 Welcome everyone to How to Successfully Promote Your Year End Campaign. Thank you so much for joining us today for TechSoup's webinar. We're glad to have you on as part of our audience. Before we get started with the content, I'd like to make sure everyone's comfortable using ReadyTalk, our webinar platform that we're on today. You can chat in with us at any time to let us know if you have any questions or have any technical needs. Most of you will be hearing the audio play through your computer speakers. So if you're hearing an echo, or if there is a delay between the slides and the audio, we recommend reconnecting. You can use a different browser to reconnect. You can also opt to dial in to the toll-free number that Susan has chatted out in the chat window if you have any issues. We will keep all lines muted today to ensure a nice clear recording that you can refer to at your convenience. 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If you'd like to tweet today you can do so at TechSoup or at PS webinar as hashtag there. We are joined today by Noah Barnett. He is the marketing lead, growth marketing lead at Cosvox. And so we're really happy to have him presenting with us. Prior to joining Cosvox he spent six and a half years in fundraising and marketing leadership roles at World Help and the Adventure Project. And he knows firsthand the many, many challenges that nonprofits face in fundraising. And he's passionate about equipping them with the resources they need to rally people around their cause. My name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the webinar program manager here at TechSoup. And so I'm happy to be your host today having been often the ad hoc fundraiser slash wearing of many hats at small nonprofits. In my lifetime I'm always excited to learn some of these best practices because we know that this last quarter of the fiscal year or the calendar year is when so many organizations really bring in the bulk of their donations whether those are individual donations or donations from community organizations or corporate donors. So this is a really important time of the year and we hope that you are able to get some good, useful tips on what you can do to improve your fundraising out of today's webinar. You'll also see on the back end assisting with chats Susan Hope Bard, TechSoup's education and training manager who is on hand to help answer your questions and help you with any technical issues throughout the webinar. We hope that during today's webinar we will accomplish these objectives that you will come away with an understanding of some gear and fundraising best practices that you will discover and learn about six different ways of segmenting your audience for the best results. And that will uncover some channels that you may be overlooking including leveraging your existing supporters for helping them help you raise more funds. So we'll talk about these and Noah will give you an agenda of the different steps that he'll be covering today. We'll also have time for your questions. Before we get started with the content just a little bit about TechSoup we are everywhere on this map that is blue which is almost everywhere around the world. And we are helping to connect civil society organizations and social change agents around the world with the resources that they need to succeed at bringing their missions to fruition. Go ahead and chat in to let us know from where you're joining us today. And if you're joining us from outside the United States we recommend visiting TechSoup.global and choosing your country from this drop-down list. We will be talking about Noah's company, Cosvox a little bit later in our program, and that donation program a little bit later may or may not be available depending on where you're joining from if you're outside the United States. So definitely start here if you are not in the U.S. If you're joining from the U.S. visit TechSoup.org. We have folks chiming in in the chat from Texas, Chicago, LA, Michigan, Arizona all over the place. So we're really glad to have you all with us. We have been delivering this kind of technology resources and information to nonprofits since 1987 and we've helped facilitate more than $5.4 billion in donations and grants to the nonprofit and social good sectors. So I'm happy to be part of that. Now looking at today's topic we would love for you, our participants, to tell us a little bit about your role in your organization. And this just helps give us an idea of kind of what you're bringing into today's topic and maybe where your role is at. Are you an executive director, leadership manager? Are you on a communications or marketing team? Maybe your role is specifically around fundraising and development. Are you program staff, IT staff, board member, volunteer, or other? Feel free to comment in the chat. And we have Olivia commenting in turn. So I didn't include all of the various roles you may be occupying. And Leona, as many of us have experienced in smaller organizations in particular, in CAP, she writes all of the above, which I imagine is the truth for many people joining today. Jill Crom, it's Jack of all trades. Ainsley says ED and the only employee. So that is very true. We know that many organizations are experiencing small staffs who do an awful lot and wear a lot of hats. So I'm going to show the results quickly. And it looks like the great majority of you right now, 42%, are in leadership roles, especially if I combine that with board members. And then we've got about a quarter of you who are dedicated specifically to fundraising or development. In the same vein, I'd like to get an idea of how many people work on fundraising at your organization. So maybe you are a team of one. Maybe you actually have a team, and all of you work on fundraising. Maybe you have a dedicated fundraising team where you have 5 or 6 people writing grant proposals and seeking out individual donor relationships. Those of you who have a team, I'm very happy for you because that's hard to come by these days. But go ahead and let us know. Again, this helps give us an idea of what sort of capacity your organization is bringing to the fundraising that you are doing. Some people are commenting that they are first time as a new organization, Communications Committee Chair, Webmaster, Stewardship Committee. So lots of comments coming in, and we know you can't see all of those comments. If there are things that are shared in the comments and in the chat that we think are informational for the rest of the audience, we will try and share those back out with you. So I'm going to show the results at this point, and it looks like the majority of the people on the line, 50%, well, half of you on the line that have voted so far, have 2 to 3 people who are working on fundraising. And the biggest group after that is the 0 to 1 category. So that's really helpful. Most of you have pretty small fundraising teams or a couple of different people that are working on fundraising. So thank you for sharing your input, because that does help give us an idea of how to best speak to your needs on today's webinar. So I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Noah to talk to us about how to successfully promote your year-end campaigns. It's November 17th today, so we've got a month and a half left of this calendar year. So it's crunch time to get these campaigns all out there and hopefully bring in lots of donations to your organization. So Noah, talk to us a bit about how to best promote those campaigns and really get the word out to support your organizations before the end of the year. Thanks so much for joining us. Absolutely. Becky, thank you so much for that intro and just for the opportunity for us to come on today's webinar and share with so many of you. I love asking that question that Becky did where you say, what role do you play? And it's a question that is built into kind of our natural networking ecosystem and just how we relate to people. So people in the nonprofit space and so many of you on this call can't answer that question. And it's because all of us in fundraising and up until joining COVBOX, that's where I was, are always managing and wearing many hats and balancing the unrealistic workload alongside limited budgets. And it's a challenge. And so I'm excited to be able to share with you all and kind of speak into how even though we're all managing unrealistic workloads and balancing all of that, there's some very key ways that we can successfully promote our year-end fundraising campaigns so that we can raise more money and we can really drive more impact that your organization has in the world. Here at COVBOX, we talk a lot about how we really want to help audiences like yourself ensure that their work is seen, supported, and shared. And so we're going to follow along that same narrative as we kind of share along today's webinar. So just as an overview, a quick agenda just to kind of guide us in today's conversation, we get asked all the time here at COVBOX is why does year-end really matter? There's all this buzz and talk towards year-end. Like Becky mentioned, there's only 45 days left, or 43 days depending on how you count. And so there's not much time left, but these last few days, especially as we lead up to the end of the year are really, really important. So we're going to dive into that at the front of the conversation. Then talk about before we get into promotion, I think we need to talk about this idea of segmentation. It's something that is talked a lot about in various fundraising and nonprofit circles, especially in today's kind of niche-minded, kind of small audience-focused world we live in just because of how connected we are. So we'll talk about the idea of segmentation. Then we'll dive into the meat of the presentation and kind of spend the majority of our time together talking about how we've learned over the years as we've observed more than 10,000 fundraising campaigns here at Cosvox, some best practices and some tips that you can leverage to really promote your campaigns in various ways. Then we have some free resources just as a thank you for you dedicating your valuable time and spending it with us and the TechSoup team. And then as Becky mentioned, we'll dive into some Q&A following our main content today. So let's dive in. Before we do, just to give a background on who Cosvox is and what we do, Cosvox is an online fundraising platform and it's specifically designed for small fundraising teams. One thing we've seen is that a lot of fundraisers have to do everything and they don't have an IT team. They don't have designers. They don't have all these people. They really have to do it all. So we wanted to design a tool and a platform that really helps you do online fundraising well without IT, without a designer and making it really easy for you to do that as well. So we allow you to easily launch and manage your end fundraising campaign with Cosvox. You can create campaigns that really drive some of the best practices for online fundraising and incorporating social and even just this idea of social proof so that you can see who's contributing to your campaign, how close you are to your goal, and even include a countdown so you can count down to your end. Our platform is used for a variety of different fundraising campaigns. Everything from year-end campaigns which we're going to focus on today, all the way to annual fund, capital campaigns, peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns, and even as simple as just donation pages that smaller nonprofits just don't have the technology resources to be able to facilitate, they can use our platform to be able to create those and also create them in a way that's campaign specific, which is quite the challenge when you don't have a team of IT staff or a huge budget. So the next part of the conversation we want to talk about is like, why does year-end fundraising matter? And there's really only one reason why year-end fundraising matters. And it's because over 30% of giving occurs during this time. And so even depending on your cycle and how your organization fund raises, year-end might not be the time that you're driving your most important campaigns. There's a lot of nonprofits that's different cycles based on your fiscal year or even just based on the work that you do and how that flows with the seasons differently. But for the majority of individuals and the majority of nonprofits, the last 45 days, the last 30 days, and then even the last two days of the year are the days that the most giving is, or the most charitable giving is done. And that's for a lot of different reasons. And so it's just essential for you to be able to be a part of this and have a year-end fundraising strategy so that you can take advantage of that. Because even your key supporters, if you don't ask them to give during this time when they're thinking about being generous, they're also thinking about how this plays into their tax obligations and various other reasons they give at year-end, especially here in the U.S. and many other places, you're missing out on that opportunity to really provide them a vehicle to be able to give to your organization because they support you. And so you really need to be in front of them and asking. There's this quote, and I can't remember it, but I think it was the founder of Save the Children said, people are generous, but people are lazy. And you really have to, as fundraisers, engage them and provide an opportunity for them to give. And we can do that through having an effective fundraising campaign. So the next thing we've seen, this whole webinar is supposed to be focused on how do we really promote our year-end fundraising campaign. We live in an environment where the cost of renting attention has skyrocketed. And most of those channels where you can rent attention, the value and effectiveness have really deteriorated. And especially for those that are on this call that kind of pointed out that they're a smaller nonprofit, it's created an environment where you really can't compete. It favors the big organizations. It favors budget and reach. But we believe that there are some key ways that you really can think differently about how you fundraise and what your role is as a fundraiser that can really get around those and tap into some of the resources that you may not be leveraging to their full potential. And usually that starts with your supporters. But before we start promoting or trying to engage our supporters, we really need to understand who they are and how we can communicate best to them. Is there something that nonprofits tend to struggle with? Because for the majority of nonprofits, they're very good at talking about their work. They're very good at talking about what they do, why it's important, how it's going to make change in the world. But they're not necessarily ones that kind of focus on who are the people that support this? Who are the people that align with us? And how can we engage them in the most effective way? And sometimes you have to kind of put your mission to the side for a second and really think through who your audience is and how they want to be communicated with, why they give to your organization, and how you can effectively engage them, inspire them, and then activate them to really get involved. And so segmentation is key for you to be able to have a successful promotion strategy because you have to understand the audience that you're serving and that you're trying to activate to support your cause. So we're going to provide a few different things, but really regardless of the size of your nonprofit, donor segmentation is an important strategic process. And there's a few reasons for that. You can customize your tone and information to a smaller target audience. You can speak more directly and more personal. You can encourage donors to engage with your nonprofit wherever they are and the donor continuum, meaning you're going to speak to a new donor versus a longtime supporter in a different way. If you really just group all those together and speak to them in one way, you're actually doing a disservice to both those individuals. In addition, you can ask for donations strategically based on the empirical data that you have, the giving level. For those that have been around fundraising for a while, the biggest mistake we can make as fundraisers is asking for the wrong amount from our donors. And so by segmenting, you can make sure that you're customizing those asks in the way that is most valuable and most aligned with the giving level and the affinity that that supporter has to support your organization and just the capacity that that individual has. You don't want to ask a $100 donor for $1,000, but you don't want to ask a $5,000 donor for $10 or $100. You really have to make sure you align that. Segmentation offers you the opportunity to do that well. The first way you can segment is really on how your donors were acquired. You can segmenting based on acquisition channel or the campaign can allow you to communicate more effectively through the channel or lens they were initially drawn to support your organization. So an individual that maybe was acquired online or was acquired through in a fundraising event, you can speak to them in a way that aligns with where they're at, how familiar they are with your organization, or what really drew them in. And you can leverage that to kind of bring them further in and engage them in a new way during year-end. In addition, you can talk about giving size or last gift amount. This is really important based on some of the information that I had already said, but you really want to focus on the fact that you don't want to ask donors for the wrong amount. You don't want to turn donors off by asking them for too much and you don't want to turn them off by asking them for too little or really underutilizing that relationship that you feel with that supporter. So the third thing you can do is segment between first-time donor versus returning donor. And so again, this is very familiar because you're targeting them at where they're at. And new donors may need more background information than returning donors. And so you can speak to them in a different way, similar to the way you would speak to a friend that you just met that you're maybe hanging out for the second time or you met in the social environment and now you're taking them out to coffee. I see this almost in the same way as relationships work. We have a podcast here at Cosbox and we interviewed someone that wrote a book called Date Your Donors. And he talked about this idea that really this idea of donor cultivation is all about kind of similar to the dating game. You don't want to ask people to marry you too soon and you kind of cultivate through the various stages. And so that's why segmentation is important as well. The fourth thing is donor giving frequency. So this is really important because you can kind of see when your donors give to you regularly so that you can reach out to them in a proactive way when they either miss their regular donation period so you can kind of reach out to them, engage with them, or you can even provide them impact reports and updates prior to their next kind of normal giving cycle so you can hopefully upgrade their giving through that next opportunity that they give. In addition, this is great because you can actually monitor how frequent someone is giving to you which shows to your organization that they have a higher affinity to support your organization. And you can reach out to them in a different way during the year-end fundraising season. I will say segmentation takes a lot of work, but it's a great way, especially for the smaller nonprofits, to raise more money from less donors because you're cultivating and catering to those relationships in a more effective way. And you're really being a better steward of the supporters that you've been given as an organization instead of always fighting to get new donors. That's one thing that's actually surprising is you talk to nonprofits regardless of the size of their organization. And their number one concern is we need new donors. We need new donors. And as soon as we start talking and uncovering how are they treating their current donors or how many donors give to them year over year and look at their donor retention, we see that there's a big problem there. And so the focus is on new donors but sometimes that is in spite of actually taking care of the supporters that care about you. And that's so much more important for smaller organizations like many of the ones you guys are a part of on this call. The fifth way is just really the engagement level of the donor. This ensures you're really just presenting the right opportunity. And so asking a donor to give isn't the only way that someone can support your organization. People have their experience. People have their networks. They have their relationships. They have their influence in the community. And so understanding how they want to engage with your organization and how they've done that previously is really important. It can help guide you in how you engage with them during year end or ask them to be a part of your year end campaign because the best thing for you to do may not be to remind them one more time to give because they already give on a regular basis, but rather invite them to share what your organization does or to be a part of the solution and fundraise alongside you. We're going to talk about that in a little bit as we dive further into today's content. Number six is one I think nonprofits understand probably more than others but it's just harder for smaller organizations that don't have access to as many data kind of sites where you can kind of pull in more data on your donor. And the demographics is one of those ones that kind of makes sense and everyone understands, but it's a lot harder to implement especially if you're a part of a nonprofit or a smaller nonprofit or a smaller association or even like a public library. And so this one I always say is important, but it's sometimes harder to do than it might seem. And so it's definitely a way that you can segment your supporters during year end, but the other ones you have that data in front of you regardless of the size of your organization so it's a lot easier to focus on the first five. And if you have the opportunity to segment based on demographics and what motivates each of the different generations, that's another way to really drive more effective year end fundraising campaigns as you're promoting them. So when done effectively, donor segmentation really builds trust and credibility with your audience. There was such a large time that mass marketing worked and where we all kind of consumed the same feeds of information. And because of the technological wave and kind of how connected we are and honestly we have the ability to really curate our experiences nowadays more than we ever had before. And you can even see that and just kind of how the elections here played out in the US where you have both sides saying, you know, I knew this was going to happen or I can't believe this happened. But it's just based on kind of the feed that we've curated for ourselves and speaking into that. And so by you also making sure that you see the individual as an individual and you speak into them and really create a personalized experience that's when your nonprofit can stand out. And I've supported a lot of nonprofits over the years and been a part of many others. And when we see donor loyalty increase is when we stop focusing on the masses and start thinking about how we really can cultivate authentic relationships with our supporters. And you do that by segmentation and really looking at them in a personal way and being human. People give to people. And so even though your cause is inspiring, you as an individual have the opportunity to really tell your story, share your story, and then talk to someone in a personal way. And that's going to drive more effectiveness for your year-end campaigns. So I can go on for hours talking about segmentation. It's kind of my soapbox, but I won't bore you with that any further. It's really important. And I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunities for you to take advantage of that, especially during year-end when there's so many messages going down our supporters in our inboxes, in our mailboxes, events, galas, etc. There's so much noise. And really how you can stand out is really making a personalized experience. So we're going to spend the rest of our conversation today really in kind of this section where we're going to talk through various channels and how you can effectively promote your year-end fundraising campaign through those channels. More than ever before, multiple channel marketing or fundraising strategies is really important because people consume information in a variety of different mediums. And if you're not presenting your campaign or your fundraising strategy or promoting it through multiple channels, you're missing an opportunity to really engage people at different stages or through different mediums that they're engaging with on a daily basis. So we're going to talk through some of the main ones. And the reason I focus on these, there's many others that are kind of smaller avenues that you could promote your campaign through. But I feel like the ones that we're going to talk about for the majority of the conversation today are really the kind of the meat and potatoes of fundraising promotion. And those are the ones that until you have those down and you're doing those right, you really should focus more on those and invest your efforts because you don't have a lot of time. You don't have a lot of – or you don't have any more kind of effort to give, especially at year-end. And so focusing in and making sure you do the things that are going to have the best impact well are going to really drive those results for your organization. And you're going to see it in new donors. You're going to see it in returning donors. And ultimately you're going to see it in the funds that you raise during the year-end time so that you can drive the impact and change that you believe in for our world. So the first place we're going to start is email marketing. And I always use this line that's more powerful than you think. And the reason I say that is people are like, great, email is great. I get email every day, but I hate email, or there's a lot of spam out there. Should I really email? Do people even read it? And here's just the stats. So what we've seen – and this is a stat from 2015, but organizations reported that they had a 3,800% ROI, which means a return on their investment when they looked at their email marketing program. And so just based on the stats, email is astoundingly important. And so for your organization that maybe has prioritized direct mail or personal relationships with your organization, it's really important for you to start thinking about how you can incorporate an email communication strategy into your fundraising. And that's more difficult than it sounds, but it just starts with collecting information and start sending out regular email communication. And we're going to talk about some of the best practices to do that. But just having an email marketing program or an email fundraising program is very, very important because though there's so many other mediums and channels we consume information, email is still proven year over year that is an effective and growingly effective channel to communicate with your supporters. So there's four components of what we've seen here at Cosbox as we have observed successful campaigns and even unsuccessful campaigns is targeting your subject line, the content, and kind of the core meat of the email, and then the call to action. So we're going to talk about each of these and kind of isolation. So email targeting, we've talked a lot about segmentation. But again, if you can understand who you're emailing instead of just emailing your list the same exact email to everybody, you can actually start prioritizing who and what actions you want specific audiences to take. And what I mean by that is when you're sending out emails, the thing we see most often here at Cosbox is they send out an email and they're saying everything they can think of. And nonprofits are reporting on how their Monday night programs went, where their fundraising goals are, they're having three events next year, the executive director wanted to promote something, the board member wanted to promote something, and it's just this epic email that includes 42 different ways that you could engage with that email. And what we see is that that's really not effective. Email is a tool to communicate and then get someone to take an action. And so if you have 42 actions, you're putting it all on your audience to decide what action is most important. Whereas what I think is important is being able to really target and position a message with the right information at the right time to the right people with the right call to action. And so we always encourage individuals that are fundraising on our platform to really have emails that have a single focus and a single targeted call to action. And those are the most effective and you're going to understand whether people want to take that action or not. And you can learn a lot quicker if you say, I want to send an email that I want people to go from my email to my year-end campaign fundraising page and see if they donate. And so if only 10 out of 1,000 people do that, or 10 out of 100 people do that, you start learning whether you're really targeting people with the right offers or the right asks. And so you can adjust more effectively. Whereas with an email that has 42 call to action or 42 links in it, it's really difficult to know what worked, what didn't work. Well, did no one donate because there was too much distraction? Did they not know how to donate? No one showed up for the event. Was that because we didn't communicate as often? It's really difficult. And then you just start playing a guessing game instead of actually having some clear results and data. And so use email as a tool and use it in a targeted way. The next thing is the subject line. I worked for a company that did digital marketing. And so I've had the luxury of being a digital native. And one of the things I heard very often that a wise man told me was that subject lines, you should spend 50% of your time on your subject line and 50% of your time on your content. And most people spend 99% of their time on their content and what they're going to send, which makes it all about you and what you want to say versus how can I engage someone with this content? And maybe right before you send an email you type out a subject line and send it. The thing is that the subject line is the gatekeeper for them to get into your email. And so the thing I see is that people get frustrated that no one reads their email. People get frustrated that no one opens their email. But when you ask them how much time did you spend on your subject line? Have you tried different strategies? How do you think about your subject line? They're like, I don't know what you're talking about. It's like, well, no one's opening your email because the subject line isn't engaging enough. Or the subject line isn't really drawing them in. Or the subject line isn't really connecting with them in the way that they were at. And again, it goes back to that idea of sending the right content at the right time to the right people with the right message. And so that's why I spent the majority of the beginning of the call on this idea of segmentation because you have to understand your audience for you to have an effective promotion strategy. Not as many people care about what you're doing as you think. And so you have to understand what they care about and try to bridge that gap. And that's really, really important and done really effectively with the subject line. So we have some best practices. We talk about this idea of keeping it short, not overusing capital letters. Again, that's just making it human. Making it more normal that you're sending them an email one-on-one. Posing a question, if appropriate, those are really impactful ways to drive people. And personalizing it with the donor's name. But in addition to this, and I left this off my list, I wish I didn't. So this one's not on here. So those that are taking notes, this one's really important. Send it from a human. Yeah, that's right. Send your emails not from the nonprofit's name, but send it from a human. Because again, communication is one-to-one. Communication is all about someone emailing me and telling me something. And that's what email was designed to do. And so you as an organization you would think through how you can effectively leverage that channel to make sure that your message actually gets delivered and engaged with. And so we always encourage people, as you can see in this example from a few emails I got from an organization that I used to work for, is that we always send it from a person. And because we knew that we wanted to create this individual dialogue as though we were sending this to an individual. And there's stats out there. The stats are really significant. But at the end of the day, if you send it from an individual, your email will get opened more than if you send it from your organization's name. The next thing is really the email content. This is things a lot of nonprofits have. They understand how it works. The only thing that I would kind of address here is that again, keeping it single-focused, keeping it really concentrated, and thinking about email not as, I have to communicate everything, but rather as a tool to get someone from their inbox, which is full of distraction, to your website, or to your donation page, or to your event registration page. Email is not just a communication tool in its entirety. Like, hey, communicate everything. It's really a tool that you want to move them from their inbox, which is very distraction-filled, to your content, your ecosystem, and your house. So I always think about it as this idea that it's almost like an invitation. You want to bring them along. You want to bring them into your ecosystem. And so I think that's a really important way to think about how you craft your content. In addition, I think it's really important for you to tell a story and to really connect it in an emotional way to your supporters. A lot of organizations, and many of you, could spit off 5 to 10 to maybe 60 minutes of stats on why your cause matters and why it's important that people support it. No one cares about that. A lot of times, stats kind of people close their eyes. People kind of like glaze over. They're like, I get it. There's 42,000 people that are in X, Y, and Z circumstance. And if all I do is give $10, it's important I get it. That's just not what drives us. And so connecting with people in an emotional way and really drawing them into the story and clearly identifying where the gap is, and then the action that they need to take, which is that one action, not 42, that's what's going to drive the best results through your email. Let's get to the last thing with email. It's really just a call to action. Being clear and direct, stand out on the page, make it very easy for your supporters reading your email to know exactly what you want them to do next. And that's really what the call to action is designed for. The next part we're going to talk about is social media. Social media gets a lot of talk on the Internet and a lot of discussions and a lot of social media is the best thing. But many nonprofits are like, I don't get it. It is what it is. I don't get it. I didn't grow up in the digital age. I don't understand social media. And the problem with that attitude is really, is that today 65% of online adults use social networking sites. It's really this idea about creating an ecosystem that we connect. So it's really taking offline relationships that we have and bringing them online. And a lot has changed over the last 15 years. And maybe some of you on this call have been in fundraising for 30, 40, 50 years. But really in the last 15 years, all of these social media sites have fundamentally changed. And there's so much more that has changed in the last 15 years. Really the last 15 years theme has been all about change. And so how you communicate or how people consume information has fundamentally shifted. And so you as a nonprofit really need to tap into that. And what we see is that more than half of the social media users discover social initiatives via social media. And in addition to that, 64% of social media users surveyed gave $100 or more to nonprofits in the last year. And so this is a really important stat to see for those that have board members that are skeptical about social media or that says it's a waste of time. Some of these stats might be helpful for you to show that people are discovering social initiatives and social causes to support through social media. They're also supporting them in a big way. And so it's not just a kids thing or something that is outside, kind of the realm of what you want to focus on or kind of, oh, that's just a waste of time. That's where all the kids hang out. That's where my kids waste a bunch of time. It's really a place where people are using it as a discovery platform and really to connect with like-minded people that support and fund the causes that are most important to them. So the best content we see is authentic. It's emotional. It's compelling. All of these big things that you can kind of use to capture your audience. It's a very busy, distraction-filled place, especially at Facebook and other sites are just becoming more and more filled with attention or things that are grabbing the attention. But what I love is that the SPCA kind of tapped into some pop culture references, also understood that cat videos and cat pictures travel fast on social media, but they also wanted to communicate their message and didn't really sacrifice that. And so they used this image to kind of share and really equip their supporters to also share it, which is the power of social media, to talk about what they do in a unique and different way that's fitting for the media. Stories connect us. Telling stories is really important, using visuals, but then also using words to really tell your story is the best way to promote your year-end campaign on social media. And using a story of one, a lot of you do complex work, but you have to simplify it back to the person's story. And what I was talking to Lori Jacob with, who's a fundraising consultant. She was talking about how you really need to break down anything you do, even if you're an environmental cause that's all about the environment or something that just doesn't seem to have a human connection. You can always bring it back to where people are being impacted or how that national parks are being destroyed. And so me as a father who grew up going to national parks with my dad will not have that same opportunity to take my 6-year-old and 4-year-old to the parks because they're being destroyed by climate change. Maybe that's your message, maybe that's your story, but you're going to bring it back to something that we can connect with. Again, videos are really effective to tell your story. Being human, again, having someone really share and drive call to action is also a great way to use social media. And the other one is that social media users should donate. 56% said that compelling storytelling is what motivated them to make a donation. Here's a few more examples that you can take a look at when you check out the slides that TechSoup will send out after the webinar today. So the next section I want to talk about is direct mail. Yeah, direct mail is not dead. A lot of people talk about how the mailbox isn't being used anymore. And although it feels like that sometimes, still the majority of fundraising is still done through direct mail. A lot of it is done through direct mail, personal fundraising appeals, one-on-one. And so we have a few tips that have kind of changed because of how technology has really enabled you to do direct mail in a different way. And so one of them is going back to that idea of personalization. So before is where you had simple letters that you wrote and sent out kind of increased up to being much more about kind of these flashy things or these tricky labels that say open immediately or important information or reply requested and all this other. I don't know what the language right there on here, but anyways, it's very kind of deceiving direct mail. And that's why direct mail really got a bad rap. But when you make it personalized, when you make it kind of effective and kind of connect with the individual, it really can make a difference. The other one is just to keep it familiar, send requests to your current lapstoners, customizing the content to each audience. Technology has fundamentally shifted where you can customize everything in direct mail for a cost that isn't crazy like it used to be. And so the tools and resources that you have are really opened up to a lot broader of audience, especially smaller nonprofits, to leverage some of the best practices that larger nonprofits have been using for a long time. The other thing I know we talked about a little bit with email. I don't want to spend too much time on this, but AD testing is something that you can also do in direct mail. And again, the cost to do that though a lot more than digital fundraising is still much cheaper than it used to be. And so you can really test out different things so that you can drive it in tech. The last section we're going to talk about is this idea of peer-to-peer fundraising. So many of you might be unfamiliar with peer-to-peer fundraising, or unfamiliar with peer-to-peer fundraising, but it's really this idea of tapping into the current supporters you have to help you promote your campaign. So like I said at the beginning, the cost of renting attention has really skyrocketed. And in addition to that, standing out is harder than ever. There's more nonprofit soliciting for giving. In addition to that, things like Buzzfeed, or Netflix, or even just all the tragedies going on around the world are trying to coach the attention that you used to maybe have more exclusive rights to with your supporters. But what has shifted in your favor is that the influence that your supporters have is much higher to convince others to support your cause than you have as an individual. And so just to say that in a different way is that the power each individual supporter you have is much higher than your influence as an organization is to convince new people to support your cause. Because the world you fundraising is fundamentally shifted. And what we see is that before you would rent attention, you would buy lists, you would have maybe sales reps, and you would have TV ads because everyone was kind of consuming the same information. It was all about budget and reach. And the only people that favored were people that had budget. And so that was the large mega-organizations that were able to kind of pay exorbitant amount of money to be able to rent the attention of the masses. And at scale, that's where renting attention actually pays off. But for organizations like the one I was at, or the one that you're serving and running, many of you said you run the entire organization. You can't compete in a world against budget and reach. It's just not going to happen. And that can be frustrating and feel like you're kind of really running up against a wall. But the world we are fundraising in has fundamentally changed and shifted. And that's really important to remember because now it's all about building relationships. The way we buy, the way many of you might buy has fundamentally shifted. When was the last time you bought something without someone recommending it? Are you asking a friend? Are you seeing someone else? Or even seeing blind referrals? Referrals and others' opinions over the brand's fake promises and bolstering marketing is more important. That's what's really driving people's decision-making nowadays rather than good marketing. And what we see is that you can tap into that because that's the way people are also giving. If we look at the way people give, we talked to this researcher before, we talked to donors and said 85% of donors prefer being asked by friends and family to make a donation versus you as a fundraising rep or your organization saying support us because we're doing good work and you want to make a difference until you're going to support us. 85%. And that's only increasing. We live in a world that's about people-to-people transactions. If you look at things like Uber where people are renting, using their personal cars to drive strangers around from one place to another, if you look at Airbnb which next week is Thanksgiving here in the U.S. and I'm actually renting out my house to strangers to rent my house. So they're trusting me to leave a place for them but they trust me because there's other people that vetted this and that are valuable. And I trust them because other people vetted them. And so we're more comfortable with transacting with individuals. And so you as a nonprofit move from being kind of someone with a megaphone to really someone with a rallying cry where you can take the supporters that you have and really engage them to share on your story. And so at Coslox we build tools that help you do this. It sounds like a lot more work than it really is because we believe that if you can empower your supporters to share your cause and your story, that's where you're going to be able to circumvent all this kind of budget priority, attention grabbing, renting attention, all this other stuff that you're not going to be able to compete in. And any money and budget you have that you invest in that is honestly just a waste. And it would be more valuable for you to really spend your time cultivating relationships with your key supporters. And so we talked about this idea of capturing a changing world through people-based fundraising. So they're always connected. They buy and donate differently and standing out as harder than it ever was before. And so the best way for me to kind of illustrate this type of promotion tactic for your year-end fundraising campaign is by really talking through an example. And so these two ladies, Lauren and Maria have a very, very small local organization that they rally people around to really advocate for maternal health in their community. And so this is a city of maybe 70, 80,000 people, but they have 200, 300 women that have participated in this. And so what they did was they were able to activate those individuals. And so you can see how they have 23 people that said, you know, I participate in this. I find this valuable. I'm going to actually go and fundraise on this organization's behalf. This is a two-person organization that recruited 23 people to go fundraising. That's more than most of the fundraising people on this call. They were able to activate and empower the fundraisers on their behalf and they were able to raise $6,000 towards their $10,000 goal and help 3,100 more women with their programming. Small organizations know that a small amount of money makes a big difference. And so they were able to do that through their community of supporters. One of those supporters was Alicia, and she was able to rally seven donors which is a lot to raise $375. So on the surface you might look at this and say $375, that's not that much. But the key thing is here, she recruited seven new donors to this organization that now that organization can cultivate and build relationships with. Truly incredible and very fitting for the connected world we live in where the power of Alicia is more than the motherhood collective. And the motherhood collective realized that and was able to tap into that for their recent campaign and activate Alicia. And now Alicia is more invested. She was invested before, but now she's in a part of it. She's felt the weight that all of you on this call are bearing yourself or with a small group of people. And was able to kind of burden herself to be able to advocate for this organization that was making a change in her community. And that's what we see every day here at Cosbox. It's incredible to see how many organizations are able to kind of pivot, see their supporters as an advocate, and drive forward. And so they were able to use Cosbox to build out this whole campaign. And we're going to talk about various pricing options at the end, but it didn't really cost them that much. So there's a bunch of other opportunities that I wanted to go through. They're not important as what we talked about today. And I spent way too much time talking already. And so there's a few other slides here that you can look at social advertising, you can look at PR and media, and you can even look at partnerships that you can do inside your community to really help promote your year-end fundraising campaign. There's lots of information on this slide. There's tons more information on our blog where we produce two to three more articles a week at Cosbox.com slash blog. We have tons of resources on any of these various subjects. But I'm going to kind of kick it back over to Becky because I ate up all my time. But thank you guys for having me. I'm so grateful for the TechSoup team. And just for giving us the opportunity to really share some of the insights that we've learned over the past six years as we've helped thousands and thousands of nonprofits really capitalize and really get around all the difficult environment we're in these days. If we're all honest, it's really hard to fundraise. Go down the other. Go ahead. We don't talk about it as much. And I'm just grateful that we have the opportunity like TechSoup to really kind of come alongside those that are in the trenches and help them raise money for the change that they're trying to make in the world. So anyway, thank you guys. Thank you for that Noah. Lots of really great information, a lot of really good ideas, some things you can probably take back and work on. You spend that 50% of your time on your subject lines. That doesn't take any special tools or any extra money to do that, to improve that, to think about what your audience might want to open instead of what it is you want to tell them. A lot of really great practical tips shared in this. So thank you so much for that Noah. You'll see we have a bunch of additional resources here in the slides toward the end. You will get the slides. So anything we had to go over quickly, you will have time to review those at your convenience later. Really quickly, I wanted to talk about CauseVox before we open up to the questions. We have a couple of different options of CauseVox that are available through TechSoup's discount program with them. But CauseVox also does have a totally free option available. So if you want to try it out, you can do that for free. Just know that some of the more advanced features go up in price essentially. So there are two different plans available through TechSoup for one-year subscriptions. The impact plan which is $88 plus the 4.25 transaction fee per transaction. That's the impact plan. And then the pro plan which gives you even more features is available for $232 admin fee. And again I believe those transaction fees, I'm not sure if they are actually part of it still or not, but these are open to all organization types. I saw somebody just chime in from saying they are part of a small Catholic church. They could use these as well. If you are a library or friends of a library program you can access these. So definitely check them out. And like I said there is a free option available directly through their website that has not as many features, but it would give you a taste of what you can do to see if it's something you want to invest more time and money in. Hey Becky, if I can share real quickly, if you do sign up for the free plan and check that out, you can change and upgrade at any point in time. And so you can use the TechSoup discount. Once you kind of check it out and see that it's a great tool for you, and come back use the TechSoup discount and you won't have to start all over again. So I just wanted to make that really clear that if you use the free plan and then you want to take advantage of the TechSoup discount we make that very easy. That's terrific. You don't need to have separate email addresses you use to do that. You can upgrade from the existing account. Very helpful. So we do have a couple of questions in here before we wrap up. Sandra comments that she's found that a lot of her emails that she sends are not getting through because they go into spam or they end up in the promotions. Some email services have your primary account, your social account, and your promotions. And they're not really accounts, but they're like tabs that they put your email into like Gmail does. And so she's wondering how do you get around that? What's the best way to do it? Is there a way so that you don't have your emails thinking to spam? Like I know we had issues here where if we put win, like win an hour of tech time which is something we used to do as a monthly like giveaway that those emails would end up in spam boxes because win was seen as like junk mail because it's a spammy word. Are there things like that that you can recommend to help people get around either the spam box or being sorted into promotions? So one of the things we see is that there's a lot of different ways and a lot of advice out there on how to get around some of those things. But at the end of the day if you understand what the email provider or the email kind of mail services are actually trying to do, is they're basically saying we're going to try to help our customers get the emails that are most important to them. So what we've seen just from our personal experience here at CogVox and then with some of our nonprofits is that the sooner you can actually invoke a reply to your email, the quicker your emails will never get put into the spam or promotions or whatever tabs because that is an email that has been indicated as important. So for example, when someone signs up for your nonprofit's newsletter or you welcome them as a donor and you want to thank them and say, hey, we send updates on a monthly basis, ask a question and get your supporters to actually reply because at that point that really unlocks and kind of prevents those issues from happening in the future. So again, it goes back to really understanding what the mail providers are trying to do and thinking how you can kind of play along with those rules. There's a bunch of other things like you mentioned, Becky, about avoiding certain words and trying to kind of mess around with that. But again, if you're writing in a human tone, you're sending messages that are important and that are being helpful to the supporters that you've cultivated, that's really how you're going to win or get around that game in those kind of spam filters in the long run. So don't spam. The company I used to work for said, don't make spam make love. And I think that's really important to remember especially when it comes to email. Great advice. We also have a couple of questions. Does COSBOX interface with existing CRMs? So if you're using Salesforce or Dynamics CRM or CVCRM or any number of them, does it sync up with any of these existing CRMs? So we allow you to export all your data from COSBOX in a very easy way and kind of a full encompassing. There's a lot of platforms out there that don't actually give you access to the donor data because you're fundraising on their platforms. We're really a tool that's empowering you to fundraise and so you own those donor relationships. And so you're able to export those really easily and then import them into the CRM or database system like Salesforce or Dynamics or a few others really well. In addition to that, we're currently in the process of developing some integrations. We're going to help with that because we really want to make COSBOX more and more helpful to you to facilitate your online fundraising. And so we're going to do that by making sure your systems talk to each other. Great. And we are actually at the top of the hour, so I'm going to go ahead and wrap us up. I know we didn't get to every question, but some folks had asked about the campaign example that you showed, and it was run on COSBOX so that answers a couple of people at once there. But we would love it if you'd chat in one thing that you've learned today that you're going to try and take back to your organization and implement. So maybe it's that you're going to spend more time on that subject line work. Maybe you're going to try the A-B testing. Maybe you're going to try asking your existing supporters if they will start asking their friends and family to support your organization. Let us know in the chat what things you're going to work on for your year-end campaign that will hopefully help improve it and bring more donations into your organization before December 31. We'd also ask that you share this information with other friends and colleagues in your network who may benefit from them, and that you take a few minutes at the end and give us some feedback on our post-event survey that will open up when we close out. I'd like to just point you to a couple of other upcoming TechSoup things that you can participate in. We have launched a full new catalog of TechSoup courses where you can take a variety of courses on training your staff on technology, technology, planning. I can't remember what else is in there right now, but there are courses that you can access at your own time. You don't have to show up at a specific time. You can access these 24-7 at this techsoup.course.pc. If you put a slash catalog at the end, you can see the full catalog of what's listed right now. Go ahead and sign up and check those out at your convenience. We also have a number of webinars coming up, including five things you didn't know about TechSoup's donation programs coming up next Tuesday. We'll be talking about SEO or search engine optimization for beginners, how to get your website to percolate to the top of those search engine results. We'll learn some steps on how to do that. We'll also be looking at Adobe Photoshop, learning about some of the different tools and filters available. And then we'll have a webinar in mid-December, I can't believe we're at December already, around how libraries can support social good in partnering with nonprofits. So we hope that you'll join us for some of those events. Thank you so much, Noah, for your time today and for sharing a bit of your expertise. Definitely, folks, check out Cosmox. They have a lot of resources available, and keep your eyes peeled for that post event email where we will include links to the resources discussed today. Thank you, Susan, on the back end. And thank you to ReadyTalk, our webinar sponsor for providing the use of their platform. Please take a moment to complete that post event survey and have a terrific day. Thanks so much, everyone. Bye-bye.