 All right, hello everybody and welcome to our final webinar at Mighty Cause for 2020 which is all about email marketing for year-end fundraising. My name is Linda Gerhart and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause and I've been with the company since 2016 and one of the hats that I actually wear for the art this company is email marketing. I manage our email marketing for Mighty Cause and before coming to Mighty Cause I did actually manage email marketing for the nonprofits that I worked for so hopefully I can bring that experience and help you put together a really strong end of year email marketing plan. Here's a quick look at today's agenda. It doesn't look that intense but there is a lot of information for you in this webinar. I'm going to go through some email marketing basics just to make sure that everybody's on the same page and then we're going to move into some specific emails that you'll want to plan with tips and best practices for each. We will be doing a Q&A session at the end of the presentation so if you think of something you'd like to ask while I'm presenting just pop it into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel and we'll make sure that we have time to get to it at the end. So to start with I want to review some email marketing basics just so that we're all on the same page and I don't lose anybody who's maybe new to email marketing with terms that you're not familiar with just want to make sure that we're all on the same page with the basics. So as most of you know December is a very important month for nonprofits as an estimated 30% of all charitable giving happens in the month of December and the significant percentage of that giving happens just in the last few days of the year. I believe the final three days of the year. So where are those donations coming from? Across the nonprofit sector surprisingly to me direct mail marketing is the source of most of the donations in December but email is a close second so people are opening envelopes that they get in the mail and opening emails in their inboxes to donate to their favorite causes. The source for those pieces of information is charity navigator. And email is important because it is a direct line to your supporters unless you send an email to an invalid email address or your email accidentally ends up in the spam folder you're guaranteed to land directly in their inbox. So there's no algorithm to stand on in your way from talking to your supporters like there is on social media you don't have to wonder if you'll be seen and most people will see your email and have to make a decision about it whether that's to open it or to trash it or ignore it. So you will end up in their inbox if their email address is accurate. So that gives you an advantage over a lot of other forms of fundraising and even though direct mail marketing reigns supreme in December a lot of small nonprofits just don't have the budget for a direct mail marketing program. It involves hiring a company and it's an ongoing expense so for smaller nonprofits email marketing is where it's at that is your number one way to connect with donors and ask them to donate in December. And finally the year is ending obviously and donor retention is a really important measure of your fundraising health. So December is your last chance to engage donors who are in danger of lapsing. So donor retention is also a huge piece of email marketing in December. So I do want to move on to some information that's a little bit technical and in the weeds regarding email marketing so that we're all just starting from the same place of understanding. The first thing I wanted to discuss is a call to action which in email marketing is often shortened to a CTA. A call to action is basically whatever it is you're asking people to do when they read your email and one of the ways you'll measure an email success is by looking at how many people actually clicked and did the thing that you were asking them to do. So obviously your CTA pretty much across the board for the month of December is going to be to donate to your nonprofit. In most cases especially with email marketing the CTA takes the form of a button you can see some examples of some common buttons on the slide here which takes the user to a landing page where they can do whatever it is you're asking them to do which for our purposes is going to be a web page where they can complete a donation to your nonprofit. The CTA button is a really key part of your email and things like the color of your button and the location of your button in the email can all play a role in whether or not people are likely to click it. There's a lot of great information that's just free on the web about CTA buttons and how to format them and optimize them but we'll talk a little bit in a bit about how you can optimize it for your specific audience but CTA buttons are really important in email marketing they're kind of the centerpiece of your email because that's where you will where people will go to do the thing that you're asking them to do. Segmentation is a word you'll hear email marketers say quite a bit and certainly if you read Mighty Causes blog posts or you've attended other webinars of ours where we've talked about email marketing you've probably heard us say it before as well and segmentation is basically just taking your whole email list and you're splitting it into groups based on affinity or the things that are alike with the people in the groups. In most nonprofit contexts this is going to be done based on user behavior like what kind of donor they are and the level of involvement they have in your organization so when you've got your different groups or your segments they're identified and they're sorted you're just going to tailor your emails to be specific to them and just to make this totally clear in most cases you're not just going to be creating a whole new email just for that segment but you're going to be taking a general email that you built like a blast that you would send to your whole list and you're just going to be tweaking it a little so just to give an example if you're sending out a December 31st email one of the segments you may want to pull out and contact a little bit differently is donors that you have not retained yet for 2020 you may want to add a little bit of extra urgency or say something like you showed up to support us in 2019 and we're asking you to help us again in 2020 so you can use language like that these are not huge edits to your emails they're just small tweaks that make it a little bit more specific to your audience you may also want to pull out your volunteers and talk directly to them so that you can add in some words about the hard work that they do for your nonprofit all year and that thanks them for that so you're not reinventing the wheel for each segment you're making these small tweaks that make an email more personalized and make it more likely to land well with the people who receive it in terms of what kind of segmentation you want to aim for at your end I've outlined a couple of key segments for you again volunteers and donors have a lot of overlap so identifying the volunteers on your email list is really helpful so you can make sure that your volunteers feel seen and appreciated your recurring donors are a group that you'll want to talk to a little bit differently than your whole list because these are people who give on a monthly basis to your organization you can also pull out specific types of donors like people who gave in December 2019 but haven't given it given yet this December people who gave to your Giving Tuesday campaign and donors who are in danger of churning which would be donors who gave in 2019 but have not yet made a gift in 2020 since this is really your last chance to prevent them from churning and retain donors so that you can acknowledge the fact that they have already given in 2020 and you can maybe change up how you asked like maybe add something like we know we can count on you because that's true you can count on them they've already donated to you this year adding a little bit of segmentation really does go a long way to making your email strategy more robust and making your emails a little bit more likely to land well with the people who are receiving them pardon me so on that note I did want to let you all know that Mighty Cause has actually just released this week a really cool new integration that's available now we literally just released it I believe on Tuesday so you guys are actually the first to know we have a MailChimp integration now and the reason we built this is that when we surveyed our users earlier in the year MailChimp was far and away the most popular email marketing product that Mighty Cause users also used this integration is available to advanced subscribers that's a subscription for $99 per month and if you are an advanced subscriber this is already available to you it's on your dashboard and if you're not an advanced subscriber yet you can actually get a free trial of advance if you're interested in taking it for a test drive the cool thing about free trials on Mighty Cause is that you do not have to give us your credit card when your trial is up you will have the choice to you know get a subscription if you would like to but you're we're not going to charge you if you opt not to so what the integration actually allows you to do is connect your MailChimp account to Mighty Cause so that you can sync your contacts create and add audiences in MailChimp add custom fields and tags which is how you can sort of note which group or segment a donor is in or just pull out pieces about that donor that you would want to have stored in MailChimp and it just makes segmentation a million times easier saves you a lot of time and manual work by automating this for you so again this is available now to advanced subscribers on Mighty Cause and if you don't have advanced yet you can just go to your dashboard today and activate your free trial if you wanted to test it out through the end of the year so I just wanted to let you know that this is available to you this is actually a little bit of an exclusive announcement so hopefully you guys if you're MailChimp users you can go take advantage of this integration. All right so next up is AB or split testing which is basically how you would go about determining what the best color and placement for your CTA button is or what kind of subject line works best to get people to open your emails or even what time of day is best for opening your emails that's a really common question about email marketing what is the best time to send emails and AB testing is a really great way to find that out and to gather that data so AB or split tests they're kind of the same thing they're just variable tests so you're taking your group of email contacts and you're randomly splitting them into groups usually two of them in a 50-50 split and one group group A gets one variation of the email and the other group B gets a different version of that email and what you're doing is you're looking at the results and comparing them to see if one email was more successful so you're basically going to want to test one variable at a time because if you test five different things in you know 150-50 split you really won't have any idea what caused one email to be successful over another so you kind of just wasted your time because you had too many variables so you want to keep it to one variable per test so you want to keep them pretty simple and this is a really great way to get data about how your your subscribers interact with your emails and what works best with them a lot of this there's you know some best practices across the field of email marketing but this is the best way to get data about how your subscribers act because every subscriber list is different what applies to you know retail customers may not apply to non-profit donors so this is a really great thing to consider doing especially as we go in to those key three days at the end of the year there are a couple of things that are really important to split test and have data on as I mentioned especially as you go into the end of the year and these really critical emails that you're going to send out the first is a subject line now this can be a little bit tricky because in most cases you're not going to test a subject line and then use that exact same subject line in an email later that week but for one thing that you can test for is format of your subject line so for instance you may want to find out if donors respond better to a question versus a statement so you'd want to change up the subject line and have me be will you help us versus we need your help so you could do a 50-50 split and test that out and use that knowledge to build your subject lines for the last few days of the year since those are going to be your key emails obviously the metric that you'll use here to determine which one was the better option is how many people open your email which is super important because if people don't open your email then all of the work that you do creating content is basically useless you want them to open the email and another thing that you can test is emojis so one of the things that is true in general across email marketing is that people are more likely to open emails with emojis in them so you can sort of see if your audience responds in that way as well like you know put a little snowman email in the emoji in the subject line and see if that helps get more opens it is pretty consistent that it does help but based on your nonprofit you may want to test that out before you throw an emoji into one of your key email subject lines as I mentioned before you may also want to test your cta button so that you can optimize for the final week of the year location is a really big thing to test that's probably the most common thing that people test so you may want to try putting a cta button in the middle of your content like between paragraphs and then have another email where the cta button is at the end right after all your content and see which one results in more clicks you can also choose to test the color of the button and the text you can fiddle around with the wording you use like testing please donate versus donate now ab testing is really cool because it allows you to take a data focused approach to your email marketing and helps you understand the behavior of the people on your list and that's almost always a helpful thing to do if there's an internal debate about a subject line or where your button is if you have a disagreement with someone about what's best you went in doubt just do a split test don't fight about it and then you have the data and you can say actually this is better and here's the data to prove it so that's also a really a cool way to settle an internal debate about what to to put in the subject line or where to put the cta button so before we move on i did want to go through some common email marketing terms so if i use them later on in the webinar i won't lose anyone um open rate is pretty self-explanatory it's something that an email marketing program like mail champ or constant contact will calculate for you and it's just the percentage of people who opened your email um so that's important you want them to open your emails so looking at your open rate the number of people who are opening your email is is a great way to see if your emails are being successful if you're not finding that they're opened very much then you may want to do some testing related to your subject line or change up your subject lines um click through rate or ctr also is something that your email marketing programs will calculate for you and it's also pretty easy to understand and self-explanatory it's just the number of people who clicked on a link in your email now most email marketing programs will give you a ctr for the whole email that mat that measures every click but if you're looking to see how many people clicked on something specific in your email like your cta button you'll likely need to drill down into the data a little bit more to find out for instance if your cta button was being effective because most of us have links in our email that go elsewhere they'll go to our website they'll go to our facebook page and so on um so you'll get all of those captured in a ctr in most cases but if you're looking for a specific part to make sure that people clicked you'll have to drill down a little bit further um a conversion is basically when somebody takes a desired action and completes the thing that you want them to do which for end of year would obviously be completing a donation after receiving an email asking them to make a donation so a conversion is they fully completed the task so a click would not necessarily be a conversion because they wouldn't we don't know if somebody clicked on a link if they actually made a donation but a conversion is when somebody actually completes the the process of doing what you ask them to do uh personalization in the context of email marketing means inserting variables into an email that pull in specific pieces of data from your email list so this would be an area where a custom field like the ones I mentioned that we have through our mailchimp integration come into play um an easy personalization would be a donor's first name so that you can start the email off saying hi susan or you know thank you for being a donor susan um but you can also use personalization in really creative ways um that would make your email more effective for instance pulling in the amount of their last donation or even the month of their last donation so you can build a more personalized specific email now the caveat here is that in order to make this work you need to actually have the data in whatever email marketing program you're using and you'll need to map it into your email which can be a little bit tricky but most email marketing programs have their own method for doing this you basically insert the variable into the email and tell it what information to pull from the list um usually a custom field and um it it'll pull that you can find uh resources on that in in support libraries most of the time um and the last term that's related to personalization is a fallback um and a fallback is a failsafe in case there is no data for a particular user and you've inserted a personalization field like for some reason if you don't have a user's first name in your email list you can set a fallback to say something like friend or valued donor or whatever you choose just so that the user doesn't see a broken personalization variable or get an email that says hi first name because that's not a good look and that's a nightmare as an email marketer so just make sure if you're using personalization that you have a fallback so another example of that would be if you were pulling in their last donation amount um and if you don't have data for that particular user you can have a fallback of your donation or your generous donation and just make sure that that makes sense in the context of your email so that your email still makes sense when the user reads it even if they don't have uh information in that particular spot all right so with the technical stuff kind of out of the way I wanted to move into some more specific email strategies I do want to let everyone know that I've included our year end email templates as a handout for this webinar so make sure that you grab those a lot of the emails I'll be going over are actually included in the template document that I've shared with you and you can also find a schedule in there so it's a really handy useful resource you can use it to double check yourself or make sure that you have all of the key emails that you want to hit and we'll be talking about a lot of the emails that are sort of templatized for you in that document so first things first this is a schedule of essential emails you want to schedule four year end um you'll want to do a general winter holiday email or several you can do Hanukkah you can do Christmas you can do both these are not a super high fundraising priority but they're a really great way to harness the giving spirit of those holidays and also do a little bit of ab testing for instance while getting some donations and showing your donors some love the final week of the year as I've mentioned a few times now is really the most critical so we're concentrating on emails that you want to send on that week and outlining which emails you should send during that week um Monday you should send an email um you're kind of setting the stage for the remainder of the week so if you have a theme or certain messages that you definitely want to hit in end of year Monday would be the time to introduce them and beginning on Tuesday the 29th we're in the most critical days for emails Tuesday send an email and again it's an important one but it's not the last email on December 31st yet so this can be a really great opportunity to get some data do some ab testing so that you can optimize those December 31st emails Wednesday the 30th you'll want to send at least one email and this is a great data focus on storytelling which we're going to be getting into in just a bit December 31st is your most important day and you'll want to plan at least two emails to your whole list so two blasts this is also a really fantastic day to do some segmentation so that you can really do an assertive push before the new year begins one email to kick off the day is recommended and then in the p.m. a shorter email that builds some urgency to donate since the deadline is approaching so obviously there's a week between this webinar a little bit over a week between this webinar and all of these dates so this is not a comprehensive schedule these this is a list of all the emails that you can't miss but you can absolutely 100 percent send more emails on this I actually recommend them these are just the can't miss emails and in the next part of the presentation we're going to focus on what kinds of emails you can send and how to build them so that you can take this schedule take the types of emails and the different kinds of content we discuss and build these emails for the rest of December and or at least tweak or add to what you've already got planned so the first type of email is something that all nonprofits do in December which is an impact story an impact story is a framing device where you basically use the the story of a real person or in the case of animal shelters and rescues an animal that benefited from your work to tell a larger story about the work that you do and why it's important impact stories are showing instead of telling you're not telling people how important your work is and all the good that they do you're showing them you're giving a real world example of an actual life that was impacted by your work and impact stories get people emotionally involved which is ultimately the biggest people reason people decide to donate because you hooked them right in the fields you got them under the gut and you inspired them to give to your nonprofit and impact stories are real stories they have characters they have a plot they have conflict and they can help donors really connect to the work that you do and understand the issues that your organization addresses so a lot of people you know these big issues seem huge and incomprehensible and what an impact story does is it really breaks it down to its emotional course that your donors can wrap their heads around it and understand why what you do is so important so just as an example of an impact story I'm going to play this video which is actually not a year-end video but it's a video from a chimp sanctuary in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that participates in one of our giving days called giving day for apes every year and it's just a really awesome example of an impact story and the format you want to use the sound can sometimes be a little bit funny so I hope this works I just wanted to show a clip of it I'm not going to show the whole thing but this is the story of a pilot who is flying an orphaned chimp to the sanctuary louiro primate sanctuary after his parents were unfortunately killed by poachers so we'll just watch a few a short clip of this oh no I lost it well that was just a short clip there's just a little bit of music and it introduces the story of this chimp and his time spent with the pilot who was flying him to the sanctuary and it's just a really great example of an impact story so I will link to that in the email that you all get after the webinar all right so the reason I wanted to show that clip and I'm sorry that it kind of I ended up backing out is that it's a really great example of an impact story and believe it or not there is actually a formula for creating a great impact story first you want to start with exposition which is basically who what where why of your story who are your characters what is happening when is this happening and so on this pulls your donors in and sets the stage and then you need a conflict or a rising action and sometimes the two happen simultaneously which is basically just the thing that's driving the plot in the story in most cases it's a challenge of some kind that your characters need to meet the climax is the turning point in the story where your characters make decisions and the path to resolution becomes clear and the falling action is the path to resolving the conflict which hopefully ends in the resolution which is hopefully a happy ending so this sounds like a lot you want to this is sounds like a lot to put into one email but I swear you can do this in a very succinct way I'm going to demonstrate it on the next slide but these are the pieces that make a story effective having exposition a conflict a climax and a falling action a resolution those are the key pieces that you want to hit in an impact story so here's my example impact story in about 150 words meet max this is my exposition max is a rambunctious dog with big ears and an even bigger heart so already I don't know about you I'm on board with a dog that has big ears and a big heart we know the story is about and a few things about him in just two sentences he was brought to us in critical condition after being hit by a car max didn't have any ID tags or a microchip so he had no one to rely on but our rescue this is the rising action this is setting the stage for the conflict and this also adds in the rescue as a character we knew we needed to help max but we knew it was going to be a long expensive process to rehabilitate him so this is the conflict we want to help him but it's going to be really time consuming and expensive so we the rescue have a decision to make we were able to tap into our rover fund which provides care for dogs like max who need extra care before finding new homes all right so this is the falling action we've realized what the path to resolution is and we're on the path to ending the story thanks to donors like you notice that because of you messaging who donate to the rover fund we were able to keep max comfortable in a foster home while he healed name checking another important service that the rescue provides under the care of our veterinary partners in november max was adopted and able to spend his first Thanksgiving with his new family so that's the resolution that's the happy ending and if this were an email you might end with a question like will you donate $25 so we can continue to help dogs like max find happy endings so you really don't need to write a novel to tell a good impact story and include all of those elements that we just discussed in your impact story you just need to make sure that you include them that you include the exposition the conflict the resolution and bam you've got a really fantastic impact story and it doesn't take you don't have to write war and peace you don't have to write a novel you can keep it short and succinct and impactful um and still have a great impact story with lots of detail that tugs at the heartstrings so there are a few best practices to follow here number one you'll need more than just words so choose a story where you have media like images and ideally in a perfect world you'll have images and video and you need to get permission this is really important i'm in order to ethically tell a story you need to have permission from the person the story is about so make sure that everyone who is in the story you have their permission before you proceed with using them as an impact story and this is even more important obviously if your nonprofit provides services that can be sensitive like people who are using a food bank or services for specific health problems and information that people may not want to share with the world and finally you'll want to choose a story that provides an accurate representation of your work so for instance if you have a really really fantastic story it's a cool story but it's outside of the scope of what your nonprofit normally does it doesn't work as a an impact story because it doesn't tell a bigger story about your nonprofit so you're telling the story that with the characters and the plot but what you're really doing is you're using it to illustrate what your nonprofit does so if you choose a story that doesn't relate to the day-to-day services that you provide and you tell a story that was a complete outlier you're not doing yourself any favors because you're not telling that deeper story about the work your nonprofit does and the lives you touch all right so moving on to the next type of email you'll definitely want to build an email from a head honcho at your nonprofit whether that's your executive director or your board chair for this email you'll want their name on the from line of the email that's something that you can edit in email marketing programs and these emails tend to convert at a high level because basically it makes people feel important to get an email from someone so important at your organization and honestly most people don't even care if it's obviously an email that you built with an email marketing program and you've got the constant contact logo at the bottom they don't care it's still converts and if it's at all possible you should get the head honcho this email is going to be from to draft it or at least have them approve it and make some edit so that it feels authentic and it's really from them because if you're anything like me sometimes your voice becomes the overarching email voice and you really want this to be from your head honcho's voice there is a format to this kind of email which I'll discuss in a minute which is Marshall Ganz story of self story of us story of now that will help you build this email in a way that hooks donors and since 2020 has been a real roller coaster of a year for reasons that are too numerous to get into in this webinar this is a really great place where you can add in specific context about 2020 and the challenges that your executive director your leadership and your organization faced in 2020 all right so here is the formula that I was talking about and if any of you have done executive training or executive workshops this is probably something that you're familiar with it's a format created by Marshall Ganz for public narratives and you'll commonly see this format in speeches and presentations which is essentially what this email is it's a presentation to your donors from somebody high up at your nonprofit so you start the email off with a story of self which is who are you what called you to do this work and get involved in this cause why do you care tell us about yourself so that this would be your executive director talking about how they came to get involved in this cause and what brought them to do this work what made them care about this issue then you move into a story of us and in this case the us is your nonprofit and the supporters of your cause so you're talking about values that are shared with your organization and the people who support it and then you tell a story of now which is the challenges that you're meeting what is needed at this time what is required and obviously which is obviously meeting your 2020 financial goals and being able to continue your work in 2021 there is a template for an email from a head honcho in the template document that you will all have access to it's very short and I highly recommend making sure that you fill in the blanks and really make that email come alive by following this format so it's a little hard to template to size because you know every every story is going to be different but if you use this format and you kind of use the template that we provided as a guide you'll have a really effective email from somebody important at your organization that resonates with donors and then obviously you want to have a cta linker a cta button in the email so that when you get to the story of now and you're talking about what is required and what challenges to meet people know what to do they can go to the link and they can make a donation so a few tips here and number one this is something you'll very quickly hear about if you mess this up is to make sure that all of the bounce backs and out of office emails and replies are not going to your executive director or your board chair directly so don't use their actual email address some email marketing programs require that if you have a from email address that it'd be a valid email address so if that's the case for whatever program you're using you would want to create a dummy account and if it does let you just edit the text of who it's from that you would see in your inbox you can just edit that text and have it go to your info at email address or wherever the bounce backs and things to your emails normally go I've done that before I've actually flooded mighty causes CEO with some responses and bounce backs and it's something that you will not forget to do once you do it once you'll want to use personalization variables in this email just so that it feels personal like a personal letter to donors and on that note this is a really great email to practice segmentation with so that you can make small tweaks that speak more specifically to the key segments that we outlined like volunteers and recurring donors obviously a best case scenario is if you're sending an email from your executive director to your volunteers you want to acknowledge the fact that they are volunteers and do a lot of work for your nonprofit same for recurring donors and so on so next up is an email with your 2020 accomplishments this is where you'll want to talk about all the good good work that your nonprofit did this year and share some key metrics of your success like X number of people served or whatever accomplishments you want to highlight this is a really great one for the last few days of the year because you're really driving home your impact and the importance of supporting your work and most people are feeling reflective around this time so it just tends to land really well with them and the key thing here is to use because of you framing I know I talk about that a lot but it's a very important at end of year and just really hit the messaging that none of these accomplishments that you're listing these incredible things you've done would have been possible without the help and the support of your your donors the easiest thing to do for this type of email is to take all of those metrics and create a visual infographics are a really great way to go here canva is a program and they have a lot of infographic templates that you can use to build an attractive infographic if you don't have a graphic designer or someone like that that you work with and the bonus is that that kind of graphic is something that you can easily reuse put it on your website put it on social media you get a lot of mileage out of it so it's also important to really just pull out key metrics that show your accomplishments and not overwhelm donors with metrics that they don't understand or aren't likely to care about you're not putting together a report for your board you're just talking to your supporters these are average people so if something wouldn't make sense or be meaningful to them don't include it you really just want to highlight the most important things that you want to communicate to your your donors and I cannot stress this enough I already mentioned it but use because of you framing because this is ultimately it's a request for donations it's not an email about how awesome your nonprofit is I mean you definitely are awesome and you achieved all these things your staff and your volunteers helped you do all of these things but you're not trying to make the case that you're so great you're trying to show that investing in your work is worthwhile it gets results and that your donors are the people who make all of these important these accomplishments possible so you're really not talking about how wonderful your nonprofit is you're talking about all of the wonderful things that you were able to achieve with the help and support of your donors so that's just really important because if you just list off accomplishments that make you look good that's not likely going to resonate with your supporters but if you make them a part of it and make them feel like they're a part of your success then definitely they're going to be more driven to support you and donate and show more interest the sister email to that one is one with your goals for 2021 which is where you tell your donors what your plans are and just make the case that they should invest in your work for 2021 this is a perfect new year's eve email because donors are also thinking about the year ahead and you really just want to outline some key goals that will resonate with supporters like starting or expanding a new program or adding to your services really nitty gritty things are best saved for your organization's leadership you just want to talk about the things that would be exciting to the average person who cares about your cause and basically what you're doing here is asking for buy-in you're asking people to buy in to these goals by making a donation these are really simple emails they do not need to be complicated but you can punch it up with some images and just share your excitement for what you'll do in 21 the framework is really that you just need people to give and make a donation in order to accomplish these things okay so this one is obviously a december classic it's the countdown email the email this email is all about urgency and utilizing the built-in deadline of midnight on december 31st or i guess before midnight on december 31st to spur people to donate now you do want to be judicious about using urgency because you can end up like the boy who cried wolf when you overuse urgency if every single email from you is urgent people are going to stop being sensitive to it they're going to stop paying attention but this is an appropriate time to use it especially on december 31st the tax deadline is actually a really great hook here reminding donors that they will need to make a gift before midnight on december 31st to be able to deduct it from their tax returns now the standard deduction was raised in 2018 so it's actually a lot harder to deduct charitable contributions because people have to give twice as much for the charitable donations to outweigh the standard deduction and make it worth itemizing instead of just taking that standard deduction but the important thing here is that the vast majority of people don't care the reminder still works with them because whether or not they plan on itemizing that it doesn't really matter they feel like they're they're missing out or about to miss out on a deal and that's what resonates with them and spurs them to action so don't second guess it it's you know people will do what they do with their taxes but that reminder actually does help convert people for end of year and it's a really perfect email to send on december 31st so there are definitely a lot more emails that you can send than what i've outlined here my hope was that you could take the schedule that i put together and these types of emails and if you don't have anything planned you could sort of use it to fit those emails into the schedule based on what you think is best and also you can sort of use it to add emails if you had a more sparse schedule planned or just you know change up an email if you wanted to sort of tweak it so that it uses one of those messages so there's definitely more i just wanted to quickly go over a couple that you might want to consider for end of year the first is a donor retention focused email which i actually would say that you probably shouldn't just consider adding you should just plan on doing this is your last chance to reach out to donors who are in danger of lapsing and get them to return what i recommend doing is building out an email and then whenever you plan on sending it going into your donor retention report on mighty cause pulling the list of people who have not yet been retained and then plugging it into the email and sending it and if you do this earlier in your schedule you may want to do a follow up on December 31st just to get the people who have not yet made their donation give it one last college try to get them to come back and if you purchase if somebody if you did participate in giving Tuesday whether it was on mighty cause or elsewhere it's definitely worth sending an email specifically to your giving to Tuesday donors to show them some love and appreciation and ask again for their support these donors have demonstrated an interest in giving they gave very recently and they are highly likely to give again so you want to make sure that you reach out to giving Tuesday donors if you participated in giving Tuesday again if you participated in a fall giving day on mighty cause we had quite a few this year if they if you participated in a fall giving day instead of giving Tuesday follow up with your donors from that event because they've demonstrated propensity to give and it would be a mistake to miss reaching out to them and last but not least if you have a matching grant you will want to announce it and market the heck out of your matching grant a matching grant is a fantastic way to drive donations I don't want to get into the weeds with matching grants in this particular webinar but it's actually not too late to secure one if you don't have one planned you may want to tap your board for a matching grant or see if you can use their annual donations or their dues as a match so there's still there's still the possibility of getting a matching grant and that's a really great way to drive donations while a matching grant is active and obviously if you have it you need to market it so if you do have a matching grant make sure that that's on your list of emails to send all right so we are in the home stretch and before we wrap things up I did want to talk a bit about personal outreach so why can't we just send email blasts I spent all this time detailing all of the work that's got to go into sending emails through your marketing program but at the end of the day donor relations is all about building relationships and you can't build a relationship with an email blast you really you build relationships with people so in order for you know your donors to build a relationship with you you need to have a personal connection people are also much more likely to actually make a donation when they're asked directly you know sending an email you're asking them but having you know Susie in your development apartment contact something and say hey we really need your support is a much more effective way to actually get people to donate the other thing that's really important to keep in mind is that you want donor feedback you want to know how you're doing and how they're feeling about you so it gives you a chance to just talk directly to your donors and see how they're feeling get feedback about your work and your fundraising so it's just a really important conversation to have and also it just makes donors feel seen and appreciated to have somebody personally reach out to them so it doesn't need to be hard personal outreach and I've been in this camp before it can feel really daunting especially when you've got a really packed couple of weeks ahead of you but here are four easy ways that you can do personal outreach number one identify your donors for outreach so I recommend developing some criteria you can't reach out to all of your donors unless you have a really small list so think about who is the most valuable for you to contact so recurring donors donors who gave over a certain threshold in 2020 people who gave more and then create a spreadsheet with their contact information just so that you have that on hand but again you don't have to contact all of your donors personally you just want to identify donors that it would be a good idea for you to contact personally and just put them into a spreadsheet with your their contact information to write a template so you again don't have to reinvent the wheel with each email you don't have to write each email from scratch you can draft a quick template I use google docs of what your emails will say and then just personalize it so if you know that a particular donor works here or cares about this you can sort of personalize it with their name and some details about them but you can sort of copy and paste and use that as a jumping off point and that makes the workflow a lot more convenient and then just go through the list of donors once you've gotten yourself organized it's actually not that hard to do you can spend an afternoon doing it and if you're really small and you just don't have the capacity this is something that you can tap volunteers to do if you need to and you can also tap your other staff if you don't have you know development staff that are available see if you have anybody else anybody else at the organization who can help you out with it and then make some time for follow up that's the last step so once you've said an email you know in your spreadsheet track you know who's responded and who hasn't and if they haven't responded then send a quick follow-up email before the end of the year and then if anybody did respond obviously be responsive to them and you know respond to whatever they said to you but this is just a really important thing to do and in the digital age we can sort of over rely on blast emails and tools that market for us and forget about the personal touch and that's really important to donors so it's definitely worth taking some time to do and the last ad break I just wanted to mention that we do actually have a sales force integration so if your nonprofit uses sales force to track your donors we now have an integration at Mighty Cause which like the MailChimp integration is available to advanced subscribers and again you can get a free trial of advance if you wanted to try it out so if you use sales force and this might be useful to you it's a really great idea to just get a trial and see how you feel about it what you can do with the sales force integration is you can automatically create contacts opportunities and accounts you can create custom fields to keep your donor data organized you can automate donor data management streamline your workflow and it basically just cuts out a lot of manual work putting things into sales force so we have this integration available it makes it a lot easier for you to keep track of your donors and how you've contact them and create follow-ups so definitely if you're using sales force at your nonprofit this is worth checking out and if you start a free trial now you should have it through the end of the year so definitely check that out if you are a sales force user all right and that is it for today and I wanted to make some time for questions that is my dog Cooper's Christmas photo so if you have a question just type that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel oh and just to clear this one up this is always a question we will be sending a recording out for this and you will have the slides accessible to you as well and the email template if you didn't it's in the handouts of your go-to webinar panel I can also include that in the follow-up email just to make sure that you have it but if you haven't already done so you can go into handouts and download that handout but yeah you can I'll make sure that you all have access to it let's see okay so how do you incorporate Giving Tuesday with year-end if at all so we actually did a webinar on this sort of how you can sort of incorporate Giving Tuesday and transition I think you know it depends on how you handled Giving Tuesday so a lot of nonprofits they just ran one campaign for so they started it on Giving Tuesday and they ran it through the end of the year and obviously if that was what your nonprofit did you know you you're just continuing the campaign that you started on Giving Tuesday if you're doing a separate campaign obviously the way to include it is to contact your Giving Tuesday donors you know talk to them specifically they were the ones who gave to you and you can also incorporate some elements of your campaign in your end of your messaging so you can sort of make it feel like a more smooth and natural transition but the most simple answer is to just include your your Giving Tuesday donors and make sure you're talking to them specifically using segmentation to you know acknowledge that they gave to you on Giving Tuesday and it's also you know easy easy enough to include similar messaging so that it feels connected to your Giving Tuesday campaign so hopefully we have our end of year toolkit which is available I think everybody who's an admin got an email about that I'll also include a link to that in the follow-up email and that has some information about how to transition from Giving Tuesday into end of year and sort of make that feel natural and normal for your donors. Let's see how can you use the CARES Act and additional tax breaks to motivate people this year so I would be really cautious with that just because you can't really dispense tax advice so in terms of like how you can sort of advise them to use that it's really tricky and you want to make sure you know if your nonprofit has a lawyer check with them because everybody's personal tax situation they should talk to a tax professional about so I would say error on the side of caution when talking about specific tax breaks for people and if somebody does come to you and they want to use the CARES Act I would definitely try to refer them to a tax professional so they can talk about whether their deductions or their donations qualify for a CARES Act deduction so that's something that can get you into a little bit of trouble I would probably try to stay away from that and just use a general reminder that if you want to donate you know if you want to claim a deduction you need to make that donation before midnight on December 31st and keep it as general as possible just so that you don't open your nonprofit up to any liability but you can certainly mention it you know and say in an email if you're reminding them about the tax deadline and your donation may be eligible for additional deductions through the CARES Act you know caveat you should talk to your tax professional about this but that can be something that you can certainly mention in the email where you're reminding them about the tax deadline but I would just be careful about that just make sure if you do include any language you might want to run it past a lawyer at your nonprofit let's see this is a huge to build this is a long one this is a huge debate among our staff the number of emails we send it year-end especially gotta love those staff debates what does the data say about unsubscribe rates if we email people every day in the final four to five days of the year this feels excessive to me so as far as like industry-wide data I don't actually have that what I would recommend doing is going back into your emails your email marketing program and looking at some reports and some data from last year every nonprofit's different so if you know you normally don't email your donors that often it may be that an email every day is excessive and your donors will go what the heck so but the thing to keep in mind is and I was told this in a training for email marketing and it's really just stuck with me is that unsubscribes are actually doing you a favor because the people who unsubscribe from your emails are not interested in receiving your emails so they're doing themselves a favor and taking them off your list if they're unsubscribing from your emails they're not likely to donate because they're so uninterested that they don't want to even receive emails from you so unsubscribes are actually not a terrible thing if you notice a spike in unsubscribes it may mean that you need to do more segmentation and reach out to people who are actively engaged in your nonprofit and open your emails and things like that if you want specific data I would say look to your nonprofit's data go back to 2019 see how many emails you sent and see if you got more unsubscribes and generally speaking if you're sending more emails you're going to see more unsubscribes just because you're sending out a higher volume that is something that is going to happen but it's one thing that it's something that I think is worth a reframe in that you know they're doing you a favor they don't want to receive your emails and they're just taking themselves off your list so they're doing some list hygiene for you that you're not really losing donors because you're losing a subscriber there are a lot of people on our email lists who signed up because they used a service that we provide they signed up at an event and they don't even remember who you are but these people they're potential donors for sure but I would not treat it as seriously as like losing a donor and again it's important to be you know have a robust program to engage your donors so hopefully email marketing emails are not the only way you're contacting your donors you can always give them a call make a plan to call people at end of the year and contact them in other ways inviting them to events when we're able to safely do so but people are I think generally a little bit over concerned about unsubscribe rates they're just you know they're people who don't want to receive your emails and you know it's not worth crying over spilled milk but these are not people who are likely to donate because they're uninterested and they are telling you that so yeah if you send more emails you might see a spike in unsubscribes but I would look at your data just to see what happened in previous years and maybe compare it you know if you had if you sent or conservative last year try sending more this year and then you'll have some good data but a few unsubscribes are not going to kill your your non-profit so don't be scared of unsubscribes because what's more important is getting people to donate um let's see we're relatively new and still without a substantial list of prior donors with this in mind would you advise using these strategies or more or less cold contact potential donors so what you may want to do is I guess it kind of depends on how you are interacting with people as a non-profit where are you meeting them are you meeting them at events or is it you're providing services are you mostly using social media at this point you may want to do a push to sort of get people to sign up for your emails certainly if you're new and your subscriber list is not that robust yet you want to probably be a little bit more conservative or you know even more do some more personal outreach and segmentation just so that you know you're not wasting your time sending them a lot of emails to a really short list with a small list cultivating your donors by reaching out to them personally depending on how small it is can be really helpful and then you just want to make a point of trying to grow your email list so for instance if you have a lot of followers on Facebook or followers on Instagram you know put a link and ask them to sign up for your email list so that they are they're able to you know hear announcements and they're also getting your year-end emails but yeah if you're you're really new and you have a smaller list you may want to you know take an editing eye to that schedule and be a little bit more conservative but hopefully the list you have is super engaged and you know you can just use a variety of approaches with them to you know get them to donate so you can try marketing emails you can try personal outreach and then in 2021 just you know take a focus make a make it a focus to grow your email list but it's really up to you and how often you're contacting your donors anyway don't feel like you have to do all of these emails I would say if nothing else sending an email on December 31st or December 30th and December 31st is probably the most high-impact thing that you can do all right so that seems to be it for questions today if you guys have any questions that you think of after the webinar I'm always available to you my email is linda at mightycause.com that's linda with an i l-a-n-v-a and I'm always happy to answer any questions that you have we will make the recording and the slides available to you so you'll have that and I will make sure that I follow up with a link or where you can download the end of year templates so that you can make use of those as well so thank you guys so much for joining me today and talking about some email neapery with me I really love this kind of topic so I appreciate having you here and happy holidays have a great new year and happy fundraising