 Good morning, and thank you so much for joining us as we close out our Part 2 series of Winter is Coming, Get Ready for Year End Giving. I am your host and your chat facilitator, LaChica Phillips, and today's presenter is Michael Stein. Michael Stein has been a writer and a digital strategist to progressive social causes for more than 20 years, and we are really, really glad to have him to present today. We also have helping us with chat today is Susan Hope Bard. If you have any technical concerns or any issues, feel free to chat your message out, and we will handle any issues that you have. Again, thank you so much, and happy Friday to everyone. And as I mentioned, this is Michael Stein, the digital strategist, and again, my name is LaChica Phillips. Before we get started, I want to make sure that everyone is comfortable using ReadyTalk. 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As some of you know, for those of you who are not new to TechSoup, you know that our mission is to build a dynamic bridge that really enables civil society organizations and social change agents like a lot of you that have joined us today to help you all gain effective access to all of the resources that you need to design and implement solutions for a more equitable world. And we are doing all of this outside of the sunny and bright San Francisco this morning. And we are really curious and we want to know, where are you joining us from? So if you will please take a second and in the chat box, this will also help us to see who has any issues chatting out or using the chat box. So simply just tell us where are you joining from? Wow, we have learners from all over. I see Mexico and New York City and Washington D.C. We really, really appreciate you all joining us today. And all of the places that you've listed, I've even seen Nashville, that's my hometown. Thank you all so much for joining. But I really want you to be aware that this map that you see before you and all of the places that I've mentioned and all of these places that people are chatting out, this is where TechSoup, all of these places that you see in the shaded blue area, these are the locations where TechSoup provides and facilitates donation programs. This is pretty massive. And what we do is we partner with companies like Microsoft and Adobe and Cisco and all of the companies as you can see here listed right before you. We partner with them and they help us to be able to provide all kinds of technology and resources from our website. And so what you can do to learn more, again, go to TechSoup.org. And I always recommend check out the nonprofit favorite section. So if you haven't had a chance to check out the new website, TechSoup.org, and there is a new section there it's called the nonprofit favorite section. So be sure to check that out. So Michael, as I mentioned, this man, he is just a wealth of knowledge. And if you joined us for part one, then you know that you are in store for even more information to really rock out the rest of this year with your organization. But for those who are not familiar with Michael, he has authored three books and he has written several articles about the rise of digital marketing, mobile, and online fundraising. He is also a contributor for our TechSoup blog and he also works as a consultant to coach other nonprofits and foundations and educators. So again, Michael, thank you so much for joining us and take it away. Thank you so much, Leshika, for that introduction. And hello everybody. This is Michael Stein coming to you from Northern California. It's great to see where everybody else is from on that list. So that's great. Today we are going to spend the next 25 minutes or so talking about year-end giving with a focus on digital strategies. And I hope that some of you were able to join us for part one on November 17. And I actually wanted to start by doing a very quick review of what we covered in part one just to set the stage. And I'm sure not all of you were able to be there. So here's what we covered in part one. And first we talked about planning for Giving Tuesday. And I hope that many or all of you had a successful Giving Tuesday campaign. If we had more time I'd love to hear more about it. I know that Giving Tuesday can be challenging as a fundraising event. But I still think it's an important opportunity for nonprofits. And I hope that many of you were able to take advantage of that. And last time we talked about preparing your website for year-end fundraising. We talked about the importance of putting content on your homepage with clear calls to action and headlines. And we also talked a lot about pop-up light boxes and other ways to feature content on your website. The third thing we covered was creating an email appeal series. And just the importance of doing that across the month of December to create a story and to bring your donors along for that experience. The fourth thing we talked about was the importance of engaging your donors on social media and really the importance of doing multi-channel messaging in the year-end. And then the fifth thing we covered was just the importance of measuring everything you can just so that we can learn as much as possible year to year. So let's quickly talk about what we're going to cover today. We're going to talk, first of all, about finding good spokespeople for your fundraising appeals. We're going to talk about using a challenge match to encourage giving. We're going to talk about promoting monthly giving in addition to one-time gifts. We're going to talk about mobilizing your email so that they're easy to read on mobile devices. And finally, we will close out by talking about the importance of optimizing your donation pages since that's where the money comes in. Great. So our first topic today is finding good spokespeople for your year-end fundraising appeal. And I still think this is really one of the most critical elements to good storytelling at the year-end. And being able – you're obviously going to write good appeals, but it's really the storyteller, the person who is presenting it, I think who is really important. And this person speaks for you and is going to represent your work. And I just think it's really important to focus and find good folks to do that. And the question you're really asking yourself with these people is, who can speak for you and really inspire your donors to give? So I think your traditional folks that you're going to be using as spokespeople are going to be executive directors, they're going to be someone on your board, or they might be a project staff. And this example actually over here on the left, is kind of a good example of a project staff. But I also just want to encourage you to be creative about spokespeople. Maybe there's someone, a community member that you've worked with, a partner. Maybe there's like a volunteer who's been really active in the community and represents your work. And maybe there's even a donor who can also be a spokespeople and an author, either an email or have a picture on the website or something on social, maybe even do a video. So really I just encourage you to be creative and really just try to be authentic as you're coming up with your spokespeople. Another couple of examples, I always love this Jeff Bridges one from No Kid Hungry. I know not everyone has access to celebrities, but always an example of how to put people just front and center in emails when you're doing fundraising. And here's two other examples from Mercy for Animals. Again, just the importance of figuring out how to put their voices front and center, and to connect them to the work that you're doing. So I think these are good examples that I wanted to showcase for you. Okay, let's go on. Our second topic is the importance of using a challenge match at the year end. And the reason why we see so many of these challenge matches, frankly, is because testing has shown us that it really works. It really makes an impact. It catches people's eye, and either in the subject line, or in social, or in other places. And the important point is that you just want to get people to make gifts. And there's going to be lots of people who are going to be ready to give at year end. And then there's going to be folks who are on the fence and not quite sure. So really the purpose of the challenge match is to get people to give a little bit more, and then also to get people to get off the fence who aren't thinking of giving you a, yeah, let me give a small amount because I know that it's going to be doubled. Also matches can work at kind of a different giving level, and it's important to sort of think a little bit about how to frame that. This example, by the way, over here on the right, which is from the plowshares one a few years ago, was actually for kind of a mid-level appeal to people on their file. So someone gets $75 to get doubled, et cetera, et cetera. But these are slightly higher giving levels. So this is what I mean by if you're just going to your main donors, or to people who have not given, or people who are last donors, you may want to use examples that are a little bit lower, like a $10 gift gets us $20, or even a $5 gift gives us $10. So it's important to think about the giving level. And of course, challenge matches, you can use those. You want to promote them throughout your different channels that you're using. Email on your website, on your social channels. And let me show you a couple of examples to inspire you a little bit. So here's a challenge match that I love which was used by Berkeley Humane a couple of years ago. I thought this one was super clever. Well, first of all, it wasn't just a double challenge match. It was a triple challenge match that they rolled out just for one day which I thought was very smart. And then in addition to that, they were just able to, in a very kind of clever way, kind of focus on the animals in the case of dogs and to tie it in. And I just thought that was nicely done. And they tied in clearly like they need the money especially at year end because they have more animals in their shelters. And so I just thought the call to action was really strong here. Here is a quick example of a pop-up light box that features the match challenge. This one is from, sorry, the name of the organization does not appear, but this is International Medical Corps. I thought this one just was nice the way it kind of blends the call to action with a photograph. I mean, I tend to like it when these headlines talk a little bit more about the value proposition and what the money goes towards. But I think the image is obviously strong enough and they are going out to the International Medical Corps community. I think people in that case know a lot of what they do already. The other place that is important to promote the challenge match is like on the donation page which is actually a super important place to put it that people are either clicking on an email or they are clicking on social. They have gone from a light box and they end up on the donation page. And so this is a good place to remind people of how they are going to get doubled. In this example, they are getting, I don't know, are they getting 3 for 1 or 4 for 1? I think it is actually a 4 for 1 match, but it does say 3 for 1. Anyway, but just a good place. This is an example from Defenders of Wildlife and it is just an important place to feature the match. Our third topic is the importance of promoting monthly giving during the year end giving season. And this is really an interesting topic for me recently just because monthly giving, in other words people not just giving a one-time gift of say $50 but giving a gift of $10 a month which is then repeated every single month. It is just one of the fastest growing types of charitable giving and the reason why of course it is popular is it gives people the ability actually to give a little bit more but to spread it out. So in these kind of lean times where people are giving to multiple charities, it is really a great way for people to give. It is very convenient. People can put it on one of their debit cards or a credit card and it runs automatically and people feel like they can make those gifts all year round. And of course, the other from when you are managing a donation program, obviously you want, it is nice to have bigger gifts at once, but the data shows that when people give smaller monthly amounts, then their value as a donor typically goes up. They tend to become donors longer. They stay longer on your file. And then you typically raise more money from those individuals. So again, the importance in monthly giving, it is important to try to, even when you are doing it year end, I mean when you are asking for a year end fundraising gift you do not have to just say make a gift of $25. You can say make a gift of $25 or $50 or give us a monthly gift and help us all year round. So you can really kind of massage that language a little bit to make that really, really interesting. And super important to remember on the donation pages. So let me give you a couple of quick little examples here that I think are useful. Here is a good one which talks about becoming an investigator ally, donate monthly, and in fact they are combining a match with the monthly gift which is actually kind of a pretty clever kind of approach there as a solution. Here is a good example of promoting monthly giving on a donation page. So this is actually a Giving Tuesday campaign as you can see here. It is from the No Kid Hungry Organization. And they have the one time button that is already highlighted, but they are also very clearly promoting monthly giving right here as I am highlighting for you. You can see the text. I hope you can see this that a monthly gift does even more to help hungry kids which I think is a really good way to promote monthly giving within a year end campaign. Typically of course the people click the monthly giving button, these donation amounts below here will change a little bit and get a little tiny bit lower. So in a perfect world that gives people a lot of great choices. Another example, I have a couple of other quick examples of using pop-up life boxes to promote monthly giving. These two examples that I have here are not actually from the year end, but I think that they are just inspiring examples of how you can talk about making a monthly gift and the importance of just highlighting whenever possible, even during the year end time frame. And then finally, another approach that I have seen people use to promote monthly giving campaigns at the year end is just to talk about it as a goal. So you don't only have to talk about we need to raise $10,000 this year end. You can also talk about we need to find 100 or 200 new monthly donors this year end. So this idea of creating a monthly giving campaign within the year end framework is something that I am seeing more and more of. You can do it at any time of the year but obviously the year end season I think is a perfect time to do that. And I certainly encourage people to give that a try. Our fourth topic is the importance of mobilizing your emails. In other words, making your emails mobile responsive. And I think this is particularly important during the year end framework, the year end time frame, principally because there is such a deluge of email that are being sent out to prospective donors. And more and more people as you know are reading their emails, browsing their emails on their phones. And so the importance of having mobile responsive emails is just critical of doing a little bit of testing. If you create an email, make sure you have people on your staff or some volunteers who can get a test message and can tell you, gee, the image at the top is too small or the text is too small or I can't see the links or the buttons are not visible, just all that kind of testing is important. There are some platforms that you can use like Litmus and Email on Asset if you want to really get into the nitty-gritty of mobilizing emails but even just doing some basic testing on your emails is super important. So this example, I'll show you on the next slide. I've got a couple of examples just to talk a little bit. So you've got this corporate accountability example on the left, this Teddy Institute and another corporate accountability. Again, these are just three classic examples of how to keep emails very simple with the design, very easy to read on mobile devices. This one on the left here as you can see doesn't have really any images at all. It has a button at the bottom. It's got links throughout the text. This one is going to read really nicely on a mobile device. The one in the middle, a little bit more fancy. It's got images. In fact, it even has a video at the top that's embedded here. You'd have to click on it which then takes you to a website to see the video. But as you can see, everything is centered in one column. And this is going to look really nice on a mobile device. And the same thing with the one on the right, it's again all single column. But again, I think just ultimately the importance is making sure these headlines are really easy to read, making sure that there's single column, that there's no fancy grids and layouts and stuff like that. And just to do the testing and to do it with a couple of volunteers or with your staff that are using some different types of phones, different types of different sized screens. And I think that is going to help you get better performance out of your appeals. People are going to be more happy to open your messages in the future. And then when they do open them, you're going to get more clicks on these links and hopefully raise more money as a result. Our fifth topic, an almost final topic, is just the importance of optimizing those donation pages, making them as good as you can. Because this is the end of the funnel. You're messaging people on email, on the web, on social media. People are clicking on your links. They're clicking on your email. They're getting to these donation pages. And this is where you still have an opportunity to inspire people to give. And it's important – well, a couple of things. One, it's important that when they get to the donation page that all the messaging and all the visuals and everything that's there is matching the fundraising messaging that you've got as they're coming from other locations, from the web, from email, from social. So your headlines should be the same. The images should be either the same images or similar images, but it should all kind of interconnect nicely. Certainly the photos, I believe donation pages should have really strong photos to create good emotional feelings among prospective donors. And anytime you can sort of reduce the clutter, keep these donation pages as simple as possible, those are all going to be elements that are going to improve your conversion rate and lead to raising more money. Let's take a couple of quick looks at a few of them. Here's a really nice one from the International Medical Corps. I really love this headline and value proposition here at the top of this page. You are instantly reminding people why that donation is going to save lives and relieve suffering around the world. I think this is really helpful. You've got a strong photo here. You've also got examples of the impact that their donation is going to make on the work. So this is a terrific page. Here's a nice one also from CARE just recently from their recent Give Me Tuesday campaign. I really love the way that they do this little feature mission statement and show people where the money goes towards. They are a big global charity. I think they are always just trying to make sure that that's clear out there. So these are nice ones here. Here's another really nice donation page recently from the National Museum of African American History. They were doing a Giving Tuesday appeal which included get this wonderful hat to show your pride in the museum. And they have hat on the donation page which I think is just so important. You are connecting the dots with the donor. When they get here, they are seeing the gift that they presumably were interested. So I think that's nicely done. And then here is another example from Fruits and Friends. I just think this is nice and big, clear design. Boy, is this a nice, simple donation page. I don't know what platform they are on but I think this one is going to look super nice on mobile devices and hopefully lead to good response rates and lots of good fundraising. And then I will just throw in a quick bonus 6th topic because I always like to talk about measuring things and just want to reinforce the importance of measuring and capturing analytics and data. So the key things are certainly what worked this year, what worked better than last year. So you are just trying to understand year over year where the differences were, which one of your e-mail appeals raised more money. You want to compare issues like the money you've raised, the number of donors that gave, and then the average gift and help you to draw some conclusions about how different appeals on different dates had better performance. Hopefully if you've done the monthly donor recruitment or promotion, that is probably an important area to be measuring. Did we get more monthly donors this year than last year? What did we do differently? How can we improve in the future? You certainly want to look at your different audience segments and just understand which audience segment did best. I mean you may be dividing your audience in various ways. They could be small donors, lapsed donors, old donors. They could be your monthly giving donors. They could be mid-level. They could be non-people have never given. So you want to look at performance across all those different areas. Or you may be measuring performance by how you acquired people's e-mail addresses if you did it with a certain project or with a partner. You certainly want to be measuring profit to your donation pages if you can. How did people get to your donation pages? If you can measure people who came from e-mail click-throughs, people who came from social media promotion, or people who just came just to your website completely organically, if you can measure those different types of traffic that gives you a wealth of information that helps you learn about what's working for you. And then if you can measure it, the conversion rate on your donation page, in other words, of the people who reach your donation page, how many complete a donation? I mean, the average, believe it or not, is way below 50%. Only half the people who get there are going to give. So this is a good measurement item and for you to keep learning about. And then finally, just always focusing on understanding how your social media presence is impacting your revenue. So if you're able to have like one donation page, for example, that's just for click-throughs from social media that would allow you to track that, for example. So I think that's another really useful thing to be measuring. And that gets us all the way to the end. So I will thank you and turn it back over to LaChica or Susan for any other items we want to cover today. Wow, thank you again, Michael. Thank you so much. Again, another day of a lot of information for all of the learners and the organizations that have joined us today to really go back to their office and maybe pull one item from your presentation today and possibly implement for the year-end. Now we do have a couple of questions before we close out. You mentioned a platform for mobilizing the emails. Can you repeat that? Sure, there's two platforms. One is called litmuslitmus.com and another one is called emailonacid.com. I know, a strange name. I didn't make it up. But both of those are places where you can upload an email and then it will show you how the email will be rendered and viewed on different types of mobile devices and different types of emails which are really useful to understand how your emails are going to be perceived on mobile. Okay, and the other questions, I think we have two more questions. A couple of questions about the match. From where will the match challenge come from? The money come from? And then he's asking will they have to line up someone to actually match the donation amount? Someone else is also asking about advice on how to get match donors. Sure, so typically a challenge match is obtained from one of your larger donors in your community. So it might be someone on your board. It might be someone who is a founder of your organization. It might even be a business partner or it might be a funder. But basically it's someone who steps forward and says, yeah, I want to put a $5,000 gift or more or less. And I want to challenge people in the donor community and I'll match all gifts up to this amount. And so therefore you can use that as part of the messaging. I've seen oftentimes I often see boards, board of directors that step forward to offer that kind of stuff. But I've also seen businesses do it as well. So they can come from various different locations. Okay, now Joanne here, she brings up a great point. She says that nonprofits associated with ministry are exempt from matching gifts. So she wants to know if you have any thoughts or suggestions on what they can do. Yeah, that is a good question. Yeah, I don't know. I probably turned to her and asked her for some ideas. I mean I would imagine that there's other strategies at your end that may work best. But I was not aware that that didn't work. I was not allowed in the ministry. Sorry about that. Okay, and we will send the links out. You will receive a recording. And Michael, can you go ahead and share your contact information if anyone wants to reach out to you? Yeah, I think probably the best thing would be to reach out to me either on Twitter, or on Mstein63 on Twitter. Or you can just go to my website which is michaustine.net. That's michaustine.net and there's a way to message me, contact me over there. Okay, thank you so much. I do see a couple of other questions coming in and we will email you the responses to those questions. We want to go ahead and realize that we are a little bit over time and we really want to respect everyone's time and appreciate you all for joining. Again, Michael, thank you so much for all of this valuable information. And before we go, we do have one second if the people who are participating today, if you want to chat out one thing that you've learned, a takeaway from today, or if there was something that you feel that your organization can take and implement today, or maybe even next week, feel free to share that out. We would really, really want to know what you're planning to do with this information and if it has been really valuable for you. So before we go, I want to show you the upcoming webinars that we have. We have one on December the 19th. It's actually part 3 of a series for libraries going deeper with social media. And then when we come back for the new year, we're going to get started on January 9th with Adobe Design. And you're going to learn tips and tricks for your next annual report. And then later in the month, we're going to give you some information and give you a great tour of our GrantStation program. And then we'll follow up on the very next day with even more information about GrantStation. So thank you so much everyone for joining us. We will follow up via email with the link and recording from today's webinar. And in the meantime, don't forget to check out the TechSoup.org website. And you can find our upcoming webinars and our archives here at the link shown on your screen here, techsoup.org, 4 slash community, 4 slash events dash webinars. And thank you again to our webinar sponsor, ReadyTalk.