Name: Smarter Fundraising for Human Services: How to See Sustainable Growth with Better Systems and Technology
Uploaded: 2025-03-04T20:30:44.545Z
Duration: 54 min 48 s
Description: Smarter Fundraising for Human Services: How to See Sustainable Growth with Better Systems and Technology

Transcript for "Smarter Fundraising for Human Services: How to See Sustainable Growth with Better Systems and Technology": Well, hey, everybody. Welcome to our webinar today. We are really glad to have you here. We have people coming in, joining us right now, and so welcome everybody. We are gonna get started here shortly. But before we do, we're gonna do a couple things, a little housekeeping. I'm gonna walk you around this platform if you haven't, been on a webinar with us before. Also, introduce, our partner today who, we're gonna be joining or is gonna be joining us, here on the webinar who's already with us. Samantha here. So if you haven't already, I'll just give you a little tour of the platform. You're gonna see a chat box over here. I'm gonna say hello. Hey, everyone. Welcome. We'd love to know where you're joining us from. So go ahead, type that in there. Let us know. We wanna know where you're from, the organization you're with, and we're really glad to have a great group on, today. One of the things too I love about this feature, or this, this platform is you can do gifts in the chat, which is one of my favorite things. I have a favorite, webinar gift that I'm looking for right now to share, with everyone. They moved it around on me, so I'm having to, like, search here, which I like. Oh, here it is. I found it. It's the Forrest Gump. Hello. Waving. So go ahead. Find your favorite gift. Use it there. Anyway, we're so glad that you're with us now that I've taken a good forty five seconds to find a gift. We'll actually get into the content that's gonna be helpful today. So, So, again, as you're joining us, let us know where you're from. We're gonna have some q and a as well. So you'll see a q and a tab above the chat. Throughout our presentation today, you can submit questions. You can actually upvote questions, to make sure that we're really answering the things that are top of mind for you. So make sure to submit your questions. We're also gonna have polls that pop up, and so those are ways for us to know where you're at to interact a little bit. So keep your eye open for those. When the polls pop up, we'd love to hear your thoughts. And, also, if you click the docs tab, you're gonna notice two things. One, the slide deck from today, so you can go ahead and click and download that, as well as a quick guide to switching CRMs for human services fundraiser. So we've our team's created this guide to really walk through, to provide a checklist, to really provide that overview understanding, and so we wanna give that to you today as well. So make sure to grab, those, and we are gonna kinda jump into things today. First, let us introduce ourselves. My name is Scott Holthouse. I'm manager of campaigns and programs here at Virtuous. Before, jumping into the software world and jumping onto the Virtuous team, I served in, faith based nonprofits for about fifteen plus years and worked a lot in, communication, marketing, and really understanding how do you, how do you get in touch and engage with your donors? How do you communicate and understand who they are and and how they wanna be communicated with? So excited to jump in today, and I'm gonna hand it over to Samantha to give her intro and to tell us a little bit about TruSense. Okay. Thank you, Scott. So Samantha Jasnos. I, am a VP here of integrated strategy at TrueSense Marketing. I've been at TrueSense for ten years. And prior to that, I was about four, four and a half years on the nonprofit side, similar to Scott in, the faith based organization side of that. And I my background is in digital fundraising. It's where I started my career, about fifteen years ago. And now we do integrate charge. So I help oversee all, programs and channels for our clients. Awesome. So, perfect. Yeah. Next slide. TrueSense Marketing here is a, full service agency that we have been around for about fifty years. So we do everything from direct mail, digital. You can see on screen here SMS, but we also have our analytics, and, predictive modeling that we do, for our clients as well. So we truly are a full service agency. We are based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, but we hire all across the country, and our clients are all across the country in a variety of different sectors from, food bank, human service organizations to, medical centers to big business organizations as well. That's awesome. Well, we're excited to dive in, and I just wanna give you a little bit of, an idea of what's ahead, where we're going. First, we're gonna look at diagnosing the top fundraising problems. So we're gonna dive into, some of the things that you all probably know well, some of the things maybe you're experiencing and haven't really put language to. But we're gonna talk about some of those top fundraising problems specifically, in human, services sector. We're also gonna look at how to get over your biggest hurdles. So as we discuss the problems, we're also gonna realize that we wanna talk about some solutions and some things, that you can do to move forward. We're gonna look at what it looks like to embrace the future with responsive fundraising. If you spent any time around virtuous, you know, we believe deeply in responsive fundraising, which is not just, technology or a piece of software, but it's a it's a whole mindset shift around fundraising. So we're gonna talk through that and then have some time for q and a and for some next steps. Now, I know I told you about the polls that we have, and so we have the first one coming up here. So if you go ahead and look up above the chat there, you're gonna see our poll open, and we would love to know what CRM you're currently using. It helps just to kinda know where we're coming from, where we're approaching today, and so you're gonna see a variety of, options to choose from. We'd love for you to answer that poll. Let us know where you're coming here from today. You can also submit that there in the chat if you don't see your option listed. So we'll have that poll open here for a little bit, and we invite you, to fill that out as we continue on, today. Now we're gonna jump into diagnosing the top fundraising problems. And so, we have a handful of these, and we wanna kinda talk through, some of them. And so I'm gonna toss this over to Samantha here as we dive into our first, key problem. Okay. Thank you. Alright. So key problem number one. Lack of donor visibility. And so as you can imagine and maybe you experience yourself, when you have multiple systems and multiple teams and departments, you end up having limited view into your donors and who they truly are. Add on top of that data silos, whether that's your systems itself or potentially your teams there, and you're not talking to one another, you have an even bigger gap into knowing who your donor truly is. Not only might you have incorrect information between one profile to the next, first name or last name spelled differently, two different email addresses, different phone numbers to name just a few examples of those. But you might have one profile in a system that is active and engaged and clicking on your emails, where in another system, that same exact donor is considered lapsed. And so what you end up doing is treating that singular person as two different individuals creating a very disconnected, journey for that individual holistically with your organization, and that's just not not a very good experience as you guys can imagine. So, lack of donor visibility is hard. Next, we have time lost to manual process. So we all know that when you work at nonprofits, you often wear multiple hats, which means that you have extremely, your time is extremely valuable, and you have a lot to get accomplished on any given day. When you have multiple systems and you're having to try and reconcile that information in between those two systems, you can imagine all that extra work that adds to your plate and the duplicate work that's just not necessary if you were just to have a single system on that. So with having those duplicate system, you lose the automation and, the reduction in the workload that you could be doing. And because we know nonprofits don't have infinite resources, you don't always get an extra body of that person to handle the data between that. Between that. And so kinda goes back to what I said at the beginning where your time is very valuable and and you need to make sure you're not, spending too much time doing duplicate work there. So definitely a lot of time lost to manual process. Next here is poor personalized engagement. So finally, when you have multiple systems and data silos that leads to poor personalized engagement, and although it may be listed here a second, I'm gonna say it first, the second bullet point. First name inclusion is not personalization. So if you say, dear Samantha in your email or your direct mail piece, that is not personalization. Donors or consumers they always like to say I don't want you to have my data, that data is important to me, I don't need to know anything about me. But they expect you to talk to them as if you know them and they expect you to serve them content that is relevant to them Although they may say they don't want you to have your data, or their data. And so it's really important that we're taking personalization beyond just first name and that we're collecting as much first party data from these individuals as possible. And so making sure that not only are you capturing that information, but that you're able to use that information, query on it, include it in merge fields that we're coming through, and submit that information back to the donor when possible. Those first party data collection doesn't have to happen all at once. It can happen over time, over years. Imagine single question surveys over time, and it's just a way to delight and collect some information from those people. That's great, Samantha. We're gonna we're gonna keep going. We have some more key problems, that we want to chat through. We're gonna jump in to number four. Number four being tech gaps. Some of you are experiencing this, whether that's an outdated platform, and so, you know, legacy systems that worked fifteen, twenty years ago, but really aren't built for today's donor expectations or for your fundraising strategy. So if your CRM can't track engagement across channels, if, again, it can't really keep up with some of that donor personalization more than just first name, but understanding communication preferences, prioritizing those. You know, there there's a chance that that you're already kind of feeling, the outdated, platform squeeze. It could be a lack of innovation just with what today's needs are. So, you know, we think about Amazon remembering the products based on your past behavior. You know, the consumer engagement and the expectations, have really risen. And so your organization should be able to personalize donor outreach in a similar way. And so if your tech can't automate follow ups or segment donors or provide some of those real time insights and keys to personalization, then, there's a chance you're kinda seeing that tech gap and feeling that in, the way you're, you know, not able to engage, the way that you want to. And then really looking at old tech to solve new problems. I think that can be such a difficult path to walk down because you're taking disconnected systems that, you're already kinda feeling the efficiencies of, and they're not leading to those solutions. So, you know, if if your CRM has a hard time integrating with marketing automation or with some of the, AI tools and some of the, other other integrations that really lead to an ecosystem, then, you know, that could be, some of the pain that you're feeling. And and the the key thing here is that your your technology should accelerate fundraising. So it should be a tool that is accelerating your fundraising, not holding it back, not being something that causes more work or difficulty, you know, or some of the hurdles that we're gonna, talk about here in a little bit. Great. And, of course, we know there is a high donor turnover challenge. So active donor files are shrinking in in our industry right now. We're having this huge somewhat of a crisis that's that's taking place. In addition to that, as we know, second year from new, donor retention is only 25%. It's only 25% of the file that's giving you a second gift. And so most of those individuals we bring in the door are going to not give that second gift. And so the hard part really comes not from getting just that first gift, but getting that crucial second gift from that donor and getting that second gift as soon as possible from that donor. So one thing that we know in our industry is that, established giving behavior or a pattern is the one of the biggest drivers in whether that donor sticks around as a sticky donor or a multiyear donor to your organization. And so a pattern requires more than one gift. So we have to get that crucial second gift as soon as possible. And, what we need to try to do is capture, as I said earlier, more information than just this person gave you $25 in that first gift. And so we really wanna try in our industry to move away from having our standard marketing income impact calendar or Marcom be the campaign at the center of the calendar and rather have the donor at the center of that calendar and making sure that we're serving the contact to Scott versus Samantha with what's resonating with that individual at that time, for his giving. Yeah. I think that's so important, Samantha, too, because it is, it is a temptation, I think, to build some of the campaigns, some of the communications, some of the outreach from sort of the top down. Meaning, we think through what, you know, our priorities are and and where those lie and then kind of build that, you know, for with that in mind down versus that sort of almost empathetic way of building to say, what is the donor experiencing? What are they feeling? What will they, you know, how will they read this communication or receive it and really starting to build from that point up. Because I think when you do that, then you can connect in a way that's very, very human despite using a lot of technology to kind of help. Very well said. Yes. Agreed. Mhmm. Alright. We're gonna keep going here. So we're talking about, you know, some of these pain points. And, again, a lot of you are feeling those. Would love to kinda hear from the chat if any of those resonate with you or maybe you have different ones that you're experiencing, some of the challenges that you're walking through. And then just a reminder too, make sure to submit any questions that you have. So as you have things that we're talking about, man, would love to hear that. I see Cassie's Cassie's shared donor retention. Absolutely. I think that that is a is a massive, thing right now that people are working through, figuring out, and and a challenge. And so we're gonna talk through some of that, and we're gonna talk through how to get over some of your biggest hurdles and hopefully be like this adorable kid who is jumping over these hurdles. No problem. And so we're gonna dive into these. And I'm gonna kick us off here as we kinda talk about hurdle number one that manual processes are stealing, my time. And so what are some ways that we can get over that? How can we look to, again, embrace technology, but also step into, maybe life after manual processes, and look at things, like embracing automation, both internally and externally. So I wanna talk through these, and really think through the question, what is the cost for you for your manual processes? I think that sometimes we we throw that word out, and it's sort of a vague idea. But really think through for you, where are you losing time? Where are you, you know, finding that your calendar's filling up and there's difficulty getting things done because of the manual processes? I think we can all agree time is one of the most valuable resources, and teams, especially nonprofit teams are stretched thin. Tons of hours on things like spreadsheets, reconciling donor records, sending mass emails manually. And so what is that impact? Well, one of the things is it leads to missed opportunities. We talked about the need for follow-up in a timely manner for understanding that we need to communicate in real time, but it takes time. And when we have a lot of those processes, it delays that. It outdates data. It leads to kind of a one size fits all communication that doesn't really connect. And, honestly, the the reality is burnout is super real in nonprofit. That is a reality that a lot of you are probably feeling. I don't have to tell you that. You're like, yeah. I'm I'm in that or, you know, my colleagues or my friends are as well. But high high workloads, inefficiencies, I mean, that just put puts more and more on your shoulders. And so what does it look like to embrace automation both externally and internally? Well, externally, we're talking about donor automation. And so personalizing donor engagement at scale. Again, we talk we we say that word personalized, and I wanna make sure we understand we're not just talking about insert first name, but really talking about understanding what matters to that person. So what matters? How do they how do they get communication, prefer it? How do they get the message? And when's the right time to do that? And so what you say, how you say it, and when you say it really matters. And donor automation, instead of saying that, you know, the same generic thank you email to every donor, you set up, Like, this is an example, but an automated journey based on the donation size, based on the frequency, based on the campaign interest, based on how they they might have, you know, gone through kind of your donor acquisition, journey. And so looking at, that donor automation, those signals also that we hear in that process tell us what's working and what isn't. And that gives some feedback loop to then be able to iterate, continue to improve. But then there's the internal, automation. So freeing up time for strategy and relationship building based on automating things like gift processing, donor segmentation, reporting. Not only does this free up time, but it reduces errors. It limit it eliminates the duplicate entries. It, you know, reduces the inbox clutter, the task clutter, all of that. And you can create workflows that automatically assign follow-up tasks to the right person instead of kind of relying on email threads or Slack messages or Teams messages or whatever it might be. Now we're gonna keep, going here and look at as the slide loads, hopefully, decreased time on repetitive manual tasks. And so what does that mean? It means exactly what it says. Right? Things like edge and recurring gift management, things like event follow ups, Like, how much time are you spending? You know, it could be five, ten plus hours a week on some of those, repetitive manual data entry tasks. Things that can be, automated, things that can be, put into a process so that it's not something you're logging in manually, doing. I think that's super, super important. And then ensuring that CRM and marketing automations communicate well. So having, both platforms, having one platform, you know, for both ideally. And when do we see you and hear you getting bogged down with that aspect? It certainly, is a common problem and you're not alone in that. But making sure you have systems that are connected and an ecosystem that works together, I think one of the most, both frustrating and both negative, impact neg negatively impactful. Oh, yes. The quite the proper grammar for that sentence, but I think you're I think I was picking up what I'm putting down here. One of the things that can hurt you the most, is data silos and, having tools that aren't integrated working together Because you have a little bit here, you have a little bit here, you have a little bit here, and you have team members who pull from here, and you have other team members that pull from here and others from here. And all of a sudden, things are not actually unified, and you miss things like giving history or other really important details that allow you, to personalize. And so, those are those are, a few things that I think are incredibly important and really asking yourselves, how do we embrace a more personalized one to many approach? So not losing the touch of humans communicating, but also not relying on one to one communication or one to everyone, you know, one size fits all communication. I think that that's really important in looking at taking some of these manual processes that steal your time, and and finding a solution for those. And so I'm gonna toss it to Samantha now as we jump into, hurdle number two. Thank you. Yeah. And one one thing I'll just note on on Scott's slide there is it's our job as fundraisers and as marketers to make you feel like we're talking to just you. We are obviously talking to the masses, but it is our job to make you feel like we know who you are, and we're sending this single email or directly out these just to you so that you feel that connection and that human touches as Scott was kinda saying. So Yeah. Well said. Perfect. Okay. So hurdle number two, why don't we know our donors? So, as mentioned before, one of the hurdles we gotta get over is we want to try to create that full picture of our donor in all marketing channels. And so this includes promotional history in direct mail, email. You can add promotional history as to, like, was that person included in a targeting for an advertisement? Obviously, we don't know if Scott was matched on Facebook or in our display a programmatic display platform, but we know that we tried to match them. So you can even just put anecdotal information into your promotional history as well. And move beyond that. Did they attend an event? Did they get a thank you phone call? Did they volunteer? Any of that. We really want a full picture of that donor to know all their interactions. And, ideally, if possible, drill down to email activity as well. Not only did they get the email, did they open? Loose term on open since now with the iOS updates that happened several years ago, but did they click on an email? And get that constituent level data where possible. So that can be an attribute on that individual personal eye or person's, record. And I'm sure if you can imagine, but I'll I'll say it just in case. Having everything in one system is fantastic. The more you can have a single system where it's your database of record, your email marketing platform, your donation, transaction online transaction platform, fantastic. But it doesn't have to be one. You can get tools that make these systems talk to one another, but, of course, it's just always fantastic when the data is just living in one place and and able to speak to another. Next here, I wanna talk about, predictive scores and models. So predictive scores and models are not just the way of the future and the target in the future. That future is now. If you are doing just simple kind of like RFM, there's much better ways to be honing in on selecting the correct person for that marketing effort at the right time. I'll I'll hone in on email for just a second here. But, of course, within direct mail, when you hone in the right target audience, you can save a lot of money. Where in email, it used to be email's free. Email everybody. Just send it to everybody, and whoever responds is great. That's no longer a best practice. So email deliverability is getting harder and harder, and the algorithms are changing all the time. And there are a ton of things that go into email delivery deliverability. And one of those things is email engagement. Are the people you're sending your email to actually clicking in that email and interacting with it? And when you do interact with it, the ESP, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, they see your email as worthy to be sent through those filters. And what that means is the more your emails get sent through the filters, the more revenue you're gonna make for your organization. So not only do you just wanna send fundraising asks, but you wanna send stewardship pieces that get people to surprise and delight. Let them click on that email, read that article, watch this amazing video, click on this really cute GIF, whatever it might be just to get that interaction with your email. Finally, here, this is a big one, is that you wanna put your volunteers and your donors in the same database when possible. We know so many organizations, have them separate for a lot of valid reasons. I'm not discounting that by any means, but we definitely wanna keep them all in one system when possible. Because then you have a full profile view of who Scott is as a donor or potential volunteer at your organization. And what we know is that donors become volunteers and volunteers become donors. Sometimes they'll be completely separate, but you will have a cohort of those individuals who are kind of your super individuals who want to give their time and their money. And when we know more information about your volunteers, when they volunteer, how they volunteer, the number of events they attend in addition to volunteering, we can start to create a model around those individuals and hone in on going after more individuals who look like Scott who was a volunteer that became a donor and really able to just kind of refine your audience targeting specifically there. Yeah. I think that's such an important piece. I mean, think about we were just talking about how when we were talking about manual processes, like, the fact that your time is so valuable. Think about your volunteers who give you that time. I mean, they're, like, they're they're bought in. They're excited. And often, you know, the such an amazing audience for turning into donors, and Yeah. They already they already wanna support you. And so how can you lower that barrier for them stepping into being a donor as well? Now we're gonna keep going. Samantha, we do have a question though that I'd love to, hear your thoughts on. And it's this. Sonia asked, what are some recommendations for how to personalize emails beyond the first name? So Yeah. Would love to hear that. Great question. So there's a lot of different ways. And, again, it all depends on what fields you have available in your database and what you can query off of. I'll just give a couple. First name is not personalization, but you should definitely be personalizing or including first name in your, marketing. But you could do last gift date, first gift date, gift amount, largest gift amount, some of those traditional fundraising elements that you can think of. One thing to always keep in mind, particularly with your last file, is donors don't remember when they gave to your organization. They really don't. So remind them when the last thing they give, and it's probably when the last thing they gave, and it's probably a lot longer than what they have in their head than when they actually just gave to your organization two months ago, and it ended up being fifteen months ago. So that's always a good one to bring in. Not only that, but think of things like now now nowadays, it's becoming really important where people wanna give to a cause and to, not an organization necessarily. They wanna know what their donor dollar is going to. And so if you're tracking designations, I, as a donor, really like to give to, a food bank and support their feeding programs at the school lunches. I, as a donor to a food bank, really wanna support, individuals who are older and don't have money for meals. I'm just giving a couple of examples. So you could feedback images around elderly individuals at a table with an empty table versus kids at a school at a table that's empty for that. So think of image personalization to kinda cue that visual of what's important to that, person. Same way you can think of, like, a cat versus a dog for an animal shelter organization, you know, things simple things like that. I'll do one little plug here too, a really great tool that takes personalization to, like, steroids. It's an additional tool that integrates with your platform. It's movable ink, and they can allow you to take some of that information and turn it into a really visual, email opportunity for that. And so it's all dependent on what data you have available, which is why it's so important to collect that first party data, on those individuals. Yeah. That's fantastic. Yeah. Similar, my, my family and I, we give to a, a farm actually in Kenya called Kijani Farm, and, they also support, students going to university with scholarships. And so I'm always looking for emails, communication about scholarships and what students are doing because they they go and get educated, and they come back. And the farm is a huge community center and just has an an amazing impact. But that's that's such a great piece though as well, Samantha. Like, how can you take that data and then create that into a story? You know, I I think of of those impact reports and things where you can that's, I think, an amazing way to to personalize and, like, take it up a level, not just you gave to this, but this person cares about this. And so these stories need to go there because that's gonna continue that engagement and connection. I think it's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. And, one more of it. Sorry. As you said, that just popped into my head. What you could also do is consider it plays into what Scott was talking about automation and those delightful moments that kinda just pop up into your inbox, out of nowhere is let's say if you work for a cancer or a medical organization and you have donors who give to designations on neuro neurodegenerative diseases or Alzheimer's or anything like that, maybe create, like, five tips for healthy brain, activity or something like that. And as soon as someone gives to a designation that's one of those designations, you send off an automated email and it's like, we just wanted to let you know about these five tips that happened, and it kinda just it's unexpected. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It speaks to that bottom up approach a little bit. Like, what's going to bring this donor value? What would they see as value and then kinda building from there? I love that. Alright. We're gonna we're gonna talk about hurdle number three here and jump into, the fact that we can't trust our data. And so we're gonna talk through, a handful of things, but the first place we're gonna start here is running from data silos. And so a few things here that I just wanna hone in on. One, again, siloed data, equals bad decisions. I think it's it's really important to understand when you again, you have data spread out everywhere and you can't look at a clear picture, it's really hard to make good decisions. And so if finance and if marketing communications and development, if they're using separate systems and there are kinda one platform or one ecosystem, you're working with some incomplete donor insights. And so, you know, for an example, a donor comes in and makes a major gift and, you know, development sees that. But without centralized data, the rest of your team still just sees this as kind of a normal first time giver and, you know, there isn't a more tailored approach. That can really have an impact on that person's experience in connection, with your organization. So running from data silos, I think, is so important. And one of the ways you can do that is to make your CRM a single source of truth. So one system, one story, your donor interactions, your giving history, your engagement, your event attendance. Like, if that can live in one connected platform, you're already off to such a great start. Now I know that that at times there there are different tools, like Samantha just mentioned one, and we have so many partners ourselves here at Virtuous to where, we we we know that, like, there's preferences or there's some things where, man, this does, you know, events really well or we love this online giving platform. And so I think it's also important to look, for a system that can integrate and that can connect and kind of scale with you as you are growing so that you can have that single, source of truth and ultimately provide better insights, which allows for better decisions, which allows for, better fundraising. I think that's super important. And, again, kind of future proofs a little bit of your technology and and the growth that you're looking for. And so run from data silos. The other thing that I want to just dive in on a little bit is to govern your data. And, again, just say, if you have everything in a single source, but there's no governance and there's, no boundaries or policies or ways of which you are going to organize and interact with that data, then you're you're in trouble as well and are gonna experience some of that pain. And so I think define things like who enters the data, how often is it clean, what fields are required to ensure accuracy, and and making sure that you have that consistency. Because without it, you know, missing or inconsistent data, it can really lead to wasted outreach efforts. So that's that time piece again that many of us, if not I'd probably say all of us, don't have to waste. But also things like donor churn and and things like, you know, donor retention that you start to kinda see, slipping. And then the last piece here, is looking at inconsistent data entry that leads to poor reporting and ultimately to poor modeling. So I think we've all kind of heard the phrase, but garbage in, garbage out. So if data is entered differently across teams, if it's coming in a way that's not unified and clean and, you know, has those policies like we talked about in governing your data, well, then reports become unreliable. You're not really sure what it's speaking to, and it can make things really difficult on the team. And so looking to standardize data entry fields and really train staff to follow a clear documented process, I think it's so important because ultimately, like, fundraising relies on trust. It's so crucial. People are, again, giving their, resources, their time, their money, their energy, to you and your organization. That's a precious gift and it runs on some trust that you're gonna steward that well. So your data should be no different. It should be clean, centralized, integrated. I think it really helps to make smarter decisions to strengthen those donor relationships and has some real impact, on on your fundraising efforts and and and really your your efficiency as a team. Agree. Yeah. And, part of that data governance here, if you are not doing email, hygiene, you should definitely be doing that at least once a year. So I'll make a pitch here to always make sure you're hygiene your day. Mentioned earlier, email deliverability. If you have bad email addresses on file, who are not active and not getting answered, we wanna clean those up and move more active email address. So little plug here to make sure you're doing an email ID. Great. Alright. So hurdle number four here. We don't know what's working and what isn't working. So make sure that when you're looking at your campaigns and your analysis that you keep in mind not all campaigns are created equally, and therefore, not all campaigns should be measured in the same way and using the same KPIs or metrics. Ensure you're looking at fundraising efforts differently than stewardship efforts or affirmational efforts within that, and make sure that you're looking at those little moments of delight and seeing what people are engaging with. Again, I can't pull one of this, but they want to be served content that matters to them. So as you're testing something out and you're trying different personalization, seeing what's working, look back at a holistic view, not just by campaign, but the full year to assess what really helped move the needle. You know, all of a sudden, our click through rate went click through rate went from 1% up to 5%. And what was it in that five percent that particularly got that over time, or did we just increase something, on average? So definitely just look at what people are engaging with, to make sure you can modify your strategies going forward. And finally, Scott's been honing in on this, and I'll say it too. When possible, use automation. I feel like this last bullet kinda speaks for itself, but look for ways to add automation into your campaign when possible. This is something like he was saying. Trigger email off of first time gift one year ago today, a donor bursary email that goes out the twelve month mark. It could be something I mentioned earlier where someone gives to a certain cancer designation and they get five tips to make healthy meals to prevent cancer or or something like that. Ways that you can help volunteer at your organization once they give at a certain threshold or maybe they've reached the same cumulative last year cumulative giving amount. And so now we want to see if we can get them to engage in a different way because we've retained them the same value or we've upgraded them or something like that. So look for different ways to push those varieties of automation throughout the year to interrupt what the donor is used to seeing in your inbox. And also remember, donors don't remember things year over year, so don't be afraid to reuse something that works really well for a couple years. Yeah. I'm always shocked to hear, the statistics around amount of email, and it always feels like, oh, that's too much. But then I think about myself, the amount of email I get. Yeah. And I I like, just the need to communicate. And, again, you have a leg up because people have already communicated in some way to you that they really care about what you're doing. Now it's your job to make sure that you are following up to connect with them and to give them more of what they've kinda communicated that they really care about. Agree. Alright. We're gonna have another poll here open up. So go ahead, look up above the chat box here. You're gonna see the poll tab open here with a little red dot, and we'd love to know kind of where you're at right now and what's hindering your fundraising the most. So is that an outdated fundraising strategy? Maybe in general, your strategy is just not where it needs to be, needs to grow, needs to change, it needs to kind of evolve into, modern day. Maybe it's poor tech performance. So you're kind of really resonating with those tech gaps or not being able to do some of the things you wanna do, because of your platform. Maybe it's staffing, and I think for a lot of people, they might feel that. Right? It's a reality of we don't have enough time in the day. We don't have enough people. Maybe it's truly just this lack of time. You have so much on your plate, manual processes, spreadsheets to check, gifts, you know, to reconcile manually all of that. Maybe it's we're losing donors. So your donor retention is not where it needs to be or you're noticing some opportunities there or it's acquisition. So finding new donors, connecting with them, a new do new donor welcome journey and really taking people from interest to, you know, a fully plugged in donor. So we're gonna leave that open just for a little bit. Go ahead and answer that poll there. I know we have responses kinda coming in. And so, keep those going here. We're gonna leave those up, and I'm gonna take us into embracing the future with responsive fundraising. So like I said, if you have, been around Virtuous at all, you've heard, the term responsive fundraising. But if you're new, if you haven't, let me kinda walk through what we mean by this. Now, ultimately, we believe that giving is fundamentally personal. Like I said, people have given some of their most precious resources, their time, their energy, their money, to you and your organization. So it's very personal. But historically, most nonprofits don't have a personal connection with every donor. It's it's unresponsive. It's one to many donor experiences. And the reason that that's a problem is, we, and when I say we, I mean, yes, everyone on this, live webinar today, but we meaning everyone in our society is living in a world where personal connection is the norm. So when you open up Netflix and you're looking to watch something, it's a different list suggesting shows than when I open it. When I open up Amazon to order things, it's a different list than what Samantha has. And the reason is because there is two way communication happening. There's two way behavior driven listening that's going on, which allows for personalized experiences, but also moves us away from the norm being a one size fits all. And so, the the reality is, like, that's every day for your donors, and that's just, like, the world that we live in right now. And so what we believe is possible is a more responsive model for for generosity. We believe the way forward is responsive fundraising. Instead of being handcuffed to impersonal fundraising system, the silos silo teams and data, lack of insights, the manual processes, all of that, we believe that we can move beyond, you know, a spray and pray kind of impersonal disconnected process into a more responsive process. And so I wanna walk through just briefly kind of what that means, when we say responsive and how to do that. Just a reminder, that poll will be open for another minute, and then it will close there. But what I mean when I talk about responsive fundraising is a better approach that allows you to connect personally at scale. And, again, we talked about about what it means to go beyond just like a first name personalization, and that's what we're talking about. How do you have a deep knowledge and know your donor, connect personally, but do it in a way that you can do it at scale and drive generosity. And so there's really four motions to that. The first is to listen. And so the more you listen, the more you start to understand each donor and understand, what that person wants, what they're interested in, what connected them with your organization, with your mission in the first place. And it allows you, to connect donor and data signals. So through integrated donor tracking, through, again, listing those donors signals, you can have, one in one place, kind of a complete donor view. Excuse me. And that also helps kind of address some of those efficiencies with automated workflows. It it allows you to have all of that information to then connect with your donors. So number two is to connect. Like, we talked about giving so personal, which means your engagement with your donor should be as well. Connecting with donors in a responsive way is contextual, but it's also collaborative. And so what do I mean by that? How do we, you know, execute that? Well, it can look like using automated journeys to build those relationships with donors, without having to add staff, without having to add, more workload. You know, you can leverage things like wealth data, demographic data to prioritize outreach, delivered tailored asks, and really kind of connect with your donor again in a way that matters to them, and you can personalize engagement too across channels. So when I say channels, I mean email, text message, direct mail, all of that kind of based on your donor behavior. So we listen, we connect, and that allows us to suggest. So once you've established that trust connected, you have an opportunity to suggest the best next step for your donor. Now not for all of your donors because, again, we're not doing a one to many approach. We're doing a very personalized approach where we know what matters to them, and that allows us to give that next right step. And so you can match donor passions to certain campaigns or initiatives. You can automate recommendations for next steps based on their activity and based on those donor insights. And you can also track donor impact, with project based reporting, which again allows you to build that trust and encourage repeat giving. And, ultimately, that leads into learning. So you use that information to gain insight, to iterate, to get better, to grow more personalized and responsive, and that cycle continues and your organization gets stronger and stronger. And, really, it gives you a modern fundraising system. You can find additional gaps and see kind of integration opportunities, but it also brings up the right questions to ask to continue to grow things like your donor engagement, donor acquisition, and some of the things that we've talked about today. And so, ultimately, for us, the virtuous platform is more than just a donor database. It's not a digital filing cabinet, so to speak, but it is, you know, truly a responsive fundraising platform that builds personal connections with donors and drives generosity. So that's kind of the the 30,000 foot view, reason why we've we've worked so hard to build the platform that we have. It's because we really believe that there's a better way forward, and we wanna help and be on the front front lines of of really, you know, sourcing that and supporting, the many organizations that we get to. So, we actually have another poll we're gonna open up here, and this one just, says, hey. If you wanna connect with our team, and would like either a demo of Virtuous or a chance to be able to, ask some further questions and really explore, how so how do we actually do the things that we just kind of talked about, and see that in action? We would love to do that. But we are gonna move to some q and a, and, we actually don't have, any that anymore that were submitted in the tab. But, Samantha, I would love to ask you. When it comes to, specifically some of the things we talked about, we had kind of the four hurdles, you know, and we hit on some of those key points, but from today's conversation, what are the things that stand out most to you, or at least the opportunities that you see that are like the low hanging fruit for people who are like, man, I wanna be able to take action on this right away. I wanna kind of take some action steps to improve. We'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Sure. I'll maybe give two, three. I always end up giving the wrong number at some point. So first, I would say, start looking at your database of record and your we'll just start start with email as a good way, and your email marketing platform and see what kind of custom fields, can be passed between one or the other. And so you can start looking at the customizable start looking at the individual data point that you could be using for personalization on there and assess what needs to happen on your email marketing platform to allow for that creative to come those merge fields to come into your creative. Two, I would say it's such a a daunting idea to just wanna start collecting first party data, but you have to start somewhere. So sit down with your team members and make a list of her story data information that you want to begin capturing. And so think about, like, you get an email from LL Bean, and it gives you an image with pink shirt versus Scott who gets an image with purple shirts because they have information on Scott that he really likes purple. So they're gonna show an image of a purple shirt to him because they know that's, valuable to him. So that's all data that's been collected over time based off of his past purchases, what he might be clicking on, all that kind of stuff. So start thinking through ways that you can capture some of that first party data information. Do you like cats or dogs? Are you interested in cancer versus, neurological diseases? Are you interested in seniors versus children's programs? Like, just think of all that information that you could potentially want to report back to the donor, make a list of it, and start with a single effort and start capturing that information when you can. Yeah. That's awesome. We I did get a question in the chat. Are there any AI tools that could be integrated, into Virtuous? Yes. There are certainly a handful. We have some that our team is is working, super hard on, but also, you know, we integrate with a lot of other tools. So DonorSearch, for instance, Ask Genius, Instrumentl, which would, you know, Instrumentl would be grant management, grant writing, Dutaro as well. And so there there's a handful of those. And, actually, little sneak peek. Don't know if I should say this publicly, but I'm going to. We are actually getting ready working on kind of launching a a whole marketplace, where you can see everything. Not only we integrate as far as technology goes, but also, some of the, you know, just some of our partners who are really doing a great job to support fundraising strategy and and other things that y'all often need help with. So, be on the lookout for that. We did just get a question, from Frank. What can a team of one do for making their outreach more responsive? I love all these suggestions, but it's a lot for one person. I think that's fair. Samantha, we'd love to hear again maybe what do you think a team of one can do to kinda take steps in this direction? Yeah. I don't know if this is I don't I don't mean to just spit off what I just said a second ago, but I would say meet with your I'm assuming maybe you're a fundraiser. I could be wrong, Frank, if you're not. Meet with your data team and start collecting get a conversation with them. Let's say, where can I capture some personal information in our database of record and how can I get that into an email marketing platform or your direct mail piece and start there? And just open that conversation with your data team to know what fields are necessary. So once you know what fields are necessary and any modifications you need to your system, then you can start working on the list of actually starting to work on capturing some of the information and gathering where possible. But first, I think you would have to maybe start with your infrastructure and understanding the limitations there. Yeah. Yeah. And I think, again, looking at looking at a couple data points that you would say are are really important, whether it would be gift size, whether it be campaign or initiative interest, but just start to maybe, categorize those and build a couple, couple journeys or couple campaigns around those. I think that's kind of a small step to take to to move in that direction. Mark also asked, can you do mass texting, mass emailing to groups from Virtuous? Yes. You can. You can do both, and you can also segment those groups. So, again, you know, not like, hey. I wanna send a text to everybody. Maybe. But maybe it's I wanna send a text to everyone who gave to this initiative earlier this year, who gave over this amount, you know, things like that so you can really tailor, the communication. So, well, Samantha, I'd love to give you a chance to share a little bit more about, TrueSense, who you all are, and maybe some next steps for people. And as she's doing this as well, I'm gonna open up another poll. I know I I love the polls. I'll be honest. I love them. But I'm gonna open one as well up, for those of you curious about, what TruSense Marketing can can do from you. So she's explaining we'd love for you to to respond there as well. Yeah. Definitely. So we would love to speak with you here if you're open and interested in, agency working with an agency. We truly see ourselves as partners with our nonprofit. We are not just a vendor that dictates information of what you should do. We'd like to make a cloud working relationship with you and a partnership to understand what your program's goals are, where you see yourself in three to five years, and how we can help you achieve those goals, through direct mail, digital. Within digital, we do email marketing, full service advertising. We also do text messaging as well, and we do also have managed, you know, thank you calling and and stewardship calling as well. So as we mentioned earlier, we're a full service agency, been around for fifty years, and we love working with nonprofits. And we work in a variety of sectors from food banks, Salvation Army, Rescue Mission, medical organizations, veterans organizations, cancer centers, children's hospitals. So if any of these organizations are you, we would love to have a conversation with you, and, you get amazing team, that you get to work with here at TruSense. So, definitely reach out if you guys are interested. Yeah. That's awesome. Last but not least, we're so thankful for those of you who have been with us. Thank you for joining us. We do have a survey, that I'm gonna launch right now, for you to be able to fill out. Reason is we wanna do these, live sessions, these webinars in a way that's really helpful for you, in a way that brings value. So would love to hear your response there. If you found today helpful, if you have feedback, if you just wanna say, hey. Thanks a lot. That works as well. But if you could fill that out, that would be great. That's gonna be open here for just a little bit longer. But, again, thank you so much, for joining us today. Reminder, the recording from this session will be, emailed out as well as a slide deck, as well as a link for the quick guide. So you can grab it before you go here in the docs tab, on on the webinar itself. It'll also be emailed to you. Again, we'd love to connect with you and your team, either ourselves when you're exploring technology, how can you grow in responsive fundraising, then also would encourage you to reach out to TrueSense as well. We're both really unified around wanting to serve you, your nonprofit, your organization. So please let us know how we can serve you. That survey is gonna be up here just for another minute. But, again, thank you so much for your time today for being with us, and we will see you next time. Thank you. Thanks, Erin.