 All right. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Mighty Cause's first webinar of 2020. This hour, we're going to be talking about donor engagement tactics for 2020. My name is Linda Gerhardt, and I'm the Senior Community Engagement Manager here at Mighty Cause. I've been working at Mighty Cause since 2016, and what I do here is manage our marketing and our content. Before I came to work for Mighty Cause, I think it's important for you to know that I worked in the nonprofit sector. That's where I spent most of my career helping nonprofits, large nonprofits and small nonprofits with their strategic communications. And my very first job was cleaning kennels at an animal shelter. So I do have actual experience in the trenches, and thankfully I was able to get out of the kennels and I was able to get into the admin office and learn all of the information that I'm about to share with you today. And I hope that I can help give you some tips and information that will help you fundraise in 2020. Here's a look at today's agenda. We've got a lot to go through. These are big topics. And we've also got a pretty big crowd for today's webinar. So I'm going to ask that if you have a question for me during the presentation, just type it into the questions box of your go-to webinar panel, and we'll make some time for questions at the end. Just so that we can get through the presentation and share all the information, and sometimes questions are answered in the course of the presentation. And just as a heads up, people are always curious about this. We will be recording this webinar. We are recording this webinar and you'll get a link to the recording and the slides after we're done. Pretty much as soon as I'm able to get that email together for you. Alright, so before we get into some of the specific areas that we're going to talk about for donor engagement, I wanted to take a step back and look at the big picture of philanthropy and the state of charitable giving in the year 2020. So numbers are really still trickling in and being analyzed from the year that just ended 2019, but we do have a lot of information about trends that started in 2018 and 2019. And we see those trends in our own metrics at Mighty Cause as a platform. The gold standard for learning the state of philanthropy is the M&R benchmarks report, and they haven't yet released their 2020 report, but keep an eye out for that to get a great perspective on the state of the sector as a whole and charitable giving as a whole when that is released. It's usually in the first few months of the year. Now, one thing that does that was true in 2018 and seems to be true again for 2019 is that growth is down. We saw roughly 1% growth in 2018, and that's compared to 23% growth in 2017. So this is looking at the sector as a whole, and this is kind of based on an approximation of, you know, the whole sector based on a smaller pool of samples, but it is a pretty large sample size. It is important to understand those numbers in context and that from 2014 to 2017, the nonprofit sector saw an unprecedented amount of growth. We're talking double digits every year, just breaking records for nonprofit growth. And now that growth has kind of petered out a bit. We've hit a little bit of a plateau. So it doesn't mean that charitable giving has has like screeched to a halt or gotten anywhere near the crisis level it was during the recession, but that's one thing to keep in mind. We're seeing that that giving is still happening, and there is still a very small negligible amount of growth, but we need to temper our expectations, especially if we're looking at the last five years or so as a reference point. And know that we still may be in a little bit of a lull or entering a little bit of a lull as a whole. So something I talk about on webinars a lot and you can find mentioned quite a bit on our blog is that donor retention is at a serious low in the nonprofit sector. In 2018, the donor retention rate was 37% and that's pretty far from where we want it to be. That means that fewer than half of the donors you acquire are being kept, they're being lost to attrition. And one thing that is interesting is that the donors who are the least likely to be retained are those who give at lower levels. So as we climb up the scale of giving, and people are giving at higher levels, we see that donor retention goes up. So there are a lot of 10 $20 donors who simply give once and never give again, but retaining one donor who gives $1,000 per year, or gives $20 per month is worth more to your nonprofit and retaining a bunch of those $10 donors. So we want to keep these numbers in perspective when it comes to donor retention you want to be sure that you're when you're trying to increase that rate, you want to see it go up but you also want to ensure that you're extending the most amount of effort and resources on the donors who have the highest value to your nonprofit, which are those who are giving at higher levels. It tends to sound very doom and gloom, but as we'll talk about it may just mean changing up your asks for what those smaller donors give, and because you know you're likely to lose them. Beyond the numbers there are a lot of important things to consider for 2020. As I'm sure all of you know as nonprofit professionals. There were a lot of really big changes to the tax code in 2017, which took effect in 2018. And the most important thing for nonprofits to know is that the standard deduction went up so for a single person the standard deduction went up from $6,350 to just to almost $13,000, basically doubling it and the standard deduction for a married couple went up from $12,700 to over $18,000. And what that meant functionally is that the bar for charitable giving was raised if you wanted to itemize your taxes and deduct your charitable contributions. There are a lot of charitable donors who lived right around that bubble of where the standard deduction is now, but it seems like that was not a deal breaker for nonprofits. It just meant that it's a little bit more silly to send out a bunch of emails to donor talking donors talking about the tax benefits of donating, because the pool of donors that actually applies to is even smaller than it was. However, there was a lot of speculation that this was going to be a huge impact. It didn't seem to quite have that catastrophic effect, because we were certainly bracing for a seismic shift. But what it means is that how people have started to give has changed. We're seeing a lot more people use donor advised funds or dafts to give it a higher level, as well as IRA rollovers. So those forms of giving have seen a boost since the new tax code went into effect, and it's not quite the end times that was predicted, but it has had an effect mostly in how people choose to give at a higher level. Another important consideration for 2020 is that in case you haven't heard 2020 is a presidential election year in the United States. One thing that's always been interesting to me at least is how presidential elections affect charitable giving, because it's always right in the middle of prime time for the nonprofit sector. And it's pretty common during election years to see some of the charitable giving diverted into political giving. Though if your nonprofit has a political mission you may actually see a little bit of a boost from an election year. Now odds are if you work for an animal shelter. You're not going to see that huge of an impact but people are going to be distracted when you're going into full fundraising mode at the end of the year. And you're going to be competing with some very aggressive and very sophisticated fundraising in the spring, summer and fall it has already started. So you'll just want to make sure that your 2020 count plan accounts for that. And you've got some strong campaigns plan because the competition is going to be tight. And now again this doesn't necessarily mean that all of your donors are going to be pulled away by political campaigns. And in fact some nonprofits even see a jump in giving during election years. Like we saw as a result of the 2016 elections, nonprofit giving as a whole went up especially to certain causes. And that was part of the reason we saw that wild jump in 2017 to 23% growth. All right so moving on. I just wanted to chat a bit for about why this topic is so important we had a lot of people sign up for this webinar so obviously it's important for you but I just wanted to review that. The biggest the most obvious reason it's worth focusing on donor engagement in 2020 is that engaged donors are retained donors. If you're talking to your donors and engaging them in a smart way. They're not going to be lost to attrition they are going to come back and give again and provide ongoing support for your nonprofit. And the other reason it's important is because donors you retain have a higher lifetime value for your nonprofit. That means the long the length of time you have them they are worth more to your nonprofit. Nonprofits can over focus on acquisition and bring in a slew of one time donors you given low amounts and never give again, but focusing on retention makes your donor acquisition efforts actually meaningful for your nonprofit you see greater returns on your investment in acquisition. Donor engagement can help you increase the amount that you raise and that means more revenue revenue for your nonprofit and a better ability for you to keep your programs funded your lights on in your staff paid. When you engage with donors throughout the year, you can work with them to increase the size of their gifts. And when you increase your average gift size and retain donors you generally see more in revenue. So this is pretty simple but it's definitely worth a reminder as you gear up to fundraise in the new year. When we talk about donor engagement what we're really talking about is relationship building and the end goal is to build a long lasting relationship with your donors. In order to keep operating as a nonprofit, you'll need to develop long term donor buy in donor churn is totally normal and you're not going to turn everybody who makes a small contribution to your nonprofit into a major donor. But sometimes in the nonprofit world it's easy to focus on the immediate funding goal rather than the long game of building relationships with donors. And we'll talk about this more in the presentation, but there are generational considerations here to basically every major you major donor you're now having conversations with about plan giving is not going to be there forever. So you have to nurture the next generation of major gift donors. And unfortunately sometimes the opposite happens and you have a hyper focus on where the money is right now, which is generally older donors who are older who are more established you have more wealth. And then nonprofits wonder why millennials are not giving to nonprofits, but the boomers won't be around forever the oldest gen X donors are in their fifties so if you want to be around for another decade or two. And it's really important to start engaging that new generation of donors now, because they're not just going to hit 55 and decide, hey, why don't I give you $20,000. You have to build up to that and it starts with a focus donor engagement strategy. And donor engagement is really just a key part of running a sustainable nonprofit organization. A big part of sustainability is diversity, which we're going to talk about some and what I mean here is diversifying how donors come to your organization, how they interact with your nonprofit diversifying your funding sources basically having all your donors clustered at one place is not healthy for your organization, because if one of those if that channel where everybody is clogged dries up. So you throw everything you've got into direct mail marketing for instance, and then that stops working, or some new laws pass that limits how you can market to donors. Donations try up as well. And then you've got no funding and then you've got a crisis situation where your nonprofit may have to shutter its operations. So you want to diversify and having engaged donors and a solid strategy for keeping them engaged keeps your revenue revenue stable so again, you don't find yourself unable to pay your staff or fund a program, because you were counting on an avenue to bring in donations, and it didn't work. All right, so I know I've talked a lot about donor retention already and we're just into this presentation but it's super important. I don't want to spend too much time on it but I want to outline some steps you can take to really hunker down and take on donor retention in 2020. The first thing you want to do to focus on donor retention is of course figure out where you currently are. Last year Mighty Cause released a new tool that any nonprofits on our platform can use to track donor retention. Your donor retention rate is right there on your dashboard when you log in. So you'll be able to just see your donor retention rate year over year. And we also have a pretty comprehensive report. You can set custom dates. If you want to compare month over month or set your own range, say to look at it quarter over quarter. And you can also export a report of all of the donors you have not yet retained from whatever timeframe you set. So that's really super cool. It makes it easy. And you can access that now by going to your dashboard clicking reports and then donor retention. That is a real easy mode thing you can do to improve your donor retention. And then you want to put that information in context. So with this information, these metrics and these donors names. What are you doing to thank your donors. What's your follow up strategy. Having the names of the unretained donors can also help you identify where you may have lost them or why they haven't been back so sometimes you're able to look at how you've interacted with a specific donor through checking checking your email marketing or your whatever you use to track your donors at this time. And you can sort of, you know, go backwards and figure out where you may have lost them. So that can be a really helpful exercise to do. Once you've taken stock of where you currently are with donor retention, it's time to start building your plan for donor retention in 2020. Things you'll want to include is your donor retention goal. And you want to make sure that your goal here is attainable. No organization has 100% donor retention unless they have like one donor. And even 60% is way beyond the pale. So don't feel the need to swing from the chandeliers, boosting your donor retention rate by 5% is realistic and it'll make a big impact for most organizations. You'll also want to include your plan for follow up. This would be a really great thing, great place to talk about things like creating email journeys for new donors to get them oriented to your nonprofits work, creating a plan and a script for follow up calls, getting a system in place for sending out welcome packets, whatever you think you can do to improve your follow up with new donors. And you'll also want to create a plan to check in with your staff, or you know just check in on your own if you're the one managing this. Just to see where you are schedule a quarterly meeting, set some quarterly goals and map out your path for actually making sure that you're implementing the changes you want to make, and are working toward achieving the goals you set and monitoring your progress. Another thing to consider is part of your fundraising plan for 2020, creating a campaign or planning a campaign to recapture laps donors throughout the year so what are you going to do to get back the people that you lost. So here are some tips for donor retention in 2020. Number one is to not be afraid to go old school. We live in a time where most of our lives are online. And we've also moved a lot of our donor engagement online. But the fact is that donors really do still respond warmly to things like getting calls to thank them, getting letters to thank them, and personal touches that make them feel seen. These kinds of interactions help you build the relationship and keep them engaged in your work. Most people are not likely to remember a thank you email, but they're going to be much more likely to remember a warm phone call from a staff member thanking them for their donation. Next, just keep trying. If at first you don't succeed, try again as many times as is reasonable to engage them. So stay in touch, sometimes sending a few we miss you type emails can be enough throughout the year, space out your communications however makes sense for you, but make specific intentional efforts to recapture donors. Sometimes we get caught up in just sending them blast asks and can glaze over making a specific effort talking to these donors like they're individuals that you're trying to get to know instead of just another name on your email list that you're trying to get to click through to your donation page. So make a few efforts to get donors to come back and don't just stop trying because they weren't responsive the first time it may take a few attempts to actually get them to come back and make another donation. And this last tip plays into your email communications. I'm a bit of a communications nerd and I can tell you this is probably the single most effective thing that you can do to get more for your email marketing and that is segmenting your donors. And what I mean by segmenting is instead of sending one big blast email to everyone on your list asking them to donate, which is sort of email marketing on easy mode. You ramp up to the intermediate difficulty mode by splitting your big general email list into small specific segments and sending them each a different email. And in most cases this really isn't a matter of creating a whole new email and making a million different emails and sending them to very small lists, but just identifying the most important audiences, splitting that list up into those audiences, and then making a copy of your blast email and tweaking a few little things about it so it's speaking directly to that audience. So for instance your email to volunteers acknowledges that they are a volunteer and they contribute their time to your organization. And if you're an advanced subscriber we have a CRM tool we're going to talk more about later that you can add custom tags to donors, and that makes segmenting your emails really easy. You can just export a list of all donors who have say hosted a peer to peer fundraiser and use that and you've added that peer to peer tag. And then you can just upload that into whatever you happen to be using constant contact mail chimp and so on. And we do also offer 30 day free trials of advance so if you'd like to try that out, that is an option that's available to you. But anyway segmentation and making the emails more personalized is a way to make your donors feel like they're being seen. And generally people respond favorably to that and you'll get more in return for your email marketing efforts when you segment. Finally keep your relationship with the donor they're giving history how they came to be on your donor list at the center of your communications. Again we often just ask and ask and ask, and that can turn people off so that's often how we lose one time donors. So it's always helpful when trying to engage donors, whether it's by email or any other method to keep in mind how they came to you and acknowledge that relationship when you talk to them and try to engage with them. The last thing I'll focus is that as you focus more on engaging donors do not forget the ones who are already there and already engaged and supporting your work. Make sure you have a plan to talk to you recurring donors and the people you have already retained. So they have the motivation to stay, show them gratitude throughout the year that's unconnected to a financial ask. And you can also work on increasing the amount these donors give and incorporating them into other areas of your nonprofit which we're going to talk more about in a minute. Moving these donors down the pipeline is called moves management. So as you plot the course for 2020, make sure you make space for moves management as part of your overall donor engagement plan. So to jump off of that last bit about moves management we're going to talk about how to specifically do that, and how you can cultivate relationships with your donors and get them in meshed and invested in your organization. The first thing we're going to talk about is moving beyond the part of moves management where you simply bump up the amount of their donation. That's definitely a helpful thing to do and in 2020 will have some helpful tools that can help you do that, but moving donors down the pipeline is more of a process of getting that donor in meshed in your organization. So think about how you can get them involved outside of donating as well. For instance, peer to peer fundraisers as volunteers as board members or even just people who are attending your events. And you can also think about things like political advocacy, depending on the type of work you do, calling representatives writing letters making phone calls and so on. These help cultivate the relationship by developing some reciprocity. I was pretty hard and you're not just bombarding them with asking them to do things. And you're, you're, you're securing their long term investment, you're building a different kind of relationship with them. And especially when it comes to things like serving on your board or volunteering, when you invest a donor in a community surrounding your nonprofit with your nonprofit at the center of that community. They have more of a personal stake in staying within that community so they're very much less likely to become decide I don't want to have any part of this and just totally walk away you've kind of got them because they have this whole community that's connected to your nonprofit. So this is a really important thing to consider, and it's much more effective effective than just say like setting them a whole bunch of emails you really want to think about how to shepherd them into becoming active members of your nonprofit and part of your work. And in the next few slides we're going to go into detail about how to accomplish some of this and some of the different options for moving them into other organ areas of your organization. So the next step is volunteering we're going to talk more about this but obviously as nonprofits volunteering is vitally important, and sometimes at nonprofits we think of volunteers and donors as being separate, but they are most definitely overlapping groups. And I'm sure a lot of you are volunteers, and it's really common for people who get into the nonprofit sector as professionals to start out as volunteers. So as a follow up ask just including donors on calls for volunteer help can be a huge help in getting them and meshed. If you're emailing segment out the people who have given, but never volunteers and present the option to them set the expectations, explain how much of a commitment it is and acknowledge the fact that they've given to you before and you'd like them to explore whether or not they'd be interested in becoming a volunteer. It can be helpful to start off with a general call to action related to volunteering say asking for help tabling at an event for a few hours, something with a really low bar for entry, but you can also just be proactive and finding out what their skills are and what their interests are, and seeing if that you have some way that you can use them as volunteers so a survey where they can indicate if they're interested in volunteering can be a good start, or you can just use your volunteer application if you have one that's a really handy thing to have. And lastly, you can invite them to an open house or information session for volunteers, and move them into more involvement in your organization. So if you have a volunteer manager or volunteer coordinator, work with them to see if you can do more to get your donors involved in volunteering. Don't keep them separate donors and volunteers are often the same audience. Peer to peer fundraising is another great way to get donors involved and it's something they can do digitally so it's a little bit of a time commitment but they can do it whenever is convenient for them, and they can even do it from their phone. Now peer to peer fundraising is a technique where you leverage your existing supporters to bring in new ones. And it's really great for donor acquisition, but what we're talking about here is how it's beneficial as something for the person doing the fundraising. It gets them talking to people that they know about your work and why they support it, which ramps up their level of investment they're investing socially. And this is actually super easy to kickstart you can do it on social media, you can make it part of your welcome journey for new donors, or suggest it in emails where you connect with donors a few times a year. And sometimes a giving event like Giving Tuesday, or any of the other local giving events on Mighty Cause is a great way to entice people to participate as peer to peer fundraisers. So it's a really great way to increase the amount that you raise in an event or in a campaign, but it's also a great way to get them more involved. And finally you can make a peer to peer even easier with the use of a fundraiser template. So peer to peer is how Mighty Cause started out and we've made it even easier to do that with the release of a feature called fundraiser templates. When a user starts a fundraiser on Mighty Cause they create their own little fundraising page that they can customize they can set a goal explain why they want people to donate, and so on. And the page itself is essentially a template but the fundraiser template allows your nonprofits to pre fill parts of their pages so that people can get up and running a lot more easily. Basically when you have a fundraiser template set up anyone who starts a peer to peer page will have the option of using the template. They can also choose not to use it if they would prefer to build their own page. And if it's going to be pre filled with certain information that you've provided, and they can customize it they can delete it they can change it up if they want to, and make it personal or they can just totally leave it as is. But it helps them get published more easily. So somebody is not really that savvy online or they are just super busy and they want to get up and running without much, much fuss. This is a really, really great option for that. Everybody has access to one fundraiser template and then people who have an advanced subscription through Mighty Cause have unlimited fundraiser templates. Sorry piggybacking onto that topic I wanted to move on to teams and events which are both different types of peer to peer fundraising, and really excellent donor engagement tools. These are basically small scale group peer to peer efforts where people are working together to fundraise for a common cause teams can exist independently. For instance, a group of volunteers can just decide hey let's start a team and fundraise for this nonprofit, or they can exist as part of an event on Mighty Cause. Mighty Cause are for large scale peer to peer efforts, and people can participate as individuals or as teams so it adds a layer of complexity and allows you to engage more people. We also have registration throughout, through an integration with Eventbrite, sorry that was a little hard to say, as well as participant management tools. So events is a really great product to consider for things like walk-a-thons, everything in the a-thon genre of fundraising, or any sort of in-person event where you may want to sell tickets and have registration. Both products are available to all users on Mighty Cause so there's even the possibility of say a board giving event where your board members compete against each other to raise the most money for your organization. And a lot of nonprofits on Mighty Cause use teams and events to engage sponsors and community partners. One of the bigger events that we see every year on our platform is from Capital Area Food Bank where a bunch of legal firms get together and compete to raise funds for the food bank called Food for the Bar, which is a really clever name. And it's always really successful because lawyers are super competitive, so it's very successful, it's a smart format for them, and it helps them engage important partners. So just as I mentioned, one of the great things about teams and events is the element of friendly competition. It motivates people and it also weirdly bonds them together and builds camaraderie, which again goes back to creating a sense of community for your supporters. A benefit to your nonprofit is that pretty much across the board teams and events raise more money than single fundraisers alone, even projects that you start typically, I believe the last time we looked into it, the amount, the percentage that they raised more was 30%. So you can increase the amount you raised by 30% just by using teams and events. And again, events are often linked to an in-person event, which is helps with the community building that we've been talking about. And the big thing it does is that it gets your supporters not just to buy into your nonprofit, but sharing their buy-in with others publicly and acting as an ambassador for your organization. So if someone is creating a fundraiser as part of a team or an event, it's much more likely that they're going to stick with you for the long haul because they've told all their friends and their family and have been all over the internet asking people to support your nonprofit. It just increases their level of buy-in. So if you're looking for more ideas for peer-to-peer fundraisers or teams or events, we actually have a whole category of this for fundraising ideas on our blog, which is blog.mightycause.com. But you can spend some time in and just get inspired and see how you can incorporate these kinds of events and these kinds of fundraisers into your donor engagement plan for 2020. I wrote about 95% of them, so please go check them out. We have a library of free ebooks, including one on peer-to-peer and one on events, so you can download those for free as well and read those if you're interested in incorporating those in your fundraising plan. All right, so now I want to move into talking about sponsorships and partnerships and how you can leverage these relationships to gain and engage donors. We're basically going to split these into two groups, sponsorships and partnerships. Sponsors are essentially big donation sources and you can use them to provide matching grants, which donors get excited by because they're able to get more for their money when they donate. And they generate positive publicity and buzz for both you and for the sponsor. Having sponsors can also help you gain legitimacy. Not that your organization is not legitimate, but sponsors essentially lend whatever brand recognition they have to you, which makes people go, oh, this is legit. And they feel more comfortable donating and getting involved. Other types of sponsorships like corporate sponsorships that can involve employee giving are a great way to pick up donors and also to keep them because employee giving programs incentivize giving and make it super easy. The other thing I want to get into here is community partnerships and coalitions where you're essentially pooling resources together with other organizations and those can help you achieve more for your mission. So sponsorships, what are they, how do they work and so on sponsorships are typically with businesses and corporations, although that's not a hard and fast rule. They can be ongoing say through an employee giving program or one time deals where they give you a chunk of change to sponsor an event like a walkathon. The tricky thing with sponsorships and this is the fine line you need to walk is that they are not stand ins for paying for advertising, or at least legally they should not be because most sponsors write the money they give you office tax deductions. So they cannot just hand you a check and you put their logo on everything related to your event, because that's just buying ads that's not sponsorship. A sponsorship is supposed to denote a deeper relationship with your work. And for instance if you were having a walkathon your sponsor might, in addition to having their logo on your materials show up and provide food or drinks or something else that's useful for the event. This is often an issue of semantics, but when you're courting sponsors, it's important not to create like a one pager that essentially makes it look like you're asking people to buy advertising space. And sponsors on the whole will help you raise more for individual campaigns and annually so they're really important to consider. These are major donors basically, and they can provide ongoing and diverse support for your organization depending on the details of that sponsorship. Courting sponsors is often where people get stuck at nonprofits not knowing how to do this, especially not small nonprofits feel intimidated by this, but it's actually not that complicated it's, you know, outlining it is a lot easier than doing it but it's just a few simple steps. The first step really is just sitting down and hammering out some sort of sponsorship program structure. Think about what you want what's useful to your nonprofit and what the benefits would be in return. You can definitely leave some wiggle room in there to negotiate something with a potential sponsor. But having a one pager really just a PDF that you can send or print out with the details as a good starting place. Look at businesses and corporations in your community, and then whittle them down from there. Look at things like affinity, does their mission as a business have any relation to your nonprofit's business. For instance, a local pet food store would be a logical and natural sponsor for an animal shelter or an animal rescue. And as opposed to where I live we have the headquarters for Navy Federal Credit Union, which would be a great sponsor for a nonprofit that's spoken focused on veterans. And then you'll do some prospecting work, learn more about them try to scope out if they have any existing relationships with other nonprofits, maybe check with your board and see if they have any contacts or connections that would be helpful. So check out their values and make sure that they align with yours. So anytime you partner up with a business there is a potential for conflict. For instance, if you're a nonprofit is all about providing healthy school lunches, probably a partnership with Coca Cola is not going to go over well with your donor base and you may be held accountable for that with your donors. So just be careful on that front. And then you just simply ask you send them your one pager try to set up a call or a meeting and you just start the relationship. It usually does involve some cold calling and cold emailing, but hopefully in the prospect prospecting stage you've learned enough to make it feel like it's not just a random sales call. So moving on from sponsorships I wanted to get into coalition building and community partnerships. In most circumstances, coalitions are with other nonprofits. So no money is changing hands, you're basically just partnering up to make a bigger impact and usually trying to address something specific. So take a look at nonprofits you already have relationships and work from there. Most people know who else is working in the same space as them so this is a lot easier than figuring out sponsors usually. And it usually goes without saying that you will only want to consider organizations whose mission aligns with yours. They don't have to be perfect. You don't have to have the same stance on every issue. You just want to make sure that you're not on dead opposite ends of the spectrum and think of projects that would be meaningful for both of your organizations and for the community. For instance, where I'm from in Baltimore, the three major animal shelters formed a coalition to focus on two main things, political advocacy, which was a hole in the community. There was no one really advocating for animal welfare and driving adoption. So on an ongoing basis they work together to address animal advocacy in the city of Baltimore and the state of Maryland. And a few times each year they would come together for adoption events, which are not held together they just all participate and report on results together so that's another nice benefit of coalitions. In general, a general coalition can be useful for having a specific aim and focus that is beneficial to everyone involved that is the preferable situation. Now coalitions are really powerful they can drum up excitement and passion and get people re engaged or more engaged. And it can give you an exposure boost and everyone has opportunities to connect with more people in the community. There is also potential for lists sharing. If you're all on board with that and you make sure it's in the fine print that donor lists can and maybe shared when people are donating and signing up for emails at least within the coalition. Coalitions and community partnerships can help you deepen your nonprofits roots in the community and can make your nonprofit and even more vital part of the community you serve. And lastly, these can usually help you get some good press coverage, you can announce the partnership release statements on relevant issues, and it really just helps to boost your visibility in the community and get your supporter base excited and engaged. So next up we're going to talk about recurring giving. I feel like it's almost kind of silly to have this slide here, because obviously recurring giving is important but here are the benefits. First and foremost recurring giving provides income for your nonprofit that you can count on and a donor who is signed up to give on a recurring basis is invested in your nonprofit quite literally recurring gifts also allow donors to give more on an annual basis by breaking their annual donation into smaller more affordable chunks, which makes giving at a higher level more approachable for people who may not be able to write you a single check for $1000 but may be able to give that to you over the course of a year. And we're going to talk more about why this is, but it's a giving model that's getting more and more popular with donors every year. So one of the questions I get asked a lot by all sorts of people at all sorts of nonprofits is how do I engage millennial donors. You'd think to hear some people in nonprofit sector talk millennials like myself are an alien species. But even though a lot of people in the nonprofit world are millennials themselves. A lot of nonprofit development departments are really at a loss about how to engage millennials. And this is the probably not the full answer, but a big part of the answer about engaging millennial donors and appealing to this demographic is recurring giving. Millennials have developed a reputation that is really unearned among nonprofits, and that's that they don't give. But the data shows that millennials are giving to charity in great numbers and even greater than previous generations have. They just give a little bit differently. And for a lot of reasons they like to give in monthly amounts monthly increments rather than one big donation. 40% of millennials are enrolled in some sort of recurring giving program, whether it's a workplace program or just a monthly charge on their credit cards. So folks, if you want to be able to go to your board and say we have successfully engaged the millennial audience in 2020, having a robust recurring giving program is a great way to do that. And one of the reasons this is so important and this is a part of the generational issue I was talking about earlier is that millennials are getting older. When a lot of people say millennial they're what they're thinking is someone in their early 20s, but millennials are in their mid late and mid late and 20s and their early 30s and they're gaining wealth and gaining stability and you can no longer discount them. I'm a millennial and I'm in my mid 30s. I give to charities now and I will continue to do so as I get older. But I'm just not going to give in the same way as a boomer or someone who is even older than that who has their own daff and is even talking about including your the nonprofit in their estate. So it's important not to get caught up in where the big money is right now to the extent that you neglect to nurture this future generation of major donors. So on to the question of how to increase recurring giving the first three easy suggestions are to embed our widget on your website. All nonprofits can embed the widget and it got a really nice upgrade last year so it looks really pretty and it can also set up recurring donations right from your website they don't have to go anywhere else. They can do it from your donation page on your website. And then you can update your suggested donation amounts to include some language about recurring giving. You could even if you really wanted to go for it, set up all your suggested donation amounts and descriptions to talk about recurring giving. A donor would still need to opt into recurring monthly gifts and they could still enter a custom amount, but that's a really great way to push people toward making that $25 donation every single month. And just so you know on mighty cause these donors can manage every aspect of their donation from their accounts. They can change the card that's used, they can update the expiration date on their card, change the date that their donation comes out of their account and they can also cancel it right from their user account. So it's very convenient for you as a nonprofit you don't have to manage that and it's convenient for them. And third you can add it to your organization story which is where most people go when they want to learn more about how to support your nonprofit. And then the harder but very much recommended option is setting up a recurring giving program again I don't want to spend a ton of time on that because we did give a full webinar on that last year, which you can access through the mighty cause blog. So I'll be sure to include that link in the follow up email for this webinar. So even if you've got a recurring donor you should not take them for granted, or that their ongoing support is a given. So you'll need to work on keeping your recurring donors engaged throughout the year to. And one thing you want to do because it helps you get feedback and people like to be asked for their opinion is doing a semi annual survey to get their feedback or hosting an annual town hall meeting where you're recurring donors can submit questions and meet with your or just simply picking up the phone a few times a year and seeing how they're feeling about your nonprofit how they're doing and getting their feedback. Gratitude also needs to be a big part of the strategy for these donors. So think of where you can think of, thank them. Giving them shout outs in your newsletter or something easy you can do on if you have a printed newsletter a lot of nonprofits will do that. You can set up a display in your lobby to recognize them. And you can even start like a donor of the month program where you recognize specific donors. And that's just all based on how big your basic recurring donors is if you have one or two people, a donor of the month program might not make sense. But if you have more recurring donors that might be something that's helpful and a cool way to recognize them. Again, in person events are ideal for building relationships. So think about things like happy hours, lunch and learns workshops having guest speakers, and so on. And finally make sure you keep good records about your interactions with them. Speaking of which you can do that with our supporters tool which allows you to track your donors activity make notes and that important information about them. As I mentioned earlier there's custom tagging that makes it easy to market to them and you can also email them through the supporters tool on mighty cause. This is an advanced tool. So if you have an advanced subscription, you have access to this and if you'd like to try this out you can get that 30 30 day free trial of advanced. All right, so we're almost in the home stretch here. We've just got a few more talk topics to run through and the next up is board of directors engagement. So board engagement could be a whole webinar unto itself, but a lot of profits actually forget about their board when putting together their fundraising plan, because we tend to think about boards in terms of governance and strategic planning. But if I had a dime for every time I talked to a nonprofit employee who did not realize that fundraising and the financial livelihood of your organization was an important responsibility of board members. I'd have a whole lot of dimes. And if you aren't currently getting your board involved in fundraising, you are not alone, because since board source has been collecting data since 1994. This has been one of the biggest challenges for nonprofits and their boards. Most of this is attributed to a lack of education, not being brought into the organization's fundraising or at least not being brought into the weeds of it, and also a lack of understanding of nonprofits programs and services. Sometimes board members are not really comfortable speaking as experts on about the work that your nonprofit does, but people who serve on your board. They should be experts on your cause and everything that your nonprofit does and absolutely 100% should be fundraising and making financial contributions. So when you're making your donor engagement plan and your fundraising plan, you need to include your board of directors. As many of you know, the key to getting board members to do things, just as with anyone else, probably more so, is to make it easy for them and this goes doubly with board members because often our board members are really busy professionals with stressful jobs. So they appreciate it when things are set up and ready for them. Creating a fundraiser template just for board members is one way to make it as easy as possible for them to start fundraising online. If you have an advanced subscription and unlimited fundraiser templates, you create the template, you send them a link, and then boom, they're just clicking the link and hitting publish basically. So that can be a really great way to get them involved in a campaign or to get them involved in an event or peer to peer fundraising effort like giving Tuesday. Off of our platform, improving your board's education and communication is essential. So make sure that all of your board members have a deep knowledge of what your organization does and set expectations with them through a giving policy or even just take some time to host an event. And a training session with board members or formalize your onboarding process so that new board members have a good understanding. And then if you haven't done that in the past, require that existing board members go through that training and onboarding process to another thing that can really help is actually writing out job descriptions. So there's absolutely no confusion about what that role as a board member includes. So again, board members are donors, so they, or at least they should be donors as it's generally understood and recommended that this is part of their responsibility to your organization, it is part of their commitment. Evaluate your giving policy, make sure it's circulated and all board members have it and if you don't have one, make sure you create one and be sure to include things that you know put in a range of expectations for how much they are contributing. And also, you know, include whether or not fundraising efforts count toward their amount that they give. So just $5,000 that they raise through a fundraising campaign count towards the total amount that they've given as a board member. And we can often at nonprofits develop very deferential relationships with our boards. I remember when I worked for a big nonprofit. We all had to be in blazers and slacks every day just on the off chance that one of our do our board members who were usually like across the country came to our cubicle farm and saw us. So people really tend to sort of treat them like the big boss, but they're really donors. They're people who are super invest in your cause who invested a great deal of time and effort. So it helps to step back and think of them as part of your overall donor engagement strategy. And one way to get them engaged is to pull together funding from your board to provide a matching grant to your next fundraising campaign. And that's a really easy, simple, effective thing that you can do. All right. So last but not least, we're going to talk about volunteer engagement as part of donor engagement. We, I guess I mentioned before, we tend to separate volunteers and donors, but the fact is that most volunteers are donors or have the potential to come donors, about 79% of volunteers also contribute financially to the organization they volunteer for. And if you don't have volunteers, or if your volunteers are not donors, you can make a plan to convert them to making a contribution. And this is really very low hanging fruit, because it's usually just a matter of asking them. Sometimes they just don't get asked. When it comes to engaging volunteers. First, that moves management we talked about earlier, share volunteer opportunities with your donors, so that they can become volunteers and get more enmeshed in your organization. So if you're existing volunteers, things like classes, workshops, training and so on, can you really great for volunteers, teach them a skill, have one of your staff experts share knowledge with them, bring in a guest speaker. You know, these are things that offer value to your volunteers that helps them pick out, pick up skills. As I mentioned, a lot of volunteers may actually go on to be paid staff at nonprofits. It's a really great way to keep them engaged, help them build that community, have regular meetings with your volunteers so that they are all on the same page with the staff and there's no miscommunication. And having a town hall with your nonprofits leadership is a really great way to make them feel heard, give them a chance to speak up, share their opinion, let you know what their concerns are and keep them engaged in your nonprofits work. Volunteers and donors are really just flip sides of the same coin. They're people who are very, very, very invested in your nonprofit. All right, so just 10 minutes before the hour, we have some time for questions. So if you have a question, just type that into the questions box of your go to webinar panel. And I'll just take a look at what we've already got there right now. Okay, so for team and event pages, can we integrate an existing Eventbrite page into our Mighty Cause site? Yes. So basically just create an event through Eventbrite. Our support team can help you through that if you have any questions about it as you're doing it. But basically you would take the link for your Eventbrite page and you just paste that into a specific spot on your event and you would be able to embed it that way. And if you don't have any issues with that, you can certainly ask our support team support at mightycause.com. They are the experts. They will walk you through specifically what you need to do. But yeah, definitely if you have an existing Eventbrite page, you can integrate that, I believe. So if you are able to figure out how to do that, you can just contact our support team and they'll help you out. Alright, so yes, we will get the recording and the slides sent out to everybody just to answer that question. A question about bank accounts. That's a little bit outside of the scope for this webinar. So I would contact our support team and just let them know that you're trying to do that. Typically there's only one, especially for nonprofits because they have to, it has to match your organization's info. We can't divert it into a related account that is not your nonprofit's account. So just contact support at mightycause.com and they will help you out. So somebody's asking for more information about diversifying donor channels. Can I elaborate on that? Yes, I can. So a great example is Facebook fundraising. Facebook fundraising has become more and more popular over the years. It's something that more nonprofits are sort of engaging in. It's creating these Facebook fundraisers and using that as a main channel. And that's actually being fairly effective for a lot of nonprofits. But, and this is a big but, that may go away. I have no insight into what Facebook plans to do, but that would be a channel that could at any moment because you don't have control over that. That could go away. Or for instance, if you're a nonprofit where you have a really robust direct mail marketing program, you're working with a direct mail company, you're sending out mailers a lot. You have people sending in checks. If that's your main source of income and that's how people are donating, that could change. What if that direct mail marketing company goes out of business? What if there's a new law about how you can market to donors? So there's a lot of things that can make a certain source go away. You basically think of it as like, you want to have different channels leading into your nonprofit. The more channels you have leading in, whether that's through social media, email marketing, direct marketing, your web presence, mighty cause, your participation in community and giving events, those are all roads into your nonprofit. And you want to have a lot of roads. Because if one of those roads gets cut off and that's the main thoroughfare where people are coming into your nonprofit, you're going to find yourself in a real pickle. So you just want to make sure that you're not over-focusing on what's becoming dilapidated and impassable. So as you take care of your direct mail or website in your digital, as you're doing Facebook fundraisers, if you want to also make sure that you're doing mighty cause fundraisers or collecting money on your website. Some organizations rely a lot on donors bringing in checks or physical donations. You want to make sure that you have a lot of different ways for donors to give and you aren't over-focusing on one particular method. So that's really what I mean when I talk about diversification. It doesn't mean you need to give equal attention to all channels that donors use to get to your nonprofit. You just want to make sure that there's a lot available and that you're taking care of. Let's see. Does mighty cause utilize any texting platforms for donations? So that is actually a feature we offer through mighty cause advanced. You can actually test that out with the 30 day free trial that I was talking about earlier. We do offer text to give and you'll have one keyword that you can set up to test out text to give. So if that's something that you're interested in trying and you want to incorporate text to give into your fundraising strategy, mighty cause advanced does offer that. That is a subscription service. So you get access to supporters. You get CRM tools. You get data integration. You get a lot with that. But one of the big things that you do get is access to our text to give tool. So you go to mighty cause.com slash advanced and you can check out what that offers there and you can also start your free trial there as well. And if you would like to get a demo before you try anything out, you're welcome to sign up for a demo with one of our representatives through mighty cause.com slash advanced. See. So there was a suggestion. It would be interesting to see a webinar on getting board members involved. We don't have one planned currently, but we are getting our content to strategy together for 2020 so I will keep that in mind and maybe we'll have one in the future. There's a question about donor based tracking. It's not really as simple as like one to one we're going to import all of that information so if that's something you're interested in. Definitely contact our support team they can help you figure out how you might be able to do that with our CRM tool. I will say that it's more of a, it's not as robust as say certain like a full database like a razor's edge. So if that's what you've been using it's not really that big of a program it's not we're not you don't need a full time mighty cause database administrator for instance. So you can contact support at mighty cause.com and they can walk you through your different options in terms of importing the donor information that you already have any advice about hosting an online town hall for donors. That is a really great suggestions great idea to do, especially if you don't have like you don't want to manage an event with a whole bunch of people. Definitely with town hall meetings, getting the questions ahead of time and sorting through those so that you kind of know what people are thinking about and choosing the questions that you want your leadership to answer. It's something that I recommend just so that no one's put on the spot that if you have, you know, for instance somebody who's gone a little bit rogue, they don't stand up and they don't, you know, rant at you. But that, you know, using any sort of webinar or web conferencing tool like zoom meetings or go to meeting that can work really well for that. And you could also just have a webinar like on go to webinar where people submit their questions in the questions box and then you can answer them one by one. And I think really just with town halls. It's making it framing it so that people know that you're just trying to get their input you're talking to them that it's all about them and you're you want to hear from them you want their feedback because you care. That's really the appeal of that is I want a chance to talk to my donors. You it's introducing them to your leadership, and it's giving them a chance to share their feedback with you that can be a really helpful tool. You just want to do whatever you can to try and control that to some degree like getting the questions submitted ahead of time. All right suggestions around refreshing our board of directors how do we ensure our new board of directors and our current board members have the same expectations of their involvement. So that's a really good point I think maybe every year if you don't already have an onboarding process make sure that that is in place. Having a training program like where they are able to learn more about what you do and get their sense of get their expertise obviously not all board members have the same role or involvement so writing out job descriptions is a really helpful exercise especially if your board seems a little bit unclear. And board meetings are a really great opportunity to you know take a moment and talk about the issues at hand for your board and if one of those issues is that they're a little bit muddy about the expectations around them you can set those expectations. And definitely if you haven't really pushed your board to contribute financially or to participate in fundraising you may need to bring that up and it's a couple of board meetings. Just until they get the hang of it and then include it in job descriptions and you know if you don't currently have job descriptions for your board members that can be a really great exercise and how you can set expectations with them. Obviously they're governing you but it's it's an odd relationship in terms of you know executive directors relating to their board of directors. So having them you know participate in writing their job expectations and being open about like hey you kind of miss this this fundraising aspect that's part of your responsibilities here and the good thing about board of directors and those kinds of relations is that there are a lot of resources online so if there's something that you're looking for there's a lot of organizations that have put together resources for interacting with your board and understanding the role of a board of directors. So definitely just Google it. There's a lot of great places like board source they have a lot of information and resources and there's often a lot of specific information specific to a field. So for instance animal sheltering dot org is a place where you can find a lot of information about board of directors for animal shelters. So just try Googling and you'll find a wealth of resources because there's a lot out there for board of directors relations but if you don't currently have job descriptions. Then that is where I would start with a board of directors and you can involve them you know don't write it to them write their job description and hand it to them because they're not your employees. That's a little bit of a trickier relationship to manage. But if you think about you know I'm not really this employee and I are not really getting each other we're not really understanding what the expectations are. The first step is the job description it's the expectations for the position that they're in so I would start there and definitely work with your board chair to initiate that because they should be the ones keeping the the board together basically. Okay so there is a question about support. This is really not for support related questions so if you do have a question that's specific to a bank account or anything specific to your organization is something you are trying to accomplish on the platform. Talk to our support team and support at mightycause.com they can help you out with anything that you're trying to do that is specific to your organization. All right so I think that is everything to go every all of the questions we have. If any of you have any other questions about you know this topic of donor engagement you can always email me. It's Linda at mightycause.com I'm always happy to chat with you and answer your questions via email. If you need support help support at mightycause.com you'll get in touch with our friendly customer support team and they can help you navigate any technical issues you're having. But that is it for today thank you guys so much for attending and we will send out the recording and slides as soon as I'm able to put that together. Thank you so much.