 So thank you all so much for joining us. I'm a, my name is Adam Good. I'm a senior strategist at Parsons TKO. I've been working with mission driven organizations on their digital outreach and communications and audience engagement for over 12 years now, working with nonprofits and mission driven organizations large and small. And something that we're really passionate about at Parsons TKO is the importance of contact models. So what we'll get into in this session is what is a contact model, why you need one and how to start creating it. You know, in the course of a lot of our working consulting, we come into situations where people want to email more effectively or they want to understand the visitors to their website or they want to be able to interact with new audience members and understand their needs more. And particularly with so many different tools in place and processes and bits of information that are likely scattered across your organization's technical and personal ecosystem. Contact model becomes really critical if you want to be able to engage your audiences more effectively. So we're here to get you started on that journey. But first I'll zoom out a little bit and talk about our philosophy at Parsons TKO on engagement. We call it engagement architecture, which is really thinking about holistically. What are the people and processes and platforms that empower your strategy that drive engagement with your organizations that create meaningful, trackable experiences and interactions with your audiences. So that's why today, especially we're talking about the contact model and not a particular technical implementation of it, because the people, the processes and the platforms all work together to help you better understand and interact with your audiences. So we're going to be talking about ways that you can start creating a contact model, get the various people and processes in your organization aligned and informed around it and then make any necessary platform adjustments, enhancements, replacements that will let you use that contact model to its fullest potential. So, the obvious question. What is a contact model. I always like to start off my webinars with a little bit of humor so contact and model. I chose these because contact great science fiction movie with with Jodi Foster, where she receives a signal, a sign from extraterrestrial intelligence, and then has to figure out how to understand it and understand it and then, you know, leverage the world's resources to build technologies that will allow her to allow the world to interact with those those new audience members. So that, you know, the idea of making contact is the point of your your contact model and model, you know, do and or we'll see him showing up throughout the art. You have a clear picture in your head of what it is that you're trying to do. So we'll be talking today about contact models. So short definition is that it's a mental model that outlines the key information that you need to know about specific contacts or groups of contacts to power meaningful engagement. I'll break this down one step at a time. So the reason we start with mental model is because from a technical standpoint, there are probably aspects of your contacts that are distributed across different platforms and technologies. So you probably have information about contacts in your email system. You probably have maybe you have a CRM that tracks similar information but maybe it's different. You might also have a donation system and an event system, etc, etc. You probably also have a bunch of spreadsheets that track various things about your contacts. And so what people try to do often is sort of say oh well we need to update our CRM, or we need to update our email list. We like to start with the idea of the mental model for what you care to know about your contacts. That's the second point. What's the key information. You know, you've probably gone through your persona exercises perhaps you use personas for your marketing or communications materials to try to better understand what people like what their interests are and how you can craft communications. But when it comes to engagement, the contact model really says what's the specific information that I am going to use on a regular basis to further engage with specific contacts. So, you know, personas often will say, you know, might have demographic information, age range information, types of types of pop culture that audiences like you know personas go all over the map. But if you're not using the specific information about very specific groups in your communications efforts or engagement efforts, the contact model helps to get you there. And then it really all comes down to meaningful engagement. And that is going to vary depending on the organization, the different parts of the organization and who they care to engage with, and how. You know, so some organizations care mostly about fundraising, and that is a huge part of their outreach so a lot of their interactions are going to be about fundraising, it's going to be different in an advocacy case or in a think tank model. So what it comes down to is really defining meaningful engagement, and then making sure you have a clear picture of your audiences, what you know who they are what they care about, so that you can really engage with the right people at the right time, in the right ways. But why contact models. We'll see this slide again. So Zoolander if you haven't seen it. Hilarious movie about male models that get swept up in this conspiracy that's as old as time where people have been brainwashing male models to become assassins. And this conspiracy theorist investigator explains this to Zoolander and lays it out in detail. And then Zoolander goes but but why male models. And he just doesn't get it. So we're going to be talking about but but why contact models really digging into the importance of this. So the, the most fun, fundamental reason that contact models are important is that you need to know who you're dealing with. You want to know as much as you can about the people that you are interacting with. So you can be clear on what you're providing what they need and how well you're you're engaging. And the way that I like to break this down in a contact model is in kind of three three buckets, you want to know who they are, what they care about, and what they've done in terms of interactions with your organization. It's helpful to break it down into these categories so that you can be, you know, super clear about the types of information that you need to track again to empower those meaningful engagements. So who they are is kind of basic information. You know, you if you have an email list hopefully you have emails in it. Hopefully you have names. You have hopefully the organizations, you know that your contacts are with particularly important in advocacy or think tank organizations, a person's role. These are the sort of fundamentals about about a given person. You also want to know what they care about. So particularly with organizations that cover lots of different topics. You want to know which topics resonate with a particular audience member. You know, if you have a lot of content on a very wide range of topics, it's highly likely that your contacts will only care about a small sliver of that contact. So you need to know what they care about regions is another example if you're doing work across multiple geographies. You know, like content preferences or communication needs, right? Does this person like PDFs versus not like PDFs do they come into they they watch videos on the site to they interact with you on social media. What are their communication needs. So if you have kind of a more advanced email system, you know, can they subscribe to specific emails that, you know, that they want to receive. That's into really understanding what they care about. And what they've done really gets to that heart of meaningful engagement. So you want your contact model to anticipate and say, when a contact does one of these things, we want our system or systems of record to note that. So that could be anything from signing up for an event and attending event, having a direct meeting with staff. So a lot of times organizations are siloed from a development and fundraising standpoint and a programming standpoint, so that if there's one person in the organization or contact. Maybe they've met with someone in development, but a program team or communications officer doesn't actually know that that one on one connection has happened. But if that's a vital engagement to your organization, that's the kind of thing that that ideally would be tracked. So examples are donating and signing a petition. And again, you know what we'd like to do is get all of these on the same page, so that you can kind of clearly say, Okay, this is the data that we care about. Let's start there. Let's start with the data that we care about. And then we can figure out where the data is being collected, how we can collect it more efficiently what we can do with that data. Because then once you have a clear mental model, then it becomes kind of a process and a platform or technology challenge. So again, why contact models, you need to know who you're dealing with. But, but why contact models. So the second reason is that you want to have this information, like once you sort of model it, you want to have this so that you can find and engage with specific audience members individually or specific groups throughout your evolving relationship. And bring up a use case. So we'll talk about contact use cases a little bit further down, but essentially getting really specific about what you want to be able to do with audience members, when what happens. So this is an example from a think tank organization that throws or hosts a lot, a lot of events. And their events are, you know, primarily aimed at decision makers influencers policy makers, you know people who have a say in the policy process. So, you know the most valuable interaction is not necessarily that they signed up for the event. But what happens at the event how it furthers that relationship. So this is kind of a fairly complex use case, but it really gets into the specifics of why contact model is important. This is a use case that came up with with one of our organizations we work with so alert me. So all the things that are underlining green are either actions or attributes that you want your systems and processes to be able to do. So alert me when a new contact from the State Department and organization registers for an event on national security. So I'll break that down again. So you're basically saying, Okay, lots of people are coming to events. And yeah, it'll be great if you show me a list of that we got 40 people an event. Fantastic. But what's most important is, if there's someone that I don't know about that's that is a new contact. And they're from the State Department, a highly important organization in our audience engagement model and definition. So if there's someone new from the State Department registers for an event on national security on a specific topic. Then alert me, I want to know so that I can notify the program lead so they can send a personal email and reach out but even before the event start and say, Hey, I saw that you signed up for the event we're really excited to have you here. So here's the conversation from there. And this is this is where it gets really into the specifics of your organization, and how you define meaningful engagement, because this is not the use case that, you know, someone who is primarily doing small dollar fundraising cares about. So it all but it all comes down to being very specific about what you want to do with information or what you want your systems to be able to do. Another example of this would be if someone signs up for email from a topic page from that national security page. Then add them to the national security list or flag them in the system as as being interested in national security, security, so that they can get emails specifically about national security. Again, this is the why this is the big why of having a contact model you need to have that in place so you can empower these types of of interactions. But why but why contact models chances are more ad hoc, scattered distributed or non existent. And this is why we really emphasize starting with the content, the contact model, rather than a particular system, because what we found with with a lot of organizations particularly in the mission driven space that have so many different organizational units, you've got your own kind of agenda programming communications, etc. You know field work. You probably have elements of a contact model all over the place. You probably have elements of it in your email system or systems. You'll see a lot of little parentheses with s and exclamation point. There's probably lots of duplicative systems that hold little, little pieces of the knowledge about your contacts. So you have an email system or systems that different parts of your organization are using. You may have a CRM or CRMs for different organizational units. So the development team might have or fundraising team might have their own donor databases that are completely separate from say the email list that a communications team uses they might have the same contacts, but they the systems don't talk to each other. So there's a sense of a contact model in the personas that you created three years ago, that you hopefully you're using those for to sort of hone your, your messaging approaches, and thinking through who those audiences are, but those probably have some deep insights into, you know, who you're talking, talking to and why the next two are my favorite because this, I think universally applies to organizations. There's probably members of your team who have a good sense of who they're talking to, and why and what they know about them. It might not be documented anywhere, or it might be documented in their spreadsheets or their personal, you know, way of organizing things. I find that particularly larger organizations will have, you know, one or two kind of monolithic systems for tracking things that aren't flexible enough to accommodate program level needs. And so those programs will create their own spreadsheets to have that flexibility and say, you know, we want to track these very specific things. Your contact model is probably a little bit here a little bit there. What's important is taking that step back and saying, Okay, let's talk about who we want to contact, why and what we need to know about them to power those those future engagements. Because oftentimes, what needs to happen is there needs to be kind of a cross organizational collaboration to really define, you know, who cares about what pieces of data around a contact. And then organizational coordination about updating the systems and processes to make sure that that data is there in the first place. And then back to our example about, you know, alerting alerting someone when a new contact from a particular organization registers for an event on a topic. You know, that's only possible if there's a clear process in place that says, these two systems are email and our event system will talk to each other. And there's someone in programming who's able to say, give me an alert when these particular criteria happening happen. But again, it all starts with that, with that clear model. And I'll reiterate that you can post questions and chat will have time at the end for a for a Q&A session. And then after after the webinar, I'll also be holding office hours if anyone wants to stay on and kind of talk a little bit more in a small group about particular challenges that your organization is facing or if you need some guidance on on how to take what we're talking about today and start applying it. So, where do I start or, but how, but how contact models. Again, we'll start at some very basic, you know, frameworks and information that you need to think about collecting. There are kind of two ways to do this. So one would be to go and say, okay, I'm going to look through my email system my CRM my spreadsheets and I'm going to tabulate all the data that we have and all the data sources and I'm going to cross compare that and then see what's right and what's wrong. That's a necessary step to really understanding where data lives in your organization and what systems handle it. But we find it's much easier if you start with articulating what you care to know. So, we're going to start with with an exercise which is just listing attributes of your contacts. So I'll go through a couple different ways of thinking about this and some examples. I'd love for for you to be an active participant in the webinar and start, you know, you can just be writing these down on paper, or typing them up. But thinking through the attributes of your contacts that you care about. You know, put aside how it's collected or where it lives or you know is it an email is it a spreadsheet. I don't care about that at this point. I want to start listing the attributes that you care about. Again, thinking in those three buckets who they are what they care about, and and what they've done. So, I'll talk through a couple different ways of approaching this but if you have some some ideas. If you want to put them in chat that would be great so I can share them with with a larger group and provide some commentary. But again this is something that you can kind of start doing now and continue doing after the webinar. What they are is the basic information name email organization role. Again, some of that might might may or may not matter to your organization. What they care about like the specific elements of your, of your mission. What they've done is the types of engagement that they do with you. And as you're thinking through that list like you just think of the ones that are most important to you from where you sit in the organization, start there. If you, if you handle events, then knowing if they registered for event if they attended event if they downloaded the PDF follow up to the event. Those are all interactions that you might care to know about, because you're close to the events. Another way to think of this if you get stuck or kind of want to go further in thinking of the attributes of your contacts is not to forget your taxonomies. The taxonomies is something that we really stress and emphasize at Parsons CKO which is really the different ways that you organize your communications and engagement assets and assets in this case includes contacts. How do you categorize what you do and, you know, present that to the world and capture information around that. If you, if you kind of hit a brick wall where you're not sure what particularly around like the things that people care about, you can look at your website IA, your hashtags on social media the different folders that in your email that you use to to organize particular groups. You know if you're doing a lot of direct engagement with your audiences via email then you probably have an organizational system or you think okay well these audiences are like this. You know, you can either keep emails for audiences like that. That's a great example of where you already sort of have a little bit of a contact model in place. Your contacts and groups list and segments. I think we had a question in India in the form when people signed up for the event that was like basically how is this different from list segmentation. It's very similar. And that basically your segments are part of your contact model, right where they're basically you basically say, these are types of contacts that I care about. You know marketing campaigns into internal reports, you know, any place where you're categorizing information or contacts is a place where you can, you know, start to really dig into and unlock hopefully some good attributes of your contacts. I'll bring this slide back up for some starters. Again, these are fairly straightforward and basic, you know, many of which are probably already being, you know, already being tracked or captured again in one system or maybe in multiple systems. So I'll kind of pause here for for just a minute and see if we get anything in chat about, you know, who they are, what they care about what they've done. And you know so if you have any particular examples of attributes that you think should go in your contact model, you feel free please post them in the chat and we'll discuss so I'll pause just for a minute and see if we get any of those. And if not, we will move on to the next section. Also feel free to post in chat if you have any questions overall if anything's unclear. We do have a Q&A portion coming up in a little bit in those office hours after the webinar that I mentioned, but if you have any questions now about what this means, please feel free to ask. I'm not seeing anything in chat so I'm going to move on, but feel free to post throughout if you come up with something and, you know, want to share it or have a question about where it would fall or whether, you know, you know whether something might be valuable or not. All right. So again this is this is the first, the first step is going through and identifying this, these basic attributes of your contacts that you care about. Often times what we found is doing that with yourself first or maybe your small team that you're a part of or a big team, whatever team you're part of, you can start there to start building the list. The contact model becomes more powerful as you bring more people in the organization into the fold and into the process. So maybe you're in communications and you say these are the things that I care about that we care about our contacts. I think that's a someone in fundraising or in development and say, you know, what do you care about, are there additional things here that you care about, and there might be some that you say we think you probably care about this and this and this and it's something we already track in our email platform or on our website. But the more that you can, you know, start from yourself or from your team and then bring other people into the organization that's going to make your contact model and it's eventual implementation, more powerful, because reflects more of the organization, and more of the different needs and perspectives that the different parts of the organization has. So did have a question about how would you classify the difference and what they've done is it important to make that distinction from the start. It's important to say the what they've done is really discrete actions that they've taken with you as an organization. So if we're talking about the example of an event. Did they sign up for an event. There's a lots of interactions around events that can be potentially tracked and could potentially be very useful. Even the first pass, you might not need to get into as much detail about sign up for an event, attend the event, download the PDF, ask a question during the event. You know there's lots of specific micro interactions that that you can track. But I think that the first pass through is really like what are the big things like what do we want people to do. Right. If, if you know if we want people that are policy influencers to like have a one on one relationship with one of our policy leads, like, we want that to happen and everything else is kind of a stepping stone for for that type of interaction. If we want people to donate. Again that's a clear interaction that you know there's some interactions right you might have start a fundraiser. Or, you know, step up from a long time donation to recurring donation. Again, those are all kind of more specific interactions. In terms of where you start, you know, I obviously ideally with strategy or in a perfect world. Everything would already be in place and you would have been tracking this throughout time but you know the world as we've all seen is not perfect. So some of this information, you'll have to dig and kind of pull together other pieces you'll say okay, we really need to know what topics people care about so we're going to need to make some changes in our systems and our processes to make sure that we have that information. In terms of, I got another great question about incorporating affinity scores into the model. The affinity if you have kind of a affinity scores or engagement scores. Ideally, those are going to be based on some degree of strategy audience specificity and interactions. So if you know if a particular type if you already have an affinity score that's great. And oftentimes affinity scores or engagement scores, those types of things are built on evaluations of these types of criteria. So, you know, a kind of an advanced engagement model or engagement score for an organization could be, you know, if the contact is at a certain level with their role. Like if they're at a manager level or director level within one of our top 10 most valuable organizations, their score is going to be higher than someone that just comes to this website once a week and has signed up for email and gone to an event. Right so it really depends on on the specific kind of interactions that you want to have with specific types of audiences. If we can talk more about affinity scores and scoring during the q amp a, as well as the, as well as office hours. There's lots of ways to incorporate it or use this to actually build up an affinity score. Okay, so the next exercise that will go through is what I call contact use cases. And this is basically the the example that I showed above, which is really getting concrete. About what you're going to do with what you know about your audiences. So you can say, right, the things that we can incorporate into our contact model are nearly infinite. Right, you could say, I want to know what we could we could collect what people's favorite ice creams are. Right. I mean, pistachio me personally. But are you going to do anything with that. No, it's probably relevant. So we get to relevant to your to your to your particular needs. So the contact use cases are really about specifying particular interactions that you want to enable with your audiences. So this is this is the this is the exercise. So I want to find blank, where blank is a specific group of audiences or specific contact that meets certain attributes, so that I can blank. And that so that I can is what what's the action that you're going to do. If you're able to pinpoint that contact or specific groups of contacts. So I want to be able above of, you know, I want to find, or I want to be notified when someone who is a new contact at a particular organization with a particular job level on a particular topic. Signs up for an event, which are five criteria, I want to find someone that meets these five criteria, so that I can get a notification. Another example would be, you know, I want to find people who have signed up for email on a particular topic, who have also attended an event. So I can put them into a kind of a particular engagement category, and say this person is highly engaged. And again the highly engaged thing will depend on on your organization. Another kind of exercise we won't go through it here but another useful exercise is to think about what does a highly engaged audience member look like, from my perspective in the organization. So what does a high who isn't a highly engaged member and what do they do. So a highly engaged policy influencer is someone who subscribes to our email list and comes to our events regularly and has a one on one phone conversation at least three times a month with one of our policy teams. So this is a very clear trackable definition of an engaged audience member. So this is the, this is the exercise I want to find blank and you've got a couple starter ideas here on the left of different attributes that you can be looking for. So again I want to find people who have donated. That's sort of one criteria thing. I want to find people who have donated and maybe it's a little more specific. I want to find people who have donated once so that I can try to convert them to a recurring donation. Very common use case in fundraising. The examples on the right are again kind of just the different uses that you have with that data. So that can be to empower sort of, you know, mass emails or one on one emails, arranging meetings, starting a campaign sometimes you really want to get a sense of, you know, what what particular issues are resonating with your audiences what types of events are resonating with your audiences. So you can use that data to effectively campaign plan engagement campaigns. Identifying retention risks and conducting analysis. This is something that's a little bit a little bit deeper but super valuable like once you're tracking information, you can say, Okay, I want to find people who you know if it's a membership based organization. So, and we've, we've done research that says if they attend a certain amount of events, then, you know, they're more likely to. And if they're below that threshold like if they've only attended one event and we've hosted 40 in the past year, we can say I want to find those people because they're retention risk. And so they're going to go in a specific sort of engagement path or campaign. And that last piece really gets to the idea of a lot of this being powered by automation. If you have a clear sense of the data that you need and what you're going to do with it. Most systems can be built or engineered or enhanced or connected in such a way to do that work for you. So that's, you know, the simplest example would be, you know, creating a basic segment in email or running a report. How many people, you know, clicked through the, our latest email, or how many people have opened at least, you know, half of the the last emails that we've sent. So I'll pause here for just a second. So that you could think of, you know, one or two use cases for yourself in the organization. And, you know, people have examples that they want to put in the chat. Great. If you have questions, you can put those in chat as well. Again, this is the kind of thing where the more examples the more use cases you create, the more details you're going to get. So this is with yourself and your team, the greater clarity of the more the more the model will come into focus. And as that model comes into focus that's when again you can go to your counterparts, or your colleagues and other parts of the organization and say, these are the things that we care about tracking. What do you care about tracking. What do you want to be able to do. So that the system can serve multiple people within the organization, and not just the system the processes, right, because that with engagement architecture it's about the people who pull the numbers who run the reports who go through the data and adjust tactics, and the processes that say, this is what we're doing and why, and how we do it. So the more platforms, the technology is just an enabler. So the more that you could bring people throughout your organization into this sort of foundational definition, foundational, definitional, a little bit of a mouthful there that the more you can bring people into that work. The smoother the rest of the path will be. I'm going to take a minute and see if there are any kind of questions specifically about the the use case creation aspect of this or if people have any examples that they would like to throw into chat. I'll take a look at that for just a second. Okay, I'm not seeing any questions or contributions to chat so I think we'll move on to the next idea here and again we can definitely circle back to this during q amp a or during during office hours. All right, so ideally what you've done first is kind of created that basic list of of attributes. And you know you have a good sense of, you know what you care about tracking with your with your audiences. Then you've taken the next step and said okay we've created some contact use cases so we really have a clear sense of how we're going to use the contact model to deepen our engagement. So basically, I see a quote coming in here. Interested in the starter campaign use case to make some paid promotions on LinkedIn to target similar kinds of users with a particular persona, basically using this to guide the content strategy. Yeah, Ryan that's a that's a fantastic example. And that's where there's a lot of different facets of that. And so the more that you're able to break down kind of the specific elements that are part of it, the clear the picture will be will become of what you need to do to track it. Again, if you have personas in place those are a great place to start to say, okay, we know we assume and we or we and or we know particular things about a particular group that we want to target more effectively. But are we getting data back from our systems that helps us either confirm or challenge our assumptions about the audience. So if you're if you're using LinkedIn again that is both a communications platform, as well as a data source, right so you can go into LinkedIn and do pay promotions and see how well, you know, you're targeting against particular aspects of personas or individuals are working, and then you get that that feedback. And, you know, the great thing with with with LinkedIn with pay promotions is that you're really able to get really specific about elements of this contact model. So, you know, organizations geographies roles, you know, there's so, so many facets that you can really, really drill into. It can be overwhelming. So again, you know, starting with, you know, what do we care about most. Another way of thinking through these cases is, you know, if I could know one thing about an audience member in order to get them to, you know, join a coalition or I think like what would be that one thing that I could use to either speak their language more clearly, or, you know, modify my ask to be more relevant to them, or provide them the perfect piece of content that that we're going to work that we have with Ryan's question about guiding content strategy is great, because you, you know, if you're in a mission driven organization probably you have a lot of content that you need to get out there. You're, you know, and you probably have relatively small staff to support that content creation. So you want to know if it's working. You want to know, you know, is it what your audience needs. This is a great way with the contact model. We talked about content preferences is one of those categories, like, do people, you know, does your very specific audience. Do they want a PDF, do they want a one page PDF, do they want a long web page. You know, there's a lot of assumptions and sort of general data about how people interact with content, but that's not as useful as having much more specific kind of context and data around your audiences. Great, great questions and thoughts there. Okay, so then once you've done the use cases, you go back to that to your evolving list of those contact attributes. And this is really becoming the starter for your contact model is, you know, all these three sort of sets of attributes. So hopefully if you go through and do a lot of those use cases you might say, Oh, we really care about, you know, where someone is, you know, in, in, you know, if you're a national nonprofit, you might go oh we actually care about where people are but we're not tracking that anywhere. Then you, then you can say, Okay, we're going to add that, like the geography or location into that who they are bucket. You know, maybe in exploring the use cases with different parts of your organization, you determine that someone, it really matters, you know, what a particular type of audience member is is saying on social media. And that's one of the what they've done things right and but it's not tracked anywhere, or it's tracked in one sort of specific place that's siloed off and only, you know, analyzed once a quarter. So hopefully going through those use cases, come back to this list of attributes and really continue to articulate what are those aspects of your contacts that you care about. So, the next, the big next step, I've kind of summarized in one slide here, because this is going to get be where it gets really specific and kind of dependent on the different systems you have in place and what you're trying to do as an organization. So this is the, the using the contact model. So we talked a little bit, or we walk through the basic elements of the contact model and how you can start getting those together. I find spreadsheets are fantastic if you just want to start listing those elements. What really you know where the rubber really meets the road is when you can implement and operationalize it. Those are two separate but related things right because implementing means how do you actually get it in place. How do you get your systems to collect the data that you want, so that you can do things with it. operationalize it means like how are you going to continue doing that over time, not just from a technical standpoint. So we have our system set up to collect the data, but how are you going to make sure that you are going to use the data that you know someone who comes on board in your organization, six months from now is going to know oh I need to use that data that data is there and value valuable to me. That's really gets really into the people and processes, you know part of the equation. How are you in operationalize the contact model, so people know that it exists and that they can use it. So you're going to be in high level, high level next steps to do once you start to build out that contact model. One is you determine where those contact attributes are stored. If anywhere, or anywhere is right. Again, some of this information might be an email and your CRM and spreadsheets and a donor database to get a clear picture you want to know where that information is. You want to identify and close gaps in storage or collection right so if you care, if you need to know what topics people care about, you need to collect that data somewhere. And, you know, maybe that's best in your email in your email system and your CRM, you know it's going to depend on what you use. The next step is creating technical requirements for meeting your use cases. And it boils down to, you know, what what do our systems and processes need to do in order to to meet our use cases. So if your use cases. I want to be alerted whenever new contact from an organization signs up for an event on a topic. Those elements of that use case need to be empowered by your system. Right so your system needs to be able to know when someone signs up for an event are they a new contact or if not a new contact. Right. If someone signs up for an event, is there a form or an element of the form for organization so we can say oh this person is from the organization. Chances are your system can do some of those things maybe can't do some of those things, but you need to sort of spell out what those are. There are probably some use cases that your current platform might be able to handle, in which case great, get started right start tracking some of that information start collecting some of that information. You know, you will also probably run into two roadblocks with what you want to implement, based on how you know what your current system is or configured, and that's where you get more into the technical systems and platforms piece of it, which would be okay if you, you know, are you we have these 10 use cases, only two of which can be met by what we currently have. So we need to explore alternatives. So that's kind of the technical the start of the technical path there. The final piece and I don't want to say final because it's kind of supports everything in the in the process for doing this really, which is showing off the contact model and celebrating what it enables. So, you know, oftentimes when you're trying to do something in an organization that involves sort of systematic change or change that that impacts the whole organization. We all know this and managing that changes hard. But as I mentioned earlier, the more that you're able to start bringing people from other parts of the organization into the contact model definition, and those use case definitions, you can start creating champions who say, Oh, we used to have three spreadsheets in them, but now because we identified that before I meet a new contact I want to know when they last donated what topics they care about and if they've gone to an event. I can run that report and now, when I talk to a contact, I save 15 minutes for every contact I talked to in order to before I have a one on one phone call with them. Things that are kind of driving meaningful engagement that are freeing up resource time that are enabling people to do the work that they they're passionate about and care about, you know, and saying that that it comes back to the contact model is really important. So that's again high level next steps, but that that should put you on the path. So I think we have, let's see here. Yes, so we have we're at the Q&A session. I see a question come in that I'll get to in just a second so yeah now's a great time to start throwing questions in the chat. And again, we have a few more minutes left for the webinar quote proper, but then we'll have office hours. I'll have a breakout room that people can can jump in and we can talk sort of more in depth but presentation okay. Could you speak to how we might go about setting up alerts for behavior across a segment of our audience. For example, a transatlantic think tank has a phenomenon with a high number of folks with Korean government email addresses reading our newsletter. How would we set up alerts so that we could identify and interpret behavior across unexpected cohorts. Yeah, that's a that's a great question so the process of setting up the alerts itself is going to vary based on based on your platform so I won't get too much into the technical pieces of that. The way that I would break this down is really going back to that attributes list and looking for interesting intersections. So as you're going through that process of building out attributes, go back to your, your reports and your systems that you currently use and look for those things that say oh, wow we've got a lot of Korean email addresses. Maybe we want to bake into our system. If someone comes from this email address extension flag them right or note that in some way, and maybe you don't even have to flag them because your system can can run searches or reports based on the email, email extension. But again that that part's going to sort of depend on on platform. So that, yeah, so you're able to say. Okay, so we have we have lots of people with Korean government email addresses reading our newsletter. Great. So you can drill in hopefully in your email tool or in your CRM and say, Okay, the people who are coming from those addresses. What do we want them to do next. Right, like, are they in a particular audience group where we care to have one on one conversations with them. Great, now we know that they're reading our emails that and that gives us more information about how engaged they are. So you can you can set up alerts, and this gets into the affinity scoring or engagement scoring or any type of scoring, where, if you're if you're clear about those types of engagements that matter to you that you can track. You can set up alerts based on that. So, instead of instead of saying like every month we're going to go into the system and look for people with Korean email addresses. You set up your system to automatically run a report, you could set it up to, to give you an alert, if someone comes through with that and is not in your system. Previous. And then with the, with the scoring piece, you know, most sort of advanced modern capable CRMs or email systems will let you define your own engagements or criteria. You can say a combination of different types of action attributes and those sort of identity attributes that we talked about. You can say, you know, in our organization, we are in our, in our program. We care the most about Korean government officials and how they're engaging with us. And if they say that they're with a particular, you know, if they have a role, right, like let's say you also wanted to know, is this a junior official a senior official. So if you're a senior official of the government they're in, if you can get that information as well, then you can say, okay, I'm going to assign a point value if someone has a Korean, you know, government email extension, they're going to get two points. And if they are at this type of roller above they're going to get another three points for every, you know, email they read they're going to get a point for every event they attend they're going to get five points. And if they accept your system to say, okay, show me the, the most engaged Korean government officials, right. And then you can get a list that's again a more actionable segment or a subsection of all of your contacts. And again what you do with that is going to be defined by your use cases, because maybe you want to do. I've talked about in terms of guiding the content strategy might want to look at that list and say, Okay, we know that these people have signed up for emails. Are they opening the emails, if they're opening the emails, what are they actually reading. Right are they, you know, a lot of organizations will have really long emails. But when you do an analysis you might find that people only click the top thing. So you can do an analysis of their content preferences you can say hey to most effectively reach this particular audience we know they're only reading the top thing of the email. So maybe let's send an email one email more frequently with one thing rather than 30 things that they're not going to read. Again it's really just going to depend on depend on those use cases. But again, yeah, kind of back to back to basis and basics in terms of the, the contact attributes, getting those down that you know about looking for interesting connections, and then looking at your systems that you're familiar with, go into your email system and and see Oh, we, oh, like, notice trends like oh there's a lot of, you know, Korean email addresses, write that down right as a potential thing to look at it's if it's already in your system that's great. Right because then you can start to use it. Hope that hope that answered the question. We are pretty much at time. So thank you so much for joining us. We will be sending sending out recording of this presentation along with the deck. If, if you'd like to continue the conversation as I said before we'll have office hours for a little bit after this if anyone wants to talk, you know, one on one or in a small group with me, or you could reach out to me on LinkedIn, or get in touch with with CTO. We have a lot of great community events like these webinars that you know are really aimed to to lift up the nonprofit's ability to nonprofit sectors ability to engage with their audiences. So check out those events. If you want to go ahead and you know start a project with us if you need some help getting a contact model off the ground let us know. We also have a survey. Let's know how you like the webinar. Otherwise, thank you so much for spending some time with us to learn about contact models. I hope this was useful in your journey. And yes, take, take care, and or stick around.