 All right, folks, let's get into nonprofit email marketing, seven things to try. And what I'm going to do is throw into chat here, pull up chat, the link where I was a little more organized sometimes than other days. And I went ahead and published my blog that has all the resources we talked about, the slides of this presentation. So then you don't have to have any impatience afterwards and you can click along of the resources that we share. We always record these and so we'll throw up the recording of this at the end of that blog as well. So if you want to get started right away, then you can. So let's get into it. I'm Jenna Dillet, work with Square. I do like to say I like people and happen to work in software because it wasn't necessarily planned, but I do love the work that I do in leading groups like this. At Square, we are a nonprofit technology consultant. We focus specifically on those platforms, Drupal, CBCRM, Salesforce, Lime Survey Development. And so all that, all that good stuff and I'll see if I will keep chat open here. We do consultation, web development, website redesign on going support, hosting maintenance and mail service. So outbound mail provisions. So we talk about email marketing and how to have better lists and cleanup lists and data management, a lot with the organizations we work with. I would be curious if folks in chat want to put kind of where you are with your own strategy and that could generate both some relationships could potentially develop during this process of are you in charge of email marketing with your organization? Have you just gotten started? Are you trying to clean up lists? Kind of what are the challenges that you're coming with today? And then we can see together, make some connections both with attendees and see the content that can be most valuable. I also wanna make a note of what we're covering to avoid spam, right? We're talking about those mass newsletters that you send for your organization. Also the individual members or sponsors or partners that you're communicating with, maybe in one-off or small groups or other small groups like your board members or critical sponsors to your organization or event attendees. There's so many ways that we can segment and think about all of the contacts that each of us have within our database. And the main thing that a lot of tools provide and we won't get much into CRM or the actual email client, the email tool that you're using to send out your emails. But the more that those can be centralized, then you are securing your organization's history. I can't remember how many years it is, the average length of stay for organizations within a job. But if you think about relationships that you build, if you're changing jobs every five years, every seven years, every three years, then who's coming in after you can know what has been sent to those people, how they engaged with it, that this is just as important as part of kind of your organizational history as some of that custom information that you track on them of their preferences or location or things that they've been involved in the past. So focusing on email marketing that it's your communications with all these different groups and it's thinking about the different groups that's of value. I also wanted to point out where email fits on kind of your general strategy roadmap. So in the beginning, having a clear strategy as much as possible and then developing from that strategy what your online infrastructure is. So you can think of that as your website, your social media accounts and profiles that you have, your email communications, your external events, your campaigns, all of that that sort of forms your online infrastructure to then do what to build a strong community with campaigns, which in the end can result in just ongoing monitoring evaluation to do it all again, right? To then refine the strategy, modify your online infrastructure, build your online community because of your online infrastructure with campaigns, monitor, evaluate, do it again. So a nice circle in that our email communications are a critical part of that. Email's not going anywhere, even if folks in our DevOps from a server perspective, they think it should, it's not. So let's look at some current stats before we jump into the tips. So we're sending more emails, right? We're always sending more emails and that if from recent data, that increase is much more significant within the nonprofit sector in comparison to just any entity sending emails. And so nonprofits especially are sending more emails within the last year. A lot of that because of COVID that that became a more important tool for communication than what had previously been. And for open rates, that also is on the rise that not only did nonprofits send more emails, those were opened, which is good, which is a good thing. And even though it's up only by what, 4% in comparison to the year before, that's pretty significant when you think about at scale, no matter how big your list is, 4% can be a pretty significant and someone in that 4% could be the individual that takes that significant action that helps really move your organization in the direction that you need to go. The open rates increasing, we see that on average, it's about 25% in comparison to any other entity, which is 6%. And so I always think of the, sign up for an online photo book or something one time and then I get emails for the rest of my life until I unsubscribe about the next photo book discount or next silk skirt discount or whatever it is. So good job, nonprofits. Your open rates are better than other sectors and a lot of that, I think we could talk completely separately about the way COVID has changed these numbers, but you're in a good time and value of sending emails that they're just as valuable as they've ever been and they are being engaged with. So let's jump into tip number one of trying a new look and the main point of why to try a new look is so your emails are easier to read and especially easier to read and mobile. And so that's the, whenever testing your communications before they're actually sent out to your audience, always look at them on your phone, have someone else look at it on their phone, click your links, can you scroll through? How does the email display when, depending on your phone and your settings, maybe you have the font made bigger, made smaller, those settings are controlled on a per phone basis, right? Cause all of our eyes are a little different. And so doing that check of how it looks and how you engage with it is important before you send. And there's some really pretty basic things that, depending on the email tool you're using, constant contact, mail chip, Emma, there's a ton of options out there that have different pricing structures and can even be free depending on the number of emails that you're sending out of looking at your font size or adding additional spacing that kind of white space having value. If you think about body length, depending on how kind of the width of your text, how far across does it display? Which is sort of, I think of like how, how far am I having to move my head to read from left to right on a sentence and you shouldn't really have to move your head. So when you think about the width of body length of an email, typically no more than 600 pixels wide, a lot of email tools have a lot of this baked in. So it's hard to build a bad template, but these are all things to test and monitor along with kind of contrast of, are you putting yellow text on a white background or things like that for readability? There's some good resources here. All of these resources are linked to the blog article I threw in chat. And so if you wanna take a look at any of those both after or as we go through the content here. I also like the shift and intentional shift of deciding how much design do you really need or do you really want? Can it actually be to a strategic advantage to just have something that's more plain text? I mean, the fact that nonprofits can have all these fantastic tools at their fingertips to create beautiful graphics and animated videos for free or beautiful posts that there can be the time and place to just send a basic email out. And some of the benefits of a more plain text email can be that there's no distractions from your content. So if you have a call to action or a critical ask it can feel a little more personal. If I'm gonna send an email to a friend I'm likely not going to format it and put headings and colors between so it can add to that sense of being personal. And it's also less likely to be marked by spam by your email provider, which is if you're on Gmail or maybe use Outlook or Hotmail or Yahoo. That sometimes the graphic nature of emails can actually have those emails end up in a different folder than the inbox, meaning that there's minimal chance that those folks could even open those communications. So the best practices for plain text of when it could be relevant for your organization to just use a more simple email is because you really have one focus that you're wanting to direct your audience's attention to or you have one specific story or statement that it is a more short and sweet thing of a call to action that nothing has to be, your success doesn't lie in your email being the prettiest still the content and quality of the content matters and kind of mixing it up can have a big value. So just some quick tips for format and design. In general, having everything within one column is always going to be the easiest to read. Think several years ago there was more of trend of having kind of a main body area of an email and then a more narrow column on the side that perhaps had a variety of other links. And since so many people are looking at your emails on a phone, even if they're first looking at it on their phone, then marking it as unread and returning to it on their desktop that mobile experience is critical. And so having everything within a one column format and display is going to be much easier for readability, especially since people on their phones are adjusting the text size, which affects everything that they're looking at on the phone. Also headings throughout the email, I used to have a rule for myself of, okay, if I'm publishing a blog article or if I'm putting together an email, would my email look interesting at all if I didn't speak English? Like if I'm writing in English, which is the, is there something that drags your eyes down the page? Or if you think in different letters, so there's kind of a classic think in the letter of C or the letter of F, then people reading the top, skimming through, reading the bottom again, letter C. Or letter F, they're reading the top, they're skimming a little bit, reading further down, then they're skimming all the way to the bottom. And so if you think about even the way that kind of the format and flow of your emails in the course of having headings, having white space kind of pulls your reader's eye down the page, which relates to having clean and simple, plenty of white space. And if you are having buttons, making those clear, centered, easy to tap with your finger in order to then be redirected to where the action is. There's some really great free and cheap visual tools. There's a lot available. So check out TechSoup. There's some others here as well. These are all in the blog post I shared. This ranges from data visualization for mapping charts, graphs to free stock photos to animation tools where you can kind of turn text into a video. So there's a lot of, and this is just, this is just scratching the free and cheap tool set that exists online. If there are folks in this call who use another tool that they don't see here, please do throw that in chat to benefit everybody else who's attending because I know that there's a lot of resources out there. Okay, let's get into tip two of tightening up your content. What I want to remind folks is that emails are not a replacement for your blog or articles or Facebook or Instagram or your website that all of that kind of funnels to, funnels your traffic to those avenues is what email is really good at. And so in general with your copy with the content that you include in your emails, say what you need to say and no more than you've done. I like to think of it as airport signage. You don't see large paragraphs of text on airport signage. You see little icons and arrows and they point you in the right direction. So you can look at it and then move on with your life and hopefully end up in the right place. And this in some ways relates to what your digital landscape is. And so this is probably hard to see potentially on your screen today, but in general, the hub, the center of your strategy is typically always your organization's website and that there's a lot that feeds into that and email being one of those. Another way to look at that is a more simplified version of this. If you have your website and your contact management system in the center and what feeds into that, your email marketing feeds into that, your organic SEO of how people find you when they're Googling online and all of your social media platforms go in. So this is a critical part of basically getting your audience to where they need to go. So there's a steady stream of content that you can use. So think about trainings and events that you have, news updates, maybe you're in the policy world and advocacy that you can share in the spotlight, shout outs about volunteers or board members or longtime supporters of what they've been doing, jobs that you have, there's all kinds of things that you can share about within your emails that you may not always think top of mind. And that what they do is they push your content out and bring your audience back. So bring them back to your hub. There's a great tool called Hemingway, Hemingwayapp.com. And what it can do is help you determine the readability of text in general. And then you could copy and paste that text into your emails, copy and paste that into your blog articles. It's just a valuable writing tool in general. I use another one, which I should have looked up and remembered as in Gmail as an add-on that sort of corrects my grammar as I go and points out the overall tone with happy little emoticons or sad or straight-faced emoticons of what does the general feel? This is where kind of AI is really valuable to help us become better writers and communicators. And so Hemingway is really easy to use. Grammarly, yes, that is what I use. Thank you, Lindsay. So check out this tool. And I think like we talked about with the design, how can you help folks get through your emails? I studied philosophy in college and so I had, I felt like a lot of unwinding of long sentences when I started at my first job after college. And so this can help point that out. So your communication is concise to the point. You're saying what you need to say, but no more. There's some online etiquette in general that I think is a good thing to note related to emails that's important to note. So we're using each other's content all the time. So give credit, so citing other authors. This is where it's really easy to hyperlink, right? To hyperlink to the original. And that is then sharing and promoting whoever put together maybe a source material or resource that you're sharing. And that also helps with your SEO too of how then that can bring back traffic just because of the types of links that you have out to similar organizations. So just in general, recognize other people's contributions, whether that's a photo within your email and giving credit to who took that photo. It doesn't have to be prominent, huge, but having that in your email is valuable and can just build those relationships too. Make those stronger and make those folks of who you're using their information that much more interested in helping you out and give information that you're going to share. The next tip we'll take a look at is focusing on relevance, which all comes down to segmentation. So thinking about blood type or the types of data that you have. And this is where your CRM enters a little bit more. So in general, is your contact management system, is that plugged into the same platform that you're sending your email communications from? Because if it's not, that can be a little more challenging to segment with the data that you have that you likely have more information about your individual contacts than what you might think, but it just depends on sort of what systems are speaking to what. And so there's a lot of different ways that you can segment out folks. So these are some of these are some funny, funny blunders on that little cutie who even knows, you sent that email to who maybe inviting people to an event and they're not going to drive four hours to your event. So having location as a segmentation for who you're actually targeting an invitation to for an event or emailing a donor who was really a one-time donor a really, really long time ago that is not likely to give again or not likely to give again at the level that you're asking them to give or a solicitation email to a staffer volunteer that maybe a volunteer is intentionally volunteering their time with you because they can't give their money to you or an email asking for a monthly donation to someone who's already giving monthly. So these are some, I think, some more easy to identify communications that can be avoided by looking at who is in the list and having maybe the same general communication but modified just enough and maybe it's three emails that go out instead of one that those three emails total up to what your list is but they just have slightly different communication to let you know. So that gala event invite is maybe a update that this is happening and this is the impact we're going to have with it maybe it doesn't include an invite or I think you get the point. There are some segments in particular to just think of what could be tried depending on the type of information you have. So previous volunteers which is different than your current volunteers event attendees maybe you can say segment that by types of events that you have maybe you have kind of three different types of events or two main types of events and you can segment out your event attendees per type that happens or your lab supporters kind of the why but last year but not this year Gevers how can you communicate to them in a different way than you would to your active supporters have demographic segmentation this could depend on the types of information that you're tracking and how you collect that data. I think of demographic segmentation as something that does require more data that many organizations may not even need but geographic location is often something that you may have. So depending on the range at which your organization serves kind of the geographic area having communications more targeted there's a lot of ways to break up your donors into I know organization for their end of year appeal they were looking at their donors and developed kind of copied their primary donation form I think they ended up with kind of four different donation forms and the reason they ended up with four different donation forms is that they wanted to change the default value the default giving value on each of those forms and so they could look at donors who in general gave let's say $25 versus on average gave $150 versus $200 versus $500 so then when they have the call to call to ask or the donation prompt via email to those folks then they could include that sort of appropriate link to that donor and so there was a default amount because there's been some nice research to show that if you have a default amount selected in your donation form it's more likely that the donor will actually give more than what they may have before and so that was a strategy they used they still only had one kind of public donation form if you were to navigate to the website in general but from an email perspective they had specific donation pages set up for those email campaign to kind of encourage those donors to give more that had the capacity to give more and had previously given more to the organization so looking at number four we've talked about segmentation so what about all those folks that are not active with you now and how to engage them so first thing is about time of day that there's some interesting research from constant contact mailchimp where they are seeing millions of emails go out through their system and they can know about the performance of when do people open emails best when do they click through emails that kind of the time of day and day of week really does matter really did to deliverability and that's something that at a further point that's something that you could even test and observe for yourself of if that makes a difference so for example highest email open rates being on Sunday I picture that as people really should be enjoying their weekend but they're probably distracted and playing on their phone right I would imagine that Sunday is also a direct correlation with people opening their emails on a mobile device versus click through rates being highest on Tuesday and Saturday so people are opening on Sunday but they're not actually engaging with the content so just looking at some of this and I think that Eli like you're known about I never pay attention to send times I don't either I mean I think of this as if people really have the time and energy to develop a more refined strategy for email communications this is definitely something that's on the table but I think that it's more valuable for time spent to be in what is the general design of your email is that responsive is that mobile friendly can my mother read it is it too designed or is the copy concise is it using active language is it clear I mean that's where I would put a lot more focus there's all these options on the table right seven tips but knowing that everybody has time pressures those are some good places to start here's some about the worst days which I think about when I get my work done it's I know I sent some you know some emails out in like Friday at 5pm it's like I'm going to get this done this week before I leave so is it more that I'm checking my box off so I can have my work completed before I check out for the weekend or because I'm wanting that communication to really be well received and engaged with as much as possible so these are some things to to consider but there's a lot else that you have on the list there's also some interesting information about not just when to send but how many to send and so this there's this kind of fine line that can exist between two too few emails versus too many emails and there's been a few different studies that show that four emails a month which is basically one a week can actually show an increase in open rates which I think of people are just getting more from you then you know it's likely that maybe they're opening one of those right if it's an open rate of about 25% then that means they're opening one of your emails a month in a sense which that's I think all of all of this is also what content would you even have to share so if from a communication standpoint then you have enough information to make a valuable email once every other month then that's a great strategy for you but if there was ways that you can break up your communication or storytelling and share more regular updates then that could result in more consistent and higher engagement. So I pulled this directly from some information from TechSoup I just liked the language I think this is something that could be valuable for folks after the presentation if you are wanting wording for how to see if folks in your newsletter list are still interested and what you do before you unsubscribe them I know that removing people from a contact list can be can feel like a scary thing because why would I get rid of contacts? Why would I knowingly stop communicating with people who at some point said that they wanted to know updates? Well, having a cleaner list is going to mean that you're going to get better engagement and that it can be more specific to their needs and so there's a variety of different language and strategies for how you can reengage with messaging. So there's a link here on HubSpot that I really liked where they had 10 examples of kind of visually from different types of organizations for how they sent the hey, we haven't interacted with you in a while kind of email do you still want to receive these notifications? The protocol of kind of sending contacts who have not opened your emails, sending those folks at least two emails inviting them to stay subscribed before then you are manually removing them within the backend because you need to keep your list which goes to tip five of cleaning up your lists and some of that is because email addresses may no longer be in use and so you could see that depending on the type of reporting that you have available to you with the tool that you use then it could be that an email looks like it's been blocked or that it no longer exists or it bounced and so removing those from the list since their emails aren't being delivered anyways or someone changed jobs and so that email is not checked anymore when they signed up or maybe those messages are landing in a spam folder and so they're not seeing them and that could relate to like we were talking earlier about who the email sender is. I know that's something that at Square we have to think about and be really considerate of because we provide the mail server the kind of the outbound mail engine for all the clients that we host and so different tools like SPF, DKIM there's different tools related to email security and performance that then help guarantee that the email will be sent and delivered and received by Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook whatever the email client would be and it could be that because of changes that are happening on kind of the platform level like thinking of Gmail it could be that folks are opening your emails but you're not getting to know that that the kind of the trigger for that tracking isn't coming back to your system and so that's the case too and that's the number that it's hard to ever know when you look at your open rates that it's likely that you have more folks that are opening those emails than what you're able to see with tracking because of different things that people can set up to block that sort of tracking because that's kind of collecting personal information or data about what they're doing and there's some tools that allow people to block that and platforms intentionally that are set up to block that sort of tracking. So spring cleaning whether it's a broom or a leaf blower so in general it's important to make time for it I think of one of the main things if you have a CRM system this is also about de-duplicate management if you have seven Sally's and they're all the same Sally merge those Sally's together and that is I think of it as a mindless podcast job like a really great time to catch up on all those podcasts that you've been wanting to listen to of going through and hopefully using the de-duplication tool that your CRM system offers to just clean up your list in general but also look specifically at specifically at your e-newsletter lists and your kind of your primary audience list. Another thing to do is identify who your active subscribers are so you can look at that by seeing contacts who opened their emails within the last 12 months and hopefully any of the email platforms that you're using is they provide that sort of data for you to see and put together and that does point to investing in a strong base and that doesn't have to mean money but time strategy setup of that is your contact management system and if that can be connected with your email tool with your email platform then you're just gonna have that much more data to use to segment and send out your communications and an easier way to keep everything centralized and clean within one place. We've got this gentle lady who does not have a leaf blower but another strategy is auditing your active supporters and so I like this little example of Katie Johnson has been making donations to your nonprofit for the past five years and she receives donations requests and thank you emails addressed as Mr. Johnson. So look at your top 40 donors. Does everything look correct in their contact record or with their email or the way if you're using tokens to auto-populate information about them that kind of makes your emails personalized? Is that information correct? Or is it in all caps for some reason? Is Sunnybrook place their address? Is that in all caps? So then it is in a token in an email and then it's sort of screaming at them. I think living on this side of the table tokens don't necessarily always make me feel closer to the organization because I know how tokens work but especially if a token is auto-populating something and it looks funny, that does the opposite for me but I know I'm not the general audience here that we're communicating to but this is easy cleanup and Eli the idea of this is your time to turn on your music loud or listen to your podcasts that this doesn't take a lot of brainwaves to do the work of but it's really, really valuable and the more that this type of cleaning doesn't can be scheduled beyond just spring that can happen on a monthly basis that can be shared across multiple team members that's gonna benefit more than just your email strategy. That benefits all the different kinds of communications and the way that everyone on your team can leave notes of how and when you're engaging with your audience. The next is automating what you can. So let's give this a robot a job. So maybe that's your welcome email to new subscriptions or your confirmation with registration that most events registrations are pretty good at or maybe you manage memberships and having that automatic renewal reminder of a membership ending within one month. There's a lot of those that no matter what CRM system you're in that it's likely that a lot of those can be set up and it can just be an investigation into what are the options made available to you for the types of communications that you're seeing and so when you think about the way that you are using your own work email account what are the types of emails that you are individually sending to other folks whether a small group or one-off individuals and thinking about those and the frequency of those can help identify different ways that a system could do those communications. So then communications that are planned, written, scheduled ahead of time can be done so with that much more intention. Another thing that I know some tools provide is the ability to put together a message template and so maybe it's not an actual scheduled reminder of kind of a system sending out a communication out of a specific day and time. Maybe you're still the one triggering and pressing send but there can be ways to also save and create email templates. So within Gmail even I think it's some MixMax tool add-on that I have in Gmail and one of the things I like about that is the ability for me to set up email templates. So maybe they're still they're not mass emails they're maybe emails to one or three people but if I'm consistently finding that I want to say the same sort of thing to those people then say that as a template I typically have my little spaces that I know that I'm customizing and filling in and that just makes even your kind of your day to day one-off emails that you're sending all day long that much easier to do because you're reusing the language that you've already put the time, mental energy into refining and getting right. And so there's tools for hopefully there's tools both on your kind of your mass newsletter and email marketing strategy that allows for having templates and reusing your communications but there's also tools like I said for MixMax that I use in Gmail that allows you to do that even with kind of your individual email communications. And the final tip is try some A-B testing. So A-B testing is where you have your email list no matter how big that is half of your audience gets one communication half of your audience gets another communication. And I included a resource that provides a lot more information to get started. I think of A-B testing as really far down the line of priority the amount of kind of strategy thought that goes into that that a lot of organizations just may not be ready for or really needing with what they're doing or how big their audience is but there are a lot of tools to help get started. And some of the main things that organizations will play with when they're having one communication to one subset another communication to another subset is just kind of one difference within those emails. So everything else being the same but maybe the subject lines are different. So are people opening more with this subject line or the subject line? And that can be pretty clear sometimes or maybe the subject lines are the same but you have a different call to action button text. So the text of donate now or make a difference today or whatever the text may be on your donate button even having that being something that's different between the two emails or maybe you have different layouts so a totally different design of maybe one has an image at the top, the other one doesn't or they're different links or language. There's a lot that can be played with here and some good tools that if you check out the blog article and click on the AB testing resource some great tools to get started if that is something that you think your organization kind of has the capacity and would benefit from to get started. So that's what we've talked about. I would love to know if people can take themselves off mute and share a little bit about what they have already tried other tools that they've tried kind of from the content today where they still have questions or would like to elaborate on like having time at the end to go through that and you can put it in chat too. I've got chat pulled up. I have a question. Great. First, thank you so much. This is great info. Sure. So I really appreciate these tips. I actually had a worked a lot in email marketing but I've worked a little bit. I used a tool called magnet mail. And my question was related to COVID. You had mentioned in the beginning that we could maybe discuss how COVID is impacted and you went a little bit into like, you know, open rates have gone up but I'm interested in any other thoughts you have on the impact of COVID on email marketing. Yeah. So one of the things I think we saw the data that I was seeing is that organizations are sending more emails and folks are opening more emails but that hasn't translated overall. I mean, from a size perspective, I think it's important when looking at data about to be able to break down from a size of organization, the engagement because I know a lot of organizations were really hit that overall giving was down, you know? And so it almost says, it's like if in general giving was up for nonprofits that almost is a not valuable statistic because that's something that if you feel it then it's valuable but if it's going up overall but your organization went down significantly like, well, thanks for the stat, you know? What am I gonna do with that in my life? That's how I feel about some of those numbers. I do think that one thing that came out is the segmentation, right? So there's this back and forth of this idea of people being exhausted or because they are or the way that we're still getting used to the shift of being more virtual but also the anxiety that is coming from kind of a reopening as more and more people are getting vaccinated. And so I think what that puts a focus on for me is that really boring, absolutely critical work of contact cleanup and reviewing who your active supporters, subscribers, donors, volunteers who they are, do you have accurate information about them? And then also using that information to have your communications more targeted. So rather than sending the same message to 100% of your contact list, having a subset intentionally that is receiving those communications just because there's gonna be that much more engagement. I think that there's, I'm seeing a lot of increase too in the self-service nature of allowing people to update and manage their preferences. And so I think it's a good thing that organizations are thinking about the way that they are wanting to know more about the interest of who is on their contact list. So there's less of the generic e-newsletter list and maybe three subsets or even two or five depending on the size and scale and variety of work that the organization does. So then you can opt in to only receive updates about a certain type of thing. And the ease of options within a variety of different both website and CRM tools to make that an easy form that kind of like a tokenized URL that when I click it, it knows that it's me. I can update my preferences, I can click save. And then within your CRM system, all of that's automatically up to date. So you're not having to manually manage any of my information. I'm on the list because I say I want to be on those lists. Great, thank you. Sure. Yeah, what else are folks working on or kind of takeaways of even what you see from all the different mini options on the table that seem like lower hanging? I think I could do that or that would be valuable to try. There we go. There you are. Hi, Sheila and Vancouver. Like for me, my takeaway, some of that is just to say like, my list is not big enough that I'm going to do a fact of AB test necessarily, in which case I'm going to lean really strongly on some of the best practices as a place to start. And so for me, it means like, oh, actually I should take a look at scheduling for a weekend send potentially. One, because I work closely with volunteers and actually there may be even more likely to be on personal email addresses than working email addresses. And so I think that is something I'm going to experiment with to see if Saturday is going to help me or Sunday. That's great. That's great. And I see Eli shared a great report about COVID and some information to put some stats to what we had talked about from a marketing perspective. Yeah, the high level version of that report basically said at the very beginning of COVID, everyone was like, you know, more people were online, more email was sent, more emails were open. So that was a good sign. But what they found is nobody was conferring. And you saw that is like, people weren't making necessarily donations, people weren't selling. Because I think people just felt, especially early COVID, financially uncertain. They're like, can I make a commitment? Is my organization going to invest in something? And as we sort of got used to this ridiculousness, they've actually seen that conversion, that final part of like, did they make the sale? Did they make the donation? Has also been rising as well. Yeah, that's great, Bobby. Thanks for sharing. I know it's not a fun, fun job. I, one of my friends, she is on a board for a nonprofit locally where I live. And she was getting so frustrated because none of the staff ever wanted to do it. And she was like, fine, this is something that I can do. Which was interesting for me to think about of even the power of volunteers. So she has many more relationships in the community than some of the staff members that are maybe newer to town or were recently hired. And so they don't have this history. So even thinking about some of that cleanup as something that doesn't have to necessarily be owned by staff. If you're trusting someone, you can give them access to their system, to your CRM system. They could have a lot of those relationships in the context of who someone is or oh man, they got divorced or oh, that person died to clean up communication. So then you're not sending something that can be really triggering and you never watch your emails to trigger something just because someone's not keeping information up to date. So that was a really good reminder for me listening to her just complain, go crazy about, ah, no one's doing it. I'm just gonna do it myself. And she's been going in every Tuesday for four hours and it's taken two months. And now their list of thousands and thousands of context is cleaned up. And so there's a lot more people that you could potentially engage in some of that maintenance that doesn't distinctly or have to be staff, right? It has to be someone you trust because you're giving them quite a bit of power and access to your system. But that can also be a wonderful volunteer job that builds that relationship. They know the value that they're giving and they can also take it in a bite-size way better instead of you thinking, okay, I have eight hours, I don't wanna spend one hour of that doing deduplication. You know, have someone come in for one hour and that's all they do and then they can go to the park. I can totally corroborate that. I also was at an organization where head of volunteer come in once a week, just spend two hours going through really like the whole bounced email bucket because as much as we also, like you had the link of like self-managed, like update your information here, lots of people are just gonna reply back or like unsubscribe me or like, hey, here's my new email address because we know people don't actually read email. So that was not a job that I was excited about, but there are lots of volunteers for whom they're like, oh, actually, this is exactly the kind of thing I wanna get done. And once you've trained them to do it once, they can do it for two years and it's just like it magically happens. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's the letting go of the, maybe it's the not how to do the thing, but who can do the thing? I answered that question, the how is pretty straightforward. Any other thoughts or takeaways from folks still on? I have a question, another one. You know, video is a big trend right now and I mean, it can even be like little animations, but out of curiosity, do you see that as something that is gonna be used in email more? So what I see an email is that the easy thing for folks to do is they take a screenshot of the video and then they just embed that as an image to make it look like a player, but when the person clicks it, all they're doing is being brought to your website or YouTube, like that's the way to do it. Don't try to embed a video in, because I don't, I mean, maybe that's possible, but I'm just a take a screenshot. I mean, that takes two seconds and then it looks engaging interactive. I mean, we had a training last week on another topic and that's exactly what I did. And that's how then I could put something that looked really engaging together in five minutes and that's just a screenshot of a video. I do think that there's a lot of platforms that can help you get started with video. I also know the amount of time that could potentially be invested in that is huge. And so I steer folks more away from video instead of have you, is your email mobile? Is it responsive? Can you easily read it on a phone? And the design and the copy, so your content really mattering. And then at that point, when I think of those, kind of the foundation and the basics of what you need for a minimum focus on that for greater success, then start launching into development of infographics or videos or things that are that kind of engaging content. And I think video too, if that can live in multiple places and be promoted in multiple places because it's typically going to take a little more time than just putting together an engaging graphic or a well-written article or interview by somebody. So start small. I think that's a really great benefit from COVID too. When we have like Stephen Colbert in his living room or wherever people are around, there doesn't have to be this same kind of professional look and lighting of things in that we can all be more human more easily. And that puts even video that phones can take way up there in comparison to maybe five years ago or something when there was a sense of the need to be more polished. So that's been a good shift. Great, thanks. Throw in a link and chat to our homepage for Amina Group. Like Eli had mentioned, we have just right now one training, we're in conversations with seven potential speakers. So the schedule will grow, but for right now, it comes down to basics, DIY major gift planning. And that's going to be led by Carolyn Appleton who's actually the lead of the Austin Tech Club. So she's fantastic and she kind of organizes it for the Austin community and has been a fundraising and communications consultant with nonprofits for about 30 years. And so I love talking with her because she talks about all the things that you could get done before there was these fancy computers and CRM systems and the practicalities and sort of elbow grease that's required, which I think of a lot coming back to now that we have these databases, are we keeping them clean? And we were still able to get a lot of work done before we had these very interactive, searchable, reportable systems that wouldn't have existed 30 years for organizations. So I encourage folks to check that out. I think it'll be a lot of practical tools for ways that you can get started separate from whatever platform you may be in. And a lot of that is just committing that you wanna do it and putting in the elbow grease, right? Putting in the time to take advantage of the resources that you have. So as always, if there's any questions, this is me, you can follow up or reach out directly if there's further questions that you have on this specific topic. If you have ideas in the future for other topics that you'd like to learn about, if you know of a really great speaker that you think folks in the community would enjoy hearing from, the list for the North Texas is always growing. And as we know, it really doesn't matter if you're in North Texas or not, you can attend from anywhere. And we don't have plans right now for when this would ever become in person. And so we'll just continue to enjoy and benefit from that virtual nature of how folks can show up and attend from wherever they are. So thanks everyone for joining today. And like Eli said in the beginning, we record this, we'll get that blog post updated with the recording of this by Friday. And so then you'll have all resources if you wanna share with other colleagues or folks who you know weren't able to attend and will also shoot that out via email. Great. Fabulous, so delighted for your leadership and I'm really tickled that you are dragging in talent from other chapter leaders in the network. Absolutely, yes. I'm really excited about her presentation before I was on this side of the table. Then I was a development director for a nonprofit and it just really resonated all the things that she was talking about. The data that we all have at our fingertips that I think sometimes we use technology as a distraction to think that we must have the most recent technology or the better tool before we can do work. Like come on people, we still have Excel. There's a lot we can do with Excel. Yeah, it's a tool. Well, thanks everyone. I hope everyone has a great rest of the day and we look forward to seeing you at a next training. Bye.