 Everybody, thanks for joining us today. Today, our webinar topic is, got it, the fundraising habits that will set you apart. Now, that's what I want to say. You want to be set apart this Giving Tuesday. Today, we're going to be learning how to take actionable steps and strategies to participate and excel your Giving Tuesday. My name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer. In the next slide, I'm going to show you how you can engage today. Many of you have already attended our webinars so you know how to turn on that CC button. But if you need the close caption, just type on the CC button. I know there'll be lots of questions, so we would love if you would type them in the Q&A. Often, you still type in the chat, which is totally fine. We'll be able to grab those from the chat. We're going to record this. You're going to get the slides and the video, like always, within 48 hours. So I want to talk about something really, really interesting. I don't know, in this next slide, I don't know if any of you are members or if you have heard of Quad. Quad is something new here at TechSoup. It is an awesome platform. It's the way you can collaborate with other organizations, often within your same industry, and get this membership is for 10 people in your organization. So that means 10 people can take the TechSoup courses and so much more. So I'm going to put a link as we go on about Quad in there, and you can check that out a little later. And of course, the link will be on the slides when you get ready to watch the video repay for those of you watching on the replay. Make sure you click on that link. I'm going to move all the way to turn it over to our two partners. I want to say they're our favorite, but you'll hear more about them in just a moment. Uh-oh, I did. I should have said that. Next up, I'm going to turn this over to you. You guys have a great webinar. Thank you. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Stand Out This Giving Tuesday. Fundraising Habits that will set you apart. So I'm really, really, extraordinarily excited to be a part of this webinar. One is I personally adore Donor Perfect. I love their mission. I love interacting with everyone at Donor Perfect. I love their customers. I'm going to tell you a little bit more about how much Consti Contact loves Donor Perfect a little bit later, but I'm going to be quiet for a second and have Julia explain her role in her background. Hey, how's it going? My name is Julia Gackenbach. I'm so excited to be here, to be presenting with Consti Contact. I work at Donor Perfect as the communications manager. Prior to working with Donor Perfect though, I was in nonprofits for 10 years. So I was a development director. I was a relationship manager. I was somebody's assistant at a nonprofit. So the whole gamut. So whoever you are, we totally are aligned with the things that you're going through in your nonprofit and we're excited to give some practical insight to how to plan and execute Giving Tuesday this year. Matt, how about you? Matthew Montoya, senior channel, marketing and enablement manager. That long, silly title just means that I teach Consti Contact and have taught Consti Contact for 12 years now. Last week was my 12th year anniversary. I've taught over 14,000 small businesses and nonprofits out of better leveraged digital marketing to help them achieve the results that they want, get to their goals. My background, so proceeding my time at Consti Contact, I not as long as Julia did, but I was at a nonprofit for four years and we were a small nonprofit, two people. So while my title was membership coordinator, I basically had to do everything the executive director didn't. And so there's gonna be some pieces where I believe both of us are gonna share things that we did that we're gonna teach you today, but there are some things that we didn't do that I wish we had. So hopefully we'll be able to impart some of that personal knowledge to you, but let's talk about today's agenda. So we're gonna be talking all about goals and why we need to set goals. I think that that's somewhat inherent in the nonprofit space, but there's definitely some pieces of it I want you to think about. We want you to think about, we're gonna talk about segmentation and why we'd wanna segment our donors, our constituents. We wanna make sure that we're breaking large lists apart and trying to target as much as possible. Be sharing best practices around building email. That's obviously gonna be my part. And then Julie is gonna be talking about like, how do you actually ask for the donation? I personally asked her to add this content in because I got to hear her on a podcast talk about this. And I was like, that is the best nonprofit content I've ever heard. Talk about stuff I wish I knew back when I was a nonprofit. We'll be talking about when you review your progress. So if you're setting goals, you definitely a big part of that is reviewing. Well, I hope we achieved our goals. We'll talk about how donor perfect and constant contact interact with each other. And there's quite a bit of synchronization that happens in constant contact and donor perfect. And we'll take your questions. So speaking of questions, I've got some folks behind the scenes that'll be answering your questions, the best of their ability, but we will open the floor. We'll come back and open the floor to take some of your questions as long as time allows. So Julie, why don't you talk a little bit about, we talked about the agenda. Let's break this up even further into some more phase oriented content here. Sure, great. So we're excited to tackle a lot of things Matt alluded to the fact that many nonprofit employees wear multiple hats. Matt and I included we wore multiple hats when we worked at nonprofits. So we wanted to kind of break this down into some bite-sized pieces to three phases on how you can develop your Giving Tuesday content. So phase one is reviewing and goal setting. This is where you'll go through data prep, goal setting and analyzing what happened last year. Phase two is segmenting and writing. This is email marketing, asking, design. And phase three is executing and stewarding. And now that's reporting, goal updates and thank yous. I wanna know that there are not dates on this. It's not two months out, one month out, two weeks out because there are some nonprofits that plan for Giving Tuesday for six months. And there are some nonprofits like my nonprofit the first year I was there. We didn't even know about Giving Tuesday and two days before. And so our plan was to post something on social media and that was it. So there's no big expectation on you to do things by a certain time. This is just the phases in which you would do it depending on your timeline. So let's jump right into phase one. We're going to start here. And before diving in, maybe Matt could you add some context to what's the point of having a goal and why is that important? Sometimes people can skip straight to, I don't know, we just need to get this done but why should there be a specific goal? I have seen that done. Exactly, you phrased it perfectly. They just jump into the action, right? Maybe putting some stuff last minute on social media. They jump into the action without actually setting goals. And the way that I like to tee this up is with an analogy around taking a trip. So let's take a trip together. We are all going to go from constant contacts, headquarters in Boston down to Philadelphia, the Philadelphia area where our friends at Donor Perfect work and live. And if I set the goal to take that trip that we're all going to be taken together, how do I know I achieved my goal? When I get to Philadelphia, right? If you don't set a goal to begin with how do you know, how do you measure the results? It's very important to sit back and think through, okay, what are we trying to accomplish? Now that does a couple of things. One, it helps you visualize and plan out the steps you're going to take to get to that goal. But as I'll talk about a little bit later, there are times where you'll need to pivot. You'll need to move. Things aren't going towards your plan and you need to be ready to take action to change course. If suddenly I find myself in Albany, okay, I need to change course. Things haven't gone the direction that I want. So let's first talk about fundraising goal setting, Julia. Sure, yeah. So we're going to look at fundraising goal setting and then we'll look at marketing goal setting. We'll get a little broad with what you do for as a fundraiser in general and then we'll get more specific about what you do with digital marketing and using constant contact and things like that. So first we'll talk about reviewing your data. This is something that some nonprofits love and some nonprofits hate. I was one of the people that loved looking back at my data because I liked to see what kind of growth there was. But I know sometimes that can be tedious. As a development director, I actually was a donor perfect user and so I was able to review my data really easily because donor perfect has all these great reports which we'll get into a little bit later but reviewing your data from previous campaigns helps you show a baseline of, okay, we've accomplished this before and we could have this type of growth if we wanted to. So being able to have that baseline is really important. And then you also want to really evaluate which things were successful in the past. For example, at my organization, a shareable social media post was really helpful for Giving Tuesday because we had a lot of donors that followed us but maybe your organization is a different organization that has students following it instead of donors and a shareable social media post isn't going to make people give. So that wouldn't work for you. So just evaluating which things would work for your group as opposed to another group is really important. Next, we'll look at reviewing our budget. You wanna review campaign costs. This one is a little bit of a doozy but looking at if you're paying for paid social media, advertising or if you're paying for mailers, things like that, you want to include that in setting your goal because those costs have to be covered in one way or another. Also, you wanna review your budget requirements and your annual goals. This is really how I set up my Giving Tuesday because by that time, I knew if I was going to really hit my budgeting goals for the year or if I was falling really short. For example, one year, we were falling really, really, really short. And so our goal was to get people to give like $5,000 on Giving Tuesday individually. So we wanted to get 15 individual donors to give $5,000. But the next year, we were way ahead in our annual fundraising goals. And so we decided instead of getting big gifts, we were going to get really small gifts. We asked for $2 from every donor because we didn't need a huge budget but it was a great way to get new donors, really low threshold and got them to be part of our Giving Tuesday without such a high giving threshold. So make sure you check your annual goals, check your budget requirements to see if you need to raise a huge amount of money or if you can focus on some other aspect like getting new givers or upgrading your current givers. And then lastly, you wanna determine how your Giving Tuesday funds will be used. For example, if you have a specific goal, people may resonate more with that than a general goal. So if you say, okay, with whatever we make on Giving Tuesday, we're going to build a home period then people could see that what they're giving is towards something specific and direct. And maybe they would be more interested in participating. Next we'll talk about determining your need. So is there a program or aspect of your mission that could use some more support? Is there something happening in your community that your team feels strongly about? And is there an exciting opportunity coming up where you can expand your mission? Having these questions helps you to see, okay, do I need a specific ask like building a house in order for people to get involved or are we looking at something more general? And knowing that helps you set your goal. And then lastly, we're gonna talk about setting the stage. So it's very important to prep your data, make sure your addresses are correct and other key donor information. In Donor Perfect, we have something called DP address updater and it makes sure that the addresses that you're sending all of your mailings to are accurate addresses. So you're not spending money, not sending letters to people who don't live there anymore or sending people who are on a do not mail list, things like that. You have the most accurate information about your addresses and your donors. You also wanna make sure to assign the right team members, make sure that people are, they know what ball is in their court. If somebody is in charge of posting on social media every day, they should know that they're in charge of that. So be sure to communicate that with your team. And then we wanna consider tools and integrations. For example, at my nonprofit, we used Donor Perfect, which integrated with Constant Contact. So we made sure to evaluate our Constant Contact tool and set up all of our emails beforehand, which I know we'll get into a little bit later, but being sure that you know what your tools and integrations are capable of. And then lastly, developing a communication plan. So you're not shooting from the hip like we were, with just posting something the day before because we figured out it was giving Tuesday. Now, these are all really big picture fundraising habits. So Matt, would you wanna get a little more specific about using email marketing and marketing in general for goal setting? Absolutely. So the first thing I wanna jump into is making sure you take time to take that look back. So Julia talked a little bit about that in her part just now. But in my experience, this may not be all of you, but my experience in talking and teaching nonprofits is that many just jump forward without actually taking a look at, well, do we need to pivot? Before we even think about Q4 Giving Tuesday, do we need to think about what we've done over the last year or beyond or even last Giving Tuesday, right? And so what we encourage you to do is review your online marketing efforts. There are questions you need to ask yourself, ideally before you even start plotting out what you're gonna do this fall. So one thing you wanna do is make sure has your marketing been consistent. So one thing I notice a lot of nonprofits do, not all of you, but a lot of nonprofits do is they do staggered sending. All of a sudden Q4, there's a bunch of emails and then they take a long break and the emails don't start flowing back out until March or something like that. There's a gala or something and the emails start going out. You wanna make sure that when it comes to marketing that you are regularly interacting and that's not just email, that's social media, because I can tell you I have gone to many a nonprofit social media sites primarily Facebook and it's Tumbleweeds. Last post was June 12th. That's not going to be consistent enough to try to get you to goal. So you definitely wanna be evaluating have we been consistent over the last year? What can we do to start to increase what we're doing and do it regularly? Also you wanna make sure that are all my marketing channels the various ways that I'm marketing out are any of them more effective than the others? Okay, so another thing I see a lot of nonprofits do is try to be everywhere all the time which is somewhat impossible in some nonprofit models. When I come back to my nonprofit model I told you that we were a staff of two. The idea of marketing across every social media platform is not only somewhat exhausting, sure there are tools that can enable you to do multiple marketing efforts on a variety of social media channels but the bigger question is are they effective? If we're spending a lot of time and I'm throwing a kind of wild hypothetical at you I doubt many of you are actually using Pinterest for marketing your nonprofit but let's just use that as an example, right? If you're not seeing results if you're not seeing engagement if you're not seeing shares and comments there then maybe that's not the optimal place you wanna be. So maybe taking a look at where you're winning and where you're not. Where are you seeing regular engagement on social media? Where are you seeing regular interaction with your website, your blog and your email and focusing your time and attention there making sure that you're focused on the things that have produced results over the last year or whatever timeframe you wanna break your review out to. And then you also want to take a look at well do I need to update additional marketing tools to achieve my goals? So what that means is taking kind of an inventory of what you got out, what you have out there and saying, okay, this need to be freshened up this need to be buttoned up and that's gonna be especially important as we start to think about three areas that most nonprofits are gonna be focused on social media, email and their website. So let's break each of these three down in terms of what we need to review. Firstly, with social, you wanna think of social as kind of rented land for engagement, awareness. The reason why I say rented land is that you probably know on social media you don't actually own the contacts that you're communicating with. They own your contacts. Now, constant contact love social media. We have social media tools in constant contact. I'm not saying at all abandon social media. You just need to understand that you are at the behest of their rules and their algorithms and that at any time things can change and we probably all witnessed them change, right? And you also wanna make sure that you're focused on the right thing. So focus if you can on that channel that's performing for you. Now, if you have multiple channels and you're seeing regular results and what I mean by that is regular comments, regular likes, regular shares, definitely wanna see that kind of engagement. I'll give you another example. So at my nonprofit, we used to post primarily to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter at that time was what we were doing was basically not performing at all for us. We weren't seeing people do anything with our Twitter handle in our Twitter account. I knew then when I know now we would have just abandoned. It just was not a place I should have been paying attention. You also want to make sure and this is actually really critical that you're engaging consistently. If you're going to be on a social media channel be there, be there. Listen, when people are commenting you wanna keep that conversation going. When people are sharing, you wanna make sure that you're aware of that. And certainly if anybody has anything negative to say obviously wanna be there as well. And you also wanna make sure that you're driving people to other locations regularly on social media, driving them to your website, driving them to your donation page, driving them to your mission page, driving them to sign up for your newsletter. We wanna make sure we're regularly encouraging people to connect to us in other places because again, you don't own those contacts on social media. Now some questions you should ask yourselves are are the right people engaging with them? And what does that mean? Just because, hey, I got somebody to comment on my Facebook post. Well, are you attracting the right audience? Make sure you're monitoring who it is that is interacting with you. Am I attracting potential donors, volunteers, other people that are going to be affected by my mission? Am I pointing people back to my website to all those locations? Wanna make sure that I'm doing that regularly. And is one social media channel performing better than the others? Am I just spinning my wheels? Wanna make sure that we're thinking that through. Now, when it comes to email, you wanna make sure that you're communicating regularly through email because email's remarkably effective at two particular things when it comes to nonprofits. One is keeping you top of mind. And that's going to be critical as we move into Giving Tuesday because there's going to be a lot of things fighting for people's attention that week. If we think about it, that's remarkably close to holidays. There are some holidays going on at that point. That's right after Thanksgiving. There's going to be all the for-profits in the world screaming Black Friday, right? So there's going to be a lot driving people's attention to a variety of different places. So you'll want to make sure that you build out an email calendar, a schedule that's already keeping in mind that email marketing is really, really effective at keeping you top of mind. You wanna think of this as priming the pump, making sure that when the moment's ready, they're there for you. Also wanna automate as many repetitive tasks as you can. So when it comes to email marketing, even social media marketing, automate some of that so that you're not having to think about it in November. And make sure you're segmenting your contacts as much as you can to make sure that you're focused on giving them content that's relevant, content that's relevant. A lot of nonprofits will send out one email that is the kitchen sink email. It's talking about this, it's talking about that, it's looking for this behavior, it's asking about are you interested in this? And it's also sharing news and updates and staff changes. You wanna make sure you're trying to do as much as you can to make sure your content is as relevant as possible. So coming back to that idea, the questions you need to ask yourselves, am I sending regularly enough? Am I priming that pump? What is my audience clicking on the most? You wanna pay attention on what is attracting your audience to take action and are my subscribers actually doing what I want them to do? If they're not, that's a cue that you need to think through segmentation, your emails trying to do too much to too many people. Lastly, with your website, this is obviously your online home base. This is going to be where a lot of our content from those social media and email are coming back to our website. So this is almost irrelevant, but make sure that your website is mobile responsive and has a modern design. Now, some of you are probably rolling your eyes, yeah, the website tool I have, it's mobile responsive, Matt. It says it right there on the label. That's not what I mean. Most legitimate website tools are gonna be mobile responsive now. What I'm talking about is, have you reviewed your site on a mobile? As many pages, if not every page on mobile, are you effectively communicating on that smaller device? Can they find your donation link on your webpage on a mobile device? Can they find additional information that's gonna be valuable to you? That's the kind of question you need to ask yourself. And you wanna make sure that you're driving as many eyeballs to these three critical pages. The homepage, obviously, about us where you're sharing your mission and how you change people's lives or your community and how to contact you. So with that, your questions you need to ask yourself is my site dusty? Meaning, do I have all the most up-to-date information available? If I not updated my website in a couple of years, this is a good time to do an audit before you're starting to drive a lot of attention there, make sure that everything's ready. Am I tracking who's visiting? So am I using analytical tools to make sure that I'm attracting the right people from the right location and are they taking the right next steps? So tools like Google Analytics, you wanna watch where people are going within your website. So maybe they're hitting that homepage, but they're missing the thing I want them to do next. You wanna pay attention to that flow. And am I using paid and free tools to make sure that I'm growing attention to my website? So when it comes to setting your goals, you wanna have a clear plan. Having a clear plan is essential to successful marketing to find realistic, practical goals that you want to focus on. And you wanna make sure that there are a couple of questions that are going through your head, like are there new things I need to do right now before giving Tuesday, do I need to pivot? Do I need to change? Are there pages I need to add to my site? Are there social media channels I can abandon? Are there things I need to update on my site? Are there existing things I can improve upon? Can I focus on growing my list, capturing more sales or capturing more donations, right? One thing that I encourage you to think through as you're doing goal setting is make sure that you are not squandering an opportunity that I see a lot of non-profits squander. And it has nothing to do with Q4. It has to do with Q1 next year. So you're driving all this attention, social media, websites, email, everybody's going to your site, right? Make sure you build up your plan into the new year because if you gain new contacts through social media, through email, make sure you're massaging and keeping your organization top of mind to those new contacts into the new year. Because what you don't wanna do is find yourself at this point next year and you didn't orchestrate on a longer plan past giving Tuesday. So I'm gonna put a link into the chat here for you. So give me one second and get down to chat. Send it to everyone. There's actually a PDF guide. You can print it out. That a lot of this content that I just shared with you is on and what I want you to do is there's actually a place where you can write down your goals, write down the things you need to freshen up, the steps you need to take. I encourage you to put things down on paper because then you can sit back and you can map out, okay, how are we gonna do this? Who's going to do this? So a couple of examples of goals, like do we need to optimize for mobile? Yeah, Matt was right. I can't find the donation link when I'm on a mobile device or I can't see where a phone number is or upcoming events, right? Also, you wanna make sure you set goals for email. If you're using email marketing, what's your goal there? Do you wanna increase your click rates? Do you wanna see a higher open rate? Do you wanna maybe do more segmentation and more targeting? Write that goal down. And lastly with social media, you wanna make sure that you're in it to win it. Be consistent. If you're trying to be everywhere at once and you're not consistently being at the places that are producing results for you, maybe that's your goal. But Julia, as I talk through digital marketing goals, I've mentioned a word about seven times, segmentation. And let me define segmentation for everybody. Segmentation has taken that large group of people and cutting down into smaller lists. So how do we take this idea of targeting and segmentation even further? Yeah, so we're now gonna go into phase two and talk a little bit about segmentation and writing, which this is my favorite phase as a communications manager and a writer. Making sure that we're speaking to the right audience is incredibly important. So we're gonna talk a little bit about, first we'll talk about the importance of donor segmentation. First and foremost, your story is unique. So is your audience. The people that are pulled into giving to your organization are pulled into a specific and unique story for a specific and unique reason. So you can't say the same thing to everyone across the board all the time, because they aren't the same person over and over. Maybe you have a few groupings of people who are similar, but a hundred percent of your giving face is not living in a certain zip code and attending a certain church and believes a certain thing. You have a diverse group who's giving to you because they are pulled by your mission. So let's talk a little bit about, again, the specifics of segmentation. As Matt said, segmentation is the act of dividing your donors into smaller groups or segments based on shared information or common characteristics. Some common characteristics that you can consider are demographics like age, family status, marital status. You can look at geographic commonalities like zip code, city, or state. And you can look at behavior commonalities like program involvement. Maybe they're all part of stalking the food pantry shelves on a Saturday. You know this specific group of people. So if you sent a message to this specific group of food stalkers, then that message may be different from the people who are out delivering food baskets on a Sunday. If you say the same thing to them both about your ability to deliver baskets is so valuable, then the people stalking the shelves maybe would feel like, oh no, you're not saying I'm valuable. So is it more important for me to deliver baskets? Maybe I'll switch to Sundays. So being sure that the message that you're sending is being sent to the right audience, grouping them by behavior or action is a great way to do that. Also last gift amount, maybe they gave recently, maybe they're one of your lie buns they gave last year, but not yet this year. And specifically saying, hey, last year for Giving Tuesday, you did this. We would love for you to be involved again. And then again, frequency. So thinking about messaging directly to monthly givers versus people who haven't given in a while would be different messaging. So we'll go, I'm sorry, I forgot. We have these a little bit more in depth slides. So I went so in depth on the first one, but we'll skim through these. These are some more examples about how you can use demographic data to group your messages. So something like if you're looking to attract new donors and maybe specifically millennials, you group some data about the age range like the demographic age range. And you can say, hey, instead of going to Starbucks once a week, why don't you give to support a family once a week? That's a very specific message, especially for millennials. I know for many across the board, but especially for those of us who go to Starbucks far too much, a message like that would really appeal to me because of my demographic. Or if you're looking to solicit larger gifts, you directly have solicit high income households. Geographic, this is a great example. If you're doing a local program, you can message to specific zip codes. So say you're delivering these food pantry baskets in my zip code is 33301. You can pull, especially from Donor Perfect, pull all of your donors that live in 33301, message them directly and say, hey, something is happening that's affecting your neighborhood and we want you to be a part of it. And then lastly, behavior. Look at what behavior you want to either recreate or reinvest in. So something like lapse donors or donors who gave on Giving Tuesday last year, that's a great one for giving Tuesday segmentation because you can specifically say, hey, remember you were part of this great impact last year. Here's a way to be part of it this year. Donors who gave in the last three months of the year, so they're in the viewer donors, maybe they only give during those times of year. So they ignored you for the last nine months. Now's a great time to reach out to them specifically. Donors who respond to time-sensitive causes or donors who respond to social media posts. These are all groups of people that you can message directly based on their activities. So Matt, what's another way to look at segmentation? We talked a little bit broad about donors in general, but how can we segment in email marketing or in online marketing? This too is my favorite subject to talk about Julia because one, I failed at this at least for a while at my nonprofit. So my nonprofit when I maybe sounded a little, I don't know, judgmental or maybe a little off my point when I said I keep seeing nonprofits do these all-in-one emails, these kitchen sink emails, guess who was guilty of that? So we used to send at the nonprofit one email to members, to non-members, to volunteers, to donors, to vendors, to vendors. And it was an crazy long email. It would just go on and on and on and on. And it wasn't speaking to the particular interest of any particular group, it was trying to be everything to everyone. And once we decided this was not really the wisest thing to do and we started to break it up into multiple emails, now some of the content was shared, we didn't have to write whole emails for everyone. But as soon as we started, I mean, the most simple thing is speaking directly in my case to non-members, saying non-member or vendor, right? It made the content more relevant. So, some things you wanna think about. When you segment, when it comes to email marketing, you're gonna see some changes in the results. So you're gonna see things like less unsubscribes, why? Because you're speaking to their interests, their passions, their abilities. You're speaking to their demographic, you're speaking to things that are going on in their zip code or their area of town or their area of the world. You're also going to see more interaction. So a lot of people, they assume that emails are red. I'm gonna share a statistic in a minute. That's not true. People scan and they skim. People, that's what they do to my emails, that's what they're going to do to Julia's emails, that's what they're doing to your emails. They're scanning and skim. And so if we are speaking more coherently, targeting our content to a particular segment, they're going to be paying more attention because of relevancy. Relevancy is the magic word. You're also gonna just see higher results because if you're targeting your audience through segments, you're speaking their language literally, right? So if I'm gonna use a jump on to Julia's example of geographic, right? If I have something going on in Southeast Florida, right? And I'm sending that to people in Central Florida who can't take action on that. What good is that to me, right? If Julia did that, if she's trying to get me to come down to that event, that's about four hours away. Sorry, Julia. I'm passionate about your nonprofit, but I'm not gonna make that drive. She just sent me an irrelevant email. And what happens is a lot of people worry about unsubscribes. I'm in a nonprofit space, not that worried. And the reason for that is the real danger is becoming irrelevant. I guarantee you in your inbox right now are emails from organizations you've donated to, organizations that you volunteered for, for profits that you've bought from that you don't see anymore because it's become white noise. It's not there, it's there, but you don't see it. The reason you don't see it is because at some point you were taught that content was irrelevant. If we send out emails for soliciting donations and they're not even paying attention, we've lost an opportunity. So when you target, when you segment, you're going to see higher results. Now, Julia gave you some ideas on how you can segment and donor perfect and beyond. I want to give you some very email specific things that you want to focus on with segmentation. So you want to pay attention to people that open your email, right? That is going to tell us something about their engagement with us. If we're seeing a group of people, if we collate and segment based on opens, well, that's going to be a likely more active person and they're more likely to be going to take the action that we want. You'll notice the clicks is in a different color. That is because clicks is the end all be all metric. And I'm going to give you a little bit more information about that in a second. When it comes to email marketing, if you segment by that kind of activity, by clicks, those are going to be your most engaged email subscribers. They actually went into your email and they clicked on a link. Also look at the frequency of engagement. So are there groups of people that are regularly opening emails? Are there groups of people that are regularly clicking links in the email? If they're regularly opening your emails, let's say we run a report and we want to look at people that opened any email in the last 60 days. Those are going to be some pretty engaged people. But if we look at people that clicked on specific links or all my links in the last 30 days, 60 days, those people are really engaged. And guess what? When I throw a Giving Tuesday ask out there, they're the most likely to take advantage of it. I also want to look at, okay, list membership, right? Which lists are going to be the most engaged with me over time. And then lastly, there's something called tagging where you can actually take a look at smaller subgroups, smaller segments of people and say, okay, which of these people are the most engaged with me? Now why I keep talking about this idea of segmentation because targeting works, segmentation works. You'll see 11% higher open rate on average just by segmenting. Higher open rate means more eyeballs in my email, kind of, I'll talk about that in a second. But you'll see when you segment, when you target your emails, you'll see and this is the most important number, 27% higher click rate. These are people that are taking action in your email. These are the most valuable subscribers you can send to. So within constant contact for those, I know many of you may already be using constant contact. There's really a fantastic way for you to segment beyond the fantastic segmentation that DonorPerfect provides, which is called click segmentation. And there's one thing you take away as a constant contact customer today. Make sure you focus on this one because it's included in constant contact and it's really easy to do. First, when you're putting a link into your email, there's a little button that says enable click segmentation. So you do that. And then what you do is you choose what list you'd like this subscriber to be added to. So what this does is it's taking that larger group of people and it's focusing, based on what they clicked on, it's narrowing the list for you. So it's actually segmenting your list for you. Then, of course, you send out your email. When you send out your email, ideally they're gonna click link. When they click the link that you set click segmentation to, they're automatically added to that list. It's segmented for you. It couldn't be easier. It's included in constant contact. And this is just one of the several ways that you can start to narrow down that large list. And maybe you're already doing segmentation. Narrow it down even further based on what they clicked on. Now, I've talked probably a little too much about segmenting within constant contact. Julia, it's all for naught. I'm sorry, we've wasted everybody's time. We'll just let you buy back time, everybody enjoy that. No, I'm kidding. It's all for naught if we don't ask in the right way. So why don't you talk a little bit about including the ask? Yeah, so this is definitely a very important element to yield results. I think we can do everything possible to make sure everything's set up to make sure we've evaluated our goals, to make sure we're talking to the right people. But if we're not giving the opportunity for people to be part of what we're doing, then we're missing the mark. So we're going to talk about how to use these specific groups in segmented asks. So first we want each ask to feel personal. It's very important to create email lists that are specific to your groups like what Matt just talked about. I love that tool with constant contact. The fact that if somebody clicks their put on a list automatically, that is an amazing tool for me because then not only with ask emails, but also with emails that are event-specific emails, you know, oh my gosh, I know this person is interested in some type of events. I'm going to let them know about all of our events, things like that. I love that feature. So being sure that you use that feature for specific asks like Giving Tuesday, then when you're ready to ask for Giving Tuesday again next year, you already know who was part of Giving Tuesday last year because you have that click specific list. You also want to make sure you get your email templates in order and that your call to action is personalized. Something that I've been talking about a lot lately is that there's a difference between saying, hey, we need money and saying, hey, your gift will make a long-term impact. Being able to express beyond dollars, which, you know, obviously fundraisers are really concerned about dollars, but as a fundraiser, I was far more concerned about my mission being accomplished than the exact number of dollars that were coming in. So when you're writing and segmenting these groups, you want to make sure that you're asked, it's not only personal to the people who are receiving it, but it's personal to your organization. Why does their gift impact the mission of your organization? Spelling that out for them is incredibly important. Next, we'll talk about dynamic content. So making sure that you fill in the blanks for your email to be personalized, like using the donor's name or using their correct salutation. This helps you to build trust with the organization. And this is another beautiful thing about the relationship between constant contact and donor perfect. The syncing of constant contact and donor perfect allows this to be pulled in dynamically and much easier than you having to go through and type in everybody's name correctly. It pulls it directly from your donor perfect account. And then next, we'll talk about the email series, making sure that the donors are in the know about giving opportunities, triggering automatic emails based on engagement, like what Matt said, making sure they're on the right lists, giving opportunities to upgrade gifts, announcing upcoming events or giving challenges and inviting people to your monthly giving program. And again, all of this is very important to be personalized to the donor, but also it's important to be personalized to your organization. Why does this matter to the people you're serving, to the hospital? What specifically about your org is being impacted by these asks? Now, we want to also make sure that not only are we including an ask, not only are we sending it to the right people, but that it's eye catching. The whole purpose of this conversation is to stand out on Giving Tuesday. Like Matt said, people are going to be inundated with emails that week. So Matt, why don't you tell us a little bit about how to stand out during that time using email design? Yeah, you know, I was thinking about what you said and the one piece I think I teased everybody that Julia was really impactful in a podcast that I heard her talk about and what the part that really impacted me. When she was talking about don't just ask, share how the donation is going to impact the community, the world, whatever your mission is. That I was just like, I wish I had heard that when I was at a nonprofit because all we ever did was say, man, let me simplify. Give us money, give us money. I just thought that was really brilliant. All right, so yeah, a lot of emails are going to be sent out really soon. There's going to be a lot fighting for people's attention. Now I told you a dirty little secret before, right? Nobody reads email, we scan and scan, well, here comes some more. Firstly, there's a lot of cell phones out there. Big surprise, right? But 86.4% of the world owns a smartphone. I almost guarantee you have a smartphone. It's probably right next to you right now. Put your cell phone down. I know some of you are looking at it. 88% regularly check their email on a smartphone. I'd be willing to bet you have checked your email on your smartphone today, probably multiple times, don't do it right now. The funny thing about smartphones and email is that the number one app on a smartphone is the email app. It is the most used app. If I asked you, if I could hear you and I asked you the question, what's the most used app on your phone? You'd probably say, oh, TikTok or Google Maps or my banking app, right? You'd say all these other things. I ask you, actually, it's probably your email app. You'd go, you know what, I am in my email app like all the time. The email app is so used that I think people start to think of it as a utility, not as an app. It's such a part of our lives, we're in it so often we don't even think of it as an app, but it is an app. You know who else is in there on their phone? In their email? Right now? Your future donors, your past donors, your volunteers, your stakeholders. That's where they are. But that last one that I bet you'd probably be focusing on if I were you is the average time reading an email is nine seconds, nine seconds. We have nine seconds to get people's attention, convey something important, convey something that is relevant and get them to take action. Now, when they actually take action, that's where things go from good to great. So what I want to do is share with you, try to big picture the elements of a good email design. Firstly, it's what's seen in the inbox. So that's going to be the header, right? So that's going to be what drives people to actually open the email. So a couple of tips. You want to use a recognizable from name. Generally in the nonprofit space that is going to be your organizational name. Now I can already hear some of you saying, oh, but my executive director always insists it comes from them. We're on board, president. Okay, well, you know what? There are studies, emails that have a person's name can get more opens. But odds are your executive director, are you an executive director? Odds are your marketing person. Odds are your board president. You know, it's not going to be there forever. And so if emails start getting open because of their name and they leave, they take your brand equity with them. So you want to make sure you use a name that's most recognizable to your audience. Generally at this point, I get asked, well, we'll use an acronym. Hey, if you're known by your acronym, use your acronym. If you're not, use as much as your name as you can type in there. You also want to make sure that you use a reply email address that is going to be monitored. So a lot of organizations and a lot of nonprofits will have the reply to go to distribution lists, marketing team app, something like that, right? Well, that's okay, but you want to make sure that somebody's monitoring that inbox because you don't want to miss an opportunity where somebody replies and says, can I pay by check or whatever the option, right? You don't want to miss that opportunity. You want to keep your subject line relatively short four to seven words. Next is the pre-header text. In my experience of training nonprofits, this is one that a lot of people ignore. It's a little bit of text that appears either underneath the subject line or adjacent to the subject line. So what happens is people, when they're going into their inbox, they look at who sent this to me, then they look at the subject line to see what this email is about, and then they read the pre-header text. What is this email really about? So you want to make sure that you leverage that little bit of text to give more context to what your email is about. So an example would be if I have an event coming up, my subject line would be broad annual gala coming up. My pre-header text would be November 17th, or whatever, right? It gives context. You also want to keep that relatively short six to 11 words. Obviously, most of you are going to put your logo at the top of the email, but a lot of organizations forget to link their logo to their homepage. A lot of people will try to click on a logo to go to a homepage to make sure you leverage that experience. Keep your brand consistent through the email. So you want to make sure that you're bringing your colors into the email, making your buttons reflect your color scheme, the background reflect the color scheme, dividers reflect the color scheme. The reason for that is that color represents brand 80%. And we want to get our brand into the brain of people when they open the email and have them consuming the content of the email as quickly as possible. We've got nine seconds. So we want to make sure that they know who they're getting this email from the second they open it. Images, you need to make sure that your images are supporting your message. Now that's kind of obvious, but remember, if we have nine seconds in front of an audience, if an image speaks a thousand words, that's to our benefit. You want to keep your images somewhat limited, no more than three. There's a couple of reasons for that. If you give people too many images, they don't know where to focus the eye. They don't know what the most important thing is. If an image speaks a thousand words, you're now speaking a million images and they don't a million words. If you have too many images in your email, that's going to be overwhelming. Text, you want to use 21 point text for your headlines, about 14 point text for the body of your content. And this is the one non-profits always, oh, they don't like this when I say this. You want to keep your email best practice. You want to keep your email as succinct as possible, no more than about 25 overall lines of texts and go a little over sure. You go under, absolutely. What you don't want to do is have people look out their phones are scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. There goes your nine seconds before they even took action. We want to keep our email as succinct as possible because we want them to take that action as goes back to the idea of segmentation. If you segment, that allows you to keep your email shorter and more simple. You want to include a call to action. You want to include a call to action. A call to action can be three things. It can be a hyperlink, it can be a button like you see here, but a really smart thing to do is make sure that the images that are supporting your content that they are clickable back to the same thing as well. Some people will click on a button. Others will click on an image. Don't lose an opportunity to get somebody where you want them to go. Make sure you're leveraging both things, images and something like a button. And you want to make sure obviously that you include a way for people to contact you and connect to you on social media. Now, one thing you'll want to make sure you do is as we get into the holiday season and this crazy quarter and Giving Tuesday, automate what you can. So some simple things you can automate is new volunteer onboarding, right? Get that out of the way. Don't do that one by one. Automate that. Oh, welcome email. Somebody joins your list. Don't do that one by one. Automate that. Get as much as birthdays, anniversaries, things like that. Automate that. Get that off your docket. You want to make sure that you're leveraging your time to its maximum potential, right? Now, I think, Julia, it is a good time to go into phase three. What do you think? I agree, yes. Definitely, especially based on what you just said, talking about automating. We want to make sure that what you're doing is the easiest transition to things, especially in the executing phase. So now we're going to talk a little bit about some key fundraising reports. This sets you up for phase one next year, being sure that you have the right tags, the right reporting setup for your Giving Tuesday. I'm going to give you a few examples of some reports. For the sake of time, we'll just fly through these. But these are specific examples to Donor Perfect. Donor Perfect is a CRM. So we use that to put all of your donut data into one place to connect with other programs like Constant Contact. And these are specific things that Donor Perfect offers to our users. If you don't use Donor Perfect, you should. But also if you don't use Donor Perfect, they're your CRM or whatever should have reports like these. So one example is donors by giving level. One example is being able to pull a giving statement by date range, gifts by date specifically. We have a report called Comprehensive Donor Analysis. I loved this report as a Donor Perfect user. It's kind of your state of the database. It includes your active donors, retained donors, new donors, reactivated donors, and your donor attrition rate. So just at a glance, you'll be able to see a lot of things like that. Also, solicitation analysis is an important one to plan ahead on. Donor Perfect specifically has giving forms. When you set up your giving form, you can dictate which solicitation this will be attributed to. So then in the end, you can pull that specific solicitation code and it will tell you who all gave to that specific giving ask. So having a solicitation analysis is really helpful. And then a few others are gift summary by selected field. So maybe you want to look at what a lifetime value is for a lot of donors. You can pull that based on that specific field. And then the statistical tabulation report, this is a side-by-side comparison of year over year, which is also really helpful during giving to say. Matt, what about you for some key email reports? I'm gonna probably, I wish I could see everybody and everybody because if you've been paying attention today, you know what the key email report is, but here's the kind of reports Constant Contact delivers. Opens, how many people open the email? Clicks, how many people clicked on links in the email? Bounces, how many emails you sit out that bounce back like an I'm on vacation reply? Spam, this is the bad one. There's people that mark you as spam. You know what, some people just gonna do that. Everybody gets marked as spam occasionally, don't fret it. And people that have lost the list. Opens, opens are problematic because it doesn't really prove anything. Somebody could have opened an email and immediately closed it. We can't really pat ourselves on the back for that, but clicks proves the email is delivered, proves it was open, proves that they read it and tells you exactly what they read. This is key. This is key because now as we learn what they're interested in, that helps us not just inform what we put in emails in the future, but this is the beginning of email segmentation, at least in the way that I described it before by focusing on what people are clicking on. You should closely monitor your clicks and notice if there are patterns in what people are starting to click on. That's gonna inform you not just what you do with your email, but it can tell you what to put on your website, what to write about in a blog, what to put in a podcast. It can tell you what to update in your social media. I get really passionate about clicks. Make sure you're paying attention to this all important metric. So as we start to wrap up, as has been mentioned several times, constant contact and donor perfect sync together. I like to think of donor perfect and constant contact as peanut butter and jelly. They're really great individually, but man, they're so much better together. So one way that we are really fantastic together, this is really all a donor perfect quite frankly, they, if you use constant contact and donor perfect together, you have templates made for you. Are those best practices I taught you before? Somewhat throw them out the window because they built templates that are already designed to produce results. And thanks to all of the experience they have helping nonprofits for decades, they know what works, right? They know the nonprofit world, even better than constant contact does. And so they have provided you all of these templates within a tab within constant contact. You choose your goal, you choose the template, you put in your logo, you personalize it a little bit, you send it off and you start to see results. But Julia, why don't you talk a little bit about the other big way that constant contact and donor perfect interact? Yeah, and we alluded to this a little bit earlier. I think the fact that they speak to each other that there is a legitimate sync between the two programs, you don't have to log out of one, log into another, download all your information, put everything in two places because it all talks to each other. It's all used together. Constant contact can seek nightly with your donor information and donor perfect. And you can use your donor perfect filters in order to populate the things that you need in constant contact. This is something I used as a donor perfect user. And it was so helpful to me, especially in the busy times like giving Tuesday or end of year. Some of the phases that we talked through today is part of a larger layout that donor perfect has created for a Giving Tuesday cheat sheet. This cheat sheet walks you a little bit deeper through each of the phases for setting up your Giving Tuesday campaign. And it also walks you through the different hacks that you may wear or the different people on your team and who can tackle which projects. So I highly recommend you scanning this QR code and getting this download. It's a ebook download. You'll get it right to your phone or your computer. And it's a great way to get started on planning your Giving Tuesday. All right, so as Julia said, there is a bundle, a constant contact and donor perfect bundle that does all of the synchronization that provides those kind of templates. And you can take advantage of it by again pulling out your phone, scan that QR code. You get 15% off the first year by using constant contact and donor perfect together. One thing I'll say is you are currently a constant contact customer and you're now interested in, ooh, wow, can I bundle my, can I get donor perfect? Yeah, we can do that. Just make sure that you are taking advantage of the tools that you need to be successful this Giving Tuesday. And Arisa, you're gonna have to forgive us, but yeah, we're at Q&A, we give people a lot of time. We made it, we made it to Q&A. You've got two very passionate people about nonprofits and we get us on a roll when we look out. There's two questions that we can answer very quickly. When is Giving Tuesday? It's the Tuesday after Thanksgiving. So the month, it's Thanksgiving is Thursday, Friday is Black Friday, Saturday is Small Business Saturday, Monday is Cyber Monday, Tuesday is Giving Tuesday. Perfect, perfect. I'll go quickly. Does it sound like, this is a question, does it sound like a good idea to use Giving Tuesday to direct donors to our crowdfunding campaign? Yes, Giving Tuesday is a great way to use crowdfunding because it gives the people who are passionate about your organization a platform to tell the people that they know that maybe don't know about you. So it's a great opportunity to say, hey, it's a national day of giving. This is something I'm passionate about. Are you looking for someone to give to this Giving Tuesday? Okay, another one. How often do you recommend sending email? So more often than probably most of you think. So again, I wanna go back to that idea of non-profits are somewhat notorious for sending a lot during this part of the year and then stopping and taking long pauses. You wanna be consistent. Now, generally most organizations really wanna have a cadence of at least twice a month. But as we get closer to November, you'll probably wanna start thinking through increasing that to maybe even one a week. Now, before you drop your cup of coffee and gasp, you can send more email if you segment and target, right? I may not send everyone four emails in one month. I may send this target email this week, this target this email next week, you can break it up. But far more than a lot of people think. It all comes back to relevancy. I get an email every day that I open nearly every day. Now that sounds like too many emails, right? It's my bank. It's my daily statement balance email from my bank. Why do I open it every day? Cause it's relevant to me, right? Now, don't suggest you send an email every day, but that gives you the idea of relevance via sending. Aretha. Yeah, staying on that topic of segmenting, Maria said, what if you have a whole bunch of contacts but you don't know who they are and they aren't tagged. You don't know where they fell over the social media, donate a couple of years, go volunteer. How can you segment them now? I think that would be to use the constant contact thing and do kind of a test email where you send them something that would segment them in a certain group if they click on something. Matthew, I don't know if you were gonna go along a different route, but I think that's exactly where I was going. That's so cool, I love that thing. I mean, something else you can do is there is a under reports, there is a segmentation report which will take a look at past data. So you can actually take a look at your regular openers, click things like that. And then, I mean, it's gonna require a little bit of gum shoe work on your part, but it's worth it, especially now as we're talking about setting goals. Take a look at the emails you sent in the past. Sitting right there are going to be opens and clicks. You can actually see what links they clicked on. Do some historical work of like, okay, wow, what did I do last year? Using constant contact last year? Take a look at what they did last giving Tuesday, right? Okay. And I think, I don't know if Julie was talking on this, but Donna says, can you touch on the monetary versus and the non-monetary goals? Somebody was talking about setting goals. What about the non-monetary goals? Sure, yeah. Like the example of the $2 gift, my goal was to get 100 new donors. It had nothing to do with how much they gave. It was a non-monetary goal. It was about the actual donors. I don't know if this question relates to like gifts in kind, like if your organization accepts things like canned food or something like that, but it is easy to be able to answer different things when it comes to like monetary versus non-monetary. It doesn't always have to be a monetary goal. Okay, great. Last question, can texts be used for giving Tuesday? I'll let you tackle that, Julie. Yeah, I think any kind of communication can be used for giving Tuesday. It's really important to make sure you're using multiple channels to reach people. And if you're texting them, that probably means they're already invested in your organization. If you have a phone number and have access to text them, it would be a great way to reach out to them. DonorPerfect has something called DP Text, and you can text directly to your donor and you can include a photo or you can include an ask, a text to give a link, things like that. It's a great, easy way to get a hold of your donors. Awesome. One more time you guys put the links in the chat. I'm gonna say, I told you guys, these two are my favorite because they give so much great information. There's lots of thank yous in the chat. Everybody's saying great presentation, great info. Because it is, it's like, you can put this into action like right now and be ready for giving Tuesday. So this is so great. You guys wanna say thank you to everybody. I'll turn it over to Matthew and then Julia. Thank you everybody. I've seen the nice comments on chat and that certainly makes my day. Just wanna see you be successful. Carve out some time, plan out your goals, make sure you're paying attention to social media. Make sure you score, you know, and consequently you can schedule things in advance. Knock out your plan. You can always unscheduled if things change, but make sure that you're paying attention right now. October is coming up on what Sunday, right? This is getting to be the go time. So make sure you're carving out time to be successful, but thank you so much. Obviously, Julia and I are very passionate about nonprofits given our background. And it's, I love talking to nonprofits, Julia. Great. Thank you all so much for being part of this. It's been a great conversation. Would recommend reaching out to myself and Matt on LinkedIn. We both have very unique last names, so you probably won't find another one of us, but look us up on LinkedIn. We'd love to connect. Donor Perfect is constantly putting out some fundraising tips and things that are on our website that you can download. So would love to be a trusted partner with you as you tackle fundraising. Thank you everybody. Have a great day. Bye-bye. Thanks so much. See ya.