 Welcome to the non-profit show. We are so glad that you're here. It's another day, another episode. And today we have Jess Campbell with us. Jess is the CEO at Out in the Boone. She's been with us before, but we are so glad you're back. And today she's here to talk to us about summertime and the email is fine, which is really hard for me not to sing that, you know, back to the sing song. So really glad to have you Jess and looking forward to diving into this conversation with you. But before we do, we want to remind all of you, our viewers and listeners, who we are, if we have not met yet. So Julia Patrick is here, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. And I'm Jared Ransom, non-profit nerd CEO of the Raven Group and honored to serve alongside Julia, day in and day out for these episodes. Jess asked us earlier in the green room. She's like, I'm so amazed. You ladies do such a fantastic job, which thank you Jess, that means a lot. And I looked up and today is episode 829. So episode 829. And hey, if you missed any of those previous 828 episodes, I have good news for you because our sponsors allow us the opportunity to archive these and I'll tell you in just a bit where you can find them. But we do want to extend our deepest gratitude to our amazing besties with our presenting sponsors. So thank you so very much to Bloomerang American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, non-profit thought leader, your part-time controller, staffing boutique, non-profit nerd, as well as non-profit tech talk. I like to say that their mission is your mission because truly they really are here to serve you and your mission and your community. So do them a favor, do yourself a favor and us a favor, check them out because they are fantastic companies with fantastic people that really do want to help you elevate your mission. And hey, I promised I would tell you where to find these episodes. So the latest and greatest, go ahead and pull out your smartphone. I know you're probably on it or it's right next to you. You can scan that QR code and download the app just a couple of hours after our conversation that we're having now with just the episode will be loaded to the app and you'll get that notification. We're still on all the streaming broadcast platforms as well as the podcast. So wherever you choose to consume your entertainment, you're in tea, you can find the non-profit show. So thank you for that. And Jess, welcome back my friend. So again, those watching and listening, today we have Jess Campbell, CEO at Out in the Boons. How are you? I'm well, thanks for having me back. Yeah, we are thrilled to have you back and right before maybe you leave for vacation. We also kind of got that negative information but would you please tell us a little bit about yourself, Jess and a little bit about Out in the Boons because what I love this tagline here for your not so average fundraiser. Yes, so hi everyone. I'm Jess Campbell, the CEO of Out in the Boons. I'm a former nonprofit fundraiser, current nonprofit consultant. And today I say that I help nonprofits discover donors in their email list. So I am a super fan of email marketing. Wonderful, I love that. And I think that that's just magical because so often we think we've got to go out and find somebody new. And yet we're not taking care of the people who at some point in time had an alignment to us or with us, I should say. And so this is going to be a great conversation. And I want to start off by asking you why summer is this key period to year-end giving? Like why should we look at it this way or is that even right? Yes, so tell me if you're a nonprofit or raise your hand in your car as you're listening to this or whatever. If you are feeling that the donations in 2023 are rolling in a little slow, you are not alone. In fact, the Giving Report just released new information that Giving is down across the United States, across all donors. And I have seen that with my clients as well. And I believe in my core that an engaged donor is an active donor and the nonprofits who take the time in summer to have multiple touchpoints with their donors and prospects are the ones that are going to fare well during end of year giving season. The ones who don't, the ones who just kind of skip over that part and go straight into asking are going to be sorely disappointed. And I just don't want anyone in that position, especially knowing that Giving is down. So I think that if you're an organization and you can do one, two, three meaningful touchpoints over the next eight to 10 weeks, you are setting yourself up with the foundation to be super successful during the last quarter of the year. And if you don't, you're just going to have a really steep hill to climb in Q4. Interesting. I love this, Jess, because I feel like in Julia, I think you said this in the green room chatter is we're all a little tired. We're all ready to take a vacation. We're all ready to put her out of office on. But what we do now is going to set the tone for the end of Q4. And as we're recording this, believe it or not, that's about six, you know, well, before it happens, you know, we're at the end of June, but also the fiscal year is starting for many of our friends across the sector, right? Ending this month, starting next month for a brand new fiscal. So I love that you said between eight and 10 weeks, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, engagement takes time. I also really want to emphasize that as a nonprofit, I want you to rest. I want you to take vacations, but there's a difference between taking in action and taking thoughtful rest. And so what is it that you and your team have the capacity to do over the next eight to 10 months? What reinforcements do you need to bring in to make those donor calls, write those notes, get those emails out? Is it involving your board of directors? Is it rallying a group of volunteers? Is it bringing in, you know, some interns for a couple of weeks to do some donor engagement? There's a lot of ways to do it, but I think you have to decide that this is a priority. We all have very long and very busy to do with, and there could never be enough time if you didn't make it. I just think that this is the key to success down the road. And can you spend your time cleaning off your desk or, you know, filling out that HR paperwork or doing all these other things that have different deadlines? Sure, but if your priority is meeting a certain financial goal by December 31st, my strong recommendation is to invest into some donor engagement this summer now. I love this. And I love that you use that critical word, invest. And as a touch point, I think that's just really brilliant. You know, you advise us, or remind us maybe is the better way to say of this old adage, you know, the early bird gets the worm. Don't wait. Talk to us about that because you're not saying necessarily hammering on asks, but this could be a period more of communication. Am I hearing you right on that? Yeah, my experience with nonprofits is that the timidness or the fear or the anxiety around the asking is really a result of a lack of donor engagement. It's a lack of a relationship. If the last time you reached out to someone was an ask and you haven't done the proper gratitude and stewardship in between, yeah, it's gonna feel kind of yucky and it's gonna feel kind of awkward. But if you've been checking in with someone about their kids graduating from school or their elderly parent or that Ironman race they ran, then it feels like a real relationship. And if you're also engaging them in the impact they've made, hey, I just wanted to let you know that that $500 gift you made back in December, that actually covered the cost of the entire bus ride for all 50 students to go to camp. Thank you so much. Here's a picture of them all hanging out the window. Then it feels good. Then you feel like you have legs to stand on. And if you don't, it's going to feel weird and awkward. So use the summer to do that work now. I also think that waiting to do specifically your major gift asks until October, November, you're too late. You are. You are so busy in the last quarter of the year and so are your donors. So why not start seeding those conversations now? Hey, so and so donor, can we meet for coffee in August? Can we talk about your gift that you made at the end of last year? Would you consider a new gift this year? Like start those conversations and what use you have for those donations now so that you're not competing with the holiday parties and the Christmas pageants and Hanukkah and just all the other things that happen towards the end of the season. You've already locked it in. I love your examples, Jess, because I also can't hammer that home enough. It's like you really have to get to know your donors. They're not just a number, right? They're not just someone in your database, like these are people that also have a life going on. And just the fact that you mentioned, like ask how their kids are doing in camp or ask how that Ironman went that they might have just competed in. Like these are real tangible people with real tangible life events. And I do love like, and I think the sooner we connect to our donors at that human level, we will exponentially see that reciprocal investment. Absolutely. And it's the easiest thing to skip over as fundraisers because you've already received the donation, right? So one of the things that I'm doing for and advising all of my one-on-one clients is to simply pull a list of all of your 2022 end of your donors. Pull the list, whether they gave $5 or $50,000. And what I want you to do is send what's called a loopback email. I want you to send this email through like Gmail or Outlook, not your email service provider. I want it to feel like it's coming from a real person, not an organization. And what I want you to say is a rough version of this, which is, thank you, Jared, for your X number of gift back in December 2022. Your generosity blew our minds and it's been able to achieve A, B, and C. We're so grateful for champions like you who are in our corner supporting kids in our program, families who want to get fed, rescue dogs, whatever it is that you do. And thank you so much, sending so much love and light your way, whatever that is, right? I want you to loop back to their gift and tell them what it did, whether it purchased copy paper, whether that hired a new team member, whether that means everyone now has health insurance, whether that means like you are now serving x% more dogs, kids, parents, whatever it is that you do, you need to loop back. That's actually a really large complaint from donors is that they don't know where it is that you're spending money and it creates this distrust and information gap. And if you can just fill that gap for people, it's like you're bringing them along for the ride and then they're like, yeah, let's do it again, versus like, wait, I don't even know what it did. Was it even helpful? I'm not doing that again. Right, right. And I think it's really important to bridge that gap with the donor that a lot of times donors will feel like, yeah, I just sent in $250, what can that do? Homelessness is such a huge problem. My money's not gonna make a difference. Well, $250 can buy a pallet of water. Yeah, I mean, it's just really an interesting thing that we can be looking at that we need to reconnect and if we don't help illuminate what occurred and use that word impact all the time. But I think it's really an important thing to kind of marshal donors that might feel like they're embarrassing themselves or they're not even helping. Totally. Or what do we do if it's like a $5 donation? Because I'm a staunch advocate for treating your $5 donor the way you treat your major gift donor. Everyone deserves the same sort of attention and you're right. How do you recognize someone who's giving $5? I think you can use language around like thank you for being a part of the team that's working to end the world water crisis or thank you for being the kind of dog rescue advocate that achieves A, B, and C. I think you can use language like that that says like as a community or you're a part of the 349 donors who did blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I think there's lots of ways that you can still make it work. So there's no excuses. Yeah, there's no excuses. And I'm right there with you on that train, Jess, about like treat your $5 donors just as well as you would treat your $50,000 donors. I was actually doing a development assessment with one of my clients and there was a donor that had given under $100 but their influential giving like their peer to peer campaign was multi figures. And so this one person, right? Like might not have had the capacity to give at their own high level but they were so influential into bringing other people into the organization. And that was a huge like light bulb that went off for this organization. Absolutely. Yeah, there's so many ways to make impact. And if you do any of these things that I've just mentioned you will be setting yourself apart from like 95% of organizations. You will really, really, really stand out. So I just really implore everyone to try one, try two of these things because most organizations are not going to do it. Yeah. Jess, you talk about the email aspect of this and you started off by saying, look for who's in your email. I wanna say treasure chest and how do we navigate that? Especially now in the context of summer talk to us about why email is our new best friend. So people and nonprofits are really uninformed when it comes to email marketing. Email marketing has a 38 to one ROI compared to social media. It's also something you own. It's also something you have control over. I've been on LinkedIn recently and my reach is just at an all time low and I'm not doing anything different. I'm posting the same quality valuable content. It's just the algorithm is not my friend right now where my email marketing, I have control. I own that. I also have basically received an invitation to be in someone's inbox. I always think of social media as like a drive-by situation. You catch what you catch, but it's nothing intentional compared to email where it's like they have opted into your email. They want to be there. And so people take a different kind of action on email than they do on social. People also, I think it's 48%. I'm sure you all have had neon one on your show at some point or another, but they released this amazing email report. And I think 48% of donors, it's the largest category per receiving information and taking action in email, not social. So again, with all this information, I'm like, nonprofits, let's be emailing more and hands down 100% of the time when clients come to me, they are not sending enough email. And I'm a real advocate for storytelling and providing value in the emails. I'm not all about being a broadcast where you just have like a ton of graphics and click, click, click, click, click, click. That doesn't actually convert. It's a little too much decision-making for a donor. So again, email is a great place to nurture, to have touch points with your donors. And it's a little sneaky because people, you can see on the back end of your email who's opening and clicking. So you can basically see who is proverbially raising their hand and saying, I'm interested, I'm curious. And then that can essentially become your list of people to go deeper with. So if you open an email analytics and you're like, okay, there's these 53 people who clicked on this article, why don't you then take it a step further and then reach out to them personally? I saw you clicked on this link. I wanna tell you about a story about so-and-so. It's just like smart marketing that you cannot know via social media for sure. Or even I love direct mail as well, but again, that's a little bit of a one-way street. An email, you have just this kind of ability to do a two-way conversation in a way that you can't on these other channels. Okay, I have two questions. One, and I hope I don't forget them, but one, what do you coach by way of segmentation? And let me say the other one next so I don't forget it. And the two of you can help me remember it, right? Often I sit at a board table and the board members will say to the organization, we send too much information. We're sending way too much emails. We're sending way too many communications. So those are my two questions. One, how do you talk about segmentation? And two, how do you also talk about too much when really we know we're not even touching it? Yeah, so I'll address the first question, which is segmentation. And I love segmentation. I think that you want your comms to speak to the right person about the right thing at the right time. I'm a huge advocate from having a weekly kind of broadcast email. So this is like maybe a newsletter or like a story or something that has very text-based, maybe one call to action that really does go to everyone. It's keeping them informed, entertained, educated, all of that. But then I think the loopback email example I gave a few minutes back, that's a great email to send folks who specifically gave to end of year in 2022. You're not gonna send that to someone who hasn't given yet. You're not gonna send that to someone who's maybe lapsed as a donor. And so I think you need to get a little thoughtful about who it is you're trying to talk to about what. I think doing a maybe series of emails to folks who lapped over the summer is a great, great segment to focus on. I think people who have given in the past is a great segment to focus on. I think your monthly donor segment is a great segment to focus on. I know a lot of folks listening are small and mighty nonprofits with not a ton of resources. So what I do with a lot of my clients is I basically use the same copy, but I just tweak it a little bit. These do not have to be four totally separate, totally different messages. It's just probably switching the call to action. It's just saying like we miss you versus like thank you for being a donor in our whatever your monthly giving program is called. Do you know what I mean? And so use the tools you have and work smarter, not harder. Your second question about frequency and volume. I see so many organizations sending, for I'm all please, one email a month. And it is just not enough. I mean, think about it. You were just competing in an inbox with the targets, with the anthropologies, with the bed, bath and beyonds, rest in peace every single day. They are in your inbox every single day. And I try and think of email like a, the fire on a stove. You always want to keep it simmering, right? So my recommendation is one email a week. If you can't do that two emails a month, one email a month is frankly not enough. But if that's where you are, I would rather you be consistent than just like all over the place. But that gives you the flexibility so that when end of your giving season comes and now suddenly you're sending like four emails a month asking people for money. It doesn't feel like such a shock to the system. You know, if you like only send an email once in a while and then suddenly you're buzzing in people's inboxes with ask, ask, ask. People are gonna be like, who is this? Like why haven't I heard from them? Like this feels yucky unsubscribed versus you're in their email regularly. So when they turn up the dial a little it doesn't feel as strong as it would if it's such a sharp difference, if that makes sense. I love that you say weekly, Jess because I cannot tell you how many times I've even heard people say monthly is too much. And I'm like, are we on the same team here? Yeah. And maybe the problem is, is the emails that they're sending once a month, if the complaint is like we send too much information and they're only sending one a month maybe they're trying to put every single thing into one email. And actually it's better to just spread that out across four emails once a week with a little bit less information because people are not going to read like a 5,000 word email. I agree, and I think that's the problem is that the email it's just too cumbersome. It's too cumbersome to produce. It's too cumbersome to send and then to engage with. And so pulling it out to a one point piece I think is a lot healthier for everyone. It's easier to achieve. It's easier to measure too, you send something out and it'll be like, yeah, our open rate for this specific email was really strong because it talked about X, Y and Z not all these other things that you can't really determine why people engaged with it. So I think it's a kind of a concept of less is more what's easy to digest. And I think the other piece of it is it has to be digestible on your phone. And when we create these things, we're on a desktop looking at big monitors and it just seems like why wouldn't somebody engage with it, but we've got to be thinking about that other side of the desk and how it looks to somebody. Well, also, can I just say something about the open and click rates real quick? So with the changes that Apple made to iOS last year, it really inflated open rates. Basically, if someone has an iPhone and they use that email open app, it counts as an open in your email whether they opened it or not. So open rates are not accurate. So what I'm trying to teach my nonprofits is to focus on the click-through rate. We want people to be opening and clicking our emails so that when we do have an ask, it's not the first time they've ever opened and clicked our email. And so where nonprofits average click-through rate, I think is around 2.3. I'm trying to get my clients 7, 8, 9% click rates, which means you have to have a really juicy curiosity-spiking subject line, like no boring subject lines, no July newsletter subject lines. No one's opening that. And then you need to have something that tells maybe a third of the piece and then you point them away to a blog post, to an article, to something on your website. You don't give it all away in your email. And by doing this, by training everyone over the summer, come fall, they will be conditioned to open and click, open and click. That is the name of the game. Love it. I love that. I love over conditioning because I think you probably subscribed to this too, Jess, is that we fundraisers in general have trained our society that Q4 is the season of giving, right? And so we can also have the ability to condition and train in other ways. Absolutely. Yeah, Jared, I think you're absolutely right. Well, Jess, this has been, right? I mean, that's, we always say like Q4, that's when all the money starts rolling in, but we know we need it the other months of the year. Absolutely. Jess, this is fantastic. It's really refreshing to have you back on, to have you talk about summertime emails. So thank you so very much for sharing so openly and just transparently what you're coaching because you work with some amazing leaders in our sector and offer some phenomenal services. So again, those of you watching and listening, let's say thanks to Jess, CEO at Boone's. Yeah, and she's here for you if you are a not so average fundraiser. So thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. Great to see you both. Oh my gosh, it's been great. I'm really, I love your thoughtful approach and it's very manageable. And I think that's the thing. So often we hear about things and it's like, yeah, well, if I had a team of 15, we could get that done, but I don't. And so thank you, thank you for bringing it back and helping us to understand why we need to be doing it. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy and been joined today by the nonprofit nerd herself. I'd like to call her my nonprofit nerd, but she could be yours as well. Jared Ransom, CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we are here because we have amazing sponsors and they include Blumerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part-time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk. Check these folks out because as Jared always reminds us, their mission is your mission. And so it's a really exciting way for us to build our sector. Jess, you really have done some great things for me today. I love your approach. And thank you so much, as Jared said, for sharing your wisdom and your actionable items with us today. My pleasure, have a great one. Hey, thank you everyone. As we end every episode of the nonprofit show, we want to remind everyone to stay well, so you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow everyone. Thank you.