 Alright, so without further ado who is speaking I am speaking Adam good I am a senior strategist at parts in CKO. I've been doing digital engagement in the nonprofit space for about 12 or 13 years now. I'm coming from a user experience information architecture background in the early mid pots, I think is what they were called knots. Well, I don't know, it feels like a long time ago. Yeah, I started out working primarily with user experience information architecture on really large enterprise size designs and redesigns for clients like Brookings Institution, Amnesty International Unicef, really helping them think through their, their architectures for their sites and their and over time got more and more interested in the types of whole scale organizational change that need to happen to help organizations particularly nonprofits that are engaged with their audiences. We saw a lot of, you know, at the time, and I think, unfortunately, still, there's, there can be a fairly myopic focus on websites as the most important channel, and often to the detriment of thinking about holistic contact engagement overall, and how that needs to be integrated across the organization, particularly if you're a large organization with lots of different audiences lots of different programs. So, yeah, so I help help organizations really understand what their digital engagement challenges are and help them figure out a road forward from there. So without further ado, we're going to talk about contact models and the importance of a contact model, why you need one and how to go about creating it. If you come from a background where you were doing fundraising or CRM management or email list management, you know, contact model is some people say oh is this audience segments or is this email list is this, you know, database design, and the answer is a little bit of yes and a little bit of not exactly. And I'll say why. The reason that it, you know, the similarities between all those things is that it comes down to how you understand your contacts, who they are, what they're like what they care about and what they do with your organization. And part of that is often in an email list and maybe another part is in the CRM and maybe another part is in the spreadsheet that the particular program keeps. And that websites the contact model piece of it because it's more of a conceptual mental model that can help you inform how you engage with your contacts across different channels. And we approach this the way we approach all of our work through the lens of engagement architecture, which is really about thinking about the engagement points in the experiences that you want to provide to your audiences that are driven by your community, but supported by the people in your organization the processes they follow, and the platforms that they use. So this isn't a webinar about how to choose the best email platform. It's a it's a webinar about how to understand contact models, and think of them from the standpoint of all the engagement experiences you want to provide to your audience audiences, and the platforms and processes of people that need to be in the context of what we make the most of that. So that's just a highlight and engagement architecture and the approach that we take. So question, what is a contact model. I like to start with this slide because I always like to start with some humor, keep going with humor is the case maybe contact model so contact one of my one of my favorite all time favorite science fiction movies about a radio astronomer who detects signals from out of their alien life and she has to decode them. So, beyond the fact that contact model, it works from a time standpoint, it is well making contact, and it is about getting clear signal and knowing what to do with that signal. And then model because when whenever I think of model I think of the zoo lander movies with male models that gets swept up in all kinds of international entry and and and succeed despite themselves. So contact models we're talking about today. What is it mentioned before that a contact model it's it's really a mental model that outlines the key information you need to know about your specific contacts to power meaningful engagement. And I'll kind of break down the different elements of this a mental model again in that it can be used to inform actual implementation so you can take things that you know from your contact model and implement them in your CRM or your fundraising database or you know whatever systems you have, it has to start from a clear mental model that isn't dependent on any particular system. The model outlines key information. So instead of just saying oh well what what all can we know about our audiences. The answer is you know a lot. A lot. In fact, you know most modern CRM have lots and lots of sort of standard default fields and allow you the flexibility to create a lot of additional fields. So if you start from a platform first basis you'll probably quickly get overwhelmed. So again starting with a mental model of saying okay what do we actually need to know what do we need to know what do we want to know about contacts about specific contacts. So that we can say, Oh, let's find all the people that are interested in disinformation campaigns. Let's find all the people that are interested in child hunger in the south. Thinking through your contacts your audiences the specifics of what you want to know about them is is really at the heart of the contact model, and ultimately that's to power meaningful engagement. So, you know, we're not, we're not keeping a giant list of email addresses just because we like giant list of email addresses, I mean maybe some of us are but you know the most part for the most part we have contact lists. We have CRMs so that we can better reach out to people and ask them to do the things that we would like for them to do to help us advance our mission. So the contact model is all about defining what the information is about those contacts, what type of engagements you want them to have so that then you can more effectively implement that in your platforms, figure out where you need to integrate your CRM with your email, and then you can have a lot of questions. Figure out what kind of processes you need to have in place inside your organization, so that, you know, there aren't a million spreadsheets with duplicate contents everywhere, or 17 instances of a CRM, which I kind of exaggerate but we definitely have clients that have, you know, every every department just starts their own mail chip account. And that leads to a lot of inefficiencies opportunity costs, as well as potentially disgruntled, disgruntled audiences, they're getting lots of emails from lots of different people. So the contact model is our way of approaching this question of how to effectively think about our audiences and plan holistically as an organization for how to engage them. But why contact models, and you'll see this slide throughout is just my little reference to the zoo Andrew joke where there's this vast conspiracy to use male models as assassins. Which I explained this to zoo lander that, you know, male models are being used as assassins, because they're gullible and not very intelligent, and he explains the whole thing and zoo lander goes I have one question. Why male models. So we'll keep saying but why contact models, because it's good to keep repeating the question. The more of it is you need to know who you're dealing with. Who are the people that are actually engaging with your organization. Chances are, you know a lot about some people, a little bit about some people, and not a lot about a lot of people. You know a name and an email address. And if you're tracking is good you might be able to go in and see what emails they've opened up. If they've donated if they've attended events, but chances are you're only getting pieces of that possible. And chances are that those pieces have to come from different systems, different parts of the organization, so that you're not getting a clear holistic picture that can serve all all the different constituents of your organization. So you need to know who they are. We, there's a lot that you can know about your audiences. We like to break it down into three, these three categories, who they are this is the basic information about them. What they care about is, you know, what do they care about why are they engaging with your organization, particularly if you're an organization that covers lots of different areas of work. And with a lot of advocacy groups with a lot of think tanks, you know they have such broad, you know many of them have very broad portfolios. And so one, you know one contact might only care about 1% of your portfolio, or 5% of your portfolio you need to know that about them. And then the final bucket is what they've done. So these are what they have done in regards to your organization. Are they opening emails have they donated have they come to an event have they spoken at an event. That's one that that's one that most organizations don't actually track in any official capacity within their CRM, which is crazy to me because so many people, especially in the nonprofit space have people coming through their system. Right interns maybe they work there for a few years and maybe and then they go on, and they go on to places of power and authority. And it's nice to have a record in your CRM of like hey, all the interns that we had focusing on this where are they now different programs might have bits of that information, but chances are your organization doesn't have a holistic view of that. And it can be really important. So you need to know who you're dealing with just a couple basics and examples, you know, who they are their name their email, at least, ideally their organization and their role. And again, this is a little bit tailored and specific to to think tanks and advocacy organizations you'll see some of the use cases in here are particularly to that but you know maybe organization doesn't matter as much if you're doing kind of direct grassroots fundraising, although still nice to know. So, these are some of the basics just basics of who they are. What they care about. So topics, which issues that they care about, which regions, if you if you're an organization that couple covers global issues. What are the regions that people are care about are coming from. If you're a national organization but have particular focus in particular regions, good to know which regions your contacts care about content preferences and communications needs. Good to know if people really care about getting issue briefs, or memos, or explainers, so that you know, ah, this person really likes explainers but whenever we send them something that's longer than an explainer they don't read it. They're really getting to know what kind of content they're they're interacting with and using, as well as their communications needs. This is part of the contact model because it's something that is frequently overlooked in organizations, or sort of looked at just through the lens of the platform, where you can say oh well we need people to be able to unsubscribe. Yes, but that is a subset of the idea of knowing your, your audience's communications needs. This is particularly important again, if you have lots of different areas where people might end up on different lists, they're not sure how they got there, you know, what, what are they hearing from you and when. And then finally, what they've done again, this can run the gamut from signing up for events, meeting with staff donating signing a petition, having a phone conversation. And you kind of did a mix of items here because a lot, a lot of focus is normally on the website, and what kinds of tracking and data we can get from the website did people donate to people donate people sign up to people take an advocacy action. And they're easier in some ways to track in terms of like discrete interactions that you can track and get data on, but a lot of the particularly more important influence generation work comes with conversations comes within person meetings, which may or may not be tracked, and if they may not be well communicated by program staff, maybe in the CRM or in the spreadsheet. So, you know, if someone, the ideal situation is that you're able to pull up anyone that your organization engages with and say, Oh, wow, they care about this, they work in this senators office. The last contact we have with them was they signed up for an event, they didn't come to it, but then oh I just see the last week that they talked with one of our senior, our senior program staff, having that holistic picture means that, you know, however you want to interact with that particular contact, you have a holistic view of how they've been engaging with your organization. But why, why contact models again why. The superpower of the contact model is that it helps you find and engage specific contacts, contacts throughout your evolving relationship. So a really strong and well implemented contact model can support fairly complex cross channel use cases like this. But the things that sort of are triggered by the contact model are green, bold and underlying to really emphasize their importance. But the, so the use case here is that alert me, alert me like I'm a I'm a program lead. I'm a program coordinator. So alert me when a new contact from the State Department registers for an event on national security, so that I can notify the national security program lead, so they can send a personal email. So this gets really into the heart of what it means to build relationships, leveraging digital tools and leveraging data. So the default case is someone signs up for an event with a name and email, and they get a response that says, thanks for signing up. Here's the link to the event. And then you know, maybe, you know, if the events team is on top of things or if your outreach team or wherever handles events, maybe they'll get a couple reminders before the event. That's kind of entry level, people should, you know, hear back from your organization. This takes it many steps further by saying, hey, we don't, you know, we do we want people to come to events. But the most important thing that we might get from events is someone that we haven't talked with before at a particular organization on a particular topic we care about. So, let's say the national security program lead says, hey, I really care about contacts from the State Department. I want to know when contacts from the State Department are going to come to an event so that I can reach out directly and say, Hi, I haven't seen you before, you know, can we meet up before the event. You know, what are you interested in, you know, starting to build those relationships. And so there's a lot that can happen here. And you can, you can implement your platforms and your processes to do this kind of work. But it has to start from a very clear contact model of you have your system has to have a way of knowing these things in order to get back results like this. And then you need to be able to say, okay, the person is from the State Department. The person is interested in national security, the person is a new contact. And, you know, the person has registered for an event. These are all things that need to be baked into the contact model for you can get to this point. And the great starting point for figuring out these kinds of use cases is particularly if your organization runs events. Sit down with the person who runs the events for a particular program or for, you know, for, you know, let's say for a particular program so if there's a national security program, the person who runs the events. What's the most valuable outcome for you sit down with them and say, you know, someone signs up for an event, who do you want to be there most. What would you do if you knew that they registered. How do you want to engage what are the kind of people you normally get and what do you want us to do next to them. So this starts to build out a picture of the types of things that your internal stakeholders care about and want to know when they think about your contacts. And this should be cross organization. So, you know, a lot of times we'll work with people who are in communications and they're doing emails, and then fundraising is doing another thing and maybe they're also doing emails with communication support or siloed from communications. The contact model is meant to support audience engagement across the board. By by saying, when we think of a contact, what are the different ways that we can engage them. And what do we need to know to engage them effectively and having these kinds of conversations across organizational silos is really important because then it becomes, it's a way of being less of a turf war, because their programs are protected protective of their contacts, or fundraising is protective of their high value donors. For good reason, right, those, those, those units are protective of their contacts for good reason because they don't want to overwhelm them, they want to have a say and sense of control over the messaging, but there's so many loss opportunities with that kind of that kind of siloing. So this is this is one reason why, why do you want to do it. Again, why contact models. Okay, so where do I start, but how contact models. So this is just an exercise that that you can do and we'll send this deck over afterwards. What are the attributes of your contacts, just sit down, just yourself, or with a with a colleague or with a team, and fill out the attributes of your contacts in these three areas, who are they. We know their name we know their email we care about organization we care about role we care about state. We care about zip code. Right, we care about hair color right there might be things that are specific to your organization. So they're kind of about the person. Not, you know, their interests or their activity. Again, look at what they care about. For what they care about. You want to remember your taxonomies. So, you think well I don't know what they care about. I'm not sure what those categories are take a look at your, at your taxonomies, particularly in in your website taxonomy is a kind of a fancy way of saying categories or groups or segments, labels, different categories for thinking of how people might interact with your organization so you can look at your website information architecture, or menus or navigation so if you have something that's a topic section and covers lots of topics. That's one of your taxonomies. You can also think about hashtags on social media folders that that teams use for internal sorting. Right, so if you're talking to program teams like hey how do you sort your emails when you're talking to all these grant makers or grantees. How do you categorize them, because you know maybe grant category or grant here is a element that you need to include in your list of contract contact attributes. So again these are some starters. These are the ones that we talked talked about a little bit before but again these are only starters and they may or may not be relevant to your to your organization. I can't stress enough that a critical part of this process is that it should be a convenient moment across organizational silos. So, you know, communications isn't building up their contact model and fundraising isn't building up their contact model right we are aiming for a holistic picture of a person and of groups of people that our organization engages with. So the more that you can bring stakeholders from from different parts of the organization together together. The better your contact model is going to be the more buy in you're going to have by people in those departments, because they see the point of creating a contact model, they see the benefit of it. They see the power of it. And then they also see that it's a group effort, right that it's, you know, the whole organization getting together behind this idea of a holistic view. And with that holistic view, your organization will be much better equipped to fine tune your engagement with audiences in a way that can be documented in process and trained training provided for people to do so that you avoid those concerns that teams tend to have. Oh, I don't want other people, you know, sending fundraising emails to my high value donors, or this person just comes to speak at events I don't want him to get any donors, or any donation asks. If those are baked into a model that the whole organization agrees on. That doesn't happen. It takes some work to get there. But again, as with most things the solution is collaboration transparency, and then governance, not, you know, grabbing your own piece of the pie and taking it back to your office and you can be in the pie by yourself. So, again, doing this with people, you know, cross functional teams cross departmental teams can be. That's really how you should do it. Okay, so another key piece of this is to create use cases. And this is where going back to that example I had of, you know, thinking of it as like the, you know, the old Rolodex model or the database. So I want to find this needle in a haystack something very, very specific. I want to find a certain person or a certain type of person or a certain group of people, so that I can do something. Right. So I want to find people at the State Department that have attended three events on disinformation. That I can reach out and ask them to speak on a panel that we're putting together on this information. So those are the types of use cases that you want to generate of it as much as possible. And while you're doing that you're going to uncover parts of your contact ecosystem that you that you didn't even know existed. So as someone is filling this out. This is what I want to find, but this is how I currently find it I have a spreadsheet where I track all this. Oh cool, let's see the spreadsheet and they'll show you the spreadsheet and you'll see all these categories all these ways they're, you know, putting in information about their contacts that can be baked into the contact model, and that really must be accounted for right if you're to create a holistic contact model. Again, 90% of the insight is going to come from within inside the house. You know, with people who are doing the work in different ways. So finding those spreadsheets finding their email list going okay. What kind of emails do you send. Who do you send emails to when they go oh well we have this email segment that's for you know people that have signed up for an event spent haven't attended. And why do you have that so that we can, you know, send them event recaps with a reminder to make sure to attend next time. Some way of deep engagement with a specific audience segment. Again, doing this across the organization really helps you see, you know what is fundraising care about when they when they think about wanting to find contacts, what are they looking for, what is program looking for platforms, media, etc, etc looking for those are all things that should be part of the contact model, even if all information based on those things isn't equally accessible to all different groups. Right. So that's where the fact that this is a model comes into play, whereas you know, you're not saying if you have, you know, let's say you have Salesforce three instances of instances of MailChimp and another email platform that, you know, part dot. That's the official one but people use MailChimp because they go rogue, right, never happens but you know maybe, maybe occasionally. What you're not starting with is let's put everything into Salesforce, or here's the Salesforce list, you know, put all these segments into all these other platforms. It's not where you're starting, you're starting with the model, so that you can clearly see what the different attributes of contacts are, what you want to know about them for what reasons. So that then you can make informed plans and decisions about how to operationalize the contact model. One of the key ways of doing that is the use cases. All right, so getting into using the contact model. So again, it's all about implementing it and operationalizing it, which I guess are kind of two different ways of saying the same things but I really like operationalize even though it's a little bit of a wonky term because it means you put it in operation. The operation should be an ongoing thing. You need to have documentation you need to have governance to make this actually work. So, in order to get there. Part of your work is determining where those contact attributes are stored. So this is kind of once you've created the contact model, you'll probably have heard these things along the way, note them down kind of to the side. And as people are saying, oh, I really want to find these, you know, people, State Department employees who care about this and come to events. Oh, I find them through my spreadsheet. That's one of your sources of contact attributes that's part of your contact ecosystem. You know, finding where all of those are is a key first step to actually really getting traction with making your contact model work. And it's, it's, it's part of, you know, overarching road mapping efforts that organizations really need to undertake, which is, who are we talking to and what do we know about them, who knows, who knows, who knows what and where is it hidden. Because I think I missed a slide earlier. Because part of the reason you should do this. Yeah. Double click over somehow is that chances are right now, your current contact model is busted. But it's not busted. It's ad hoc or scattered or distributed. You know, most organizations don't have this clear single source of truth model for who contacts are. They have what I kind of think of as like a distributed contact ecosystem. So we have email system or systems. We have CRM so many organizations have lots of different email systems in place. In addition to different donor databases. Different, you know, maybe personas that the marketing team created three years ago and people like and that responded to and kind of referenced once in a while but they haven't really been leveraged fully spreadsheets spreadsheets are great spreadsheets are great because they structure content in a clear hopefully clear way. But not as great because often they're not shared. So chances are, we've come across this time and time again, an organization that has programs doing programmatic work. They'll each have their own spreadsheet of their contacts, how they think about them, how often they contact them, maybe that effectively is their CRM for their program, and then they just use email to email people directly. It's fine, but that's, you know, information around contacts is trapped away in all of these places. So, a key part of taking that contact model you have is understanding where that information lives now, all the places that it might live, and then you have to try and close gaps and attribute storage or collection. So this is where you say hey our contact model says we need, we need to know these 20 things about our contacts. In order to engage them effectively we need to know these 20 things. Then you can say, Okay, 15 of these are being collected five or not being collected anywhere. We need to know where to collect them, where to facilitate or solicit them from clients. So often this will be, you know, on an event sign up. If, you know if we want to know someone's organization if that really really matters to our more granular, you know, impactful engagement if we want to know their organization. So put it as a field on the event sign up, and you many organizations do this but many organizations don't. So, saying hey where, where, where can we possibly get at the data that we don't have the attributes. And, and look to fill those. This is where you're also looking at duplications, right where, you know, one field is being collected across half of the platforms, like okay. We need to make the other half of the platforms collect that or kind of synchronize them or distill them down. Almost always, you want to get down to fewer systems that more people understand and have buy in it into and process about rather than seven instances of MailChimp. That's not always exactly the case. I'm definitely not a firm believer in everything has to be in one system, but someone needs to know where everything is in which systems. And then, once everything is known from, you know, from the systems map. The systems have to justify their existence as separate systems. I would say, okay, well, we have this email platform that lets us do X, Y, and Z, and it gives us consistent branding and consistent, you know, quality control and visibility into contacts. So why do you have a MailChimp instance. Oh, well we didn't know how to do this or this okay well we have a training doc for that now so now we're going to roll down your MailChimp instance, because you can use this. It's a lot of organizational change that goes into that. But, you know, the goal is to get to a map of your systems and platforms, what they do, how they interact with contacts, and then you provide governance and guidance for the people who are actually doing the work. Okay, so then the second step I think I've already touched on some of these is creating technical requirements for meeting your use cases. So all those use cases that you establish might current be, you know, they might be possible by your current platforms. You know, a lot of people get a little anxious about doing a contact modeling exercise as they say you know we don't have time for strategic exercise or we're not going to be able to switch CRM or, you know, where our CRM is paid for the next year, and you know it's not it's not time to move or consolidate or we just replaced our email system and even though we're not happy with it there's a lot of fatigue so we don't want to replace it. All that can be well and good, but that doesn't need to stop you from implementing some things now. Right so you can go through prioritization exercises with the use cases and say, you know, which of these are really important to us, and which of them could be implemented now. So the the adding the adding the single field on the event sign up for organization is like a perfect example. Hey we'd really like to know people's organizations. Where do we get most of our new emails. Oh from events and let's add that to the form. And then as with most tactical conversations or considerations you might get people that say oh well we don't want to put a required field on the on the sign up to deter sign ups. That's that's not that that doesn't do away the fact that you want to understand their organization. So, then you go okay well do we send a follow up that asks for their organization, or when they sign in do they have to put their organization like really dive into the tactical experience of getting at that information that you as an organization have seemed an important part of your contact model chances are you can start to get at some of that information. The, the other thing is as you're as you're identifying all of those contact sources and your contact ecosystem. You can update, you know, often organizations will have kind of what I call like a soft core of like a CRM where we'll do with their, they will have a CRM, or they will have an email list or they will have a donor database and kind of the most complete ish centralized ish contact space. And maybe you can do more effective things with that, just by adding in a couple fields that you know most programs use in one of their spreadsheets. So none of the programs like using the CRM, because they can't put in this information. Okay, we'll put in those categories, put in those fields those taxonomies into the CRM model, or the CRM implementation so that you can encourage those programs to use the CRM. Okay, so look for those opportunities to start making change. You know it's it's not a rip out everything and replace everything that almost never works well. So chances are you'll be able to do some of those things. If there are significant obstacles to meeting your use cases. That's when you really want to start looking into technical enhancements. And this is where the rubber really hits the road, particularly with thinking about new email systems, because the email CRM space is evolving so rapidly and so many email platforms are effectively fully fledged very capable CRMs as well. You can't really go you know if you're if you're unsatisfied with with email, if you're like I hate writing emails in this thing like no one likes it it's outdated. We pay too much money for it we think. When you're looking at that problem realize that it's a contact engagement challenge, right it's a contact engagement challenge, not an email software challenge. Because the email is just one way of getting in touch with your contacts, asking them to do things getting information back from them, and ultimately that activity around your contact needs to reside somewhere. And one of the biggest loosest, greatest weirdest areas is the whole email CRM integration. And there's a lot of like a lot of big names standard CRMs like Salesforce say oh well we've got this product that seamlessly integrates with with our CRM. And when you get into the use cases it can actually be a lot more challenging or problematic than they make it seem. So, this is where you know as in, as in most well in everything where you're looking at systems, look at your technical requirements, and those should be based on real life use cases that have been developed by you know input collaboration and consensus, because any product is going to say oh yeah we integrate. We integrate with the system we integrate with this system. So until you get into the details of I want system X to do a when it interacts with system be getting very specific is critical to seeing you know what how systems can be flexed or stretched to do the specific things you want to do. Or when you might need to have a different system to do the specific things you want to do. Another key part of operationalizing the contact model is to show it off. Right and celebrate what it enables. And this is a big part of the organizational change aspect of things is that, you know, first rule of organizational changes people hate change, right, even if they're unhappy with the current parts of bother them. If you start telling them oh you got to get tear up your spreadsheet you got put in the system now, they're going to be pissed off. They're not going to be happy about it. Most likely unless unless they're a little crazy and just like oh I love learning new systems every day. So you need to start from a place of, hey, we have this contact model. If we implement it well, and everyone consistently, you know, sort of follows the standards that we've developed together, you can do things like this. And that's where you have an advocate who is, you know, in in maybe the disinformation program who developed that use case above about the, you know, National Security State Department event attendees sign up, you say hey, because we did this. I've created five more, you know, I've developed five more contacts at the State Department that are meaningful that matter to the work that I'm doing and that matter to the organization. And other programs can go oh wow gosh I didn't know that we could do that kind of that kind of thing. Right. And chances are they might want to do the exact same thing, or it'll get them thinking of, oh if you can do that, you know, could you also could I also get a list of all the people who have ever worked here in this program and who are now at the World Bank. And you can go oh cool let me check out the contact model. Yes, we can do that. Because as part of the process we identify that, you know people who worked here was an attribute. People's organization now is an attribute. And, you know, their topic area is an attribute. So yeah, we can we can do that we can run that query for you. You'll have it tomorrow, or you'll have it in an hour or pull up the CRM do collect this click these three things there's your list, there you go. You need to build up that that sort of, I want to say aggressive promotion that sounds a little too aggressive, probably because I use the word aggressive that that very public celebration of the contact model. Okay. That was, that was a lot. Now we have open time for questions about contact models but why how when who where any questions about contact models. We've got plenty of time here we can chat. If you have questions, just unmute, or put them in chat.