 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today, Digital Fundraising Tools and Trends for 2018 with Michael Stein. Before we get started, I just want to go over a few housekeeping items, so all callers will be muted. So if you have questions, you should be seeing a chat box on the left-hand side of your screen. If you lose your Internet connection, just reconnect to the link that was emailed to you or refresh your browser. And you should be able to see and hear the webinar from there. If you have to leave early or you want to watch the webinar again, we will be hosting the webinar on our website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. You will also receive an email once the presentation is over with the recordings and a link to the slides that were presented today. And also if you are on social media, feel free to send us a tweet at TechSoup and you can use hashtag T.S. Webinars. 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And now I would like to introduce our speaker today, Michael Stein. So Michael Stein has been a writer and digital strategist for over two decades. He is the author of three books and numerous articles about digital marketing, mobile engagement, and online fundraising. He works as a consultant and a coach to nonprofits, foundations, and educators with a focus on marketing and fundraising. And myself, I'm the online learning producer here at TechSoup, so I will be helping Michael with the Q&A throughout their presentation. And then we also have LaShika who you guys might have had a chat with already. She is going to be assisting us with chat on the back end. So if you have any technical questions, please let us know. If you have any difficulties, she's here to help you. So I am going to go ahead and pass it off to Michael. Yes, thank you, Sima, for getting us started for today's webinar on digital fundraising, tools, and trends for 2018. This is Michael Stein and I'm coming to you today from Northern California. Very pleased to be here with you. I've had the great pleasure of working for many fine nonprofit organizations around the country and around the world of different sizes and different missions and have definitely enjoyed many exciting digital fundraising campaigns over the years. So what is digital fundraising? Why don't we just dive in? I thought I would start us off with a little definition and it's about using all the digital channels that are at your disposal in an integrated way to reach your audiences and of course their friends and family with the goal of sparking engagement and growing your giving opportunities. I mean it's a fundraising process that I've watched evolve for 30 years and it's definitely a field that is constantly evolving. So I'm glad to be able to talk about digital fundraising techniques today that work and also discuss some of the latest trends that are emerging in 2018. I think my goal, I will say my goal today is to inspire you to keep improving your own digital fundraising practices so that you can engage more with your supporters and of course to raise more money to fund your causes. I also want to mention that just throughout the presentation I have screenshots that are over on the slide. Whenever I put a screenshot they are usually from a project that I've worked on directly or indirectly and I always try to put the name of the organization, the date on which the campaign took place, and a web address or URL in case you want to learn more about the organization. So hopefully that gives you a little bit of context. Let's see what digital channels are people using for fundraising? It starts out by thinking of it that way. And immediately after this slide we are going to ask you a quick survey so that you can answer this for yourself. But this is a digital channel that I'm seeing that are being used now. I mean obviously email lists probably at the top of the list both for messaging and fundraising appeals. People using their website and the amount of visitors that come to the website for fundraising. People are continuing to try to use social platforms probably the biggest ones, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Video continues to be popular and platforms including YouTube especially make a lot of fundraising tools available to nonprofits. Facebook Live has been a big item this year. We'll talk a little bit about that later. I still continue to see people to try text messaging. We get messages from Catholic Relief Services and a few other groups. I get a lot of, continue to get requests for personal fundraising campaigns. And we also see folks using digital advertising and using that to try to reach out to their followers and to other folks. So that's just a quick way that I'm sort of thinking of the different digital channels that are being used for fundraising. And if I go here it is in the right way. So here's one of our surveys. So if you wouldn't mind answering this question for those of you who can see this clearly the question is what areas of digital fundraising do you know the least about? So we're curious to know what different areas of interest people have. So take a close look. And this should mirror pretty closely the content on the previous slide. But I'm going to continue watching those responses go right up. I think like living in real time here. I'm just going to pause and reflect on these numbers for just one second. Some of them are now in the triple digits. Inverting website visitors, digital ads is in second place. I need help with all the above. Okay, fair enough. Okay, terrific. That actually is incredibly helpful. Okay, I am going to keep moving along. So here's how I want to organize the next 15 minutes. We're going to go fairly quickly just so that we can cover as much ground as possible. And hopefully if you have further interest you can take a look at the PowerPoint which will be delivered to you later if you want to get some of the details or look at some of the screenshots. But really quickly I think the way that I'm going to organize our time today is in these eight different topic areas. I'm going to start off by talking about how to make your website as donor and fundraising ready as possible. I want to talk about donation pages which are absolutely critical for fundraising. I'll talk a little bit about different donor platform options that are out there. I'm talking about choosing one. We'll spend a good chunk of time talking about email fundraising which is a core part of fundraising online. We'll talk about promoting monthly giving which is a growing field. We'll check in on personal fundraising campaigns. Of course we'll talk about social media fundraising and we'll end with digital advertising to reach donors. And I'm noting that both the website and digital advertising are the two top items that came up on the survey. So we'll be sure to cover those items. Okay, let's dive right in. So the first area is about making your website donor ready. I know I've seen so many nonprofits just really take their websites to new places. And the fact that websites are easier to build, cheaper to build, I think the last few years have just been tremendous. I mean for fundraising obviously the most important pieces are, and where's my little pointer when I need it, are of course making sure that the donate button is as prominent as possible in the navigation. And also that when you are doing a fundraising campaign, oh, I think that's a good idea. I will go green. How's that? When you're doing also a fundraising campaign that might be happening in email, social, it's just super important to sort of take advantage of some of these top areas on the homepage so that you get the most possible visibility from people that are visiting your site. So if you have a carousel or if you have a top view section, these are just critical places. And I know that they will displace other content but it's just so important to get it there front and center. Another theme is the website has to anticipate the traffic that's just going to come from other channels. You may be doing a mailing in the mail. And as you know, a lot of people who get direct mail often don't want to put checks in the envelopes. They go straight to the web and make the gift. So it's very important that your website anticipates that traffic of people who want to make donations who are coming from these other channels of promotion. And then finally just critical to consider the screen sizes. People are on their mobile devices constantly. And so any website that's going to be fundraising ready or donor ready I think has to be completely mobile responsive. So I think that's really a top consideration. There we go. The other theme that I just want to talk about really quickly, I think the biggest trend really in websites for fundraising that I think has just been clear in the last few years is the importance of using pop-up light boxes during fundraising campaigns. I mean, we see these a lot at the year end like in December, November when most fundraising happens. But it's totally fine to use these at any time of the year when you're doing a fundraising campaign. If you're doing a fundraising campaign in the mail, if you're doing promotion on social media, and if you're doing email, the biggest trend is having the pop-up light box made available on your website. It shows up on your home page. And it should also show up on the top 10 or 20 pages of your site. And again, you only have to show it to new visitors sort of once. You don't have to keep showing it over and over again. You can use a little cookie to disable it so it only gets shown once. But these are really critical. These are a couple of examples. This on the left is from the City Institute. This one over on the right is some corporate accountability. The one on the right is actually promoting a monthly giving campaign they were doing. The one on the left is a very clever graphic for a space organization promoting their year-end giving campaign. Can you just, we got a couple questions about what a pop-up light box actually is? So if you just don't mind. A pop-up light box is basically a graphic that pops up literally on top of the home page. I'm sure many of you are familiar with these. When you are just searching around the web they are promoting all kinds of stuff. And for a nonprofit during a campaign these images right here would literally appear on the top of your home page for example or really any of the pages of your website. So it's a little piece of, it's a graphic image that you do have to work with, your webmaster, webmistress to get it programmed and installed on your site and you say, you know, I wanted to run from this date to that date. And it's also called a light box. And when a visitor clicks on the light box it then takes the person directly to your donation page. So it's really this quick path from the light box into your donation page. And because it's so interactive and right in front of people it's really one of the most effective techniques for fundraising on a website. Great. Here I'm just showing you another example. This is a light box from the Middle East Children's Alliance. They use it at the year end. You don't have to use photographs if you don't want them, but I like this one especially because I bought the photograph to capture the essence of the work they were doing with kids. You can see there's the donate now button right here. It's requesting a tax deductible gift. And so this is a good example of a light box and how it can be used in fundraising. I do want to pause for just a second and talk a little bit about mobile usage trends. The one thing to just keep in mind is that in 2017 according to some of the studies 21% of all online donations were made on a mobile device. Someone's using their mobile phone in their hand and typing in their credit card number on the screen. And so this number has been creeping up more and more and more. Now that it's over that 20% tipping point, I think it speaks about the importance of having really a mobile responsive website. I mean all of your donation pages need to be mobile responsive. We'll talk about that in a second. All of your email messages need to be mobile responsive. Because you should expect that a quarter or more of all of your activity is going to be occurring with your donors using smaller mobile devices. So it's no longer just big screens and so on and so forth. So that's just really important to keep in mind so that you can always put your best foot forward. And so that you're in front of people where they are. They want to make a gift while they're sitting at their dinner table. That's great or in front of the couch, that's great. If they want to continue to give on a laptop or on a bigger screen, that's fine as well. You can track your mobile traffic very easily on your website. Most websites offer that kind of a tool if you're using Google Analytics or something like that. So really what you're looking for is the percentage of mobile traffic versus non-mobile traffic. And I often say once you've reached that 20% tipping point, everything you do should be fully mobile. Okay, let's get back on track. Let's talk for a few minutes about improving your donation pages. So a donation page in digital fundraising is obviously the page that's sitting kind of attached to your website which allows a donor to be able to make a donation in real time using a credit card, using a debit card, using a PayPal account, whatever the finance tool they might be using. But these donation pages are ubiquitous and just a really important piece of your puzzle. The one thing to note is that the average number of people who have kind of completed that page once they get there is actually only 17% which always is a staggering number when I realize that it seems so low. In other words, for every 100 people that reach your donation page, only 17 of them just sort of go through to make the gift. The other 83 of them are kind of still scratching their head and they're not quite sure. So I think that's an important average thing to keep in mind. And it really speaks to the importance of really working hard to improve your donation page with clear headlines, a clear what we call a value proposition, making the case forgiving, and last but not least the images. So all of those three things really have to come together on these donation pages to make an impact. And probably the reason why so many people abandon a donation page is because they're not feeling it when they get there. The image is maybe, there's no image or the image is kind of boring or it doesn't really speak to them. Maybe the headline is just not captivating enough. So those are really the key things. The other key thing of course is that the donation page in a perfect world should match the messaging that you've been using as part of your campaign. If you're raising money to plant trees in its neighborhood by the time they reach the donation page in a perfect world, the theme is reflected there so that the messaging really should match when you do a campaign. And then finally, good photos really move the needle a lot. In fact, they're probably the most important item in terms of testing and statistics and so on and so forth. Like a photo can improve the donation page conversion rate more than probably any other factor. So that's something for you to keep in mind. Here's a couple of other examples. This one again is from the Middle East Children's Alliance. I apologize a little bit hard to see but I thought that the headline was very strong, Help Protect the Health Lives of Children of the Middle East. I thought the photo was captivating. I mean this one, I mean there's actually quite a lot of text here, maybe a little bit too much. But again, they worked hard to kind of connect the dots here and to make this strong. Here's another one from Defenders of Wildlife. What I liked about this particular one was that they were actually promoting their match which they had been doing at the year end and so which I think is again connecting the dots between the messaging you're sending out and email, maybe you're promoting it also on social media by the time the prospective donor reaches the donation page he or she is seeing the match reflected here. So as they just said, should I make a gift of $30 or $50, they are able to reflect there. So you can see how what ends up on the donation page plays a role in helping that donor to make their choice and to make a gift. Okay, thinking about trends, what's hot this year, what's important? I mean the biggest trend that I'm seeing is that people are building simpler donation pages. So reduced in clutter, removing fields that you don't need. You don't need to address fields. You don't need to know if someone is Mr. or Mrs. or Dr. There's all kinds of things that you can take out that really aren't necessary and also removing headers and footers, things that just add clutter. And so we've noticed that when we do testing that the simpler you make donation pages, the more people donate through those pages. So they improve the conversion rate. Another big trend that we're seeing this year is that people are making monthly giving as the default giving type. Normally it's like make a one-time gift of $50 or $75. Now what we're seeing this year is make a monthly gift of $5 or $10. And so that's becoming the default as people are thinking, hmm, maybe those lower gift levels. And we'll talk a little bit more about that a little bit later. Maybe those lower gift levels are helpful. There's a move away from credit cards probably because of all the credit card fraud and debit card fraud that exists out there. There's a big move towards getting PayPal added to their pages. So people are selecting vendors that have PayPal or they're adding links to PayPal. So this is something for you to think about. Lots of embedded videos on donation pages. So that's an important – if you're doing a lot of work with video as part of your fundraising campaigns, we're seeing a lot of folks embedding them on their donation pages right at the top. And then they have to sort of synchronize the video a little bit with the messaging, but as long as they've done that we're seeing a lot more of that. I talked already about the importance of making these donation pages multi – excuse me, mobile responsive. Another theme is just moving towards donation pages that aren't this big long one page but what are these so-called multi-step pages. This example for animals on the right here is a multi-step page. And you start out by choosing a donation amount, whether it's a monthly gift or a one-time gift, and then click and you go on to the next page. So there's a lot of testing that's being done that this tends to be less overwhelming. Sometimes people get to these big long pages with like the 40 fields and they're like, oh, I don't have time for this. And so these multi-step pages seem to be a super big trend here. And then two final things, because so many people abandon their donation pages there's a lot of people who are working with what are called abandoned shopping cart recovery tools so that if someone abandons the gift a little bit like if you abandoned something on a retail store it will then follow up with you with an email assuming they are able to gather your email or it might push marketing at you through advertising which I'm sure you've had the experience of doing. If you go to a store, you don't buy something, you leave it in the cart. And lo and behold, those bags, that item you were trying to buy shows up and follows you around the web with retargeting. So those kinds of tools are available to nonprofits and they are actually quite popular and a good way to recover those donors who didn't finish making their gift. And another big trend is just more and more gift tracking by channel. In other words, if someone makes a gift, where do they come from right before? Did they come from social? Did they come from your website? Did they come from Facebook? So more detail, granular detail on where they are coming from. All right. Let me quickly just talk a little bit about analytics as you mentioned before. I think people are always like what should I measure, Michael? What should we track? And I think this slide gives you maybe the top things. I think you want to know what's working year over year, what's improving, what's declining. I mean, obviously you want to measure revenue, but not just that. You're also – is the average gift going up or going down? How are you doing with monthly donor recruitment? So those are really good elements to track. Also by audience segment, your smaller donors, your mid-sized donors, your larger donors, your recurring donors, there's all kinds of audience segments that you probably break out your donor audience. So it's important to measure that performance. How much traffic is getting to your donation pages, and how are those pages converting, and also tracking revenue from social media. I think all of these are super important digital fundraising metrics or analytics that you should be looking at year over year and helping you make decisions about how you're doing and where there might be areas for improvement. Okay, let's dive into area number three, which is donor platforms. There are a lot of donor platforms. That's one way that I'll just put it, more choices than ever. I mean, there continues to be constant growth in what I will just call simple or simple tools like email tools or donation tools. I mentioned just a few vendors here by name, but I'll talk more about others later. There's obviously a lot of nonprofits, especially the smaller organizations are using these simple tools, but it's also little by little folks are interested in migrating into tools that are a little bit more integrated. And over here on the left, I just have a really quick rundown of the six key areas that people are looking for for functionality from their donor platform. I mean, this is the irony, we're calling it a donor platform. But in fact, these donor platforms have grown into other kinds of platforms, able to help people with advocacy or activism be able to schedule events, be able to do other types of integrations with other tools that they might be using, and of course doing email more generally for the organization. So what started out as like simple donation buttons has definitely got a lot more complicated, but also a lot more choices. So what I often tell people is take some time to understand what your needs are in the organization. Think about how mobile you need to be. And I often say you do need to be fully mobile. Think about what your growth is going to be like over the next couple of years. How do you need a platform to help you grow? What's your budget? A lot of organizations don't have a budget for these types of technology, so it's a good question to ask. Reading reviews, getting demos and referrals are definitely super important to help you think through the platform that you might want to use. Let me mention two tools that are just invaluable for nonprofits that I recommend very strongly. One of them is this wonderful Consumers Guide to Low Cost Donor Management System which has been republished I think about three times. It profiles about 32 different platforms, definitely targeted at small to medium sized nonprofits. And it's really an absolutely terrific guide and it sort of compares the different systems around different functions. It also has pricing comparisons. It's really an absolutely invaluable tool. And I would say start here if you're a small to medium sized nonprofit and you want to think about are you on the right platform, or you're looking for a new one, or you're starting out and you need a brand new one, really pretty invaluable. And we have a link to this a little bit later in the guide here. Another guide book which is helpful, another tool is this one called The Nonprofit Guide to Online Engagement which is published by Firefly. They only look at a smaller group of seven platforms. And definitely this one is targeted more kind of a medium to large nonprofits. But also really invaluable. I know that there's a lot of organizations here on the call, on the webinar. Some of you may fall into this medium to large size. But anyway, I think both of those tools would be invaluable. And I definitely recommend you get a hold of them both. In terms of trends, probably the biggest trend is that there's more options than ever before. I've been doing this work for over 20 years. I've sort of given up trying to keep track of them all. It's just physically impossible. And I feel like every month there's a new one that's making its appearance which is great, the more the merrier. But obviously there's a lot of options that are designed to fit all different sizes. Organizations, different budgets, different types of functionality. I would say generally there's a good trend in terms of the prices for these things have gone down which I think is a good thing. You can start out on one platform at a certain price point before you have to spend more for more functionality. The mobile tools have just improved dramatically in five years which is a big thrill and really an important piece of the puzzle. The tools have become more integrated which I think is really important. If you're building an email list, you should be able to really easily push those, fund raise off the list really quickly or if you have some kind of peer-to-peer or other kind of platform, the integration really becomes critical so that it can more seamlessly, the modules can talk to each other and so that you can basically do more fundraising. Credit card management, this used to be a little bit of the unspoken nightmare of these platforms. People's cards run out or they expire or they need to be rerun. This has gotten a lot better and I think this has helped nonprofits a lot with fundraising. So this is great. And another trend, more and more social media integration so as you bring on a constituent on your file, some of these platforms will automatically tell you which one of these folks are on social media, which platforms are on, who is an influencer which might allow you to target those individuals in a more focused way. So all of those are trends that I think are really helpful in donor platforms. Okay, I'm going to pause there, Sima, and see if you have any questions that you think you want me to answer before I go on the email fundraising campaign. Sima- All right, let's see. So there's a few that came in. I think this one was from a little bit earlier. So Ann was asking, are you saying that multi-step pages is good or bad? I think that was from a little bit earlier in your presentation. Sima- Fair enough. As a general rule, I would say multi-step pages are good in the sense that when they're tested up against single pages, the multi-step pages almost always perform better. One of the main reasons is that they work better on mobile devices. They're more seamless and so on. So if someone says to me, if I have a choice, I would always say multi-step. But again, not every donor vendor platform has multi-step pages. So it's really a little bit of a choice you end up making when you select or use a specific donor platform. Sima- Okay, perfect. And I think I'll ask you one more question and then we can save the rest for the end. Somebody was asking, are these website add-ons expensive? Sima- I'm trying to think of what the word add-on might be referring to. If you're referring to donation pages, no, the price points have gone down a lot. By that I mean you can get a donation page for as little as $20 a month plus credit card processing fees. So the price points have gone down tremendously. If you're talking about donation pages. If your question related to pop-up light boxes which it might have, I mean those would require you to work with a webmaster or a webmaster just to help you install them. They don't really cost anything other than the time that it would take to install a pop-up light box on your website. Sima- Got it. Okay, cool. And then actually let me just ask you one more question. For multi-step donor pages, how many steps or click-throughs are ideal? Sima- I mean I would say probably around three. I mean typically on the first step you collect the amount of the gift of the person and whether it's a one-time or a monthly gift. So you start out just with the gift amount because that's kind of the biggest thing that you want to get from them. That's the hardest choice, right? Then on the second page you're typically gathering some demographic information, what's your name, what do you address. And then on the third page you're typically gathering payment information and then there's a button to finish the process. So that's a traditional I would say three steps. I say that and I see four. I see sometimes four steps and sometimes I see two. But two or three, maybe three would be fine. Sima- Okay, perfect. Yeah, I think we're good for now and then I can save the rest for the Q&A at the end. Great. Let's keep going. So email fundraising campaigns, definitely a big piece of the digital fundraising for using all these tools. So I went looking for statistics. I mean email accounts are about 26% of all online revenue according to some of the studies which means there are other channels that raise more. I think what's interesting about email is that it's a very quantifiable kind of channel that you can use. You have a bunch of emails, you have your email addresses, you can send them when you want, you can send again when you want, you can look at open rates and click through rates. So it's a very sort of quantifiable tool and I think that's why email fundraising has just become really the best performing channel that we have when we do digital fundraising. Open rates for email fundraising tend to hover around 13%. And then here's probably the shocker which is always a reminder of how challenging this medium can be. The average email fundraising response rate is 0.05%. So to put that into normal math, it takes about 2,000 emails that you have to send out to your file, to 2,000 people to generate a single donation. So you have to have a file size of at least 2,000 to start doing fundraising. I mean this is how it works in terms of averages. Not everyone's response rate is 0.05. This is really kind of a national average across thousands of nonprofits. I have a client right now that has a 0.25% response rate, another one that has a 2% response rate. So these things can vary but it gives you kind of a benchmark point to give you a sense if you're starting out. I mean this is really the average that we're working with and it gives you a sense of scale. Also the average one-time gift from an email appeal in 2017 was $87 which can help you to think a little bit about, well where do you fall on that? Are you around that amount? A little bit lower, a little bit higher? All of these particular numbers by the way come from the M&R 2017 benchmark study which I mentioned on the last slide. And they by the way are publishing their 2018 edition next month. So hopefully you will get a hold of that and use that to help you grow and learn which it does for me every time I read through it. So the key to email fundraising, many of you probably know this already. You have to be creating a series of messages so that you can capture your campaign theme, the series of messages could span a month. It could span three weeks. It could span more than that. But it's typically a messaging arc that allows you to communicate and get into people's inboxes. These things work best when you have some kind of visual design template that you can use to capture your campaign. And of course part of what you're doing in most digital fundraising as in non-digital fundraising is you're increasing the urgency as you're getting closer to the deadline or to the end. So whether you're doing it at the year end, you're doing it in the spring, you're doing it in the fall, you really want to use all of these tools. A quick example here on the right is from a plowshares fund. This was before they did a rebrand. But I always loved the way they tried to capture their brand colors and used a nice theme to kind of build urgency, the midnight deadline, the $20,000 year end challenge. And of course putting in individuals, in this case a couple of celebrities to help build the buzz. I think on this next slide I have another example of a campaign. This one is from the SETI Institute, which is in Silicon Valley in California. I thought I was able to scrape this out of their year end appeal. And what you can see here is just a great example of how to build a campaign with an email template. You start out with a little gold. The gold goes up. You can see the red, they have a little thermometer bar. They've got different speakers, different writers that are communicating the message of their campaign. They've got nice big match my gift buttons because this happens to be a match. And one of the messages they're offering a book as a premium is you gave over a certain amount. And at the very end as it got closer and closer to December 31, they were even able to put a graphic that had a countdown clock. I don't believe it was a moving clock, but it was definitely something that created a lot of urgency. So I just loved how they put this piece together. A couple of trends in email fundraising, probably the top one is that, again, mobile responsive templates. And I have this example here of how, again, Plousier's Fund went from a non-mobile responsive to a mobile responsive. Mobile responsive is all one column, larger headlines, a normal font size, and then getting rid of these little sidebars. So again, really moving towards mobile responsive templates. Another trend is what I would call graphic rich email. So get rid of the long paragraphs of text. Go for a photo, go for a thermometer, go for images, graphics, make the text really short. There's a big trend that we've seen this year. And these usually work terrifically well on mobile devices, because they're just fun to read and to look at. A third big trend is countdown clocks. I mentioned this a moment before with Plousier's. Some of these countdown clocks, if you can embed them inside the email, will actually count down. This one's from the Democratic National Committee, the one that wrote some corporate accountability international. I mean, talk about building tension at the end of the campaign when you want people to make a gift before a certain deadline, which could be the end of the year, but it could be any other time of the year as well. And of course, the other big trend, which is a trend that continues to grow year to year, is email list growth. I created just a separate slide just to capture a few of these ideas, and folks can take a look at this on their own. I mean, this is definitely a big year for people to grow their email lists, doing it on their website with sign-ups. You can in fact use pop-up light boxes, which we talked about before for fundraising. Those are also really popular for asking people to leave their email addresses. I mean, people are working on social media platforms with downloads or quizzes to get people to offer their email addresses. For those of you that work on political or advocacy campaigns that use the petitions and advocacy campaigns, it's just such an important way to gather email addresses, which can later be used for fundraising. There are numerous vendors out there that can provide help to help you get lists to what are called paid growth. There's a couple of vendors like Care2 or Chains.org, and there's a few others that I could mention that are specialized in that. And then of course, if you have a direct mail program, there are vendors that will help you acquire emails through public databases for people on your direct mail file. Okay. All right, let me keep moving forward and talk quickly about monthly giving, or sometimes it's called sustainer giving. So this is the fastest growing giving segment right now. I mean, it saw like literally 23% growth in 2017. And in the count, when you look at it sort of on average, I think in the last numbers I had for 2016, it's about 16% of all on-rend revenue is coming from monthly giving. And this is a huge change over the years when it really wasn't a very important way of giving. I think economic pressures and other factors have made it that people want to give less, but they don't mind giving more often, which I think is a great change. People tend to stay on your file longer. In the end, you raise more money from them. You just do it over a longer period of time. The average giving level of a monthly gift is $23. But I see plenty of people asking for monthly giving levels of much lower numbers than that. I've seen them $3, $4, $5. I think Hillary Clinton's campaign was trying at it, like $2. Why not get people in the door, and you can always upgrade them later? Monthly donors tend to be people who are recent donors, people who are given to your organization frequently, people who are given in the mail already. And so there's a lot of opportunity really to work with your current donor population to try to convert them to become monthly donors for your organization. Here's a quick example of how to promote monthly giving on a donation page. This is the No Kid Hungry donation page. I'm not sure if you can see this, but it says a monthly gift does even more to help hungry kids. And so I think they're doing a good job to build as much visibility as possible for their monthly giving program. The pointer is not moving forward. There we go. Here's another quick example from the Semper Myron Fund which works to protect Redwoods. This is their Redwood Ranger campaign. And I thought this was very clever. They had a goal to get $50 by a certain date. They had a match. They also were giving away an exclusive carabiner. I thought those were a lot of enticements as part of their campaign but really shows their dedication to building their monthly donors on their file. So really something for you to think about in the year ahead. So a couple of quick trends in monthly giving. One is that people are doing these monthly giving campaigns. Here's an example from the SETI Institute. This spring we're looking for 50 stars to join our campaign organization as a donor. They call them SETI Stars. So that's definitely a big trend that we're seeing. I think I have one more example on the next slide. Here's another example from Corporate Accountability International. You can see that they use a little thermometer here to show how far they are towards their goal. A couple of other trends in monthly giving are very low gift levels. So even though $23 is an average gift level, it's perfectly fine to start as low as $5, maybe even a little bit less. I would try testing a couple of different things. But the idea is to get people in the door and see how far you can upgrade them. Also monthly giving is great when it can be targeted at lapsed donors. So people who are donors in the past can often be brought back on your file with a low monthly gift. So that would be something to think about. Another key trend here is just better credit card management. One of the biggest challenges in monthly giving is that people's credit cards expire. And so because vendors have improved some of their tools, this has been a big management issue and something that's a big trend here in 2018. Okay, we have a few more slides to go which I'll go through as quickly as I can so we can get to the end. One other big trend is the development of personal fundraising campaigns. These are sometimes called peer-to-peer campaigns. And I think this has been really popular in the last couple of years. The example over here is from the Best Buddies Challenge. But it's a way for individuals to set a personal goal to raise money for a charity that they're fond of. I mean you can pick a low number, $250 or a big one like $5,000. You may be doing an event like a bicycle ride or a swim or something like that. Or you just may be helping out at a certain time of the year during the campaign. I think this is a good strategy also for organizations that have smaller email lists because you get to take advantage of social platforms and people's network of friends. And really the key here is that you have to sort of work with grassroots volunteers to help you do the outreach. But many of your organizations have those networks of volunteers. And there are numerous platform options that are out there. And I will actually recommend this report by Kefexis Partners which does a really good job reviewing about I would say 30 different platforms that specialize just in personal fundraising campaigns. So that would be something for you to check out which is a little bit too fast. A couple of quick trends here just to keep in mind. I mean one is that these succeed when you have a volunteer team of cheerleaders to help you. So just keep that in mind with personal fundraising campaigns. And also they tend to work better when they're tied into a fundraising event that you might have. So you might have a gala scheduled in December and then you can build up to it with personal fundraising campaigns. We see a lot of folks using Facebook Live events to promote them which makes a lot of good sense. And then another couple of quick trends is the importance people sometimes give. I'm going to give $5, $10, $15, $50. And the key is really how can you welcome some of these new donors onto your file and then get them to make a second or a third gift. So these are interesting challenges in fundraising but I think the biggest benefit of personal fundraising campaigns is that you get to reach out to brand new donors. And as many of you know that's really a critical element in building a strong fundraising campaign. Let's see social media fundraising. I'll just say a little tiny bit about this. Obviously it fits in very closely with all your other channels and it's really important that social media fundraising, you know, spin with your email efforts with the work that you're doing on the web, the work that you're doing at events or in the real world. It has certainly been slow to grow as a direct fundraising channel but we know from looking at analytics and looking at studies that the more you have visibility on social media with your supporters and your donors, the more you help increase fundraising in other channels. And so that's where analytics can fit in. And of course the critical thing because a lot of these platforms have become pay to play, it's just critical that you be able to boost your posts on platforms and that you put aside advertising dollars to potentially widen your reach for something to think about as you're going. So a couple of quick trends. One is that the Facebook fundraiser's tool continues to be extremely popular. Probably the most common way that we see that are these Facebook birthday campaigns. I have an example of one that my friend did on the right. She was raising money for her birthday. They're very easy to use. You can reach out to your Facebook friends and raise money from them. Really the critical thing and really the big trend is that if you are an organization using a Facebook fundraiser, you do have to spend money to boost these campaigns and get them more visible. Another big trend is of course using Facebook Live throughout social media fundraising campaigns. Also Facebook Live makes you more visible throughout the Facebook platform and their news algorithm. So Facebook loves you when you create live events. So this is really a positive for you when you want to promote a fundraising campaign on social media. And then of course on places like Facebook but not only Facebook, you can use the advertising tools on those platforms to also widen your reach. So if you for example upload the email addresses of all your donors onto Facebook, Facebook can literally tell you how to offer you the opportunity to send advertising to your donors for the ones that are on Facebook and will also allow you to create what are called look-alike audiences. So I know that not everybody has used advertising before but these are incredibly useful opportunities for fundraising. Let me show you my last slide on this one point. Oops, a little one too many there. Which is that I would say about 60% of nonprofits that have been studied have spent money on digital ads and it continues to grow every year at about 10 or 15%. So I think nonprofits are realizing that digital advertising gives them an important method for reaching out. So on the one hand they are able to reach their existing donors with ads in front of them but they are also able to reach out to people that are like their donors. And because Google and Facebook make these types of tools available then it's really a question of nonprofits deciding to put some money on the table and to experiment a little bit with some of these digital advertising tools. Two other big trends that are happening are the ability to take all the visitors that are coming to your website and to retarget them with advertising. And you can also as I mentioned earlier you can retarget people that are abandoning your donation pages. So all of these advertising opportunities I think are useful for fundraising and hopefully more of you will experiment with it. And then finally, I know that many nonprofits have taken advantage of Google Ad Grants. That program is still available. It's become a little bit more difficult to use with some of their other model has changed but it's still available out there. I mean you can use it to promote fundraising campaigns. We've seen quite a lot of nonprofits decide to move over into the paid Google Ads because you get a little bit better performance and you can reach more people that way. But it's exciting I think that more nonprofits are using digital advertising to be able to supplement their fundraising campaigns. Okay, I kind of at the end, Sima, I'll just close just by saying a few final thoughts. I think if I had to pick kind of my top six things and to give you some inspiration for digital fundraising, I would say integrating digital fundraising channels is really important. Great to send email but you have to connect with the content on the web and the content on your social channel. So really the integration is going to make an impact on your donors. Number two, just the importance of creating campaigns that have visibility and a messaging arc and a theme that really in the digital space is really an impactful technique. Improving the mobile experience is absolutely critical. So many people in digital are on small and mobile devices so it's just so important to be able to do that. Improving donation pages, if you can get your average completion rate to get above 17% then that's less money that you're leaving on the table so to speak. So I think working in your donation pages is really critical. Promoting monthly giving, I mean this is obviously the trend of the future people want to give at lower price points but give longer and more often. And so making that available to people is really important. And of course increasing activity on social media, again it's part of the integration fit between all of those pieces. I'll just mention that I put all of the references that I made in this webinar on this one slide so that you can go grab a copy. Don't forget that the benchmark study new edition comes out in April. And with that I will pass the baton back to Sima. Sima All right, thank you Michael. That was super helpful. We have time for just a couple questions before we finish up today's webinar. So one question that I've seen come in a couple of times was how frequently should one send out campaign specific emails? It's difficult to find a sweet spot of reminding people to give but also not bombarding them and risking their unsubscription. So do you have any advice in terms of email frequency and how often people do that? That is certainly a tough question. I mean I think as a rule of thumb I tend to say once a week if you're doing a campaign that's going to last a month so you could maybe do three or four in a month. I think that's probably a cadence that's probably comfortable for most people. That said I think at the year end everyone breaks that rule left and right. And that's why you end up getting five emails in the last five days of December. But I think that's clearly too much to send that many. I mean I think this is why it's important also to compare your campaigns year over year. So if you're doing a spring campaign like what worked last year, take a look at which email appeal performed best. Which one, where the open rates are declining, declining, declining. Maybe that helps give you some thoughts on whether the cadence was right or whether you were over messaging. Also look at your unsubscribe rates. If you're seeing a much higher set of unsubscribe rates in a campaign that could be a sign that you're over messaging people. Got it, perfect. Okay so I think we have time for a couple more questions. So in terms of like the most effective combination of strategies for fundraising in terms of everything that you presented today, what do you think is kind of the most effective combination of these things? Or maybe if people are to walk away from this webinar what's the top two or three things that they should get started on right away to see the highest return? I think growing your email list is probably always high on the list and people should be doing it all the time. And because we know how well email performed in digital fundraising I think that's always something that I would recommend that everyone needs to be doing always. I would certainly think improving donation pages or choosing the right vendor that gives you the kind of donation pages you want I think is critical. There's no reason why you should have old donation pages that aren't mobile responsive. And really donation pages do make a really big difference to donors. That's why so few people convert on those donation pages. So I think you can do a lot better. I think number three, I think promoting monthly giving and being more flexible is a way of being more flexible at different price points for donors. I think donors want to do partner with you in different ways. And so I think that's why the monthly giving movement is so strong right now. People are like, I want to give less but I want to give more often and for longer. So it's really important to do that. And I think ultimately just creating campaigns and kind of mapping out how to create a compelling fundraising appeal that is going to be interesting to people. Make sure that it ties in well to the news cycle or to an event that you're doing or to the themes that your organization is focused on. Give it a theme, give it a goal, give it a match or whatever. Give it a deadline. I need some of those techniques to get people excited. Find a spokesperson who can help promote the campaign. And then use the range of different digital channels at your disposal to promote it. So if you're doing a campaign it should be visible on your website, in your email outreach, on your social channels. And then the other channels that you might have at your disposal. Perfect. All right, I think that's a great closing. We are at time. So just want to thank you again, Michael, for all the information that you shared today. I know a few of you were online and had questions that he couldn't get to. So if you want to email him, his email contact information is here. He's also on Twitter. And he also writes regularly for the TechSoup blog. So if you guys want to take a second to write this information down, we'll also be emailing these slides after the webinar is over. So just before we go today, it's really helpful for us to always understand what you guys walked away with. So if you don't mind chatting one thing in the chat box of one thing that you learned in today's webinar. Also we'll be sending out a post event survey. So any feedback that you have for us is always really helpful. We incorporate that into our content planning. So if there's stuff that you're interested or want to learn about or any gaps that you missed today, we'd be happy to incorporate your feedback into our webinar planning for the future. Also if you are on social media, we are on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. So we post a lot of helpful tips and tricks. I know a lot of you guys had questions about the different platforms and technologies that Michael was referring to. TechSoup partners and several of these companies to offer it either for free or at cost. So check out our products page which I believe Lashika sent out earlier. And we have a few upcoming webinars. So we have one on 4.17 about saving time and money, why cloud integrations matter. And then one on 5.1 about online surveying for nonprofits. So I think that's another trend that we're seeing. So if you guys are interested in that, that's happening on 5.1. And lastly, thank you again to Michael for your presentation and to our webinar sponsor ReadyTalk and to Lashika for answering questions on the back end. Thank you all.