 Hi everyone. It's just a few minutes before we get started and it looks like people are still logging on. So before we get to the starting point, I just wanted to take care of some housekeeping and make sure that you guys can all hear me and see my screen. So if you're able to hear me and see my screen, you should see the cover slide right now. Just let me know by typing yes into your questions box so that I know that everybody can hear and see me present presenting. Awesome. It looks like everybody can see and hear me, which is always good. So we'll just give everybody a few minutes to get logged in and then we'll get started. All right, so thanks everybody for joining me today. I'll go ahead and get started. Hello and thanks for joining me today for our webinar on donor acquisition. I'm Dikkar Hart and I'm the senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been with Mighty Cause since 2016. And in that time I've talked to a lot of nonprofits about their fundraising efforts and goals and the challenges they face. And I know that donor acquisition can be really the biggest hurdle for smaller nonprofits. So I'm really excited to dig into this topic today. And just as a bit of background on me and why I'm hosting this webinar, until I started working with Mighty Cause, I actually worked in the nonprofit sector, specifically in animal sheltering and animal welfare for nonprofits that were very big and you would recognize their names and also some smaller nonprofits. So I'm speaking from experience and since my background is in nonprofit marketing and communications, I really hope that I can blend that experience to give you some insights and tips that will help you get more supporters. And just so you know, I'm available to you. That's part of my job is working with nonprofits. So if you have a specific situation you need to talk through, you can always email me at Linda at Mighty Cause.com. Here is a look at today's agenda. We do have a lot of ground to cover since this is a pretty big topic. So I just want to make sure that you all know that I'll be taking questions at the end of the presentation. So if you think of something while I'm presenting, just go ahead and type that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel. And I'll make sure that we make time for questions at the end of the presentation. All right, so since we've got a good sized crowd today and everyone comes from different backgrounds and levels of experience, I thought we'd start off with some donor acquisition 101 and make sure that we're all on the same page on the basics before we dive in deeper. The first thing we have to do when we talk about donor acquisition in any meaningful way is of course define it. Donor acquisition is a term that refers to efforts made by a nonprofit to attract and solicit new donors. There are a lot of ways to do this and different elements to donor acquisition, which we'll get into later on. This is just an umbrella term for the act of trying to onboard new donors and grow your donor base. There are a few connected terms you should become familiar with as we talk about donor acquisition as well. The first is what a conversion is. And a conversion in marketing terms basically means that a person you were targeting for a purpose did the thing you wanted them to do. So obviously for the purposes of donor acquisition, the conversion would be making their first donation. And with donor acquisition, that is the main goal. That's the main metric you want to consider is whether or not they converted, whether or not they made the donation. And later on the conversion will be making their second gift, making a recurring gift and so on as you work to steward these new donors. The other term that's important to know as we have this conversation is prospect donor acquisition is finding prospective donors and trying to get them to donate. And while sometimes see donor acquisition actually just called donor prospecting prospect can also refer to the process of finding new donors so it can be used as a verb as well as a noun. But for the purposes of this presentation a prospect is a potential donor whom you're trying to convert. And I want to just provide some general context to the state of donor acquisition across the nonprofit sector so you can sort of gauge where your nonprofit falls in the grand scheme of things. Your reports and numbers are kind of still trickling in at this point, but as of 2017 donor acquisition has been up, and that is a trend we've seen over the past five years or so donor acquisition has been strong and steady. New donors also account for the most growth in charitable giving across the nonprofit sector. And this is all great news, except that most of these donors are lost to attrition, meaning their gifts are lost and these donors are not being retained. Nonprofits in general are doing a really great job of getting new donors in the door, getting that first gift gift and then doing a rather lousy job of keeping them. So there's a little bit of a hamster will affect happening where nonprofits are getting new donors and then losing them so that they run out of new donors and then they run out and get more, which is to say that there's an important and close relationship between donor acquisition and donor retention which we'll talk about a little bit more further on, but these two things have to work together and either in order for either of them to work. And the last fact I wanted to share is that donor acquisition costs are typically higher than the lifetime value of each new donor. So donor acquisition, what that means is it's basically an expensive endeavor with a fairly low return. And this not to paint a dismal picture or make you feel like it's hopeless but just to put donor acquisition in the bigger picture of charitable giving. So how do donors actually acquire how do new nonprofits actually acquire new donors. So many nonprofits have a natural constituency, which would be for instance congregates at a church, alumni at a university adopters from animal shelters and rescues and so on. Basically nonprofits find easy donors and people they serve. So if you have a service based nonprofit you should have some people you can easily target to become donors, although of course this can be tricky for certain nonprofits because if you're a poverty relief organization. It's not exactly a great idea to start asking for donations from the people you serve because that's kind of antithetical to your mission. Another thing nonprofits, another thing nonprofits do to acquire new donors is purchase or rental lists. This is done through direct mail marketing companies typically and they will do the research for you and try to find people who have an affinity to your cause and make an attempt make the first attempt at converting them. This can be pretty effective but it's also generally pretty expensive so it's something midsize and large nonprofits might do, but small nonprofits can find that out of reach. Nonprofits can also use advertising which covers everything from Facebook ads and boosted Facebook posts to billboards, bus wraps, TV commercials, PSAs on the radio and so on. So that covers a lot of really large endeavors and a lot of smaller ones too. And nonprofits often acquire new donors through existing donors, which we're going to talk about a lot more later on in the presentation, but word of mouth and personal referrals can be a great source of new donors. Many nonprofits do targeting outreach, particularly with major gift donors and sponsors, which tends to be a longer process where you're cultivating a more intensive relationship. But in many cases targeted outreach can be as simple as calling a donor or emailing your constituents going door to door choosing a spot in your community to pass out information and meet people. And nonprofits also gains donors from simply being a presence in their communities, especially for nonprofits with local based causes. It's kind of a word of mouth effect. You where you serve the community you serve the people that other people know you're out there you have a recognizable brand, and your community knows who you are and where you are. For instance, in DC, there are some organizations that do harm reduction for people struggling with addiction and sex workers, and they have branded trucks, and they are just always present in certain spots handing things out, offering them their services meeting people they want to assist. And so they become pretty well known in their community in that way in particular without doing a lot of push through traditional advertising. And finally the media can help nonprofits bring in new donors. When people read a story about a nonprofit or a reporter covers a project of a nonprofits, it brings people in the door it gets them interested in what you're doing. So cultivating media relationships and placing stories is another huge way that nonprofits get new donors. Okay, so we're going to go back to this issue of donor prospecting. This is basically how you'll evaluate whether someone is a good prospect as a donor. First you'll want to look at access. Do you have a way to contact this person? Do you have permission to talk to this person or this group of people? This is a big concern with things like purchasing email lists, because often programs like MailChimp actually don't allow you to use their services to contact people whose information you've purchased. And obviously if you don't have a way to contact somebody or you don't have permission to contact somebody, then it's really not a good prospect for your nonprofit. Access is basically the bare minimum you need to even consider in order to consider somebody a prospect. The next thing you'll want to consider and that people who are engaging in donor prospecting need to consider is affinity. Does this person have a connection to your cause? Do they donate to similar nonprofits or at least have a common interest? For instance, if you're a cat rescue, having a cat or two would be a good sign of affinity. Or on the animal front, if you're a nonprofit, that does trap new to return for feral cats, but somebody donates to a bird conservation group, that would probably not be a good prospect because there's a lot of beef between feral cat advocates and bird advocates. So you just want to keep that kind of thing in mind. Is this person connected to my cause and are they likely to be interested in my cause? And to finally tune your prospects, the last thing you'll want to consider is capacity, which is basically a nicer way of saying wealth and whether or not they can afford to engage in charitable giving and if they can, to what extent can they give? Basically, this is where you'd want to separate major gift prospects and sponsorships, who can give in larger amounts from people who can afford to give it a lower level, which can change your strategy a little bit as you're thinking about how to reach out to these groups or these donors. Alright, and so when we're talking about prospecting donors, we're going to talk more about entry points and that's what this whole section of the presentation is about, which is kind of the nitty gritty of how new donors or how prospective donors actually get to your organization. So talking about entry points, the first thing you might ask is what are you even talking about? And an entry point is how a prospective donor finds out about your nonprofits work. It's basically the jumping off point in your relationship with them, the how do you do stage. An entry point can be physical like your lobby or digital like your website or your mighty cost page. And it is important to note that the entry point is not usually where you convert them, just like a store does not make a sale the moment someone walks in through the door. But just like getting people into your store is crucial to actually making sales of products. The entry point for prospective donors is also a really important and indispensable first step. So in the next few slides, we're going to go through where the most common entry points are for donors who are, you know, interacting with nonprofits. Okay, first step is your website. In the olden days, people would actually dig out the phone book call a nonprofit and request information. When this is actually true when I worked for a big nonprofit that's been around for decades and decades. I couldn't believe it how it used to work because we still had some of those old materials, but people would call and they'd request a pamphlet about a particular issue. And then they would wait for the pamphlet to arrive in the mail. But obviously we don't do that anymore because it's been made a lot easier to get information about a cause or a nonprofit. You just Google them and find your website. So that's most commonly how people will find their way to your website is from Google or another search engine like Bing. But they may also find your website through links on social media links from media outlets links from people they know, like if you're looking if they were looking for help with something and you provided a friend. And they gave the link to your website that would be one way they could get to your website or paid ads. Another possibility is if you have a Google grant, they may have seen a paid ad on a search engine page. And one important thing to note here is that nowadays most of this information seeking process happens on a mobile device. Most people are on their smartphones when they're at this point of looking for more information. So we'll discuss why that's important to know in just a few moments. Another common entry point is just being part of your community as we just talked about a few moments ago. So a great way to meet people in your community and let them know about your nonprofit is through community events, whether you're tabling at an existing event or hosting your own event. And just general presence in your community is an important entry point, having signs that point people to where you're located, having signage outside of your location that clearly states who you are and what kind of work you do. And also being a presence in local media, getting featured on local news segments, morning news is a great way to break into this and build those media relationships. Being willing and available to speak to the media about your area of work, writing op-eds and so on. And word of mouth is a big part of the community aspect of donor acquisition too. For instance, if you're an animal rescue and someone who has passed your rescue's brick and mortar location and saw some wine and wags events, has a friend who's looking to adopt a dog, they might tell their friend, hey, I pass by this rescue on my work all the time, why not see if they might have a dog that you can adopt. So just being visible and present in your community is important to providing lots of pathways for people in your community to find out about your work. Events are another way people can get introduced to your nonprofit. We did just mention community events, but on this slide I'm talking about other kinds of events. For instance, snagging a speaking engagement at a conference in your area of concern can be a huge boon to your nonprofit's visibility and a great entry point, or speaking at local schools and colleges. Where I live in Northern Virginia, we have George Mason University nearby and on my drive into work, I pass by a big screen outside of their campus where they advertise talks being given by activists, scientists and all sorts of folks. So these types of engagement can be super important for getting people introduced to your work. It helps you become a thought leader and an authority on the subject where you do your work. You can also host your own event, like a charity walk, but also education and service based events are a great gateway. For instance, when I worked for a local animal shelter, we'd have a rabies and microchip clinic and actually get to help and interact with people and their pets by offering low cost services. And we'd also have educational events like authors who wrote about animal welfare issues. We had a grief expert who would host a pet loss support group. And we offer all kinds of events like that that were kind of non ask events. We weren't asking anything of people except for their presence and learning opportunities that really just acted as a gateway to help people find out about our work and to get people in our door. And lastly, one kind of event that can be overlooked but depending on the nature of the work you do. And can be an important gateway is activism events that can include town hall meetings, attending political events lobbying for your cause. A big nonprofit I worked for would host lobby days where they invited advocates to come out. These were just people who were interested in doing more activism, and have them meet with their local representatives learn about pending bills impacting animals in their state and get involved in the activism aspect of the work that they did. And it was a great place to meet and get to know motivated people who cared about the nonprofits cause. So this can be small scale but just having a presence and local politics can be an important entry point for prospective donors and supporters. There aren't really many areas of nonprofit work I can think of that are not impacted by local and national politics. That usually don't have at least one pending bill in their state that directly affects their work. But keeping an eye on this aspect of their work and actively engaging in politics is how a lot of nonprofits make important contacts increase their visibility and pick up new donors. All right, I mentioned this before, but the next point of entry is called direct mail marketing, and it may seem pretty old school in the age of Google but direct mail marketing is still around still making money, and it's still helping nonprofits find new donors. How nonprofit, I mean, sorry, how direct mail marketing works is that mailers are sent to a list of prospective donors, which the mailing house assembles and qualifies for you. And these mailers come back to your nonprofit hopefully with checks and money inside. It basically outsources a lot of the donor acquisition drudgery for you. And as a result, it usually comes at a higher cost than other terms forms of donor acquisition. You're usually signing a contract to work with the company on an ongoing basis. But this frees up time for your staff and your volunteers to concentrate on other things like stewarding donors. So while the financial cost is higher, the opportunity cost is usually lower. There are a lot of companies out there so it can be a mixed bag for nonprofits because some of them are better than others. But it is a really popular way that lots of nonprofits who have the budget to do so outsource some of the donor acquisition labor and gain access to lists of new donors. The next extra entry point is social connections. So often this means that the entry point is just someone that they know this prospective donor knows in their personal life, whether that person is a board member on your organization board, an employee, a volunteer, a current donor, or someone who works with your nonprofit as a sponsor through the workplace is another really important common entry point. Some companies might host volunteer days or have a workplace giving program that allows them to donate to your organization. For instance, I'm in the DC area and a lot of government employees live around here and we'll find out about new nonprofits through the combined federal campaign, which is run through the Office of Personnel Management, the OPM. So it's a big federal program to encourage charitable giving through the workplace for federal employees. So it's not an essential entry point. Not every nonprofit uses this to get new donors, but it's one that really does truly help for the nonprofits that sort of engage in workplace giving. And there are a lot of entry points you may not even have considered as important in terms of donor relations. Community outreach is an important entry point that some nonprofits can focus on really well doing door to door outreach, calling people, working in events. Your lobby, your physical location is another important touch point locations that are well marked, easy to find and access, get more foot traffic. And depending on the type of work you do foot traffic and drop ins can be a really important way for you to reach constituents. For instance, a food bank if you have a really difficult location to get to and people don't know where you are you're not going to be as effective in your work and you're going to have barriers to people actually finding you getting the help they need and getting more information about your nonprofit. I also want to make the point that all customer service oriented aspects of your work are very important entry points. That means on the phone via email, no matter what the request you are dealing with prospective donors, and the nonprofits who are really looking at providing quality customer service and friendly assistance are the ones who are able to acquire new donors through those means. So this is really the top reason to help customer service training for staff and volunteers, and to have a service oriented culture at your nonprofit, because you can actually convert someone who calls your phone number, looking for information into a donor in the long run sometimes that can even happen on the same phone call. So that's really something important that to consider that sometimes nonprofits overlook when they're thinking about how people get in touch with them. But if somebody calls your nonprofit and is looking for some more information has a really great experience. That person may eventually become a donor, but if they call your nonprofit and they either can't reach you or you're not friendly to them, or it takes you three weeks to get back in touch with them. That is a bad experience that they're going to remember and they may even tell other people about so those are things that are a little bit lower down on the list, but are nonetheless just as important as everything else we've talked about. And lastly, you have a social media and online presence as entry points, which are a little bit more diverse than just your website, a nonprofit that is really acquisition focused will have a well built out web and social media presence. There are lots of pathways for people on social media to get on their mailing list to make donations go to their mighty cause page and so on. All right, so now we're going to move into the elements of a strong donor acquisition strategy and the key parts you'll want to include in your nonprofits donor acquisition acquisition strategy. Before we go over the actual steps you can take in the next couple of weeks to start boosting your donor acquisition. But really the most important thing you'll want to think about and incorporate into your strategy is diversification. And what I mean by that is having multiple diverse channels you use to regularly acquire new donors. The reason it's so important is that relying on one or two channels as your main source of donors and funding in general is just really risky because if those sources dry up, you're in a position where your nonprofit may not be able to actually stay funded. So having diverse channels for new nonprofits to find you for new donors, I should say, to find you means that your nonprofit is more likely to be sustainable, since you're not, you know, a table balancing on one or two legs you have multiple legs and multiple points of support. This also allows you to engage with different types of donors. For instance, people who give through direct mail marketing companies tend to be a little bit older. If you use that as your main source of donor acquisition, your donor base is going to skew a little bit older, and people who give through crowdfunding campaigns tend to give in smaller amounts. So if you rely on that as your main source of donor acquisition, you'll have lots of new donors who give small gifts, and they miss out on sources of larger contributions. So diversification also helps your donor base itself become more diverse. And again, you're just building more spaces where you're supported, you're not focusing too much on one area, you're casting a wider net and getting more types of people involved and developing diverse funding. So this is really important to consider as you consider your strategy is you want diverse funding, you want diverse channels where people can reach you. Another tenant of strong donor acquisition is being accessible and that kind of runs counter to a lot of nonprofits instincts, especially smaller nonprofits, where they only want people to use email they don't want to manage a voicemail box they don't have time to respond to social media messages, and they don't have the ability to take live calls, and they really just try to insulate themselves so that they have to deal with the public less instead of more. And that's understandable and I totally get when you are a volunteer run organization why nonprofits make that choice. But unfortunately, it's also a huge mistake, because when people are looking for information about your cause and looking to make contact. It's really not a good look when you're impossible to contact, and you put up a bunch of barriers to actually connecting with a human being being accessible also makes you more trustworthy. And the more trustworthy your nonprofit seems to people who are investigating you who are considering asking you for help or considering making a donation, the more likely those people are to convert. And when you put up barriers to talking to someone and getting information, you're just less likely to convert them to donors in general because you're not engaging with them and actively keeping them at an arms length. So we'll talk in a few slides about practical ways you can make your nonprofit more accessible, but you really just want to keep in mind accessibility on all fronts making sure the public can learn about your work and get in touch with you. So calls to action are important for donor acquisition that's just important for fundraising in general and something we talk about a lot at Mighty Cause, because that's the actual asking part. And it's something nonprofits can sometimes be shy about but donor acquisition requires bold and clear asks, and that's because if you think you'll sway them to support you passively. Unfortunately, you won't. So unfortunately, if you take that approach where they'll figure out that we want them to donate you're going to be sorely disappointed. Because one of the few places in life where people love to be told what to do is charitable giving. In most cases, prospective donors want to help that's why they're in contact with you they care about your cause they care about your nonprofit. Or they have some sort of interest in what you do, and you're enabling them to help by making clear asks. For instance, you'll start out with them just gathering information like their email address and phone number. Easy asks that allow you to start engaging them and move on to bigger asks, like making a small donation after that making another, and then making that small donation of recurring donation. You'll want a clear path of calls to action or CTAs from every entry point to your nonprofit. That's digitally and in person, so that you can convert website visitors people in your lobby people who call you into email subscribers and email subscribers and to donors and so on and so forth. So basically you want to create a breadcrumb trail of things that you would like them to do to lead them to where you'd like them to be, which is making a donation to your nonprofit. And lastly, I want to make sure that your strategy treats donors as individual as a marketing person. This is something I'm very big on and I talk about a lot people like to be treated as individuals and not part of a large group. So the benefit to considering donors as individuals instead of a big group is that you can engage with each donor more specifically and intentionally when you know more about who they are, what their interests are, and take notes about their behavior. So a lot of this is just tracking your donors getting to know them, making sure that when that you learn something about them, it's recorded somewhere. And part of that is making sure that the fundraising platform you use allows you to create donor records, which Mighty Cause does. Donor records are where you'll keep track of all the important information you learn from your donors so that you can interact with them better. You'll want to gain as much information as you can just to make sure that it's noted in the donor record. For instance, if you have an interaction with a donor or potential donor or somebody that you're talking to, and they mentioned that they prefer phone calls over email or vice versa. That's really important information because if you do the opposite of what they've told you, they're going to be less likely to convert. So keeping good records of who each of these people are will allow you to segment your communication so that when you send an email, you're not just sending a blast that's addressed to no one is just going to everyone. You're tailoring it to groups of donors and how you'd like to talk to them. So on mighty cause we do have a tool that creates donor records and also includes the wide range of supporters so can be really helpful for donor acquisition. So that includes volunteers people who've created fundraisers. And so it may have they may haven't haven't actually converted yet but you can still include them. And this is called the supporters tool. It's available to mighty cause advanced subscribers and advanced subscription costs $99 per month and this is just one of the tools that you'll get for that price. Just to show you how it works there's a screenshot here of what a donor record looks like and it automatically tracks donors donations made on the platform allows you to input offline donations let's you note that they're volunteers or they tend to donate in the summer. You can add custom tags and notes to track important information and to start segmenting them and you can even message them through their supporter record. So if you're not currently using a system like this at your nonprofit and you really want to dig into donor relations. This is a really great place to start and it's an affordable way to start using CRM tools because those kinds of big databases can be really expensive. You might need a full time staff member just to manage your database but this is just a way you can augment your fundraising so that you have supporter records and you can start tracking this information without needing to make a huge investment upfront. Okay, so now that we've talked for a little while about the concepts and tenets of donor acquisition. I want to move more into the actual steps that you can take to get more donors which is probably why most of you are actually here today. So a lot of the time your best and brightest and most generous supporters can already be found within your ranks. So if you're looking to acquire more donors, look around you in your organization's inner circle first. That means your board, your staff, your volunteers. These people are all champions for your cause and it's a huge mistake not to engage them as prospective donors as well. They may, there is probably already some overlaps with these groups and donors. But before you start any new donor acquisition programs, look inside your org. Our staff members donating. If you have a decent roster of staff members, you can make it easier for them by setting up a program where they can set up an automatic donation through their paycheck. And small amounts that feel manageable to them because as we all know, nonprofits don't pay a whole lot. So you usually need your paycheck, but simple programs like that can help you bring in revenue, convert staff members into donors. And it makes it easy for them, which is what it's all about with donor acquisition. Volunteers donate time and effort to your nonprofit. So some orgs can be a little bit shy about asking them to donate money, but usually they're happy to do it and sometimes they just don't get asked. So talk to your board, talk to your volunteers, your board should be making donations annually or paying dues, but they may also be able to point you toward people they know who would be good prospects, especially for sponsorships and bigger partnerships. Some ways you can engage these groups is by hosting a friend raising event where you ask people in your inner circle like your board and volunteers to bring a guest that doesn't know much about your nonprofit and is not currently involved. You provide some snacks and drinks or host the event at a local restaurant or bar and then just get to know these folks and introduce them to your work. Referrals are kind of a basic platform of sales. They work really well when you're trying to sell things and they also work really well for donor acquisition because in a lot of ways they're kind of the same thing. You can also host other non ask events like educational opportunities and trainings that help might help draw people into your nonprofit and use your inner circle to bring those people in. And finally the lowest bar thing you can do that's so simple it's hard to understand why anyone would say no is asking people in your inner circle to share links to your website and your mighty cause page your latest campaign whatever it is on their social networks to help people find you. That's something that costs them absolutely nothing and can be really helpful at getting new people in the door. So next, after you've looked at the people around you you kind of want to take a long hard look at your website and other online channels and audit them for access. CTAs or calls to action and the things we talked about earlier that increase the likelihood you'll be able to convert people visiting your website and seeking more information. If you don't have a website this is a great time when you're thinking about donor acquisition to actually look into building one platforms like WordPress and Wix make it really easy you don't need any web design experience for those those platforms. But there are also a million people who do this for a low cost volunteers might be able to help you so if you have a volunteer base ask if anybody has web design experience. If you have, you know, if you're just just beyond your skill level, or you want to make sure that it looks a certain way. So first on your website, there should be a clear way for people to sign up for emails and a pathway to making a donation that is painfully obvious like it needs to be front and center. Those two calls to action need to be right at the forefront of your website sign up for emails. Here's how to make a donation. And if they aren't you should work on adding them, or making them even more stupidly obvious. I've had people contact me asking for help getting donors in the door and when I look at their websites. I can't figure out where to donate. So that's the root of the whole problem for a lot of nonprofits is that they have all of this information online, or their website is just not really built out. And people can't figure out how to donate so people can't figure out how to donate when they go to your website. They're not going to nobody is going to sit and tool around on a website for 20 minutes to try and figure out how to make a donation. You also have other pathways on your website to get involved, like information about volunteering and events calendar, your mission statement information about any programs and services you provide at your nonprofit. It should just be absolutely clear who you are and what you do from your homepage with lots of supplementary information throughout, because as we discussed earlier, this is often where people will go first when they're looking for information about your profit, or your cause or even just to find assurance that you're a legitimate nonprofit people will research you. So it's a good idea to have a lot of information available to them. And as we discussed most people doing this research are on smartphones. So make sure that your website is mobile friendly. And the main thing for your website and how for profit businesses approach their websites is that it's a tool for lead capture. The biggest donor prospect would be a lead in a sales context. So you'll want to consider every visitor to your website a potential lead and build in ways to capture those leads into your website. So there are a lot of tools you can use there's one called opt-in monster that works great and is very easy to use it has a WordPress plugin. So definitely if you are looking to make a website WordPress is really great for people who don't want to build one from scratch and has lots of plugins that you can use to accomplish these things very easily. So really put on your business goggles and take a really close look at your website to ensure that you're capturing leads and using it as the kind of tool it is, which is a place that you can connect with potential customers. And once you've got your website in order you'll want to Google yourself. Every business and nonprofit should have a profile on Google my business with accurate information. So make sure you have your address listed a phone number your hours of operation. You can also add photos and other information to build out this profile. And this is important because when this information is up to date on cell phones on smartphones rather users can Google you and just click a button to press a button to call you. So it really makes a difference in how accessible you are. And as a hint Google prefers businesses and organizations that actually utilize their tools. So it'll be helpful in getting people searching to your doorstep and at your website. It just helps with your general visibility. You should also take a look at where you're ranking for specific searches for specific keywords. For instance, if you are a soup kitchen in Cincinnati. You'll want to be one of the top ranked pages for soup kitchen Cincinnati as a search term. And if you're not you may need to do some search engine optimization or SEO on your website so you can target that keyword. The topic of SEO is a whole separate webinar, but basically if you're wanting to rank for a search term and for nonprofits. I definitely recommend thinking about how people will search for you and how people will find you. You definitely need to have that term on your page, preferably in your page title and headers on your page. Since those are things that Google looks at when they crawl your page to see if it's relevant if it's relevant to a search from a user. Okay so switching from the digital world to the real world. The next thing you should focus on doing if you're serious about donor acquisition is actually getting out in your community. Again this is something I've seen a lot with nonprofits when they tell me that they're having trouble finding donors. I'll ask what they're doing in their community and they admit they're not really doing anything community based they're not getting out there. So a basic rule of thumb is to meet people where they are both figuratively and literally you can search community calendars for events that might be of interest to your nonprofit. Sometimes nonprofits will have booths at farmers markets, a lot of nonprofits here in Alexandria, Virginia do that, because there's a big farmers market in a local square where there's a lot of foot traffic so it really helps boost their visibility. But as we talked about it can really be anything like a town hall meeting, a community meeting, or even an existing event. Just take a sign up sheet with you so you can collect people's names and email addresses for your email list. Ask them to leave their phone number with you. Come prepared with flyers and pamphlets and information about your nonprofit. And this aspect can really make some nonprofits uncomfortable or seem intimidating like you have to conduct these events yourself but to be clear I'm not talking about starting your own event here. I'm talking about basically glomming on to existing events where people are going and using them to spread the word about your nonprofit and make connections in the community. Because when you meet people face to face and you tell them about your work, they're much more likely to hear you because people love that kind of human connection. So bring a sign up sheet, get out in your community and start meeting people start shaking hands and kissing babies, and you'll probably see more donors in the long run. The other side to the community engagement piece of it is engaging locals in a strategic way by partnering with local businesses, offering a service or an educational opportunity for a workplace. For instance, or partnering with a local restaurant for a charity night. That's a very popular type of partnership and generally pretty easy to pull off. The restaurant likes it because they get customers in the door who like to eat food for a good cause and the benefit. They get the benefit of looking charitable to the community while you can collect some donations from food sold that night. Be present to hand out information, get people to sign up for your newsletter and have someone on hand to process donations on site. So if you have an event like this, people can come and make a donation right there in addition to purchasing food, which you collect a percentage of. So these are easy partnerships and a strategic way to get out in your community. So that's something that a lot of nonprofits do when they're looking to meet new people. Sometimes this also means purchasing a table or a booth space at events, but just be strategic about it and ensure that if you're spending money which you may have to for a booth space. You will be reaching a nonprofit that makes sense for your not reaching an audience that makes sense for your nonprofit. Okay, so we're going to move on to two specific ways you can acquire more donors on mighty cause. The first of which is peer to peer fundraising. Peer to peer is a fundraising technique where you leverage leverage your existing donors to bring in new supporters. In a nutshell, a supporter, whether it's a board member or a volunteer or just somebody who cares about your cause, creates a page on mighty cause and asks people they know to donate. That's where the name comes from. People are asking their peers for donations. It's peer to peer. There are these are totally free on mighty cause. There's no startup costs involved in all nonprofits can have unlimited peer to peer pages on our platform. All users can start a fundraiser for 501 C three charities on mighty cause and collect money for causes they care about so there's no need for approval from the charity they don't have to go through any red tape they can just go to mighty cause dot com create their page and start fundraising. And this is great for nonprofits for a lot of reasons. And in the most obvious way is that it's kind of a passive way to acquire new donors, the person running the fundraiser does all of the work, and you just sit back and collect donations. We'll talk more about teams and events in a minute but those are basically just larger scale coordinated peer to peer events. Mighty cause. These are actually cheaper than a PayPal donate button with our new pricing guarantee PayPal charges 2.2% plus 30 cents per donation. And if you meet the terms of our pricing guarantee, your nonprofit will never be charged more than 2.2% plus 29 cents. And in return, instead of just having a donate button, you get robust reports and fundraising tools like peer to peer pages. So when I follow up with you guys with the slides after the presentation I'll also send on some information about our pricing care guarantee so you can learn what that's all about. The main benefit to peer to peer aside from the cost on mighty cause is that this is a proven donor acquisition method. We know it works because we've been hosting peer to peer fundraisers at mighty cause since 2006. And most of the donors and the not most of the donors that the nonprofit sees are totally new to their organization. And again, it outsources that labor of running a fundraiser. And it's a great way people can volunteer to help one of the most popular and fun types of peer to peer pages we see our birthday fundraisers. We've seen be tremendously successful. Some people who run them year after year have actually created a brand for their birthday fundraiser. They create hashtags they create logos it's really cool to see. So peer to peer basically just allows you to move beyond your own reach it allows you to move beyond that existing base of people you have in your circle. So you can you probably don't have permission to contact say a volunteer's aunt to ask them to donate to your nonprofit, but that volunteer can certainly contact their own aunt and ask them to make a donation to your nonprofit. And that's how that's the mechanism through which you're able to reach beyond yourself to get new donors you can reach all of these people that you don't have access, or really permission to solicit because they don't have a relationship with your nonprofit. It really can be a great tool to help your nonprofits donor base grow. Excuse me utilizing peer to peer is mostly just a matter of asking people to raise money for you. You can start with asking people in your inner circle at your nonprofit like your board or your staff. Because as we've talked about these people are natural champions for your cause, and they're usually more than happy to help. You can also suggest it on social media, send out emails asking, you know, letting people know that they can create fundraisers for you. Add it to your website. Just link them to mighty cause and they can get started. If you want to kick it up a notch. You can also put together a kit for peer to peer fundraisers that has logos, photos talking points and so on that can help them out and help them create their page, which you can actually upload to mighty cause if you want to because we have document upload, so create a custom tab and you can stick those resources right there. If you don't want to build out a page on your own website. And if you really wanted to kick start a peer to peer effort, and this is especially helpful around critical time periods like giving Tuesday, you can offer a small reward to people who start fundraisers, like a T shirt or a bumper sticker or a pin or something small that you already probably have on hand, but that little incentive can really give people the kick to actually start a fundraiser and start asking people to donate to your nonprofit. And just so you know, all nonprofits on mighty cause have a screen where you can track peer to peer campaigns. You just go to the campaign screen on your campaigns on your dashboard. And from there you can access your campaign screen. You can trash or hide old peer to peer fundraisers that you don't want appearing in searches anymore you can track progress of current fundraisers. And you can also message the people who've created those fundraisers through the mighty cause platform which is really cool. So if you need a report, you can get that through the campaign screen. And again, all nonprofits have this tool this is not something you need to subscribe to us for it's available to all nonprofits. So if you have a mighty cause account and you haven't taken a look at this, definitely just go into your profile and take a look at your campaign screen and see what's there. There's a tab for your campaigns that your nonprofit has created. There's also a tab for peer to peer campaigns which are campaigns that were created by other users. All right, so just a few quick facts about mighty cause the mighty, the peer to peer on mighty cause the money raised from peer to peer fundraisers is bundled into your regular disbursements, and you can see its source on your donations report. The fundraisers themselves the users who create these pages, never have access to the funds or any of your nonprofits financial information. So there's absolutely no risk at all to your nonprofit in these types of fundraisers. You get the donor information from every donation you get their name and their email by default on mighty cause, and you can add other fields that you'd like to collect in your donor experience tool which again is available to everybody on mighty cause. So if you want to collect a phone number and an address, you can also get that information that'll filter down to any peer to peer pages that are created for your nonprofit. And if you're an advanced subscriber each time somebody makes a new makes a donation will create a new record in the supporters tool so you can start tracking your engagement with that donor and start getting to know them. And so now I just want to quickly go over events and teams because these are great acquisition tools as well. So events and teams are kind of siblings on mighty cause. An event is a large scale fundraising event with a peer to peer aspect, like charity walks, marathon school fundraisers and so on. They're usually competitive events or people are people and teams are competing to raise the most money or bring in the most donors events allow you to get people fundraising together as teams and individuals. So for instance, if you need a platform that allows you to have multiple teams fundraising together, as well as individuals, you'll want an event as opposed to a team. There are two leaderboards one that tracks individuals fundraising on their own and another that tracks teams fundraising for the event so you have two leaderboards with an event. And teams are great for smaller scale peer to peer events. The competitive aspect or aspect is still there there's just a single team leaderboard. But the big difference is that a team page is a little bit leaner and it only allows individuals to join the team so a group of people would not join the team together, they would they would join it individually. So you can't create a team within a team so if you want that functionality you would want to choose an event. Now on mighty cause teams and events raise around 30% more than individual fundraisers and that includes fundraisers created by nonprofits. And that makes sense because the more people you have fundraising for you, the more money you can raise and the more people you can reach every person that is part of an event has a whole network of people they can contact and ask to support them. So these can be a great way to acquire new donors and really expand your reach beyond what you already have. These can be a great addition to any live events you have. And live events are a great way to drum up community interest in media coverage to events and teams are just really low bar easy entry points for new donors, because they're being brought in by someone they know, and they're donating to support that person. So they can be an excellent way to get a bunch of new donors in a short period of time, running an event or a team can be a little bit more intensive than just sitting back and letting people raise money for you as a peer to peer fundraiser. But if you're really looking to ramp up donor acquisition in the spring. This is a great way to do it so instead of just running a regular campaign for your spring fundraiser maybe consider an event you can make these digital only they don't need to have a live event corresponding with them. But these are great ways that you can get more donors in the door and start onboarding them. I don't want to get too lost in the weeds on events and teams but I did want to note that we have an event bright integration for events so if you need to manage registration or sell tickets, events on mighty cause are the perfect way to do that. You can organize a team or events but individuals not associated with your nonprofit can also start one for your nonprofit. And in fact some of the most successful events that we've seen on the platform have been from workplaces. So if you have a workplace that wants to get involved with your nonprofit. It's worth suggesting that they start an event or a team. And nonprofits on mighty cause all nonprofits whether you are a subscriber or not have unlimited teams and events. So if you want to host 15 or 50 events in a year you can do that on platform there's no cost involved to you upfront. All right so we're just about done but before we move into the Q&A I do want to talk about the other side of this coin which is donor retention. So we discussed at the beginning of this webinar about half of all new donors are lost across the nonprofit sector. And that's alarming because as I mentioned before it costs less money to retain an existing donor than it does to acquire a new one. So really all the work and money that's put into acquiring new donors is a total waste if we're not actually keeping a good number of those donors. Some attrition is absolutely natural, but unfortunately nonprofits are losing donors to attrition very high numbers. So a quick and thoughtful thank you thank you is statistically very important in determining whether a donor is likely to come back and give again to a nonprofit. So we have a thank you page on mighty cause for this purpose and insert a thank you message in their receipt but we definitely recommend going above and beyond that sending them a personal email to thank them for their donation or even just picking up the phone and giving them a call if you have their phone number. Once you've got that first donation. We also recommend a welcome series of emails or even mailing a welcome packet. So you can start engaging them, get them learning more about your nonprofit and eventually get that second gift because that second gift is also a good tell as to whether this donor will be retained over time. The worst thing you can do is get a new donor, thank them and then just stop communicating with them. So have a plan in place for how to follow up with them while you're making your donor acquisition plan. Keep talking to them share the impact of your organization and their donation, because even if you do everything we talked about in this webinar. If you aren't following up with your new donors. It's all meaningless so this part is really important is it needs to be included in your donor acquisition plan. They need to work together so that you're getting new donors, but you're also keeping them once you've got that first donation. Great, so thanks for sticking with me. I know that was a long presentation. So I wanted to open the floor to questions. So if you do have a question just go ahead and type it into the questions box on your go to webinar panel. And it looks like we have quite a few already so I'll just go in and start answering these. I missed the beginning. I'm not this isn't time stamped but you may have missed the very beginning of the webinar but I will be sending out a recording as well as the slides. So if you did miss a portion of the webinar. Don't fret, I'll send it to you and you can rewatch that portion of the webinar. Okay. This is a good question. What is attrition. So attrition is basically in a business it's it's a loss that occurs. So if I were to acquire a new donor. Let's say I acquired 50 new donors in the space of a year, and then 25 of those didn't come back that is considered attrition it's basically the flip side to acquisition. Acquisition is the new donors you gain and attrition is the donors you lose. So you can lose them through a number of ways either just not them not making a second gift them lapsing they may come back at a later time. Or there may be some incident that causes them to leave but basically means year over year, you did not retain this donor. So when we talk about attrition we're typically talking year over year. So I made a donation in 2017 but I didn't come back and make another one in 2018. I would be considered lost to attrition. And to be honest, a lot of that is natural and nonprofits just like with sales. Some attrition is going to be normal. You're going to lose some donors that you gain some of them just won't have interest or the ability or means to continue donating. But unfortunately nonprofits do lose donors to attrition at a much higher rate than other industries. So it's something that usually I think has to do with the follow up. And whether or not they're communicating well with these donors but it's just the other side to acquisition is instead of gaining new donors, you're losing them that's all attrition is. Okay, so this is looking. This is a question about registering being registered in each state before receiving any donations out of state. And that's actually a really good question because we get that a lot. There are some states that have very few requirements and some states that are very stringent in making sure that you have, you know, a certificate to fundraise in that particular state. And the good news is with mighty cause, you don't need that because the mighty cause charitable foundation does have certifications in all states. So, basically when somebody makes a donation on mighty cause, it goes to the mighty cause charitable foundation which is a donor advised fund, and then is sent to your nonprofit because it was advised by the donor for your nonprofit. So, because it's filtered through the mighty cause charitable foundation. First, you don't need that particular certification to accept donations in a state. So if your board is having concerns about that, they can certainly contact us because that's part of the reason that the mighty cause charitable foundation exists so that you can, you know, collect donations wherever you can find them and not have to worry about that we are certified as the mighty cause charitable charitable foundation. And they're a 501c3 donor advised fund. So that is how you can get around that the donate now button. If you use mighty cause does actually your covered you don't have to worry about that state certification with other things like PayPal, I can't tell you that they are certified in the same way the mighty cause charitable foundation is. So I would say if you can talk to your board about using mighty cause you may be able to get that donate button on your website, because you don't have to worry about that particular piece of the puzzle with mighty cause. Okay. Oh, so this is a good question if you receive a donation on a peer to peer fundraiser and get an email address. Do you need permission to add them to an email list. No, no, because they gave your information to us as mighty cause and they gave it to you as the nonprofit that is required for them. In order to make a donation it's in our terms of use that if they make a donation that we share their email address with the nonprofit that they made the donation to. So just to be totally clear we don't share donor information with anyone else. The only people who have access to that donor's email address is the nonprofit there are people who are administrators with the nonprofit. They can access the email address if they have other things like an address or phone number that was collected during the donation process. The nonprofit administrators on mighty cause have access to that, but that information is never ever ever sold or shared with third parties. So yeah, you can add them to your MailChimp list your constant contact list we actually have a way to automate adding new donors to those lists. If you use constant contact or MailChimp through Zapier, which is an advanced feature. You can absolutely add them to your email list there's no no consent issues there you have implied consent because of the terms of use that they agreed to when they made the donation on mighty cause. And if donors are concerned about it you can assure them we do not share their information. We don't even email them ourselves outside of sending them their receipt and giving them transactional information is mighty cause free for the non advanced subscription. Yeah, there's no startup costs involved with mighty cause so if you wanted to start using mighty cause, you can go to mighty cost calm right now, go to nonprofits and claim your, your organizations page and start fundraising there's no upfront costs. The way mighty cause works is we collect if we collect fees on the donation before we disperse it to you so before it goes from the mighty cause charitable foundation to you. You can we collect a small fee that covers our expenses and covers the transaction fee donors also have a chance to cover that fee. And that plays into our new pricing guarantee, which I'll send you guys some information about so that you can get familiar with that. But if you are eligible for our pricing guarantee which basically means that you've allowed us to ask your donors for an additional fee we should we ask them how much it's our 4% fee. And they, you know, can opt into it or opt out of it, then you're, you'll never pay more than PayPal. So that's, it's totally free for you to try out we also have a 30 day trial of mighty cause advanced. So if you use mighty cause and you get set up and you're like, hey, I want to check out some of these advanced tools. Just let us know because we can set you up with a free trial of that so that you can explore these tools and see if they're worthwhile for your nonprofit. But there's absolutely no upfront costs to using mighty cause the way our platform works as we just collect those fees on the back end, and we are a lot cheaper than the competition you don't need to sign a contract with us. We're upfront about our pricing 2.2% plus 29 cents is the fee if you get our pricing guarantee but our standard platform fee is 4% if you opt out of that pricing structure. But again, stay tuned. Check your inbox. I'll send some more information about our pricing so you can see it all laid out because that's probably much easier than me trying to explain it. Okay, so let's see a private website. I'm not sure what this is in reference to so just reply back it says what if you have a private website. Let me know what that means I'm not quite sure what that question means. If I use MailChimp I need to pay for Zapier, but if I work with ConvertKit I don't need Zapier. So we have a specific integration with Zapier and Zapier account a basic account is free. They do have upgraded accounts that you would pay for but I'm not too familiar with ConvertKit. We don't have a specific integration with them. So, you know, automating through Zapier needs to be done, you know, as part of our data connect program and you need to zap your account. They are free and they if you want additional abilities through Zapier to automate processes, you can upgrade your account but I'm not too familiar with ConvertKit but I'm happy to take this question offline if you wanted to talk about the possibility of using ConvertKit. You can actually add things to MailChimp, add new contacts to MailChimp in an automated way through Zapier and I believe that is a free Zap that you can create. So I don't think that you need to get a paid Zapier account for that. Okay, how do we download emails from Mighty Cause? That is actually in your donation report. So on your nonprofit page on your dashboard you can go to the section that says donations and that'll take you to your donation report. That's a truncated view so to download the full report you want to download the spreadsheet but that'll share the email addresses with you as well as all of the details about that donors. So if you download your donation to your organization and any additional information that you collected, there's just a short, there's just not a whole lot of space available there. So if you download your donation report you'll get all of that information about the donor. Another question about going about automatically adding contacts into MailChimp, it's done through Zapier. So Zapier is a third party that we've partnered with. We have a specific integration with them. If you have a Mighty Cause advanced account which is the $99 per month subscription, you can use Data Connect and that's our Zapier integration. Zapier automates certain processes. So if you have two programs like let's say Mighty Cause and MailChimp, those two things don't directly connect to each other but Zapier acts as a bridge. So you create a bridge which is called a zap in Zapier and that gets the information from point A to point B over this little bridge that was created by Zapier if that makes sense. So that is something, that's how you would, it would be automatic. You just need to enable that zap. That one is actually preloaded into the Data Connect feature. So you just need to connect to your Zapier account and connect your Zapier account to MailChimp and then they would build that bridge and get that information through to the correct place. And so yeah, unfortunately there's a follow up question to that. Do we need to pay $99 per month? That is a subscription feature. So on the free accounts on Mighty Cause that is not available to all users. If you want to upgrade and start using that feature, you would need to subscribe to Mighty Cause advanced. So I'll make sure that there's some information about that in the follow up email that you guys get. I also know it's a little, we're a little bit over, but we do have some good questions. So I want to continue to take questions as long as you guys have them. So there's a question. Do we need to have a website? Yes, I would say you do need to have a website. It's not required. There's nobody's going to come to your door and arrest you because you don't have a website as a nonprofit. But it is actually a really important piece of how people will find you and just having a web presence. It's how people will authenticate you. Certainly if you're, you know, you just got your 501C3 and you're just starting out, starting a Mighty Cause page can be a good first step. But eventually as a nonprofit, you'll want to have a robust website. And again, I can't recommend WordPress enough for small nonprofits just because it's so easy to use. You have themes you can choose from. A lot of people who work with nonprofits as web designers will recommend WordPress. There's lots of plugins you can get that will take care of some of these processes for you, like collecting information from visitors. So WordPress is a great place to start. They're not that expensive buying a domain WordPress will help you do that. I don't get any money from WordPress. So I'm not giving you a biased biased opinion about that. It's just a really great place if you're looking to make your as an easy website that's functional and you don't have the money or the budget or the know how to sort of design one from scratch. So I would start with WordPress and see if you can get a website built. Again, it's a worthwhile investment because that's how people are going to find you. That's how they're going to learn more about who you are and what you do. And that's ultimately part of how you're going to be able to collect donations and keep keep yourself funded. So I wouldn't say it's like a strict requirement. There's not the website police that's going to track you down. But as part of your long term plan as a nonprofit, I would definitely recommend investing in a website to establish yourself and set up that that trustworthy digital presence. All right, so there's one more question it looks like we're a small and volunteer based nonprofit and we don't have a physical location. How would we get started with donor acquisition. So yeah I mean definitely if you don't have a physical location if you're kind of virtual and maybe do your work outside of you know a traditional brick and mortar location and some nonprofits just don't need that kind of stuff. Then you know still make sure that your information is up to date in Google that you have a phone number listed that you have a PO box, you can list that as well. And just make sure that you have all that information set up. And certainly you know that doesn't mean you can't get out there in the world and start meeting people in your community and making connections and doing those things that we talked about in the webinar. Definitely when it comes to Google just make sure that you know you have an address listed even if it's a PO box and list of phone number and email. Definitely if you don't have a physical location I would say having a you know an email that people can contact as well as like a voicemail box or phone number where people can give you a call is is a really important step if you don't actually have somewhere they can visit you. But it doesn't keep you from, you know, doing peer to peer fundraising it doesn't keep you from going out into the community and getting involved and meeting people and sharing your services and what you do with them. So yeah just start at the same place as everybody else you just don't necessarily need to invest in signs for your lobby because you don't have a lobby. So it shouldn't be a huge impediment. And there's certainly ways that you can make yourself accessible to your community without having a physical location. All right, I think that is it for questions thank you guys so much for all of your questions and sticking with me through this long webinar. Again if you have anything in particular to your situation that you want to hash out with me I'm available to you my name is Linda, and you can contact me at Linda at mighty cost calm and I'm always happy to chat with you and answer any questions you have. If you have any technical questions about getting set up on the mighty cost platform or pricing I am again going to share some information about our pricing with you in the follow up email but you can always contact our support team. Their email is support at mighty cause calm. All right, well thank you so much and have a great rest of your day.