 So let's talk about today's event. The question I have received many times from colleagues, from my boss is how many emails shouldn't we be sending to a list like in this next fundraising campaign, in this next marketing campaign. And I thought we would want to bring in today, a local expert in Victoria, Benjamin Johnson, who can offer a perspective on that question, maybe not a definitive number with an answer, but a good way to answer and resolve that question. So let's talk about Ben. Ben was maybe 10 years ago, my co-organizers in this very chapter back when we were meeting in person. So Ben is a leader and strategist within the cause world. He founded Frontier Marketing back in 2010, and he's been an advocate for integrated marketing and results-oriented fundraising. So at Frontier, his mission is to bring efficient and effective direct response fundraising to charities across Canada. And for the last decade, he has raised over 10 million in annual fundraising revenue through both email and mail in the mail. Ben's got loads of experience. And with that, I'm going to pass it over to Ben Johnson. And here we go. Speaking of 10 years ago, I grabbed the cover of a presentation I made in 2014 that's in our circle. And I used to call it email blasting, because for some reason we used to call it email blasts or e-blasts instead of email campaigns. And actually some of the encouragement is not only is this sort of applicable in Burlington, Ontario, as it is in Burlington, Vermont, it's applicable over time. A lot of the lessons I've learned to have held up. So I think that's one of the things that makes me excited, both to reconnect with Eli now, but just to do these sort of presentations. And I wanted to cover just a tiny bit about us and that question doing, and my interpretation from doing some other webinars and connecting is show and tell to be valuable. I have a whole bunch of emails that we can walk through and of course, not only the video from this presentation, but the slides can be shared as well. Because the thing about email is it's a very publicly accessible document because we send it to everyone. And so there's nothing really proprietary about this. So just a tiny bit about us, we're an agency or the point of us is to raise more money for charities. We raised a little over three million in email revenue. We sent like millions of pieces of mail. That's for another time. And so email is here to stay. We're very West Coast based, but we are Canadian only and we're not based in one particular sector. And there's about 30 of us. I'm number three right there, a couple of people attending are visualized and that's made me extra nervous to think that my peers are here. And once again, we just do direct response and we partner with those who do other areas really well. So here's to that question. And not only has Eli gotten a lot, the last 15 years of sending email marketing is this is the number one question. And I think it's a distant second. So I said everyone, everywhere, all the time. It's a very normal question to ask. And it's the beginning of the journey as the email marketer and maybe Eli addressed it to you as maybe everyone is like, what are the common fears of what is leading to that question? And one that I thought is the frog and water. So what point do I put one too many and things are boiling donor fatigue? I hear that one a lot. I'm nervous that I'm going to tire out my donors. And then the ease of unsubscribing. And this was especially back in the late 2000s when I started doing email fundraising was like the joy of mail was, it was really hard to get off a list. You had to call someone and then they had to like, we were work involved, but email unsubscribed, that link has to be there. And it's just done. And it's maybe another one is the inability to please everyone. Right. Like, how do I write an email in which everyone is pleased? And the inverse of that is just not knowing kind of what you're delivering and not knowing whether it's valuable. But by Eli, is this in the chat or yourself, is there any other common fears as we proceed onward? Yeah, I'd love to hear from others about that. Certainly, yeah, the fear I always heard was unsubscribing. And also we're just going to have fewer and fewer people actually bower to read and open emails. So yeah, yeah, but that is that fatigue worry. So that's like the part of it. The other part of it was just sometimes capacity. Why? Which are we exhausting our internal staff? Yeah, yeah, a turn of constant emails. And one of the things that I that's to that point often say is personally believe the general concept of donor fatigue is a myth. There's every myth has a basis of truth, right? And then like, and then that's where we're going to go with this. There's really actually fundraiser fatigue. And how do we become great storytellers and capture people? And at any point, I'll do a couple of slides. You lying if someone has some kind of fear questions or questions based on what I'm saying. Hopefully I'll jump in a moment kind of thing. And I'd actually confused Eli with my little presentation, too, where my common answer to when someone gives me that question of how many emails should I write? I say, all right, how long should a book be? We presume it's an OK question to ask how many emails. But if I were to reframe it and say, how long should a book be? That seems like an absurd question. And I my common refrain is it turns out you can write seven about a middle school kid who finds out he's a wizard. And part of the point of that is quality. If all of a sudden we heard like, oh, my goodness, not another book about this wizard like this, you're overselling a very small story. I very specifically remember rushing to get the next book in the series. And any of my kids are falling in love with series. And what matters there is equality and compensation, composition. And the other metaphor I like to give is there's this book, Salt, Sugar, Fat. So I grew up in a bakery and the basic principle of the book which is unfortunate what kind of the industrial society is doing to our bodies is that if you vastly increase the amount of salt in whatever you're cooking, that would be horrible. Any of us who actually made the mistake of putting too much salt in something and just ruined it. One of the solutions is to put more fat and sugar into it. So that if you think of it as three dials of salt, sugar, fat, you can keep increasing all of them as long as you're increasing the others. And so when we're talking about composition in a moment, that's what I'm referring to. And I'll talk about my philosophy about thanking, engaging, reporting and asking. And so if you're telling me that you're going to send 30 emails to your list, all basically salt, I'll be like, this is going to make me puke out and unsubscribe. And so in terms of when you look at your upcoming emails, are they all the same thing? Or have I provided variety in my composition? And then the next one is one of the most famous movies ever. And I believe still according to IMDb, the best movie ever, Shawshank Redemption. And so one of the things I want to talk about is this quote here by Reds. And there's no part of me that could ever presume to have Morgan Freeman's gravitas of reading it out. But the point of what he was trying to talk about, how Andy Dufresne escaped, was about time and pressure. And I think if you turn and we're going to look about an email calendar, it's one of the things that a frontier is very important to how we do our work is planning out via calendar is remembering time and how much space and distance that am I applying to getting to my end goal of a good year of fundraising? And I think, actually, for most arguments, time is often an externality. And so thinking in terms of how many emails should I send and what is my pace and what is my ultimate goal? And I wanted to share my original inspiration for becoming an email marketer, and that was the Obama campaign. And then I mentioned brackets, money ball, but that's a whole other conversation. They had two quotes that really struck me many years ago. Many people have a nearly limp list capacity for email won't up on subscribe, no matter what, how many they're sent that one floored me at the time. But the other one, which was really important was we were so bad at predicting what would win that it only reinforced the need to constantly keep testing. So I don't want that to be lost in this. And this was two quotes by Amelia Walter, then the director of digital analytics for Obama. And think about that. This was in the year 2008. These quotes are incredibly relevant still now. So one of the things I wanted to before we go into show and tell is I think your better inspiration is your emails to friends, colleagues, the family over and above the email templates that we might be using from the past, particularly ones, like if you're in constant contact, some of those were built before the year 2000. And what I'm saying is there is a presumption of how a lot of the tools thought people would communicate over email. And then there is the reality of how we communicate now. I might send a LinkedIn message to Eli or I might send an email to him. I might we're not sending letters to each other anymore. Maybe that's an idea for the future here. Eli, we could become pen pals. But it's important to remember that it is often our personal emails are very different than what maybe TELUS and DC Hydro and others are sending us now. And back when Eli and I were doing email fundraising in the late 2000s, we were championing the cause of an organization doing email. And we were having to provide proof that the organization is not fraudulent. So the purpose of email originally had to be about making sure it wasn't looking like spam. Now the purpose of email is a person to a person. And I would just encourage you to take a look at some of the nuances of how you communicate with others or how others communicate with you and just be inspired by those. And I try and communicate through quotes. So it's a show and tell time. And here is a couple of things for a framework. So I want you to become a terrible fundraiser and I'm a dad. So that's dad joke. I want you to thank, engage, report and ask. And so I want to things I say here is a great email or direct response program is clear and direct asks. So I loathe the come the terms hard ask and soft ask. And that's just my perspective. I'm hoping that they're direct and they're able to solve a tangible problem. Good fundraising calendar also needs a time of thanking, engaging, reporting, and we'll show what those look like. They ask one might seem obvious. It's important to build a well balanced marketing plan that allows for impact reports, campaign related thank you surveys and low touch increase and well time fundraising requests. So one of the things you know, I use some of the images from a presentation I made to this group in 2014. So if you're looking and you're like, this is a screenshot showing activity in 2012, 2013, this is still ongoing. Our team actively uses, we call it FC ultimate where we report on everything. Every result from every campaign we've ever done ever. So an important part of being email fundraiser is just having a repository of where you're recording all your results. Second is the calendar. You can see here how this client, they shut down their organization. But you can see here in 2014, we've laid out, we use terms. We have project plans, which I'll show you a little glimpse of that. If we ever want to unpack as a Q and A, I have a project plan loaded up so that we could walk through. And then we archive every email and you can see how it's connected there. And because the great thing about being an optimizing fundraiser is you have the year over year opportunity to continue improving. And like I said, here's an example of our project, just at the top of it, where is here's what we're trying to do and everything goes in this, including a lot of the internal information. If you're building an email and Mailchip. Eli, is there anything keep rolling or buzz? I've got a question coming in here, which is no to the side, but just to want it to say, what has the castle anti spam laws? Does it anything to to the work of email fundraisers? Well, fundraiser link yourself, I think, if anything, it is second guessing and fear and meetings, if I'm being honest, I've been, I've attended a lot of meetings where someone wants to add a link or a button to ask for money in a situation where they're not and like cover their just be safe. So because the purpose of castle is for commercial marketing and charities are explicitly exempt if their overall purpose is for solicitations. So if you're ultimately trying to sell tickets for a theater, that crosses the line of being like a social enterprise. If you're collecting my email for commercial purposes, because at the end of the day, you want to make sure I know about your thrift store or other social activities like that. That's that is acting as a commercial endeavor. But if all of your communication throughout the year, ultimately for the purpose of fundraising, the great work of essentially lobbyists has made sure that charities are exempt from that ruling. The unfortunate thing, like I said, is for near a decade, I've attended many zooms and meetings of trying to clarify that. So that initial ambiguity as the rules were coming in are still living with us, even though it really isn't affecting most charities, except for those who are closer to social enterprise and the way they're focused. Yeah, speak up if you've ever heard it ever enforced. Our most popular block flows is actually about Castle that was written in 2014. Yeah, we could always circle back. All right, I've got actually one more question coming here from Rain. Is there any thought to the impact of large scale email campaigns sending like multiple emails, stressing resources and the long term impacts on the environment? Is there any way to make sure you're sending a precise amount that is helpful, but with less impact? So I think I think the question here is that there is a bit of an environmental impact from even digital activities. And so the service and things like that. So that could be a potential concern. Am I getting that question correct? Yes. OK, good. So I confirm that that's the general thrust of the question. Is that by your world? That is one of the most advanced questions I've ever heard. That has not come into my world. No, that's way above my pay grade, if I'm being honest. I've never even contemplated that. I don't know if you have Eli. Obviously, if we go to the extent of like crypto, but that's the only concept I can come close to for digital footprint. But then for being honest, my my organization's and quite involved with print funders as well, right? Yeah. So we wouldn't be the ones to learn from as regards that. Yeah, I would say it's not something I've run up against. I know that Greenpeace and others have done a bit of work around the impact around just like server farms and all of that. But I couldn't say I know much about that as well. So I read you a little bit of Google like today. The socialist in me says, I hope we don't look for a market solution to that problem. But then, you know, so one of the things I'll dive into. There's these sections around thanking, engaging, reporting, asking in past presentations, I found it helpful to do the show and tell. So here we go. An obvious way that you can improve your email calendar is to thank people. I I would there's and there's a few examples here and my encouragement is to make the email just that in natural communication, a genuine thank you that isn't followed by an ask or really a change of topic and whatnot is to me is a more genuine thank you. And if you just email to say, OK, I wanted to say thank you. I make it clear. One of the things in if we're kind of critical of this one is it read the blog isn't that's not natural. And in I've never got to thank you from a person that is a giant image saying thank you. And also it's not even clear who's saying thank you to me. Saying this good, but here's some criticisms. Here's one of our internal ones that we wrote. You can see that we're framing it from a person. Tara is saying thank you to me. And we've made sure that Tara's email signature is part of it so that if you ever did receive emails from Tara, this it would have by and large the same look and feel with some differences, of course. And there is no PS, please give is an ideal thing. There are often opportunities to say, hey, if this if you hadn't had an opportunity, maybe do. But you notice here is like one of the things that the organization wanted was like, hey, we have more from the story of the person that was helped. And often organizations want to be like, we have technology. So let's sort of horn it into an email. And if you were to share a cool video that you saw, aside from, say, if Eli's and I were buddies and I'd forward a TikTok video to him, which makes me sound old because I don't use to talk. And I don't know if I'm in the language, right? But you notice at the bottom there that there's, hey, you know what? Thank you for in their language, prayers and compassion. They're grateful. If you want to keep learning more about it, like, here's her story. Like, here's the payoff to the feeling you might be having right now. Here's another one. Hey, Ben, I want you to know how thankful I am for you. And here's a recipe that gave me a gift. It's amazing. Happy cooking. And you notice that even the PS is just do you want to get and just be participatory in that culture of thank you. And especially you'll note this and the next one are trying to feel like the email came from that person. And then this one is there's a way to frame the thank you and sort of more aspirational language, right? You're making a tremendous difference. Here's what you made happen in a very tangible way. I thought this one was so cool. And I worked one years ago, I worked at a university and traditionally they would send this email once a year, which was an e-card. And those of us who've been in this business for way too long know about the like the e-card days where it was just so exciting. But it was not very human and authentic. But what's really cool is there's now a culture. I don't know about your workplace, but we sign the card and we pass it on. It's a Google doc that gets turned into something like this. And so this organization, MCC did it. And they're like, hey, for the people that are being benefited by your gift, they made a card of thank you. It's not personalized to me per se, but it felt as much. So engage. Now, what does that mean? Hey, involve me in some way. The traditional charity likes to involve me through volunteer. You will never get a volunteer hour out of me. I haven't volunteered since I worked with Eli. And so here's the email subject line. Real quick question. Turns out it wasn't actually Tim Kachurik. That's not his real email address. He's sneaky with it, Tim K. And it's like, hey, Ben, real quick question. I thought it was him asking me how to describe. I know Tim Kachurik. And I was like, oh, I want to son of this isn't actually him. But I was I felt like I was involved in how he was going through the branding process. Amazing work by a BC Green Party. Give advice just goes to the contact form. You probably I sure hope you have a contact form on your website. But they're like, hey, give us some advice. And this is a very aligned with people who support a political party is wanting to give advice. So it was a very popular email. Dearest, this is I redacted some of the information. And it's like, hey, this is how we feel about you. And can you be involved in just a few questions, quick questions? Take the survey. We want to be better. Thank you for support. And one of the things I thought was ingenious, or by the way, here's a glimpse at the first survey question. Here's your mailing address. Like, Eli, what are you likely to do if I showed you your old emailing address? Oh, my God, I've got to fix that. I couldn't leave at night with it wrong. Yeah, what a hook. No part of you wants to update a charity with your mailing address in general and be like, oh, I can't wait for them to send me more direct mail. But when they show you the wrong information, you can't wait to update it. Yeah, and it's nice because they gave a preview, right? Like, I'm extra incentivized to click on the link. Like I was living in a dorm and that was my university days. No, I really like that. I think I do say it's incentivized people to get into the survey. The other one I really liked was that next after because it was keeping people in the same media, wasn't saying, click out here into another browser. Yeah, yeah, with like reply here in the email, keep in the email chain. I think they'll just lower the barrier to entry. So yeah, just reply back. And we'll see another version of this as well. And one of the things you can see, actually, we're looking at is there's a new executive director, president for Union Gospel Mission. And one of the ways we humanize the situation, because that's the whole point of this, is to say, hey, do you have any questions for the new boss or like some well wishes for the old one? Just hit reply from a tech perspective is like you said, there is pretty, pretty easy. And then you often you have to honor these reply backs by going, what do we do when we get a reply? Hard to see this one. But one of the things that it does was say, hey, are you planning on giving about the same and much as last year or things different than things preceded from there on the landing page once they hit the button? But it framed things differently as I'm doing my this is what we in our team would call a high value donor email is treating someone a little bit more exclusive mean like Eli, you get you're a generous donor to the Canadian Colorblind Foundation of which I'm the founder, I'm doing my future planning you that where are you at versus treating me as more donor centric and saying, hey, will you get this not doing a formal ask? And here's another one much more designed. Do you feel connected to the people whose lives you're helping through ever? Oh, man, if I said yes versus I said, no, I hope that goes into your CRM, right? But also, you'd have to be a monster to say, look at this product. And one one caveat is I affinity surveys are more like what is my favorite Disney princess? And we've all answered those surveys. And why is it Moana? But this shouldn't be sent to a board of directors to say just so you know, of the respondents, 95% of them fell connected because as Eli's pointing out, people who don't feel connected aren't unlikely to aren't likely to say no. And this isn't like a statistically valid survey. Because of those who like answering surveys, they all said they like answering surveys. But the thing is, if someone does say no, and you're you are keeping track, you can be like, Hey, like, what is our issue that is going on here? That's genuine engagement. Hey, this is a charity. What's going on here? Give my thoughts. You're right. They call me one of their favorite customers. I sure hope it wasn't everyone, but I felt like I was one of their favorite customers. And it's like we it will help us understand that your brand, you view our brands, right? For they did with it, I felt involved. Reporting. So this is my hope is you can see how thanking is being just genuine and true and saying thank you. And then people be like, we do thank in our newsletter. There's some brackish water there. So this is what reporting to me looks like. And it is about demonstrating impact and accountability. And so here's one. And it's funny. I know Jenny Marsh, she's been on the podcast. I got tricked yet again. And notice the raw link as we call it hypertext markup language there. They the hyperlink is actually what Jenny would send me because she wouldn't possibly know how to build I don't know how to build a button in Gmail and send it and be like, Hey, Eli, here's a link I wanted to send you and then I put it in a button. What is natural is for us to share the link as it is, right? And so you can see here that it's like, Hey, take a look. I wanted to report back to you. And that's a little report. It's an annual report. Here's another one. Again, this is hard to read and you zoom in. But it was this was a January message reporting back to being and it was not framed as here's the list of accomplishments we made for the year. It was done by a tired and weary executive director. I'd like I wrote this. It's not actually him. And it was like, my goodness, what a year it was that you made happen in this way by being part of our community. They didn't worship the donor and say they did it all. But it was just like, here is where the money got spent in terms of actual stories. And there's this temptation because of those old templates to put logo and photo up at the top. I personally don't put the frontier logo up at the top of my emails. I put it in my footer, my email signature. And more so as I I don't start emails with a photo. If ever, I put it at the bottom or in the middle. And so one of the things you can see here is they were like, we did all this work then to produce this image of all these people saying thank you. And I was okay, I'll find a way to use it. And I put it into the PS is a PS there. Here's something we did for you. And then this was this very much of a thank you thing that got worked in. And it's real people being quite genuine. It was a fun email. Yeah, no, I like putting that in the bottom because you always have that issue, which is images are blocked and so you people destroy, you know, with a big, empty box at the very top before they even see any content. Yeah, the downside of email is it was built before like the internet really flexed its muscles. And so email is a structure is just so awful, that you're sending someone to an outdated outlook. And that but so here's one where the organization, it's not from a person. So it's a little bit more marketing centric. And there's some beauty in it, which is great. But it's a and there's a preview of what it looks like to look at impact report. But here's the thing, this is actually a slide from 2014. We still send e newsletters. But at the time, and people still do this, we were sending a PDF of our print newsletter. And I was like, that's weird, because especially on an iPad or an iPhone, like, this is awful UX user experience. How about we have it the way, especially at the time with the emergence of medium and all these like the blogging tools, what if we have things go from top to bottom, instead of using the I frame apps or like this issue where it's like a pretend physical experience, what if we lean into digital and digital first, we went from, and it was amazing how it's 800 to 1000, we would stand out, Hey, here's the latest issue of gratitude and click on this PDF. And I see some charities where they just try and write out the whole newsletter in the email. That's gen X or write emails like this. Like I'm Eli, I suspect you're a long email writer, but we'll deal with that later. This is, hey, I'm going to take you to this, and then you can scroll down. And it at the bottom there, what and you can see the obviously the difference between the PDF and the website is there is the opportunity. If I feel like I want to give a gift, if that's the end result of all this reporting back, it's quite easy because I'm already on the website asking. So this is the most obvious and to give you some examples. There's Jenny again following up with me. And there's a transaction if we ever wanted to get to I'm a huge fan of match campaigns. It's so clear to me what the opportunity is because I'm a skimmer. I love that. Can I count on you, Ben? Oh, it's hard to say no. Match 2021. You can see that they're not mincing their words. They're not trying to be like, Hey, you know what? We could only send you so many emails. So we wanted to send you the annual report. And by the way, we have a match campaign. They were priming me is to use the language of marketers by sending me the annual report. Dear Ben, look at this. Do you remember going back to school as a kid is oh man, oh, it's so positive and full of anticipation. However, and will I make it make kids in need thrive this school year with a special gift. It's very particular. It gives me a amount 7589. And the button is to support kids in need this fall. It's not give now it's not support. It's not submit the least useful button name on earth. But here's it done in a different way. Again, I'm the skimmer. Could you provide a full bag of nutritious food to someone in our community? Costs is $35 to provide groceries to family for whole month. You can see there's raw links. Maybe if you're a little bit nervous, hey, if you've supported us already or in other ways, thank you. We're so blessed to have you and that's the language of their the organization to have you as part of our community. And if someone gets mad for receiving this email, like I would be quite surprised. And there's an opportunity for a good conversation. Here's done a little similar way. Can you imagine this? Right? I reached out earlier. I reached out earlier but with temperature dropping quickly again, there's here's the reason for sending you a follow up will you protect your city's most vulnerable people are making a lifestyle donation today. And here's how to do it. Wouldn't it feel weird if you got this email? And it's like a giant button in the middle. And the PS, let's reiterate that point. Fellow Victorians, we all know how well the dogwood initiative just crushes their fundraising. I'm a huge fan. And huge added Adam Bailey as well. You see there's the multiple links, those of us who've been doing fundraising for quite some time know that results go up. The more you can keep reframing the same thing. And so this is another example of good email. And checking in before the day is over, that's how a human would follow up to ask for more money for the Giving Tuesday match only lasts until midnight. You don't want to miss your chance. Every email has its ups and downs, but like this would be how a person who wants to make sure I sort of fulfill all my desires. And I think the big issue that a lot of organizations when they do they're giving Tuesday campaigns is they're not thinking about the clutter of how many other organizations are wanting to do it. And I love the way this was framed. You can see the subject line here literally out of options. One of the people on our team suggested pointing out there's a lot of success in very long emails. And you can see how that this one I couldn't even show you the whole thing who's so long. And I'm aware that this I performed really well, but notice the staccato nature of it. Even sometimes starting with ellipses dot the essential items that keep them alive. And this would have scored incredibly well in a tool that we often use called copy optimizer that shows us the readability and the story value. Not all our emails are this plain style. But if they are designed, they use they make sure they work on our telephones, right? Because that's how we look at a lot of the internet is making sure those little tiny devices we look at when we're done work. And so making sure that the dimensions if you are doing photos, if you are doing fundraising campaign, you can see that it's a little bit more of a square than that sort of movie aspect ratio. And one of the things it doesn't use is that kind of awful grays or those bright oranges that back in the day used to dominate all the email templates. And rounding through here's another one. I the thing is, most emails aren't written as a series are written as individual points. And you see here, you may remember this previous thing, if you do, maybe, if someone remembers every one of your mailings and emails, that's a sociopath test. But most likely they don't. And you can be like, Hey, I'm following up, we ask caring people like you to launch commercial business. And now to quote Bernie centers, I am once again asking for your support. Here we go. You can see just another example. To me, I'm starting to blur and look the same. But just wanted to make sure you had lots of examples. If you want to fundraise around monthly giving, so this is a bit of a whoop, those were all of these things were about getting that one time gift. But this is one of the best ever monthly giving emails I've ever seen. When's the worst time a year to do financial planning was in summer, please don't do summer monthly giving campaigns, because I'm not in that mood. One of my most likely to be in the sort of the mood and desire to be the best version of myself as regards physical planning is January, I want to join the gym. I want to do better things. And so you can see here that they use January 13. This year is this opportunity to say, Hey, I wanted to say good things and just talk about how amazing this new year is. Here's the thing. I wish I could simply say thank you today. But the truth is, we expect this year to be an extremely challenging year. Boy, is it ever. And that's why I'm asking if you can support this work by giving us a monthly gift. And as in they gave some follow up of by setting up a monthly gift, you could help make sure up. But as can you please be on our recurring program. And what they didn't say is it helps reduce admin costs primarily, it's part of the board's overall goal of increasing monthly giving. And we just can't wait to treat you like an ATM. And those are things we all hear all the time. Those are the second and third and fourth most common things that I hear from others. And but you can see it's can you join in so that like the moment we want to be there for people were able to this really does go up to your idea that there is no real donor fatigue because I always heard that coming right after the holiday giving season, people feel and tap down the credit cards that like it would not get the time to come with a big campaign like this. Then we've done a lot of monthly giving campaigns that just crush in January. And for one is asking the thing that's unspoken here is like, are you sending every email to everyone? And what are the who are you sending to right? It's maybe the reverse of that question of ecological impact is like, you don't have to send even though it's like near free, you don't have to send every email to every person. But so here's another one. I love these ones for years. I've loved this. You can see that match campaign for UGM in 2016. In 2015, I saw this one type of email and I just couldn't wait for the following year for our team to do this, where you get this forward from Bill William Mallard. And it's hey, just checking in. Did you get the email? And and those are the sort of forward email. There's a couple ways. So I one I wish I loaded now was sometimes we've done an email. So let's say Megan on the team or Daniels here. It's they send me an email. And then I am forwarding you their email as Ben just wanted to let you know how amazing the results are. And I go, Hey, Eli, I'm forwarding you this email, this internal email of what's going on. Do you want to participate with a gift? It's this is mimicking how we use email, right? There's a forward button. And it's again, thinking about this again, using that ingenuity, instead of just hitting resend, which has its own value. Years ago, there's another way is when you ask, you could just reframe. So by the way, especially if you're a political party, go figure that political parties manage to have legislation that rewards giving to a political party. But it's like sometimes we don't understand the benefit of charitable giving and is there ways that you could reframe it and share people with people like what the the true cost is and how it will affect. And here's another where it's Oh, this is that this I had a separate one, which was the do not do list. This made it in all of this email is a precursor. There was a video and a stats image. All of this is a precursor to eventually asking me for money. I read it, and it takes a good minute. And then all of a sudden, by the way, we'd like to ask for a gift and it is stunning how much of a left turn it is. But so because we have a no section later and that's supposed to be there. Here's an oldie that we had it is like, here's match my gift. It's very specific and it shows me who I might be sponsoring. These are a little because this document is me saving kind of best examples I've ever seen. These are subject lines matching donation attached and they use that emoji. There's a whole bunch of like generational divide around emoji emojis and I'm not sure how much of it is true. But it's interesting to think of attachment and using the that emoji. I want to introduce you to someone that sounds like an email I might get from Eli, not from tech soup. If I get that email, I'm probably opening it because it was just like I'm just so preconditioned to assume it's someone in my network. So there's this actually terrible section. This is the end, essentially. And then for your own time, I would absolutely suggest you read this blog post. I as a Britain, I would have just jumped over myself to make sure that I could have purchased one of the bricks in the Tower of London, or the White Tower, sorry. And they framed it in a totally different method, which was as a result of the pandemic, they're facing serious financial challenge which threatened their future and needs work for financial recovery. And they're offering this opportunity to buy a brick. And with who among us hasn't heard about the kind of to buy a brick idea, right? And they're like sponsors stone is like, you know how much I would pay for an eye level stone in one of the most iconic buildings in the United Kingdom, so that I could show my kids and I would pay so much more for it to be at eye level, therefore to be that kind of crack at the top corner. Like I would have paid $10,000 for that. And not only that, they framed it as help us get through our financial challenges. And then there's the classic, just so you know, it's very expensive here. Time is running out. We found an image to go with this. And this year knowing you made a difference, but what difference is this basically the classic trope of to me of a bad template. Oh, let's work a dad joke in golf for addiction recovery. Whoa, that's this is me taking potshots now. But there's a time to be free fun. And there's a time where it's not. But the next section is if we wanted to and had time just one time. So I'll throw it to you, Eli. We've got another nine minutes. Let's run. Cool. So as desired, one of the things to realize is look at all the lonely people. One of my favorite charts here, Love Charter, by the way, is just remembering that more and more Canadians are living alone. This important social ties. And sometimes so because one of the things will be like, no one wants to read my emails, could be one of your common fears. So I'm just I'm disturbing someone by sending them emails. What if that's one of their areas of connectedness? And one of my fundamental beliefs around fundraising is that by giving someone gets to be the best version of themselves, this is self actualization at work. And it's in the could be even a part of a healing journey to participate in your community. I'd be very cautious to assume that you're being burdensome as a default of what's going on the zeitgeist of the people matters. I would never recommend saying the word in inflation or other $10 words. I don't think you should say the word empowerment. There's so many that it was like, what is this actually food insecurity? I technically, I'll be honest, I'm recording. I don't know what that means. If you said to me that I want to make sure people are seen and heard and the perspectives of people who, you know, in this way need to be brought forward. I'm like, oh, like my daughter, she's 13. I want to make sure she's seen and heard. I guess I want her to be empowered if you want to use that word. And so if you're thinking through the language of the people right now, and there's this challenge between how organizations want to use $10 words and how people just generally speaking don't. So just but take a look at Google Trans take a look at what's happening and be like, okay, like inflation is something is happening. Is it happening to my organization and to the person? Can we make it relatable? So that's a big part of how I do email fundraising is making sure that you're saying, hey, Eli, man, because if I said that just so you know the costs of frontier are going up, so I'm going to charge you more. Like, there's no part of you that are going to be empathetic to that situation. I don't care. Hey, just so you know, payroll skyrocketing, we're charging an extra 20%. And you're like, hey, I've got some other problems too, but this is also a volunteer driven organization. We might be at that loggerheads now. But if I was like, talking into a way that is relatable, especially empathetic Eli situation, very different. I don't I've never met an organization that overuses video. It's funny because when and say when I first met Eli, the concept of using video on the internet was like, you don't know about the people in Salt Spring, man, they're still on dial up. And you're like, I wish I could use larger images even as careful. But obviously, we're doing a live video right now. And there's other things like cameo. So one of my incursions is, do you have any celebrities in your world? And there's the A celebrity, of course, a few charities who've gotten to work with Ryan Reynolds. And by like, my son is an A celebrity to his mom and grandmas. And for happy Easter, he spent like 30 seconds and very quickly said, Hi, mom, happy Easter. Hey, grandma, happy Easter and had me send them all out. And then this case, there's a visual example of how Nick, one of the kind of great leaders on the frontier team, we were celebrating many years of working with them. And we asked his childhood best friend to select as a celebrity from cameo and was Colin McCree. And it was very well received. I, if there is a campaign to eliminate con, as I like to call it within the fundraising world, please let me know and I will contribute. I personally not a big fan, I should say of constant contact. If you're asking me what email provider I should use, Megan on her team did a great job of creating this slide and saying, Hey, there's these popular ones. And I think if you're based in Vancouver in particular, I swear, if you asked the average charity person, what's more popular constant contact or Mailchimp, it's often thought to be near equal. And just so you know, constant contact was created in the 90s. That was before many of us started emailing. It would be incredible, incredibly predictive of them if they were accurate with how that was built. Here's that example I mentioned before, I would suggest bifurcating your emails. So while I don't believe in a two tier health care system, I do think you're bound to the realities in this, what they would say K shaped economy is having different emails framed for your high value donors or the ones you want to become that. And your usual annual donors. We've shown countless examples of how the opportunity of being low tech gives you that ability to be high touch. There is this other fundraising agency build good and run by Mike Dirksen and he had this LinkedIn post like this week. And it was like, here's an email sent out with no copy. And here's an email sent out with no design, which one would you rather since obviously it's a bit of a strawman argument, but I view it as a great change up if you're used to sending very designed emails. To that end, one of our partners next after has done countless experiments to show the value of a plane treatment. Like I said, huge fan of match campaigns. I wish there was like, when we talk about capital campaigns, or events and like all these pillars of fundraising, I wish one of them was just match campaigns. And there's a lot of opportunities to optimize and ethics within it. But this bar chart you see here is 2014 through 2020. I have usually a match campaign that started in 2011. And then this visual is from like 2014, maybe the heat map. I highly encourage anyone to read the MNR guide to ethical effective and ethical direct response creative. So how do I move my language from the problematic nature of donor centricity, where $5 saves a person's life. And this is a journey I think a lot of us are on. I myself included in the direction of more community centered fundraising. So there's this book and or the report. And just a recent podcast that I did with Nicole Mucci talking about changing language guidelines. And big fan of copy optimizer take a look. And one of the things it does, we go look at the agitator, which is their blog is making sure that your writing style is more a narrative involving like the start of this entire webinar is he didn't have in a conversation. Well, oh man, I love Christopher Park. He does this. They do that. There's this arc of the stories that we just love because children and Star Trek fans, right? And so what we want to avoid is being traditional fundraising, which is a little bit more like academic pros. And just wrap it up. As you saw surveys have an incredible effect in the ability to engage people and get them to give again. We often do laps donor surveys. And not really included in this, but just want to mention is welcome series or automated emails, which are more to the person's journey than to your annual calendar. And so there you go. I attended forgetting the right name Alexander Hamilton. There Hamilton this summer. And I'm a huge fan of R&B music from the 90s, because I'm 36 years old. And I watched the Super Bowl and I was like, finally, for younger people, I was like, oh, and then I heard Biggie Smalls quote by Secretary Jefferson of saying, if you didn't know, so there we go. Thank you so much, Ben, lots of really great practical advice there around what we can do with inter fundraising campaigns, especially around the other pieces, which is just strengthening those relationships, properly thanking people and making it feel like authentic real communication rather than yet another EPEL template we pull off the show. So that's really fabulous. And for those who catch everything, don't worry, we will have a recording available to you very soon. And I'll probably get that out tomorrow. Maybe time. Let me just do a really quick wrap up. So this is not the end of it. There are more events coming. So next week, we're going to be talking about AI, future of work, automation and like finding some kind of sustainable work-life balance. So if you go back to the event page, you'll find the future of work there. We're back again in January with my favorite event, which is the top technology trends to knock off in the coming year. And what we do is we invite the eight to 10 experts from around Western Canada and ask them about their top technology trend for the company or marketing trends for the coming year. And so they'll all come and blow your minds with these quick five minute demos and overviews. And maybe one of the won't be good, but don't worry. It's over in five minutes or on to the next one. So it's a fast-paced, it's super fun. And then we're going to come back in February to talk a little bit more about the spine-raising trend and the pizzas that you can do that would drive more raised. So that is what's coming up. Before I leave you, though, let me once again say, right now it's me and Ben Abel as the core volunteers running the group week at week out. We would love to expand the team. So if you're interested in learning a little bit more, give us a shout, drop something in the chat and we'll follow up with you. And I'd love to bring you into this community. And with that, thank you so much for joining us today. And we will be back again by January at the earliest. So thank you so much and have a lovely afternoon or evening.