 All right, shall we get started? Yeah, let's get started. Well, everybody, thank you for joining TechSoup. Today is a very exciting topic, email marketing. I know we all do it, we get tons of email, but this is to help you. This is the fundamentals of email marketing for nonprofits with Tila. I'm excited to have Samantha and Elsie with us today. But before we get started, let's talk about how you can engage in today's conversation. I know you're used to this, everybody's on mute. Feel free to put your questions in the Q&A section. Check your email in about 48 hours. I'll be sending the replay of the video from today. If you hear something, you get an aha moment or, oh my God, I didn't know that. So glad I know that now. Tweet us, send it on Facebook, hashtag us, all social media channels. We need to use a closed caption. Please use the CC button at the bottom of your screen. Hey, my name is Aretha Simons. I'm the webinar producer here at TechSoup and I'm so glad you are here. If today is your first time here at TechSoup, we want to welcome you. We use technology to bridge the gap between nonprofit and resources. And one of the ways we do that is by partnering with organizations like Tila. So today I'm excited to introduce Samantha and Elsie. They're going to take it over in just a moment. Thank you, ladies. I'm excited to see what you have to share today. Thank you for being here with us today. Thank you so much. All right, let me just pop my screen up. All right, can everybody see my screen? All right. Yes, looks brilliant. Perfect. Okay. Well, good morning, afternoon, everybody. As mentioned, my name is Samantha Leica. I'm Tila's marketing director. I will apologize. I tried two cups of coffee right before this webinar thinking that was going to be a great idea. So I will, I will speak slowly. So as mentioned, Tila's marketing director. We also have Elsie on the line. She's our director of customer care, as well as Maggie, who's our in-house training specialist. Maggie will be answering some of your Tila specific questions throughout the chat. So feel free to say hello. If you do want everybody to be able to see your question, please remember to select panelists, all panelists and attendees. So if you are new to Tila completely, welcome. For those of you who don't know what we do, Tila is a complete nonprofit management software that gives you powerful, intelligent tools to manage your donors, market your nonprofit and raise more money. We've actually partnered with TechSoup to provide you with a discount of up to 40% on your first year plan. So Maggie will pop that link into the chat for you so you can peruse that in your own time. Thanks, Maggie. But the real reason we're here today is to talk to you about email marketing and how you can send better, more effective donor communications without the hassle. So with that out of the way, let's dive in. All right. Eight seconds. That's the average amount of time you have to capture your adult reader's attention. And yes, it does compare to the attention span of a goldfish. So I can guarantee that your email did not take you eight seconds to create. In fact, if I were to hazard a guess, I'm pretty sure it would have taken you closer to eight hours. So why go through the hassle of pouring all of that blood, sweat and tears into your next email campaign? It's because email marketing generates the best return on investment, ROI for your marketing dollars. And as a nonprofit, you're already ahead of the game when you compare your emails to other industries. So nonprofit emails are four times more likely to be opened, and their click-through rate is 25% compared to, say, a social media post on Facebook, which is sitting around 7%. So in this webinar, we're going to run through the most common type of email campaign today, which is your fundraising appeal. We'll teach you some best practices on how to quickly and effectively capture your reader's interest. And as a nonprofit, we're going to run through the most common type of email campaign today, which is your fundraising appeal. We'll teach you some best practices on how to quickly and effectively capture your reader's interest. And teach you how to translate these into Kila to make sure it's the best eight seconds of your reader's lives. And I'm going to start. We're going to launch a poll. So this poll has two questions. And the first is that I want to know if you've sent a fundraising appeal recently. So I'll give you a couple of minutes to answer these two questions. Did you send a fundraising appeal recently? No, I didn't. I didn't. I didn't send a fundraising appeal recently. I didn't send a fundraising appeal recently with the results. So. If you're unsure whether you're happy with the results, you can type, you can choose no. I'll let everybody continue answering that. We've got about 56% of the vote coming in. So it's looks like looking like it's pretty half, half yes, no for sending a fundraising appeal recently. And it looks like it's an overwhelming majority of people say, no, they were not happy with the results of that. That last appeal. So just a couple more seconds and then we'll share the results with you. Okay. So currently we're sitting at about 45%, 45, 41% of people have sent a fundraising appeal recently with 59% not. And then were you happy with the results and overwhelming 82% said no. But don't worry. The reason that we're here today. Is that we're going to teach you how to create a great fundraising appeal. So we're going to take you through eight tips to make creating a great fundraising appeal. And then we're going to take you through five tips to make a great fundraising appeal. So before you dive first into sending your email, you're going to want to figure out who you're going to send it to. Tip number one is segmentation. And while it might be tempting to blast everybody in your database in the hopes of driving more donations. Statistically, we know that you're better off sending your appeal to a smaller group of people or a segment of your donors. And the crux of segmentation is that it allows you to group your contacts into lists depending on certain shared demographics or behavior. So from a fundraising perspective, you can send your email to a specific donor, and send it to a specific email campaign to reengage these contacts. Or you could choose a target only you're recurring donors and try to get them to upgrade their donations. And actually this last one just happened to me. So I donate to the Humane Society international on a monthly basis. And they just sent me an email based on the specific programs that I'm interested in and donate to. And it said if I only increase my donation by five extra dollars a month, by $5, I'm happy, they're happy, the puppies are happy, and everybody in the situation wins. So by using segments, you can send hyper-personalized messaging to the audience that it's most relevant to. Plus, segmentation can have incredible impact. These are email marketing stats from the for-profit sector, but they still pack a punch. I'd like to focus on that last one, a 760% increase in email revenue from personalized and segmented email campaigns. That's a big jump. So how do you segment your list, Sam? You can start by breaking your contact list into these smaller groups based on those similarities or shared characteristics. And this could be anything from demographics, age, level of engagement, kind of whatever you feel is right for you. For example, you can create a segment on program interests where certain donors may only be interested in specific programs you run. And that's just like my humane society experience. Or you could segment based on level of engagement. Is this donor recurring, a retain, a first time, or a lapse donor? Each of those segments will have a different style of communication. And you can also donate, sorry, segment based on your donation method. So does this person prefer to pay by check, credit card, debit card, Bitcoin? All of this information works in tandem to create really specific email communications that reach out directly to your donors. But just remember, your database is unique, so there could be other types of segments. And so you can create tailored segments specifically to your donors and supporters. We also have three common segments that are key that customers use that I just wanted to highlight. And so this includes lifetime donation value. So this segment is used based off of our contact insights, and it shows whether a donor is one of your major contributors, or if they just started out, maybe need a bit of extra love. You can also segment donations by campaign or impact area. And this allows you to analyze which specific area or organization folks are contributing to. It does say a lot about the connection they feel to what you're doing. And the final most popular one we have is our recurring donor campaign. And this obviously provides a list of donors who have given a couple once-off gifts, maybe over the course of a year or so. And they actually, we believe them to be a good fit to transition to regular giving. So tip number two is write a really good, and I mean really good, subject line, because none of the following steps matter if you can't get someone to open your email in the first place. So where we start is with our subject line. By far, this is the shortest piece of content in your whole email, but I can guarantee it's likely will you spend the most amount of time trying to figure out the exact combination of urgency, mystery, flirtatiousness, and allure to get your readers to just click on your email. And that's because 35% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. No pressure. So here's some best practices for writing effective subject lines. And I know that they're effective because they worked on me. So the first one is you want to make it descriptive. Be clear about what you're offering. Something that sounds too spammy can actually turn people off entirely. In fact, building on that 35% of people who open emails based on the subject line, 69% of email recipients report emails spam based on the subject line. So in this case, you want to be really careful with your word choice. And you can do that by avoiding things like all caps, symbols, and trigger words like free or buy or money. These are automatic red flags for spam filters. Don't worry though, I've got a resource at the end of this section and it has an exhaustive list of all the words that you shouldn't use in your subject lines. You also want to make it short. Shorter subject lines typically perform better. So we in marketing try to aim for about 60 characters or less. And that's because more and more people are opening their emails from their phones, which means that you need shorter subject lines or else it's truncated. And truncated is obviously when you see it in your inbox and it's cut off with ellipses, those dots dots dots. And so all that work you went into crafting your perfect subject line just went out the window because of truncation. And the third is you want to make it urgent. You want to encourage your audience to act right away. Using urgent language gives your readers a chance to take part in something that's only available for a limited time. And for most of us, it's at least a click to see what's up. And as mentioned, I've got some resources for you here that Maggie will pop into the chat. And the first is of course that list of spam words I mentioned earlier from HubSpot. It's exhaustive. It goes through based on different categories of how you're speaking to people. So it's a great resource. And the second one is an inspiration gallery of really good emails from across the web. It's literally called reallygoodemails.com. Very easy to remember. So have a squeeze through there to get those email writing juices flowing before you send your next fundraising appeal. And I also want you to start paying attention to which emails you open. Why'd you open it? You'll start noticing subject lines a lot more and can deploy those tactics that work on you directly into your own emails. Plus every time you open an email because of a good subject line, a marketer gets a cookie. Tip number three, this is the one we all know, embrace storytelling. Remember, people donate to your organization and get involved because they want to be a part of your mission. So the first place to start is by leveraging the power of your nonprofit story. So when you're writing your email, I want you to think what drives your organization? What makes your impact valuable? Why should people care about the work that you do? Keep these questions in mind and recycle that language into your communications so you can spark the interest of both your recurring and new donors. So I've got some ideas on how to incorporate some better storytelling into your emails. The first one again is an obvious one is tell the stories of the people you are helping. But I challenge you as well to use their names if they give you permission because it helps build a direct link between your pool of donors and then the community that you serve. The second one is by sharing first-hand accounts from your staff. So this is actually an underutilized wellspring of stories because who sees your impact better than the people that are on the ground? If you lean into your staff's experience as an expertise, you'll give people an interesting behind-the-scenes perspective and this will go a long way in building that transparency and building that relationship. The third one's a bit more of a fun one. It's list-exciting or interesting facts about your organization. People are naturally curious and they want to know more about you. So anytime you can give them an extra bit of context, it goes a long way. So I want you to take a look at this example and it's from the British Red Cross and they did an incredible job of telling the story of Mabine and her family. They detail exactly what she went through. They include a high-quality image of her. They make the story relatable to the average reader and they show exactly how you can help Mabine and people like her. So that's a typical and very effective fundraising appeal using that story narrative that we're checking through. Tip number four is focus on your fundraising offer. Donors give when they know the value of their gifts. So to communicate this impact, you need a fundraising offer and it's also known as a value proposition. What will a donation accomplish? So if you're fundraising for an environmental organization, this could be something along the lines of a $20 donation helps plant 50 trees in the Amazonian forest. And yeah, it's a very oversimplified statement and it probably only covers a part of the work that you do, but it's emotionally powerful and it's easy enough to communicate via email. You want it to be simple, digestible and impactful. So here are some fundraising offer examples from around the nonprofit sector. Charity Water writes your $80 monthly donation can give 24 people clean water every year, 100% funds, water projects. So simple, digestible, impactful. Another important thing to remember is this is not about you. So as much as it is that you're asking for donation or to solicit volunteers or to get someone to read your latest blog, the language you need to use has to empower your donors. It has to make them feel involved and it needs to show them that they're making a difference. For example, you wouldn't say this month we raised $500 and were able to feed many hungry children. And said you'd flip it and say something along the lines of your donation of $50 helped to feed five children who would have otherwise gone hungry, as thanks to donors like you that we are able to continue putting food on the tables for many families and need of support. So same message, different delivery and it has a very different impact. And that's something that's known as the warm and fuzzy effect. When you're writing your messages, I want you to reread them and really focus on how it will come across to the reader. If you're not sure, you can get someone on your team to read it over as well. But what do you want them to do next? Tip number five is include a call to action or a CTA. You'd be surprised at how many emails I get that either have none or conflicting calls to action. But think about it. You went through all that trouble of figuring out your audience, nailing your subject line, creating your most compelling fundraising offer only to have your would be donor confused on what the heck they're supposed to do next. So your call to action should send donors directly to your donation page. You don't want to create friction points by making people click through to multiple pages in order to get there because with every extra step, you're actually giving your donors a chance to walk away. So I've got some best practices on creating your next call to action for you and they include making a clear ask. Don't tiptoe around the fact that you're asking for a donation. You need to make it really simple for your readers. You also want to make it visible. No one wants to be an aggressive salesperson. But in this case, I want your call to action to be the equivalent of a giant wacky inflatable flailing arm and impossible to miss. Kila actually allows you to easily drag and drop your call to action buttons in your emails. You heighten your chances of an email conversion directly. You can change the colors to make them stand out or match your brand. And you can also send your readers directly to your donation form. And the third tip is I want you to try getting creative to see which messaging better captivates your audience. So for example, help us reach our goal might be more effective in saying donate now. And here's an example of how you can get creative with those CTAs. So instead of using a simple donate now, the World Wildlife Federation uses different donate buttons with engaging copy. We've got I want to protect tigers and other wildlife. Yes, I will help end the extinction crisis and finally donate now and make a difference for wildlife. So these three buttons will link to the same donation page. And I can guarantee the World Wildlife team tracked this email on the back end and then figured out how many people clicked on which buttons and use the most popular language and email campaigns going forward. Tip number six is get personal after 18 months of zoom. So speaking with someone face to face is obviously very intimate. And while it's much easier to develop a relationship with someone in person, there are a few handy techniques you can apply to make your virtual relationship feel a lot more personal. For example, you want to send your email from person, not a generic one. So if I was sending a fundraising appeal, I'd send it from Samantha dot lego at kilo dot com over a marketing at kilo dot com email. And this just lets people know that there's a real person they can reply to on the other end of the line. We also have something called smart codes or merge tags. And these are placeholders that get replaced by the relevant value. So for example, if you use a first name smart code, hey, first name becomes Hey, Sam, adding an extra touch of familiarity with no extra time in it for you, it automatically pulls it from your contact records. So for key users, the information your contacts provide the our forms, you can actually take and use as a smart code. This includes things like name, organization, title, programs, campaign information. But what it does, it allows you to send hyper personalized emails. Using smart codes, you can send an email along the lines of, Hey, Sam, I hope your work is marketing director keyless keeping you fulfilled. If you wanted to chat about how you can improve your bank group based campaigns, reach out and let me know. And while it can be creepy, if you try to personalize everything in your emails, using smart codes can actually increase your click rates by up to 41%. And more importantly, it can generate donation amounts of up to six times higher than generalized ones. So sometimes it pays to be a little bit creepy. However, with all good things, a word of caution, smart codes are awesome if your database is clean. When they're not, this can happen, which then completely undermines you and makes you look rather silly. Luckily, that's because they're doing nonprofits and we mean that we've registered for giving Tuesday and approved registration, I'm trying to determine to participate in and do the actual location received, aka Lori had a really good sense of humor about it all. But to avoid situations like this with for Lori, please make sure that the source of your contact information is reliable and clean your database occasionally. It will go a long way. Secondly, with Kila, there's an update your information custom form that you can include in your email. So supporters like Lori can change your information if needed, rather than having to reach out to us directly. Sorry, Lori. Tip number seven, moving along, keep it simple. So it might surprise you that the most impactful fundraising emails are not necessarily the most beautiful ones. Now let me explain that. In a series of tests, the next after Institute showed that the removal of graphic elements on a fundraising email actually led to 145.5% increases donations. Why? And it's because a simple email actually looks a lot more personal. Think about it, heavily branded emails look like a marketing email. It looks like a sales pitch. Whereas a personalized one feels as though Anita from Save the Whales sat down herself and typed on an email directly to you. The psychology behind this is that the more playing your email, the longer someone took to write it. Now, if you've ever sat down to design an email, you know that this is 100% not the case, but it's the sentiment that counts. Someone's taking the time out of their day to send you a message versus receiving a marketing email that was probably sent to a thousand other people on a generic mailing list. This doesn't mean you should eliminate all images and creatives from your email though, because we all know branding is important for building trust. But it is best to keep it as simple as possible when it comes to your fundraising emails. You want to keep the focus on building a relationship or conveying a story. So each donor database and honestly, even each segment within that database may be different. And it's your job as newly minted email marketing experts to find out what the audience likes, what message is delivered and what format they prefer. And you can do this through testing. So test your emails using images versus no images, videos versus no videos, templates versus no templates. You can see what works better with your specific audience. And a tip, if you do use graphics, please avoid stock images, please. Use real photos of the people you're actually helping because it does make a massive difference. People can spot stock images from a mile away and it's a bit of a turnoff. Tip number eight is track your results. So now here's where it all comes together. Tips one through seven are important, but the real indicator of your success here is in your metrics. You can tell a good email campaign from a bad one by both comparing it against your previous campaigns as well as against industry benchmarks. For example, on average fundraising emails result in a 17% open rate and a 0.56% click-through rate. If your fundraising email open rates fall below these percentages, you may want to reconsider your current strategy. If your results exceed the benchmarks, congratulations, you're doing a great job. Here are a list of common nonprofit benchmarks. These are from M&R benchmarks. We use them very consistently. You can also look to HubSpot, Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, MailChimp, all of these provide industry benchmarks for the nonprofit sector. The trick here is kind of choose one and stay as consistent as you can. So in Kila, you actually have a choice on how to benchmark yourself. You can benchmark yourself against the nonprofit sector as a whole or you can become a little bit more granular and choose your specific cause area. You can also benchmark yourself against yourself if you really wanted to. So you can see how you've improved year over year or in whatever timeframe you choose. We let you decide how you want to measure your organization based on what campaigns you're sending and what your organization's goals are. All right, now that we've chosen how we want to benchmark ourselves, we're going to go over four key email marketing metrics to track your fundraising campaign success. And the first is your open rate. This is the percentage of email recipients who open your email. This metric helps you understand whether your contacts no one trusts you, if you're sending them content they want, and whether they think your emails are worth reading in the first place. High open rates will typically correlate with compelling subject lines. But if you notice that you have low open rates, it means you need to take a bit more time and focus on that hook of the email and making sure that it stands out in the inbox. So if your open rates are far below average, you need to reconsider your mailing list. Did you know that it's best practice to stop emailing people who haven't opened any emails from you in the last year? Millennial Sam coming out here, if your donors are ghosting you, it's time to stop texting them. And that's because completely unengaged stakeholders are not who you want to spend your time on, or at least not via email. No, that's when you get out a boombox and you head over to their place, Ella, John, QSAC for all you GenXers. You can ask them if they want to stay on your list, and if you get no response, just remove them and start working with your more engaged contacts. So just like you print your garden to keep it strong and healthy, you can do the same thing with your contact database. It will give you a more realistic understanding of your metrics, so your actual open and click rates, and you're going to have a healthier crop. Sorry, I got really into gardening during COVID, so I had to slip that analogy in there. Your second metric is your click through rate or your CTR. So this is the number of contacts who opened your email, then clicked on your call to action. Also known as your engagement rate, this shows you how effective the content within your emails is, as well as the level of interest for your campaign or organization. If your click rates fall below the industry benchmark, it's time to consider switching something up, and you can do that by looking at emails that have performed well in the past. So those are your emails that you've determined that are above industry benchmarks, and you can ask yourself, what content do we use? How do we direct a reader's attention? So by critically analyzing those emails and figuring out what worked, you can take that and incorporate it into your emails going forward. All right, our third metric is the conversion rate. So this is the percentage of recipients who opened your email, clicked on your link, and also completed your desired action. In this case, it was making a donation. This gives you a big picture assessment of your email's engagement performance, and is especially useful for strategic planning. Because if you know that your conversion rate is consistently 1.7%, which by the way happens to be the nonprofit average, you can predict the expected results of your next campaign and plan accordingly. So this is where tips four through six really come into play. If your fundraising offer is appealing, if your call to action is attention grabbing, and your email hits a personal note with your reader, you're likely going to have a good conversion. But if you fall below what you expected or what your previous benchmarks have been, you need to look a little deeper into those three tips. There are a lot of fun experiments you can run an email marketing. And if you're looking to kind of spice up your communications, I really recommend following the next after Institute. They're leaders in this space. I love their blog. I spend a lot of time on their blog. Okay, our last tip, we're getting through this, I promise. Our last tip is bounce rates. This metric is the percentage of emails that don't get delivered to an inbox, and they can actually be categorized into two types. A hard bounce happens when an email has failed to deliver for permanent reasons, such as an invalid email address, you've been blocked by that sender, or because maybe 3000 spam box have signed up to your list. So it's important to clean your list occasionally. A soft bounce on the other hand is caused by a temporary delivery issue like a full mailbox or an offline server. Whatever the reason it's good to monitor your bounce rates, you can keep a close eye on the health of your mailing list. If yours is higher than the benchmark, it's time to include it and investigate why. And just circling back to that last slide, who I mentioned was the next after Institute. I'll pop the link into the chat as soon as I pass the reins over to LC. All right, I'm going to leave you off here with a tip. So most email marketing platforms charge per email volume. So I'm going to say that is the amount of emails that you send. But the higher your bounce rate, the more you're actually paying for emails that aren't being delivered in the first place. So FYI, Keela does not charge per email volume. We charge based on how many contacts are in your database, which is again, a good incentive to clean your list. Can you pick up on my theme here? Okay, now I know that was a lot of information to digest, but don't worry. I'm going to pass it off to my colleague, Elsie, who's going to show you how to incorporate these tips as well as how to automate a lot of them in Keela. So you don't have to. Thank you, Sam. What a beautiful segue. Let me just make sure I'm sharing my screen and the right screen. Everything looks good. Everyone should be able to see Keela, the land of purple. Sam's giving me a thumbs up. We did it. What a beautiful transition. What a beautiful segue. So technology, technology is sort of my field and where I spent a lot of my time in Keela. And one thing I've noticed is that it, yes, it has completely changed the world. It's changed how folks work in the world today. And for most industries, that is great news. It means that folks have been able to streamline their work or even reduce their work. But of course, nonprofits aren't exactly like most industries, are you? You're all the wearer of many hats. And that time saved, that the time that technology has saved you, most often just means that you've got more time to spend on something else. So the new opportunities created by technology are actually just more pressure for you to do more and more and more. And if you can squeeze more in there, you will. And it's amazing, but it can be really overwhelming. It can be exhausting. So for me, the single most important thing about automation is that technology is brilliant. It's changed the face of the world. We're all very grateful for it. But unless you can set up technology to run in the background without the need for anybody to do anything so that it ticks off all those lists, it's not really going to help you, is it? Sometimes it can make more work. So to hit technology's full potential, I think you need to investigate automation wherever you can. And that's where Keela is sort of coming in. I want to show you within the context of Keela how our automation tool can help with these kinds of things. But maybe it might get you inspired to think about your own automation tools or potentially investigate any sort of automation tools. Most of them can do a similar thing. But Keela's is connected to your CRM. So picture this. Storytime. You've built a fundraising strategy. You've created a beautiful set of marketing communications all based on Sam's tips that she's just gone through, and you've clicked send. Let the fundraising begin. But what happens now? Well, ideally, your whole team would be out in the field connecting one-on-one with your community, promoting your fundraising campaign. Or maybe you've got to do some much needed work in your cause area. The fundraising's been sent off. Let's get back to business. Or maybe everyone's just taking a very well-needed break. But you've actually just sent out thousands of emails now. And you're starting to receive responses. You've got donations that need to be processed, receipts to be issued. There's 100 email replies alone in your inbox that you need to sort through and respond to one-on-one. So no, no, everyone's in the office. Everyone's glued to their laptops sorting through the admin of such a large fundraising undertaking. So now that I've set the scenario and perhaps given you all some stressful flashbacks, sorry, I wanted to show you how an automation tool could save you in this part, the part once you've clicked send. So when donations are received in Keela, all of the receipts are created and emailed out automatically. Donations are processed and contact information is up to date. That all happens automatically. That part's already checked off. But what about everything else? How can I make sure that I'm following up with folks who don't open my emails? How do I send powerful thank you messages for first-time donors to make sure that their first experience with us is super engaging? But I don't want to have to sort through my first-time donors and my returning supporters, right? And then send one separate email for each. That's too much manual work. And it's all great questions, but automation can do that for you without you having to do a bunch of meaningful tasks. So we're back in Keela. The land of purple, we're very keen on the color purple here. Hopefully you find it as soothing as I do. And I want to show you our automation tool. I want to show you an example of creating a workflow that you could run after your fundraising campaign that would automate some of those things I just touched on. So let's go in. I'm going to create a workflow. I'm going to call it my September fundraising campaign because I'm an inventive genius and not very creative and we'll save it. Okay. So first things first. What I need to do is to choose when this workflow that's going to automate all of these actions and tick off all of these things in the background, when should it start? And I have a list of all these starting points I can choose from in Keela. And I'll show you as an example of them so you get an idea of what I mean by the starting point. So we've got three different types of starting points in Keela. The first one is contacts. So what this means is that the starting points for these new contacts added or tag is added to a contact. It's all based on things that happen to people or organizations in my Keela account. So all my contacts include my donors, my volunteers, if I have a volunteer run organization, my team members, the people working at my organization, maybe my board members, all the folks who sign up online to receive our newsletter. It's every contact I have in my address book really. And these starting points relate to when something happens to them. So if a new contact is added, perhaps this is when a new contact signs up online to receive our newsletter. Or when a tag is added to a contact, maybe my team members sort our contacts through volunteer tags and donate donor tags or board member tags. So I could choose one of those tags. And when a contact is automatically added to it, they'll automatically trigger this workflow. Next is transactions. It's pretty straightforward. This workflow will start when a contact makes a transaction. So maybe they make a donation or when they schedule a recurring transaction. So maybe they sign up to give on an ongoing basis. So that's when this workflow will start in that way. And then lastly, I think more relevant to what we've been talking about today, it's the workflow will start when something happens to do with an email. So we've got contact receives an email, contact opens an email, contact clicks a link in an email, and those three sort of points should sound very familiar after we've just looked at Sam's track your results. So in this case, my workflow might start when I send out my fundraising email, I've incorporated all of Sam's points, I've created a beautifully branded, beautifully beautiful subject line nice and snappy. I've sent out a fundraising campaign marketing email to all of my supporters. And I'm ready to start the workflow. That was the beginning of this kind of task. So I'm going to start my workflow with contact receives email, they need to receive that fundraising email. So go ahead and I'll add that. And I'm just going to choose my September fundraising. We call our mass emails in killer eblasts, but just think of it as a mass email when folks receive that in their inbox, the workflow will begin. And so this is kind of the beautiful thing about automation and workflows is that I can choose when a contact is added into it, when it begins, and then I can choose to have different stages, different actions and specific events that occur as my contact moves through this workflow, depending on how they interact with my email, depending on bits and pieces of information on their profile, perhaps, and it lets me really personalize their journey. So now I know they're going to start as soon as the contact receives that fundraising, the September fundraising email that has a beautiful call to action saying donate our puppies need you. Then we're going to hit a couple of things called stages and these are the really exciting kind of parts of automation of workflows. This is the stage where the magic happens. And we've got a couple of different stages in here, I'll run through all four of them. So you can kind of get an idea of what they do and how it works with with automating things in the background. So we start off with if else. And what this means is that a contact is going to hit this stage, they'll begin the workflow, they'll receive the email, and then they'll go to the next stage and they'll hit this if else stage. And what it does is it gives you a checkpoint. Keela sort of keeps them at this checkpoint and you get to ask a question. Does this contact match this specific thing? Does it match this filter? Do they have this specific piece of information connected to their profile? And if they do, they'll go one way and if they don't, they'll go another way. So it's a way of adding a fork in the road that automatically lets you filter folks. And Sam spent a lot of time at the start, tip number one in fact, on segmentation and how it's important to sort your contacts into buckets that are relevant to them because it helps you to make more personal communications and more personal connections with them. And using things like this, like an if else statement to create a fork in the road, let's Keela do or your system do the segmentation automatically for you so you don't even need to think about it. Wait for a trigger. So in this scenario, a contact would hit the workflow, they would receive that email which starts the workflow and they would hit this stage and Keela would say wait, wait for a specific trigger, wait for something to happen. And there's a bunch. This is probably my most favorite one but it's not the most important one. But it can be things like contact receives email, contact opens an email, contact clicks on an email, wait until this specific action occurs. And I actually think that's what I might use for this one. I think now my next thing that I want to look at now that I know that they've received the email because that was the starting point, the next thing might be that they need to open it. That might be what we're waiting for. And Keela will create a fork in the road here as well, wait for them to open it or wait for them not to wait for this trigger to happen or wait for it not to happen. And I'll show you in a moment what that looks like. We'll just finish up with these stages and we can look deeper into that. The next stage type that you can have is really simple. It's just delay, delay the next stage. So a contact receives this email that starts the workflow and then they hit this stage and Keela just says wait, just delay for a specific amount of time. And this can be really good if you've got someone new signing up to your organization or perhaps a first time donor. Maybe you want to send them a welcome email, but you don't want to send it straight away. Maybe you want to give them a little bit of time. Perhaps you want to wait 24 hours. So you might put a delay the next stage here and say wait 24 hours and then automatically send them a welcome email as an example of that. Speaking of sending automatic emails, the last stage we've got, which I think is probably the most important one, is the action. So this is the bread and butter of automation, of the workflows. All of these ones we've been looking at so far has just been a way to tell Keela how to organize your contacts and what path to send them down. The ultimate purpose of it is for these actions to be taken into play. So you can send out an email. You can, in the past, so in advance, you can create a beautifully marketable email with images and call to actions and subject lines and save it to this workflow. And when your contact hits this stage, when they filter through, when they hit this stage in the workflow, the email will be automatically sent. We've got things like notifying users or adding to dos to user profiles. It's a brilliant way to help automate your team members work. So maybe you hit a stage in your automation where someone needs to make a phone call or someone needs to send a letter. And it's not something that can be done automatically. Someone's actually got to pick up the phone and call. What I could do is add it to do so that would automatically pop up on my team members profile when the contact hit this stage and they needed a phone call. So it kind of automates that while it's not automating the phone call itself because of course, we still need the one on one connection. We still need people. It's automating the room that it would take to hold those tasks in your mind. You can start sort of using Keeler to prompt instead of having to keep track of who needs a call when. And lastly, you've just got the option to add or remove tags or update some fields on contacts profiles. So this can just be handy if you use some filters to manage folks. You can automate the updating of that information. So let's get back to my example. I have a workflow. I want it to be all of these steps that occur after I send out my September fundraising campaign email, my marketing email, the big one that I spent all this time creating. So the first thing I want to do is make sure folks are opening that email. It's such an important statistic Sam just took us through. So I'm going to have my first stage. I send the email, the contacts get entered into this workflow. Stage number one, contact opens email. Let's add that. Now I want it to be that specific email that I chose. They need to open that September fundraiser email. And I'm going to wait a specific time. I'm going to give them some time to open it. Let's say they have 10 days to open it. And I'll go ahead and I'll save that. So now you can see I've created a little fork in the road. We have contact enters here when they receive that email. So the September fundraiser email lands in their inbox. They're automatically entered into this workflow. And then I want to wait 10 days to see if they're going to open that email. And you can see we've got two different paths. If they say yes, if they do open that email, they're going to go down this path over here. And if they don't open that email, they'll start down this path here. So this is where things get really interesting, because you can personalize your automated responses based on how your contacts are interacting with your email. So you can make sure that you're only sending a follow-up email to folks who've opened it, but it also happens automatically. You create all of these emails and all of these follow-ups in this automation workflow before you click send, so that afterwards when your fundraiser is rolled out, all this stuff ticks off automatically. Okay, let's continue on with building this. So a contact opens, contact opens email. Yes, let's work on this path first. This is the path we're hoping folks will do. So when a contact opens an email, I want to add another state. What happens next once they've opened it? What am I waiting for then? In this case, I'm going to wait for a trigger again. I'm going to wait for something specific to happen, and I want it to be that the contact makes a transaction. Specifically, I'd like it to be a donation. So I'll add this as the next stage. I'll make sure that my transaction type is donation. If I wanted to, I could specify it even further. I could say it must be someone who's a first-time donor to tick on to this next step, or maybe a donation within a specific time period. Maybe they haven't donated in a year or something like that. I can get very granular, but we'll keep it simple today, but that's the next stages. And I'm going to wait 14 days. So in this case, the next stage is wait for a trigger, and that trigger should be that the contact makes a transaction, a donation transaction, within 14 days. And again, this has created another path because either they will make a transaction within 14 days, or they won't. And that's the goal of this fundraising campaign, right? I want folks to hit that call to action. And that call to action, the big button that I've got in my mass email, is to make a transaction. So the ultimate goal is for folks to end up here, yes. But some folks might not. And we want to be able to follow up in a way that is appropriate for that. That's where automation is sort of giving me the power to do that. So we'll go, contact makes a transaction. If they tick all the boxes, if they open my email, they receive my email, they open it, and then they click on the call to action button, and they make a transaction, I want to send them a massive thank you email. So I'll go here and I'll click actions. And this time we're going to send them an email. And I'll do this email in advance. I'll make it look beautiful. I have a perfect subject line. So let's make it something impactful. You've helped us save five puppies today. So they know exactly how their donation, how their gift has made an impact. And it's told a story. And we've connected with them on a personal level, based on Sam's tips, right? So I'll add some content to it. Maybe you want, you have your own template that you've created for this, or perhaps you want to use one of Kiehler's templates and adjust that. You can do that in here with our email marketing tool, our inbuilt email E-blast tool. But I'm just going to use a template because this is more about automation than anything. So let's go back to the workflow and I'll show you. So contact receives an email. If they open it, yes. If they make a transaction, yes, they're going to get this email here. But if they opened it, but haven't made a transaction within 40 days, if they haven't donated or followed that call to action within 14 days, then maybe I might send them a follow up email. Because I know they opened the email, they read it. Maybe they forgot about it. Maybe they got distracted. Maybe they need a little nudge. So if they haven't made a transaction within 14 days, I might send them an email just saying that puppies are waiting, something along those lines, something snappy and short. And then in this case, they'll get this email. And if I wanted to, I could add another fork in the road and say, well, did they make a transaction after this? Do I send another follow up email and so on and so forth? I think that's enough though. I think that's enough for now for the yes. But what happens if they didn't open the email? If we go back up here, we've still got a whole branch that we haven't even touched yet. Contact opens email, no. So if they didn't open that email within 10 days, then perhaps I would send a follow up email. Maybe a reminder, just saying, hey, we're still here. We still need you, something along those lines as a reminder. And then perhaps after that, I could say, okay, did they open that email? Did they make the transaction after that email? And if they didn't, maybe I'll put an action. Maybe I'll put a to do in there for my fundraising coordinator, Nicole. I want her to unsubscribe these folks because we need to remove them from our lists. If they're not opening our emails, as Sam said, it's important to keep our email marketing list clean. So maybe I'll add it to do like this and I'll just say unsubscribe them. And I'll give Nicole seven days to do that and I'll find Nicole in here. So what's going to happen now is if a contact enters this workflow, they receive the email, they don't open it within 10 days, we'll send a reminder, just letting them know, maybe retry one more time. And then if they don't make a transaction, we'll just add a to do at it, where we just say, okay, maybe they're not as engaged in this, maybe we'll remove them from our list, spend more time and more our efforts on someone who's really interested in what we're doing here. So that's an example of how automation could help after the fundraising is complete, and how it helps you use the subject lines, the call to actions, the open rates, the click like rates automatically. So it's not a lot of menial tasks. We've got lots of other examples as well that I'd like to sort of show you really quickly. So things that we've created ourselves are in here, we had it's very fun to play around with this stuff. But I want to show you particularly the one that Maggie has created, because I think it's just beautiful. So in here, because this is an active workflow, you can see that we've got all of these kind of statistics to show you. So you can see how many contacts have completed the workflow, who's been entered, how many are in progress, you can see the dates that folks entered it. So the dates that folks receive the email or whatever the starting point was. But more importantly, we have all this information about the exit performance. So when did they drop out of the workflow? How many people aren't reaching exit number one? So exit number one might be they opened the email, they clicked in the email, and they made a transaction. And you might find you've got a lot of people dropping off at a specific point, maybe you need to review your call to action and at that point, or your subject line at that point, it tells you where you need to look to investigate. And then down here, you've also got email performance. So it gives you the delivery, delivery rates, open rates and click rates of all the emails sent within the workflow. And then down here, the to-dos that might be being generated from it. But I just want to show you the workflow she's created because absolutely beautiful. So it's based on the concept of a volunteer signing up online. So they complete a form. That's when the workflow starts. They complete our volunteer sign up form. And they're automatically tagged with potential volunteers. Then we wait 15 minutes and then we send them the volunteer application form automatically. And then we wait for them to complete that form. And if they do complete the form, they get a tag, volunteer applicants, and we let them know we've received their application. But if they don't, we'll wait a couple of days and we'll send them a follow up to saying, hey, we're still waiting on your application form here it is in case you misplaced it. So it's things like that. It gets very, very deep. You can see sort of all the layers of the stages that Maggie has going here. Can be really fantastic. We've got lots of other examples like a new welcome workflow, which I think is really good. When a new contact signs up to your newsletter, you can send them like a welcome pack that gives them the rundown of who you are, what you do, and how they can help. Gives them the opportunity to choose how they'd like to be contacted. So you can manage their email subscriptions in that way as well. We've got a special email that gets sent out to anybody who makes a donation over $500. They get a special thank you. We've got event registration. And here's a really cool one, lifetime donation. So Keela's constantly calculating in the background all of my contacts total lifetime donations with my organization. And as soon as they hit 5000, they get this special email and their profiles automatically updated saying this person's a major donor. They hit the lifetime donations of $5000. Okay. So I think the thing that you should take away from this, the thing I'm really hoping that you'll take away, is that if you're doing it right, automation should be an extra team member. It's the team member that you give all of your menial administrative tasks to, you set it up and you let it go. It's the team member that helps you sort folks into really personalized and meaningful segments so that you can build relationships without the need of a bunch of administration. So whether it's keel or any tool that you're using, automation should be used for all that menial stuff, the stuff that as many tasks as you can muster. And then the really cool thing is once you've used them to make some room, once you've used them to create some space, then you can start using that room you've created to think, okay, how can I take automation to the next level? How can I use this to take our organization as far as we can? So the possibilities are really endless. Thanks for letting me chat. Thanks, Sam. Thanks so much, Elsie. So I just popped this back up. I'm going to answer Deb's question. If I haven't answered your question in the Q&A or I'll answer them live, but if I missed your question in the chat, just feel free to repost it and I'll get to it. But just certainly back up to Deb, what's the fee for Keelah? Our packages start at $89 a month for 1,000 contacts, but good segue, we are offering a discount through TechSoup. So you actually get 40% off your first annual Keelah subscription and then every consecutive year afterwards you get 20% off as well. So that's called our tech pack, and I believe Maggie will pop that link back up in the chat for you so you can look at it for your own time. But other than that, I think we're ready to go to questions. So, guys, thank you. I was writing notes, automation is something I need to get better at. You want to go ahead and read. I see some questions been answered, but you can go ahead, Samantha, for the Q&A. Sure. Perfect. All right, so I see this first one from Catherine. I worked for a direct service provider for many years and got reasonably good at storytelling, but now I'm working for a coalition. So we're one more degree removed from the clients. We help other agencies help clients. I see. Okay, so what are some good ideas for authentic stories in that scenario? Donations to us, paper training and resources for other agencies, not for direct service. You know what though? Storytelling is authentic, right? So tell that story. You're an enabler. You're the start of the chain for good things to happen. So you could do it too pronged. You could talk about the agencies that you help, and then you could talk about how that helps other people, right? So that trickle down effect. You can do interviews with that agency, with people in that agency, or you could even interview the people that are again on the ground working directly with communities. See if you can interview someone from that community and just kind of show where that donation is going. And again, it's all about testing. Say you try a story out and it doesn't land well with your audience. That's okay. That's when you know that now so you can pivot your storytelling and try something else. I hope that answers your question. Okay, I got another question. Can you benchmark more than one category, like your specific business category and yourself? Of course, you definitely want to do that. So say you're benchmarking yourself against your industry or cause area, perfect. You know that you're meeting the minimum amounts of open rates, the minimum amounts of click rates, you're like, great, cool. I'm doing a great job. But say you then benchmark yourself against yourself and you're like, okay, well, last year I did fundamentally so much better of what's changed. So you can kind of take a look at how those metrics have shifted. And again, you always want to benchmark yourself against yourself because you always want to improve. You always want to grow. Okay. Also, there's key laggies answering the Dory's question. So let Maggie continue typing on that one. And I might move to Corey's question, Dory and Corey. How can we add a form to the website that isn't just a donation form? Good question. So I'll take this a couple of ways. I'll hit three different possibilities that this could be and hopefully I land on one of them. So if you want multiple forms on your website in respect to Keela, you can definitely do that. We've got all these different types of forms. Or actually, no, there's a clarification. For example, if we just want to have a form for Keela to register newsletter signups. Beautiful. I was going to hit it with the first one. So yeah, we've got a couple of different forms that you can have. We've got subscription forms. We've got revenue forms, which just accept payments that aren't donations. We've got membership forms and then custom forms that you can use to just ask questions. So in this case, if you're wanting to add a form to your website that was a newsletter subscription, you would just go to Keela and you would create that. You would choose that type. And the cool thing about it is that there are still automations that you can use for all of your forms outside of the automation tool as well that are included with Keela. So it's things like you can automatically tag folks. You can ask anybody as many questions as you like on your forms. So if you did use a subscription form that just automatically asks for full name and email address, if you wanted, you could ask a couple of other questions. You could say, well, you would say, do you opt in to receive marketing communications from us? That's a standard one. But you could also say, how often do you want to hear from us? Give folks a choice about how often they'd like to receive communications. So that's a really good one for me. When I'm signing up, I find that I get weekly messages from some folks and I wish they would just chill out and I could change it to one month or maybe even yearly. So that's another way you can use the form. And then you can also say, well, what are you interested in? Do you want to hear about fundraising? Do you want to hear about our special events? Do you want to just receive our newsletter? So you can definitely just have a newsletter sign up form with Keela. But then that's some examples of how you can take it further as well. Thank you for clarifying. That would have been a much longer answer if I hadn't seen that. So brilliant. All right, let me cross these guys off. Okay, so I've got another question. Do you have to perform your exact value proposition as you state? IA of $10 provides one free book to school. Can you receive a thousand? Do you have to donate 100 books? Can the value be closer to that number but not exact? Absolutely. This is again to help tie your donor base into your community and the work that you do. Like I said, it's oversimplified. It's not going to cover the breadth and scope of everything that you do. It just gives people a better idea of what are some of the ways that you help that community, how kind of that cost is broken down. It doesn't have to be exact. It's about building trust. It's about building community and building relationships. The next question is for me. Does it integrate with existing website service? So I think that means the Keela forms or at least Keela in general. And yeah, all Keela's forms can be embedded into any website. We just use a code, HTML code, which is a fancy way of saying the same language that your website is based on. So you can just put anything, all of the forms, one of the forms, two of the forms, as long as you have access to the back end of your website, you can put all of them up there. So any website, does Keela integrate with GoDaddy? So GoDaddy is a domain system. So yeah, Keela does in terms of you can put a Keela form into any website, regardless of if it's GoDaddy or if it's Wix or anything like that. All our forms can go to all websites. And then in terms of GoDaddy, you can also connect your GoDaddy domain, so your fancy domain to your Keela account as well. And then MailChimp, we also have an integration with MailChimp where you can use, connect your MailChimp account to Keela so that anybody who's added to your Keela account is automatically sent through to MailChimp and organized in a way that you want. But we also have our own email marketing tool as well that's included with Keela subscriptions. So if you are paying for MailChimp and you purchase Keela, you might consider actually sticking with Keela because it's included in your subscription. But I know that MailChimp is free for one audience, I think up to one. So lots of folks have both going if they've got the free option too. Yeah. Well, excellent, ladies. Thank you so much for your time. This has been amazing. I learned a lot. Lots of takeaways in the comments section. People were saying, look, this is what I needed. I learned so much. This is headed me in a different direction. So thank you so much. Thank you for magnifying the background. And Allison, thank you so much for joining us. Come back again. Will you guys come back again? I'd love to. We love working together. So we're always happy to chat too. We're pretty chatty. Yeah. Thank you so much. Sorry about all the weather comments. That's all we've got. Thanks, everyone. Everybody. As you're taking care of everybody else, make sure you take time to take care of yourself and have a great day. Bye-bye. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much. Bye.