 Hi, everybody. Thank you for joining TechSoup today for this special webinar, How to Grow and Engage Your Donors, Members and Volunteers. I'm Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup. I'm going to let you know how you can engage with us today. Everybody's on mute as you know. Please use the Q&A section. I know you guys are probably used to this. So you've probably been here, especially with Juana. Thank you for always joining us. But use the Q&A to ask your questions or feel free to engage in chat room. You can chat with us. I'll try to keep up in the chat room and answer your questions. We'll answer the Q&A at the end. Check your email box for the video replay. I'll be sending this out within 48 hours. Try to get it out to you real soon. If you learned something new today, once you hashtag it at TechSoup, Instagram, just shout us out. If you need the close caption, use the CC button right at the bottom of your screen. And on behalf of TechSoup, next slide, I am our over 100 partners that help us provide hardware and software at a discount for nonprofit organizations. We want to welcome you. And TAP Network is one of those partners that help us provide that. We want to thank you for all of you do TAP work. And I want to ask you a question. Are you struggling to engage your audience? I'm going to introduce you to Whit and Caitlin. It's going to outline some of the best practice for nonprofits to grow their audience and engage with them through digital marketing. Whit and Caitlin, if you can unmute yourself and take it away. Thank you so much, Aretha. Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for tuning in. It looks like we've got quite an audience today, 178 people. So welcome. I'm sure you guys are all over the place. We're tuning in from Wilmington, Delaware. We have some guests here in person with us. Very excited. So we will be kind of doing a hybrid session today, which is, I think, new for TechSoup and new for TAP Network. So we're very much looking forward to presenting to you guys on the topic of how to grow and engage your donors, members, and volunteers. For formal introductions, my name is Whit. I'm the director of strategic marketing at TAP Network, a nonprofit marketing agency here. My background is in customer experience, particularly. I worked for Apple for about five years and then I joined a startup company where I managed our digital marketing and branding globally for about $55 million company called Exploding Kittens. And my fantastic colleague here is Caitlin Salazar. Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone in person too. I am the director of strategic partnerships here at TAP Network. My background is actually completely in nonprofit. So I love the partnership with TechSoup. Previously, I worked at the American Heart Association as the development director and I was also at a children's hospital in DC. I've also been a performing arts venue. So I've kind of seen the spectrum of very small to very, very large nonprofits. Also, I'm seeing a couple of comments in here. I don't know if anyone in the room knows, but some people recognized Exploding Kittens. Yes, I did work for that company. I was their branding and marketing director from 2014 till 2018. It was a really fun time. So it's a great game. I think it aligns with a lot of really cool opportunities in the nonprofit sector actually because it's all about getting people to play in front of each other. But that is another webinar. Everyone's going to go look up that. They're going to go leave our webinar, go get Exploding Kittens. I'll send it to you guys on a later date, but I do want to introduce you guys to our agency specifically. So we are a part of TAP Network, a mission driven marketing and technology agency. We are TechSoup's more formal partner in all digital marketing and website services that are offered to nonprofits at a significant discount. We've worked with nonprofits for probably about the last six or seven years. Obviously, Caitlin has some pretty depth, deep experience with working with the nonprofits and myself. I was born in the nonprofit sector. Both my parents were in the nonprofit sector and I'm really grateful that over the last two and a half to three years I've been able to work more one-on-one in the marketing arena with nonprofits. So today we're going to be covering a couple of things and I think Caitlin's going to talk us through exactly what the topics of discussion for today. Yeah, you can see that we're going through a lot of different topics, including understanding the difference, you know, the audiences we're going to be covering are vastly different in their needs. Where are we all today in terms of these audiences and what are some methodologies that we could approach for all of them on an individual and kind of as a collective basis to the driving vehicles, inbound marketing and then really going into some very creative tactics to be able to engage all of those different audiences. So to kind of clean slate, we all know what these people are, but let's just give them some definitions. So donors are of course people who support your organization, philanthropically with what we all want, a financial gift, goals, that is the goal number one. Volunteers are those people so important, but they're those who are able to support your mission with their time, their energy, their talents, really nonprofits truly could not run without volunteers. Oftentimes, what we consider staff are also actually volunteers too, so most nonprofits could just not run without volunteers. And members are not always included in every nonprofit, but for those who do have members, you know, you know that they gain the most value from what they're kind of giving to the organization, they're also getting something for their membership. So sometimes it's VIP tickets, it's a parking spot, it's, you know, a place at the cool lounge, you know, VIP access it's all those, all those things can kind of draw members in into why they would become a member. Well, these are a lot of different statistics that we found throughout the, you know, inner web of being able to kind of provide some baseline. I think that one of the most telling statistic is the online giving which increased by 21% over 20% in particular for small nonprofits. This was an even more dramatic increase. I think I saw like a 17% increase just for nonprofits under a million dollars in operating revenue, which is, I mean, it was huge it really dramatically shifted how people give to how we're going to actually prepare for the future with with these statistics in mind. That's kind of what we're going to talk about talk through today. I also kind of want to point out that 45% of members said that email was their most engaging content. And I think that making sure we have have an email strategy to being able to engage not only members but different audience segments that's going to be important too. Yeah, I think this is a great slide to sort of give us a sort of a holistic perspective on how we can utilize and engage with these three, what would be presumed to be very different audiences but at the same time, once you get them past that growth stage once you've introduced them to your organization, and they're actually engaging with you as a volunteer as a donor or as a member. There's a really great opportunities for you guys to leverage those relationships and kind of introduce them into engaging with your organization and maybe one of the other verticals right one of your members could become become a donor, or they could become a volunteer, and I think a big number that sticks out to me on this slide is 85% of volunteers donate to the nonprofits that they volunteer for, you know that's a that's low hanging fruit. All these will all be linked will send them out but I have all the data sources linked into that's a great question set thank you so much. I have all of these statistic resources linked in here so we'll make sure that Aretha sends that out alongside with the rest of the follow up emails that you guys and access to the PDF source and I will also make sure that you get a copy of it here. The rest of the folks here in the room. Yeah, no problem stuff. We have 85% of volunteers will donate to the nonprofits so there's this. I think there's this idea that we silo individuals that engage with our organizations and I think that these metrics really lend a perspective to understand that while we might identify someone as a donor that's the that's the number one kind of relationship we want to forge, but there's opportunities to maybe transfer that relationship into other verticals and ensuring and what we're going to outline is ensuring that you have a fully integrated technology solution that allows for that ease of transfer and that ease of membership or that ease of messaging. No that's good. And I don't know if you knew this wet piece of information point of point of information here volunteers are actually the most likely group to give a leadership gift, or write you in their wealth. So they're very key people so they might be the person that's giving you $35 their whole volunteer career, and then they're most likely to give that leadership gift down the line. I like that. Good. Good point. Yes, I love it. So you guys can explore these metrics moving forward but I think this is a great place for us to get started but you know as we move, move into the rest of the conversation. Let's talk a little bit about where are these people and when we talk about growing and we talk about engaging individuals, where are they within the relationship of a nonprofit organization. What we're going to talk through is more or less the strategic approach here. We're going to talk through the different stages and then the tools and technology to actually leverage those, and then some of the creative tactics that go alongside those. So, for those of you I'd love to ask you guys in the audience here. Are you guys familiar with a marketing funnel. You, you, you, marketing funnel. Have you ever heard of a marketing funnel. All right, how about no, no, no. Okay, fantastic. That's good. So a marketing funnel. I like yes the flywheel Catherine. I love this. Yeah, so the marketing funnel is essentially a step of order of operations how we nurture a particular individual through different digital or, you know, in some cases, non digital touch points in order to convert them into a particular platform. And so you can see here that that sort of orange dotted line that falls through the center here, we look at the attract and convert and then we have the close and delight. On the left hand side we're really looking at how do we grow those individual interests right those, the, the perspective right those perspective individuals. On the other side of that orange line we have the close and delight which are more, they've made some semblance of a conversion point saying, I'm interested in participating. I'm interested in volunteering. I'm interested in donating, or in some cases that kind of falls out outside of this particular webinar. I'm interested in utilizing your services. So don't, don't look at this methodology as only for making revenue or making engaged decisions around individual people to support your organization. But this is also a great methodology to identify prospect users of your individual services that you might be providing through your, your nonprofit organization. So for the for the first part of the presentation today which I'll bring you through is really identifying different ways that we can utilize these tactics to attract and convert individual folks. So let's talk about growing your audiences. The first piece of content here that we're going to talk about and I'm sure nonprofits out there are like I've seen this I know this blah blah blah, but blogging is probably one of the most effective and cost effective ways of actually sharing what your organization does and getting your information in front of new eyeballs. It also supports spreading awareness of your overall cause. It can help establish the credibility as an expert so if you have thought leadership conversations right so if, if, why would I believe that a particular organizations that particular organizations that are dealing with, you know, food insecurity or housing insecurity. How do I know that investing in them is is the right decision against somebody else well my first pass might be how thought leadership are they like how much thought leadership do they showcase their knowledge base around that particular sector. It also allows you to build trust with the supporters right you can, you can speak through first person narrative, you can actually talk about your supporters in your blog posts, you can talk about opportunities and showcase and highlight right when we talk about a supporter wanting that sort of more or less a validation or exposure. They're not necessarily doing it to get like the overall good feels but they want really want that necessarily that notoriety. It can drive interested people to your mission so let's just say for instance, I get a I see a blog post that Caitlin posts on Facebook we're friends, obviously, and I am totally enthralled by this mission that she shared, she posted a blog post I'm really interested I've never heard of the organization before. It comes up on my news feed. I click on that blog and now I've been introduced to your organization. And a little bit later it's like where it can cause to action and additional incentivized pieces of content to lead that person down the marketing funnel. I think we're blogging is also really helpful that people kind of, there's a need for in the nonprofit space is we talk a lot about storytelling and how do I share my impact I need to share, I need to do this big huge annual report at the end of the year, and it's going to be my one time to be able to actually share the impact that I'm doing. I mean the annual report is wonderful people love it people want to see the metrics behind it blog blogging gives you the opportunity is to share those stories throughout the whole year. And then you already have those created and set up so that when you're doing the annual report it's a mad dash to December 30, and you've kind of been doing that work throughout the year of of establishing what are my case store studies, and gives you a way to be able to share those in a concise way on both social media and your website so everything's very aligned to. It's a great, great point because it makes sense you said yeah absolutely yes 100%. And I'm going to throw a metric out here, which is fun I think a lot of people appreciate this, I've given webinars for the last two years with you guys through tech suit, but there's an 8020 rule, I did not put it on the slide I apologize, but 8020 rule is when it comes to writing content anywhere that's on that awareness level 80% of the time you should be talking more about your overall sector, and the industry in which you work, and then 20% of the time should be content specifically about your organization right. So if you are constantly blogging about. This is my mission this is my impact that's great, but if you're looking for the mass appeal you want about 80% of the content that you're developing whether not that social media or blogging. You want it to be more industry or sector oriented. So it could be, if I worked in. Let's give an example, roof, roofing. So, how, how is your roofing organization working within the nonprofit space, just so I can get a background story. So we started on, we started nonprofit to get free routes away to those people. Perfect. Okay, so I think a really important metric would be housing insecurity, the number one statistics around housing insecurity and how your organization at the tail end of that conversation is stepping in and solving that problem. Yeah, that would be the 80% would be. Yeah, the sector conversations right. So, so thinking through exactly what the content is that you're delivering from a blogging perspective and the stories. The second piece here is social media. I know we're kind of getting into like the basics here a little bit, but it's, it's 2021. We've all been quarantined too many times. It's a really great opportunity for us to really own the story of your organization and build those one to one relationships with your audience members, and that's the storytelling, a really comprehensive content strategy I kind of alluded to that a little bit just now about the 8020 rule, but also diversifying your content, not posting the same type of things I call it content fatigue on social media. So if your organization posts the same type of thing over and over again, know that eventually your audiences are going to start to know what you're posting and they're going to scroll right past it. So you want to keep a diversification of your content types whether or not that's video blogs, infographics, you can get fun and crazy and creative. Yes, the 8020 rule does apply to social media as well. 100%. That's a great question Stephanie thank you for asking. So basically any type of content that you're publishing organic or like natural from your own organization that you're not necessarily paying for from like an advertising, or you're earning through like public relations PR and news, any type of content that you're publishing on behalf of your organization should generally apply, you should apply that 8020 rule. I love for social media, I love when organizations ask me to help in some way and I'm not saying volunteer but like choose our race shirt. I love that because it gives me the chance like feel involved with the nonprofit, but it's like a little bit it's not asking me to donate all the time. Yeah. Yeah, we have a question in the room. Sorry. That's a great question. So we have our person here asking about quizzes so there are I don't know if any of you guys are familiar with Buzzfeed, but these are that they can be entertaining as much as they can be informative. So there are different platforms. Lacey, what is the one that we use opinion stage opinion stage is a great platform that we've used in the past opinion stage I'll type it in here. It allows you to develop your own type of quizzes where people will actually answer certain questions and it will spit out a certain result. This goes more along the entertaining side but you could definitely extrapolate this to be actually very educational as well. Where should I live. What, what mission what initiative should I support within your nonprofit organization things of that nature, but it's like really like harnessing these organization often shares post my organization similar which that's a great idea 100% sharing other people's folks thank you for preparing that up. Yeah quizzes are great way to engage and get people to involve. And usually what they'll do is they'll share those results particularly if it's along the entertaining side. I want to point out an interesting metric as of the last year, which is 29% of online donors actually stated that social media was the main communication tool that most inspired them to you, which is actually two points higher than what has been the proof of the pudding which is email, which was 27%. So it's really interesting I think it's very valuable to consider, you know you want to identify and track those engagement points. As you're looking at how people are interacting with the different contents that you're publishing. And then next slide here. And then I wanted to talk a little bit about the difference, and this is very important I think for nonprofits so if you have a operational 501 C3 this is a really, really, really important conversation to have. What is the difference between search engine marketing, which is term SEM. And what's the difference and that of search engine optimization. So search engine marketing is actually a paid program that actually allows your nonprofit organization to rank in the top three to five search results depending on your bid value. There's a couple different things and there's a whole, I'm sure whole course that we could do around that. But essentially what you're doing is your organization goes into the back end of Google, and you are bidding against other bidders to take real estate based on words or phrases that may match the search results of an individual so if I'm looking for, a roofing in Wilmington or if I'm looking for homeless shelter in Atlanta, Georgia. If I'm bidding on homeless shelter. I could potentially rank at the top five results where it says add and you can even see here I've got little. You can see here but where it says add here next to that if you've ever seen that when you go into Google search. That means that that organization actually paid for that spot, and it's going to rank higher than any of the other organic searches. The way that you pay for that is what's called pay per click PPC. So you're going to play a fairly nominal that nominal value anywhere from 20 cents to maybe $3 per click depending on how important or how popular the particular keyword is, but the most exciting and important thing to know is that nonprofits have the ability to get $10,000 a month in free ad spend on their Google search and 10,000. We're talking $120,000 a year of free ad spend. Now there's an application process we've actually worked as an agency we've relaunched quite a few websites recently. We need some qualifications around your website presence, but it's just something for anybody that's on the call today who's interested in at least pursuing that opportunity to look at, you know, applying for the Google ad grant and see if you're able to get approved and if not we're more than happy to help you by like maybe doing a quick audit we have we have the ability to do that and help you oversight help figure out exactly what do you need to do to help you guys actually be awarded that grant. And then the other side is SEO so that search engine optimization is exact is more along the lines of what are you doing on your website and on the content that exists out in in the digital landscape. So it usually gets divided into two, two different segments technical SEO, which is, you know, as I have listed here on your site map. Do you have the appropriate robots dot text file that is able to actually crawl your website. Alt text and images. Does your is your code up to up to date has it gotten kind of fried over three or four years of constantly changing your website. Does your overall page speed good and do you have appropriate security protocols built around your website. So all of those are going to also infect your ranking on the Google, any search engine that exists outside of that ad proportion. Right. So if you're going to scroll down and you see a listing that doesn't include that the second side of SEO beyond technical is your content SEO and this goes back to the blogging right. I think you are you're making good point like the more content the more up to date content you have the more relevant it is Google is actually giving you a nominal quantified figure of where you rank amongst your industry amongst those individual keyword searches and it's going to say Yeah, this website hasn't been updated in five years, you're going to be on page 10, but if you're constantly and consistently updating with relevant content. If your website is linked from partners websites as well that's validation that your website is a proper resource to a third party organization they're going to take that into consideration. And of course the actual content structure and length and that that's somewhat content a little bit technical but like using proper header one header to paragraph bodies. But I do want to say we'll show it at the end but there's a great tool that TechSoup offers that's free to all of you guys is our website greater our website assessment tool and it'll actually grade you on almost, I think almost all of the technical SEO and a couple pieces of content SEO so I will make sure we get that link sent out to you guys through Aretha. It's just a great tool just to get a baseline of understanding where you are. So kind of understanding more of the strategy side some of the baseline understanding of where all of these growth opportunities. I want to take a little bit of a detour here into identifying what the individual driving vehicles are behind the strategy, and then allow the tactical implementation of these strategies to actually be beneficial and increase ROI build capacity and continue to really see the numbers grow along the way and that is through what I like to call the power of three. So three audiences three powers like we're we have a three theme today. I like the number three. So does Taylor Swift, I think. I don't know about that. But you can maybe that's again another webinar for another day on Taylor Swift. Let's take a little bit of a look at what each of these three components are so I'm going to start with the CMS your content management system. Some of you might be familiar with the word with the term wordpress hub spot even offers a CMS solution but essentially your content management system is how is the content on your website and manage and stored and then ultimately published and shown on your domain. So that includes your blog management, your individual pages, your landing pages, how your forms on your website exists, all of that is going to live on your content management system so if you have wordpress wordpress. I did not mention wix I'm sorry I should have mentioned wix that is also a very strong partner thank you Sharon for calling me out you're absolutely right. Yes, but wix is also a content management system so thank you very much for that that's absolutely correct. So you have your content management system is where more or less the larger columns of your content are going to exist. And then you have what's called your customer relationship manager, your CRM. So this is something as simple as MailChimp, right. Where does the contact information of the individuals in which you are hoping to communicate with either via email, mostly via email, and in some cases through snail mail, you know, or other relationships like websites, identifying donor, future donors, you know, capital giving sponsors, any other relationship that you might have with a non organizational contact that would live in your CRM. And there are great ways to integrate weight into great processes to actually procure that information through your CRM through your CMS that funnel into your CRM. The third part here is your marketing automation platform or platforms. And this actually exists across the entire digital ecosystem of your nonprofit organization. Marketing automation lives in social media, it lives in email marketing, it lives in membership portals, it pretty much lives in any and all digital experiences that your individual audience members are experiencing. You can actually build some semblance of a marketing automation process that actually builds capacity for your nonprofit and further targets and personalizes the messages that are being sent to that individual based on the information collected through the CMS that is then imported into your CRM. It's also based on what they want to see. I mean, based on what they're doing, it also can make decisions on what they might want to do too, which are creepy on some senses, awesome on other senses. Perfect, yeah. So let's take a quick, very simple birds eye view on how the CMS and the CRM actually integrate with one another. Here's an example of a call to action, right. This is a key component to your CMS platform calls to action or telling telling a visitor to do something, make a donation, download this particular guide, sign up for our newsletter. For an event, any and all of those things, those are what we call call to actions. And that call to action exists on the CMS, right, so we've built that call to action through our CMS platform, whether or not it's a landing page on the homepage, which would be like, learn more, and then it takes you to another page, that's also a call to action. So you want to align those call to actions and then eventually the goal through in non marketing methodology is collecting information. And you can, you can sort of figure out whether or not you want first name, last name, email, company, birthday, you know, let's keep it a little bit on the simpler side at the very top of the relationship. So for instance, this one here, which is download this guide on social media best practices, all we're asking for is the first name, last name, and the only requirement is your email. And that is going to be sent to this individual as an email document. But what happens is now we have that individual's contact information, and we know that they're interested in social media best practices. So we can develop in our CRM side, which we'll get to a little bit later, but utilizing marketing automation, we can actually continue to engage with that individual person now that we've captured their information, and we've identified what their interest is. We can actually follow up with those individuals with a slew of emails that are personalized and properly timed that continue to engage that individual with the hopes of potentially leading them to make a conversion point. So for instance, you could apply the same methodology is make a donation, fill out the donation form, and then they go into a donation list where you can actually respond automatically with subsequent requests to either increase their donation or become a monthly donor or thank you so much for your donation we actually have an event next month we'd love for you to volunteer if you're available. So this is a really, really great way of looking at how you can marry your website content with your CRM and ensure that they're properly integrated, and that those are filtered into your overall marketing strategy. And we'll get to this as well but the reporting ability on top of that is vital right so you can see how many clicks to this particular email campaign open and actually Caitlin's going to talk a little bit to that further but this is the overall theory and the overall methodology in action as you guys can see it here. And the most I think the most important thing about this is looking at your site critically to being able to see where am I asking people for donations which is important but also where am I just gaining some information from them that maybe they're not ready right now to make a donation, but I'm going to nurture this relationship more and more and more slowly over time, so that maybe in two weeks, they're going to be ready to make that donation because they know more about me so both are both are important for an organization. Nice. And I'm actually seeing M stewart I just want to confirm because in case there's any confusion about where do we switch from CMS to CRM in this diagram. So the call to action on the left hand side exists on your CMS right you're going to build that it's going to be a part of your landing page, the lead form component is actually the the integration point between your CMS and your CRM so it's on the CRM that form exists on the CRM but it's on the back end connected to your CMS, and then it's on the back end is connected to your CRM so when I put in first name last name email, it's going to create a new contact in my CRM to based on a particular list that's been set up through that form field and then I can further market to that individual. I think what's sometimes confusing about this process for people is this, these three steps can be one system, it can be something like HubSpot which can be literally your CMS, all the way through your CRM, or it can actually be three separate systems that are able to talk to each other. So I think that that's sometimes where for every organization it's going to be different how many systems you're actually utilizing in order to create this chain of events to happen. Perfect. Yes. Yes, and I and to your point Renee, I know that Squarespace I know that Wix has some some semblance of a CRM capability. And I think that that can be very accurate and appropriate for certain size organizations, depending on the breadth of resources and the breadth of resources and personalization that you're looking to, you can look at third party solutions outside of Wix, like HubSpot, even MailChimp to some degree, where you can actually further monitor those relationships and I'm actually going to skip to the next slide here and somehow constant contact that cut off but that's okay, don't worry about it. But looking at what is marketing automation? Are you guys familiar? Anybody have you guys heard that term before that are tuning in virtually and here, marketing automation? Yep. Awesome. Rico, yes, yes, yes, I'm glad. So many automation fans. Oh, I love the Lillian, all the spaces, I love it. Exactly. So marketing automation is essentially the process of using that software to automate different components of your marketing campaign and activity throughout the user journey. And these are a couple of different software platforms that we use here at TAP. The top left is HubSpot, which to Caitlin's point serves a multitude of different solutions from marketing support, whether or not that social media publishing, blog publishing, form fields, email marketing. It also provides CMS. MailChimp, I know a lot of people and constant contact. I know a lot of people in the nonprofit sector utilize that from an email marketing perspective. But essentially there's ways you can tie these all together. And it just depends on the top left is HubSpot. And I love AirTable. I didn't include it on here today, but it's like my favorite thing. So, Algorapulse and SproutSocial are more along the social media side. HubSpot and MailChimp in constant contact. I would say lean more toward the CRM slash email marketing type of solution. And then Zapier is a third party. None of you have heard of Zapier. I suggest you all take a look at it. It's a conditional platform that says if something happens on this software, make something else happen on this. It lets things talk. Yes. So like if I were to click a particular button or submit a particular form, I could identify through Zapier to say, when Greg submits this, then make that contact or that particular data point get sent to AirTable, for instance. And that way you're automating a lot of that transference of data in case you guys aren't able to necessarily invest in some of the larger full out of the box solutions like a HubSpot type of platform. And I think, I mean, I know a few people mentioned that automation is a little scary. Like to set up all this stuff sounds a little scary, but once it is set up and it's running, it definitely, it's almost like adding another hand to your, you know, or adding five more hands. You know, things are happening that you don't even know they're moving data. I feel like in nonprofits we spend so much time just trying to organize our data. So, I mean, definitely it's a little scary, but just as soon as you dive in. One perfect example that's I think simple is click up as a great project management tool doesn't necessarily live within the marketing side it's a great for project management. But when it like let's say someone makes a donation, right, you can usually most platforms and most people today are familiar with that automated email thank you so much for making a donation, you might add in that a an option or an opportunity to maybe increase their donation. Same thing could go for volunteering, right I'm interested in volunteering for your organization rather than having to respond one to one in real time. Thank you so much for your interest my name is Julie. I'm here as the volunteer coordinator that initial comp like that initial conversation could actually be built out in an automated process. And that way when someone actually makes an action based on that first initial email, you have a more viable volunteer community and that way your volunteer manager the director of volunteers can more appropriately focus their time and efforts on viable volunteers or viable donations or viable partners. So now I'm going to stop talking and pass it over to Caitlin to talk a little bit more about the engaging process. I mean, we talked about this earlier that until this year email was at the very top of all ways that you need to engage with all three of these audiences. So really what is an email drip campaign I feel like email drip campaign is kind of it was at the start of all this marketing automation that we're discussing you know it. What is the pivotal point so it's a series of pre written emails that are automatically sent to a prospect over a period of time. So what is with example of the volunteer coordinator who's trying to manage all of these volunteers. That's a perfect example of an email drip campaign. It could also be the newsletter signer upper. So they sign up. The official term you heard it here. So they sign up to come to your newsletter they obviously want to learn more information. How are you going to actually get that person to convert into a donor, you know how are we going to utilize this newsletter as a way to gain some more donations. There are three different types of email drip campaigns. The very first are prospects and that newsletter example that I just gave is a perfect example of that. They want to learn a little bit more. They're not quite sure about you. I think oftentimes we can kind of relate all this to dating anyone anyone feel like that. So you like someone maybe you see them in a coffee shop, you know maybe maybe you're kind of you're just feeling it out you're dipping your toes in the water. So what are this top of mind email campaigns come so it's it's really just to set yourself apart. It's the time you're going to give some education. This is where those case studies. This is where the case studies will really come into play and you'll be able to say you know this is what I'm what I'm doing to impact the community here and this is why my organization is important, or the first date, as we go back to that. The next phase is where you're engaging. Mostly this is where our audiences that we're discussing today for volunteers for donors for members. This is where those people live so they already know us, they've already maybe they've given a gift already or they given us the gift of time. What are we doing to keep them up to date on either new events that are coming up, or you know giving them impact other opportunities that they could get involved in on a wide spectrum. So this is us, you know, we're we're actually we're into this, we're into this relationship now we're either boyfriend or girlfriend, maybe you're engaged who knows who knows but you're you're you're invested, you're invested in this relationship. And the last one is sometimes what you get broken up with. Unfortunately, it happens, you know there's lots of orders out, you know, it could just be a ghosting situation. No, not the ghost, the ghost, oh man but it could be there's lots of there's lots of reasons why any of these audience members would choose to unengage with you. The third type of email drip campaign is really timed in a way that's going to encourage them to come back I think that and an event campaign is a great example of this, you know maybe they came to your event, and they made a donation, but they have didn't do anything else after that so how are we going to kind of encourage those people, especially once that event comes back around to, you know you liked this thing come back to us we promise we're cool I'll give you some roses maybe some candles, it'll be great. I do want to just quickly pop in here I know someone mentioned you guys are looking at Salesforce for CRM which is a great solution. I think it's important for anyone interested in looking at Salesforce versus other CRM Salesforce is great. It's a perfect solution. So in order to integrate to any of the other tactics that we're discussing, you're going to need a little bit more of a technical oversight to link it and integrate it into your email marketing. So it's really just think of the CRM for Salesforce as just a database. I wanted to be more than just a database as food brigade said it is a lot and that is absolutely correct. It is a lot. So if you are looking at Salesforce as a CRM that's not a bad solution they do have Salesforce for nonprofits. I highly suggest doing some further investigating as far as what capabilities you're going to have to have internally to really maximize the database that you have. Sorry. A lot of people are also mentioning little green light. Love them. So they're awesome and they're offered through TechSoup. Yep. Another TechSoup partner. This workflow that you see now is kind of an example of any of the flows that we just any of the three campaigns that we just discussed. And I think that what's important about highlighting this is that personalization. So, and the timing aspects of things. So it kind of highlights that after someone you send an email, then you are waiting for them to either take an action or not take an action and then what your automation does after that is dependent on what actions they've taken. So let's say they make a donation. That's wonderful. We're not going to send them another email in two days. Perhaps it's an educational email. Maybe it's to double their gift. You know, whatever the message may be. If they then click within that email or they take the action within that email, they're then going to go up through the yes column that you see, you know, kind of waiting over a period of four days in this case. And then we're going to thank them and then we're going to stop the messaging. Like we don't want to overdo what we're we're trying to, you know, that's how we don't over saturate someone. Sometimes that's how you get ghosted. Sometimes that's how you get broken up with, you know, you don't want to take people for granted. On the flip side, if they didn't respond to that, maybe they didn't even open it, they just didn't like our email, it could have gone to junk. So, we're going to try again, and maybe we're going to change its subject line we're going to add, you know, a different call to action, we're going to change up the design, perhaps, you know something's going to change within that email. And I think it's also really important to note that on the bottom of this, we're also waiting a week. So, you know, the timing, if someone's like really, like a hot prospect and they're engaging with you, you want to keep, keep on that until you're thanking them and goodbye until the next campaign, whereas if they're not, they might just need some more time in between your emails like we don't want to be sending them an email every hour. I don't suggest that for anyone. You know, it's, it's really important to keep in mind the time. Yes. Okay, so Abby asked, how do you overcome the junk mail issue happens a lot, even after authenticated. So, depending on the, the mail server that you have using to send out servers are going to actually rate you on the open rates of your email. Normally you have an email list of 2000 people, and you're emailing that 2000 people every single month, and only five people open that email every single month, because you haven't set parameters to only email engaged users within your CRM. What ends up happening is that server will flag you as spam, because it knows when, and if someone opens it so if you're sending thousands of emails that are not getting opened. And if there are two that are, they're going to identify you as a spammer so they're going to automatically target like they're going to they're going to flag emails coming from your email server as potential spam, unless the recipient actually goes in and actively says, this is somebody that I want to be receiving emails from. I think that's what that's another reason why keeping, you know, when what was discussing kind of the flow so that the newsletter people is a great example of that you really want to convert those people into taking some additional action. So that you don't just continue to send them a newsletter that's actually going to eventually end up hurting you. So you either convert them into being a donor of volunteers they're opening other emails and then they're probably more likely to open your newsletter email, but if they're not opening your newsletter after, you know, four times of trying to send them a newsletter. You know at what point do you have to kind of move, move through the process. So social media, you know obviously this is a whole thing specifically how we engage with social media has really changed. So social media fundraising, especially in 2020. I mean that was the only way that we could fundraise. I mean it was, it was a little bit of a, you know, blank slate, no in person events. I think for many of my colleagues in the nonprofit space. This was kind of a jump, like, know, a lot of people who relied on one main fundraising event. It was a huge, you know, shift. So, you know, really looking at how do you use different platforms in different ways in order to be able to engage on a wide variety of fundraisers so I think Facebook has, you know, been such an explosion and we all know a lot about Facebook fundraisers birthday fundraisers have been huge. This is oftentimes where you are able to write much more about your mission on Facebook. I feel like it's probably one of the platforms I see the less actual fundraising occurring through Twitter I don't know what it's real time so it's think of it more as like if you are a like a nonprofit organization that's very much in touch or in tune with the news. A lot of advocacy organizations are going to benefit from something like Twitter, where they're able to stay top of mind and kind of in the conversation in real time, because of the way the feed works differently than Instagram and Facebook and particularly LinkedIn. So this doesn't necessarily cater to static content and a in a more static type of conversation, but it is still useful depending on what your vision and your overall organization goals are, but yeah. And, you know, of course we have Instagram LinkedIn I think is a really highly underrated nonprofit organizational platform to be able to utilize and then I mean tick tock has just kind of taken over the world in 2020 and many many fundraisers are now happening on tick tock raising thousands of dollars. Fundraising can really happen all over, you know, within different challenges brand ambassadors, I do want to bring up the peer to peer campaign space, if you're not currently doing a peer to peer fundraiser. This is one of those really, really easy low cost, you know, basically no cost to you where you can encourage other people to bring on more advocates for your mission sometimes they give for your mission sometimes they give to support another person, but launching a peer to peer campaign. I mean, I've seen an organization launch a peer to peer campaign and raise $250,000 in their first year. So it's about, you know, getting those right people and getting your volunteers and your donors, you know, on board with with something like that but very fun way to do it. But these other ones are also a great example. Yeah. Can you explain a little more about what's involved with a peer to peer campaign. Yeah. So for those tuning in. What is a peer to peer campaign, peer to peer. So peer to peer anytime you see donate to my walk donate to my ride donate to my dance. It's when you have a volunteer sign up for your event, and then they are actually going out into the community and being your advocate and asking for donations. So it's peers asking peers, and it's a nice way for the nonprofits to actually get a break from having to be the asker, and these, you know, advocates are the ones who are going out and seeking those donations but lots of different examples of that. Hi Melissa was good to see you thank you for joining in. We just kind of went through, you know, an example of a peer to peer event so you know there's lots of different galas have become a huge aspect. I don't know if you wanted to talk about this. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know this was an organization that was actually founded last year, and they engage with us, and I helped work with them around their annual gala. And we actually just at the gala the night itself, we had just about $200,000 in primary virtual auctions, virtual auction items which is a really great way to engage and I would almost say that that's more like a membership type of relationship right. I'm investing in my money to get something back like I want the reward. So that type of auction item auction platform is really, really great. But outside of that we raised an additional $150,000 just through sponsorships and social media one to one donations, through different email marketing as well so it's just really important I think to not forget particularly as we move forward and potential lockdown like virtual non virtual events are really helpful to raise money. Someone asked if birthday fundraisers are peer to peer events, I would consider them because they're people asking people, some organizations don't consider them and they consider them just individuals hosting their own their own events. And then community portals are another are another way that a lot of people are engaging you know kind of taking social media off of the platforms and bringing it in house, so you would have more analytics if you did something like this, you know, this is just really based on your specific audience, whether or not this would be appropriate but a lot of people will do want to create this community. I'm going to jump to this. This is a huge pivot point in the last 12 months, since we've all gone through COVID. A lot of nonprofits rely on their annual galas as a way to not only raise funds but network in your own sector so if you're like, you know I have a client that works within the medical space and they add the annual their nonprofit organization that manages and runs these two main events throughout the year used to be in person. We decided to build a community portal that allowed that networking that would normally happen naturally and organically in person. How can we elongate that relationship building platform into a virtual space for annual and ongoing. So with that, we would love to open our last five minutes sorry, Rita. You got to the chatty as Kathy is here to answer any lingering questions that might happen I know areas probably be keeping track on there. We have some people here who are also possibly having some questions so. Thank you Rico I really appreciate it. Great job guys you want you want to start with your audience that you have live and if you stop sharing screen. Sure, I have a couple other things I want to share well I guess. Okay, great. Yeah, keep it up there that go ahead. Maybe the box where you covered. How much, how much is your mission statement of your charity drive engagement. It is probably one of the most vital components, because if you can't explain how much is your mission statement appropriate or informative of engagement. It's like it's like if it's almost like your elevator pitch right so if you're looking at a nonprofit organization you're, it's like your elevator pitch it's, who are you what are you doing, how are you doing it why are you doing it and what can I expect the outcome to be in about five. And when we talked about SEO earlier like Google and other search engine crawlers are actually going to be reading that text on your website. You're validating your mission against the rest of the content on your website, and I deciding is it continuously relevant. And does all of this make sense across your website. Very, very crucial, very crucial. Great question. Thank you so much. So what you asked everybody to type in the chat box is really hard to keep up with the chat box so the questions move up. So please put them in the Q&A. I'm in the Q&A I apologize. I know, I know. I'm going to go ahead and go with the Q&A lots of questions. Pretty much. There were several questions on the blog section when you started blog, blog versus podcasting. Other than setting up a blog section on your website where would a nonprofit in the area of food insecurity blog. It says where would a nonprofit in the area of food insecurity blog. Go ahead, go ahead. So I'll touch on the podcast versus blog. So when we talked about search engine optimization, I website crawler search engines can't listen or see anything they can only read stuff. So if it's not actually written in text form that's coded into your actual website like a blog text or that alt text that describes an image. A search engine is not going to be able to crawl it. Now that being said, you can still have the description of your webinar episode but know that it's not going to pick up all the stuff you talked about about 45 minute episode. The second question was related to food insecurity. So if I want to write blogs around food insecurity. I would talk about maybe the national or blog where to launch a blog of your own website. I think you should have launched on your website there's no other place you should because if your content is driving readers you want them to be driven to your website. So the blog should live within your own website ecosystem right. So partner, I mean I think of doing guest blogs on other organizations is always, you know, a cool idea but the main one should certainly, you know, live on yours 100%. Okay. I'm podcasting would podcasting be better marketing strategy than blogging when it comes to that metric, like, and also the use of clubhouse thoughts on that. I'm not super familiar with pubhouse I need to get better at it I apologize that sort of me being a little bit ignorant around that but I know it's been coming up in the last year, essentially since like COVID it's really taken on. I have my fantastic fan, amazing colleague who like knows every single thing about every social media platform. She's looking at me she's going. I don't know much about it off the top of my head but we would more than happy to explore that conversation, but the difference between a podcast and a blog podcast are going to cost probably four to five times more money to produce than a blog. So if you have a podcast. If you have the budget to do a podcast do it. I would also suggest also publishing on your website a transcription. So make sure you're utilizing a platform that can transcribe your blog, and then add that to the page so we were as we were talking to before it could actually crawl the words from a text perspective. Generate money, so there's so many benefits of podcasts, but for ease, you certainly if you don't have a blog, I would start at blogging before you dive into podcasts. Correct. Yeah, and podcasts are going to be like you need a consistent regular publication, because it's really like a whole entire radio subscribers. Yeah. Lots of questions about the 8020 rule explain the 8020 rule as it applies to your nonprofit work. Okay, so anytime you guys are publishing. So it doesn't have to necessarily apply to your website directly so you're about section talk all about you, your mission talk all about you, your donation page talk all about you. But if you're publishing any content that includes social media content, blogging content, video content. The 8020 rule means you want to spend 80% of the time talking about your industry or your sector. The idea is getting general mass interest and mass understanding it can still be informational it could be more or less prescriptive like a client not a nonprofit client but another client that we worked with was is a healthcare beauty salon. So we published it. It's a listicle essentially have a blog like how to host your at home facial party with you and your best friends, one of the five steps promoted a product but the other four steps had nothing to do with this actual salon. It incentivize that virality behind the content because it wasn't specific about that one particular company or that one particular organization feels a little bit more organic than just like talking about yourself all the time. It's like how do I relate to everyone else within the world interest. Yeah. Okay, this is about keywords so the keywords, not have any bearing for your better ranking for SEO keywords do have. Yes, keywords will help you rank on your SEO. There's a whole again this is just like SEO as a whole keyword SEO is a whole other can of worms, but there are some really great third party plugins if you use WordPress internally at tap we use a plugin called IO AST that that will actually crawl any content and and give suggestions on how to improve the SEO technically and contextually to sort of help benefit or increase the overall SEO score of the content that you're publishing. So on your 8020 can also apply on your website to something like your blog would be on your website and so you'd apply that 8020 role to something like that just not your about section so that's kind of the difference. And your email I love that question about it 100% being your email. So the question. So you guys in the room said so website email is 100% of your organization social and content is 80% sector 20% your org depends on the email marketing campaign you're running. If there is a, if you're looking for donations, and it's a pre donation or a post donation, it might be helpful to talk about the greater cause of that particular industry or sector so let's say for right now, you're running an organization that is looking to do pop up clinics and homeless shelters around you're trying to deliver vaccines. Well, you might talk about just that specific raise money for this thing but you might want to contextualize it with here is why industry wise this is a really important conversation for us to be having. And then here is our solution around that particular problem that we're solving right. I hope that's helpful. Sorry. I think the other thing that the it's important with the 8020 role it's all about trying things you have to try things out seeing what people engage with seeing how you open seeing all that stuff you know you do have to try stuff out to find what's right for your organization. Okay. How trustworthy how trustworthy is that beer we're considering using it to connect our CRM with our email marketing campaign, but I'm nervous because I'm not very familiar with it, or the data and data so sensitive. That's a great question. Zapiers actually we use it for a lot of clients it's it's it's pretty secure any third party API plugin like that is going to have their own security protocols around the data transference. However that being said, it's always worth going to your it department and ensuring that whatever information you are sharing because I can't accurately say 100% sure it's good to go. If you work within the healthcare space, and you're, you're sending EHR information back and forth that could be a major liability and hit the violation. So you have to identify and understand exactly what content you're moving to from one place to another, but knowing know that Zapier itself is not a, a, it is a secure sort of platform, and you can trust it to transfer internal data. As long as exporting it from one location to the other location is legal, right. So you have to just make sure that you have the other components around that I hope that was helpful. What's the best approach for reconnecting with an audience that may have fallen off during all the happenings of 2020. I actually feel like events are such a great place to reconnect people they're they're one of the most engaging opportunities, and they're such an easy ask, you know you don't, especially when it comes to a peer to peer event. It might not even be that you're asking for a donation or you know you might just be asking them to support their friend, you know sometimes even sending an email saying, Hey, like if, if wit is the participant saying, Hey, Caitlin, what is participating in this, you know if I've donated to wit in the past, you know so I think that utilizing events as a way to kind of re re spark people's interest and I think everyone's looking for a way to connect with one another and feel that sense of community once again. Okay. And we're, I'm sorry we're not going to be able to get to all of this is the last one is it better to remove users from CRM, like MailChimp rather than leave them in the database, if they are engaging or clicking on your messages after 10 to 12 months as an example. Always want to leave them. Yeah, you'll always want to leave them there's opportunities to re engage there's so many creative, as you were kind of mentioning earlier. There's so many different creative ways that you can potentially re engage educational drip campaigns other types of opportunities. The only way I would say remove them is if someone is charging you to have them there. Right. If it's a financial decision, I would suggest exporting and saving that CSV file from anyone that was in your database. If you're being charged to house them in that database, you can remove them. I, that's fine if you're not going to necessarily email them, but you don't want to lose that contact information so usually three years is a good, I feel like good role of thumb of trying to have them within your database for Great. Well, I want to thank everybody for joining us. This has been so awesome. We have to do this again. I'm too many questions to answer. And so I want to put that benchmark. We're going to send that out via email and please stop the survey. Yeah, we'll send that out. Email. So everybody will get the email. If you have any questions, actually you can reach right out to wit and Kailin. That's their email just pop it in there. You can take a screenshot if you think you might not copy that in the chat room, but thank you all for joining us as you're taking care of everybody else. Make sure you take care of yourself and we'll see you next time. Bye bye.