 Hello. Good morning. So glad to be back. Good afternoon. Good evening. Wherever you're tuning in from, we are thrilled to have you joining us for another episode of the nonprofit show. Today we're talking about and sharing the top five post campaign strategies. And the only person we can think of to do this is of course, head of coaching at Cosmatch, Benny Merrillus. So we're going to dive into this conversation with you, Benny. Before we do, though, we want to remind all of you, our viewers, our listeners, who we are. So hello to Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, and to me, myself, Jarrett Ransom, nonprofit nerd, CEO of the Raven Group. We are always so very grateful, day in and day out to have the continued support of our very loyal sponsors. So thank you to our presenting sponsors. Those include Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Be Generous, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Thought Leader, and the Nonprofit Nerd. If you haven't checked these companies out, we encourage you to do so. In fact, that should be your homework as soon as we're done with today's conversation. But don't do it yet, because you're going to want to hear what our guest has to say. Hey, I mentioned we've done many episodes. In fact, today is 658. And you can find all 657 of them on Roku, YouTube, Amazon Fire TV, as well as Vimeo. But wait, there's more. You can also listen to the nonprofit show wherever you stream your podcast. And of course, today's episode with Benny will be up on these channels and platforms just a few hours after today's live episode that you're here for today. So let's get started into this conversation. Again, Benny Merilis, thank you so very much for joining us. There's a 10 hour time difference because you are joining us from Israel. You serve as head of coaching at Cosmas. Cosmatch, tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about Cosmatch. Sure. I'm actually, I think an accidental fundraiser. I started out in the rabbinate and in teaching. And then the synagogue where I was the rabbi had a very small budget for programming. And suddenly, I moved from just being the rabbi to also being the chief fundraiser for the synagogue, learning how to raise money from the same people over and over and over again. So that started that path. I was teaching doing that I ended up in organizational work, programming, communal, and then fundraising full time. I joined the company about four years ago and our company is an online fundraising platform, helping organizations everywhere in the world raise more money doing peer to peer and crowdfunding campaigns. Just fundraising smarter is sort of what we talk about. And so we marry the tech piece with real fundraising expertise, experience and knowledge based in the data, based in the experience and based in the arc of the ask. And that's what we do. My role specifically in coaching is a combination of coaching and consulting. So I deal with the mindset around the fundraisers and their discomfort around some of the tech, and then also helping set up the strategy and the timeline and the execution for their actual campaigns. Fascinating. I love that journey. And I'll tell you why Benny. I think that anyone who's been on the other side of the desk, in your case, you know, the synagogue to and then to try and communicate what it is you need and how you get there. It's super powerful. And I love love love that you said going back to the well going back to the congregation time and time again. What a powerful background. Now I'm even more excited to get you to share with us all of these post campaign strategies that you recommend. We have five and that's a lot to get through. So let's like hammer it in right now, teach us something, Benny. Okay, so we run a lot of campaigns for a lot of organizations and year to year people are coming back and they want to know what we do between campaigns to make the next campaign better, you know, and why isn't it better if we doing it a second time? What happened? And so we've started over time developing an understanding what people need to do to make it better. And so if I step back for just one second, one of the first things I would share is this, every organization for every event in every program and every campaign that they're going to run needs a post campaign strategy and needs to plan that post campaign strategy before they run the event before they run the campaign so that when it comes time to implement and execute, you're not exhausted and too tired. They can actually do what they need to do. So it's really important as a foundational statement. My experience had always been that I was exhausted when it was over. And I wasn't ready or had the energy to now go thank everybody for whatever I needed to do. And so pre planning it was just massively meaningful and powerful. And the system helped me get through my motivation issues. So building good systems and being organized on is really before even get to a specific tip. The goal of the between strategy between campaign strategy is to build a relationship with your current donors, your new donors, and I'll add a third category here, which is your peer to peer your peer fundraisers deepening those relationships also we're going to talk about all those in here. So my first tip for you today strategy number one is to mine your data. There's gold in there. I love it. There's gold. Yeah, it's about that. It's right. I swim inside organizational data all day every day. And what you find in organizations inside their data set when they're starting to talk to people, when they're starting to talk to you and answering your questions, suddenly a lot of more information comes out. And so post campaign by being organized with your data and figuring out who those new people are where they're coming from how they got to you, and then how to message to them following afterward is extremely powerful because now you know how to follow up. Now you know who you need to talk to. Now you know which executive needs to speak to which donor, which you know, teammate needs to speak to a certain level donor, and you can get really organized really quickly with a structure and a strategy in place from before you launch, and then you're ready to go right after. So just take a quick example. I always sort of break it into sort of groups, take your top 25 to 20% of your donors from your campaign or your event, slice them off. That group now becomes the focus of executive leadership and board leadership for follow up. It should never go to someone who's brand new in the organization. But you only know that because you did the work organizing and setting up everything. And now your follow through is much more respectful, much more honorable, and much more meaningful. And then on top of that, if they're new donors, so then you want to run as fast as you can to speak to those people as fast as you can, right? And so that's only true if you're really organized and you're mining away all the time at that data set. You should always be there. You should always have it sort of open on your screen in a tab somewhere, and you're mining it and working it and organizing it and working it and reviewing it and all the time so that you can get to where you need to get. So that's tip number one. I love everything that you're saying, but most importantly, and Jared, I mean, you're on the rubber chicken circuit like I am. The concept of getting this pre done. I preach it to you, Benny, because so many people think, oh, we did the event. We're done. You can sit back and relax. And it's like, that is literally the beginning. That you just wrapped up. That's the beginning. All the right. I always say that all the work that happens between campaigns in the middle of the night and no one's watching is why you then get success the next time around. But you're tired. So this is what my example always was. When I did a dinner regala event, I pre-wrote the thank you email and set it in the system to launch and go, you know, an hour after the event was over, right? And people are wondering, wow, how did he do that? Like I saw him running around. He was there. He was busy, right? But as long as you sort of are careful with some of the numbers that you put into that email, you could write it in advance. Thank you to the hundreds of people who attended and for the thousands upon thousands of donate whatever it is and send that out gold. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, well tip number one was pretty ding dang good. How's tip number gonna, how's tip number two going to work for us? Yeah, tip number two, I call thanks a lot and often. People like to be, people like to be thanked. They really do. They like to be appreciated. They like to be reminded of the good things that they did, partially because of that, but also because they want you to remember them, right? And so here's the rule that I learned years ago in a completely different environment from just a mega awesome teacher, which was this, when you appreciate the good, the good appreciates. Cool. Yeah, right that one down. When you appreciate the good, the good appreciates. What happens here is that by thanking people often and consistently and regularly for their donations, right? So they appreciate that you remember them and then when it comes time again to give, they're going to give more and they're going to give more easily the second time. That is true not only for your donors, that's also true for your peers and your volunteers. I'm going to talk more about the peers in just a minute, but let's talk about volunteers for a second. When you thank your volunteers for that work, which no one else can do, at no cost to you, they come back. They come back again and they convert into donors, ambassadors, preachers, evangelists for your organization, all that stops. So when you thank often, you get great success. And the way I like to do it is there's an immediate thank you after a campaign. So you'll break down your list by however you want to do, that's number one. And now you want to thank immediately. And then a month later, you do it again, okay? Because no one's expecting the second thank you. No one's expecting the second thank you. So if you can go into a second thank you and it's a little bit more personal, if you can do that, a month later and all you're just saying is, hey, you know, I still still glowing from that event that we did that you were a part of, and I really just want to thank you again for your gift, right? Julie, I heard you talk about this a couple of times, the BOY because of you, right? If you do that again here a month later, you are solidifying the early portions of a deeper relationship with someone who, if they're a new donor, is never expecting this. And the person who has been your donor who didn't get this in the past is shocked and surprised by the goodness of your sudden generous heart by being so appreciative of all that you're doing. So you bake it in that you're going to thank on a regular basis and because you're now organized because you're scheduling this out, right? So you ran your event, your event ran on December 31, you have an immediate thank you on January 1 or 2 that goes out, maybe that's automated, that's fine. One month later, February 1, it's built into your system. There's a second thank you that's going out to your donors at different levels and then you can go from there, you can continue to do it. You can make start making phone calls, talk to people directly, you know, twice a week, that kind of a thing. All that is built in and baked in to a very sort of gratitude oriented attitude. I love that. I have a viewer that wants to know, Benny, for more personalization should the second thank you also include the gift amount? No. No, okay. No because the good donor, the good donor knows when it has the gift amount in it that that system generated, right? And which is fine, generally speaking. So when you're following up, you know, campaign to campaign, that's one thing. But in just a pure thank you, let's not talk about numbers. This is in motion, let's talk about how this is making you feel about you and how I'm hoping it makes you feel about us. So just get in there. It can be short and tight. It can be a phone call, an email, a text message, a voice note, whatever it is. But it's so personalized in that way. And now there are other tricks you can do to personalize 2,000 emails, but maybe that's a different time. But you know. That's great advice. So move us into number three because what if you were, I mean literally, I would have, I would have been like our guest and customized and done that mail merge tab, you know, insert dollar amount here. So tell us post campaign strategy, tip three. Yeah. Number three specifically is more focused on new donors. When you do crowdfunding or peer to peer, you have a lot of people that are coming to you that just don't know you. They don't know anything about you. But this is something you can prepare in advance for the long term. This is what I'll call the welcome kit. This is now that you have, let's take a crowdfunding situation specifically or peer to peer. So Jarrett reached out to her friends and family to raise money for an organization people gave to an organization they don't know. So what is going to make them give again another time? They don't know anything about the organization. And so you can build a welcome kit that now bridges the gap between Jarrett's relationship with that person and your relationship with that person which you don't yet have that now gives people a information about what you do, talk about your impact, send them some really interesting pictures or videos. That kind of approach digitally in this environment is easy for an email and sort of an email system. The old way might have been a snail mail packet that was sent to somebody's house which still works to some degree today. People don't get normal mail on their own anymore. And so a welcome packet that's printed and sent to them and personalized to a degree can be very powerful and really works well, can be done in advance, does not cost a lot of money, but it shows your interest in them. And as long as they don't unsubscribe you still have a chance to hold on to them. So you build them in to this sort of welcome drip schedule automated system in your email because otherwise if you think about it this way they made a donation now somehow they ended up on your email list. They start getting your newsletters. They don't even know who you are. They don't even know the organization that they donated to. And so here you're stepping into it and you're saying hey you donated to organization. You don't really know us. I'd love the opportunity to start developing and cultivating and connecting with you on a deeper basis. And that is awesome. It just really no one does it. So like you know everything you can do that no one does just makes you better than everybody else. Right. One more live question. Yeah. And first of all a comment. Exceptional information. From the timeline standpoint how long after the second thank you should the welcome email be launched. So again we're thinking the welcome email is specific for the new donor. So what's your timeline on that? Yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't wait on the second to the second. Thank you. I would drop it in the middle there because person donates to you on January one by January three. They forgot that they donated to you. And if you wait a month. Yeah like. Yeah they're wondering how did how did I get into this. How did I get here. Right. So you go like a week to two weeks. You start to drip with them. You know you do it. If they're a high donor like it does happen. The new donor is a high level donor. So skip the emails. Go call that person right away and make a meeting. Right. Like all that stuff is great but that we're talking about sort of down the train of the donor list that people who opt in immediately to your top 20% and never gave you before you should be running to their house with a bottle of wine thanking them for that gift. Otherwise like they're going to go. So they opened a massive door for you and you have to step through it. So you know so in terms of the timeline that second thank you can still come a month later that's fine. But you want to drip right in the middle there and get this welcome thing started with them right away. And would that be red wine white wine or some bubbly. I'm a red wine guy. So for me it would be red. But you know whatever works you know do some homework on the donor maybe and find out. But but that's sort of how I think about it. Yeah the great questions by the way. So I'm glad you're here and asking live tip for Benny. Tip number four is a long term strategy that we developed in the in house which is we call the ask thank report approach. It's a 12 month engagement cycle with new donors and current donors that basically requires you to ask twice a year and then thank and report the rest of the months of the year. So you're doing thanking and reporting five times for every ask that you're doing in the course of the year. Right. And so it sort of goes like this ask thank report thank report ask thank report thank report ask. And what it does is first it orients you into just a beautiful structure which is great. So you know so it's a once a month not your newsletter email that's going to your donor base outside of that this is focused on them being awesome for being supporters of your organization and it's very much tied to thanking them for the donation that they made and reporting on the impact of the donation that they made the only thing that changes is the medium by which you do it. So it could be email it could be a text message it could be a phone call whatever it is and the voice that you're using in that report. So it could be a faculty member it could be a board leader it could be a beneficiary it might be a kid if that's if it's a kid oriented program you just let people know hey thank you so much for making that donation I'm only here finish the sentence for me because of you right. And so that never happens right people just don't do this the donors are heroes they're valuable the silence that you if you don't do this stuff is not only deafening it's expensive because it's costing you money by not engaging in an easy way we see these all the time now and our content guy will send me when he gets him from organizations how simple these messages are it's just a picture of a kid or a pet or whatever and a brief message finished and that's the whole thing but you can do that every month and you schedule it you know the other week that you're not newsletter is going out on let's say so let's say newsletter is first of the month 15th of the month you're scheduling this you know ask thank report strategy it's built in it's baked into your communications calendar and now you're just simply figuring out okay what message we want to send this month you know what program do we want to highlight that's a lot easier because you're now already in the structure in the space but if you don't build the structure and it's never going to happen it's just never going to happen I love that I think that's it's logical it's intelligent and it's genuine yeah you know it's genuine because everybody wants to know what is happening and the good that has emanated from this this interaction think about the difference of a person who makes a donation on January one one year and every month gets either a thank or report right and then you come around to that next ask with a person who doesn't get that in the interim like major difference like I don't think we can overdose on gratitude right like gratitude gratitude gratitude is such a huge it's free right it's free it's easy it's easy to do and I would say this I'm sorry I cut you up it feels so good to receive it you know it feels so good to be the recipient of that gratitude it does it does and I would say this I think some people might hear this from me and think well that's going to take a lot of people and a lot of time it really doesn't take a lot of people a lot of time as I said it doesn't have to be expensive it doesn't have to be fancy it just has to be and so as long as you're doing it it doesn't have to be a lot like a voice note to somebody is like you know I'm standing here in the summer camp right now and I'm thinking of you because I know you made that about that donation and these kids in front of me are only here because you made that donation thanks again like you can't beat it oh yeah so hard I love it wow Benny I know I think we have time for for one more yeah and I'm like stunned because we've been really really impressed with one two three and four okay wow us with number five number five is a little bit more inside the space of crowdfunding in peer to peer but it what we call it ambassadors or royalty the people who are coming into your campaigns who are not employees of your organization who are not fundraisers we're stepping out of their comfort zone who may be benefited from your organization over time and now they're raising money on your behalf like that's the best thing in the world right and so getting people to do that and successfully so is super important the data shows it's not just cosmet data this is like industry wide data on this is that when people do it a second time they rise twice as much money the second time the problem is only about 15% of the people are asked to actually do it the second time so you're leaving money on the table but when you when you think about what this person has done for you and you think about them for the impact that they've had it's everything changes so let me give you an example as a donor let's say Benny Mariles as a donor is a $50 donor so I think of him that way but as an ambassador or as a peer for my campaign a fundraiser he has a massive network on social media he knows a ton of people people may actually like him he raises 10 grand for our organization right okay so how do you now treat him I just flipped the script for me you know and I and I feel so you started off tip one like let's segment our donors our top 20 but then this strategy is you know the other 80% the ambassadorship that they provide the network the sphere of influence that yeah that just flipped the script yeah so when you view this person as a $10,000 donor effectively for your organization you will treat them like wrote yeah because they've done in a mass just an incredible thing for you so the ability to sort of the way I teach it when I work with organizations and leaders is what it's not my quote but you'll like this one too when you change the way you look at things the things you look at change right famous quote yeah and so now don't look at this person as a donor of $50 look at this person as a presidential level participant in your organization and then you're engaging with them changes your outreach to them changes your interaction with them changes what you invite them to changes and then everything changes because you're now looking at them differently and you're treating them differently that is just beyond and so anything you're sending to a donor right this ask thank report send it a second time separately to just your ambassador list because they had impact too and they should see the benefit of what they accomplish for you as well love it I'm just I'm speechless because of my mind is just like going you know it's like ping-ponging around in there yeah I was going to say you make me sound so simple and I love that you acknowledge that many people question well how many people do I need on my team to make this happen and what I'm hearing you say and I want you to correct me if I'm hearing this incorrectly is it's the systems and the processes that you put in place it's the preparation for the entire year so that once these campaigns launch and they wrap up you already have this wheel spinning is that correct yeah you have to know yourself and you have to know yourself well enough that the day after an event is over you want to just you know disappear into your bed and that may still be true but because you put the system in place to prepare because you know that that's true about yourself so then you're good to go because you automated you built a good system you thought it through in advance and you put it in place and click play before it went live and so that's a that's a just fundraising smarter in all kinds of different ways as I said like with all of the tools that are available digitally for people today as long as they are comfortable enough to step into the discomfort around tech and start to use some of these tools that are available to them a lot can be accomplished by a small number of people in an organization and it can feel like there's a big machine that's operating this organization when it's one person or two people and they just do it and they do it consistently and they do it consistently and they're super important because system P is is huge yes it really is well Vinny Merleys you've been an amazing guest even more amazing when we think about how you've had to stay up late because you're coming to us from central Israel and so thank you so much Vinny I think your journey into being an accidental fundraiser is fascinating and once you shared with us that side of you and where you how you navigated to this it just was magical because I know that you've been on the other side as we said of the desk right yeah yeah thank you I appreciate it yeah yeah it's really cool and and I really appreciate that you would come and and spend so much time Vinny Merleys head of coaching for Cosmatch Cosmatch.com check them out they've got a really interesting product and an amazing website with a lot of different talent I think Vinny you're the second or third person we've had on from Cosmatch and it's been really a lot of fun so we want to make sure that we thank you very very much and I know this is a busy time for you again I'm Julia Patrick I've been joined today by the non-profit nerd herself Jared Ransom we want to extend our gratitude heartfelt so to all of our corporate sponsors Blumerang American Non-profit Academy Fundraising Academy at National University Be generous your part-time controller non-profit nerd non-profit thought leader and staffing boutique these are the folks that have been with us Jared what's the number six fifty eight and you know before we sign off I feel like I want to bestow these upon you Vinny because you are truly a fellow nerd and you have made such a pleasure and an honor you know with six hundred and fifty eight episodes under our belt we've heard it all right and we keep hearing it all but we keep learning we keep growing and we keep hearing new things so thank you my friend for bringing this to us thank you thank you first thank you it's been great you know as we end every episode we want to remind ourselves our viewers our listeners and even our guest Vinny because he's a busy dude stay well so you can do well we'll see you back here tomorrow everyone