 Welcome to all of you. Happy fryer. Glad that we made it through the week and I hope that you're all you know really celebrating your achievements big or small, really excited to be wrapping up today's episode with none other Jacob from Bloomerang. So you're going to learn a little bit more about Jacob Baker and he's going to share with us top five questions about non-profit CRM platforms but he's really not going to share them he's going to answer them so we have your questions and he's got his knowledge turned on. I just learned Jacob you've been with Bloomerang now you said seven years. Yeah yeah so early adapter I guess would be the best way to say it yes. Well I love that I'm excited to nerd out with you and again this entire week I've had the great pleasure of nerding out with some of my besties over at Bloomerang. I've shared very transparently I'm a huge fan girl of Bloomerang. It's culture, it's customer service so this entire week has been dedicated to non-profit Power Week. Julia and I have had just so much fun with your team all of you and we would be remiss if we did not give a shout out of gratitude to our friends over. The entire team at Bloomerang whether you're in Indiana or not I know there's a lot of remote workers also want to say thank you to American Non-profit Academy, staffing boutique, non-profit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, non-profit nerd and your part-time controller. These companies are here I like to remind everyone Jacob they're here for your mission your critical mission there's 1.8 million nonprofits registered in the US and these companies they have your back so make sure that you check them out and hey they also help us produce these episodes so March will be four years for us which feels like Jacob a whole nother baby that we've birthed right it's like you know four years but you can find all of our episodes including these Power Week episodes with Bloomerang on Roku, YouTube, Vimeo, Fire TV and for those of you that are podcast listeners like myself you can also go ahead and queue us up wherever you stream your podcast. Jacob so excited to have you here my friend in the hot seat and for those of you watching and listening Jacob is an account executive sales manager at Bloomerang early adopter been there seven years but do you tell us a little bit about yourself Jacob and non-profit experience, Bloomerang experience, all this good you know CRM experience. Absolutely so I mean my non-profit journey kind of starts back back in college so I wanted to be a history teacher and thankfully my my advisor at the time sat me down and had a heart to heart my first semester and said what sport would you like to coach and I was like I don't understand the question and he was like you probably don't want to teach history then I was like okay so I became a wayward you know non-focused student and lucked into finding a non-profit degree being offered at my university and it just lined up with everything that I wanted to do so I have a degree in non-profit it's actually labeled as a record sports degree but that's the way we were able to get it kind of programmed in and from there I I always wanted to focus on kind of the youth development side so I did some work at a parks department for a good minute and helped them set up right out of college their new foundation that they were they were forming so took all the you know textbooks for the five-year plan and put it in action right and then from there I got a job at the Boy Scouts here locally so for four and a half almost five years worked at the Scouts doing fundraising program expansion I mean you name it ending with the best kept secret that program has which is the exploring program for career interest so working with kids getting them involved so but yeah so I mean that's my journey to I love that background and I've got to say I feel that all representatives team members maybe I should say at Bloomerang they really have that like deep knowledge of being in the trenches day in day out with non-profit so it's not like you're sitting back totally from the CRM space you know without that internal day-to-day knowledge so how this works for those of you watching and listening you know for our non-profit Power Week we have five questions as our you know marketing even showed that so we're going to go through these questions Jacob I would love to know what you you know would share with our viewers and listeners and we're going to start off with this you know CRM question one and again customer service management is the platform able to show a supporter's holistic involvement in the organization tell us about this I know you represent Bloomerang but you're able to really kind of talk about this holistically about the holistic involvement yeah so tell us a little bit about the platform and you know really what we can see as that end user yeah I mean I think you know at this point and and where kind of donor CRMs are at you know all of them need to show the full picture so you know not just making it a repository of funds coming in right because if that's the case there's Excel there's there's accounting softwares right but if we really want to move the needle and really want to cultivate good relationships and steward them appropriately that's where that holistic approach comes so you know tracking our one-off emails tracking phone calls tracking events attended volunteerism you know all those various aspects that make up that roadmap for that donor it's important to have that um so I mean that's I don't know if that really fully answers the question there but I'm always very passionate about that full picture because I think we all have the horror story being a non-profit employee and being thrown into a new role and having no idea of any of that past information and just having to roll with the punches for the first year and you know wouldn't it be great to drop somebody new in and let them digest and see all of that data and know who those key supporters are and maybe even find some that have been flying under the radar for you all. And that historical data is so interesting you know we shared I'm sure we could share some more stories um you know there are numerous stories I've heard in my career similarly I'm sure you have as well Jacob you know that a new person comes in uh they access the database they pick up the phone they call someone and really and are not completely privy or knowledgeable I should say I shouldn't be privy but knowledgeable of the entire holistic impact of that person the holistic you know relationship of that person so there's this one story that comes to my mind it's not mine but it has been told on the show before Jacob um and it was for a higher you know uh education higher higher university they called and it was like you know the dean's brother and they didn't that relationship was not connected in the database and so I think it's so important I've had my hands in a lot of different CRMs I love going in and really absorbing all of the data that's in there so I think capturing that is really important now this is an off the cuff question um but there's a lot of integration in CRMs and I think those integrations be it you know another email system be it another you know way to capture gifts that integration can also help to provide that holistic data is that accurate absolutely so you know most modern databases at this point you know we they're either going to go out and work with the best that they they determine on the market or they're going to have a bridge with a product called Zapier that unlocks the door to thousands of different products then and so you know all nonprofits are unique everybody does things a little bit differently so the database needs to be adaptable to those needs for sure yeah adaptability and what some of your colleagues also have shared this week is really about you know the data is a team sport it's not a one person's shoulders you know it's really shared amongst the team so having that holistic involvement in the organization having that represent in the data yeah that's that's a big one that that needs to happen so great answer let's move to question number two and uh this question here that we have for you today jacob is how are the nonprofit supporters relationships and connections tracked i feel like that's a really big question but it's one i hear often in the day-to-day trenches you know is having the tracking and the connections of those relationships really on point so talk to us about this yeah i mean it's a great question and it is really important in this kind of you know modern crm kind of take right um not only households right so tracking spouses and in those types of relationships for the the family unit that lives in one roof right or under one roof right but then also all the other offshoots of that family and if if there are supporters in some way um for me one that i wish uh in my old solution that was DOS based at the time uh i wish i love that shout out to vintage yeah i shouldn't i'm not old enough to say i was in a DOS based solution but i was in a DOS based solution so um you get what you get right so you know in that i wasn't able to track employee to employer relationships and for me that was such a key thing to unlock those like matching gift opportunities and just not having a way to visualize that in any clear way uh you know really impacted the overall amount that we were able to raise each year um because it becomes a mountain of work you know to figure all of those pieces out so you know all aspects of that you know who knows who um one of my favorite things and i'll kind of plug a bloom ring piece here but donor search one of the key things that i always tap into from a donor search perspective is what boards does that person serve on because if you can see the boards that they serve on or have served in the past in who served with them at the same time board members swap around they they interchange they like to move around once they feel like they've completed you know what it is they've done so if i can find that right person through relationships to then be in the room with me to make an ask it's it's going to go better you just blew my mind that is not something i've ever used it for but i will now going forward is really that board space board development yeah prospect tool with that um so i'm so glad you mentioned that i know one thing i hear often jacob is about you know tracking not only the connections as you mentioned the relationships the households things like that but tracking credits like soft credits you know did this person help to bring in this relationship when it comes to a lot of boards you know now we're looking at that give and get policy i shouldn't say now because it's been around for quite some time but really looking at okay are we honoring this person's relationships and how they have leveraged their relationships to provide that give and get and i think that blooming you know and many crms really do provide that great opportunity to support the relationships and connect that you know all of that through tracking mechanisms so are you seeing that easily within blooming oh absolutely you know so you know both aspects of that right like we we like to say there's there's the like monetarily assigned soft credits say with a daff a donor advice fund and then there's the the zero dollar ones which a lot of times you know i would attribute to say like a board member so we can still track that that that gift is coming in in some way but maybe at a zero dollar amount because you know we don't want that to maybe show up you know fully on that that board members record in some way yeah that's a great point yeah i love that you mentioned daff's because the donor advice funds and you know for us in our world we're very acronym heavy so i'm glad that you mentioned that because we we tend to speak the jargon right yeah really good answer so far so we're going to move into question number three and it's about intelligence and insights so our intelligence and insights are those being offered in the customer service management you know platform for example here how can we evaluate metrics such as that donor retention as well as engagement so what are you what are you seeing here and and what should we is again that end user really be looking for yeah i mean i think i think anybody that's been you know fundraising and in the space knows that you know retention is key and you're never going to retain 100 percent i mean that's that's a very lofty goal but you know it's it's easier to retain a donor in the long run than to try and bring in a new one and so as much focus or really just filtering the data up in a very easy and indigestible way um you know just helps to keep everybody at kind of the front of mind to to retain your to retention right so you know for example in bloomering the minute you open up the database you immediately see your donor retention score and one of the things that i i always kind of ask you know my reps to do that are kind of on my squad is to see if the organization that we're talking to as we're kind of doing our first discovery or consultative call see if they know what that retention score is because it's it is important right and it's something to kind of live by a little bit so so yeah for me retention is key and in those those metrics those insights just help help us all kind of do better uh as as the you know the campaign progresses you mentioned the dashboard and i'm so glad you did and you know crms have dashboards i love it because you're able to see like the intent right is it's a snapshot of some of these kpis key performance indicators what are we tracking where are we i like to do kind of like a red light you know green light yellow light you know are we just soaring and crushing it is there something we need to be cautious about so the platform and many you know dashboards jacob there's a way i i recall that you can do versus a calendar and a fiscal year is that right so you can track kind of these donor retention be it a 12-month rolling calendar or perhaps that fiscal is that right that's correct yep okay absolutely so so seeing that and then it also gets me thinking to this this level of segmenting you know and many of your colleagues this week talked about segmenting our donors um and i'm i'm curious because we could also go deeper to say okay this donor segmentation we can get that granular to say here is that donor retention rate you know for today's question really looking at the intelligence the insights what's being offered to evaluate the metrics such as that donor retention and the engagement so we can look at all the segments for that it might not be on the dashboard but we're going to have a really good over oversight is that am i thinking that properly completely accurate because really this question piggybacks off the first one which is is your database being holistic in its approach because if it's not you're not going to get the engagement that you need right because if we're tracking all of those metrics the database at the end of the day should then show and visualize for you in some type of scale you know how engaged are those individuals and you know my favorite thing to kind of point out there would be you know take your live on so they gave sometime last year but unfortunately not this year right so take your live on report and send it different to those that have a high engagement and talk about it in that capacity and then send it different to those that have no engagement right or very little and try to word it in a way of bringing them back right as opposed to treating everybody the same because if you segment that up just to just a little bit you're going to get a better response rate for sure yeah that's right and I love that you you bring that up I think that you know it's so important the lie bunts again last year but unfortunately not this and really looking at how we can you know separate this to to share so we're going to move into question number four I know you know there's five questions for today so if you missed any for those of you watching and listening make sure you go back and watch the full episode as you said Jacob like it really does kind of stack on top of one another so question four is specifically the platform so how does the platform look from when it was built in terms of upgrades and secondarily this question here Jacob is what about the update for a mobile first world this is a really good question so I'm all yours yeah I like to think of this as you know there there is a clear split between those that were made before the iPhone and those made after the iPhone and and when we think about it from kind of just a visualization right so we Bloomerang recently went through a huge overhaul in terms of how the product looked we streamlined everything you know even simply just making all the fonts the same right like just cleaning that type of stuff up because if things look cleaner if things are you know very apparent and how how it's done right you can get your job done faster you know sometimes we joke in the database world that you need to just get in and get out so how can we make it easy you know if we could track I guess you know those users that only had to spend 30 seconds or a minute in the database and got what they needed that that's like a gold star for the day for us right because it needs to be quick it needs to be easy and it needs to be efficient and that's I think you know when we think to a mobile first world you know the real question there everybody kind of has an app but I think the question to always ask is how much can you actually do in the app at the end of the day is it just a Rolodex right am I just pulling it up so I can find the contact information or the address of their business or you know can I log a phone call can I can I you know save an email you know it with in there can I pop in some notes after I just went and got coffee with them in the morning so I'm just sitting in the parking lot I don't have to wait till I get back to the office and all of my notes are now logged fully to that record so you know that's the kind of you know ideas and the things that you know I think those that have been adopted you know post iPhone right and those that you know really truly want to make an impact when it comes to that like you know busy kind of world that we live in like that's those are the kind of key things that come to mind for me yeah and you had mentioned too and I've seen it because again I'm privileged enough to have my hands and in some bloomering accounts some other CRM accounts and whatnot but you know these dashboards and the evolution of the system overall I think continue to change and one thing that I love so dearly about bloomering and customer service and support not only the online chat because I've spent many of nights with online chat it's very helpful but really looking at you know coming from the software side to the end user what do you need how can we improve where's the evolution that needs to take place so that we can help you you know get in and get out just just to that point as you said so in your seven years jacob again off the cuff have you seen you know really the platform change and upgrade and again kind of looking at that mobile first world yeah man it's it's it's a lot from a full a full overhaul of our reporting tool from the ground up they rebuilt the entire reports tool right that was like a whole year long project to uh to having a full uh you know full quickbooks online integration to like I had mentioned the the UI changing so you know updating that with the new brand we launched a new new brand and identity for bloomering that's right you know there's so much in that I will say specific to like some best practices because we also like to try you know to to work in some pieces there like you know the whole first time donor workflow uh and making sure that we highlight those that are giving for the first time because we've just like some very simple tweaks to maybe how you thank them they have a very strong chance of coming back in the second year if not giving a second gift within that first year that they gave so yes and shout out to josh uh that started our week on Monday really talking about that first time donor we also had Anne Felman chief marketing officer come on and talk about you know how do we get them them being the first time donor to give again because as you mentioned Jacob like really retaining the donors is always going to be more cost effective or efficient uh as opposed to acquiring right new donors so I I too have seen a lot of upgrades for many CRMs and I I just have to give a shout out again you know coming from that place of the end user how can we help you what else would you like to see there's so much goodness there within the bloom ring system okay this one might be a doozy because it gives me a little bit of heartburn just as I look at it but this is our fifth and final question and we want to know and ask you can you discuss migration training as well as the onboarding process of moving to a new CRM platform and I've just got to say I've seen organizations go from you know pen and paper excel into you know a CRM so like no CRM into a CRM but I've also seen the export of another fully fledged and robust CRM into a new CRM so there's a lot to digest here but discuss this migration training onboarding process of moving to a CRM what are the things we need to think about yeah I would say you know bias here coming from a sales perspective you know so one of the things that I feel like we always combat the most speed does not equal greatness you know so as you look at all the different offerings because you know onboarding and specifically implementation of your previous data right everybody has their own take on it and it seems like the metric that a lot of times we really dig into there is the you know how fast you know how quickly can we get in how quickly can we get going right and yes that needs to be very important especially if you're on a time crunch but you don't want to do that to the detriment then of your historical data and more often than not you know yes if you're on let's say a very flat you know one two-tab excel file yeah those should be very quick and easy to get going but if you're on a full platform I'll say let's we'll throw a big one out like razor's edge right one of the more common platforms out there that shouldn't take the same amount of time as a one page excel file right uh in in the way you're using it properly well that's yes in the in the real I think the real reason behind that is it any conversion needs to be a two-way conversation you know it should not just be the database company kind of dictating to to you then how that data is just going to come in and just do the the whole work right you should have some skin in the game it's your data right you should want that to hopefully get into the database the right way and that's where the time factor comes in you know so anybody that's on a previous like CRM or you know they're on an actual uh you know donor management solution now you know just know that it should in general take somewhere around two maybe up to four months to convert the data fully but every company should have a way for you though to jump right on in to those onboarding uh some training maybe even have a separate database that you can then build your forms in and get those on your website right so so that you can't make a switch really quickly but just you know appreciate the hands-on approach that a lot of companies do to migrate the historical data in so that is very no that's very helpful because I know that I hear a lot of organizations they have recurring donors right they have ledges set up so there's a lot of intricacies that you don't want to lose especially if it means you have to you know recapture some of that hard information because that could be a big loss a big gap of um of revenue and so I just think there's a lot to go in there but discussing this migration you know again I'm I'm sure you and your team are always here ready to help um you know moving to either as you said a flat a flat platform um into something more robust there's so much to think about but I just think you know it's really helpful knowing that you've been again in the in the trenches day in day out jacob from that end user standpoint so very helpful for those of you watching and listening jacob is here today at jacob baker wrapping up the final for fry a non-profit power week and is the sales manager at blooming extremely knowledgeable so glad to have your wise mind and expertise with us today in the hot seat I promised you some fun or I think I did if not I hope you had some fun this is great I thoroughly enjoyed this it goes by so quickly um you know I had to win the arm wrestling championship with julia today so she's out I'm in but I love to nerd out over CRMs you know we talked with a lot of your colleagues as I already mentioned jacob this week this week really um you know has been a culmination of so much insight so many non-profit professionals that just use passion even when it comes to cleaning up your database if if you think that's not fun mica makes it fun so um yes do go back and and take a look at any of these episodes so we started off with learning from current non-profit giving trends we talked about that first time donor journey which today's question also alluded to you know Tuesday's conversation that we had with Ann Felman spring cleaning shout out to mica there the non-profit tax receding that was just yesterday it seems like it was you know already last week but so many good information that came out of Diana's conversation yesterday about this tax receding and then today's five commonly asked questions about non-profit CRMs jacob so grateful to have you um and the support from Bloomerang so thank you from me to you I wish you the best weekend and just want to say thank you for all that you do um I do want to give a shout out to our friends and supporters that allow us to have these conversations so again the entire team um in Indiana in the Indiana that was clearly very hard this morning are much further away so thank you to Bloomerang American non-profit academy staffing boutique non-profit thought leader fundraising academy at national university non-profit nerd in your part-time controller these companies are here day in day out just like jacob is to help you achieve your critical mission and and they are are here to to help support you do just that so so grateful to have this conversation uh you know really looking at all that uh Bloomerang offers the entire team there's so much here but do they are customer-centric I have experienced that firsthand and I've witnessed that as well this week so jacob thank you for joining us and for all of you that joined us uh you know video or audio so glad that you're here if you missed any of the episodes you can find them on our archive and as we end every episode we want to remind you to please stay well so you can do well thank you so much jacob