 Hi everyone. So we'll give everybody just another minute to get logged in. Before I get started, I just want to make sure that everybody who is attending right now can hear me speaking and see my screen. You should see the title screen that says communications planning for a campaign. So if you can see what's on my screen and hear me talking if you could just put a yes into your questions box that would really help me out. I just want to make sure that you can all see and hear me. Awesome. Thank you, Ronnie. Thank you, Allison. The one time I did not check because I was like I check every time and there's never a problem. There was a problem. So I'm going to go ahead and put myself on mute and just give everybody a few more seconds to get logged in. All right, well, welcome everybody at the top of the hour and it's time to get started with our webinar today, communications planning for a campaign. This isn't specifically a third part of it but if you've attended our other spring webinars we've done spring fundraiser planning and spring fundraiser ideas. So I'm kind of thinking of this as the last installment which is where you actually get to put all of those pieces together and start thinking about communicating to your audience. My name is Linda Gerhardt and I'm the senior community engagement manager here at Mighty Cause and I'm actually coming up on my five-year anniversary here at the company and I should be a familiar face and voice if you've attended our webinars before. At Mighty Cause I'm actually in charge of most of our marketing, our content and our communications and before I came to work for Mighty Cause I actually worked in nonprofit marketing and communications. So this is a subject that is near and dear to my heart and I hope that I'll be able to bring some of the experience that I've had to give you some useful information as you start planning or start communicating about your spring campaign. Here's a quick look at today's agenda. We are going to do a Q&A session at the end of the presentation so if you have a question you want to ask or a topic you want to chat about just go ahead and type that into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel and we'll make time for it after the presentation is over. It's going to be pretty straightforward but there is a lot of meaty content to this webinar today. So before we actually talk about building a communications plan for your next campaign or your spring campaign, I really wanted to make sure that we're all on the same page about the basics of communication planning and the different components of a communications plan. So that's what we're going to go through next because we have all levels to attend our webinars. We have people who do nothing but communications and we have people who are running small nonprofits and literally doing everything themselves so I just wanted to lay the groundwork for building a communications plan. The most important thing to understand of course is what is a communications plan? A communications plan basically acts as a roadmap for marketing your campaign basically and it helps you break down how you plan to communicate about your upcoming campaign. It's one of those things that can sound kind of intimidating if you've never done it before, if you've never made a communications plan before, but if you've made a fundraising plan, this is actually not any harder than that. I would say it's a little bit easier than a fundraising plan. The purpose of a communications plan is to simply give you a path from point A to point B. You're kind of noodling out what your messaging is for your campaign, who you're going to communicate with about your campaign, how you're going to do it and what you're going to say. So I wanted to get into the specific components of a communications plan next because that's what we're really going to be talking about in this webinar. The first thing is your objective, which is basically what are you trying to get your audience to do and why are you asking them to do it. So one of these communications objectives as your goals for all of your marketing and outreach efforts for your campaign and the thing all of your communications should be grounded in. So if you're not clear on what your objective is when you're communicating with somebody, you're not going to be very good at communicating is just going to be a lot of words or a lot of images because you don't have a focus. So your objective is your goal and that's what's going to help you focus in on how you communicate with your audience. And on that note, identifying your audience as is going to be an important part of communications planning. And it's really as simple as thinking about who do you need to hear your message. Who are you trying to get involved in your campaign. And now when we say audience. I just want to clarify that I'm usually talking about groups of people, an audience group, which is, which is basically. Based on affinity or what these people have in common. So you already have some audience groups that you probably already have identified, like your board members your volunteers, recurring donors, social media followers, your staff, and so on. So basically that's what affinity is what makes these people like and how does that change how we communicate with them. So there is going to be a lot of overlap between groups, but that's totally fine we're going to talk about that and it's absolutely fine for you to have overlap. An important thing to note here is that you may have different objectives for different audiences, and that's something we're going to dive into a bit as well. And something you'll always want to keep in mind is why you're communicating with a specific audience and what the value of communicating with this audience is to your nonprofit and to your campaign. So for instance, if you're communicating to an Instagram audience of 20, and they're not really paying attention then that's not really valuable, and you'll want to maybe focus on communications channels and audiences, where you can get a little bit more bang for your buck. Next up is channels, which are basically where you'll be sharing your messages in hopes of getting it to specific audiences. So you have some basic channels that you're likely already hitting really hard in your communications at your nonprofit, such as your email lists, your social media, your website and so on. And a lot of us have channels of communication we may not think of as important when we're talking about connecting to an audience like your lobby. When you're thinking about channels of communication, you want to think about opportunities for communication as well, which could be a totally new channel that you've never tried before, or one that you've never really invested much effort into. So you really are just kind of naming different ways that you can communicate with people who are important to your nonprofit and important to the success of your campaign. So this component of a communications plan is really important, and we're going to spend a lot of time talking about why that is later, but you'll want to use your communications plan to identify key messages. There's an old and very good Ted talk by author Simon Sinek, where his entire thesis is that people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. So your key messages are really all about your why, what are you doing and most importantly, why are you doing it, and why should your audience care, and what do you want them to take away from your communications, what do you want them to know. Your key messages are a great place to start if you tend to get stuck on not knowing what to write or say if you're one of those people who's like, Oh gosh, I have my Facebook screen open and I'm about to type and I have no idea what to say. This would be a good starting point. Your key messages are the starting point of your storytelling for a campaign. And the last component is timing, which is pretty self explanatory. There's not a whole lot to that. When are you communicating with the audiences and through which channels are you communicating. If there are any important dates to know like your kickoff date, your launch date, your fundraising deadline and so on and so forth, you'll want to identify them during the planning process so that you don't get to the day before say you have a big online event and realize that you've only sent out communications to like half of the places that you wanted to communicate. So timing is important to consider as well, particularly with a campaign based communications plan for an overall nonprofit fundraising communications plan. This may not be as important, but obviously, when you're talking about a campaign where you have deadlines and you have important dates that you need to hit, timing is going to be a key piece of that. Excuse me. So now we're going to talk about how to bring all of those things together and actually do the work of creating your communications plan. So the first thing that you'll want to do before you do really anything else is identify your internal team, who is actually going to be working on communications for this campaign. So if you're big enough that you have development coordinators and social media managers, then your team might be really obvious to you and you just need to gather them in one place. But if you're small and you've got a bunch of people who wear a lot of hats, you can loop in volunteers, and you may need to check with your team to basically see who has the capacity to help with communication. So there may be some back and forth in determining who can handle what. So ideally, you'll want to outline their responsibilities and specifically what they're responsible for. And when you're at this stage, I really recommend thinking through how you're going to communicate with your comms team for this campaign, which is basically an internal communications plan. I recommend setting up a standing meeting or a quick stand-up meeting to check in with them on a regular basis and identifying how you're going to track your progress on each piece of your comms. So for instance, you may want to use a task manager like Asana, and you may even want to create a Slack channel where you can chat with your team in real time if you have a quick question that you need a quick answer to. And just as a bit of a plug, we did actually release an integration with Slack a few weeks ago. So if you are an advanced subscriber on Mighty Cause, you can actually set up a lurch through Slack that let you know that somebody is donated and will be adding more to that as the months go on. But I just wanted to quickly mention that that is now available. So to help make this process as easy as possible for you, I have put together a communications planning template, which you can download by going into the handout section of your go-to webinar panel. I actually have two versions in there. There's a PDF and there's a Word document if you are a Word user. So you can download whichever is best for you and what your office setup is like. You don't have to do that right now, but just make sure that you do it before the end of the webinar. And I'll also just include them in the follow-up email to this webinar. And that actually brings us to our next step, which is actually physically writing down your plan. Now, I could do probably an entire webinar about the benefits of writing things down and documenting your efforts. But the gist of my thoughts on it is that without writing this down and having a plan that you refer back to, you really aren't going to have any effective communications. And you're also not going to be able to track the success of your efforts and track your progress. Identify the things that work and what didn't work, like finding the bright spots. You won't be able to do that if you don't have it documented, because if you're anything like me, once a campaign is over, your mind goes a little bit blank. So you want to make sure that you're documenting your communications plan and you're also documenting your progress on that plan. So this template is really just designed as a jumping off point. You certainly can use it as your actual plan. And you can also use it as inspiration if you wanted to customize your own plan that works best for your nonprofit. But literally all of the things I talk about today are things that I want you to have written down and documented somewhere. And this template is a good place to start. So using the template or another document, you'd want to start talking about your goals for communications for this campaign. So that you have some sort of direction in your objectives and can check in after your campaign to see how you did. You basically go through this as a part of the fundraising planning process. But what I'm talking about here is communications specific goals, which work in support of your fundraising goals, but they're more focused. There are things like getting better engagement from your board of directors, doing more on Instagram if you wanted to grow your audience there and so on. And during this process, you can also define some metrics to evaluate your success at achieving those goals. So just like you would if you were sitting down to plan a fundraising campaign, since you're planning communications for a campaign, you want to set some goals for yourself. And, you know, that way you'll have direction as you set off and start communicating and you'll also be able to check in and see how you did later on. And this is also really important. I just wanted to mention because if you're thinking about, okay, what channels are really valuable to us and we want to show some love to. Or you're trying something new and you're spending a lot of effort and maybe even some money on a new channel of communication. If you don't have a goal and you're not really thinking about how you're going to measure the success of that channel of communication, then you're not going to be able to determine when you come to making your next campaign. Is this worth doing? Is this worth spending money and time on? So when you set your goals, set up metrics to evaluate that. So that way, if you're having an internal discussion or conflict about whether to do this or do that, you can actually point to your goals and say, well, this did this for us and this did not do this for us. So it's just really helpful to think about your goals and have those documented. So I wanted to dig in a little deeper on communication channels here. So you have ongoing channels at your nonprofit, which are the channels that you use on a regular basis to update your supporters, talk about your operations and reach out to the public. So for these channels, you may want to have and I actually recommend having a separate detailed schedule. The communications plan is going to be a little bit of a mess if you literally write down every single email that you plan to send. And I do recommend having a schedule so you have a guide of where you're supposed to go and what needs to be made. But you may want to have a separate schedule for those just so you keep your communications plan really focused on the big picture. And you can stay on top of what needs to go out without having to clutter up the communications plan that you have. And within those channels, you'll want to identify your audiences. So for instance, within your email channel, you'll have multiple different audiences. You'll have groups that you want to talk to specifically like recurring donors, major donors, volunteers, and so on. And you'll also want to think about channels that could present a new opportunity to communicate with a new audience. So here you'll want to include things like potential media coverage. Do you have any local news stations that have morning shows or regular shows where they might where you might be a good fit as a guest. And what I'd call proxy channels like avenues to get your message out through community partners or business sponsors. Anyway, where you're not doing the direct communication, but it is an important channel for you to reach people. And one thing that we tend to forget about in the digital age is physical advertising. So things like putting up signs, taking out a billboard, creating and distributing flyers using staff meetings and board meetings and so on. So there are things that we kind of tend to forget about and thinking about our email strategy, but it's important to consider them because they are important channels. So if you have a lot of foot traffic in your lobby, that's a really important communication channel. Even though a lot of us don't tend to think about how lobbies and marketing work together, we kind of think of a lobby as traffic control and not a marketing opportunity, but it absolutely is. So we'll chat more about this in a bit, but channels and audiences work together. So anytime you identify a channel, you should also identify an audience. They pretty much go hand in hand. And tying into that, I also wanted to drill down on audiences. So there are basically three main groups in which you'll have audiences. The first group is stakeholders. And you should know who your stakeholders are immediately when I say that to you. Your stakeholders are the people who are very invested in your nonprofit and the success of your campaign. So your board members, your staff, your volunteers, your sponsors and so on. Your stakeholders are going to require probably the highest level of care with communications. And next is your donor groups, which is where you split your donor base into groups based on how they give and what makes them alike. So for instance, your major gift donors are a group of donors. You're recurring or sustaining donors are an important group of donors. One time donors, donors who gave to like your Giving Tuesday campaign or another specific campaign. These are groups that you'll want to talk to specifically. So you don't need to break down your donor base into a million different groups and possibilities. Just the ones that you want to specifically tailor a message to. And then you also have casual supporters who are casually interested in your nonprofit and not really invested in your nonprofit in any major way. So that most of the time includes your social media followers, people who visit your website, people who walk into your lobby, your general community. And again, you're not naming every single potential group that your nonprofit touches in your community. Just the ones that you want to reach out to about your campaign through a communications channel. Okay, so basically everything that we're talking about here is called multi-channel marketing, which is just integrating multiple channels of communication to market your campaign to different audiences. So the benefit of this approach is that you'll increase your reach when you appeal to different audiences and use different channels, right? So if you use one channel only, if you only use email marketing, you're only going to reach people who are on your email list. But if you use email plus social media, plus media coverage, plus a flyer distributing flyers in community, plus a billboard, you're going to reach so many more people in your community about your campaign. It's really just a numbers game. It's casting a wider net. And it'll also help you find new donors who aren't already in your circle. And multi-channel marketing is kind of a buzzword. It sounds kind of complicated, but most of you are already doing it. So this isn't an approach that you're adding with the communications plan. You're really just refining it because this is what all of you are already doing in your regular fundraising practices. So stepping away from audiences and channels, I want to dive into key messages because that is what's going to help you focus in how you communicate and what you say. So if you're wondering exactly what to put in a post or an email, getting a little bit of writer's block, not really sure how to communicate with your audience, this is the process for finding a message that resonates. First is your overall nonprofit messaging. What you're going to do here is define two to three top level messages about your nonprofit in 2021, which is the starting point of any communication with your supporters. So what you're going to do here is zoom out and you're going to think big picture. What is your mission? What's your vision? What are the values that are driving your nonprofit and driving your work? What's your why? Why are you doing this? And these are basically going to be the things you touch over and over again in your communications. They're threads that are going to run through every email, every social media post, every media interview, just the high level messages about who you are, what you do, and why you do it. So just to show you what that looks like, I've got three non key nonprofit messages for a fake food pantry that I created just for the purposes of this webinar. So first we have a values based message. The first two are actually values based. We believe that people have a right to be free from hunger and that food is a human right. So that is a core message about my nonprofit. Number two is communities have a responsibility to care for their own and our food pantry is a way to care for people in our community. So again, that's a value and that's also a vision. That's why we do what we do because we believe that we have this responsibility. That's what our nonprofit is all about. And the number three is a more timely message about our situation in 2021, which is the pandemic has hit the most underserved people in our community, the hardest, and we are committed to helping them make it through. So we are aiming to be of service to the people who really need it in our community. So those are things that are going to run through all of my emails and all of my communications about my campaign that's for this food pantry. And when you've got your key messages, you're going to define your key campaign messages, which are what you're doing, why you're doing it and what you hope to achieve with this campaign. And the way I usually envision this in my head, I don't know if this is helpful to anyone else, but it's kind of like a sieve or a sifter you're taking your high level messages, and you're using these campaign messages to sift them. And what you're left with is a much more focused message that has all of the extra stuff taken out and it has just the stuff that made it through the filter. So you'll want to keep these fairly broad as well, but you're talking about your campaign. So zoom out and really think about your big picture goals for this campaign. So for instance, for my food pantry our key campaign messages are one we're raising $10,000 so we can expand our pantries physical space and feed even more people in our community. So that is an important why not only is that our goal, but that is a why that's why we're doing this. Number two is COVID-19 and the recession have increased the need for services in the community, and we must grow to meet that need. So that is something of a necessity that's something that we need to do and it's another big why. And number three is we want to provide 100,000 meals by the end of 2021. And this campaign will set us up to do that. So we have a goal and a larger scale thing that we're trying to do and these messages are things that we're going to take our top level nonprofit messages and filter through these messages and those are going to be in all of our communications and obvious in all of our channels. So you're just basically refining your, your messages. And this makes it for me really easy to put together an email put together a blog post to talk about something when you really know what the core things that you need to discuss are, and you see everything through the lens of these key messages. So that's really what you're trying to do is just deliver a cohesive consistent message that resonates with people where there's some degree of repetition because in marketing and communications, repetition is really key. The more people hear something and the more they, you know, see it out in the in the messaging, the more it sinks in. So it's really important that these are somewhat repetitive. I'm not going to say the same sentences over and over again, but that these messages are, you know, grounding every single thing that you send out and everything you do to promote your campaign. So you'll also want to put together some talking points where you can get very, very specific and add things like facts and figures that support your messages and your campaign and also make a case for your org's importance and effectiveness. I also want to include some basic facts and information about your organ campaign, because talking points should also function in that if you need to give these to a board member, because they're going on the news and they're going to talk to an audience about your campaign, they should be able to just take one page with them and have pretty much what they need to deliver your message effectively. So yeah, this your talking points is where you can really, really get more specific. You can draw out some, some statistics and numbers. Those are really not helpful as key messages, but definitely just some sort of, you know, general talking points about your campaign, what you're doing and who your organization is that will translate, you know, to, you know, help people talk to the press and help you create your communications. And so when you're getting started, you'll want to make sure that you plan out what content you're going to need to support your communications about your campaign. So for instance, you might need a press release, a campaign video that you can share on multiple channels of video is a very effective piece of content that you can get a lot of use out of. You can also have a new graphic, a new landing page on your website that talks about your campaign and a spot on your homepage that people know about your campaign if they just happen to come to your website. And then also traditional marketing collateral like signs, flyers and so on. Some organizations may not do those or have the budget for those, but don't forget to consider them because they still can be distributed. People can be really powerful at getting your message out to people who aren't already in your circle at your nonprofit. So just think about what pieces you'll need and what formats you'll need them in. That's especially important for things like graphics and video. You want to think about the format that you need to have them in and then just put together a plan to execute this. These content needs how to put these things together and get them all together so that you have everything set up so that you can start communicating. Okay, so now we're actually going to take all of this and talk about implementing and executing all of this planning that you've just done. So first off, you want to build your schedules for your various communication channels and the associated tasks and who is responsible for them. So the communications plan is really the ground level the big picture of who you're going to communicate what you're going to say to them and why you're doing all of this in the first place, and your schedules are kind of the next floor up. These are pretty detailed you want to get into like what specific emails you want to send out who your media contacts are and who's going to contact them, and so on and so forth. So you can use a task manager there's a lot available. And you can also just gather everything together in a Google sheet with different tabs it really doesn't need to be fancy, but you'll just want to make sure that you're divvying up the specific tasks, and that you need to complete and then just start doing them. So it has a note campaigns that are campaigns are inherently time sensitive. So just make sure that you're also assigning deadlines to your tasks. So you can have a list of emails you want to send but if you don't know when you're supposed to be sending them you may not be able to stay on top of that schedule. So deadlines are really helpful when you're thinking about building these schedule schedules out so that you know what's going out when and when it's due. And the next step is both the most simple and hardest step. You're going to start drafting and building all of your communications, all of your content, putting it all together, and then scheduling and communicating with your audiences to promote your campaign. So there's a lot that goes into this this is just one slide because there's not a whole lot to say but this is the actual work of taking the planning that you've done and making social media posts scheduling those in in Facebook or Hootsuite or whatever you happen to use drafting your emails and having the team test them out to check for the links working and typos getting a blog post ready for your your nonprofits blog and so on and so forth making that first contact with media. Those are the things that you're going to start doing when you start wanting to get this message out. And also this is when you'll start doing your outreach this is when you'll start talking to people through your various channels. So this is the hardest step really is to sort of take all of this planning and build it into your content and start communicating. But that's basically the next step that's that's the end of the road for your communications more or less. So yeah you're just going to start building them and then you're going to execute them according according to the schedules you have and the tasks you have and everything that you've planned out. And hopefully this should be a lot easier when you've done all of this planning I personally as a communications plan planning person who I have a lot of stuff going at all times multiple balls in the air. So when I've done that planning I can really just look at a list, bang it out and then send it away and cross it off my list so that planning period is really key. And then when you actually start building the things they fall into place a lot easier because you did that initial planning. So one thing I thought would be fun was to actually give a few examples of what this stuff actually looks like to your audience and how different people come to your nonprofit to donate and why this. Why we're doing all this why we're having this conversation. So first step is board member Barry. He's a local business owner who sits on your board of directors and Barry is a super busy guy so if you send him an email odds are he's not going to get it and he absolutely does not have time for social media. He's the kind of guy who does not get information if it is not delivered to him in person or by phone. So he's going to find out about your campaign in a board meeting when you give a presentation and explain the upcoming campaign and your executive director is also going to call him and talk to him about the campaign. So since he's a key stakeholder he's going to get a much bigger and a much more personal ask, and you're not just going to send Barry a blast email out and hope that he donates he's a key stakeholder he's an important guy. Your executive director or your development staff, they're going to call him on the phone, they're going to talk to him they're going to have a conversation, and they're going to work with him to coordinate a gift so he's a great example of a key stakeholder. And you have these paths of communications that are not email blast they're not social media because very doesn't care Barry's a busy guy, and he's very entrenched in your nonprofit so you're going to use different channels of communication to get in touch with Barry and work with him to get his donation for this campaign. So next up we've got volunteer Vicki. Now she is a rock star volunteer she goes a million miles a minute and is constantly helping you out at your nonprofit. She's at your physical location helping you out at least once a week. She knows your staff by name and she's always coming to your location to help out. So she's very much online and she's always connecting with your other volunteers on social media. She's sort of the queen bee of volunteers she knows all of the other volunteers, and they all know each other online. And here's how she's going to find out about your campaign. So first she comes to your location a lot so she's going to see the flyers that you've posted in your lobby. And then when she comes by to do her normal volunteer stuff. And she's going to also talk to your staff about it because that's what she spends a lot of time doing is chatting with your staff. And hopefully you've talked to your staff about it at a staff meeting or have sent out some sort of internal communications with your staff, so that they're able to tell her about the campaign, even your operations level staff, not just your development staff. So we have overlap between volunteers and donors, and Vicki actually has a recurring donation setup which is pretty typical for volunteers. And she's going to make a donation to your campaign on top of what she already gives every month. And since she's also and she's also going to post about your campaign on social media, since she's on Instagram all the time she was the first one who saw your Instagram post, and she was the first one to like and comment on your post. She's going to blast us out to her very large social media network and encourage them to give as well. So this is a great example of how somebody who's very involved in your nonprofit she's probably not going to be looking at your email blasts because she is so very much in the trenches at your nonprofit. So that's the importance of internal communications making that making sure that everybody who has contact with the public at your nonprofit is able to talk to them about your campaign. And physical flyers so somebody like Vicki probably isn't going to go to your website and check what you've got going on because she's there every day. She's going to see flyers and go oh there's a thing happening. What's that about and she's also just going to talk to people. And since she's online she's going to see your social media posts but that's not the primary way that she's going to know about your upcoming campaign. So she's a really great example of multi channel marketing and why it's important because she has multiple channels through which she can hear about it and get excited about your upcoming campaign. Next we have Norma Norma is not a donor of yours and she doesn't really know a whole lot about your nonprofit at this point. But Norma loves watching the morning news show on a local TV station while she's drinking her coffee in the morning, and she saw a segment about your campaign. And then she saw a piece about it in your local newspaper read the article and thought huh that's interesting. So Norma is very charitable and gives to plenty of causes, but she's a very discerning donor she wants to make sure that she's giving her money to worthy causes. So before she gives she goes to your website to learn more about your nonprofit see see what you do see what you're all about read more about your campaign, because she really wants to research who you are and what you're doing before she gives. And Norma ended up making her first donation to your nonprofit on the landing page on your nonprofits website using the widget that you installed on that page. So the interesting thing with Norma Norma is that you had no prior relationship with her she's not on your email list, but you reached her through various channels you reached her through through three different channels. And you also had the infrastructure set up on your website to greet people like Norma if they Google to find out more about your campaign, they you are ready to collect their donation and give them the information that they needed. So this is a great example of how those channels that seem a little bit bigger than what we want to do like email lists. Like, you know, when we want to talk on talk to the news when we talk to the media when we call our media contacts and say hey this is what we what we've got going on can you do an article about it or send out a press release. This is how that can work out for you in reaching new donors. So this is another great example of why multi channel marketing is so important for campaign marketing. And finally we have casual Carl now Carl is on your email list but neither of you actually know how he got there. He's never donated he's never used your services. So Carl's relationship to your nonprofit is a little bit of a mystery I think we all have those people on our email lists where we're like I don't really know who you are, and I'm not sure how you came to us. Anyway, Carl gets an email from you on your phone on his phone he gets one of your email blasts and he goes, I don't know who this is. So I'm just going to open it and see what this is, and I'm probably going to unsubscribe. But then he remembers he was at a community event before the pandemic started, and he signed up for your email list there in person. So your email keeps the ask pretty small since you don't actually know who Carl is or what he has to do with your nonprofit. And you asked him for $20 you made your case for why your nonprofit is important, and gave him a small ask you asked for $20 donation so Carl. Now that he understands why you're he's getting your emails, read your email and he has 20 bucks he wants to be philanthropic so he gives you a $20 donation to your campaign. So all of these examples were designed to showcase why multi channel marketing is so important, and how one donor can be ushered through multiple different channels before they end up making a donation. Sometimes with donors it's a very clear path from ask to donate. And sometimes it's the cumulative effort, or the cumulative effect of multiple efforts through multiple different channels. So this is ultimately why it's really important to think through your comms very carefully and get a plan in place. And think through your different channels your different audiences and different opportunities that you have to communicate about your campaign, and really have a plan to communicate that gives multiple that gives you the opportunity for multiple different touches since most people don't actually just come to your nonprofit through one channel they come through several. So these examples were really just meant to showcase how different people can end up, you know, from point a which is not making a donation to donating to your campaign point B. And that's where communications plan becomes very, very important. All right, so we are in the home stretch and so before we move on to the Q&A. I just wanted to quickly go through some best practices for communications. So channels and audiences go together I was talking about this a little bit earlier. Anytime you have a channel you need to also have an audience. So they go hand in hand they can't exist independently they're very intertwined. So this is important because if you have a hard time identifying an audience that goes with a channel. That's probably not a worthwhile channel that's not where you want to spend a lot of your effort and time. So you can try new channels and try new things to get your message out to more people, but you just want to be really thoughtful about who is the potential audience in that channel like who will you potentially be reaching and make sure that it's worth the effort make sure that it's potentially valuable to your nonprofit and helps your campaign be successful. So for instance, you may find an opportunity for a communication in a newspaper that's one town over, but those people don't live in your community. So that's maybe not a great use of your effort, or maybe you don't really use your Twitter account that much. You only tweet out occasionally and you never really get people interacting with you much. And you're not even really sure who your followers are you don't can't really identify any people who you know you understand what their relationship to your nonprofit is. So that means that maybe you don't want to spend as much time and effort on Twitter if you don't really understand who that audience is. So that's just to say that anytime there's a channel there's an audience and if there's not a channel or there's not an audience, then it's not a meaningful route for your communications about your campaign. So you'll want to tailor your communications we've talked about this a lot in most of our webinars at Mighty Cause we usually call this segmentation. So basically, if you send the same message out through every channel, it doesn't really make sense to do that because you're trying to reach different audiences using different channels to try to get to them. So if you're just kind of sending the same message out here the same message out there, if you're sending board member Barry and casual Carl the same message, that's not going to be effective for either of them. So you really want to make sure that you're tailoring your communications to who the person receiving it is, and the channel through which they are receiving it. And so that's a really simple reason why whatever simple reason why we need to do that is that people respond more positively to communications that sees them that knows who they are and they know what your relation, the relationship is with the nonprofit they take their their relationship with you into account. So it's basically the difference between if you get an email from a store that you frequent and it's like hey, last time you were here you purchased these things. We thought these things might be of interest to you as well and you look at what they suggested and that's absolutely right you are interested in those things versus hey you should come shop at our store. And no, no suggestion, no call to action just sort of, you should do this because we're marketing to you. That's not great marketing so you want to make sure that you're making your communications as personal as they can be. And I just want to point out here that when you're tailoring messages, you're really not starting from scratch with each one you've got your communications plan, you've got your key messages, and you've got your different audiences. For instance with email what that would involve is taking the same basic email, and just slightly changing it for each different audience, so that you know your volunteers get a thank you and acknowledgement that they volunteer for your organization, along with their And so that the people who are like the casual carls of the world who you don't really understand who they are, they get a much smaller approachable ask. And that, you know, you're just sort of slightly changing up the messaging, but you're not changing the overall thing you're not reinventing the wheel every single time you go to tailor a message. So that's really all we're talking about is making sure that you are mindful of who your audience is when you're sending out a communication, and really just trying to make it tailored to who that person is, and who those audience members are, and what's most likely to be resonant, what's most likely to resonate with them. So, one thing that we didn't really talk too much about is storytelling. So basically, part when you're doing what you're sending out is, you're telling stories about who your nonprofit is. That's all about that's what campaign marketing is all about so all of your emails your social media posts your landing pages, they should tell a story you're telling an actual story. So use your key messages that will help you hone in on what kind of story you're trying to tell is one of those situations where you kind of have the end result. First, and then you build backward. And one thing that's really helpful is an impact story that can be mean multiple different things that can mean a story from somebody who's used your services. A staff member of volunteer or just a story about something that happened at your nonprofit. Those are really helpful at telling the story of what your nonprofit does, and why you're important why your audience should care. And when we're talking about stories, we are talking about the key elements of a story so the same story flow that would apply. If you were writing a short story apply here as well so you'll have characters. Who are we talking about who is the story about what who is involved, you'll have expedition exposition what is the context, what is happening, like why. Okay, we have the characters but what what's going on why what what's happening. And then you have a conflict or a rising action which is basically what is driving the story. So in a, in a nonprofit context, it's usually some sort of challenge that your organization has to meet it could be a specific challenge that a staff member had to meet or a volunteer had to meet, but there's got to be some sort of conflict, or a decision point where you had to make a choice as a nonprofit, or as a person who was involved with your nonprofit. It's something that you needed to resolve and find a solution to. And the climax is when you sort of find out who what the resolution is, what's, what's the path forward. And then you're going to resolve it by the end of the story and then you have your CTA so you can actually do this in a Twitter, Twitter post, you can do this in a social media post this can be a very short email. But these are the things you want to think about when you're telling a story. So these are kind of the details that will fill in the blanks from your key messages so your key messages are the ground level and then you're building up with these other elements so don't forget about storytelling. Make sure that you're incorporating storytelling. It does not have to be war and peace it can be a short story that illustrates the impact of your work, but storytelling is really key on all channels to get people emotionally involved in your campaign. So to get personal outreach that's something that we can really forget about in the age of mass emails and social media. So we kind of miss out on personal outreach and the sad thing about that is that personal outreach tends to give us the highest returns on our effort. So we're making connections with our donors and people in the community. So we spent, we spend not enough time on it because we're so worried about digital communications, but personal outreach should be part of your communications plan as well. As we saw with board member Barry, he needs a phone call from somebody at your organization to make his donation. So you want to include an outreach plan in your, your communications planning when you're making your schedules. So that includes phone calls personalized emails from actual people at your nonprofit. And if you're really small volunteers can help with this this is something easy that they can do at home. Just give them a list of people to contact the information they need to contact them. You can write a script or you can hand them your talking points or give them both and just let them help you. They can do that work for you. That's not something that you necessarily need to do yourselves at your nonprofit. You can certainly have volunteers do it. And the personal touch really, really does matter. It allows you to have conversations you can get important pieces of feedback. It matters to people it makes them feel seen it makes them feel acknowledged by your nonprofit so getting a phone call from somebody at a nonprofit organization saying hey, we're doing this really great campaign and you're always such a great donor for us. We would love it if you could help us out and maybe tell your friends on social media that goes a lot longer that goes a much further distance than an email blast. Don't forget about personal outreach make sure that that is incorporated into your communications plan. And make thank you a part of your plan you want to build gratitude in. So, you should include follow up plans with your donors because once they donate. That's not the end of the line obviously you need to thank them every donation is a starting point. A personal thank yous work best so somebody giving the call sending them an email, but you'll also want to do some, you know, more formalized follow up like sending out an email with your results or posting a blog on your website that talks about all that you were able to do with this campaign, and so on and so forth so you're going to do a mix of personalized thank you for where you think it's most important. And then all you may need to sort of focus on the groups of donors who are really key for you and sort of let the smaller donors get the mass communications. And then also having you know sort of sort of formalized thank yous that go out to everybody. And one thing that's really key here is paying attention to those new donors. Make sure that you're welcoming them to your nonprofit that you're making them feel like they're part of a really cool club. You can pack it or a welcome series of emails, and you basically just want to start building the relationship find out who they are. Tell them more about who you are and use the opportunity to cultivate a deep and lasting relationship with these new donors. And that is it for the presentation. I wanted to leave some time for questions it looks like we've got just about just over 10 minutes so if you have a question, just go ahead and pop that into the questions box of your go to webinar panel. There's a comment from Angela about the message that seems conflicting to raise 10k to expand a pantry and provide 100,000 meals. I think as a donor. I would think that the 10k will cover both of these goals. Left thinking if you are not asking for enough money. So basically these are two completely different goals so the 10k is our campaign goal that is what we want to do in this campaign and the 100,000 meals is a larger goal at our nonprofit so that is something that we are looking to do this year. And this will put set us on the path and enable us to do that because we'll have the larger facilities that allow us to feed more people so those things work together. And these are not literal emails that I'm sending people, I'm wrapping that into a larger communication so I'm putting that in an email that has those two things there that is not the main point. So, basically yeah those are two different things they're not the same message they are key messages about what we're trying to do. And certainly if you're a nonprofit you can absolutely customize your message to be whatever you want. The basic point is that you want to zoom out and think big picture, you don't want to get to detailed with your key messages you want to zoom out and think about what you're doing and why you're doing it, the why is really important here. So your key messages might be different at your nonprofit. And that's absolutely fine but those were just examples of what your key messages could be. It looks like there's no other questions at this point I'll give everybody just another minute if you have any questions that you want to ask or any topics that you want to you want to talk about. It's going to give everybody another opportunity and Angela said thank you so thanks Angela thanks good feedback and definitely it's something to think about as you're crafting your your campaign and crafting your messages is making sure that you're clear and consistent, maybe those weren't as consistent as they could have been and that's a good lesson for everybody on the webinar is that you want to make sure that the totality of what you're saying makes sense together. All right, so let's see it doesn't look like we have anybody else who wants to ask a question. So I will go ahead and email everybody the communications worksheet if you haven't already downloaded that. Thank you guys so much for your time today I really appreciate it. And if you have any other questions that you want to chat with me about in private my email is Linda at mighty cause calm I'm always happy to chat with you. But thank you guys so much for your time and have a great rest of your day.