 So welcome, everyone. We are really excited to have everyone here today. This webinar is our three steps to up-level your team's end of year fundraising strategy. This is a webinar for all of you fundraisers out there who are having a year 2023. We know has been a real challenge for a lot of organizations and fundraisers are at the heart of that and a heart of overcoming a lot of the challenges that nonprofits have faced. As we come into the Super Bowl of the Season, the end of year giving campaigns, we are really excited to be here and share some tips and ideas to help fundraisers get every edge that they can in maximizing their success as they do the work to support your organizations in all the various missions. So to give you a brief introduction of the panel that we have today, my name is Stefan Bird Kruger. I'm the Chief Analytics Officer at Parsons TKO. We oversee a lot of different work and my skills in particular come on the data side of fundraising. How can we use what we know about our audiences to give them the most relevant appeals, most relevant outreach and build relationships, long-term relationships with our organizations and their missions. I am and was to be one of your two panelists today. Unfortunately, as we were discussing before the call, I sound either like Barry White or perhaps James Earl Jones as I'm fighting cold. So I have brought a surprise guest, our Chief Growth Officer at Parsons TKO. Jamie, I'd love for you to introduce yourself. Great, well, thank you, Stefan, for inviting me to join today. It's a pleasure and an honor and I'm excited to be participating. And yes, as Stefan said, I'm the Chief Growth Officer at Parsons TKO and actually was at Bon Terror before this. So it's a little bit like coming home to be able to be on a webinar with Bon Terror today as well. I have spent the last 10 years in the nonprofit technology space, helping with lead acquisition and fundraising strategy, especially on the digital front. And before that, I was in the nonprofit space myself, working on developing community impact strategies and improving the business development strategies of our nonprofit community. And so I'm joining from Percival, Virginia today, right outside of DC. And I'm really excited to be here with Janet. And Janet, I'd love for you to take a moment to introduce yourself. Oh, you're muted. I am muted, sorry. Thank you for having me. Jamie and Stefan. I am Janet Cobb and I'm coming to you from Chicago as a personal fundraising coach at Bon Terror. I've been coaching with Bon Terror for since about 20, well, before it was Bon Terror, et cetera, et cetera. Since 2014, I've been coaching nonprofits across the country and strategy communication and fundraising. Prior to that, I've been in the nonprofit arena my entire life, literally. So I was first a service recipient and then I worked in nonprofits from the time I was about 16 years old. So I bring all of that with me into our conversation today, the wisdom that I've gathered from the 600 and some nonprofits that I've worked with. So thank you for having me. Now Jamie is muted. We'll figure this out, we'll figure it out. It's like we haven't been doing this for years and years and years. Thank you, Janet. We're so excited to be joined by you and over 600 nonprofits, definitely. We're gonna learn a lot today and I'm excited to be partnering with you on this as well. So Stefan, I think I'll take it from here if that's okay with you. But Stefan is definitely going to be staying involved in this so that he can lend his expertise because Stefan and I come with different experiences in the nonprofit space. And so together we form a whole in many cases. So Stefan and I put together this worksheet that we're gonna drop into the chat as a link. And the reason that we're going to do that now is because we're hoping that we can do a little bit of choose your own adventure, small step bingo, whatever you wanna call it. But basically we've created this opportunity for you all as you're kind of going through our conversation today to pick out the areas that you think you wanna focus on moving forward. And the reason that we're doing this is that we're gonna be talking a lot about a lot of different tactics you can deploy. It's not just three steps but we're gonna talk about what we mean by three steps. And then we're gonna give you a lot of opportunity to discuss how you can deploy those three steps in a multitude of different ways, depending on the capacity that you have inside your organization, your willingness, your greatest need and where you think you're gonna be able to make the most impact in your donor journeys this giving season. And so we wanted to give you a little something that you could kind of follow along with. And if you are confused or unfamiliar with some of the terminology that we have put in here we'd be happy to define that. Just drop into the chat your questions about it. And as we're kind of going through this we will attempt to define some of the terms that we're sharing with you as well as we go through it. So yeah, I think if there's no other questions or Janna you wanted to add anything to that we will move the conversation on and forward. I would just like to add that some of these words you may know what you may be doing these things and not knowing it just because everyone's vocabulary is different. So please don't be afraid to say, Hey, what is that? Because we'd like to explain it. I mean, I even had to ask like, what is that? And then as soon as they explain it's like, Oh yeah, yeah, I get that but that's not the word I use to describe it. So there are no silly questions. If you don't, if you have a question please put it in that Q&A and we'll take care of it hopefully today. Yes, absolutely. Great. Wonderful. Okay. Well, I'm gonna start us out by talking a little bit about the way that why we decided to do this webinar and why we decided to do it now. The first thing is that I don't know if you all have been to Target but recently Fall is here whether you realize it or not. Actually, I think Thanksgiving is here according to Target. We skipped over Halloween. I'm not really sure what happened there and we certainly were well on our way to the giving season. So it's time for us to start preparing now and we wanted to give people plenty of time to be thinking about what they're planning on doing this year and giving because stuff is changing. Our donors are changing, the tactics are changing, the technology is changing and all that requires us to try and continue to iterate on the fundraising strategies we've been deploying year over year in order to keep up with the times and keep up with our donors. We know that the Giving USA report came out recently and there's lots of debates on what that means for the giving sector but I don't think we can ignore the fact that we are facing a little bit of a dip in donations and individual donors and what that means for you might be that your strategies need to be improved upon. It might mean you need to shore up things that you may have neglected over the past couple of years during the pandemic. It could mean a great deal of things and so we wanted to provide this webinar as a chance to inspire you and also remind you that it is the small iterations, the 1% improvements that you take on this giving season that are gonna have the biggest difference and the more 1% you take on, exponentially you see improvement versus doing one major overhaul and we'll talk a little bit more about what those tend to end up being and why they might not provide the return on investment you're looking for this giving season as much as making those small iterative changes that are a little bit easier to deploy and a little bit faster and easier to maintain as well. And Jamie, if I could also just, I wanted to tap in briefly. Go on. You know, I think another perspective that we bring to this in our work as a consultancy we're working across lots of different departments. We're working across lots of different systems, different ways of working, different types of giving that different organizations are managing. And the one thing we see through all of that is there is no one place in an organization where you will find these solutions. When you were trying to find that little edge that you can get, it's not just about looking at your data. It's not just about looking at your technology. It's not just about looking at your staffing. It's the interconnection between all of these things. And that gets at this core principle that we have our Parsons TKO of Engagement Architecture is seeing that the relationships between all of these things is what creates the experiences and engagement that lead to more and more significant giving. Absolutely. Thank you, Stefan. And yes, that is at the core of what Parsons TKO is all about is if your audiences are at the center, your current, your pillar or your engagement is your main pillar. How are you building around that? And what are the key little small steps that you can take in order to improve that structure and improve that process and improve the experience that your donors end up having with you this giving season? And so I spoke a little bit about this, but to the idea that it is the small steps that you take that make the biggest difference. We see a lot of folks that look at their individual giving and are seeing a dip in participation in their giving programs and think we need to look at our technology and maybe it's a CRM switch or we need to launch a new channel. We need to get on threads. We need to get on threads. I don't know what it might be. We need to expand our plan. We need to create a plan giving program. We don't have one right now. These are big changes and big shifts that organizations can make, but they take a lot of strategic planning and to the point of the engagement architecture, they require bringing in a lot of different components within an organization to make that function. Thinking about a plan giving program, you need legal, you need digital, you need major gifts, you need finance, you need all of these different things in order to make that happen. And it's a huge endeavor to take on. And when you're preparing and up against a deadline of December 31st, that might not be the best use of your time. Whereas if we're looking on the right side of the screen, there's these small improvements that can add up in major ways like optimizing your calls to action in your email and on your website, improving your donor acquisition strategy, personalizing your follow-ups and your reoccurring asks. These are small steps that might just require adding a thank you email after somebody donates or providing or adding a part of your donation form online that gives people the option to make a reoccurring or monthly gift to your program. And those are much easier to put into place usually for organizations, they just, they might require a little bit of time allocated to that process. But once it's done, the improvement that it has on your bottom line can be significant and sometimes more significant or have a greater return than some of these longer term more time consuming and resource consuming investments that you might wanna make over the years to come. And so what we wanted to do is turn it over to Janet to talk about what are some of these small steps that you can take within the constructs of the best practices of your end fundraising program. So Janet, as we're looking at it, one thing that always pops up is your segmentation and are you doing that well? And that can be a really big game changer in so many different ways. So did you wanna share a little bit about your thoughts around this? Sure, absolutely, thank you. So segmentation, many people when they hear the word segmentation, if they know it at all they're thinking donor, non donor, major donor, not major donor, right? And they kind of stopped there. But I think one thing that is really, really important to remember is that all of your donor communications are about communicating. And if you're sort of lumping everybody into one group based on one criteria then you're not really communicating. Because you can't speak to all people in one way, right? So I'd like to encourage people to think of three different new sort of ways to think about segmentation. There's demographic, age, if you know the age groups of your donor base there's probably one at the higher end because that's typical, the typical donor age but how high is that high end? Is there a group, a subgroup in your database that would be great targets for required minimum distribution when they hit a certain age they've got to give some of their money away. That's what the IRS says. So are you speaking to them in a way that it resonates and reminds them and puts you at the forefront when they're thinking about that? It could be their family situation. You're done paying off your kid's student loan, your kid's college or whatever not the loans, the college and maybe you have some extra cash. You're speaking to some of those folks differently. Are they white collar, blue collar, no collar, right? Like, where did they operate? Where are their worlds? And how are we speaking to them? The psychographic is more about how they feel and think and their view of the world, right? What motivates them in their giving, right? Are they more, oh, I wanna be part of this big old team and let's have a social approach to giving or are they, I'm an altruist and I just give to the world and I'm just a good loving person or are they the, it's the right thing to do because my family has always given, right? Those three people want very different communications from you. Otherwise you're missing them. They're not hearing you and if they don't hear you, they don't respond to you. So you really want to start thinking about who the people are in your database, which brings me to one of the things on that spreadsheet. If you don't know, if you don't know the answers to those questions, you don't know your donor as well, you gotta figure that out. So there's one of those surveys, right? How are you going to figure out who is in your database? And it's August now. So that means in September and October, you might drop a survey or two to figure some of this out so that when you go to do your year end, you really can do some segmentation, not just based on their giving or not giving to you. Then there is, within that giving and not giving to you, their relationship to the organization, one thing that's often forgotten, we look at major donor, minor donor, but do we ever look at consecutive years? There could be people, and I had an organization once who was like 25 years old, and they had never really looked at their consecutive giving. They only looked at lifetime giving. And when we went through that exercise, the guy realized there were people who never hit his major donor mark, even though they had been giving for 25 years. They had been giving small amounts every year for 25 years. And so he made the decision to call everybody who had given more than 10 times in 25 years and actually have a conversation with them. And it transformed giving that year because people felt seen and heard and understood, right? So what is the thing in your database that is going to help you better communicate with those different folks, right? Because if you're speaking the same to all of them, you're not speaking to any of them. You're not, none of them are hearing you in the way that is gonna really motivate them to give at any significant level. They'll give what I call go away money. Here's $25. I did my duty, go away. Stop asking me. You're raising such a wonderful points. And what I heard you say also is, is there's two ways of going about segmentation and this can be an exercise that you go through. There's the survey where you're being proactive in identifying what your donors are interested in or maybe even not even your donors but those that you want to acquire or convert into donors. So it could be people that have signed up for your email list. Have you asked them what they're interested in? Could that sway them or convert them into being a first time donor? Or it could be people that are reoccurring givers. Why do you give your over a year? That would be a great thing to find out from those individuals. Morgan asked, can we share a survey that is an example of getting to know your donors? And Morgan, I think we could definitely add one of those to our follow up email. I don't have one like on top of my head. I don't know if Janet does, but. I was gonna, I was, I had just typed up an answer to you Morgan and I'll say it aloud. I don't have a template for a survey like that. We can certainly give some guidance but I think an important thing and one of the big reasons we don't have a template for that is a survey like that should be tailored. It should be tailored to your organization's mission and learning what connects people to your mission. And then also I think it should be tailored to the gaps that you have in your own understanding and not to mention data that you're trying to fill. You know, you don't wanna run a survey on something you already know about your audience. So it's, there's a little bit of introspection I would wanna put into a survey like that. And then after that, you know, it's just sort of a survey design principles of, you know, you want it to be just long enough and just short enough and overall written to what you know about your audience and what they'll respond well to. And I would say given that we're focusing on this year end, you wanna, you want to think about one or two things you really wanna know because that's what you're gonna base your segmentation on, but then having survey quite short, simple, easy surveys throughout the year, not every day or whatever, but you know, over time, right? You're going to slowly get to know your donors better and better. This isn't gonna happen overnight. So just pick one or two things. I mean, I can tell you, you can Google 100,000 questions to ask your donor in a survey, ask chat GPT, right? You'll get them all, but if you just plop those into Google Forms, you're gonna have a mess, right? So that introspection is really, really important. Yeah, I would agree. And the other thing, the last thing I'll add Morgan is that you can also be looking at this as an opportunity to educate your donor base as well. So, you know, adding in a little fact or information about your organization prior to asking the question you wanna ask can also be a great way of not wasting that communication or not using that communication in a way where it's creating a two-way conversation as well. So that's another thing to think about is, you know, is there a fact or something about the impact that you could add in that might also help to your donors understand you better and also be more willing to provide you with the answers to the questions that you're asking them. I think one thing that's very popular on social media that might get to folks in a way that could be very helpful is a quiz, right? Those are combined. A cause-related quiz that you capture their answers and you ask them some questions that you capture knowledge of them, right? So you begin to see how much they know about your organization or the cause area and then you capture knowledge about them as well. But in the quiz form, surveys, who wants to take a survey? But everyone wants to play a quiz, you know, take a quiz. Especially if you can share it with other people afterwards. Yeah, I've seen a horoscope ones. Like what kind of, you know, I've seen those. Elizabeth Glazer Pediatric AIDS Foundation, I remember this was a while ago, but they did one where it was kind of like a game show situation where it was helping you learn more about pediatric AIDS epidemic around the world. And it was kind of like a test your knowledge kind of deal. And then once you went through the survey or the quiz, it also asked you some questions about. So what is that, you know, what facts stood out to you the most? What do you feel would be the most impactful way that the foundation could support pediatric AIDS research? And so it got to those motivations and those passions in a little bit of a different way, which I found to be interesting. So that's like a proactive way of doing it. The other thing, Janet, that you mentioned was a very reactive way of doing it or some reactive ways you could do it, which is to, and Stefan mentioned this as well, is to look inside your database for the information you have in order to uncover those motivations. Maybe have you noticed the, you know, donating every year at a certain level. So a lot of people have already done the well screening or the propensity to give, but people fall under the radar a lot with those types of things. And you have to be very careful of those pitfalls of not reaching a certain donation level and not being detected by some of those well screening tools. Although both, you know, that is another tactic that you should deploy if you haven't yet is to screen your file for those that have the propensity to give more based on their wealth. But in addition to that, who's opening what emails you're sending or who is visiting certain pages on your website or who is volunteering or engaging in other advocacy efforts with certain programs that you're involved with, those are great opportunities to start to segment your audience by their interest areas in different ways that don't require you asking, but more just being intuitive and looking at the trends among your segments of donors in order to better predict what they might be interested in or might be more responsive to in the future. Absolutely, thank you, Jamie. Yeah, absolutely. So what about this, Janet? What about engagement plans? Yeah, so once you have segmented and decided what groups you're going to sort of target, you can't do them all at once, right? So pick a few that are going to be probably have the most impact, like, you know, some of those major donor, consecutive donor, those people who are much more engaged with you, that's where you wanna put a lot of your emphasis. And then you have a general sort of donor and then you have the non donor or extremely lapsed donor, right? But within those segments, you want to start thinking about how you're going to engage them over time, right? If you have been sort of communicating with them all year in the same way, by about October, you want to start creating your streams, right? Of saying, okay, you know, if someone is say a volunteer and they have a high capacity to give, they have a higher propensity to give. So how am I communicating? Am I doing a phone call to this group? Are we having coffee? Are we just putting them in the email stream? Are we giving them a direct mail piece? Now, ideally, you do all the things with everybody, but we have limited capacity, so we can't. So there's the standard that is running across the bottom of the slide. Everyone should be getting a direct mail piece, but not everyone should be getting the same direct mail piece. A major donor should not be getting the same direct mail piece as a one-time $25 donor. Volunteers shouldn't be getting the same direct mail piece as non-volunteers, right? You have to start thinking of these different groups. And often you start with the same, you know, source, you know, the Q source, and then you just tweak the opening paragraph and the ending paragraph. You tweak a line here or there. You're not reinventing the wheel for every single one of these segments and every single one of these engagement plans, right? But you start with the direct mail piece. It's the longest piece, right? It should be at least about four pages, right? Lots of white space, but four pages. Then you take that piece and you break those down. You pick pieces, you snip pieces from it to create social media posts, to create a series of emails. But the relationship of these folks, their largest gift amount, their last gift date, all of these things are going to determine how frequently you communicate with them and in what channels you're communicating with them. So for example, the direct mail piece, you send it out beginning in November. You have this segment of people who you know gave last year at this time. If by beginning of December, they have not responded, part of the engagement plan for them is that they get a second nudge, right? They get a second direct mail piece, a postcard, a one page letter, something that's going to remind them. The non-donors don't get that, right? You don't have time and money for all of that. So once you've decided your segments, you then want to decide what is the engagement process? How many touch points will there be and where will they be? What channels will they be through? You wanna touch all the channels at least once, but some will get more emphasis on one or another. And surprisingly, I am amazed at the number of people who don't check if someone has unsubscribed or their email has bounced or you don't have an email and you send them one letter a year, asking them for money because you've stopped sending a paper newsletter and you've stopped doing all of these things. So take a look at that stuff early so that you can start getting some things out to them before it's too late. I love that. Some little things that you might wanna think about doing in addition, so Janet's points are wonderful. And so data hygiene, checking that early, making sure that you have those critical communication channels, you have emails, they're good emails, it's not jamiemuller at gmail and no.com, right? For instance, I see that. Whatever the case may be, you're missing area codes, whatever the case, there's a lot of data enhancement tools that are out there that can help you kind of enrich your data in order to get that ready. The other thing is, let's say in Janet's example, you do have a direct mail, you have their physical address, you're sending the direct mail appeal, maybe add a QR code to your direct mail appeal this year to get people to your website or to an area where they can put in their email address to receive email communication. We do know that people don't love to get mail, they do. Even younger generations are absolutely loving to get mail, but they also are very omnichannel and they want to engage with you in multiple ways. So offer that opportunity, a QR code through direct mail is a great way to encourage people to also connect with you on Facebook or threads, if that's where you're going next or through a newsletter. It's also a great way of re-engaging people that have bounced email addresses, but they do seem to still donate to you to get them on different channels that just gives you other areas or ways that you can create those touch points. The other thing that I'm just gonna add in here and then I think Janet we should move on to the next one is this is a really great example of that engagement architecture that Parsons TKO was talking about at the beginning. This requires coordination between your functional areas. And I think we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that that can be very difficult. Your digital, your comms, your marketing, your major gifts, in some cases we all have, there has to be some collaboration in order to get that QR code on a direct mail appeal. That's your sometimes digital fundraising and direct mail are in separate areas of the organization. And so it's really important to come together early around your segments, your audiences, in order to look at how can we make this the best experience for them across our functions, across our channels, across our giving platforms to ensure that we are truly providing a great experience for each of our donors. Absolutely, I think that it's critical especially that anyone who has anything to do with comms is involved in the fundraising conversation early on because what you don't want is to start planning and then I mean, I have an organization where the comms team has shut down everything the development team is trying to do and it's infuriating because how do you fundraise if you can't communicate, right? So I think those departments definitely if you have more than one department in your org you definitely want to coordinate early. I think also this is where if you have more than one person in the development office and your executive director or CEO you want to make sure you're clarifying who's handling sort of the VIP group, the personal cultivation approach and who is handling sort of the mass market approach. This is, I always say there's sort of two train tracks with the special events track running through the middle of them which that's a whole other webinar but personal cultivation that's for those VIPs and it doesn't mean that they're more important I'm not trying to say that but that their relationship to your organization has a bigger impact on your ability to accomplish your vision in the world, right? So you want to bring them in in a different way because you want to be creating conversation and building the relationship, right? And your mass market approach is how you begin to identify new people to move from the mass market to the personal cultivation, right? Or from non donor to donor but all things being equal the most important thing to do when you're talking about fundraising is donor retention over donor acquisition any day of the week, hands down everyone's like, how do I find new donors? No, no, work and create better relationships with the donors that you have and that's can be through mass market but it's still gotta be a conversation if all you ever do is communicate what you do and how good you are at it to prove your credibility, you're not communicating you have a megaphone where, you know bulldozing them with facts about you, right? But what you want to do is create a conversation where people who care about what you care about find value in what you're providing to them. You know, this idea of donor fatigue if we communicate too much or too often people get tired, well, you know my husband's a sports fan he never gets tired of it it's radio, it's TV, it's computer it's talk every conversation every event, right? It's not donor fatigue it's not because we're talking to them it's because we're not saying anything of interest to them, right? So we've got to get into a situation where whether it's mass market or personal cultivation we are really creating a relationship through the conversation, right? And that just doesn't mean keep asking them questions that's us asking ourselves how can I provide value to the community, right? What do they want from us? Instead of sort of saying even in your donor appeals we hear it all the time please help us accomplish our mission. When really what we wanna be doing is getting folks to think, oh, they're helping me this organization is helping me accomplish my vision, right? So you have to be asking yourself how can we help donor A, donor B, donor C accomplish their vision of the world? Because that's how we know that there are people, right? If they care about what we care about we have a shared vision of the world and if we use certain language we know who those people are if we're communicating to them on a belief system on what we value in this world we're gonna find those people and then it doesn't matter how often we talk to them because we're all trying to create the same world, right? So you want to make sure that you are doing this year round but especially starting in October at the latest, right? Look at your comms plan from August to October what are you sharing with them? What are you saying about the world not just about your organization but about your cause area about the world you wanna create? If you are doing that well then from November and December it's the unfinished story of need. You don't have to rethink them you don't have to re-report out what great success stories you've had because you've been doing that already and then come November and December it's the unfinished story of need where the donor can find themselves in these communications and say, oh, if I act today the story's gonna end well. If I don't act today, we're still in this miserable crap of a whatever problem we're trying to solve, right? Or the world's a worse off place because we've lost the arts or whatever, right? So you wanna make sure that as you segment and as you plan your engagement you are figuring out how you're creating conversation and building relationships so that those who care about the same thing are finding you. You don't have to convince anybody. You don't have to convince anybody. You're just amplifying so they can find you. You're so right Janet and Janet is speaking to something that has been researched a great deal as far as what brings about brand loyalty and trust. I don't know if anyone has seen I'm a big fan of the Edelman Trust Barometer report and everything Janet is saying it's the same in the commercial market as it is in the nonprofit market that people are looking for communities, brands, organizations that align with their principles, their values and their personal missions. And so how are you helping these donors and supporters identify themselves as being part of your community and you all having the same goals, mission, principles at play? And the more you can do that, the better you're going to be able to have these very natural conversations with your donors year round. Janet, we did have a question about the orange and green lines and could you just give us a little bit more context to what people are seeing on the slide here as well? So really it was just to highlight that these are two different tracks. One at the top one is the personal cultivation. In those engagement plans, the way you create conversation is through the phone calls, the second mailings, the let's have coffee kinds of things. You can even do personal emails, right? So they're not getting the mass market email, they're getting one-on-one emails with really personalized and personal, I think personal cultivation is personalized and personal. Mass market is personable, right? You want to be personable, you want them to feel like you know them, but it's not taking the same time and effort, you don't really know them as well. So there's no significance that it goes from orange or green to gray. It was just to show that the two lines are different. Yeah, and I saw a question pop up that I'd like to answer if I may. I think I saw it from... Shelley? What kinds of questions can we ask that help us understand? I think that there are two things that really work well. One is when someone makes a gift, especially a first gift, always have a phone call. Whether it's $5 or $500,000, they should get a phone call, thanking them for their gift with one simple question. What inspired your gift? You learn oodles from one question and that $10 donor could quickly become a $10,000 donor if the core values match. Now, if you missed that vote, if they gave their first gift a long time ago and you don't know what inspired their gift, that can certainly be one of your first survey questions. What inspires your giving to our organization, right? But the other thing is in your social media posts, in your email communications, in your conversations at your events, start asking the do you believe kinds of questions, right? So do you believe that no animal should be abused? Yeah, I believe no animal should be abused. So if you're an animal organization and you ask me that question, I might agree with you. But if you ask me, do you believe that all animals deserve the same compassion and autonomy as humans? Sorry. Yes. I don't, right? So right there, I am no longer your person. If your emphasis is that the entire world has to be vegan. Now, I'm pescatarian, but I'm not vegan. I don't think the whole world has to be vegan. If that's your belief, you've lost me. I'm not your person, right? If you want, no, go ahead, Jamie. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Sorry. If you want to solve the homelessness problem, I do too. But if your organization serves the homeless, they're not trying to solve the problem. They're just serving those who are homeless. You've got me there too. But for some people, no, I don't want to keep feeding people. I don't want to keep housing, emergency shelters. I want to solve the homelessness problem. You're going to give to two different organizations. It doesn't mean that one is right or wrong. The vegan versus the abuse, they're not right or wrong. They're just different core principle values motivating me and the organization. And so using, do you believe kinds of frameworks? Get people, you begin to see who's drawing closer and who's pulling away. And after you ask about three, do you believe questions? Do you believe every child should have a quality education? Yes. Did you know that one in six children in some state don't because of A, B, and C? Are you interested in an organization that will help them have the quality education that you've said already every child deserves? And then if they've said yes to all of that and then they won't give you money, they're kind of feel like jerks, right? Right? So you've got to build that into the language that you use throughout the year because that's what's going to pull people in. Yeah, wonderful. The patented Janet Cub don't be a jerk strategy. It's her donor retention, I like it. Oh, I did. I did. I wanted to jump in quickly on this in the next couple of slides. I mean, we've just thank you both, Janet and Jamie. I mean, you've talked through so many different ideas, so many different donor experiences that you can create and ways to create that long-term engagement, the two hearts of engagement architecture, donor acquisition, donor retention, whatever strategy you're doing, relationships with people is the heart of it. I think what I wanted to talk a little bit about is when you hear these things, what does it take? How do you put that into practice? And I wanted to come back to this concept of engagement architecture, which we introduced at the top. This stack, your collection of strategy, the people in your organization, the business processes that you go through, your workflows, the tools and technology, your platforms that you're using to do this, that's the place. Look inside yourself. Look inside your organization. Think about how you do the work. And if you can jump to the next slide, Jamie, if you took those layers and spread them out as a deck of cards, you can imagine looking into the different pieces of your organization and think through, in your plans, do you have a campaign strategy document where you have written out what you're going to do? Do you have a campaign retrospectives from previous years that you can review and see how things went last time to inform your new strategy? And then the people side, definitely understanding who is on your team? What experiences do they have? What are they good at? Or do you have skills on your team that you are underutilizing? I think just understanding what you have at your disposal as an organization can really help you prioritize. Which of all the ideas that you heard today are the right ones for you to try? Just use that really practical, sort of internally focused lens to understand, to know thyself and know your organization's capacity. May I jump in right there? Yeah. Don't forget board members. Yeah, don't forget board members. Volunteers. Absolutely, yeah. Yes, totally, totally. The people, your people is a very extensive list. Even other donors. Other donors can tell a story in a way that you can't. Precisely, right. Use your influencers, and I'm not talking about the macro ones, but those are the... Not the ones on threads, yeah. Not the ones on threads, but the ones that are passionate, your evangelicals, use them. And they want to be used in that way. Some may not be able to be your wealthiest donors, but they certainly could be your wealthiest megaphones. And their word of mouth is invaluable in this market. And the peers that they bring to the table are wonderful. So don't discount those as opportunities and segments that you should look at pursuing this end of your giving. That's a big passion of mine for sure. May I also mention one more thing from the last slide, your website. Don't do a whole rehaul of your website, but please, please double check that it is responsive. So it shows up on a telephone correctly because I don't know what number. Some astronomical number of people look at everything on their phones now, right? They don't use computers. And also double check that your donate button links directly to where I put my credit card information in. Do not let the donate button lead me to a page to tell me the seven different ways that I can support your organization. You can have a menu bar for that. Ways to give, ways to get involved. But the donate button, how many clicks does it take me to give you my money? If it takes too many, you will lose me. And if you require me to give you too much information about myself, you're also going to lose me. Make it quick and simple. Giving is an impulse by at most levels. So don't discourage that impulse. Great advice, Janet. Wonderful advice. Very good. Thank you, Janet. So yeah, I think also moving on from the previous slide, one of the things buried in there was process. And here we are talking about end of year giving. Let's look really concretely at the process of running an end of year giving campaign. Wherever you come from, whatever organization you're in, you have a process of some sort. If you're at a big organization, that might be complex and sort of bureaucratic. And you have a lot of checkpoints and milestones and schedules. If you're at a small organization, your process might be looking out a window until you remember who you're supposed to call. Whatever your process is, just really think about it. And it's going to look something like this. There's going to be a planning phase where you think through what you're going to do. What do you need to have in place? What do you need to prepare? What materials are you going to make? What kinds of segmentation? All those things we talked about. The targeting, how do you actually tell the difference between who gets which kind of treatment? Some of the mechanics of actually setting up your outreach and your appeals. And then optimizing in-flight, once you go, you're going to start to learn, hey, this ask, this survey question that I came up with isn't doing as well as I thought. I'm not actually getting the right insights. And I thought of a better way. Give yourself that liberty. Recognize when and where you have the opportunity to change tactics in the middle of a campaign. Because you have that freedom. And sometimes it's just important to remember that it's there. In every one of these steps, you have opportunities to introduce these new ideas. So I think that's just a light I want to shine and recognizing that however we work, there is opportunity to change it. And so just going on to the next slide, I think if I have one big appeal that I always want to make in every webinar where we're talking about what you can do, it's think about what you want to do to improve your end of year fundraising and show me on your calendar when you're going to do it. And I would say, literally do this. As you get off this call, the next thing you should do is have your calendar up and actually think about when can I sit down and act on these ideas? Whether that's taking over an existing meeting. If you have a development team meeting where you're all going to be together, go find the agenda and put your name on it because you have stuff to talk about. You have ideas you want to bring to the team. If it's a particular production process, if you've got a meeting with your comms team, let's get it in there. Write it in your standard operating procedures. If you need to talk to a peer, send them a calendar invite today. Literally get this on your calendar one way or another to make sure that you get momentum and you move forward with it. So that's my piece and my appeal to you. Well, Stefan, that's four steps. Yeah. But I will go back to the last slide and I just want to again reiterate. And Janet said this so well is you need your comms team involved in your fundraising efforts. As you're looking at, I don't know how to go back anymore, but as you're looking at that last slide, think about who do you need involved in your planning process and maybe that iterative step, that maybe that 1% improvement is inviting another function to the table. Have you ever had your web analytics person involved in your end of your planning? Have you ever had your finance department involved in your end of your planning? Could they add something? Could they contribute some knowledge, insight, information, or could they be prepared to help you optimize your campaign or look at your segments differently? I just, that is one thing that if you do nothing else, broaden your internal engagement to bring that end of your giving plan into the entire organization and make it an all hands on deck moment in time. I think you'll find some surprises in there that could enhance your end of year program by you doing nothing else, but just that. Janet, any thoughts, questions from the audience, anything that you'd wanna add in to bring us home? As much as I love the idea of bringing in all of the teams, please do not allow editing your letters by committee. Oh, yes. Do not do that, right? Do not do that. Have all the teams you want involved in it until you've written it and then no committee editing. No board approval of the letter. That's right. Once again, just a reminder, and I popped the link back in the chat. We do have this worksheet that was designed to accompany today's webinar. This'll help you think through all those steps that you can take and help think through the right ones for you and your organization. And then if we could jump forward just two slides real quick, Jamie. I also wanted to emphasize today's webinar is just one of many things that we have done for our community. We have so many resources out there. We encourage you all to come to our website, take a look. We've got articles, videos, podcasts, events like today's that are all recorded and we'd welcome you to look through those. And with that, I know we are at time. We are at time. We are at time. One question from you, Landa, though. I'm gonna have Janet answer that because I think we, oh. This, Landa asked, how many people should be involved in the fundraising and marketing process if you have 5,000 contact list? Janet, do you think? So I mean, I think it's how big, how much is the mass market approach and how much is personal solicitation would really determine that? Because you could send, one person could manage 5,000 if it was all mass market, right? Because the way your database is. So I hate to say this, but it depends. That's a horrible answer and I'm sorry, Landa. I'm sure if you follow up with Stefan or Jamie or feel free to follow up with me and if we knew a little more, we could answer a little better. We'd be happy. We would be happy to talk more, Landa, about what strategies and the type of people within your organization might need to be involved and how many people might be there. Everyone, thank you so much for your time and being so attentive and all the amazing questions that you asked. It's been such a pleasure to have this conversation with you. And I hope that you were able to get some inspiration. And again, the three things to think about really the three steps, planning, looking at your segments and evaluating who you're talking to and how you're talking to them and then optimizing the campaign as it's going on. Those are the three, but the tactics you deploy within those need to be your own and based on your organization. And we hope that you've found a number of them in there that you can take advantage of this giving season and we're looking forward to hearing how it goes and we're happy and here to support you if we can be of any assistance along the way. Have a wonderful afternoon, everybody.