 Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us for our webinar today, Building a Successful Monthly Giving Program. I just want to go over a few housekeeping items before we get started so all callers will be muted. If you have questions, you should see a chat box to the left-hand side of your screen. Feel free to ask questions as we go along. If you lose your Internet connection, you will want to refresh your browser using the link that was emailed to you. Also, if you have to leave the webinar early or if you want to watch it again at a later time, feel free to visit our website, techsoup.org, slash community, slash event, slash webinars, where we host this webinar and all of our past webinars as well. You will also receive an email with the link to the presentation and the recording once the webinar is over. Also, if you are on social media, feel free to give us a tweet at TechSoup using hashtag TSWebinars. Like I said earlier, we will be using the Q&A box on the left-hand side to monitor questions for today's webinar. Just a little bit about TechSoup before we get started. We are located in 236 countries and territories. We work with over a million nonprofits around the world trying to bring donated or discounted technology to them. We partner with several technology companies like Adobe, Amazon Web Services, Intuit, Microsoft, Symantec, and many more as you can see on the screen here. If you are interested in learning more about our tech marketplace, feel free to visit our website to see what is available to your nonprofit. Just before we get started, I wanted to make sure the chat box is working so if you guys don't mind trying it out and typing in where you are calling in from and I can read out a few of those. I see Brooklyn, Maryland, Austin, Texas, Boston, Colorado Springs. We have people calling in from all over the United States. Hopefully we have some international folks as well on the line. I'm going to go ahead and introduce today's presenter. Today we have with us Michael Stein. Michael Stein has been a writer and digital strategist for progressive social causes since the birth of the Internet. He is the author of three books and numerous articles chronicling the rise of digital engagement, mobile, and online fundraising. He is currently the Senior Director of Partnerships at Every Action, a cloud-based online platform that offers tools for email messaging, fundraising, donor management, advocacy, and organizing on a single unified CRM. He is also a contributing editor to TechSoup, so we always appreciate the content that he gives to us. My name is Seema Tucker. I'm the online learning producer here at TechSoup. And then you've probably seen some messages from LaShica. She's going to be helping us on the back end today with any technical issues you might have. So I'm going to go ahead and pass it off to Michael. That's great. Thank you so much Seema. Hope is the next slide. Great. Well, thanks everybody for joining. I'm actually joining you today from Northern California. Great to see folks from all over the country and also from a few other countries around the world. So let's see. Thank you for inviting me today to share my ideas and strategies for building a successful monthly program. And I wanted to quickly take a minute just to talk about what we will be covering today in the webinar and how we'll tackle this topic. So we're going to start out just by talking a little bit about why monthly giving is important and why nonprofits should be focusing on it. We're going to spend the second part probably most of our time discussing different tactics and strategies for recruiting monthly donors. We'll look at things like how to use donation forms, how to do website promotions. We'll talk about seasonal campaigns that you can do at different times of the year. We'll talk about the different audiences that you can target to recruit monthly donors. And we'll also touch on using email welcome series to recruit donors. We'll also chat a little bit about managing a monthly giving program that's already set up. And then we will close by talking about how to measure the impact of your program by looking at analytics and such. Great. So let's see. As we get started though, we wanted to do a very quick two-step survey or poll just to get a sense of folks that are joining us today. And the first question is, does your organization currently have a monthly giving program? And this is a yes-no answer. It might also be I don't know, which might be a no, but we'd appreciate both. And I can see the response is just flowing in over here. And I think, let's give it another second or two. And do I put on a skip to results? I think right, Ema, and it should show that to folks. Okay. So it looks like, thanks. So among those who have joined us on the call today, it looks like 36% of you currently have a monthly giving program and about 63% if you don't. So hopefully I will be able to share with you ideas for both of those groups of people, help you improve an existing program, and for folks that are looking to build one, hopefully giving you lots of strategies and tactics to help you move forward with one. Let's see. I think I need to just click the forward button. And so we have a second question. So a second question I guess is really for those of you who don't have a program, I mean, hopefully you're here to learn how to implement one. I mean, does your organization actively planning to implement a program? But yes or no, that might help just give us just a quick snapshot also of people's intent. And I'm going to quickly skip to the results. I think this probably builds in real time. So that's certainly very helpful just to know that you're actively thinking about doing it. And so hopefully I can leave you with lots of action-oriented to-do items that you can jump on right away on Friday or Monday morning. Good. I am going to close the poll over here and then skip on to the next page. Great. Let's see. So let me start a little bit with a few setting stage things around the importance of monthly giving. I wanted to share some of this material from the very helpful M&R benchmark study which they publish every year and they look at monthly giving among many other digital metrics. And so what they're showing is what we're noticing is that monthly giving is basically the fastest growing segment of digital fundraising. And so like just last year alone in 2017 it saw a 40% growth. And the year before it was at about like around a 30% growth. So it's still a really fast growing segment of fundraising. And that's why I think more and more organizations are interested in adopting monthly giving programs or growing one that they already have. One time giving grew at almost 20% but you can see that basically monthly giving is growing at about twice the pace. So if you're seeing a lot of people interested in this and of course many of you are interested yourself, it all kind of makes sense. There's just a really good surge in this area. And also in last year in 2017 just in terms of how much it accounts for revenue, basically it accounts for about 16% of online revenue. So that's from 2017. It was 14% the year before. So we're still seeing growth there. So 16% of online revenue coming from monthly giving and then the other, what is it, 84% coming from one time giving just in terms of those types of percentages. And then the average gift size also in 2017 was about $18 when people do email campaigns and then what we hire on $25 is an average gift size for monthly giving when people are giving via other types of channels or when they find your donation page. We'll talk about that a little bit later. But I know that when folks are putting together budgets or estimating I know that these kinds of average gift size amounts can sometimes be useful. I took a couple of quick snapshots from the M&R Benchmark Study which I thought were also useful. This one just shows monthly giving as a percent or the color of this key is a little bit off. But basically you can see here 16%, monthly giving represents about 60% of online revenue. And then when you break it down in these different types of verticals there is a lot of variability. You have of course public media which is things like radio and TV which do a lot of monthly gift promotions. They have really the highest level of that. And then you can see down here in terms of the size of the organization basically in sort of medium sized orgs a pretty large percent of revenue is coming from monthly giving. So this is just interesting stuff and I think helps to support our efforts in continuing to grow this. And in terms of average monthly gift basically when you're doing an email campaign the average is $18 when people are giving just straight up on your donation pages just navigating to your site tends to be even a little bit higher. So this gives you a couple of benchmark numbers. Again the public media stuff always skews the averages a little bit. But I think when you come down here to the size of your organization you can see that there's studies that show a little bit of variability. But even in this medium sized organization or small sized organization you can see between $15 and $27 is really what we're seeing of averages. Great. Moving on. So let's talk a little bit about the value proposition really of monthly giving. I have one slide where I just want to talk about why in fact do donors like monthly giving and why is it growing so fast? It's not just because we're asking them. It's actually because donors really love a couple of things about it. And I just want to highlight these for you as you either develop your program or grow a new program. I mean first of all donors love joining special clubs or special programs and I think the more you can highlight how unique and special your monthly giving program is folks will be interested in. I'll talk a little bit later about branding and names and all that kind of stuff. But this is really something especially if you can highlight how monthly giving really supports certain programmatic areas of your organization or helps you achieve more in a unique way. I think those are going to be helpful. Donors love to give year round support and so a monthly gift is just perfect. They can make the payments at the beginning of the year or the middle of the year and I think they have this sort of mental sense that they're sort of spreading their payments out across the year. And I think that can be really helpful not just for donors on a fixed income but just any kind of donor that wants to feel like they're involved with the organization and so they're feeling like their support is happening all year round. But there's no doubt that the low gift entry point of giving just $15 for example which is a typical sort of dollar amount is definitely of high value for donors. They like giving a smaller amount but then spreading it around. And there's certainly this concept of like set and forget, a donor can make a gift he or she can then, hey, it's going to happen every month. I can sort of just let that go to that. But to the extent that they know that they can cancel at any time and that you can highlight that in some of your marketing materials that can be helpful. So I think these are all sort of value items for donors that you should keep in mind also as you're writing your marketing materials. Now the value for nonprofits on the other side of the coin, I would assume that most of you here on the webinar are nonprofit staff or nonprofit volunteers or board members. So obviously from your vantage point in terms of engaging with donors, I mean monthly giving is a terrific donor entry point and especially because the dollar amount is low. So that's a pretty important thing. We find that a lot of monthly donors that come off of the file are oftentimes first time donors which is exciting. But there's many as well that have already made gifts that are switching over from being a one time donor to a monthly donor. So in any way, it's just a really easy entry point and we notice that a lot in surveys and so on. I mean the other key point for nonprofits is that it's really like the revenue that you can count on month to month and you can really put it in a spreadsheet. If you know that a certain number of donors are giving at this level, it compounds over time as they say. And this I think from a nonprofit perspective gives a sense that that is really a great value in terms of revenue which is why nonprofits have been promoting these kinds of campaigns. Another value for nonprofits is there's really no need to kind of renew them in the traditional sense of the word. In a typical world, someone made a $50 gift and then maybe six or a month later or a year later you go back and say, hey will you renew your gift for another year? Well really with monthly giving, there's really kind of technically no need for renewal. It just keeps on going kind of ad infinitum. I know that some people have monthly giving programs that do have endpoints and I think that's okay. But there are just as many monthly giving programs that literally have no endpoints. So they just really just continue on. Although I do think and we'll talk about stewardship in a minute, it is important to be acknowledging people along the way and to celebrate them every year, every six months as a way to thank them on an ongoing way. And then of course what we do know from doing studies is that a donor who becomes a monthly donor, basically their lifetime value to the nonprofit really increases exponentially. A monthly donor stays on the file longer. A monthly donor is more likely to make another one-time gift. A monthly donor is actually more likely to make a higher gift or sometimes even to become a mid-level donor. So building your monthly donor file or part of your file just brings so much value to nonprofits. So I just wanted to spend a few moments looking this over for you. I was just trying to think of the big picture components of a monthly giving program. I think this can be helpful both for people that have a program in place and those folks who are building a brand new one. And so I just came up and wanted to present you sort of these six big points. So I think you start out in a program focusing on recruiting people. You might do it different times of the year, seasonally. We'll look at a lot of examples in a minute. But really that's something that hopefully that you're doing all year round. And then of course after you've got them on your file as monthly donors you're going to focus on retaining them. You want to send them, get them engaged in the organization. You're going to send them occasional thank yous and other ways to get involved and so on and so forth. So really retaining them is about engagement. Also in a monthly giving program, in a perfect world you're also working to upgrade them. So if they're giving at a $15 per month level, you should seasonally or annually, there's no harm in asking people to increase. They're monthly giving them out by a couple of dollars. And I think most, a lot of monthly donors are comfortable if those asks are happening on a regular basis. Tracking just so important in a giving program to just be all costly measuring, not just from a budgetary perspective, but also looking at what some of the metrics are on recruitment, the attention that really helps you to assess how the program is working, areas of strength, areas of weakness and so on. Re-engagement means if you had a monthly donor who stopped being a monthly donor and fell away, maybe they'd last for a little while, re-engaging them and asking them to come back as a monthly donor is a really successful strategy that a lot of organizations are using. So I just want to keep that there. And then finally just testing, I mean your program in a perfect world always needs to evolve. And so as you're tracking your success, it also lets you test different things. By testing, I mean trying different ways to recruit people, maybe different types of language for upgrading them and so on. But I think all of these components should be included as part of your thinking and part of your strategy as you're building and managing the program. Great. So let's segue on to part two of our webinar where we talk about recruiting monthly donors, and I'm going to cover four different areas. We're going to talk about websites and donation pages. We're going to talk about creating seasonal campaigns to recruit donors, monthly donors. We're going to talk about different audiences to target and then we'll talk a little bit about email welcome series. And hopefully this gives ideas both for people with existing programs and also gives ideas for folks that are starting a brand new one. So let's talk first about website promotion. It's so important. So even though it's important to actively go out and to recruit monthly donors, the reality is that statistically most of the monthly donors that will be recruited by you will be folks who will come to you on their own and sign themselves up. So whether they are coming to your webpage or they're reaching a donation page to make a gift during another time of the year, that's actually the largest proportion for most organizations that I've worked with historically. That's where most of the sign-ups have come from. And I think the key thing on websites is wherever you can to make your monthly giving or monthly donation program as visible as you can to the visitors to your site. I went out looking just the other day for some fresh examples. It wasn't hard to stumble upon a queue of examples of nonprofits that are making monthly giving visible and fast and easy. So here was one just from the Greenpeace website, obviously a pretty large organization but just a great example. This is the top of their home page. Now of course they have a donate button like most people have. But if you look at this right here with my red highlight, they are promoting a $25 monthly gift right here on the front which I think is great. In other words, the fact that they are promoting a monthly gift rather than a one-time gift is a real dedication on their part to sign people up. I also just want to point out because this is the first example but I'm always going to give on the bottom of a screenshot where the example is from, the date the example was taken, and the URL so that you can hopefully go take a look at it yourself in the real world. So I just wanted to point that out for you. This was another one that I found. This is the No Kid Hungry website. This is the top of their home page of just a couple of days ago. Just a great example of making monthly giving visible. Here it is. Your support can feed a hungry child. Donate monthly, the button is right there. So as you can see, they already have a regular button but they've got this extra visibility here. They've got a little bit of copy. It doesn't really connect that well to the monthly donor appeal right here but I think I've seen some other pages that do that a little bit better. But definitely the visibility of putting it here I think is super important and I think is really nicely done. Another key place to promote monthly giving on your website is going to be on your actual donation page. I just want to take a look at a couple of donation pages and see how people are doing that. I mean basically you either have a main donation page where you can highlight it and then some of you may have just a special dedicated monthly donation page. So let's take a look at a couple of quick examples. So this one I found is from Jewish Horse for Peace. So this is a pretty typical example I think of how monthly giving is promoted and you'll see it right here on the bottom where you'll see these little check boxes make this contribution monthly. I would say that for all of you that have a giving platform that's helping you take donations, there really has to be this feature because this is literally how most of your monthly donors will arrive on your file. They'll come to a donation page and then they'll be your gift levels and then they'll be the ability to do this little checkbox. This checkbox on a main page can remain unchecked but of course the donor can check it so that he or she can convert their donation into monthly. I mean they'll probably need to change the donation a little bit. This is a multi-step page so when someone clicks next then it takes their credit card and all that kind of stuff. But I thought this was just a perfectly reasonable and good example and a very common example of how people promote it. This next example is from No Kid Hungry. This one is probably another technique that we see a lot. You can see that this is kind of a multi-purpose page. You can make a one-time gift and it sort of starts out assuming you're making a one-time gift but there's also a toggle button where you can say, I want to do monthly. And typically when you click the monthly button here then these gift amounts get a little bit smaller which is a feature that I think that most donation platforms will have. And of course I don't know if you can see this copy right here. It's a little bit small but it says a monthly gift does even more to help hungry kids which is a nice way to promote the monthly giving option. But I think these are all great examples and I think folks can use one of these other ones to be able to feature these on their donation pages. And then this is just another one also from No Kid Hungry. I think it's old from my collection from 2012 but I just always save it because it was one of my favorites. First of all, they feature the name of their program which is called the Hunger Corps. And I feel like this set of content right here I think is a nice strong kind of presenting the value proposition shall we say of the monthly giving program. So this is a page that is only collecting monthly donations as opposed to one-time gifts. And you can see the gift amounts are a little bit smaller. They are encouraging you to give at a certain level. And I just think this presentation is really solid. You can see that they are really working hard to get you to come in at the $20 level. So these kinds of elements here are all going to be helpful for the prospective donor when he or she is here thinking about the gift, what giving level should I select, etc. All right, let's segue onto Seasonal Campaigns. This is where I spend 10 minutes or so on this really important area. Seasonal Campaign is basically an effort that you would do on a couple different times of the year where you are very intentionally campaigning with your donors to sign them up for your monthly giving program. So I like to use the word Seasonal because you might try this a few times a year. In fact, I know several organizations that do these three or four times a year. You might start out once and go from there. And really the key thing to doing these Seasonal Campaigns, I mean basically it increases your signup rates. You are able to accelerate your program. It creates a lot of visibility among your supporters, your subscribers, your existing donors. It's really a chance to really push your monthly giving campaign and how it kind of connects to your mission and program. So all of these are going to be really useful in building your program. So there's lots of different tactics that you can use for these. I think the basic one that I would always say when you are doing a Seasonal Campaign, and one that I see most often is you can kind of create a goal like we are trying to raise 50 new monthly donors by the end of the month or in the next couple of weeks. You can create deadlines. You can use thermometers. Typically you would have a combination of different tactics. You might have an email series, a couple of emails going out, promotion on your homepage. You could try a lightbox that pops up on your website. And of course on all of your donation pages you might add some additional promotion. But these I would say would be all the basics. There are some advanced tactics that I see people use. They might not be right for all of you here, but I just wanted to present them. Sometimes when you are doing a Seasonal Campaign you can offer a little premium gift for signing up. It could be something digital or it could be something you mail to folks. You could be doing some very special segmentation where you ask different types of people to join, to rejoin, to upgrade. Again it can be a little bit more advanced because you have to do some segmentation. And I do see folks who build in in some other digital channels by pushing out things from direct mail, by trying telephone campaigns, and online advertising. Not all of these are for everyone, but I wanted to put these here so that you can see kind of what the goal standard is. Let's take a look at a couple of examples. Here's National Audubon Society. This is their monthly giving ask that they push out in the form of an email. This is actually a really recent one and I was impressed that they were connecting their monthly giving ask to a current event, which has to do with the US Secretary of the Interior. And I thought that was very clever. So this is the top of the email. Here's the bottom. What was really interesting also, and I wanted to just show this to you, was they literally present four different giving levels. And they have some language around each one. I thought this was a really strong presentation. It wasn't just become a monthly donor, but they're really presenting to you sort of different programmatic ways that the gifts are going to be helpful. And you can see they start at $10 here and they go up to $35. I think when you reach the donation page they offer a couple of other giving levels. I think this was a really strong presentation, maybe something that folks here can emulate. Here's another example from the SETI Institute, which does studies of life in the universe. And they had a terrific campaign, a month-long campaign. They called it Become a SETI Star, which was again a nice branding element for their campaign, their goal here. This spring we're looking for 50 people. So you can see that they're framing it as a goal. And as they rolled out the campaign across a few weeks, they would update this amount. Like, hey, we've gotten to 24. We need some more of those SETI stars. So that's a way also to build their argument for it. And they're also giving away a gift, which is down here. Establish a month's gift of $10 and they'll give you a free VVD Affinity Contact. So just really nice presentation. And they were targeting at the time I think their lapsed donors and their low donors in the campaign. Another quick example from corporate accountability, they did a month-long campaign. This is the top of the message and this is the bottom of the email message they sent out. And I thought this was a nice presentation. They had a really nice thermometer as part of their email. I think this message probably went out kind of halfway between. You can see that they were at 74 and they were trying to get to 100. I liked the fact that this was a very visual presentation, nicely done. And I think at the time they were targeting some of their lapsed donors on the file. But I thought this was a really, really nice presentation. And then a final example with the email, this is from Semper Byron Fund. They were asking people to become Redwood Rangers. That was the name of their monthly giving program. They had a goal of 50. And they had a deadline which was great. They were actually offering a match from a local foundation. They had a lot of stuff going on in here. And in case there wasn't even enough, they were giving away an exclusive carabiner if you became a donor. There's so much going on in this appeal. It's a little busy, but you'd have to think that this would be a great test with all of these elements in here. And I thought this was a nice visual presentation with a lot of good tactics that were built into here. Ways that you'd be also promoting during a seasonal campaign. I mean, it's important to do email series if you can do presentations on the website. Like the pop-up is a really nice idea. People reach your home page. They think a graphic will pop up. Here's an example of a pop-up actually from corporate accountability which was promoting their monthly campaign. And you can also do promotion on social media to remind people that the campaign is going on and then linking them back to a donation page on your site. So those are going to be common types. Here's another example from Mercy for Animals. This is also a website pop-up that occurs. And the thing that I liked about this was they had this really nice thing where they were just able to show who had recently donated and made a monthly gift. So I'm just drinking a little water there. This was a clever little piece of technology. I'm not entirely sure if you can accomplish this on the platform that you are on, but I thought this was a really strong example to put in front of people during a seasonal campaign. So just to close this out, I think a seasonal campaign would probably have these elements for what I might call a simple or a basic campaign. Two to three email messages over three weeks. Feature on the home page. If you can do a pop-up, that's great. If you can't, maybe just a feature to do. Some posts on social media tied into the same time. A special monthly donor donation form. And you can probably leave out any fancy segmentation, but just go out to your whole file and see what you can do in terms of recruitment. So on the subject of audiences to target, I just wanted to talk for a minute about which ones are the most likely to become monthly donors. From a lot of the campaigns that I've been involved with in the past, I would probably put them into four general categories. Basically, your recent or frequent donors are the most likely for most organizations to convert to monthly donors. Most likely because they are folks who have already demonstrated interest in your work by having made frequent gifts. And also recent donors because they are very active. They are paying attention right now. And obviously they've made a recent gift. It means that they are really committed to your mission and to your work. So these are audiences that you can target. You can even say with recent donors, thanks for your recent gift, can I interest you in becoming a monthly donor? You are the reason why that's important. With frequent donors, you can often say things like, thanks for your continual support these last few years. Other types of donors that are great to target would be multi-channel donors. I mean if you have fundraising going on more than just in the digital, if you have a mail campaign or events or you tell a marketing on the phone, those are people who have given in more than one channel are very high likelihood of becoming a monthly donor. So those are folks to definitely pay attention to. And then anybody who has just been a donor in the past, whether or not they were a monthly donor, if they were just a donor three or four years ago, they may be really excited to come back as a donor but at a lower giving level which is why the giving level can be useful. Let's talk also a little bit about email welcome series. As some of you know, some of you may have welcome series. These are a series of emails that get sent out to new subscribers on your file. And we've noticed that these welcome series are very fertile grounds for recruiting monthly donors. So I wanted to put that here and add this to the webinar. And one of the reasons why the email welcome series is a great place to recruit monthly donors, I mean these welcome series get very high open and click-through rate. So you typically get a lot of visibility for your messaging. And most welcome series will include a fundraising ask. It's extremely common to have one. And so what we're seeing is that more and more people instead of asking for a one-time gift in their email welcome series, they're now adding, just replacing that with a monthly giving ask and seeing a lot of really great response rates. So I really think that's one area for you to try. And I have a quick example. I found this one from the International Medical Corps. This was part of an email welcome series that went out and they were just able to slot in what I thought was pretty strong. Although a little bit of a wordy message around the importance of their monthly donor program and how it provides support year-round. Anyway, strong writing and certainly something that I think for those of you that have email welcome series to integrate a monthly giving ask, I think is an important place to add there. You can certainly try online advertising. And I do get asked quite a lot, should we pay places like Facebook or Google or Instagram or others? I do see some organizations that try to recruit monthly donors through online as probably the most fertile ground is probably Facebook because you can do a lot of very precise targeting of your own subscribers and donors. But also you can use a lot of their look-alike tools and so on and so forth. I would say to folks, there's no harm in investing some money in online advertising to recruit monthly donors. But I would just do some testing at first, measure your response and decide if the ROI is the return on your investment is worth it. I would say not every organization can succeed with online advertising to recruit monthly donors. So I would say this is probably an optional area. Okay, just keeping an eye on the time to have a few more to go. So in terms of managing your monthly giving program, just an important area for you to keep in mind, some of these folks are now giving to you every single month. And I do think you need to be focused around retaining them. And I think the main way to do that is through whatever types of stewardship activities that you can, acknowledging them through an occasional email, thank you. You may want to send them a special sort of bi-annual update on how their monthly giving gifts are having an impact on certain program areas. I know folks who create email newsletters that are focused just for their monthly donors. So I see a lot of different examples. But just to be mindful of that, I'm going to talk in just a second about preventing the loss of your monthly donors. And just always be keeping in mind that monthly donors like being engaged more and more. And oftentimes that includes being invited to give at a higher level. I think it's something that people respond really positively to. So by monthly stewardship, I mentioned this on the last slide, but everything from acknowledgments, inviting them to get involved in other donor-related activities, maybe they're invited to a special event that's framed as something unique for them as monthly donors. And then just keep in mind that they are already giving to you every single month. You want to suppress these folks correctly. You might want to avoid sending them every single appeal that you might be sending to the rest of your file because these folks are already monthly donors. So just be thoughtful in your segmentation and suppression as you're managing these folks on your file. Also just be very aware of the monthly donor loss issues. The main way that we see this is of course with the expiration and credit cards because it's oftentimes tied to a credit card. The moment that credit card expires, your monthly donor will essentially no longer be able to make his or her contribution. So it's important I think when you're communicating and stewarding with your monthly donors to always include a telephone number. If someone knows that their credit card is expiring, a good number of them will, if they can find that number easily, they'll make a call and send you an update. But also you can do that proactively with your donor services platform. You can check for upcoming dates for expiring cards. And you should be able to on a monthly or quarterly basis send them a trigger email that says, hey, your credit card is expiring in the next few months. We'd greatly appreciate if you would call our donor services folks and update your information. You can also send postcards to these folks I mean my simple point is that your monthly donors are just very high value donors to your organization. And so this type of work to hold on to your donors and prevent their loss is a really important component of managing your program. Let's see, measuring your impact, you know, you'll be working hard all year round to grow the program and to steward folks. I just want to take a few minutes to talk through different ways in which you would, you know, manage, you would measure, you know, different analytics that help you to understand how the program is performing. So probably, you know, your core area of analysis would be just a number of sustainers or monthly donors. Sustainers is another word for a monthly donor. And so, you know, you're looking, you know, you want to just, you know, keep track every month, keep track every quarter, keep track every 12 months, you know, but just, you know, keep a spreadsheet and just make sure that you have a good handle on those numbers. You can pull those numbers out of your donor platform. They should be providing those to you very easily. And you really want to know the total number of active donors that you have at any given moment and keep track of that. You also want to be tracking obviously the revenue that that represents, you know, from, you know, from these monthly gifts, like make it a whole budget line in your revenue so that you understand very clearly how much your monthly giving program is contributing to your bottom line. And I think your, you know, your CFO and your board will be interested to understand that. Another thing that's really closely worth tracking is upgrades. In other words, of all the money you're getting in a given year, like, you know, how much have you been able to raise just from upgrades. And this gives you an important view into how valuable that upgrade segment is going to be and how important it might be. And, you know, maybe your upgrade numbers, you know, your upgrade asks could be increased a little bit. It could be done more frequently. But that's really an important area. It also tells you how strongly you may be able to push people into higher numbers. And of course, average monthly gift is super important. You know, you'll be able to easily calculate your average just by, you know, how much money that you raise divided by the number of donors. Year over year in a perfect world, you should be able to increase your average it's both by upgrading folks every year, but also by testing ways to ask for higher giving levels. I think I showed you in one of those early examples a way in which you can encourage people to give at the $20 level instead of at the $15 level. So really, you know, tracking, you know, what your average monthly gift is, you know, month to month, year to year will help you determine how successful you've been. Lifetime value, duration on file, I mean, these all give you, you'll have to do a little bit of analysis in your data. But this helps you to understand, you know, how long a monthly donor sort of stays on your file. I mean, typically, you know, a monthly donor can stay, you know, a year, year and a half to two years as a monthly donor before they can drop off that. And so you should be able to figure out what that amount is for you. And, you know, in a perfect world, if you do careful and good stewardship, you should be able to increase, you know, the duration of people on your file. If you're finding a lot of people dropping off because of bad credit cards, maybe you can work to reinforce and repair that area of your program. So these are really important areas to measure impact. And then finally, just these last two that I mentioned here, performance by audience segment. In other words, for folks that become monthly donors, like where did they come from? Were they originally lapsed? Were they frequent donors? Were they multi-channel donors? Try to do some analysis of who's the best audience in essence to become your monthly donors. And that kind of analysis will really help you grow your program going forward. And also know which part of the program is maybe worth abandoning and focusing on the ones that are working the best. And then finally, performance by digital channel. I mean, this, you know, can you bring people in through email? Is it better to work on getting people to your website and working to create better pop-ups? If you're able to track traffic coming from social media, you may be able to get some insight that that digital channel may be worth doing. If you have a telemarketing program, you also may be able to have some insight that that may be another good area for you to grow. I wasn't planning on spending time talking about direct mail or telemarketing in this particular webinar, but I think those are other potential areas of growth for those of you that have those other programs as well in your organization. Okay, so I just wanted to, as we're getting to the end here, just to give you kind of my top four elements for building a successful program. I think if I had to recommend four things that you should do to help you succeed, and this I think applies both to folks that already have programs or folks building a new program. I mean, one, I would make sure that you're improving your donation pages as much as possible because that's where a lot of the conversion and folks are going to be doing their sign-up. I think these seasonal campaigns and we looked at a bunch of examples and tactics are incredibly valuable to grow the size of your file, and I would always recommend people do this. I think it's important from an audience perspective to be targeting what I've called the recent and the frequent donors since they are the most fertile ground for recruitment. And then just super important not to forget and try different tactics for stewardship of your existing donors, connecting with them, engaging with them. All these things I would say are the top four elements for building a successful program. And we're going to do a couple of quick polls and then I have something to give folks, and then we'll segue into Q&A. So our question here for this particular poll, what challenges have you come across hosting or having a most forgiving program in terms of in the past? So I don't know enough about this program, which is why I haven't done it. I haven't had success with it in the past. We haven't had enough resources. I think that probably means staff resources to do a program, or we simply just don't have enough time in our organization's work to be able to focus on this. And I am going to quickly skip to the results. So I think just not knowing enough about it, while I'm glad you were able to join today, and hopefully there's a lot of practical and useful ideas that you can use. But I also really respect the other two answers here about not enough resources and not enough time. I mean hopefully you can get a sense that the value of monthly donors to your organization is really high, and so that encourages you to make an investment of resources and time. But I know that easier said than done of course in the real world, but hopefully there's some results that will see the value. I'm going to close the poll, and I'm going to pop to our next question. For those of you that are planning on developing a program, what's your timeframe for doing it? Are you planning on starting one right away in the next one to two months, six months, one year, not sure or never? So we're just curious to get a sense of people's interest, and also we present these webinars how we can make them as actionable as possible for all of you. So it looks like for the vast majority of you are in the right-of-way and the one to two months category. So it sounds like hopefully there's enough actionable material in here to help you continue to build your program. Great. And so I will also leave you with this guide which I wrote a couple of months ago, a nonprofit guide to Building a Successful Monthly Giving Program which is published by the organization that I work for, and it is available as a free download at this web address right here, which I have lost my pen. Let me see if I can get it back right here. You're free to download that there, and hopefully enjoy that. There's a lot more material in the guide that will hopefully give you some strategies and tactics for building a program, in addition of course to receiving a copy of this PowerPoint. And I will go right there and pause and pass the baton back to Sima or LaShica for Q&A. All right. Thank you, Michael. So we have about nine minutes left for Q&A and we have quite a few questions that have come in. So I'm going to go ahead and get started. So one of the questions that we got was our donor base is about 70% baby boomers. We are wanting to attract the younger age groups. Is this a good method to do so? Is Monthly Giving attractive to the younger audience? Yes, absolutely. Definitely baby boomers are and or younger audiences are super fond. I think partly because of the low giving levels, I think a lot of baby boomers and younger donors are interested in also spreading out their gifts across a number of different organizations. And they like to get feedback and observe how their contribution makes an impact. So I think A, the low giving levels are attractive. And number two, I think this is really to highlight the importance of stewardship. They want feedback. They want to hear how their money is making an impact. They like that kind of interactivity. So I think they really are a perfect audience type for reaching out and to participate in Monthly Giving programs. Perfect. Okay. It seems like we have quite a few small organizations on here. So we got a question. It says, I work for a very small nonprofit in a rural community. We are the only domestic violence sexual assault center for our county. It's been challenging to say the least to get monthly donors. Do you have any suggestions for this scenario? So I guess we've gotten a few questions around if you're a small organization and maybe the database isn't that large. Do you have any advice? A couple of things. One, you may want to rethink a little bit around the branding or the messaging of the program or how you're presenting it. As you saw from many examples, it's not just about our Monthly Giving program, but really thinking about a way to anchor the program as part of one of your programmatic areas and really to say a gift of $15 per month over the next 12 months will allow us to do X and Y and Z to help grow our program. So I think it can be helpful just to try to really anchor the program more strongly with one of your program areas so that people really see the value that they have. Another issue, I don't know the exact particulars of how everyone has tried to market their program, but to really rethink some of your multi-channel marketing opportunities, I mean a lot of the examples that I've used here in today's webinar are really the digital channel, email, web, social media, etc. But a lot of success with monthly giving programs can also happen through events, through direct mail, through telephone campaigns, through corporate or business partnerships, and so you may want to think about expanding your scale and your scope so that you're able to reach out more broadly and not relying just on your digital presence to be able to market your program. So you may want to take a little step back. There may be a business or a community partnership that can work with you to do something. There may be a special donor, a large donor who wants to put up a match and help you build some visibility for people making monthly gifts, so really rethinking how you're presenting the offer out there, and also thinking more broadly about just different multi-channel opportunities to be able to do marketing for your program. Perfect. Okay. So we've got a couple questions about best practices. How do you know when your solicitations are getting annoying and may have a negative effect? Yes. That is a universal challenge. Goodness me. Well, I mean, that's not unique to monthly giving. I think that obviously you're looking at the first level, you're looking at response rates. So if you are, for example, creating email campaigns and you're getting a very, very few sign-up, that's a sign that something is not well adjusted in your campaign and you may need to rethink how you want to go about it. So certainly your basic response rate, your basic core response rate is going to be one of your most important elements. I mean, there can also be other indicators. Unsubscribe rates can certainly be an indicator. It can be a little bit tricky to measure that and to assess like, oh gee, the reason why people unsubscribe is they're tired of hearing from us. But I think this speaks more broadly to the need to be constantly growing your file, to growing your reach in your fundraising program. And this is certainly not unique to the monthly, to growing a monthly giving program. This is, I think, more broadly in your fundraising. I mean, you need to be constantly acquiring new names, constantly testing new techniques and new messaging. I mean, I think a healthy fundraising program, whether it's digital or non-digital, is going to need to be doing that on a constant basis. So that's a core question that speaks to really fundraising on the bigger picture and certainly applies to monthly giving as well. For sure. Okay, so I think we have about three minutes left. I'm going to ask one more question. What about creating a reward program? Is that something that could be useful? For example, for $25, somebody gets a bumper sticker, $5,000, you get a small plaque. How do you, I guess, feel in general about having some sort of rewards program? Yeah, sure. In fundraising, we typically would call those like, you know, premiums or gifts or something like that. Absolutely. I mean, I think we saw a couple, I think we saw one example from the Tempor Virus Fund in the slides where they were giving away a carabiner and then I think also the SETI Institute was giving away a DDD. I think that if you can figure out the fulfillment angle to that, but basically you have to mail things to people, I think that can actually be a pretty interesting approach. I mean, I think that, you know, I don't see it that often in monthly giving programs. And I think it certainly has to be tested just to see if it'll work. And then I think you have to, you know, just pay really close attention to your cost. I mean obviously you have to, you know, produce something, you have to mail it, you have to do the fulfillment, which is staff time. But I think, you know, because monthly donors have extremely high lifetime value, I think there's absolutely no harm in trying to introduce a premium or a gift or a reward into the mix. You could try testing two or three different rewards. Maybe you can try a digital reward or some kind of a reward that isn't too heavy to mail. But there definitely can be some concerns I think around fulfillment that you would need to address if you're going to do that. Perfect. All right. So it looks like we have about a minute left. We had some really good questions here. So Michael has generously provided his email on the slide. So if you guys have questions or your question didn't get answered today, Michael, I think it's okay, right, for everyone to email you. That is correct. I'd love to hear from people. Great. All right. So just to close out today, if you guys don't mind chatting one thing that you learned in today's webinar, it's always really nice for Michael and myself to see what you could take away from today's webinar. We also have a post-event survey. So if you guys could take a couple minutes to fill that out, your feedback really helps us dictate future content. So any feedback that you have for us is really appreciated. If you're on social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, I think we're also on LinkedIn, please feel free to give us a follow. We try to post a lot of helpful tips and tricks every day. So please give us a follow there. And then also we have a blog, blog.techsoup.org where we post articles at least two to three times a week. So please give us a follow there as well. And then if you would like to join us for one of our upcoming webinars, we have one on August 14th, How to Produce Captivating Digital Content. And then on August 21st, 27 Ways to Immediately Update Your Website. Again, we post all of our webinars on our website if you can't make it. So just make sure that you register and we can send it to you to your email. Thank you again, Michael, for today's webinar. Thank you, Lashika, for helping on the backend. And thank you to our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk. And thank you to the audience for attending. We hope to see you guys soon. Thanks, everybody.