 in the startup recording and process. I've had the luxury of working in marketing, primarily in the startup world when I was living in California. If any of you guys are big gamers or you like card games or tabletop games, let me know if you are because I used to be the experience director and marketing director at Exploding Kittens. So that was my time there for about two and a half years. And so after working in-house as a marketer, I decided to move back to the East Coast, started my own nonprofit consulting agency. And then I moved into, yay, Laura, I love Exploding Kittens too. Yup, so that's one of my babies a long time ago. And now I work here at an agency called Tap Network. And to give you a little background as to who Tap Network is, we are actually TechSoup's marketing technology partner. Our mission is your, your mission is our passion. I think it's, I'm sorry, I'm totally messing that up. But basically we're a mission driven marketing and technology agency that has been partnering with TechSoup for the last two years. So if any of you guys have ever explored the digital marketing and the website products and services offered through TechSoup, you'll eventually come and meet my team. And I will also be giving you guys lots of access points to continue this conversation if you feel the need to continue moving forward with it or have any other questions. But today, what are we gonna be talking about? We're gonna be talking about the donation funnel and how you look at it and build it for yourself. There's also gonna be some helpful best tips and tricks along the way at each of the points that I'll be gonna be shedding some light on. Now I also wanna be very honest and very transparent. This is a massive conversation and it's always gonna have to be looked at through the lens of your own organization, your mission. But what I'm gonna hopefully do is really showcase and identify for you guys the really strong perspective of what the skeleton should look like and then some high level, very targeted tactics along the way that you guys can either implement or at least maybe align with your current efforts. So let's start a little bit about like what we need to know or just some interesting key notes, key metrics around donations. So in case you guys haven't heard or seen any of the materials that we've been publishing, online giving, I'm waiting for the numbers for 2021, but online giving actually increased by 20% in 2020, which is an amazing number, especially given the fact that we were all kind of locked down a little bit scattered, a little bit scattered, a little bit overwhelmed. People weren't sure about how financially secure they were. A lot of you guys in the nonprofit sector as I worked with many, many of you through the last year and a half, really having to figure out how do we pivot from having these, I was just talking about with Aretha, having live in-person events, switching everything and most things to digital. So I think it's just a really telling number and we can continue to expect that percentage to grow over the next year and the years to come. Another interesting metric that I thought would be helpful for everybody on the call is 30% of the American population will actually at some point volunteer their time. So this is an important point for us to consider when we're looking at the overall donation strategy and we can tie this in at some point along the way with the segments of the different audiences we're looking at because 85% of volunteers donate to the nonprofits that they volunteer for. So I have always liked to throw that out anytime we're talking about donations on high level, really specific, making sure that you're identifying and noticing, sorry, you're including your volunteers in your ongoing messaging strategy through email and through web, making sure that you're always thinking of those as a very viable source of one-off donations and sometimes sustainable donations. Are you seeing a change in giving for 2021? Gail, great question. I don't have all the metrics because I unfortunately don't do all of the, I don't take all of the data points and make the reports myself. I'm waiting for some of the reports to come out. I'm anticipating probably by the end of this year some reports will start to come through and give us an understanding. So we're gonna just, let's dive in a little bit as to just high level, what is a donation funnel? I would love for you guys to either raise your hand or just say yes. How many of you guys are familiar with a general marketing funnel? Understanding what the marketing funnel is. Anybody? Pipeline of potential funders, awesome, great one. Great. Well, I'm gonna give you this lovely little visual. So in case you're not familiar, marketers use sort of this like funnel analogy because it sort of showcases and it really fits to the process of, as sort of Florie Wilson pointed out or said, it's nurturing prospects by attracting, by starting with the biggest audiences and then through a series of strategic tactics, you'll begin to narrow those pool of individuals by having them essentially convert at a specific step. This is what happens is basically you're gonna start with the largest set of audiences and you're gonna slowly narrow those individuals through a series of steps and conversion points and communication touch points to get an anticipated outcome. And when we're talking about donations, obviously we want them to make an initial donation as a single one-off donor. And then eventually we wanna look into how do we nurture repeat donations, sustaining donations along the way. So using this method and looking at this, we're gonna look at some of the metrics around each of these points, right? So if we're looking at, we have a bunch of website visitors and then we wanna know how many of those visitors become email subscribers and then we wanna know how many of those email subscribers make a first-time donation and then how many of those first-time donors can we actually nurture and turn into a sort of a repeat or recurring donor? So there's two levers that you are going to have to your disposal and to your sort of disposal to ultimately grow the overall number of people going through each of these stages. One is increasing the number of the amount of people coming into your website. And the second is increasing the number of people taking that individual sort of conversion point or call to action. So for instance, as you can see in this diagram here, if you're looking to increase the number of email subscribers, you can either increase the overall number of people entering the funnel, right? 1,500 people and we'll go over a couple of tactics on how we do that. And so if you had 1,500 people come through with a 1% conversion rate that would give you 15 new email subscribers. Or if you work, if you look to really maximize and optimize the actual landing page and the maybe the value proposition of that email subscription form, you have the opportunity to increase the actual percentage of individuals. So in this example, we only had 1,000 visitors but we had a 2.5% conversion rate and that actually left us with 25 individual subscribers. So I want you to think through on each of the steps and as we walk through this, we can always look at increasing the number of actual eyeballs on a piece of information or of a deliverable. And then we also can focus on increasing the percentage through certain tactics and strategies to actually increase the overall percentage of that what we call conversion rate. So that's something I kind of want to put on our radar and kind of get the baseline there as we continue to look through how do we actually attack and strategize to increase one of these two numbers. So let's take a look at website traffic. Now I know you guys came here to learn all about donation finals but this is a very important component and that is SEO. As a digital marketing agency, one of the things that we are always working with our clients is helping them optimize on their new websites or on their existing websites is optimizing their SEO for a multitude of reasons. The first is the technical SEO side. So let's go through a little bit of what each of these things. So a sitemap and a robots.txt file, these are really, really important for you to be able to have your website be readable. Oh, SEO, I apologize, that's a great, great answer. It's search engine optimization and I will type it into the chat as well. So you're gonna have it. So search engine optimization is essentially how are you optimizing your website from its technical code, the way that it's built on the actual platform, as well as the content pieces that are actually published on the website. How are you utilizing those two tactics and strategies to increase the visibility and the likelihood of your website showing up on a search engine website, right? So Google or Bing or Yahoo. What happens is when you type in a certain amount of keywords, search engines are actually crawling your website on a daily basis minute by minute and they're deciding which are the most relevant websites to actually put toward the top of the search engine outputs, right? So the best would be that we have your website popping up if someone were to say, homeless shelter is near me and then maybe it's your homeless shelter in your organization that pops up due to the location services as well as you guys have some really great SEO, you've got relevant content. So we're gonna kind of dive through each of those different pieces of the SEO and that we're gonna start with your technical SEO. So talking through a sitemap and robots.txt, did you not see it? Yeah, you had it to host the panel. Sorry, thank you everyone. Thank you. Search engine optimization, perfect. That way you can Google that. Sitemaps and robot.txt files, these are two objects that live on the back end of your website. You're welcome. These are the two types of objects that was this on the back of your website that essentially supports and helps make search engines as they read through your information, read it correctly and read it contextually. So it basically helps search engines be able to organize all of the information on your website more efficiently and more effectively. Alt text or alternative text in images. So anytime that a search engine is trying to read one of your web pages, it cannot actually read images. It doesn't have eyeballs, it uses robots.txt, sitemaps and other types of page readers to actually read the words on the page. And that's how it's gonna start to grade you on relevance of one page to the other, as well as the relevance between a search query and the content on your website. So alt text is an actual text file that you attach to every picture that you post on your website. And what that allows is for search engines to actually be able to read the description that you can manually input as to what's in that image. So for instance, if I had a picture of someone drinking a cup of coffee and I have a nonprofit coffee company that does fair trade coffee and I put wit drinking fair trade organic coffee from a coffee mug, a search engine can actually now read that and it actually increases the relevance of the content on your website because it can create that sort of connection point between the image and the actual written content on your website itself. So it's something that's very important. Additionally, it's really, really important for people with, for website visitors who may have some accessibility requirements around they may not have the best vision or they may be blind and they're using screen readers to actually read through the website. But like I mentioned before, screen readers can't actually, what tool do you use for creating alt text? Great question, George. Any website sort of hosting platform WordPress when you upload that media, look in the options when you're uploading it and you'll literally see the words alt text. It's different in different places along the depending on what website you're hosting your site on but it's usually part of the exact same information as you would put where you can add like the file name and then there should be an alt text piece right in there. So it doesn't have to be a third party tool. It's actually a tool that's gonna be built into the backend of all of your websites whether or not that's WordPress, Squarespace, Wix. So go and check out the information on your media on your website and you can update that there. The overall code. Now this is gonna be something that a lot of us as a nonprofit marketers, nonprofit professionals we may not have the technical know-how or the technical capabilities but making sure if you are hiring someone to do your website for you that the code is working correctly. Just something to be aware of it's not gonna be something I would put at the very, very top unless your website's constantly breaking but that's gonna cause more issues than the actual SEO. It's gonna cause other issues within your site that's probably gonna be more important. Speed is gonna be very important because if your website takes too long to load if you have large pictures on your website if you don't have enough bandwidth on your server or server space on your server and it's causing your website to lag if it takes more than three to five seconds for you to actually load for the website to load you're gonna start to rank lower in that page speed. Should we have an alt text? It's on each image Jackie that's a great question. So Jackie asked should we have an alt text for each image or once per website? So anytime you add a new image you always wanna set a unique alt text to each picture along the way. Lastly is security. This is gonna be really key because especially as we're discussing donations if it says not secure in the top of that little window that is gonna not only make it not necessarily look so great for Google to rank you but also from a user's perspective I'm not gonna trust your website. So security making sure you have security protocols set up and you have a security SSL on your actual website make sure that that's available to you. And then let's talk a little bit about the content side and this is gonna be a little bit more manageable. Sarah it's gonna be if you've ever went to a website it's like a single security login basically and then at the top corner if it says not secure right next to the URL bar in the URL bar that's how you'll know if your website is not secure and you need to probably contact one of my team members and we can take a look at getting that added on for you. Yep, single security login. Thank you. And then is the content relevant? So content side this is gonna be where you're gonna be able to you're gonna be able to actually have a lot more control as an executive director and as a marketer. So important components are relevancy as I was discussing before. If you're a nonprofit that deals with housing insecurity or with healthcare and you have a blog post about how great giraffes are that's gonna ding against you for your Donna let me hold that question. We can during the Q&A section I'll give you guys access to one of our email address and we can kind of figure out from there how we can kind of escalate these one-off scenarios but definitely Donna I would love to help figure that out. So you wanna keep the content relevant are there links to and from your website? So this is a great way to showcase authority. So if you have partnerships with other organizations make sure that you have your website linked on their website because what happens is Google is gonna be looking at oh, is this content being linked to and from another website? And if it is then they say, wow they have another person approving this content for me. Someone's added this website to their website as a reference as a partnership or as a potential other solution and it gives that extra level of clout. And then the actual content structure and length. So this is something where you might see H1, H2, header one, header two when you're looking at writing the content on your websites if it's a blog but ensuring that you're actually using the correct content structure and then identifying how long that content needs to be usually for a blog post if you really wanna write a blog post for SEO 750 to 1,000 words is probably gonna do the most benefit for you. A 300 or 400 word post, not so much that's probably more efficient for the actual marketing itself but it may not necessarily greatly impact your overall SEO. All right, so moving to the next way in which we can look at increasing traffic to the website. So we've got the SEO which really helps with your search engine optimization the visibility of your website when individuals are searching general topics around your website. The next piece kind of leads out from that second half of that content SEO piece which is what are you publishing on your social media in conjunction with your website that's gonna help drive individual visitors. So I've put some options up in here it's definitely a key component for your guys' donation funnel and a key element to driving an increase in the overall number of visitors to your website. So really focusing in on storytelling even just basic storytelling like what your organization is who you are why you do what you do and then dialing in on some maybe higher level content strategy do you have video that you're posting on social media there could be some really great testimonial videos that you could add to your social media. Additionally, blogging as I was mentioning for SEO that's a great way to help kind of create repeat visitors to your site if you're regularly posting blogs. We have, I might actually send Aritha I'll send you a couple blog posts that we've written around content strategy that will include to help sort of supplement some of the conversations and the pieces that I'm pointing out here. And then infographics this is a great opportunity for you to really get to the point particularly when it comes to focusing on your donation funnel and driving visitors to your website giving very simple yet visually appealing metrics around your impact, right? We say we sent 500 laptop computers to kids that needed laptop computers at risk youth to help them get through middle school and high school during the pandemic, right? These are really important pieces that someone might go, wow, they did this let me find out more about what they did and then I could start to make the concerted decision whether or not I want to either volunteer my time or in this conversation or within this scenario we're hoping for it in this webinar is what I donate my money. Quizzes are another just fun way to drive people to your website. If you come up with some silly ones sometimes it's like, it could be like I'm trying to think of a scenario we've done before where it's sort of, which trying to think, if you're trying to think of something off the top of my head you've may have seen some of those silly BuzzFeed type of quizzes where you answer the color your favorite color, your favorite destination that you'd love to go visit and then it outputs some sort of like you are a top tier giver or you are a perfect volunteer it could help maybe people figure out exactly what programs they would most appropriately or find most interesting to support with in your organization, but think about it it can get really fun and very creative. Also affords real time engagement and reporting and the most important piece is you're accessing your audiences in the palm of their hand, right? So 29% of donors in I believe in 2020 said that social media is the communication tool that most inspires them to give. 29% trailing just behind that is 27% at email itself and then I believe website is about 18%. So we're looking at 29, 18 and 27 the top three drivers, digital drivers are email, social media and website. So not skipping or skipping over social media would do all of you guys an incredible disservice as you're focusing on driving donations. And then lastly is making sure that you guys are maximizing the opportunity of additional grant funding for those of you who may not have heard about Google Ad Grants. They are very tightly tied through the TechSoup organization as being the validator. So I've put down here the steps for you all to basically go through and enroll and apply for Google Ad Grants which gives you $10,000 a month for free ad spend which is $120,000 a year guys. I would imagine most of you guys probably couldn't even spend that much on a cost per click basis the way that they charge you but that's an amazing opportunity for you to get more eyeballs to your website driving traffic to your website. Something to point out and to be very cognizant of is during that application process that step number four all of that SEO talk that we were talking about on that like two slides ago Google is actually going to be grading you based on 200 and something different metrics and saying your website is approved or your website is denied to be enrolled in Google Ad Grants. So I suggest folks if you have not done this before and you've never done it, I would definitely go through the process and see. Yes, thank you very much George, I appreciate that, yeah. So check and see if your website is actually approved and then we actually have a Google Ad Grant service that we can help you with setting it up and running it and managing it. It really is as George pointed out, it's a lot of work, it's a whole ecosystem and we actually are one of the service providers at TAP Network here. We help a lot of nonprofits that we've redone their website and then because we've redone their website we've been able to help them become eligible and for the Google Ad Grant and then set them up with their different Google Ad Grant campaigns and really hyper-targeting some of the top-performing keywords and trying to maximize as much of that $10,000 a month spend with the most relevant traffic to hopefully get folks through the different steps. There are, that's a great question Dr. Warren. I have not done a direct TechSoup webinar on Google Ad Grants but I'm sure if you go to the search bar and you type in Google Ad Grant it'll pop up basically any type of resource and it'll show at the top webinars, blogs and courses. I do know that there are some like 100 and 200 level courses on Google Ad Grants and I'm working on potentially launching a 300 level course next year with the courses team on managing and running Google Ad Grants as well. So that's another option. And then lastly is really how do we maximize the traffic that gets onto your website and actually incentivizes. So while SEO and social media and Google Ad Grants are great ways to increase your overall website traffic. Remember that other side which is increase the conversion point. And so it's important to think about the things that you're putting on your website and how it's positioning folks and visitors to actually sign up for your emails. That's gonna be the number one conversion that we're looking to do in your donation funnel to help us continue to target through email communications to actually either get that first time donation or nurture that ongoing recurring donor relationship between you, your organization and that individual. So the call to action, CTA, it kind of reinforces our psychological sense of reward. I was actually having some fun this week. Kind of, I just decided to figure out what is the psychology behind calls to actions. And so I kind of just found us a couple of high level things, but what we've been taught over time is our mental history. They've taught us that by clicking or signing up for something instantly brings a subconscious sense of reward, right? So we have actually ingrained in our general psyche as a world, right? As a community, as a society that when we are offered something or we're asked to do something and we actually click that button, there's almost like a, we can't help ourselves. We just have to click on that. So I've added a couple of options here, of what could be some really high performing, compelling ways to ask somebody or tell somebody to actually sign up for a website or for an email list. So these are some examples here. You can Google search a bunch of them, but this is a great opportunity for you to start testing some out and see what happens and how they're performing on your website. And then just as to give you a little bit of a high level of how this works on the backend, when we have a call to action on your website, right? And in this case, I've shown you guys what we have on TAPS website, which is a social media best practices downloadable work guide, workbook, right? So what happens is we say, hey, click here to download this free form or this free workbook. When they click that download now button, they get sent to a form where we ask for their first name, their last name and their email and that lead form dumps into our CRM list, which is where you guys can start to manage whether or not it's MailChimp, if it's constant contact, a multitude, we use HubSpot for in this example, this is a backend image of what our HubSpot looks like. Then you manage your ongoing communications through your CRM, which stands for Customer Relationship Management Tool, Customer Relationship Management Tool. And I'm gonna just point out, just put out there for everybody on this call, TechSoup recently just partnered with HubSpot, which is one of the, which is our favorite and most utilized CRM and one that I use with a bunch of my nonprofits to help them manage their ongoing marketing. It's just an incredible solution. Definitely go take a look at it. You can type in, I think if you just search for HubSpot on TechSoup's website, there's a landing page that kind of outlines, I believe it starts or is 40% off for all nonprofits. And I will tell you right now, it is definitely worth the investment compared to all the bells and whistles that come with the full solution. So take a look at that. And it will help when we get to sort of the email side, which we're about to jump into, you'll get to understand why leveraging something like a more robust email marketing platform can really help smooth and create a lot of efficiencies, particularly for some of the smaller nonprofits who may not have a larger marketing team that wants and need to send a lot of emails to a lot of people. And you guys, you're able to set that up automatically. And I have a little bit of a diagram for us to go through and a couple of slides. So let's take a little bit, look at sort of how to, what are the best practices? What are some components and some important pieces of the email marketing? So now we've looked at the website, we've looked at how do we increase the number of the actual number of visitors. We've also looked at how can we maximize that conversion point by really honing in our CTAs, our calls to actions. Now it happens when we have their information. So we're going to take a look at how, what are the best ways to get the most out of your subscriber list? Now, what I want to point out is it doesn't, your donation funnel doesn't always have to have a direct singular ask for donation. A donation funnel is all about building a relationship and eventually getting the individual to the point where they're compelled or they feel ready or excited to make that financial commitment to what you guys do. So as you're looking at your overall email marketing strategy, think about how you can sort of develop and build a relationship. And then you can start to spin off in maybe more direct email marketing specifically for donations. But I also want to just talk a little bit holistically here about how we manage and we should be managing the relationship with our subscriber list. So obviously I'm sure many of you guys know, newsletters are a vital piece. Consistency as well is key. If you're not doing it every month, consider starting one every quarter. You can also make those, make those newsletters not always just an update, but maybe adding valuable additional valuable content. So it could be a specific article, update, event invite, something along those lines, something that's gonna be really valuable and it doesn't have to be just, this is what we did in October. Something that sort of adds a new level to what it is that you're communicating. Obviously, as I was saying before, you really wanna use this tool to build trust and familiarity. So do that, try doing that with a welcome email series. So when someone signs up for your website, for your subscription or for your newsletter, really build out a lovely one or two thank you email series that are beautiful, that tell a little bit more about your organization, that really does that like, hey, you just showed up to my house for a house party we've never met. Let me introduce you and talk to you a little bit about who I am as a person and why I'm so excited that you were able to join me for this dinner party or for this evening. Think of your email subscription list as the same way. Be sure that you're sharing through your emails really compelling stories. Think about who is affected by your cause and what your organization's impact looks like. This kind of takes that infographic to a whole new level. You can embed the video files of testimonials and this is where you can potentially also start thinking about adding that support now, make a donation. There's always room for that on any of these types of things but this is where we can get maybe a little bit more pointed. And then of course, you wanna make sure you have that call to action, right? And other links to any of your website, any relevant pages, landing pages. And then I've included here as a pro tip. This is for folks who have really gotten their email marketing underway but maybe not necessarily taken it to the next step but A, B testing your emails. So an A, B test is when you change one component of a deliverable and that means you change just the subject line, maybe you change the infographic, maybe you change the call to action that's actually inside of that email, that button. So try testing one versus the other. I generally suggest starting with the subject lines and coming up with two subject lines and sending those out and see which one performs better then you can start to learn how many, which one actually got more opens on that particular email set. Was it the A subject or the B subject? That way you can start to learn about the behaviors of your audiences and make more concerted decisions that will hopefully increase that conversion rate, right? That's what we're always looking to do. All right, let's talk a little bit about what the compelling call to actions can look like within an email. So I've actually got, it's still fairly basic but I think overall, I think this is a great example. Become a Braun sponsor. It's not just like click here or donate now. We've really targeted exactly what this particular call to action is. Some of these other ones impact the life of blank today. Give to blank and blank today, I think is like, so this is actually a health equity organization. So and health inequity today could be a larger sort of top level donation CTA, whereas this is more a targeted sponsorship CTA that I've put in here. So become a sponsor. So these are gonna be some helpful, compelling calls to actions that I think you should be considering and using in the actual email bodies themselves. All right, so let's talk a little bit about once we've got those individual donors and they've come and they've made that donation. So this is how I want you guys to think about engaging with your donors once they've made that first donation. Make sure you have a thank you email. Donation receipt is not a thank you. Please, that is very, very important. Make sure that you have an actual email setup that goes to that individual saying thank you so much for your donation and it comes from your organization. It doesn't come from your donation platform with the receipt number. That way you guys are able to help, again, make that more familial relationship with that individual. Eventually you may decide if they're a one-time donor, you wanna maybe send another email in a month or six weeks and update that donor and show them the impact of the gift that they gave. Depending on how your donations are set up, you guys can kind of figure it out or just say, you know what? Overall, because of everything that we've been able to pull in this last quarter, we've been able to help get lunches to 550 students in your city. Another great way to do this is give them an opportunity to give again or increase their donations, right? So thank you so much for your donation. Would you like to make another donation? Would you like to become a recurring donation? Or would you like to just increase your initial donation? If you have a recurring giving program, this is a great opportunity to promote that, right? So if you have, I'm sure some organizations might really have some perks. I would say, and I'm gonna answer that question, that's a great question. What is the timeline you suggest sending a thank you? I would do it if you can immediately. If not within 24 to 48 hours, absolutely. You definitely don't want anything later. Mailing a card versus sending an email, it depends on the type of donation. I have a lot of clients who are stewarding, the 50,000 types of donations and those might actually be a much more high level, high touch type of, it might warrant that higher touch which would be mailing a card. I think if you're looking to make this an efficient system, I would try to set everything up digitally and in email because the likelihood of someone getting that card and then going, wow, thank you. And then they can't click on anything. You're not driving them necessarily to your website. So really thinking about how you can leverage that digital ecosystem, that deep digital sphere of the world in all of your communication touch points. Then maybe if you end up having a high level legacy donor that you're trying to nurture, that would be where I would potentially start to manage that relationship on a more interpersonal level. And you could maybe start integrating, sending gift baskets and things of that nature. But if you have a recurring giving program, so even if you're like, hey, if you become an ongoing, like a sustaining donor donating $20 a month, you get a free t-shirt and a bumper sticker or a pin or you get VIP access to our webinar content or you get early bird ticket specials to our annual fundraising gala. Think about how you can maybe start to incentivize your recurring giving programs and make sure that you're promoting those to the individuals who did that one time initial donation. That's gonna help kind of nurture them into hopefully understanding some additional value. And then this is a pro tip, I'll throw in there. And as I was talking about in this, I think I can circle back and answer, Donna, you asked like suggestions for good email services because so many newsletters end up in spam. Check out HubSpot. So HubSpot actually has a pretty significant, sort of a, what's the word? They are very quick to identify which email subscribers are not responding to your email. So I will tell you why that, why your emails might end up in the spam folder is if you have a list of 5,000 people and you're just sending random emails to all 5,000 people and then you don't really have a lot of strategy behind it, if it starts to be unopened by so many different people and it just sits in their inbox and then they throw it in a trash. Email service providers are actually, are able to identify that your organization server is not necessarily sending something that this individual wants and might start blocking that. It could also affect a new time person coming in. So I would take a look at HubSpot. I also think MailChimp's a really great service as well to take a look at, to do that. So the next piece here is building out, I wanna go through this pro tip quickly and then we can get to some questions because I think we're close to the actually end of my slide. Yep, actually perfect. The pro tip here is talking about HubSpot specifically as an option. MailChimp has a few options around this but setting up your emails as automated workflows. This will make the process much more efficient and Donna, it was Anne talking about the timeline. If you can actually integrate or set up your donation platform with your email marketing and CRM platform you can set up an automated response so that you don't have to worry about it, right? It just goes, it would say Anne donated $50 that gets dumped into an ongoing workflow. And then it says, okay, after her email lands into our CRM through on this particular list we're gonna send her an email 24 hours later saying, thank you so much for your donation depending on how complex and sophisticated the platform is you can sometimes pull in really, really specific customer properties. It could even say like, thank you for your X dollar gift and it can pull in exactly what the dollar amount that individual contributed and really customize that communication. And then you could eventually build out a multiple and I'm gonna walk through the whole process and kind of give you the high level perspective of it as to building out an automated email workflow that can go on and on and on depending on how much you wanna try to engage and nurture an individual. So let's talk a little bit about what a workflow looks like. So there are three basic types of email what we call drip campaigns. So an email drip campaign is essentially a set of emails that are pre-built into your email marketing platform that are triggered at a particular time based on the involvement of that particular individual contacts interaction with your website and with your email marketing. So it'll make a little bit of sense when I go to the next slide here but I wanna talk just holistically and at high level what the three different types are and how I would consider looking at each of these and implementing them into how to do your donation funnel email marketing strategies. So top of mind email drip campaigns. These are really focusing on prospects. So that would be someone who has never donated before. Some really great goals around this are gonna be make yourself memorable provide a lot of education about your organization. So this feeds right into the newsletters, the blog updates and things of that nature. And then once they become a donor, right? Once we kind of mixed, we got that prospect through and they become an actual supporter you are then gonna wanna use the goals in this drip email campaign which is to update donors or volunteers on what's going on in the organization invite them to become a recurring donor. That could be, it could take up to three or four different drip emails in a row to get someone to go from a one time donor to a recurring donor, right? So it might take a little nurturing as I'm sure many of you guys know when it comes to nurturing stewarding donations from individuals. And then the third one would be re-engaging sort of inactive and former supporters. So this is a great opportunity when I was mentioning earlier about things ending up in spam. You might decide, you know what? 30% of my email list is not really engaging with myself. So I'm actually gonna remove them from my regular ongoing newsletters and I'm actually gonna put together a really soft messaging, warm kind of a little bit of a different tone and messaging around that and send that to that list of people to try to kind of win them back basically, right? You know that they're not opening your emails or they're maybe opening your emails but they're not clicking through to the information what's inside of your emails. So this is really focused on targeting that re-engagement piece. So let's take a look briefly at what one of these drip campaigns kind of looks like from a roadmap perspective. All right, so in this email drip campaign setup or this workflow, we have this initial email. So orange is gonna be all of the emails, right? So we have the initial email which says make a donation, right? Please make a donation. And then we have wait two days. Do they open that email? If it's yes, then you go to the next, you follow this roadmap. And if it says no, then you go through and you say the same email with maybe a new subject line. And then you'll wait to basically see did they make a donation within that one week? Did they make a donation within that one week based on whether or not it was a yes or no? And then you follow those individual pieces until you find that final stopping point. Some organizations have a seven or eight step workflow. Some organizations create educational workflows as well. So that's a really great way if you're, TechSoup for instance, we do a lot of their drip email campaigns as well. So you might see a lot of, this week we're gonna be running up, we're gonna be running this program. This week we're gonna be running those programs and things of that nature. There's actually a lot on the back end that says who's opening what and how are they engaging with the email we sent before. So it's a pretty cool tool to use to really leverage the communications once you have someone's contact information in your CRM. So before we get to questions, I see we have a few more here. I just wanted to kind of briefly take a moment and kind of walk through what can we do today? What can we do now? What are the next steps after this webinar? Obviously I'm gonna be sending Aretha a couple other resources based on the content. You might say, hey, I need to learn a lot more about this technical thing or I need to learn a lot more about this particular software, things of that nature. Jim, that's a great question. There actually are quite a few out there in the ecosystem. I have a potential product that we're working on putting together right now that we will be selling through TechSoup, hopefully in the next week or two. It might not be actually available until January of 2022. We're finalizing a couple of things where it's essentially a whole package of products that fits tightly into this webinar and all this content and strategies around the donation file. But what I want you guys to do first is go through and take an inventory of all of your current materials based on what we talked about, your website, your email marketing, what emails exist, what platforms are you guys using and then really get an understanding of your current metrics. What are the number of visitors to your landing page, your donation page? What are your email metrics around your current donation emails or your newsletter emails? And then what are your donor metrics? What is the average donation? What is the average number or percentage of people who go to your donate site? Let's say you have, we can go back to that first slide where we were talking about those numbers, the percent conversion rate, right? If you had 600 people going to your donation page and only three people are donating, that's something that probably says, do we need to tighten up our call to actions? Are we properly positioning our value and our impact? So get an understanding of what your current metrics are and that might even start to open up some windows in light of the end of the tunnel of kind of what you guys need to do moving forward. I would then build out each step of your donate donation funnel workflow. Get specific, right? So do you need another landing page for a particular campaign or do you just wanna use a standard evergreen like as we would call just like your standard one donation form? So your website, do I need to develop any additional pages for this one particular donation initiative or this campaign? Then looking at your emails, how many emails do you wanna start with? Do I have an automated thank you email or do I have a canned thank you email that my interns or my volunteers can send out on your behalf? And then take a look through what your donors and your recurring donors and understanding what those pieces are involved, whether or not it's additional communications, is it additional materials that need to be developed for those individuals? If it's recurring donors, do you need to be putting together like annual reports that are gonna continue to help support you in asking them to return again as another annual recurring donor? And then, so take a look at that and then identify what you're missing and then use the best practices that we covered today to start to build out and optimize the entire donation funnel for you guys. So with that, I hope that that was helpful. Can you show more light on stewardship in African IGR? It's not something we hear a lot of practice here. Sure, so stewardship is essentially, it can be very like simple and it can actually, there could be an entire development committee on your board of directors that's responsible specifically for stewarding any level of donation. So it could be, you could steward somebody to do a direct sort of donation, one-time donation. It could also be stewarding a legacy donor and you're hoping that you can, maybe they'll leave, they'll bequeath you a large sum of money upon their death at some point. One of my other clients, they just got a $10 million endowment upon the death of one of their donors. But it was because they maintained that relationship over a long period of time, we're talking 30, 40 years that this individual decided that they wanted to actually include their organization on their will and hand over and support them with that. All right, so let's go back to the Q and A. I'm gonna go to, I'm gonna hit done. Anonymous Tendi, what do you think of other email marketing tools that TechSoup actually works with? Like GetResponse rather than MailChimp which is quite costly. I will be straightforward. I have never used the GetResponse email platform for any of our clients here at TAP. We've used constant contact, we've used active, oh gosh, what was it called? Active campaign, I use Classy has some email marketing and it looks like, I think it was Shankel who said that they're using Wix for email marketing and they've used it for their community learning opportunities and it's fairly easy to navigate. So I think kind of looking through, I know and I totally understand MailChimp does get a little bit costly but really making sure that the time, it's not just the time but also the money is gonna be important to make sure that you're actually getting the outcome that you're hoping for, right? So I'd say to some of my clients, like if you spend $500 more a month on this particular solution, we could probably expect a five times increase in return or response on X, Y and Z. Now that number is not always like, it's client to client if that makes any sense but identifying those pieces is gonna be really helpful. How soon after should we promote our recurring giving program if someone just gave a donation? Don't wanna seem ungrateful if they just gave. That's a great question, Jackie. So I think it gets a little this, not exactly a black and white answer here. I think it depends on what your recurring giving program looks like, right? So I think it's all about the positioning. So thank you so much. We're so excited that you were able to support this. Hey, guess what? Come join this really awesome community of people just like you who are joining or who are giving ongoing recurring donations. Here are some of the perks that you could expect. Whether or not it's swag, no one's, I would imagine nobody's gonna necessarily feel like you are shirking them for what they gave you the first time. If you thank them and say, this is amazing, we really appreciate it, but we would love if you would be interested to come join this other side of this organization and really maximize what you're doing. It could be, and you might wanna test it out, right? It could be depending on the sector that you're working in. It could have a very different sort of psychology around what this looks like. So maybe try doing it in the second email versus maybe the first email and see what happens and see what works. Anonymous we have, we want to make sure our email marketing can be integrated with our CRM sales force. Do you have recommendations for the best email marketing tool? That's a really good question. So unfortunately that's a loaded question because I have to, what ends up happening as Salesforce is a very great database. However, it can be utilized and implemented and structured on the backend. So many different ways depending on how your organization has set it up. So it really requires kind of looking under the hood and seeing what pieces exist in there and then how do we properly integrate that with an email marketing platform that works best for you. So unfortunately I can't give you the perfect answer. But if you, I'm sure there may be some support on the Salesforce side that could maybe, you could figure out like what would they suggest based on your Salesforce capacity sort of what you're doing with your database. And then if you have a larger budget we could also look at, I would potentially look at really building out a custom integration potentially. Do we need to be concerned about who owns the content of a CRM? Are you asking, I'm assuming what your meaning is like the actual contacts, right? Is that secure? Most if, great, thanks, Scott. I would make sure that you're using a actual like reputable company that has their policy clearly listed out there. Most if not all should not own your stuff. You will always own your data until you say otherwise. But make sure you're reading the privacy and the policies within whatever platform you end up using. Great. And then Aretha just threw in here. I'm going to go to this next slide briefly. She's already thrown in the, the email address that you can send us an email. I've also in this slide deck this get in touch. It actually takes you to the digital marketing inquiry form on TechSoup, which will allow you to basically identify and see if there's a possibility of getting in touch with one of our digital marketing experts and seeing what we, what type of support we could potentially help you out with through the TechSoup marketplace. And with that, thank you. Well, thank you everybody for being here today. Great job with lots of information. Again, the recording we will send it to you within 48 hours and you guys make sure you take care of yourself as you're taking care of everybody else. Bye bye. Glad to hear everyone enjoyed it. Thank you so much.