of messages out there, but you're not sure what's actually working. And that insight will really allow you to hone your fundraising, be a better steward of your donors' dollars so that you're spending, in the right areas. And last, I'm just gonna talk a little bit about some advanced features for a future ready CRM. We talked a little bit about reporting and insights, but AI is such a big topic right now. And I know that in the fundraising space, it is being used in some spaces, but, maybe a little more carefully and cautiously, just based on donor information. But if you have a tool, there's many tools out there that allows you to use AI to look at donors, to look at their giving history, to look at their demographic history that allows you to make that it makes recommendations for you. Like this is the best person to ask for a major donor gift. This is the best person to ask for a recurring gift. That will really help narrow in on personalizing asks, for each donor. Also, the idea of integrations, I think this really helps with removing that multi tool chaos. We have so many systems, not just in fundraising, but even in other departments like accounting systems. If you have a online giving platform, you really want a tool or a system that allows all of those integrations to come together and have all of that data in one place. So you have one source of truth instead of trying to make multiple systems, have the same source of truth. And lastly is just this idea which has been huge in the past few years as we're talking about donor privacy. You wanna make sure your data is secure, that the CRM is ready for your organization to scale, that it's, isn't aligned with any different compliance needs, like even just spam and donor, ethical donor standards, those types of things, because obviously that really helps the authenticity and transparency with your donors that continues to build that relationship. Mike, I'm curious that that's a lot of, thoughts on, CRMs, but what's kind of from your experience, what do you what kind of jumps out to you? Sure. When I look at the at the list, it's here. All all three of these areas really require a lot of internal examination of readiness for taking on some of these things. So when it comes to AI, a lot of, products on the market have great new features that are being introduced. And most of the organizations we deal with don't have the capacity to do things like build their own AI models. They're really looking to leverage features that are being developed through vendor innovation. But you still wanna think about whether you have a policy internally about how you evaluate for AI technology. Think about what data it's being connected to that may be first party data and whether that's protected, for your organization. For integration, this is gonna vary greatly from one team to the next because you have different capabilities internally. Open APIs provide a lot of flexibility if you have a vendor that has those to be able to really create great experiences connected to your data. But do you have the the team to support those? And maybe it's the vendor that you wanna have who has a lot of existing connections to different tools that are in your ecosystem. And the last point I'll make is just around the the compliance with communication. So as a former director of marketing, compliance has always been high on my watch list. We have a little bit more, I would say, scrutiny for consent in Canada. So I'm I'm very used to it, but I'm seeing a a huge emergence of different legislation happening all across The US. Every state seems to be at a different stage of introducing something. So always being aware of what's happening, where are your constituents and which legislations matter most to them, and do you have a system that's flexible to support those varying degrees of compliance? Yeah. That's great. And I'm gonna make you, Scott, do a little work. But just talking about the AI piece for a second. We actually just put out a blog in the past month that was about, do you need an AI policy for your nonprofit? And we'll drop that in the chat. It's a great resource, just really tactical about maybe your organization is thinking about wanting to use AI, but, not sure where to start, wanna make sure that you are abiding by, donor, you know, just, abiding by your donors in a way that is that values them. So really great resource if you wanna check that out or that's something that you're interested in. So we've talked about how the donor landscape has changed, what type of technology that you, may need. But let's talk about change management, which is usually the scariest part of moving to a new piece of technology. I know I led many teams through a CRM change, and it was very difficult. The technology part was hard, but it was the team management part that was harder because, of course, not everyone loves change, especially when it comes to technology, how it changes their jobs, how it changes processes. So I wanna spend a minute talking about that. We'll start really with this idea of cross functional alignment. You wanna make sure that you're changing your CRM not in a vacuum. Like, in what we did is we had one, like, we called them a superuser from each department, and they were nominated. They were on this cross functional team, and they had a say in all of the decisions we were making about the CRM change, the processes that affected their department. So you wanna make sure you're engaging people across all the departments that may touch the technology, in a way that impacts their jobs or their roles. The second was a lot of times people came in saying, hey. I didn't like how our past CRM did this, so I'd really like our new CRM to do this. And you wanna make sure that you're discerning between what actually must have to change versus, yes, we can do that in the future, but right now we just need to move on to the new system. So really allow everyone to dream, but then be able to, determine this is a must have versus this is a nice to have. And often, I think what, is one of the biggest barriers is training, is again the idea of, just people understanding the why behind the change. If it just feels like they're changing for change sake, that can become a huge issue and then people are not bought in. If you can get your teams to buy in, then they can really help champion that change within their departments, which will make it much more successful. And then lastly, just building a business case for CRM change. So it's one thing to get your departments to buy in, but you might also have to convince your board, or the leadership team. And it's important to, of course, think about cost, but also time savings of your team, how it's going to impact their roles, what can be adjusted so they can focus on other things. We often say at Virtuous that we want, organizations to focus on the meaningful tasks and not the menial tasks. Also time savings when you think about integrations. I know for me, we were able to look at other integration options by switching to a CRM that allowed us to integrate with a lot more vendors, and we saved a lot of expense by doing that. But we weren't able to do that before because we just didn't have a CRM that allowed us to look at those types of integration. So really just thinking about from a business perspective, why is this change important? Is it going to help scale your fundraising? Is it going to help build personal relationships with donors? Those are all also cost to consider instead of just the hard cost of CRM to CRM. But, Mike, I'll hand it over to you to talk about implementation. Sure. So thank you. So there's lots of things that go into planning for change and and an implementation, just like moving houses. If I can use that analogy, you don't wanna, you know, move houses and find out when you get to the new house, you've got a bunch of boxes that you never opened ten years in. Data cleanup is something that is something you wanna do before you go moving to a new system. The last thing you wanna do is have all of your users excited to jump into this new system and arrive there, and then the shine gets taken off by the fact that all your dirty data is still there. So thinking about data cleanup, getting rid of duplicates, getting rid of old data that maybe could be archived into cold storage, how can you standardize anything like addresses that are maybe missing, ZIP codes? They could be missing a few other data points. So there's, different append services you can use at this time to try to make sure you have the most complete information. So that's certainly the first stage. Thinking about the workflows, where are there opportunities to do things differently in the streamline? So this new system comes with new opportunities to automate processes, and it's likely one of the main reasons you decided to move systems. So take advantage of that. But don't expect that you have to do it all at once. And think about your user roles. You might have had specific roles in your old system, but that doesn't mean those have to be the exact same roles in the new system. Think about each user of your system, what their data needs are, what functional areas they need, and try to create a structure for your new roles that align with those. And then we have some general adoption issues. So I I think Carly mentioned highlighting the why for change. So much, adoption fails because people have not embraced the reason why the organization's going through such a huge transformative change. If if possible, develop a vision statement just like you have a probably a a brand vision statement for the organization. What's your vision for this project? And as you're communicating out, make sure you repeat that over and over again because it just reinforces the why. And ideally, you've engaged your stakeholders along the way to make sure they've been part of identifying why and understanding it and internalizing it. Find those champions who are your cheerleaders. Look for the staff who are excited, who are connected in the organization and trusted by colleagues to really help you get early wins and build momentum with your your other colleagues. And be flexible. Be ready to adjust to how the new system works in some cases. Don't always expect that you have to reengineer the system to work the way you worked. Chances are some of the things you were moving away from are reasons why things weren't working. So look at this as an opportunity to embrace a new tool to to help you do something differently. And then once you've you've gone on to that phase, it's all about stabilization and what do you do post launch? How do you make sure you're continuing to monitor? So in your planning and system design, be thinking about how you're going to measure the success. Not just those KPIs we talked about earlier in terms of visibility into your donations and whatnot. But think about how you can examine staff engagement and be sure that you're giving staff the opportunity to provide feedback along the way so that you can make adjustments. Launch doesn't have to be seen as the ending. It can often be seen as the beginning of a longer journey. So you wanna make sure you're getting off on the right foot and being ready to make course corrections along the way. And lastly, how do you keep up with the constant change of technology? Certainly, if you can find a vendor that has a roadmap, it gives you a bit of that crystal ball into the future. If they are constantly sticking to that roadmap and delivering new functionality over time, have a way to internalize that with your staff and bring that information back so that you can take advantage of new features as they evolve. Really finding a vendor who can be a partner with you and who's investing in innovation so that you can be constantly moving forward and not finding yourself back in the same place reexamining systems in a couple of years. So I'm gonna turn things back over to Carly. Yeah. If this is something that you are thinking about doing, but it seems like just a daunting task, we put together this, what we call the CRM conversion playbook. It really walks you through all the way from beginning of planning, like, what should I even be thinking about when I'm thinking about changing a CRM, all the way to the go live process. So that includes the change management, the data pieces you have to look at, implementation. If it's something that, you know, maybe twelve months from now, you maybe you have to do a CRM change, like, I would still recommend look taking a look at this playbook. You can, get it again in the docs part of the of the system up here on your top right. But it really gives you all the information from beginning to end, and, hopefully, helpful resource tool, if it's something you're going to have to go through, but it feels like just a totally overwhelming situation. But I'd like to talk a little bit more about responsive, which I hinted at earlier. We're living in this this nonprofit era where sometimes it feels like it's very unresponsive. We do a lot of mass communication, and it can sometimes look like this, which is we're sending the same information to all sorts of different donors or people who are engaging with your nonprofit. It's not personalized. It feels very disconnected from their behavior. But you might be thinking, well, we don't have time to do personalization or, you know, we don't have the resources to be able to do that. But we really are trying to move towards this idea of a more responsive model for generosity. At Virtuous, we call this responsive fundraising. This is the methodology that Virtuous was built on. It really starts with listening to your donors. We've talked about this throughout this whole webinar, but the idea of, hey. They're giving you information. They're giving you insights. They're giving you preferences, what they care about, why they give, how they respond to different types of communications, how they respond to different messaging. But you have to be able to have tools that allow you to listen. After you listen, the next step is to connect. So this is, again, that personal level, how can you connect with them in a way that totally resonates with them, that feels like, oh, they they really understand me. They they get me. They they know me. And third is suggest. So what is that next ask? Is it a financial ask? Is it a volunteer ask? Is it a, can you post this on social media for us ask? What is that ask for them? And that, again, all starts with listening to their behavior, connecting with them, and then suggesting something that makes sense to where they're at in the donor journey. And the last part before the cycle repeats is learning. And that goes back to reporting, looking at campaigns, looking at metrics to see how this is working, to see if the connection, the insights are leading to the right ask, that are leading to better performance, better outcomes for your organization, both from a fundraising perspective, but also from mission impact perspective. And you if you're able to do all these things, it really should increase that personal connection and grow your giving and improve your donor retention. But the technology that it takes to be responsive is responsive CRM, marketing automation, like we talked about. So you can cut back on a lot of those manual tasks and allow you to personalize at scale. Data enrichments, I could say it over and over. Data is the foundation of fundraising. Your data has to be clean. You have to make sure you're being able to, house it in a way that you can pull from it, that you can use it, whether it's, responding to those insights or it's looking at reporting. You have to be able to rely on the data. And then lastly, an online giving platform that is able to use that information in the CRM about those donors and to be able to adjust and suggest based on that information in a dynamic way. So, again, that donor feels like they really know you. But let's look at what this looks like. So you saw in the beginning, you know, hey. We send a lot of mass communication to everyone. The idea here is, okay, people are coming in for different reasons. Maybe they came to an event. Maybe they downloaded a piece of content. They should have different donor journeys accordingly, and they should be different based on their communication preferences too. Maybe it's a an email or a call or a text message or a direct mail piece. Each of those donors should be on their own journey based on their behavior, their, personal connection with that organization. And, again, you need automation or a tool to be able to help you do this. Otherwise, manually, this will take a ton of time and a ton of resources. But we see that donor retention increases, average gift increases, engagement increases, and staff time is you usually goes down about 20% as well. So let's look at this on a very specific, donor journey. Here's an example of someone who comes to an event, gets a personalized follow-up within the hour, another follow-up within a day, another follow-up within two days. Again, very personalized. The message is personalized to her. Maybe she comes and visits the website. A day later, she gets another response then she gives, and then she gets a thank you acknowledgement. Very, very personalized. Now I I know sometimes I've gone to an event and I get just a normal just a normal welcome series. I get dropped into the welcome series, and I'm like, okay. Hey. Yeah. I just I interacted with that organization this week, but it's not personal. It's not like, thanks for coming to the event. It was great to see you there. I hope you enjoyed the presentation and a very specific follow-up. That just increases that personal connection. That's one example, but imagine this at scale. Whether it's a new donor that's come into your database or someone that you're retargeting or, again, a content journey or a lapsed donor, having very specific journeys that allow you to follow-up with messaging that relates to where they're at in their stage of relationship with your organization just creates this personal connection and allows you to grow giving. So we've talked about a lot about this idea of responsive fundraising. I just wanna take just a few minutes to go through the virtuous platform itself. We often sometimes think about our CRM as just like a data warehouse. It holds the data, but we see Virtuous as much more than that. We see it, as really all of the systems together in one place as a single source of truth. Of course, Virtuous is a CRM. It's very easy to use, very intuitive. The user interface, is very easy to navigate. It also has a lot of features that are really specific to fundraisers. So, for example, one of my favorite features is what's called the major gift ask pipeline, which allows you to really measure major donors from a pipeline perspective. So maybe you asked for a gift. You think it'll come in about 50% chance, and based on that, you can forecast how much is coming in from major donors and really see where those gifts are at in the different stage of asking, which is super helpful from a forecasting perspective because sometimes we're like, well, we we got a million dollars in major donors last year, so maybe we'll get that or a little bit more. This allows you to be really specific based on the actual gift asks, and it allows your team to manage their portfolios, in a way that's very organized, and they can actually see what's coming in. We talked a lot about, automation, and that is another one of the tools that is, super a super important part of Virtuous. Like, I like to say it's the secret sauce of Virtuous, But you can do internal automations, external automations. This is where you can really build those dynamic journeys, and create different journeys for each types of, personas, whether it's a new donor workflow, whether it's a birthday workflow, whether it's a lifetime, milestone workflow. These are all things that you might be doing manually now that you should be able to do through automation. Virtuous also has marketing and email tool. So your email right in the system. I previously had an email system outside of Virtuous, which then we would have to integrate that or pull that data in through a CSV file. This allows all that information, all those behavioral insights that you had be able to use right in the email system along with text messaging campaigns so you can see all of those channel giving in one place so you can really measure how a campaign did. It also includes AB testing. So if you test subject lines or content or images, it allows you to test. One of the things really interesting about the way that we test, is that it does, like, a pretest. So you instead of doing, like, a fifty fifty test, it sends a test to, like, 10 of your database, and whichever one wins sends to the entire database. That way, you're really utilizing the result of the test immediately, instead of saying, oh, well, the results will apply next week. It allows you to really look at it immediately. And just this idea of measuring donor signals, looking at the information that your donors are giving you in a way that allows you to really understand who they are, whether that's, where they live, what they give to, what they're interested in, what their demographics are, who else they know, what their giving capacity is. All of that information really allows you to respond to them in a way that is personalized. Purchase also has an online giving platform right in the system. This is really helpful because when you're able to use that giving history, it allows you to create dynamic asks. So what I mean by this is, say, a donor who gives usually a thousand dollars comes to your donation page and they see an ask string that starts with $30, that's gonna seem like it just doesn't make sense to them because they usually give much larger than this. So it allows you to dynamically increase that based on their history, which again feels very relevant, feels like you know them. Or in reverse, if someone gives a small amount and now your donation page has a super high ask amount on it, that's gonna feel like it doesn't relate either. So just, again, using that information in a way that makes sense, to the actual donor. If you are an organization that has volunteer, recruitment, volunteer opportunities, that can all be managed right within the system as well, both on the front end and the back end, which makes it really seamless to connect into Virtuous. Same with events. If you have ticket events or non ticket events, all of that, again, can connect right into Virtuous right in the system, so you can manage it all in one place. And then lastly is the reporting. Virtruis has really advanced business intelligence tool called Virtruis BI that allows you to build reports from scratch. It also has many nonprofit fundraising metrics built already. So if you want to look at how your campaigns are doing, what your, LTV is, what, how your major donors are doing, it's all built right there so you don't have to build those advanced, reporting. It's built there so you can get it immediately. It's also super customizable. So if you're being asked to deliver a report that, maybe you didn't know how to create, you can start with something that's already there and just adjust it, slightly and then get that information you need really quickly without needing any advanced technology or any, like a developer or someone who builds reports in SQL. Any user can do that right in that system. So, again, Virtuous is the only responsive fundraising platform, and our goal is really to build personal connections with donors and grow giving, which we believe is what has to happen right now in this context of the nonprofit space where personal connection is really falling by the wayside. We really have to focus on that personal connection, and the only way to do that is at scale, with a tool that allows you to do that. Carly, thanks so much for for for that. We're gonna open up now another poll. I know everyone's been kind of waiting on the edge of their seat saying when is a poll gonna come? We can't wait for another poll. So we're opening that right now. And we just love to know, if you'd like a a demo of Virtuous. I know we just kinda walked through at a high level of what the platform can do, but we do have some team members who would love to, be able to sit down and actually show you, in the platform with your specific, issues or or things you're trying to solve, those, you know, problems that you're like, hey. We really need to figure this out. They can really kinda tailor that, walk you through that. So go ahead and answer that poll as that pops up there. We're gonna leave that up for a little bit. But if you would like, a a demo with our team, I know we'd love to connect with you to be able to answer questions, dive in further, and really see if this might be, something that would be helpful for you all. So, as we kinda leave that up, would love to, open up some time for some q and a. One question that that, that that I sort of was wondering and that I'd love to toss, to you, Carly, and to you, Mike, is maybe some of the common challenges, surprises that nonprofits face when it comes to actually modernizing that CRM. So as they kinda actually step into the process, walk through it, what are some things that have come up that are, oh, we didn't think about that or that's kind of a surprise to us that people should maybe have in their mind as they consider the process? I can take a first stab at that. I think one is, really driven by what team is engaged in the process. So sometimes you have a really, siloed team that's been working through this and have a very narrow perspective. And suddenly at the last minute when you're just about to implement another team, gets brought in and you hadn't thought about it at all, that's usually when these new features come that introduce some wrinkles to your launch planning. And it just stresses the need to really think cross functionally, even though you may own the decision for the software in your team. Think about the other stakeholders across the organization that might have a a later role. Don't always think about how you've done it before. Yeah. I think for me, what is a surprise is you might realize the processes that are happening that you had no idea were happening. Because now you're literally diving into the weeds of how, each person is doing their job, and you probably aren't in that level of detail as you're managing, a team. So just really diving in and being like, wow. I had no idea we were doing it like this, and it was taking so much time. So but it is a it's a great audit of processes as well because you really are going, like, with a fine tooth comb, like, going through everything everyone is doing. Yeah. Absolutely. Mike, we'd love to toss this question to you. What is what is a good CRM implementation project look like? Like, how do you know it's successful? What what does that look like? I think if you've set some goals of what success looks like at the beginning when you get to the end, if it aligns with that, that's usually the best measure because I think people have different perspectives, whether it was delivering it on the schedule that you set out for, whether it was, meeting a certain budget that you set. There tends to be changes in project that can affect either of those things. But ultimately, if your goal was to have less manual work, is the focus of your success and how you're measuring it, then that if you've been able to achieve that goal, whether it took a little bit longer, cost a bit more in some overruns, ultimately, that's that's one thing you're doing. We get asked a lot of the time, like, how do you measure the ROI on a system like this? And certainly, there's going to be, those that can promise that you'll see a certain increase in your, you know, retention rates or lift on donation forms and things like that. But ultimately, think back to what matters the most for you. If it if it is really deepening relationships, that's a hard thing to put a a figure on, but you'll see the the outcome of that in the length of relationships you maintain and the, you know, overall lifetime giving you might see from your stakeholders. Yeah. That's great. Well, Mike, we'd love to love to toss it to you. I know you have a resource for people, that that you're kinda making available. And so I'd love for you to walk, people through that and let them know what they can get. Yeah. We love talking to to folks about their technology. Certainly, one of my favorite things is when we, meet a new organization and start to learn about their their tech stack and see the potential that lies ahead. So we've got a little tool here that we invite you to visit that talks about the different approaches that you can take to transform your technology. You'll find there as well there's a little handy quiz that might help you narrow down an approach that works well for your organization because there are all shapes and sizes when it comes to CRMs, and and this is to help you navigate that process. Of course, we encourage you to reach out to us if you'd like any help navigating. It's a increasingly complex, landscape for nonprofits anymore, and we just love the opportunity to work with you. That's awesome. We're actually gonna open up another poll. So those who are been loving the polls, you get one more today. And that is, do you wanna connect with the Heller team? So, that should be open now. We'd love for you to answer that. They'd love to connect with you. We actually had a couple questions come in as well, so we'd love to jump, to those. The first one was this. Does the campaign reporting reflect actual dollars received or dollars pledged? I think that might be specific, Carly, in regard to Virtuous. I'm gonna toss that one to you. Yeah. Virtuous, does look at dollars received, but there also is a dollars pledged area. So for organizations that do take pledges, you would be able to use that field to look at campaign reporting versus dollars pledged or dollars received. Awesome. And then, another another question here. So our org, serves seniors, most of whom are resistant to technology. We've made progress with email reminders, digital campaigns, but our course still communicates, you know, with paper newspaper that they've been, you know, printing out. And so multi, you know, channel communication is nowhere near text message or Apple Pay yet. So any advice in regards to looking to modernize tech stack but also realizing that's kind of the demographic? I think we we have a a wide mix of clients who still have a very big component of their fundraising that is in the mailbox. And then, you know, there's a lot of systems that put that focus on on email. But, there's still a lot of insights as a fundraiser that you can get from the information that's coming in through your your mail or if it's responses to, in this case, things that might be printed in the newspaper. If you've got ways to even play with systems like QR codes, maybe that's not the right audience, but it is still something we're seeing, more relevant than it used to be. I thought at one point it might go away, but it is a way to to tag some of those offline interactions so that you can see where it actually came from or even using something as simple as a a custom URL that's only found in that one source. And you can bring that back into your system to know a little bit about where you're seeing that happen and and hopefully use it as an opportunity to collect some data on the way in if it's a a simple lead generation form. I'd love to answer this too, Scott. Please. I worked at an organization where the average donor was over 70 years old. So totally understand and can relate to this question. I think improving your your personal organization's tech stack just allows you to better communicate with them. I definitely agree with you that, most in that generation are not on text message or Apple Pay, but one of the things we saw is that we were able to do voice mails, automated calls, other communications that they're still receiving, like, they love telephone calls, they love direct mail. But on your side, automating those things, like, we have we send out postcards to people that they would put up on their refrigerator on a quarterly basis as more like a stewards stewardship touch base. You can still use those channels that they that their preference preferences are, like direct mail and, phone calls, or whatever those specific channels are. But, again, doing it in a way that's super relevant to them. We're you're not trying to move them to a digital technology, but you wanna be ready for whichever generation is talking to you that you can talk to them on those different channels and record that information so that you're relating to them in a way that is personal and that they, prefer. I I have been there where the paper newspaper and paper newsletter is still their favorite thing to get, and I love that. Like, I think direct mail I know we talked about direct mail as dead. I think it's one of the most disruptive, channels still because you have to touch it and decide what to do with it. Where with an email, you just swipe that away immediately, where with the direct mail piece, you have to look at it and decide what to do with it. So, I definitely think those are still important channels, and there's ways to use technology now on your on the organization side to be able to reach those people with their specific channels. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, listen, folks. We're so thankful to have spent the last hour together. We're launching right now a survey, just to hear kinda what you thought of the webinar. We want these to continue to get better and better for you and for, for people in your seat or who are, you know, looking to grow fundraising, who are in charge of development, who are, managing their databases, all of that. So if you don't mind filling that out, we would still appreciate that and just give us a little bit of feedback on today. And so we'll we'll leave that up for a while, but we just wanna thank you again so much for being here and for joining us. We will send out the recording. We'll send out the slide deck. We'll also send out links to the other resources, that were shared today both from, Heller Consulting and from us. And that way, you have kind of all of that in one spot. But if there's anything that that we can do, please reach out whether it's to us or, again, to Heller Consulting. We want to be there for you, to partner with you, and to really help your organization continue to grow, so so you have the resources you need ultimately to make the impact that you wanna make. So thanks so much again for being here. We continue to have different events and webinars. In fact, we have one, coming up next week. That's five years from COVID. How has fundraising changed? What is the landscape look like? And what can you do about it? And so we have kind of a a big panel there. I'm actually gonna put the link here in the chat, for those of you who might want to register for that. It's gonna be diving into a bunch of different perspectives, a lot of different verticals, and really be able, be a helpful conversation, hopefully. And so register there. We'd love to see you. Thanks so much for being here today. Watch for the recording, and we will see you next time. Thanks so much. Thank you.