 So, welcome everybody. Welcome. Good evening. Good afternoon to everybody that is joining us. Whatever you are in the word, we're going to talk today about a very special product. So today's virtual office hours is going to be from unbelievable magic to good marketing insights learn from interviewing 404 nonprofit leaders. And I'm going to talk about a few housekeeping items. So you can use the check function to type in your comments. You can ask questions in the Q and a function or as well in the chat. This event is being recorded and it will be shared via email after this session. So don't worry about that. I want to talk to you about quiet. So what is an online community that Texas has assigned only for nonprofits. You're going to have a peer to peer community. You're going to have exclusive events. You're going to have expert technical support. You're going to get to know other nonprofits in your area. You can access that all the entire text of courses catalog. You're going to have additional discounts and more. And you can have 10 members in your organization. So I'm going to plug in in the chat. I'm going to have a few minutes and link where you can actually join quiet. And we're going to tag on today's agenda. We're going to talk about some introductions. You're going to talk. We're going to talk about magic or marketing. We're going to speak about some lessons of our 404 nonprofit leaders. We're going to know about the good marketing framework. We're going to talk about what now and how you can apply to feather and we're going to have a Q and a session as well. Alrighty, so I guess you already know a few of us, but here's the customer success team. We have Gerard, our director at Kevin. We're probably that you already know he has done quite a few of this virtual office hours. We have to me as well. We have Tony, we have Ashley, we have Jennifer and we have myself. So my name is Vanessa. I'm going to be your host today and I'm the program manager of the digital customer success team is super excited to be here today. I also have no born it who's going to be taken away to talk to you about marketing and about feather and not take it away. Thanks Vanessa. Thanks to tech soup and the team. I'm really grateful to be here. Just a little context on me is I'm currently the VP of marketing at feather feather is the nonprofit marketing platform purpose built to help you run and report on all of your marketing activities from programs to fundraising. And so a bunch of other little things about me. But I'm excited today because I get to talk to you about nonprofit marketing. I started my career in nonprofit marketing and fundraising I ran growth for an international relief and development nonprofit. And I'm excited to share some of the learnings that I've seen over the last 15 years and really get into it. So let's dive in. Before we do what I would love to do is if you can share in the chat so if you can see the chat share with everyone. If you could wave a magic wand. What would you make happen for your nonprofit. If you could wave a magic wand. What would you what would you make happen for your nonprofit. Imagine you went to Hogwarts and you're like flipping magic. What would you do to make your nonprofit better more efficient more sustainable. We'll add that to the chat and make sure you share with everyone when you're putting in the chat. Lynn says we'd be a higher profile in our community. Chris says greater brand recognition more engagements expand our intellectual bandwidth more than anything. Liz I think that's common likely would go out of business because the need went away. What a powerful statement we would go out of business because the need went away everyone would recognize our name. We're not a part of Parliament more funding and community involvement more unrestricted funding enable us to be more financially secure connected with everyone who needed us more brand awareness. We're not our we aren't a part of our fishbowl or who aren't a part of our fishbowl so acquire more donors. David says more volunteers. There's a lot of different things in here and what I want you to do is make sure you hold on to that truth throughout today's presentation because we're going to come back to it we're going to circle back to it. But today I want to start here. And you might be asking why are we starting our conversation today at Best Buy. What is going on in here. What's going on right now in this picture. Just drop it in the chat. What is going on in this picture. Black Friday sale Chris says yep exactly lined up for a special offer Black Friday etc. Yeah so the reason I share this photo is because you're absolutely right there's a bunch of people outside in the middle early hours of the morning, waiting in the cold people have blankets and hoodies and all sorts of things. I'm waiting for Best Buy to open in a few hours. Now the reason I share this photo is because I saw a similar situation when I was about 15 years old, and I was my mind was blown, and it wasn't blown, because I was like, Oh wow why am I not in that line, even though I definitely wanted to get in the line that's how lines work. And I was like, What is this magic that's making someone, or some ones, lots of people do irrational things like what is this magic that's convincing all of these people to do irrational things. And when I learned as I got into my career and went into school for marketing and then definitely began doing marketing, I realized that it wasn't magic. It was actually marketing that created this scenario. So magic I thought magic was help or making people do irrational things but it was actually marketing was doing, helping people do or making people do irrational things or encouraging people to do irrational things. And my naivete mind or whatever when I went off after college was like if we can use marketing to convince people to do irrational things can we use marketing to convince people to do rational things. The rational thing I did was I went into international relief and development work, and I got to meet kids like this kid Francis, and was able to do development work all over the world, and really invest in providing education and housing and clothing, and really a safe place for Francis and a bunch of his other friends and community. And I got to see the power of that marketing played throughout our impact as an organization. Marketing was what helped us reach more supporters and to basically build a sustainable funding program for all of our programs around the world. Marketing was what helped us elevate advocacy and the importance of caring for children in the communities that we served. It was actually mission critical and helping us reach families and families impacted by various crises to get them to know about our beneficiary programs that they could be a part of. Again, marketing was mission critical at every step of the process, and we were able to use the power of marketing to mobilize thousands and thousands of people to support and provide opportunities to dream again for kids like Francis, and others. I saw this in action and I was like man if we can use marketing to convince people to do rational things. How do we do this at scale what does this look like, and I've spent my entire career now really focused on this one problem how do we use marketing to convince people to do rational things that are going to make our world a better place. And I hope to share some of those insights I've learned and a framework that I've applied that you can use as well to not rely on magic to hit that goal that you said at the beginning with good marketing. And so my journey now has found my way to these individuals because I realized there were other people just like me that cared about elevating the importance of nonprofit marketing and the power of nonprofit marketing. And feather we have about 120 of us. We've built a platform that enables organizations to do good marketing and implement a lot of the framework I'm going to share. And so it's given us the opportunity to work intimately and really close with some world changing organizations so we have over 1500 nonprofits that use our platform. And so a lot of the lessons of the framework I'm going to share. Don't just come from my own personal experience as Noah, but rather the experiences of observing and really looking at what makes an organization, or how does good marketing look that then mobilizes more people to impact. And so we're going to share some of that. Now, the challenge I've had in 15 years is that most nonprofits rely on magic to hit their goals, not marketing. And that is unfortunate. And it's for good reason, you know, we love grogu style promises. And sometimes it's not because we don't want to do good marketing or that we don't have a framework to do good marketing it. And a lot of people are like I want to do good I just can't. And so we asked 404 nonprofit leaders in our state of nonprofit marketing report that said, What is preventing you from growing what is preventing you or what is holding you back from impact. Because I wanted to explore like why do so many organizations opt out of marketing and rely on magic to hit their goals, or to mobilize more people around their organization or to grow support. What is this what is it. And the number one response in our survey was we're operating on fumes. The number one response by a huge margin was that we're operating on fumes as organizations. If you resonate with this just put a plus one or a yes, or something in the chat. Do you feel like this is holding you back in your organization. It's not a lack of intention to do marketing to promote our organizations. It's due to the constraints and the, the kind of challenges that we're all dealing with that we just have to opt for hope sometimes and rely on magic, not marketing. What we have to do because we're all navigating this and some of these challenges are what I call the chaos cloud that we're all we're all in right now are things we can't control, they're just the nature of the work we do right now and it's gotten even more complex, because change is now constant and attention is the most valuable currency and resourcing for organizations continues to decrease. Now we can throw up our hands and say, yeah, Noah, you're right, you've just made the case as to why we rely on magic over marketing. But what I hope to do by the end of this conversation is to provide a framework that's actually even more effective in the midst of the chaos cloud that helps you organize your activities and focuses in a way that's going to help you rely on magic to hit your goals, and not marketing, because if we continue to just rely on magic, we're leaving our impact up to chance. And so typically in marketing, we either do nothing, we do everything so we're not it's not that we're not doing anything we're just doing everything from tick tock to telethons to billboards to broadcast media to Facebook ads to email marketing, etc. We're just like if we do enough things, then we can hit our goals. The third strategy a lot of people opt into which is that they do ad hoc, or what I call the hopscotch strategy is like, oh, we tried this. Oh, now we're going to try this now we're going to try this. And regardless of which of these strategies we employ. This is what I mean by unreliable magic because doing nothing is more hopeful, doing everything is exhausting and not intentional, and doing kind of the hopscotch strategy is not allowing the benefits of multiple activities to really pay off. The alternative is not is my my argument for this is that the alternative which I call good marketing is is a better approach or a better response to us operating on fumes, because it gives us more intention. It allows us to slow down focus on what we're focused on which is our community it's community first approach. It's responsive so it doesn't require you to know exactly what to do and when to do it, or rather just to open up a conversation with your community through marketing. It's omnichannel versus siloed channels so it's not just relying on email or just Facebook or digital advertising or events. It's saying what are the right channels that we should leverage to connect with our community. Again good marketing is just a more mindful approach to outreach and communications and again I'm going to share a framework that walks through this. And last but not least it's more measurable and so you know not just, well we got a bunch of clicks on this ad or we had, you know, 35% of people open this email, but good marketing is really grounded this idea of we're doing things that are measurable. We're not falling victim to the 50% of our marketing is working we just don't know which half. It's rather saying we know what's working because we're measuring it and its impact against our things this is what good marketing is. And my argument to you today is that good marketing is actually better response to the chaos cloud and us operating on fumes than typical marketing or unreliable magic, because it's more focused it's more impactful, and it's actually less exhausting because it has more intention. Let's get into what how do we actually make this my this transition how do we move from unreliable magic to good marketing, and we're going to provide a framework that you can use to grow your fundraising and your community that we've developed here at feather. One thing I will say is that if you have questions throughout today's presentation, feel free to drop that in the Q&A box. That's going to be the best way to isolate the question. We're going to provide commentary or clarification on the content, use the chat box, either way will definitely spend a lot of time in Q&A, after we kind of present the framework and give you an opportunity to respond to that. So, what is a framework frameworks can be scary frameworks can be academic frameworks can feel as though you know we're going back to like algebra class and we're going to do some formulaic kind of manipulation and all of that. I want to dismiss that. And what I love about this slide so this is my son Eli. And what I love about this slide is it fully embodies why frameworks are helpful, it fully embodies why frameworks are helpful. And here's the point. Eli is intently focused and so Eli is taking the time to have a plan and to come up with that and really focus in on what we're doing why we're doing and what is what is that that's the intention of a framework. The other thing that Eli is doing is he's using a pencil, a Star Wars pencil for that matter. Didn't know that tie into the theme of magic but here we are using a Star Wars pencil to write this plan. Now the reason this is important is because a framework should be flexible in the same way a pencil is. So there's this axiom that says hey you need to make a plan, but you need to do it in pencil and make sure you bring a pink eraser with you. And that's the power of a framework. And so when I walk through this framework it's not intended to be some like algebraic equation. It's supposed to center around intention and focus, and also flexibility and learning. And so that is the power of a framework. And so let's walk through what we call the good marketing framework right now. And then I'll talk to the application of this for you and your organizations at various challenges so whether you're trying to acquire new donors, you're trying to cultivate deeper connections with your donors you're trying to build advocacy and awareness. You're trying to apply the framework to each of those scenarios after we walk through it. So the first step in the good marketing framework is to identify who you are trying to connect with. So instead of starting first with what we are going to do the good marketing framework says you must first identify who you are trying to reach. You are trying to reach could be your current donor base so people that have given to you in the last 12 months, you want to cultivate a deeper connection with them and so you have identified who you want to target, which is the group of people in your community that have given to your organization in the last 12 months. You could also say I want to reach or connect with individuals in my community that I don't know, but that have an affinity for the work we do. So this is an unknown group of people so you don't actually know that it's Noah or Vanessa or Shannon or Lynn, but rather it's a group of people that are in the community that have an affinity for your cause that would be an unknown group of people but they're still in your community, and they're individuals that have an affinity towards your cause that could be because they've given to like minded organizations. That could mean they mirror the attributes of your best donors by using things like look alike audiences. Each of these are a way for you to identify who you want to target. So the first step is, who are we trying to target. Who are we trying to engage and connect with. Who are we trying to reach. Once we've identified who the next thing we need to do is understand what we know about them and what they know about us. Once we've identified who we need to ask, what do we understand about them and what do they understand about us. The way to do this is to ask two questions. The first is what interactions or engagement have they had with us in the recent past, if any. So this is you as an organization reflecting about how have they engaged with you in the past it could be that they've given to your advocacy programs, and that's the unification of this, this group but they're not just donors but they've given to the advocacy programs and they've supported the advocacy programs you have in the last 12 months, that would be the first question. The second question is almost more important. And the question we skip over is, how would this group of people. Describe their relationship with your organization. How would this group of people just define their relationship with your organization or connection to your organization. This isn't what how you see them as don't your last 12 month donor advocacy donors, but how would they describe their relationship with you. It could be oh we connected with them at an event, and I've loved getting to know their organization in the last 12 months. It could be that they have no idea who you are right like and if they were asked they would they wouldn't know who you are. But if they were asked to, if they supported advocacy programs for children in the community, they might say yes. They might not have a connection or describe a relationship with you and your organization. But if it's an awareness group that you're trying to target or trying to engage with. They might just describe their connection to the cause or their affinity towards the cause like, I'm a Colorado residents that is outdoorsy and I really appreciate the protections of our national parks. You might be an organization that is advocating sustainable protections for national parks in Colorado. They don't know who you are. But you would describe that they would have a relationship with the cause and that would be the context of this group has. So again just rewinding a little bit is first is who do we want to target. The second question is how would they the group describe their relationship or engagement with your organization and or cause. The third question is how would you or what interaction recently or engagement has this group had with you if any, in the past. So who, how would they describe their relationship how would you describe their recent engagement with your organization. These three questions are crucial, and you might feel like we don't have time for this you know we're a fast moving organization you just told us Noah that we're operating on fumes like why are we going so slow. So we go back to this graphic is that the reason we're asking these questions at the top of the framework is because we want it to provide us intention, which then leads to focus which actually gets more output per input. Then we would historically versus focusing on just doing things. We're starting with focusing on the market. It's marketing, not in market. So we have to start with understanding the market or the group in our community that we are trying to target, or we are trying to engage. Now, the next part of this framework is that we want to cultivate a connection with this group of people. We want to cultivate a connection with this group of people. We intentionally don't use like target convert attract convince interrupt any of these like typical like war torn marketing words, because ultimately what you are trying to do is to cultivate connection with this group of your community. Whether it's a new community, a new group of people, or it's a very loyal and supportive group of people, you're trying to cultivate connection, because unless we cultivate connection with them. We can't actually activate them to action, which is the next step. If we don't cultivate connection we can't activate to action. I haven't got I haven't activated someone to make a donation without connecting with them first. And connection just isn't like building rapport and doing all that it means like they're out in the community they're scrolling social they're wandering the web, they're inundated in their inbox. They connect with them in those spaces where they are they have no bridge back to your organization. The connection is the bridge between your community and your cause the connection is the bridge between your community and your cause. Now when I say cultivate connection and we're going to dig into this further. There's three components of cultivating connection. The first is that you can think of this like a campaign. So you can say hey we're going to design a campaign to cultivate connection. In a campaign there are two core components. There is the content we are going to use to communicate or to bridge that connection. And then there are the channels we're going to use to facilitate the connection. So within a campaign you have content and you have channels. The reason this is important is because the content and the channels should be informed by what you understand about the community. I think that this group of people has an affinity for outdoor protections in the environment in Colorado, but they have no context to our relationship. You know Colorado Conservancy or something just making up these names for illustration purposes. I then need to ensure that the channels and the content I'm using take that into consideration so I don't know who they are and they don't know who we are. So email or phone calls might not be the best option because we don't have that level of connection. I don't even know who these people are. But something like digital advertising or affinity targeting or geo fencing or intent targeting may be the right channels to use. And then the content we would use would be oriented around their affinity for the cause and then create a bridge back to our organization as someone they can partner with to work on that cause. So again, understand your community, cultivate connections cultivating connections requires campaigns and then within campaigns there's content and there's channels. Again, we're going to deep dive into this much further as we get in. This is just a primer. Now once we've cultivated connection with this group of people. Now we get to activate them to action. We get to activate them to action. So this could be a membership sign up. This could be getting them to volunteer. This could be getting them to just sign up for your email list just to be informed about all the great things that your community or your connected community is being able to have in on this cause area. It could be signing up for a policy change. It could even be signing up to be a beneficiary of your organization. This is an organization here at Feather that they don't even use us use the good marketing framework to raise money, even though they could, but they actually use the same framework to reach beneficiaries of their programs to encourage individuals to apply for housing assistance. Because again, that's the activation action they're trying to achieve they're trying to activate people to fill out an application to get housing assistance and so they're using the same framework for their program outreach as they are for their fundraising or volunteer donation outreach. So whatever that activation is is the next thing. Now, the thing is is that when we typically design campaigns, we stop here. It's a linear framework group of people that were trying to reach or target or engage. We run a campaign, and then we measure the impact on outputs. How many donations did we get how many volunteers did we get. What is the outcome. Now with the good marketing framework. It's not linear. It's a learning framework. And so the other outcome that comes out of every campaign you run is that you also get learnings about the community that you engaged, both those that actually were activated those that connected with you. Also those that didn't even connect with you through the campaign. All of those learnings are now additional information that you can use in your next campaign. So the last part of this is learning what we learned throughout the campaign that we can infuse back into our next campaign that we might run. Now the last thing I want to say is the good marketing framework is intended at all of the intersections understand cultivate activate and learn every single one of these steps is actually driving more impact for your organization. What I mean by that is that marketing is not a means to the mission. It's not something we do to achieve the mission or to get people are convinced people to do the mission. That's actually part of the mission. If you're a childhood cancer research organization, you understanding your audience is part of the mission you cultivating connection with them is part of the mission. You're using them to get involved with advocacy to sign up for educational learnings or to actually donate to the organization is part of the mission, and you continuing to learn about how your community is responding is part of the mission. So at every intersection of the framework, we're increasing the impact or good, we're having which is why we call this the good marketing framework. That was a quick primer on this. We're going to dive into each of the segments more specifically again if you have questions feel free to drop those in the q amp a box. And I'm going to kind of walk through a few examples with you, and then we'll open up for q amp a. So just as a reminder, this framework the good marketing framework can be applied at each stage of the engagement funnel. So whether you're trying to reach net new people, whether you're trying to engage your current community, or maybe you're trying to cultivate deeper connections with your most loyal supporters volunteers members. You can use the good marketing framework at every stage of this funnel. The framework in the funnel compliment each other. They don't compete with each other. The framework in the funnel do not compete against each other they compliment each other their two things that come together for you to be able to drive more intentionality and focus and how you use marketing to grow your organization. So let's go through the framework again in detail. First step is identify who, what's their context, what's their intent. Again, every single group of people that you're trying to engage has different context of your organization, and they have different intent or engagement with your organization. And so as we're designing campaigns we can't start with we want to drive more donations. So we are going to send emails, and then we are going to send emails to these people. That's working the framework backwards, which only gets you tied in a knot. You have to start with who are we trying to connect with. What do we know about them. What do they know about us. What is the right content and channels we can use and then how do we activate them to the desired action. It always starts with your audience. Again, what you know about your community drives your campaigns. There's some examples segments or targets that you might use to begin using the good marketing framework. It might be volunteers for you. It might be event attendees, it might be members, it might be website visitors maybe you're like hey our website gets 1000 visitors or 100,000 visitors or 20,000 visitors every single month. And we actually only know a small percentage maybe 234% of them. But there's all of this engagement right like we get natural PR, or people come to our website because they're always trying to learn about the latest. Latest goals or objectives. This could be a segment that you're saying hey we want to engage this audience further we want to drive this further. And then you put in the chat in the Q&A isn't there a step zero where you define what you want to accomplish or what success looks like. That's absolutely true. I think the thing that's important here is that even if our end goal for your organization is drive more donations. What we want to activate someone to do based on what we understand them might not be to give a donation. And so even if that is our end goal. We want to make sure that our donations or that's what maybe you are reporting to your boss, or reporting to the board is that we still have to go back before we decide what to activate is understanding what we know about this group of people. And what is the next right activation on their journey to maybe making a donation so your activation goal for a campaign using the good marketing framework, maybe for them just to watch a video, or to sign up for your email newsletter, or visit your website. There's a lot of different ways that you can program the goal that you're trying to activate people to because that information or that first yes or micro yes is going to enable you to better cultivate them for maybe a donation. And then we're going to begin in kind of a more complex version of the framework is create what we call nesting campaigns, where you're basically building campaigns on top of campaigns that feed into each other. So when someone activates through one campaign they actually get fed into another. And then when they activate in that campaign they get fed into another and this is called like nesting good marketing campaigns. So for today's call since we're just doing a primer on this, I'm not going to dig into the nesting function of this, and really just focus on how do you actually design using the good marketing framework, a good campaign. And then how does that potentially apply to the various stages of your engagement funnel, but great observation. Absolutely. You still need to know what you're after as an organization, but then still the audience and what you understand about them should dictate how you connect with them and then activate them to in any given scenario. So back to identify, there's a lot of different ways you can do this. And again, even though we're talking about a lot of different opportunities here you might just start with one you might say hey like, I want to apply this framework to donors that gave last year but haven't given yet this year. And specifically I want to target ones that have have been more digitally inclined and so we have their email addresses, but they gave last year but they haven't given this here yet, and that's where we're going to start. It might be different it might be hey we want to target net new audiences or acquire new donors. And so we're going to focus on donors and our potential donors in our community that have an affinity towards our costs, and that might be your starting point. And again wherever your starting point is is going to inform the campaigns. The important thing here is that the good marketing framework is focused on relevancy overreach, relevancy overreach and so it's not just about how do we reach as many people as possible, and then get my 3% conversion rate. But rather it's how do we design our campaigns to be highly relevant, so that the increases the likelihood that a higher percentage of the audience will be activated to action, even if that means you're reaching less people, even if that means you're reaching less people. So, we've talked about understanding and then defining your community, we're going to get into cultivate. Cultivation is a campaign where you want to design a campaign and say what content and what channels should we use that's going to best engage this content could be. Hey, we're going to use this advocacy article that talks about the 10 ways that are 10 descriptions about how this policy issue is impacting you know community residents. It might be a video showcasing the impact of your work in international programs like we did often at my organization. It could be promoting an event that's coming up that could be the content hey we have this event coming up and that's the content. Channels is going to be other things like email display ads social ads website engagement marketing automation, etc, that you're going to use phone calls billboards etc that you're going to use to connect with this audience and again certain channels are going to be better for certain groups of your audience. And also different budgets are going to enable you to use certain channels or not use other channels. Again, what you know about your community is going to inform both the content and the channels that use. So a few different channels that we find really helpful that a lot of our customers at feather use is that if they're trying to drive awareness. This before is but they'll use what's called affinity targeting. So affinity targeting allows you to define various attributes about what your best donors or best volunteers look like. And then through that target those individuals or reach those individuals with various advertising types whether it's on social media or whether it's through display advertising like graces doing here. And so as people are wandering the web, or scrolling social, they'll actually be able to see and connect with your organization's cause. And again it's defined by shared attributes or affinities that mirror your best donors. But these are net new people that you don't know. And so you can define this using what's called affinity targeting based on demographics purchase history industry affiliation location and more. One thing I found interesting is for example, you can go down to target recent intent purchase or like purchase intent. And so let's say you are going back to our Colorado example, you are someone that engages around environmental awareness and protections. You might say that people that shop at outdoors shop outdoors like REI or Patagonia or Dick's Sporting Goods or even some of the other big box sporting goods stores may have a higher affinity, or there's a perceived affinity that if you're testing and enjoying the outdoors, you might be more inclined to have intent to support our cause. You can target down to those intent details like recent in shopping intent history at REI Patagonia, etc. Very, very powerful. The other option opportunity here is smart send emails. So instead of just using email marketing to email out to your supporters, you can actually use smart email triggers by people that engage with your website or engage with your ads, or recently have done something specific. So instead of me saying, hey, I want everyone in this group to receive this email right now, smart send emails enable you to send emails at the right time to the right person in the right context. And so they could have just seen your ad on Instagram or Facebook. They could have just visited your website. And so then they can get an email in their inbox in relationship to a previous action they took. And that's a really powerful channel. So it's not just email marketing blast to get out, but it's actually smart send emails based on recent engagement. The other one to mention is retargeting. And so this is a great way to re engage or to recultivate an audience that you're already connected with. And so if someone's visiting your website, or you spent a lot of effort really promoting let's say your end campaign like the IJM had. They want to benefit from that. And so they said, hey, people have been exposed or seen our campaign. When they leave and you know imagine like your websites like a store, they come into the store when they leave the store. We want to continue to remind them of the impact they can have and continue to participate in our programs. And that's what retargeting is so when they leave your website or store. And they go out and they're in their inbox, or they're scrolling social or wandering the web. They would still be able to connect and be reminded that this. The most practical way we've seen this and it's really increased impact, especially at end of year is retargeting traffic that comes to your donation page, but they don't complete a donation. So this is called like donation page abandonment or sometimes it's called like cart abandonment campaigns, but basically using the channel of retargeting ads to engage the people that visited your donation page, but they didn't complete a donation. So there was intent. That was your audience that you're trying to target and then you're using both smart emails and retargeting advertising to be able to reach that. So that's the channels you're using. And the content you might use is more of a reengagement content versus an acquisition content because they've already been exposed to the campaign. A great example of how what you know about your community informs both the content and the channels you use to cultivate connections. Again, community first, not channel based reporting so it's not just how did our emails do or how did these ads do or how did this billboard do, but rather we are reaching this group in this campaign. How did our orchestration of activities impact them to not only activate action donations volunteers etc, but also what did we learn so learning and activations are both outcomes. And so we're measuring the impact of that at a community level, not a channel level. And again, this can be applied across the engagement funnel. So last but not least here is activation. So activation is going to be different on what you're trying to activate someone do based on the campaign based on your organization. But it's really about measurement. So one thing I wanted to share as an example from a executive director founder of an organization. She sent me this message and said, Hey, no, we're talking about you today because I feel like you might know the answers to my question. We have a segment of 3000 people who have given recently less than $500. So they're beginning to identify using the good marketing framework, who they're trying to engage. We're thinking of sending a direct mail ask for joining monthly with a corresponding email marketing that matches. So this group has already previously donated. They want to use direct mail and email the channels to invite them to be a part of their monthly giving program. And they're going to use a story. This detail isn't in the text but a story about someone that is benefited from the monthly giving program and how others and why others support monthly giving at their organization. Now this is where the confusion comes in, which is she says, but should we just ask for a one time instead of end of year or since it's end of year. So the assumption is end of year is a time where people give one time gifts in their experience. Or should they ask for monthly. So they really wanted to ask for monthly and activate that but they're saying hey based on what we understand about this segment, should we ask for monthly gift or should we ask for a one time gift. And the challenges you don't know. And I said it depends. And I said it ultimately depends. I know that's helpful right and I went on to describe a bunch of different scenarios and different options that they could begin to test and what might help them. What might help them better make a decision here or they don't make a decision they actually try both and then they can use that learn the learnings that they get from the campaign to inform their future campaigns. Again, one thing about activation is it's really about what you're trying to accomplish what you know about the community, but ultimately it's just about trial and error and being able to test. So there are three types of tests that you can use as you're beginning to use the good marketing framework. The first is what's called trying and a trying test is that you're just testing new things you have a lack of control to learn, but you're just trying to benchmark results. And one recently put in the chat. Hey, what's your thoughts on threads. What, how do you think they should be using that instead of x slash Twitter with all the distractions right and it's like I don't know for your organization. I'm not sure. I think threads might be a great opportunity I think x slash Twitter might be a great thing for some organizations or you've never done it maybe now is the right time. Well no so that might be something you want to try so it's still a test it that you're using hey we want to test this channel, but it's not a pilot or an experiment it's like we're just going to try this out and see how it helps us or doesn't help us. That's trying the second like version or lever level of testing is to do a pilot and so pilot is an organized test of new things with a clear hypothesis on the expected results within a predetermined time frame. So for example you might say hey we're going to do retargeting advertising we're going to try to reach we're going to we've tried retargeting advertising that began working. You know we saw some increased conversions than what we saw in the previous month. Now we're going to run a pilot for three months during end of year, where we're going to invest X amount of dollars, and we're going to use these this content. This channel of retargeting ads on social and display, and we are going to re engage people that visit our donation page and don't make a donation, and we expect that that will increase our results by 20% year over year. So again we've defined the pilot time found you have a hypothesis on what the results are going to be based on what you've tried and seen in the past or other benchmarks. So that's a pilot right like you've never you don't you're not a B testing or doing like this detailed statistical significant analysis, but you're just piloting something with clear expectations, clear bounds and a hypothesis of the impact. Level three of testing is where most organizations think testing is and then don't do testing is around experiments and so once you have a successful program, or you're running a program that is producing results that you feel like a significant, but you want to optimize or improve that that's where you can run a level three test, which is an experiment where you're doing variable testing that includes a hold out of the control group to determine if a specific test performs better. This is kind of like what you traditionally think about testing where it's like okay we're going to show the green button instead of the red button and we're going to compare red button versus green button and see what the impacts are. We're going to have a video on our donation page and we're not going to have a video on our donation page. What is the results. Again you have a clear anchor to what is true, but you're testing that against in real time usually in a competitive environment where you're testing some people and one to the other. That is more of like your ab test ab experiments. That's a level three type test. But again, the reason I think a lot of individuals and organizations don't do any testing is because they think all tests are level two. And what I would like to do is free you up and say no summer level two is where you're having a pilot others are trying we're just trying something in the shared language about what level one test are level two test are level three test are, enable you also to have shared expectations within your team of hey we are looking at this to learn. That's what trying is typically we're trying to figure out like if this is a good channel for us. If this is good content for us. If this tactic that we heard other organizations are successful with is even beneficial to us. Again shared language on what the outcomes and the objectives are with experiments it's very clear like we're running a scientific experiment a versus B if B wins we're going with B. It's not up to qualitative research it's like B wins we're going with that. Again shared language around testing can be super helpful. So what I think good marketing individuals do are people that apply the good marketing framework is that we always want to start with the assumption that we're wrong. And our goal is to find out how wrong as quickly as possible. The great thing about being a marketer and being in the environment we live in today is you don't have to be right. Sometimes you can't figure out if you're right without taking action. And so in that text message example, my final advice to them was like hey, whatever you choose you're probably wrong. But your goal is to figure out how wrong as quickly as possible so that you can apply those learnings to your next campaign and continue to improve. So again, good marketing assumes that we're wrong. Our goal is to find out as how wrong as quickly as possible. Our marketing framework is designed to help you provide intention and focus amidst the chaos cloud, give some clarity to that and say hey we're focused on this part of our community. We're going to cultivate connection with them and we're going to activate them to this action. And then we might do some nesting of that into other campaigns but ultimately we're just trying to learn. So the last part of the framework is learning. And so this is to provide you new context and new intent. The goal you want to do is is really understand like is our programs working is our people the right things our processes right and really growth is kind of a result of you learning which of these it is. Again we're going to provide these slides to you if you want to go deeper on this, but growth is a result of programs are people in our processes. And I think our role in learning is figuring out like, how is this framework applying to our funnel, what is working what is not where are there opportunities to grow. And that's the mindset that good marketers have. We also encourage our customers and even those that are using this framework to use what we call responsive rhythms where you're doing like weekly check-ins you're saying hey we're going to look at the metrics on Mondays we're going to do priority huddles around various campaigns. Maybe like I do with my team is we do a weekly wrap or we just take a step back and say hey what did we learn this week that we didn't know last week that's going to be more helpful or that's going to help us be more successful. Next week just a simple question, what do we want to celebrate this week to close out the week because we're always getting better week over week. And then monthly doing retrospectives hey how did this campaign work how did this test work. Hey we really had high hopes for this and it really failed or flopped what happened what did we learn. Was it a process was a program. Was it just something we learned and then doing priority check-ins like what are our priorities for this month what are we focused on. And then quarterly doing a broader set of feedback, whether you're doing PPP reviews which is programs people and programs people and processes reviews. Hey, how are we doing across these three buckets, getting your audience feedback or your community feedback. And then even doing what I call a pot refactor. This is priorities obstacles and targets and to really refactoring what that should look like for the quarter. Again, this is getting in more to the 201 301 level of implementing the good marketing framework, but I wanted to provide these as examples for you. Again, the intention of the good marketing framework is to give you the focus and kind of a clarity of thought on having a plan amidst the chaos cloud on how you can do good marketing and rely on that versus relying on unreliable magic. I want to kick it over back to you Vanessa I know we have about 10 minutes left for some Q&A. If you're interested in learning more on how our feather platform or our nonprofit marketing platform can enable you to do good marketing. Feel free to reach out to us at feather.co and be happy to chat more with you. I'm actually just read. Yeah, thanks so much on that on the chat so everybody is able to click on there and connecting you guys. All right, we do have a few questions here. I have a question here says people don't like to receive unwanted mail messages. This go often to spend how do, how does your organization react to this kind of reaction. So, people are receive unwanted mail or messages they often go and spam how is your organization react. Got it. Okay, I found the question because I wanted to read it to make sure I processed it. So I think that is true for everyone right like we don't want unwanted mail I look at my inbox right now and I have tons and tons of messages that I don't really want to answer and I'm like why are these people reaching out to me. I think what's interesting is that's typically because it's not only unwanted, but it's not relevant to me. And so one thing that we focus on a lot is like what is relevant to the community you're trying to reach, especially when you're doing acquisition or awareness campaigns. And so again, getting the definition of who you believe would be one or who you would want to connect with this not just anyone allows you to make sure that the content and the channels you're using are relevant. In addition to that just respecting people's privacies and not buying email list is a great way to do that as well and so digital advertising. Other more like brand centered marketing channels become more effective to use when you are trying to drive awareness and acquisition. Those typically do cost money to do, but if you're really targeted and hyper focused on who you're trying to reach. And you're thoughtful on the content and the channels you're using to reach them that are why usually pays off in the long run to connect more people in your community to your costs. That's really awesome. I also, we have a few questions regarding how this better work. I'm in David in particular, we're asking, they are a very small nonprofit. And they were decided to work with feather. How would that work. So maybe we can just think about how can you sign up for feather and how those maybe those plans work for any type of nonprofit even small or bigger nonprofits out there. Yeah, I'm happy to speak to both parts of the question so feather is a marketing like a nonprofit marketing platform, similar to what you would run your email marketing through or maybe what you would even do natively like in meta, or on Google and search. We just provide a centralized place for you to organize run and report on all of those campaigns so everything from your, you know, weekly email newsletter to your drip campaigns to cultivate new donors to your digital and social advertising. We usually are working with organizations over a million dollars in revenue. And so if you're not over a million dollars in revenue, I would, you're likely not a best fit for feather, because the complexity of your campaigns aren't such that you would need a centralized marketing tool to be able to facilitate that. And so there are a lot of native tools that you can lean on like meta, like Google, or your, you know, what email marketing platform you're using to implement some of these things feather just enables you to do that in a more sophisticated way. And again, typically, it's an organization that's a little bit more established over a million dollars in revenue is kind of an arbitrary line, given that that's when organizations need feather as a centralized marketing platform. Awesome. Some people were asking about some integrations with feathers so someone asked if you guys are doing anything with AI as of right now. So right now, and I think this is maybe my suggestion even beyond what feather is, is there's a lot of great opportunities with AI and I think like we even are experimenting it on my own marketing team. However, when it comes to like the fundamentals and foundations of connecting with your community. We have not integrated that directly into the tool in a way that's trying to over leverage that we continue to look at it and continue to see on how AI can actually not do what I think is popularized right now which is like content creation, or like content creation, but how can you actually use AI which is something we have had in our platform for a while to give smart insights on like how you should connect with your audience or smart reporting on like, what are the pathways that someone's taking to connect with your organization, etc. Some people were asking about how can they create marketing outside of the US a lot of organizations have branches outside of the US or maybe they are because we're global we also provide services to nonprofits outside of the US so like is it different from a US marketing campaign, or this specific method that feather does can be applied outside of the US. Yeah, I'll be the first to admit I'm not a like global marketing expert so I know that different laws are different, different laws in different places mean different things and so I'll just self admit that. I think regardless of what the rules are around in your community, it still comes down to what are the channels that you can use to connect with your audience and so in some it might be you can use things like affinity targeting or you can use things like look audiences like you can do here in the US, or even things like geofencing where you're saying hey I want to target this group of people that live in this area. That's not an option in other places, but there are a set of channels that you can use to connect with your audience and so again it goes back to within the context that you are operating. You may have certain channels that are available to you or not. It still comes down to what is what do you understand about your community and what channels and content should you use to connect with them. Yes, I think that's very important to like know your target. A lot of people were asking about emails like email marketing and then someone asked like how do you get smart email. Yeah, so smart email is a feature within feather, but it really relies on the ability to know who's engaging with your website and who's not. And so the key here is that feathers email marketing tool is connected to our our website in engagement tracking. So when if I send an email to Vanessa and Vanessa came to my website, I would know that Vanessa was the person that came to my website because feather is being able to identify that that email engagement was associated with the website visit. And so that's where you can then do smart emails, or when someone like Vanessa maybe comes back or engages with the website and doesn't take the action we wanted. And then send another email which I'm like hey Vanessa, I saw that you checked out our video campaign like we're so excited for you to be a part of this campaign again do you have any questions. And the relevancy of that significant because I sent another email that was like hey everyone we launched this big campaign and she clicked on the video and went to watch the video. She watched the video but then she didn't sign up or take action. She personalized email and be like hey Vanessa like we're so excited to have you back in this like it's again that relevancy of smart email becomes really impactful and a platform like feather enables you to do that, because you're tracking all of your website digital engagement in one place. It's really cool. And I feel like you can you can like you were saying you can put people in different journeys like there's somebody click when you're in on your email or somebody can watch your video. They maybe the other campaign that you can put them in another journey can be actually checking out something on your website or doing a donation. It's super cool that out there they can allow you to do different journeys at the same time as well with the same person or same organization. Yeah, and I will just if I could comment Vanessa I know someone asked about this earlier is where you start seeing the big the more powerful aspects of using a platform like feather for maybe a medium to large organization is those nesting campaigns. You know you refer to them as journeys, but it's really you're like nesting campaigns together that are always on. Let's say Vanessa comes back and takes action. I've already predetermined the path, or what we call flight that I want you to go on now. So it's like you sign up for email list. Here's the path that we're now going to take you on and that's running 24 seven. Instead of it being just based off of quarterly campaigns or other things so. Just about Salesforce we do integrate it with Salesforce I just wanted to comment on that. I don't know if there's anything related to to website hosting that you guys also have any integrations as well. So we integrate with most all website hosts or CMS is so whether you're using something like WordPress or Wix or something else. You can integrate the feather engagement tracking into those types of websites. And then we typically are integrating with like a CRM or donor management system like Salesforce, or razor's edge, or virtuous or some of the other kind of sort of bloomering, for example, even association platforms like I miss. And then we are usually replacing like someone using MailChimp or constant contact. They can use feather for all of their email marketing, and all of their other marketing campaigns as well. It was a pleasure having you now. And to everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. I have left in the chat. For you guys to join us in our next virtual office hour in October 31. We're going to talk about AI power tools in the Microsoft power platform. Please register there. I have also left the community, the quad community link for you guys also to sign up. And as well I have left there the feather website. So if you want to talk with Noah again, please make sure that you go to the website and contact them to know more about feather and how can feather help out your organization. It was a pleasure again everybody. See you all again in October 31. Thank you everyone. Thank you Vanessa. Thank you TechSoup. Appreciate it. Thank you guys. Bye bye.