Name: How to Ensure Clean Data and Seamless System Adoption with Virtuous for Database Administrators: Can Your CRM Do This?
Uploaded: 2025-02-27T20:32:09.576Z
Duration: 56 min 48 s
Description: How to Ensure Clean Data and Seamless System Adoption with Virtuous for Database Administrators: Can Your CRM Do This?

Transcript for "How to Ensure Clean Data and Seamless System Adoption with Virtuous for Database Administrators: Can Your CRM Do This?": Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar here today. My name is Kayla Schneider, and I am our DBA in residence here at Virtuous. And I am joined by the lovely Amy. Amy, you wanna give a little introduction? Yeah. I'm Amy Vitulli. I am a senior training specialist here at Virtuous, and I'm excited to get to talk to y'all today. Yeah. And we are yeah. Like, we are really excited to chat with all of you about one of my favorite topics. Really, how do we use Virtuous from, like, that DBA, data health, data cleanliness, internal processes, that kind of back office tasks. That is really my favorite way to talk about Virtuous, and so that's what we're gonna talk about today. I know, Amy, that's sometimes not the most exciting thing, but it's gonna be exciting. Best because if you have clean data, then everything else starts to work. It it it is the the backbone of having a great system. A %. And so before we get started, Scott, our friend, in the chat did kinda put in, where are we all coming from? We would love to hear from you. So there's a chat on the side of the screen. Please feel free to put any questions that you have in there. We'll be monitoring. We can answer those as we go. There's also a q and a section that can be bubbled up. So use the chat, use the q and a. Feel free to do that, but please tell us where you're calling in from. I'm calling in here from Las Vegas. It is a gonna be a balmy 75 here today. Amy's on the other side of the country. I am in, North Carolina. We are also having a a warm spell and, enjoying some nice t shirt weather now. Love it. I love that you're in a t shirt. It's probably definitely colder than 75. I'm in my sweatshirt, and I'm, like, freezing over here. That's where we're at. This session will be recorded. There'll be an email with the recap with also the slides that we're gonna walk through today. And most importantly, They are so excited you're here. And so before we do hop into the product, obviously, we're gonna do a little product demonstration today. But before we hop into there, I did think it was really important for us to kinda start at that idea of, like, one, what what are we here to talk about. Right? So couple of things that we're focusing on is that backup office that we talked about. Right? What are those pieces? How do we do that with inside of Virtuous? But before we get into Virtuous, I wanna talk about some of the pains and things that we exist in, the world that we live in. Right? This idea of, what are some of the things that, you know, really make it hard for us to do our job every day, that we have workarounds around, that we think that we're doing really good job with, but really that make it harder for us to get get that idea of how do we, you know, connect with our supporters, in the best way possible. And so here are some of those pains that, Amy and I kind of just wanted to talk through today. I think the number one that we have out here is the idea of disjointed data in siloed systems. Right? You can raise your hand, put yourself in the chat. How many of you are working in more than one platform? A lot. Right? I know from, you know, my perspective, I used to work, in higher ed and did, was GBA there. And we had, you know, an online giving tool. We had our CRM. We had a marketing, platform that we were engaged with. We also had our student information systems. I had, you know, all these other pieces. And how do they get that data? How do it live in different places? Not being able to get that full view was really, really hard, and it made my job harder because I had to figure out how to how to make it all map together. You know? I know, Amy, you've kind of seen this from Yeah. That's a very common pain point when I'm working with clients is they say, you know, I wanna build this report. And I say, great. Where does that data live? Well, this piece lives over here, and this piece lives over here, and this one lives over there. I'm like, that's a challenge. You know, we gotta maybe export out of here and export out of there, and then you can do some magic in Excel. And I don't know about you, but really anything in Excel is kind of magic to me. So, you know, having that ability to put it together somewhere else is okay, but it's definitely better if you can have it in one place so that you're not having to export and rely on somebody's magic skills in Excel. Yeah. I think that, I mean, yes. I I did consider myself an Excel wizard, and and felt like I had some really great process in place, but all of it was really taking that and saying, great. I do have all these separate things, and I need to get them together. And it spent a lot of time doing that. But that then leads to this next point. Right? Like, because we do have all of these siloed systems and this different information, like, we actually really don't have a single source of truth. Right? Like, there's not, like, one place I could go to be able to, like, answer my questions. Like, I probably would have had to go to this system for part of the information and then come to this system to get the other part, and then I have to join them together. But then I'm I can't really just get one view of what I'm looking for. How do I especially when it comes to supporter. Right? I wanna know somebody who's given who's come to an event, who's given through an event, who has also volunteered for us, who also reads our emails and what they're visiting on our website. Right? I wanna have all of that insight because that's what makes it really, like, powerful for me to be able to reach out to them and say, hey. Thank you for all that you do for us. Like, you're not just a volunteer here and a donor here. Like, you're one person. Yeah. It's always unfortunate when somebody reaches out to you. You've been volunteering with them, and they reach out to you for a donation as if you've never interacted with their organization ever again. And that lack of a single source of truth, if our volunteer program is not connected with our CRM, you just see me as somebody that's never made a donation, not the fact that I've, you know, been volunteering for five years and been donating my time, talent, and treasure to your organization. Yeah. We had, there's a great story that one of our, colleagues tells us where one of our customers actually, they had a really awesome volunteer, and their volunteer coordinator would talk about them all the time. And then they had a really great major gift donor, and their major gift officer was like, yeah. I love spending time with them. They're fantastic. And one day, somebody walked into the office, and they were both like, oh my gosh. It's so and so. And they were like, oh, my gosh. You're the same person. Like, they've been talking about the same person for months. But because they had different systems and different things and different viewpoints, like, they just didn't realize it. Right? And so, like, how much more powerful could those separate conversations have been and also so much more valuing to that supporter. Right? Like, we know who you are. Like, it you know, that that that's that's hard. And I think part of part of the reason why that's hard is because we are dealing with really complex technology. Right? The idea of making having CRM at all is hard. Right? It's not just, you know, this one Excel file. Right? There are so many pieces of data and so much information that lives in so many places. And how do we make sure that that complex technology is being used correctly, that we set it up appropriately, that we're validating that every you know, all the time, like, that we're making sure we're using it appropriately, everybody's using it appropriately, and and taking that piece of and and making it valuable, using it, getting the most out of it. Yeah. That's a pretty common thing when I'm working with folks that have been using other, you know, platforms to do their giving and say, oh, have you used this particular feature? What? I could do that? Yes. You absolutely can. And it's been a matter of having those disjointed pieces, siloed systems, and then coming down to the complex technology. All of that comes together. It's like it's a domino effect with all of these. It just keeps growing. Yeah. And when you have that complex technology, it leads to our next one. Right? Like, low system adoption. Man, I can't tell you how many times I would, like, look at how when people had, like, logged in to our CRM. And the amount of my major gift officers that never logged into CRM was outstanding. It was really rough. But that's hard. Why? Because it's complex. Right? Not everybody is like this group here. Not everybody is super tech savvy and can deal with that complex technology, and so that leads to low system adoption. Also, when training isn't there, right, if there's not great training, people aren't gonna adopt. And so making sure how do we get people to adopt? How do we get people to enter their notes into the system? How do we have, the ability to, you know, make sure that people are looking at the same information, having access to reports, those types of things, all of that is gonna make your your life, you know, much, much more, easier. Right? Absolutely. Yeah. And then the last piece here, I think, is, one of my biggest pet peeves is inefficient processes. I always, like, gave myself a pat on the back when I would meet with somebody that I used to work with, and I'd be like, hey. Like, tell me about this thing that you're doing today. And they would be like, well, I have to do this and this and this and this and this, and I'd be like, okay. I could make that easier for you. Let me create, like, this, like, literally Microsoft access. Like, I would create this, like, access, and I would, like, do a little coding, and I'd say, okay. All you have to do is push this button in the in the CRM. It's gonna export out this query for you. That query is gonna be named this thing, and this this little piece of technology is gonna pick it up for you. And now you'll just have to push this one other button and voila. And I thought to myself, man, I am so good. I am, like, amazing. I have saved them so much time, but, like, man, is that inefficient still. Like, I think about it today, and I'm like, holy moly, Kayla. That idea of, like, all of the things that we have to do, the same queries we run every day or every week or every month, the same, you know, the the same processes and those things that we're doing all the time, shouldn't we have automation or AI or something like that to help us today? I run into that all the time in training when I'm working with folks, especially during onboarding. And I do, a q and a session or queries and report session with them, and they come to me with this laundry list of things that they need to have. And one of the common questions that, as trainers, we ask people is why. And it's not because I think that your reasoning is bad, but because we might have a better way to do it, like using automation instead of having to scour every single first time donor to determine, you know, who gave a gift over x number of dollars and did they give to a particular project, we can have those options to go in and say, hey. I wanna see only these, you know, these contacts. They've given these kinds of gifts. Just put them in my plate. You know? Put them in my bag. Tell me exactly what I need to look at. Don't maybe go looking for it. And people get so used to like you were saying, get so used to these process. You're like, I made it. Great. Not realizing that there's a better way to do it that's not a workaround. A %. A %. And so when we take these kind of pain points and things, like, we we all know we're all dealing with these things today. Right? We are all doing I would love it actually if everybody in the in the chat just put in, like, their least favorite process that they have to pull do every day. I will say what mine was. It was our loyal donor program. I literally had to run a query, like, five queries every single week and send them over to your to my annual giving person so that they could print out things. Like, every week, I had to do that every week. And, like, that was my least favorite. But I thought I did a really good job at creating this process, but it was, like, 17 steps. Like, there could have been a better way, honestly. Okay. So when we think about those pain points, I think the next thing is this idea of, like, well, like, that's all great. Like, we yes. We all acknowledge that these are hard things, but, like, how is Virtuous different? Like, how do we at Virtuous see this differently? And how do we take those things that we hear every day and those pains that we've experienced, and how do we help alleviate them? Right? What does that look like? And before we got help into the product, I think it's really important to think about specifically why Virtuous is what we are, like, what we are doing. And so this is the problem that we are hearing and we face every day. Like, this idea that, like, unresponsive, one to many donor experience, inefficient processes. Right? That is what we're struggling with today when we think about legacy technology, those siloed systems. This this is what we're producing. Right? We have this one to many approach because we can't see the data in one place. We can't segment in those different ways, and it's forcing us to to have these kind of experiences where we're not really valuing our supporter. We see a volunteer and we see a major donor, but we don't see them as one. And so what Virtuous sees, when we think about that is, like, we we see that, but and that's what we're experiencing, but the world that we are fundraising in is not that way. It has changed drastically. It is we are living in this world where there are personalized experiences for everything. Right? I go on to Hulu, and it's telling me exactly the shows I need to watch. I go on to Amazon, and it's saying, hey. You haven't bought this in a while. Or, you know, Spotify is telling me, Kayla, this artist, you would love them. Right? And it's reading me. It's identifying my behavior and how I've engaged, and it's triggering those responses back to me. And that's what I expect as just a human being. Right? That's what I'm used to. I love my Netflix thing, my, you know, thing, like, next watch shows for you to watch. I bet my shows are really different than yours and Amy's. Right? Like, and and that's fantastic. I love that. I hate it when somebody messes up my algorithm. It just handles. And and that's how you that's what, as humans, we expect today. Right? We have these algorithms that are running on us every day. And why why should that be any different than how we engage with our supporters, that really personalized connection? And so, Virtuous really thinks that there is a more responsive way to increase that idea of generosity, to model, for generosity. And that is what we call responsive fundraising. There are these kind of four key pillars to that and that's when we think about, like, how do we listen to our supporters. The more we listen, the more we know, the more we can understand, like, what makes them tick. What do they like? How are they engaging with us? What how do they want to be communicated to? Right? Being able to understand and listen to the signals that they're sending out, then we can take that information that we have listened for, and we can connect with them. This piece is so important. How do we connect with them personally and really at scale? I think this is something that nonprofits do really well for all of our major donors. Right? We listen to what they like. We understand, and we know who they are, and we connect with them, and we ask them in really personalized ways. But how do we take that specific experience and bring it down, right, to all of our supporters, making sure that everybody has that personal personalized connection at scale? That's what we're gonna talk about a lot, and we'll talk about automation and how that how that can work. But then you take that connection. You've created those relationships, and then how do we suggest that right ask at the right time? Whether it be a financial ask, maybe it's asking somebody to volunteer for you, or whatever that next step might be, it's really saying based on how they have engaged, how they're communicating with us, how should we ask them to support us, and really making sure that we're asking in the right time and the right opportunities for each person. And then we take all of that data, and now we're gonna learn. We're gonna learn, what has worked for the supporter. Right? We're gonna learn from that, but we're also gonna learn what's working for us internally for our teams as well. And so taking that information, and that's that continuous cycle. We're then gonna take it. We're gonna continue listening and continue connecting and moving those the that, idea. And that's really that idea of how we have built our platform and how we really think about fundraising. And just to make a training plug here, there is a a Virtuous Academy. There are two responsive fundraising courses in the Virtuous Academy. So if you're interested in learning more about how, you can start implementing that and really getting diving deep into that, we do have some free academy courses that can go in. And like Kayla is saying, our platform is really kinda built on this this foundation of responsive fundraising, but the academy can give you a deeper dive into it. And, I mean, you you can do responsive fundraising as well. Like, that's something that you can do every day. Right now, you can start implementing some of those things. But Virtuous is built based off of this idea of responsive fundraising. We're the only responsive fundraising platform out there to help you actually put this into play. And so we have that idea of being able to have those pieces that you need in one place to make sure that you can actually do those those different steps and not have to do a thousand workarounds to get there. And so, the one thing I do wanna call out though is, that all sounds lovely. Right? Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to have responsive conversations with every single person in your database? Oh, yes. I would love that. But it is all predicated on this kind of idea of how do we get there? How can I be responsive? How can we, as an organization, go from this one to many approach and become responsive? And that's where this idea of our responsive maturity model comes from. It's how do we take these kind of pillars and say, they're not like kind of, how do we take each of them and really make sure that we're we're implementing them. Right? So, we have these pill pillars. You can see there are five of them here. The one that we're gonna spend the most time on today, I think, is data health and reporting and the idea of integrated teams and tech. So those first two pillars of can't really be responsive until I have these things in place. Right? I can't segment my data well if I have bad, unhealthy data. I can't actually, create a persona around someone or create understand what engagement means if I don't know any of my email engagement or if they're visiting our website. I if I don't have that information, I can't use it to then create this idea of a dynamic campaign to be able to say, great. As soon as somebody hits this trigger, now I'm gonna do this this idea. Right? It's making sure that we have all that data in one place. It's good, clean, healthy data. We know what we're working towards when it comes to reporting. We're all focusing on those same metrics. We're moving in that same way, and our teams are working together. And so, that is really kind of the key around, like, where we wanna get started, why Virtuous, why what what is that why do we do this the way that we do? And so we're gonna hop into the product now, to be able to see how do we actually make this possible, what can that actually look like for your team. And so if you have any questions, again, please feel free to throw them in the chat. We'll make sure that we're answering that as we go, but I'm gonna hop into the product here. So, this is Virtuous. When we think about Virtuous, this is that idea of kind of, the idea of where I'm gonna come each day to get access to all this data. And I think the key to start with, as we just talked about, is that idea of data health and how do we make sure that the data that's coming into the system is good data, but, also, how do we make sure that the data is in there is still up to date, is still running well. And so we're actually gonna kind of walk through this idea of how do we make sure that the data is good, then where does it live on the records, how do we then keep that data actionable. We're not looking for a really expensive filing cabinet here. Right? We are looking for something that's gonna allow us to focus on that meaningful work. One of the things that I think is so important is that we focus on actually connecting with supporters instead of doing the same things over and over and over again. Like, let's have a system that works with us and allows us to spend time where meet my human brain needs to spend time instead of just doing that same thing over and over that really a machine can do for me. And then we'll kind of take that last piece and follow it up with reporting. Reporting is so important. We can't know what's working and what's not if we don't have access to see that information. And so, that's kind of like a little overview of where we're gonna start today, but we're gonna start in how does data come in and how do we get it in there well. So our, gift in contact import tool, this is, like, I like to love them and call it, like, customs at the airport. This is really where we want all of our information to come in because we need to make sure that it gets to the right place the first time. Right? When we think about that idea of dynamic campaigns, let's just think about a really easy one. Right? I wanna thank somebody for giving their very first gift, and I want that to happen automatically. I want an email to go out as, you know, they give that gift. I process it. It's gonna go out. How do I know that it's going to the right place? Right? And this is key. We wanna make sure that it's going to the right person. Why? Because let's say Amy has been giving for three years, but she just gave a gift online really quickly last night, and she actually used her her work email. That's what populated. It came through. And now Amy is gonna get this email that says, hey, Amy. Oh, hey, Amy. Thanks for that very first gift. That's not great donor stewardship. Right? Like, we wanna make sure, like, that's bad data, and that a lot that actually hinders the trust that we're actually creating with our supporters. So spending time on the front end, getting data to the right place the first time is so, so valuable when it comes to that idea of how do we trust the information that's coming in and how can we run those that dynamic, campaign. And I always talk to people when I'm talking about this this feature and why we think about contacts and individuals and Virtuous and email addresses. Email is a unique identifier. However, I am me, whether I'm using my work email or my personal email or my junk email or my volunteer email or whatever 800 different emails I have, I am still me. And I don't know that you might view me as different people. And so having the ability to review your data before it comes into the system, before it influences your reports, before it goes over to your accounting system, before you have to go make reversals because, oops, it went to the wrong thing. We didn't update the form and do all the things. It's so valuable just to have it right to begin with. Yep. Yep. And so what our tool here is doing is we're looking at a couple of different, data points. So we're not just looking at email address. We're looking at name, address, email, phone number. We're actually running this algorithm to say, does this person already exist? And what our system is doing is then we're just kinda dropping into these three buckets. These buckets are gonna allow for us to know, like, great. Kayla Schneider, she exists. She's ready to go. There's no information needed. I already have her in the system. Everything matches. Great. That's really low hanging fruit. I don't really need to spend time here. But then on this match needed section, this is where I'm gonna see things like Jessica. Jessica doesn't match anything. Like, there's no match on Jessica in the system. So we're actually gonna be able to create a whole new record right here, in the system without having to leave and then come back and then have to do that. Right? I can do it right here in one fell swoop. And I love this tool sorry. I I get really excited about this because I talk about this on a regular basis. One of the things that I really love about this particular feature is it's searching each piece of information. It's not searching Jessica as a whole. It is searching Jessica. It is searching Fujimoto. It is searching her email address. If her address is in there, her phone number in there, it's searching each piece of information and is looking for any possible duplicate because maybe she's in your system as Jess, or maybe she changed her last name, or maybe she decided again to have a different email address. So it is looking at every single piece of information. As a human, when we go in and go to type in a new contact, we might get in a hurry and say, hey. I'm only gonna look at this one piece. But this import tool is gonna look at every single one of those pieces and give you any possible match on that right hand side of the screen so then you have the ability to say, oh, no. I think that's the same person. We just have a different name in here, and you can then choose to make a different match if there's a possibility. So I love that you have the control as the person coming in looking at this data. We don't have to rely totally on, a computer to make that decision, but it does do the look looking for us and allow us to have the most information in an organized format to be able to make it the right decision for us. Yep. Yep. I love that. And you'll see that. So what's happening here then in update needed is it's actually saying it's this person has matched on multiple other pieces of data. So as Amy just said, it's looking at all of the pieces of data. Right? And so because there are, you know, matches on the name and the email address, it's matching that information. It's just telling me here, well, hey. We have some new information. Like, we have either a new address, we have a new phone number. It's gonna highlight that for us, and now we can actually keep that data clean coming in. I can send my receipt to the right place now because I have the updated address. Right? All of that's happening here in the screen to make sure that now everything you do after you import your gifts is good to go. You have trust in the information to allow the system to now help you do your job. K? So once these processed in, where does it live? What's in what are we happening here? Right? And so that's where we're gonna hop in. We're gonna just kind of look at a contact record here now. When we think about contacts, let's think about households, organizations, foundations. It's really kind of that overarching view of that that that, entity there. And so here I have Justin and Melissa. They're a household. One thing I always love to call out here is that Justin and Melissa are the household. It is kind of like an overarching umbrella. They have a unique ID here at the household level, But, also, they have individual IDs as well, and that's allowing me to see there's Justin and Melissa as a whole, and then I have these individuals that live underneath that umbrella. This allows me to see the whole household. I do not have to reconcile two records together, Justin and Melissa. I don't have to look at them and say, oh, well, when's the last time I talked to Justin? When's the last time I talked to Melissa? Who did this here? And have to look through two records to see, you know, I wanna call Justin, but I I really should know who's talking to Melissa too. Right? We we need to understand that that relationship there. But I also still wanna be able to see who's coming to an event. Right? Who's volunteering? Wanna be able to see the individual information at the same time, allowing me to, again, segment, target, talk to each individual in the most appropriate way possible. Kayla? And so as you can see here, there are a couple of different things on this contact record. We have some overview information, some volunteer information. This is actually all customizable for for each user. You get to choose what's important for you to see, what you want to be able to engage with, and so what what is valuable information for you. And then we have some insights here that allow you to have some, idea of how we should be engage engaging with each of these people. And so here, we have some different asks. These asks are based on, information that, that is in the system. So it's saying, hey. For this financial ask, how should we be asking them for are are they ready for a financial ask? Are they ready for a a gift ask? And so what this is saying, it's looking at recency, frequency, and amount of giving, how they're engaging with you as well, and then being able to say, are they ready for that next gift ask based on their behavior of giving to towards you? We also have a suggested ask amount here. This is one of my favorite pieces being able to say, hey. Based on how they normally give, they're ready for about a $1,200 ask. This could also be based on how they normally give. They're ready to have an increased increase their recurring gift, or maybe they have the capacity for a large major gift. So being able to see that information here in one place allows me to get started on where how should I be engaging with them financially. And I just wanna yeah. Go ahead. I was gonna say I wanna piggyback off of what you were saying earlier where you're talking about that customized view. That's customized based on user, not organization. So if you are a major gift officer and you wanna see a certain set the statistics and your colleague one cube over needs to see something else, you can each have your own personalized view. It is not, defined for everyone. It's defined on that user, which is really handy because we don't all need to see the same thing. 100%. Yep. Everything is important. Like, you see things differently than I do. We wanna be able to engage with that and see that pretty quickly there. This last piece here is that social score, and that's I'm looking at how can somebody really advocate or engage with you on your behalf. So we're looking at a couple of different features and pieces here to create the score. So we're looking at, our social insights piece where we actually scrape the web for public data associated to the each email address. So looking at, you know, followers on Twitter and those types of things. Like, what does their social media presence look like? And then we're combining that information with the relationships that are in the system. So how connected are they to your other supporters? And then lastly, we're combining that with geolocation data. Where are they in the midst of other supporters as well? So they might not be connected, but they might be in a really hot pocket of a group of people that are engaging with you too. And so we take this data and we say, okay. Socially, how can we ask them to engage with us? I love this score because, coming from higher ed, you know, I'm sure everybody gets this. You know, you probably get phone calls asking for money from your alma mater. And we do this to young alumni, right, people who just just graduated and saying, hey. Would you fancy giving us a donation? They're still paying back student loans. Right? How much how much more impactful could it be to say, instead of asking them for a financial gift, let's actually use this score to say, hey. These people have a really great social media following. I'm gonna ask these people to consider being my alumni reunion chair instead using their connections that they have and being able to now have that that advocate, you know, option instead of asking them for a $25 gift. It can be so much more impactful. So, again, being able to see the difference in each of these scores, how somebody can engage with you and what that looks like, I think is really, really valuable as well. Yeah. I can't tell you how many times I used to be a teacher, how many times I had people students come back and tell me, yeah, my university just sent me a letter asking me for $50. I don't have a job, and I have to pay back student loans. What are they doing asking me for money? And, those universities definitely could have used some better judgment as far as looking at, you know, that social score. Their their social capital, is definitely worth something, to speak up and out and about of things happening at the university, so that people that aren't in the midst of paying back their loans or looking for their very first job ever can participate as well. Yeah. Or even just, like, I mean, outside of university lenses, thinking about, like, your Giving Days at the end of the year. Right? Like, Giving Tuesday. Who are your best social media advocates? Right? Let's run a query of everybody who has a Twitter account who also has a score of 80 or higher on their social score. That is gonna give me a great place to get started to say, hey. These people can actually spread my message so much farther than I can on my own. And so engaging those people in a different way. Right? Maybe instead of asking them for a gift on Giving Tuesday, you ask them to share with their you give them social copy. Ask them to post on your behalf. Right? That idea is just as important and can be so much more impactful as well. K? A couple of other things here before we kind of move into what actionable data is. One thing I love about Virtuous is it is customizable. So you have the ability to do things like custom fields. So here, I'm tracking language spoken. I have an overall prospect status. But on an individual, you can track whatever you're looking for as well. Maybe you want to track different information on grants, on gift asked, or proposals, or on gifts. Right? You can have that information system to track what you need to be able to do your job as well as being able to create what we call custom collections. They're really like custom objects. So here, I've created one around education. I'm tracking education information here. Maybe you also wanna be able to track your board member information, being able to create and hold data in a way that makes it easy for you to access. Right? I don't just wanna look at this data. I wanna keep it actionable. I wanna build a query, and I wanna create a segment for my event at the end of the year that says anybody who was a board member in the last five years, I wanna include in this opportunity. Right? Again, this is that one place, that holistic view of our supporter, being able to capture each of those different ways they're engaging with us and allowing us to make sure that we know who they are, how they're engaging so we can talk to them in the most appropriate way. Kayla, I'm gonna interrupt for a minute. We had a question in the q and a that was asking if there's a way to have pass through gifts be calculated with the suggested financial ask. Yeah. That's a great, great question. And so, that pass through giving, so pass through gifts, here we are. That that's what we call that here at Virtuous. Our pass through gifts are gonna be kind of things like thanks donor advised funds, family foundations, those types of things. And currently today, this is is only looking at kind of that hard hard credit giving in that sense, but that is something that our team is working on as well. So how do we take that giving that is, within that might be something other outside of that. Right? It's not coming directly from my hand, but it might be coming from donor advised fund. How How do we do that? That's actually something that our team is, is working on. So stay tuned because I think you'll be excited. Yes. Thank you, Amy. Yeah. Okay. So, the other way I wanted to kind of call out is this idea of how do we kind of use segments and tags and things. And this is one of the big pieces. So we're gonna kind of talk about tags and and whatnot, but we're also gonna really lean here into automation. And so when we think about tags, when we think about, custom fields and those types of things, one of the things I think is so, so important is to think about how can we have the system help us do our job. Right? How can I not run that same query every single day? And so tagging this idea is, is really how do we segment and target different audiences. Like, how can we pull those things together? And so I like to think about this personally in, like, a direct mail fashion. Right? So, we ran a lot of direct mail at the university, and it took me a lot of time to run direct mail. We had about 75 segments. And to run one direct mail, it took me about two weeks. I had a large I had a large list. My system was running. I would work on multiple computers to go back and forth because my computer was locked up, and I had to do all this work. Took me a long, long time to run one list. And it was exhausting. Like but I I thought I had it down to a really good system. I was like, I got my things. I know how long it's gonna take me, and I would do my whole thing, and it'd take me two weeks. We then got some some tooling. We got some other software, and it took it down from two weeks to, like, three or four days. And I thought that was mind blowing. Like, I was shouting it from the rooftops. Holy moly. Like, this has changed my life. Like, I have so much more time in the day. Wow. Here at Virtuous, the thing is is that the like, literally and and that was just because I would run my segmentation once. Like, I'd have to do it every time I had a direct mail. Right? So we had, like, let's say, like, I think we had, like, nine direct mail. So I had, like, four days for nine direct mail, so over a month. Those are us running direct mails of my whole job. With Virtuous, the segmentation possibilities with tagging and those types of things, the system could literally be segmenting my my data nightly. So I would be setting up my queries that I would have to run one by one, add and remove tag add and remove segments, those types of things. The system would be doing that for me every day so that when I come in to actually pull my direct mail, I just find my segments, and I'm like, great. Those are the ones, and it would maybe take me an hour if at the most at the most. And I know it sounds crazy, but it's true. Like, it it's the idea of if you have to you're doing the same thing over and over and over again. That is where this idea of tags can come into play. You can add them one by one. You can add them in bulk through a query. But the idea of internal automation, allowing a system to run those queries for you and add and remove people from those segments for you is where that time savings will come into play. We see about a 20% decrease in staff time when people adopt Virtuous. That's a whole day back into your week. Right? Five days in a week. That is an entire day. What else could you be doing? Right? And this is one of my favorite quotes from our among our customers is, Virtuous does the menial work so that I can do the meaningful work. And that is so important. That is so important to what we're talking about here today is how do we make sure that you have time to spend time where you are needed and let the system do the stuff that it can do on its own. Which goes back to our downfalls, the five downfalls that we listed in the slideshow earlier, that complicated tech, the siloed systems. One of the things when we get into Virtuous in training helps you understand and why we ask the whys. What are you gonna do with it? Why are you trying to pull this so that we can then because we understand the system can help you understand how to take care of some of those tasks. While I'm chatting, Kayla, we had another question. It said, how is the prospect status shown in the address section, and how is the solicitation shown? By, I believe those are gonna be your custom fields in your database. So those are ones that someone, could go in and create in the database, and those would be decided based on whatever rules that you decided they should be named for. Yep. Yep. So personally, it's something we had at my university, and we had different statuses over time. And this is actually a field that's being updated, through automation. So it's actually saying based on where somebody is in their gift their ask journey, this is actually automatically being updated. So saying, hey. This this they have an open gift ask. They're out for an opportunity. That's in solicitation mode right now. When that opportunity is closed, that would automatically then change to being, like, a a stewardship, journey based on if they said yes or if they said no. And the other cool thing about that is because that's a custom field that's on their contact record, if you were doing, like, your end of year mailer and they were actively being solicited for a major gift ask, you could use that to exclude them from being in that annual, appeal at the end of the year. So those fields can be purposeful for specific things, but they can also bleed over into other things and be useful, in other ways that maybe you've had to manually go through and pull people out of list. Now that we're tracking it all in the same system? When we build our queries to do our automations to add tags or to run segmentation, we can say, hey, I wanna exclude anybody with this on their in this custom field or with this on their record as far as a tag. Yep. And you can also use those custom fields to actually populate emails as well. So let's say you do have, like, information on them and you wanna be able like like, you know, maybe you're, a dog name. Right? Like, hey. Like, you're you're you're doing things like that that are capturing information or maybe your interests. Right? They fill out an interest survey that I'm interested in this. And then in the email, you could say, hey. We know you're interested in two. And having those, like, different small personalizations at scale makes a big difference. Right? Says you're talking to me. Oh, I I did tell you I was interested in that. You remembered I was interested in that. And even though it's the system doing it, that is still personalization. Right? It's making it so that you can have that more connected relationship at scale. I'm gonna hop over into automation. We just talked about where that data lives, all that good stuff. Like, if it just lives there, how useful is it? Right? And this is honestly my favorite piece about Virtuous is automation and the power that it will bring your team. So we just talked about some internal automations where we're updating custom fields, we're updating those tags. But, also, Virtuous has a fully built in marketing engine that allows you to actually do external automation as well. So whether you do just wanna focus on internal automation, like assigning out tasks for somebody to complete something or being able to manage your email lists or do those things we just mentioned, tags and custom fields and that type type of piece, or you actually want to send out emails, text messages, and, what we call letters on demand, which are postcards or letters that can actually be printed, stamped, and mailed, and sent out on your behalf. And that's, like, kind of two sides of automation. Right? Internally, let's save you time, but, externally, let's also save you time and connect with your supporters at scale. And so it can be a little overwhelming, honestly, if you've never thought like, worked in with automation before. And so one thing to call out here is Virtuous is built for nonprofits only. Right? We only serve the nonprofit community, and so everything within the platform is really built on this idea of best practices. So we're providing best practices in all of these different places to make sure that you know where to get started from. And so here on automation, there are nine best practice templates that give you a great, kind of place to get started from. One of my favorites is this idea of stewardship. I love thanking donors. I think it's such an important piece. But often, stewardship gets put into I'm gonna send one thank you letter at the end of the year because I have all these other things I have to do. How amazing would it be to be able to say, like, hey, Amy. With your last gift of a hundred and $50, you just passed a thousand dollars of giving to our organization. This is the impact that you're having. And literally just sending that that can literally go out automatically without your team having to even do anything. Right? That is the power of automation, being able to keep those relationships going at scale. Nobody has the time every single day to run that kind of query and to then talk to each individual person in that very specific way. It's just not possible. So with automation, though, with purchase automation, you have the ability to set up your parameters, set up your queries, and make that a reality. We talk about that idea of a new donor welcome series a lot in the same sense, being able to have that person. One of my favorites is that idea of loyal donors. Right? Loyal donor giving. One thing I think is hard is maybe not everybody's gonna pass the threshold of giving. You know? We have a lot of supporters who give to us consistently. Right? We had, you know, since we we had a lot of, older women who would give to us consistently every year on Valentine's Day. They would send in their gift to the university every year, and they would send small gifts, $20.30, $40. And that was that's huge. Right? Their loyalty should still be recognized and so important, But it is hard to do that. And so having the ability to have something like an automation running that says, hey. Kayla just gave a gift that she just gave two years in a row. Let's send her an email. Right? Let's send her an email saying, did you know you just gave two years in a row? Like, thank you so much for your continued generosity. Well, great. What happens when they hit three years, when four years? When ten years comes, what happens? We wanna, you know, have them become a potential planned giver. We also wanna get a handwritten thank you note out the door. Right? There are different things that we can have happen each and every day, making sure that we connect with our supporters in the best way possible, letting them know how valuable they are. Right? Because we couldn't do our work without them. So mother, may be giving, but it could also be volunteering. Right? Being able to thank our volunteers when they volunteered for thirty hours, forty hours, fifty hours. That idea of stewardship, it's so important and creates those life that loyalty and that lifelong support, but you have to take time for it, and it takes a lot of time. The thing I love the most about this here is that if I took out this handwritten postcard, literally everything in this this small automation is happening automatically. There is not one human taking a step every day to do this, which is it's it's massive. Right? Virtuous doesn't get sick. Virtuous doesn't go on vacation. Right? You don't have to figure out who's gonna do my job while I'm gone. Right? Virtuous is doing this every single day, allowing you to have confidence that this is happening, and that that goes back to our very first conversation. Right? Data integrity is so important, and we know that. And that's why we've built in those tools to make sure that you can have confidence in things like this. Yeah. I love I love the idea of that donor loyalty. I always talk with folks about, people who make recurring gifts of 10 or $15. They're giving every single month, but over the course of the year, their recurring gift is a hundred and $20 if they get $10 each month. But if they give for ten years, that is that is saying something. Even if they're and they might increase over that ten years, but they might still not reach that threshold. But, man, what does it say about your organization and about that donor when they've been giving consistently for ten years? You know, that should be celebrated, and you get the opportunity to see that and do that without having to drastically add onto your workload simply by being able to have automation. It's it's it's a great tool. A %. A %. In external automation, great. So important. So valuable, but so is internal automation. I don't wanna lose that either. Like, internal automation, I would have had probably hundreds of internal automation pieces running every single day. But this is one where I mean, I think this is so so valuable. Whether you have a major donor program, like, giving program right now or you don't, like, how do you find your major donors? Right? How do we do that? How can we make sure that we're finding them? So having natively integrated wealth data that we have in our system with donor search, having that information around giving, you can create a query that's saying, like, these are my identifiers. Somebody who looks like this is what I would consider a major donor. That's gonna then allow me to do some qualification. I can either automatically just add them into a portfolio. I could say, great. They look like somebody. Let me automatically add them into Kayla's portfolio, and she can do all of that work. Or maybe you have a prospect researcher who's gonna do some qualification first. Whatever that might look like, how can we make sure that there are, you know, 18 steps happening? You know, you have to find them. You You need to qualify them. You need to add them to portfolio. You need to send a email to the major gift officer letting them know that they're new in their portfolio. You need to make sure that they reach out to them. So I need to check that reach out, but I also need to make sure that they've scheduled their recurring, you know, tasks to go forward. All those small pieces take time. Right? What if the system can do 80% of that for you? Right? If the system can do 80% of those clicks, 80% of those emails that you're sending, all those things, right, and then you only focus on that 20% that you need to get done, again, how much of that time savings can you do and just become more efficient in the processes that you're actually creating? One of my favorite internal process automations is to identify folks that are in a portfolio that have not had a note added to their record in the last thirty, sixty, ninety days so that your gift officers are not having to constantly scour their list of a 200 contacts that they're responsible for to figure out who they should reach out to today. Virtuous can go and look for them and say, great. There's not been a contact with this donor in ninety days. You need to reach out to them. Now that's a custom workflow that you can build out, but, man, I think that's one of the handiest ones that you can build for an internal purpose. 100. It's like a little executive assistant. Honestly, it's so, so easy. And so, I know we're coming up on time here. So the last thing I we wanted to talk about was reporting. Right? All this is so fantastic, but how do we know if it's working? How do we know where we should be spending time? And so Virtuous has quite a bit of different pieces that can can take place. So, we're gonna spend time here on our dashboard, and then we'll look at our our BI tool. But here on the dashboard, again, as we talked about previously, this is customizable for each user. This is what you want to see, what is important for you when you log in each day. Again, it will look different for each person, and so making it easy for you to come in here. We have widgets that you can create into little metrics and little reports. You can either, use our best practice widgets. Again, there are a ton of them for you to get started from, or you can create your own custom reports to really give you a place to help you get started, to help you know what's working and what's not. We have a full set of standard reports that you can use to work out and get some really great metrics on. We have a robust query tool that allows you to get into the nitty gritty weeds of who are the people we're looking at. I'm pulling lists. I need to be able to target and segment. Our query tool allows you to do that. And then our, BI tool here really gives you full flexibility in being able to really understand what is working and what is happening within your, instance. So we do have 11 best practice dashboards that give you a really good place to get started to help you understand what is going on in my data. Right? I could have a thousand, you know, a hundred thousand gifts in one spreadsheet. How valuable is that to me? It's probably not. Right? I can't gather my brain doesn't have the ability to gather that a hundred thousand gifts and do all these calculations in my brain. Right? So being able to come into these dashboards and have information out of the gate that's being able to say, what was my average gift over the last, you know, twelve months? What is my median gift? How much, you know, am I looking at month over month? What channels and what are where are they coming in from? Having this kind of out of the gate allows you to have some really great information that, gives you a place to get started. But, also, these might not be exactly what you need. Right? Like, I personally love this giving five month by channel report. I think it's fantastic. It's something that I built at the university I worked at, something we wanted to focus on. But, also, one thing that I really needed to know every single month is we focused on one project or fund, a designation. Like, I we focused on our annual fund, and that was a big deal, and I had to have all my reporting just for that. Here, I don't have the ability to filter down by a project, what we call a project or a fund, where that money is designated. Really simple within our tool to be able to say, hey. I want this to be, my annual giving. I just wanna be able to look back. Let me pull in a filter here. I can come in. I can adjust what I'm looking at without having to build a full new report. I can just come in here and say, I wanna look at just my annual fund, and now I have a whole report that, again, is so valuable for me and my organization, not for everybody else, but just for me and making sure that I can get the information that I need to see each and every day. Your team has full flexibility to build those reports as well from scratch, again, making sure that you have what you need to be able to understand what's working and what's not. Okay? I know we ran through a lot today, and, not sure if y'all have any other questions. But, one of the things I think that is really, really important as we talk about just overall in Virtuous is, what is like, where are you guys spending time today? Right? Like, where are you really taking that time and saying, hey. How much time are we spending doing all these tasks? Like, how much time are we spending bringing data from one place to another, combining data, using Excel, creating these workarounds that are so great, but are really spending time. Right? How much time is that? And that time is so valuable. Right? There is only so much time in the day. And so thinking about some of those things and trying to think about how we can really get through, I think, is is key to why we do what we do here at Virtuous. K. And for you. Yeah. So, in the chat, we did just drop a, a link for a demo. And so, while this was great, I we I do we do have a full team of people who give personalized demos to really talk about your specific needs, your use cases, and answer the questions around what it looks like for you in particular. And so feel free to to grab that and request a demo. We would would love, love, love to have a conversation with you. Thank you for spending time with us. An hour is so important. We talked about time is so, so valuable. So thank you so much for spending time with us. Feel free to reach out, connect with us on LinkedIn. We'd love to chat as well. But, yeah, we hope you have a fantastic day, y'all. Bye, guys. Y'all have a great day. Thank you.