 Hello, thanks for coming to our session, aspirations versus realities, where we're going to be talking about the results of a survey of nonprofit organizations in regards to how they are prioritizing their investments across the different components of their marketing stack, including their website. So I'd love to get a quick show of hands. Who here is from a nonprofit? Great, it's a little over half, so this hopefully will be relevant. We are from Blue State, an agency that focuses primarily on working with nonprofits, and I am the SVP of Platform Partnerships. It just means I work on the things that we build, like websites, so I help establish new relationships with clients, and I also build relationships with other partner agencies that we use to build Drupal sites in particular. Hello, I'm Jack Steadman, I'm Chief Technology Strategist at Blue State. So I head up all of our technology and data work, and spent a lot of my time consulting with nonprofits on this very topic. So for a little bit of background on the research that we're going to present here today, we asked to hear from organizations who use Drupal or WordPress for their websites. There are obviously a lot of other CMS platforms and use by nonprofits, but these are the two that we most commonly work in, and we were looking for insights that were most relevant to this community, but also to our core business. So to set the stage, first we'll talk about the role of the website in the ever-expanding MarTech ecosystem used by nonprofits. So 10 years ago, this is what a typical Blue State client looked like. We built a lot of websites in Expression Engine. A lot of our clients were locked into long-term contracts with BlackBod, which was and still is a big name in non-profit tech. And because BlackBod's digital tools were pretty clunky, we built and often added in our own platform, the Blue State Tools, so that we could be a bit more nimble in our email segmentation, data collection, and fundraising work. But around 2015, the landscape began to change. Most of our clients outgrew Expression Engine and started moving toward more sophisticated open-source content management systems like WordPress and Drupal, and obviously much larger developer communities and so on. And at the same time, Salesforce started to make a massive push into the non-profit space and we started to see a lot of our clients migrating to Salesforce and to a lesser extent HubSpot. This point we started to see a split. Some organizations stuck with the non-profit specific all-in-one platforms like EveryAction and Engaging Networks where CRM, email, fundraising, advocacy, and so on are all rolled into the same platform, whereas others started to take a more composable approach. Adding in separate tools for email and donations and so on built around Salesforce or HubSpot. And so the result was that there's a lot more fragmentation. There's a lot more systems, a lot more tools that come into play. Some of these tools are more sophisticated than the ones they're replacing, but it creates a lot of fragmentation and it means that every single one of our clients is running a unique combination of these tools. But if we zoom out even further, we can see that the bigger picture is even more complicated. CRM, fundraising, and email are pretty common to most of our clients, but depending on the organization, there could be a number of other tools in place. Some organizations do political work or advocacy work and have tools for that. Many non-profits rely on in-person or virtual events or peer-to-peer fundraising. Some offer online communities or online courses and some are even leaning into new tools like A.V. testing, personalization, machine learning, data warehousing, and so on. So nobody's doing all of this, but our typical client will have some number of these five, six, seven of these different platforms in place. So we're primarily interested in what these changes in the technology landscape mean for websites, particularly because we build a lot of websites and we respond to a lot of website RFPs and we see there are changes in what's being asked for in terms of skill sets and the size of projects and the types of relationships. And we really want to understand where these trends are heading so we can think about multi-year planning for nonprofit websites. So something that's easy to spot from this slide alone is that today the website is competing with many more systems for an organization's attention and investment. In a given year, there's only so much a team can accomplish and so much budget to go around. So this might mean that decisions are delayed on when to make a website redesign happen or even when to do sort of essential technical upgrade. So we want to learn how organizations are navigating these decisions and which parts of the stack are highest in priority and what are the expected benefits of the year investments. So to learn about this, we conducted a survey. We ran the survey between February and May this year and we invited around 300 organizations and of which about 58 responded and completed the survey. So we started by asking this question if they agreed or disagreed with this statement, our website is our most important asset for marketing and supporter engagement. So I'd love a raise of hands for people here. Do you agree or disagree? If you agree raise your hand. So about 45, 50%. We actually got a higher response in our survey, about 72 respondents either agreed or strongly agreed but that left about a third, 28% who think that other systems are as important or more important than the website. So with so many other systems in play now, this isn't entirely surprising but we wanted to learn more about which systems are on the rise in importance. So the importance of the website to the website is influenced by what the organization thinks of as the website's primary jobs. So we asked what are the most important jobs your website has to do. And here you can see the responses grouped in three buckets by the size of the organization by their operating budget. So brand awareness and general education is a consistent answer across all three groups but after these two the results diverged a bit depending on the size of the organization. For smaller nonprofits providing community resources and enabling community connections were highly important but as the nonprofit grows in size from possibly a local organization to a regional or national one then fundraising and donor acquisition really starts to become important and event promotion becomes very important along with building their email list and mobilizing for advocacy depending on the focus of the organization. So these are the most important jobs that the websites need to perform but next let's look at what components are used to power the website to accomplish these ends. Right so the website isn't just the core site running on the CMS. So all these other platforms in place serve up front ends of their own. So forms, landing pages, event registration pages and so on. So we asked what platforms made up the front-facing user experience and we can see that email, the CMS marketing automation tools were used by 84% of respondents. Event management systems are closely behind the 71% followed by fundraising platforms at 67% which is actually to me surprisingly just a little bit low. But then advocacy, social media, job recruitment systems all came in in the 30 to 40% range. So what that means is that maintaining consistency of user experience and creating content on the part of staff can be a difficult and fragmented experience. And in fact, we hear from our clients that all these systems aren't working all that well together. Of course, the proliferation of specialized marketing tools creates a new challenge, data fragmentation on the backend. And in fact, we're frequently hearing from our clients these days that their systems aren't talking to each other. So there's a lot of data integration work that needs to happen to make the platform as a whole function as well as it can. Given all this increasing complexity to get a sense of where nonprofits are heading, we asked how priorities are changing across a range of tools and capabilities. You can see here in the top right that there are four that stand out as increasing in priority. So marketing personalization, CRM, primary website and email. So we're gonna set the website aside for just a minute and take a closer look at why CRM personalization and email are rising in priority. Nonprofits know from other sectors, particularly retail and e-commerce that personalization works. It works to increase engagement, drive additional revenue, and they're trying to get there, right? They're trying to figure out how to apply these technologies and tactics to their own work. That may be part of what's driving the adoption of a wider range of tools and more sophisticated platforms, but getting all those tools to work together is hard. And I think organizations are really struggling to unify the experience and the data. We heard a lot of respondents saying we wanna make better use of the tools that we already have. So let's look at the CRM. We asked why the CRM is increasing in importance and here we have some responses that are representative of the reasons we've heard so far. Our CRM has always been a high priority for our organization but is only growing more so as we try to better integrate it with the site and build out user journeys. We have tech debt left over in our CRM due to a staff turnover and issues with our CRM software provider that are now we're investing and correcting that. We need more tailored interactions with our audience and that's increased substantially. We want to be able to personalize user journeys and content and our first step is capturing users info and engage in history. And then lastly, data just feels more important than ever. So we have a range here of it's, we're trying to do new things and better integrate. We are trying to correct technical debt and just sort of upgrade our stack. We are trying to create tailored experiences and we're trying to work with data more holistically. CRMs are now designed to integrate with many other systems and so by nature they gravitate to a very central position in an organization and non-profits adopt these systems because they have a vision of unifying supported data in hopes that it'll create more targeted communication and personalization. But CRMs aren't necessarily great at making data useful and actionable in real time. Often we see the data sinks happen on 24 hour cycles, there may be additional expenses to pull data out and do things with it depending on the product. And so we see that many of our customers are adding additional systems for marketing personalization or CDP to hook it up to the CRM which is more nimble and they can do things in real time. And that leads us to the next set of tools that non-profits are prioritizing. So why is personalization such a high priority for half of respondents? As we saw in the previous slide, the ability to support personalization strategy is a key driver for investment in the CRM. But as the quotes on this slide illustrate, marketing automation is typically the next level goal once an organization is in a good place with a CRM. So we adopted a marketing CRM and automation platform to deliver personalized email content. We're looking at personalization to deliver engagement opportunities based on what they're interested in. We're optimizing donor acquisition with appropriate cultivations, asks and CTAs and by tailoring messaging. You can see here that organizations are looking to lean into personalization to respond to softening responses to older and less sophisticated tactics like light boxes. Supporters have grown accustomed to personalized messages in their other activity on the internet. And so they don't respond as well to generalized content or messaging that doesn't speak to their interests. So the expectation is that if we can tailor messaging and calls to action better, make them reflect where a person is in their journey with the organization, they'll drive a stronger response and ultimately lead to more revenue. So at Blue State, a big focus of our work is email campaigns for large non-profits. And we were particularly curious to learn the reasons why organizations continue to email as a priority for greater investment. And the quotes here show some of the key drivers. Email enables highly personalized communications. It provides a channel to very specific audience segments. And email has been seen as a safe constant in a shifting landscape, particularly as Facebook and Twitter fade as reliable channels. So the respondents talked about why email is important from a strategic perspective in their communications. But we think there's another reason at play here, which is that it's simply less complex to implement. Typically the non-profits we work with see tighter integration between the CRM and the email tools to create marketing personalization. It's that the email tools are in the CRM are already sort of pre-built to connect together. Sometimes they've even sold as a package suite. And so there's relatively little work to get that functionality up and running and show results. Conversely, we see very little integration for personalization between the CRM and the website CMS, Drupal or otherwise. And this sort of sets up a three-on-one competition among these four priorities because more progress can be made faster between the CRM and email. So rounding out our questions on priorities for the near future, we asked what organizations planned up with you this year and next. Two highest priorities were take better advantage of the tools that are already in place and better integration of data across the current stack. And these are, I think these are pretty interrelated. The first point is something we hear often from clients that they've invested in sophisticated technology but aren't able to take full advantage of it. Often they say their teams are stretched too thin or the tool ended up being too complicated for their staff to learn or use efficiently. The second point, addressing data fragmentation is a major area of focus for us and our clients right now. All this says that organizations do believe that they have the right tools in place. They just need help making it all work together. We also asked respondents to look back to their most recent big technology investment. And most said their most recent big move was to a new CRM. Most added that it had been a long and bumpy road with a lot of pushback deadlines and many were still struggling to make use of the new platform long after the project officially completed. Which is why this work continues to be a top priority. Getting to a good place with CRM is seen as a prerequisite for unlocking a lot of other capabilities. Many organizations also reported that they recently updated their website but in at least half of those cases that was driven less by a strategic priority than the need to do a major version upgrade or just needing to upgrade the technology for the site, particularly in many cases moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8, 9, 10. So what do these findings tell us? 2022 year-end saw revenue decline across non-profits digital programs in our work and reported by some of our peers in the space. And this continued a year-long trend of lower-gift volume as people have worried about the state of the economy. So less revenue combined with more digital marketing tools means organizations are making tough choices between platforms for attention and investments. And the survey suggests to us these takeaways. First, organizations take on a change to the CRM when it's seen as a strategic imperative and then once started, it becomes a consuming priority for several years. Following a CRM implementation or migration and organizations need to better integrate data comes into sharper focus and then that drives a new set of priorities in that direction. And then conversely, or perhaps because of prioritized investments in the CRM, organizations are currently making big changes to the website less frequently. And when they do, it's often not driven by strategy but it's in reaction to required updates or technical debt, as Jack mentioned. So to put this in another way, organizations know that their website could be improved but they choose to get by with what they have for another year because upgrades to the CRM are seen as more crucial. So for everyone here, I'd love to get a raise of hands if this resonates with what you're seeing. So about six or seven people raise a hand. So obviously this isn't a trend for everyone but we think that this is sort of becoming a real concern in our space and that there's only so much you can do and there's a sort of a sense of capture by the CRM providers of budgets. Like it's sort of once we step on this path, we have trouble doing the other things that we thought we'd be able to do because it's bigger and more expensive than we were led to believe, for example, is a concern that we're seeing. So we've talked so far about how the survey suggests that the website has been losing a bit of ground in competition for investment with other parts of the stack but in the last few slides, we'll look to turn back at the website and say what the survey revealed about the challenges and opportunities there. So we asked, what are your most significant website challenges? And the two most common responses were integrating external systems with the site and measuring and optimizing performance. These resonate with what we heard about making systems work well together. It's a priority to incorporate the website into the broader MarTech stack to unlock things like website personalization and behavioral data collection. There's a lot of eagerness I think to get more sophisticated in how websites engage visitors if we can only get the various data systems working well together to enable it. But despite those challenges, we have seen recently that the website has been outperforming other channels like email as we'll see on the next slide. Yeah, so fundraising is obviously a key job for the website for nonprofits in general. And so we wanted to share what Blue State has been seeing outside of the survey in this area. And so overall in 2022, it was a down year for fundraising, which shouldn't be surprising given the overall concerns about the economy and waves of layoffs that we saw at the end of the year in particular. So 2022 year end results saw a decline about 5% in general. But email in particular is sagged by about 15% compared to the previous year. However, while revenue was down generally, more than half of our clients saw increases in revenue attributed solely to the website. So meaning finding the site organically, not driven from a media buy, email or social, coming in through the front door, getting inspired and deciding to make a donation. So someone on that particular journey, we're seeing actually a raise in the results at the end of the year. And that was remarkable given the overall decline. So helping to make improvements to the website to optimize those journeys actually can move the needle and raise more. So in our work with clients, we're focusing more efforts on SEO, increasing the top of funnel on A.V. testing to optimize journeys once people arrive at the site and remove friction in the donation paths and ultimately raise conversions. In particular, mobile journeys are something that we're realizing you can really make a lot of gains in. So on average, close to 60% of all traffic coming to the website is from mobile, but only 36% of donations are from mobile. So you get many more visitors, but many fewer donations. And so, and also the average donation size is about half when given from mobile. So under $96 versus 94 is some of the data from last year. So digging in to optimize the journey on mobile really is an opportunity to move the needle. And it's something that we're starting to do with more of our clients and sort of evangelizing this idea. So while we recognize the practical challenges that organizations face as they seek to incorporate new tools and unify their data, we're encouraged that most organizations still see the website as their most important asset for marketing and engagement. And for half, the website's only increasing in priority. I'm gonna call out two of these quotes. Is our main engine for driving engagement with the core audience we serve and diminishing returns and attribution challenges make upper funnel even more important to Sam's point on the last slide. So to end, I'll share some advice we've been giving our nonprofit clients for how to maximize their limited time and budget. Don't think about updates to the website in terms of a three or five year cycle of major rebuilds. It's a shift of thinking about frequent incremental improvements. Think about the website as a revenue generating digital product with an ongoing roadmap. Especially since we know that many orgs have recently done a major website redesign or upgrade. It's likely that the site is in good shape to sort of grow incrementally now as opposed to needing a full rebuild or upgrade. And that gives an organization the flexibility to focus on whatever is the most pressing issue of the moment, whether it be website performance, SEO, mobile user experience, or even adding in some level of personalization as the rest of the stack catches up. So it's not revolutionary. It's also not how most of our clients work. For those who haven't made the transition, we're able to be a lot more agile and make more consistent progress on the website. So we wanted to round up by giving a shout to a few partners who helped us recruit survey participants. So thanks to Kenobi Studios, to Forum One, to Calamuna, to Think Shout, WDG, Capellic, Corner Shop Creative, and Pantheon. And with that, we'd be really happy to answer questions. And also, if anyone wants to take shot of our email addresses, we'd be happy to share this deck with you. We intend to publish this more formally in the coming weeks. And so are there any questions? Michelle? So the question is, what was surprising? What did we go in? What did we go in not expecting and that we saw from the results? I would say the statement that we think we already have all the tools we need, but we're not taking best advantage of them. And then that's the pain point, is that we don't need something new. We just need to use everything that we've already invested in better. Any insights that stuck out to you? No, I think that's right. It does resonate with some of our clients. I think that there's a range of feeling on technology adoption, I think. Some clients have invested in sophisticated marketing cloud platforms and are now frustrated in questioning that investment, because they're not taking full advantage of it. Others are just looking to invest more, looking to figure out how to get past those complexities, the staff limitations, the things that are getting in the way of taking that next step. So the question is, what is the next step if you are struggling with integrating the website into the broader stack? And this is an existential thing for us in our work, because we're eager to make progress. And we see strategies that should be achievable. But year after year, they get deep prioritized. And even when we have an ongoing relationship where we're helping plan the roadmap, some of these things just end up getting set aside year after year. And so it's frustrating to us. The one thing that we really would love to see and should be simple to achieve is the personalization of a CTA and a website to resemble somewhat what we were able to do on the email side. So it's very typical for the email journey to get someone to sign up to the email list. And then once they're there, start asking them for donations, tailoring the ask to their donation history and what we know about their interests. And why don't we do that on the website side? It should be very simple for the CTA to say, if you're not signed up already, sign up for email list. And if we know you've given something in the past, ask for the first donation if they've never given. And if they've given before, ask them to become a monthly donor or ask them to give more. And those three states are pretty simple. And we have the data on the CRM side. We know all of those things. But we don't actually have a single client that has succeeded even the largest organizations that have the most sophisticated tools are doing this on their website and Drupal websites included. And so why is that? And it's just there's a lot of friction getting the data over to the website. And so I don't know if anyone saw Elevated Third's presentation of their personalization tool. They've presented it in a number of Drupal cons this time, smart content. We are looking to use that in conjunction with the CDP with some of our clients where we can actually get the data over to make that very simple journey happen. And the question is, if an organization doesn't want to invest in the CDP, how can we still get things going like that? I don't know if you have any thoughts to add. Yeah, I think CDPs are really promising for this. So adopting a tool like Segment or Buconic or there's a whole wide range of them that can be much more nimble in terms of what data it's collecting, how it's storing that data, how it's making it available directly to the website, and being able to connect to a wider range of systems more easily, I think there's just a lot of promise there. But it is an investment. In the meantime, I did a webinar a couple of years ago actually about how to just, if you have specific tactics like the Lightbox example that Sam was giving, that you think can move the needle and you want to experiment with, just go at the problem of getting that specific piece of data, like someone's last donation, get that either in a cookie or into the content management system somehow, whether even if it's manual, it's not a sustainable solution. But if you could make that some specific piece of data available to the website in some timely way, then you can start to experiment incrementally with some of those tactics. Again, it's not sustainable and it's not necessarily simple. But we do think that not asking somebody for their email after you've already gotten it or not recognizing that someone is a donor to your site when you pop up that Lightbox or whatever ask you're making, not recognizing their history with you, is detrimental. That's something that is worth trying to address and trying to get the person to deepen the relationship by recognizing where they are with you and making sure that you're always making the right next ask. One of the things that we've seen, if anyone here uses the platform Neon, is that they've recently reintroduced a CMS product going back in the direction that Blackbot originally was pursuing just because they want their customers to be able to create these effects, to have this integration. And I was very surprised to see them launch that last year sort of a step back in the direction that we had been going for a number of years in the space. Any question over here? Yeah. The question is, how are data warehousing is relatively low on the importance list? And the question is, how are organizations pulling all this data together and doing personalization if they're not prioritizing data warehousing? And from what we've seen, there's a lot of variation in our clients in how much they've invested in data and data warehousing. Some of our clients have full data teams. They're running Snowflake or Redshift warehouses, and they have invested in this. And then others just haven't. And so we sort of see our role as sort of helping to bridge that gap in a couple of different ways. One is just helping with whether it's point-to-point data integration or helping to sort of solve some of the CRM challenges, even if there's not a data warehouse, if you can get as much as possible connected to CRM and then use that as a jumping point to push it into the marketing tools from there. And we are also, like as Blue State, we're investing in not necessarily, I wouldn't call it a data warehousing platform, but investing in a reporting platform that we can sort of hand to our clients who don't have sophisticated data teams of their own. What we're doing is we're building something that is relatively easy to deploy that can collect data from all of these different sources for the purposes of reporting. We haven't necessarily taken the leap yet to say, OK, we're actually going to build you a data warehouse that we can then push back audiences into all these different tools, but that's potentially a next step. Again, that's not necessarily answering your question about what organizations can do. But as an agency, we are trying to help our clients by providing them with reasonable cost, templated solutions that can help to fill some of those gaps. Thanks again for attending. And looking forward to sharing this with you.