 So as I mentioned, I'm your organizer here for the Toronto area, and we are a global network. It's a TechSoups and non-profit that helps other non-profits get implemented and use tech effectively, and we are global. Now, Eli, is this number still accurate? I thought we were over 128. I think I might have an old slide. It's an old slide, but accurate enough. Close enough. We're all over. We're pretty wide networks and it's been pretty fun being virtual because we get to meet people from other countries as well. These are a few of our community values. Obviously, it's kind of mostly common sense stuff, but it's worth mentioning. We welcome everyone. We put our community first and, you know, we like to support each other. And in order to help build stronger non-profits and we use technology to do that both through our presentations that we offer and now virtually as well using things like Zoom. We love to have people participate, so feel free to ask questions. And going forward, if you have any ideas for presentations that you would like to learn more about, or if you have something you want to share, something that maybe worked well for you in your own nonprofit, or if you are in the tech industry, if you have something you want to share for other non-profits to be able to learn from you, we would love to hear from you. I'll provide my email address later, whoops. And obviously we treat each other with kindness and respect that kind of goes without saying. So a little bit about TechSoup. You can learn more about them at TechSoup.ca. Basically, they give you access to technology at really affordable prices. In some cases, there's even free items that you can get such as Google for non-profits is actually free, but you do need to validate through TechSoup. And these are just a very few of the vendors out there that have products available through TechSoup. I've already mentioned anyone can kind of help with planning an event or giving ideas. Feel free to reach out if you have any ideas to help increase participation or like I mentioned, if you have any other topics that you might find of interest. A little bit about me before I pass this off to Chris, I have over 20 years of experience implementing a variety of systems from HR systems to CRMs to all sorts of other systems, real estate as well, for all sorts of nonprofits, small businesses, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and large government organizations. So I've been very immersed in technology for a long time now. I'm also Google Cloud certified. So if you are interested in getting on Google for nonprofits, please reach out. I'd love to help you take advantage of that free offering. I'm here because I'm passionate about helping nonprofits and businesses work smarter and not harder. I love this platform here that TechSoup has that we're able to bring all of this technology and information to nonprofits who might not have had the same opportunity somewhere else. And one of the other reasons I'm kind of here is because I'm actually part of a nonprofit as well. I'm the president of the One Parent Families Association of Canada. And in setting up that organization, I've had to set up a lot of their systems and processes and to make sure that they're operating efficiently. So that whole kind of marriage of tech and nonprofits has been with me for a while as well. So I'm going to stop talking and I will hand this over to Chris, who is going to share some interesting information with us, I'm sure. So Chris, I'll let you tell us a little bit about yourself and what we're going to learn from you today. Amazing. Yeah, I have it all set up for the intro. Super excited to chat today about marketing software. We have a lot of great software options to go through and I'll definitely review there. Everyone can see the presentation plan. Yeah. Okay, so leveraging marketing software to build a marketing funnel for your nonprofit. I haven't anything just want to stay high level for a second. Within the charity industry within Canada there was about $10.6 billion donated and this is 2017 so might be a bit higher now. But it hasn't been growing for the past decade or 15 years now, and the average number of organizations donor supporters around 3.8. Well, there's a growing number of charities that are competing for a pie that's not growing, but they're not not growing in of itself, which means it'd be super efficient and super smart with your marketing, both spend allocation and strategy. Software enables that and allows for better automation a lot smarter decisions, but it needs to be part of a larger strategy. This is some pre COVID annual operating budgets up with marketing's part of and as everyone who may be part of a nonprofit or these one marketing dollars are extremely restricted. So it's more important to know what not to do, then it is what to do. So when it comes to leveraging software to figure out how does it fit within my strategy from the market which will walk through. And then more importantly, how does it help me leverage and scale tactics that I implement. So today we're going to go through three key areas. Number one is brand positioning, this part does not touch on software but it's necessary to set everything else up so that you know how to why you're leveraging the software in the first place. Once we get through that will go through marketing funnel, we're going to stay high level here and focus more on the software usage because we could talk for days about how to best set up your marketing funnel. So when you actually implement your marketing funnel, you implement your software to optimize and be super efficient. How are you actually going to track and measure success to know that you're heading in the right direction. So more of a high level review and marketing strategy, in addition to leveraging software. So a bit about me before we dive into it. So I'm a graduate from the Ivy Business School in Toronto, sorry, in London. I founded three companies in the past, one successful exit. I've consulted with both marketing strategy and website development for over 30 businesses across 19 different industries so nonprofit real estate fashion, beauty, private equity. I've been a part of a lot of industries which has allowed me to really learn the principles of marketing and what actually works across multiple industries, and not just tactical things that may help one individual. And finally my volunteer side I'm a Canadian delegate from the nations and the private sector representative for the youth, most recently at UNACCCC. So throughout this presentation I'll be leveraging some examples from Charity Water. Charity Water is one of my favorite organizations in terms of how they display themselves to the market, how they position themselves, and more importantly how they make the donor feel like they're adding a lot of value. They've done a terrific job so I'm going to leverage some of their homepage designs and emails to show his examples as we move forward. And before we dive into caution on software, software is only valuable if your team and yourself actually utilize it to its full extent. A lot of time to see software implemented, but it doesn't get fully utilized. So it ends up just being an added cost with no added benefit. So when it comes to the examples I'm going to show I'm not diving heavily deep into every each individual example. I'm staying high level. And with that you could take that as inspiration on trying to find either that one or a comparable example that you could implement in your nonprofit organization. So first off brand positioning the three carriers we're looking at here is what is the market landscape, what do you stand for and who are you targeting. So the market landscape is key to understand before you start building your marketing funnel. Obviously every every marketer knows this but to understand why you must review it. So first off, the market size and growth we already reviewed that the market size was about 10.6 billion dollars in the charity space in Canada. So that's the total address for market. Now you have to figure out within my organization or how I'm positioned what's the service bowl address for market the same. And this just means if we do, for example, we target a specific geography, let's say British Columbia, or we target a specific vertical let's say educational nonprofits. That's your service bowl just on market from the total. This allows you to understand how large we be scaling and what is our potential goals when it comes to figuring out who our target audiences, and then growth rates a huge, huge point as well. You can figure out that understanding who your competitors are, and technically every nonprofit is competing for the same pie of dollars. So you have to consider them as competitors even though everyone wants to donate for good cause, because they're competing for attention in dollars, right. So once you lay out your competitors and how they're positioned within that market, you could figure out, where does the gap exists for myself to position our brand and our nonprofit so that we could attract our specific type of donors that be applicable to our nonprofit and break through the noise. So when it comes to market size I do a quick, I did a quick 10 minute research on a simple takeaway you could get that's applicable to software. So first I looked at what's the market size and growth this is where I got that $10.6 billion number, and we can see adjusted for inflation the industry has not grown much since 2006, there's an annual growth rate of 0.9% so it's completely state or nearly which means once again the Pies and Growers seem to be really smart about how you allocate your capital. The second thing I found was that online giving grew to about by 17%, this is back in 2017 again, compared to 6% in total giving, and that's not adjusted for inflation, which means that a majority of the dollars are shifting to online. And finally, when I looked at an online giving index this is from Canada helps monthly donations have been scaling in comparison to single donations. So just by this quick market research, there's a key takeaway found how much people are giving isn't changing, but the manner in which they do so are. So what does this mean for your work. Well, if it means there's more monthly subscriptions and people want to spend money online is your organization allowing that and offering that to your and donor. If not, are you potentially losing out on a large share of those donor dollars to help your nonprofit make a larger impact. So I was done in 10 minutes and imagine we could do with a much larger market analysis and how that could affect how you spend your dollars and be very, very focused with your marketing overhead spend. Next is what do you stand for. So a lot of organizations know what impact they want to make but communicating that to the end customer can be difficult because they have a knowledge bias as in, I know what I stand for, but everyone else may not understand that. So it's a simple method that has a lot more research behind it, but it's called the I help statement or we help so we help who with what so they can do what. So for example, we help children children in underprivileged communities with getting access to quality education so that they could have an impact in their communities and growth throughout their career. Something like this that could be organized simply could be and communicated very focused to your own consumer could then help them relate what do they want to give back to and what are you actually doing as a nonprofit why am I don't know what any money to you. So this is the charity water example. So this is just a screenshot from their homepage on their website. And first thing I see is they have their mission or one liner right away. A lot of the charities I looked at did not have this which was shocking. But for example here is we believe in a world where everyone kind of access to clean one. Join us. This is a cause I care about I already know what their mission is. They also have a monthly donation call to action that research we did prior for the quick market research they're offering that as their main call to action on above the fold on their homepage. So allowing people to donate monthly their $40 USD a month is probably researched on the average person average someone is willing to donate monthly. Below that they have a clear cause and effect so your $40 monthly donation will lead to this right. This is huge for for donors because in the day the nonprofit isn't the hero and that's the donor is your job is to help guide them to where they want to go which will get into. And finally overview their impact. They're very very clear on what they do what their impact is, and how I would be contributing as a donor, and they have a clear call to action that aligns with the trends in the new industry. So they know who they are what they stand for, and how they differentiate in the market, all seen within one screenshot from their homepage. Finally is who you're targeting. So once you know what the market landscape is like and how competitors are positioned. You are and what you stand for and how you want to be positioned, who you're targeting is the next step with limited marketing funds you have to be super focused on targeting. So this is a simple software from HubSpot it's called make my persona, it allows you to create an avatar on your ideal customer, though I do recommend diving a bit deeper because this is a much more simpler and high level version but it gives you some good guidance. The idea of an avatar is my customer let's say it's Chris I'll use my own name. He is this type of person this age group this income demographic. This is his likes and dislikes brands he associates with, you want to know everything about me and my type of segment and amongst other segments you may target as a nonprofit. Because when you do so you're able to craft all of your marketing messages and all of your marketing campaigns and strategy and tactics around those personas so you heavily focus so that your marketing dollars go further, as opposed to just spending across the spectrum. It's a, it's a called a story brand framework is a book called building a story brand highly recommend it, and they leverage the story format of movies and books to apply to business and it's a very simple way of thinking about it. Step one is a character in this case it's the donor that character has a problem, and that problem shows itself in three ways there's external internal philosophical problems. The my feeling of having anxiety or that emptiness feeling in my stomach, which is a result of an internal problem of maybe I don't feel like I'm doing enough with my work, which is a philosophical problem of me wanting to have a larger impact in the world, figuring out who your character is. So who you're targeting and what their problem is is key, because then you can figure out how you should be positioned as a nonprofit you are the guide in this journey you are not the hero nor the character in your role show the character, how why you understand their problem, and what to do about it. So you give them a plan. In the example of charity water that plan was you spend $40 a month every month and over the next year you'll have an impact on 12 water projects. And then you give them that clear call to action do this next, and then you'll be able to solve those external internal and philosophical problems to avoid disaster in this case that feeling of emptiness and its success the feeling of impact. So laying out this heroes journey and I just explained a very high level one, you're able to think through how your brand is positioned and how should it be positioned in the market, which will then align all your copywriting on your website all the copyright within your marketing to target the problem that your character is facing. So let's high level brand positioning, we could go into it further so you give her one more question that have to reach out or answer any questions at the end. But next we'll go into the marketing funnel, and this is where a lot of the software as per the keynote will be discussed. The software we're going to touch on will be around generating leads nurturing leads and then closing donors. The marketing funnel step one generate awareness so what is your brand represents step two is converting leads this usually implies collecting an email or some sort of contact for your CRM customer relationship management system. Then it's to nurture and close those leads so if they're not donors right away how do you make sure that over time you give them more information, more education and more reason to donate and close. And the final advocacy, we're not going to tap into advocacy at the end, because there's not much software around this so we're going to stay with the first three. So generating awareness. For areas I want to cover there's so many different tactics you could leverage but just want to keep it simple. Digital advertising social media blog posts and press within digital advertising, there's a bunch of softwares you could use I narrowed it down to three really good ones. Adderall HubSpot and FoodSuite so I know someone mentioned HubSpot before HubSpot is an amazing CRM that has awesome mark integration and they actually have integration with Adderall that allows you to use a lot of artificial intelligence, to connect all of your ad softwares together in a system to see how you're spending money and where you should reallocate. And I actually have, what's it called. So AdRoll and HubSpot have a great integration which I'm pulling up now this is a video demo. Did everyone see that video by the way, easily, I want to make sure that everything's playing correctly. Yeah. The visual is coming through the audio deletion but I think that's okay. That's fine. Yeah, as long as the video was there. So the reason I wanted to share that was because that's an AdRoll integration with HubSpot. Why is this important? Well, whatever CRM you're using and we'll get to some CRM options afterwards, you want to make sure that it integrates with all other technologies because AdRoll, for example, is a great way to have displayed advertising. FoodSuite's another option as well but AdRoll allows you to have, all right, we have these Google ads going, this Facebook ads that's integrated with our CRM, either if you're a B2B focused nonprofit or a B2C focused nonprofit. With that, you could see exactly where leads are coming from, what they're clicking, what their actions are, calculate all your attributions so that you're very, very data-centric when it comes to applying a marketing spend. As opposed to just having our CRM and then running some Facebook ads, you really want to make sure those integrate really well and you want to make sure that all of your platform is together so you know what works and what doesn't. So when you're measuring and tracking, you can reallocate budget and focus on what does. Next we have social media, so these are social media planners, FoodSuite's another, once again, FoodSuite's a great old companies in platform. There's Buffer and Agorapulse, I'll walk you through Agorapulse. These are just ways to manage all of your social media accounts into one and get good analytics and data to figure out what's working, what doesn't, who's my audience, what are they interacting with. So for FoodSuite, our Agorapulse, apologies. They have a lot of great features, so here we have a unified social inbox, so if everyone can see, there's Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, so you can see all of your pages, all of your accounts under one page where you can reply to DMs on one platform. There's that intuitive publishing, so this is a way to publish across multiple platforms. Social listening, so being able to track, all right, what are people saying about you, about your competitors, about your industry, whatever it may be. So you could stay on top of trends to post more social and interact, or to see, or to correct things if they're going wrong and there's a bad social buzz around your brand. And finally, just as importantly, the insightful analytics. So there's great tools on what you're publishing, the interaction with it, the content, etc. So having a social media platform, something like an Agorapulse, like Buffer, like FoodSuite, is extremely beneficial to make sure that you're on top of what you apply on social media. And then connecting that data to let's say your CRM, like HubSpot, so you have everything once again coordinated to see who's interacting with why. So you get a really data-centric and holistic picture of who your customers are as they start rolling in, or who your donors are, apologies, as they start rolling in. Next is BlogPost. BlogPost, this is very high level, but anything that's a content management system, so CMS, something like a WordPress, which a lot of people might be familiar with. They're about 50% of the internet, so they're quite popular, but there's a lot of other content management systems you could leverage for blogs. And the great thing about something like an ad, or which we'll get into later, you can see HubLogPost impact potential donors, which we'll get into a software on within the converting lead section. And finally, Press. Press is more about managing reach out outreach and coordination. You can do this simply in Google Sheets, which I know NetSquared has access to G Suite and Sandra is a G Suite expert. So there's also Airtable, I brought it to the sub-prior, but Airtable is a great way to more of a data table you could leverage to track everything. So they have amazing templates. Here I just searched Press, for example. And you have some great options to manage and track Press. So PR media lists, you have a firm CRM, PR outreach, I'll just go to this one, for example. And here you can see the Airtable, which is more of a data table, less of an Excel sheet, where you could connect fields from different publications. You could have a bigger deep dive. You have fields like links. You can put images in the cells much more cleanly than you can with the Google Sheets, for example. There's great filtering, some different views you could leverage. So Airtable is a great tool to use, if once again, if your team is willing to take on the learning curve. Each cell could open up as its own sort of CRM in and of itself, so you could find all the details for an article, a post, or whatever it may be. So definitely take a look at Airtable if you're interested in more of a data solution, and less of an Excel sheet solution to manage and track Press, or whatever else it may be. So again, to converting leads, those Airtable software that you could leverage to generate awareness. When it comes to converting leads, like I mentioned, it's about collecting some sort of piece of data on the customer. So maybe it's email. Email is a classic one. It's a low hanging fruit, and it's super valuable to nurture. Two areas I want to cover for potential uses is transitional CTAs and marketing analytics. In general, CTA, what it means, a CTA is a call to action. So the main call to action that say is donate now. If a customer is our donor is not ready to donate, you need a transitional call to action, which is okay if you're not ready, do this, give us your email, and that way you can nurture them. So for example, download this ebook is a classic one. And with that download, you got to give us your email. This transitions them to a nurturing phase, which then you could transition to a full call to action. So some software you can leverage, there's Upwork, InstaPages, and GoToWebinar. I'll start from the bottom, GoToWebinar. I just didn't want to use Zoom since everyone has Zoom fatigue, but it's another option. We have, it's another option to leverage when it comes to doing webinars, which is a transitional call to action. Give us your email and you could sign up for the webinar. InstaPage is, you could leverage to create landing pages. So I'll pull up what that looks like. InstaPage is homepage. So it's, once again, another version of CMS. So you could organize pages super simply, have a call to action be download this ebook or whatever it may be, download this PDF on our impact or whatnot. Watch this video. You could create very beautiful, very simple landing pages. You could also use WordPress, but InstaPages is very focused. And then finally was Upwork. Now Upwork you could leverage. I had a previous talk on NetSquared around Upwork and leveraging softwares alike to find great freelancers. So here I just searched ebook writing. You could post a job post as well and invite people. But you could see there's professional ebook writers, content writers, you could just hire for relatively cheap, say $25 an hour for this person. And you could help produce those transitional call to actions. So leveraging Upwork InstaPages, go-to webinar, all very valuable. Next is marketing analytics. So if you're not already integrating Google Analytics with your website, definitely should. There's a lot of tools in Google Analytics that you should use on the advanced stage, which is more around ensuring there's goal conversions and tracking those, seeing who your demographics are, what sources are coming from. Google Analytics is just a basic, you should always have integrated into your platform, your website. But I'm going to dive into or a rebbe. This is a platform I learned about recently. I have a three, four minute video, I'm about to play that's going to walk it through. But when it comes to marketing intelligence, it's extremely, extremely good at executing and helping you learn what works and what doesn't, especially if you're not super data forward. So I'm going to play the video now so you can understand what the platform looks like. So how will rebbe works and what makes it different from all the other analytics tools out there. Here's a short is the volume playing by the way. The video, I hear it. Okay, great review that'll give you the lowdown. A rebbe is a marketing analytics tool, which will help you will evaluate and optimize all of your marketing efforts from your main campaigns to new posts to release. It will help you analyze the flow on your website showing you what leads certain visitors to convert while others leave your site. While Google Analytics will certainly give you important data, a rebbe sets the bar higher. In addition to providing you with data you can trust a rebbe was designed to solve the problems that users of Google Analytics face. Yes, this is your chance to be data driven without the headache. So what's different about a rebbe. First of all, it doesn't require any code. You can divine any event on your website button clicks form submissions page groups and anything else by yourself without a developer. We don't believe in creating endless amounts of data. You're not the one who should be doing all the work. We present summarized and actionable data for everything you need in order to track changes and stay on top of your site. A rebbe is also very simple to use and has a beautiful friendly interface so you can. Let's go over the main features or rebbe offers codeless events know what led visitors to convert. As I mentioned, you can easily track any event on your website without using code signups purchases new subscribers and more. Unlike with other tools were defining an event shows you data only from that point on or rebbe lets you see that data retroactively. You'll be able to see data for any event that occurred since installing the rebbe tracking code on your site, even if you didn't define the event right away. So every time you have questions about your site, you'll be able to get answers right away. Learn what leads website visitors to perform this event, what the conversion rate of each channel is which pages convert best and much more funnels create beautiful funnels in just a few clicks and learn where you're losing visitors. Individual visitor journeys track the activities of individual visitors see every single event they perform and discover what they do before they convert or rebbe makes it easy to integrate their email addresses as well. You can also view the journey's aggregation and find out what the most common journeys are for getting to a certain event or page. It will help you know where to focus and which funnels to build. Correlations. Discover how a certain event impacts another. For example, are your blog readers more likely to buy our visitors who viewed the video on your homepage more likely to sign up. Analyze your different marketing channels learn which channels have the highest conversion rate and find out where your best audience is coming from or rebbe also offers attribution display which will help you better score each of your channels and ultimately understand how each channel contributes to sales and conversions. So I'll stop it there. But as you can see there's a lot of value that industry standard to have when it comes to marketing analytics, especially as things shift digitally. If you don't have things like this set up there's a lot of money being wasted through the funnel and with limited budget you have to sort of make sure every every dollar goes as far as possible. So leveraging software like or rebbe or Google Analytics the very base at the very base is very, very necessary to have integrated, especially with the online donation scaling, even further with coded Before I go on I, there might be some questions I just want to take a look at the chat to make sure. Well, we'll just answer closer to the end. Okay. So next is nurturing leads and closing them. So we have CRM to customer leadership managers, you probably already have one integrated but just necessary to go overview. You can use something like a Salesforce which is much more enterprise level, a lot more expensive, difficult to onboard, but once you're on, it's extremely powerful, or something like HubSpot which in my opinion is just as powerful as Salesforce with a lot lower barrier to entry, and has a lot of add on tools that's easy to build on top of. These are two classics for tech and software businesses. There's also software focused on donations and nonprofits so donor perfect is an extremely popular one, a lot of you may have heard of. There's rager's edge, and then there's network for good which is meant for smaller organization. So something like a donor perfect, which I'll just take through if you do not have not heard of it. It allows you to see all the data for your donations like geographically, where is it coming from, easily process payments and set up payment pages create campaign allow your donors to create campaigns to raise capital or raise money. And it has a serum integration so you could foster donor relationships over time. So here's a quick video from donor perfect. Your donors live online. They keep up with family and friends online. They pay bills online, and chances are they donate online to on average online giving increases by 8% each year. So why not meet your donors where they are online and make giving easy for them. However you collect payments through online forms are on the go on your mobile device, your donor perfect system goes to work for you, simplifying the donors experience and collecting data for you in real time. When you enroll in donor perfect payment services, your organization can effortlessly process online payments through donor perfects online forms, collecting over the phone payments that process right from a donor's record and take onsite payments directly with the DP mobile app. All of your payments are processed securely through donor perfects payment services using donor perfects merchant services means short turnaround time on receiving funds and lower processing fees. Your donor perfect online forms you can configure your forms to match your brand and embed them right on your website. At the end of their transaction donors can share your form to their social media pages. All forms are optimized for mobile for a smooth donor experience from anywhere. Your online forms can link right into your email appeals which you can design and send in the snap with constant contact. It's never been easier for donors to give a one time donation, join your monthly giving program or create and share their own peer to peer fundraising campaign on your behalf. With every gift, no matter this listener gifts can be acknowledged through automated personal emails set as soon as the gift is processed. So that's a high level overview of something like a donor perfect so as you can see there's a lot of different options when it comes to CRM or software so find the one that works for you is key and so I'm not diving super deep into anyone individually. Something like a donor perfect could be really useful if you're looking for just one platform to do everything, but if you're more of an advanced nonprofit and have a larger potential base of customers, a hub spot is much more advanced, and you can use other integrations, like different email funding funnel tools or the other tools we mentioned prior to integrate everything else into HubSpot. And with that there's email funds and converting leads. First you got to get the email, nurturing them email is someone the best ways as many of you already may know. And there's some great tools for that mail champ active campaign drip are just a few there's a lot of email final tools, and even some of the CRMs like HubSpot or donor perfect have email automations built in. So something like a mail champ which I'll just show everyone are not familiar with it has a lot of great options. So you can actually create websites, email campaigns, landing pages. So audience management is great, great, great for second patient to create platforms, target, you could create content for the emails directly in MailChimp. So images, whatever it may be. You have some great automation so customer journeys. So for example if a customer signs up on a Pacific landing page that you built outside of your website or if they sign up on the sign up form on your website, they can have different journals, you could always you could automate all that. And then of course insights and analytics so MailChimp is one of the many powerful tools you could look into. It's one of my favorites because it's the easiest in terms of user experience. But there's also very powerful it's active campaign drip. After campaign maybe get more geared towards tech companies so it may not be right for you. And then drip is really really good for more of a B2B sales type of initiative. An example of an email so I signed up for Charity Water just to see what the first email look like and they sort of executed it perfectly so it's not just leveraging software and automating it's also making sure your content is really on point. So things repeated from what we learned in the marketing strategy stuff session. First off their mission statement is repeated. Their mission to build a brain clean water to every person in the planet. Secondly, they repeated that subscription call to action that is their main call to action monthly recurring revenue. So they repeated it in that first email, but let's say I'm not ready to donate, even though they have my email, they have a transitional call to action. Watch this film, educate yourself more. This is a perfect first email. If I was ready I would have clicked the subscription. I wasn't probably I actually did watch the film because I was interested. So, figuring out what your content is when it comes to that email flow and automating is just is even more important than automating in and of itself. And the final software within the marketing fund I want to talk about is Zapier or Zapier. If you have not heard of it, it's a phenomenal tool. I know Sandra is a big fan of it, where you could integrate a lot of different software. So all the software we talked about you want to make sure they're communicating together so you have this integrated system to do things better and more effectively. So in this example, there's a trigger. So in this case the trigger is when I get an email and Gmail, the action, we're going to copy the cash from Gmail to Dropbox, or no net squared has the description to box so maybe it's box. And the action is alert me in Slack for about the new Dropbox file so you could create these automations on there's thousands of apps you could leverage. So I'm gonna walk through a quick video from Zapier just what what this looks like when it comes to creating a zap. Why not realize it, but a lot of the work you do every day can actually be done automatically with Zapier, you can automate repetitive tasks. For example, let's say you spent every morning downloading, then uploading CSV files full of yesterday's leads, you might even need to download email attachments and upload them into a cloud app for your team. Maybe you take the time to organize your day your weeks to do list by grabbing tasks from email chat and wherever else. And while this work is incredibly important to the health of your company, it's time consuming meant for more than just data entry with Zapier using automated workflows, which we call zaps, you can connect to or more apps together to do the busy work for you, either create one from scratch or grab a pre made workflow, which we call zap templates, we have 10s of 1000s of zap templates that you can turn on within minutes. So let's go ahead and set up a zap with the template, because my team uses Gmail for email and box for cloud storage. I'm choosing the zap template with those apps. Don't worry if you use different apps, the principles I'm showing you in this zap will apply to every zap you make. This app will trigger whenever I receive a new email with an attachment in Gmail, it'll then upload the attachment to box. But all I need to do is authorize my Gmail and box accounts, symbolize your zap as much as little as you'd like to ensure it's doing what you want it to. You can add a step to send a message to your team, or even filter which attachments are added to the cloud. Your zap can be as customized as you need it to be, depending on what you needed to do. So here's a zap here, so super powerful tool, when it comes to communicating all these softwares we're talking about, because in the day softwares are only valuable if it fits within the system. Each software uses that individual node, so whether it be using a new CRM that you just heard of, or using air table, you could connect all these things into a zap here, which is super powerful. And the final part which is we're almost done here is measuring success and this is very, very important to overview and there's like a few softwares you could leverage. We're going to talk about choosing your KPIs, your key performance indicators, and then measuring and tracking system. So the biggest questions is what KPIs do you choose, right? If your team doesn't know the strategy behind this, I will do a quick overview, could definitely dive into it further if you have more questions afterwards. The first off is figuring out what your North Star KPIs. It's one number that you associate, that's a good encompassing number to associate the success of your entire nonprofit organization. From that North Star, that one number, you have sub-KPI's, these numbers feed into that North Star to ensure its success. And then each sub-KPI could have further detailed numbers, so detail one, two, and three, for example, that feeds into the sub-KPI which feeds into the North Star KPIs. One of your numbers down like this is extremely important because let's say for example, I'll go through an example. My North Star KPIs number of people served, one of the main sub-KPI's is donation dollars, donation dollars to be broken down to number of donors, dollars per donor, and retention. So if I notice that my North Star KPIs for the year is I want to help out 1.2 million people, so 100,000 people served per month. So 300,000 people. So in order to do that, I need let's say it's a dollar a person, $300,000 in donation dollars. I just broke down my North Star KPIs into my donation dollars. If I'm missing that mark, I can look at those three key feeding indicators, number of donors, dollars per donors, and retention to see which one is off and what levers do I have to pull or change to ensure that I'm hitting my donation dollar target, then feed into my number of people served target. Once you have this laid out, this will allow you to influence what marketing tactics and strategies are actually working and then adjust course if they're not working. Because at the end of the day your goal, you have a mission as a non-profit and you have to make sure you're hitting that North Star KPI and marketing just one way to build awareness and build out that funnel to close to hit that key performance indicator. So how do you measure and track these KPIs? There's two key softwares I want to point out. So Google Sheets is a low-tech version that I actually use just because it's simple to use, easy to share. There's also one that I found called GECO board, which I'll show. So when it comes to Google Sheets, this is how I've actually laid it out for one of my organizations. There's all my KPIs laid out because the main ones, then I broke it down by vertical in the organization, so sales and marketing, customer care operations, product and tech. The unit I use, the data source, the data source usually links out so I can just click it and go to that source. And then I track it month over month. And then what I do in Google Sheets is I leverage some conditional formatting. So if I have a target every month. For example, let's say I want to get $100,000 in donation dollars a month. If I'm below that, it'll go right if I'm above that screen. So I can figure out where am I missing the mark and what do I have to change. So by breaking it, those key performance indicators down by month and then by week, you can really be focused on that long-term goal for the year. And then GECO board is, it has a dashboard that integrates with a lot of other softwares. You just have a clear look at all your main KPIs. You can even project it onto a TV if you're in office to see those KPIs every day. So a lot of tech companies use something like the GECO board. But like anything, especially with software marketing, you have to be inpatient with actions. So do things quickly, but patient with results. Testing takes a while. Let's say it's three weeks. It doesn't work. Change. The results usually happen over the course of three months, six months, 12 months. So be really diligent and focused on tracking everything. A lot of the software represented today was on tracking analytics and making sure you're on top of everything. But really be patient with the results. Look at results over the course of three to six months. So that's it. Today we covered the brand positioning at a high level, marketing funnel and then measuring success and all the software you could leverage within. So thank you for listening and I will open the floor to any questions people have. Yeah, that was excellent. Thanks, Chris. I'm just, I don't think I saw any questions come through the chat yet. Does anybody have any questions you can also come off mute if you like and ask away. Hi there, Yila and Vancouver. Let me dive it and like break the ice here. So yeah, so this is really helpful to get a sense like the tools and the stages of that marketing funnel. You know, I think part of my question is to say like, so I have people in here. And what I think I often get stuck with as an organization is that North Star discussion. We all have our own separate work and like getting us to agree on North Stars can be something challenging in any organization. Can you give me give you some hints on how I might start that discussion or get people to some kind of common agreement so we can really identify what success looks like. Another question because defining success numerically is extremely important to your make sure you're on the right track, because a lot of times people just spin their wheels and not actually making any progress towards that North Star. So I'll use the example of one of my own organization so I'm a director at a company called Adrian director and partner, and we sell just a sparkling water. We're trying to figure out what is our North Star because we have a lot of different departments. One department is sales right we need revenue. One department is operations making sure we're producing enough cans. One department might be human resources. So figuring out what that number is that if this number is hit, it means that the health of our business is being tracked is performing well. So, for example that North Star for us is number number of cases sold. We need to sell those cases we need revenue, we get revenue from it, but also just as importantly operationally it means we're producing the cans properly. So when you're figuring out what that North Star KPI is it has to be encompassing of a bunch of different departments that all work in coordination, where businesses fail is, they usually mismanage that number where they prioritize one area of the business let's say it's just donation dollars in the case of nonprofits, but don't prioritize other areas like donor retention rate is a huge one because you want to make sure you're not just getting their money this year, you're doing over a long period of time. So, in the case of the mission of a nonprofit it's always around that mission the mission towards impact. So what impact are you trying to make in the world, put a number behind it, even if it's arbitrary to start let's say it's a million people served. What happens is once you get there which happens quicker than you think you just push the bucket down. Alright now that I hit a million let's do 10 million that's our new North Star KPI. And it will force everyone to change the way they think under those sub buckets and those sub KPIs to think through okay hot what do we have to do differently to hit that North Star now. So, yeah, that help answer a question you like. Lovely thank you yeah that sounds good. There was another question here from Ian. He's looking for open source or free equivalence some of the software that you showed. And I'm not sure even if you had something kind of specific, because I know Chris covered a lot of different softwares out there. I know. Eli you mentioned. I honestly have never learned how to say it. But yeah I think yeah Ian I'd love some clarification as well because yeah there are so many different sets of functionality as you saw no one piece of software covered all of this like if you're looking for a straight up CRM solution with a nonprofit flavor on it. I would definitely say start with city CRM. It doesn't do modeling of sales funnels very well out of the out of the box but does lots of like donor management case management all that kind of stuff that nonprofits need. So that could work really well so yeah so I think actually Lori the city CRM might be actually a good solution for membership based nonprofits, where you can sort of you know run that kind of flow. So what you're looking to look at, if you've got again some more developer help is to look at using something like Salesforce which also has membership based modules where you can like you know send automatic reminders to people people as their memberships renew, instead of help you manage that flow. So that depends really what you're looking for to I know from, if you're looking to manage membership, there could be some micro, not Microsoft WordPress plugins that are free that might be effective I've used them in the past. But it also depends on your needs, because you kind of get what you pay for. Yeah member plus I believe is one of them and I think there was another one called s to member. I mean they might have changed their name since I last looked at them. It really depends what you're looking for. There's a lot out there. Yeah, like there's, you could go full custom if you have the budget for it, something like a WordPress and like you mentioned, they have subscription management that you can integrate with a payment processor like stripe that can manage all the subscription dollars you can see what people subscribe to and what do they have and then you can integrate that with your website quite easily. So that's the technology you're currently using so a lot of software is indicative of what what how are we currently built out in terms of technology, what will it integrate well with, and what makes sense for what we're trying to achieve. There was a, there is another option called streak for Gmail. It's free for one user but if you're planning on using it for a team then you need to start paying but if you are kind of just one person. It would work well with your free Google work space for nonprofits account, and essentially it manages your Gmail inbox to act as either CRM or project tracking tool or order management or donor management or membership management and emails. It's quite an interesting tool. And it's got a lot of different uses so that could be something if you're heavily email based on some items that might work well for you as well. And one thing I'll definitely mention with comes to software what I always do with organizations I'd rather built or consulted for start as low tech as possible, because what happens is over time with that low tech. You add some some columns and customizations you realize what you actually need. So when it comes to automating you have that base setup knowing what your needs are. So you're trying to find a software you're looking for a certain criteria, like X, Y and Z. So starting low tech allows you to have like not spend money or spend too much time invested into a certain software, and then you could grow and then you find a software that fits your needs. There's so much software out there you could definitely find one that's perfect for you like there's, there's a reason why I just present so many options. So first start low tech and then scale up I would say. I actually am planning on presenting and doing a presentation later on this year on five steps to select the right tool or system for your nonprofit, working in the tech industry for many years as a BA and doing product management as well I see that as a gap for some nonprofits and businesses in general. They tend to, and that is a good suggestion start small and figure out what you need, because it does all start with figuring out what you need. So and a lot of people have difficulty trying to figure out what it is they need because they don't also don't know what's out there. Exactly. Were there any other questions. And if there's any questions laid on the road. My email is in either the presentation or somewhere else you could always reach out and ask any follow up questions happy to answer and help out. But hope the presentation was was helpful and gave people a lot of options for software to leverage. I think I found it really interesting and useful and everyone else is saying thank you. It looks good. So I'll, I'll pop Chris's email in here. Anybody who wants to reach out to him or Chris if you want to pop it in I'm just trying to find it out here it is. So you guys can reach Chris here and if you want to reach out to me for anything or you have any other ideas for net squared, I will find in here as well. Thank you, Sandra. Excellent. All right, well I guess that's a wrap. Thank you so much Chris. Thank you for having me. Thanks. Hi everybody. Thank you so much.