 All right. So I still got approximately 30 seconds before we officially begin. I love that she just went through that little bit of introductions of who's in the audience today. It is not hyperbole, I'm not trying to falsely win all of you over as she was reading what you were doing. I got a little one proud that I'm lucky enough to present to you all and I'll tell you why in a second. But like just hearing all the work all of you that were kind enough to reply are doing I got a little emotional. It's really, really cool to work with nonprofits. I just I just adore that so many people are doing such great things around the world. And with that one o'clock so let's go and get started. Hey everybody. Welcome to how to own the smartphone with social email and text call attention which see on the slide there. We are recording today's webinar we're going to copy the recording out to all of you. Keep your questions coming in through the question little tab there or through the chat. I've got Heather behind the scenes from contact who is going to answer questions that can be immediately answered that are maybe specific to you. And she's also going to collate some questions to read to me at the end so keep your questions coming throughout. And talk about what we think the top challenges to nonprofits are and this is actually very probably pretty familiar to you because you would probably identify the challenges that your organization is similar to these. What nonprofits typically say is that they big challenge number one challenges finding new donors, new stakeholders volunteers employees. Getting getting connections to the media etc etc finding these new people is the most critical thing is the top challenge for a nonprofit. What we do is time crunch right small staffed, maybe wearing multiple hats. This is very very commonly told to us by nonprofits is the second biggest challenge third biggest challenge is making sure that they're retaining and connecting and committing to existing stakeholders existing volunteers existing donors existing stakeholders making sure that's connected what I'm going to suggest to you and what the purpose of today's presentation is is to flip all of that upside down. Next, a nonprofit organization pay attention to is number one, retaining existing stakeholders number two, finding new donors new stakeholders and number three, conquering that time challenge. Keep in mind that gaining a new donor can be five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. Do you need to keep the donor pipeline. It's not full. Yes, you need to have new donors constantly coming in, but you need to make sure you're paying attention to people that have donated to you that have connected to you that are volunteering for you, keeping people connected to you is going to be really critical and it's going to help you save time in the sense that you're not constantly having to chase that new stakeholder, because you're committing time to the existing 99% of consumers. You need to check their personal email at least once a day and what devices they check that on that's why you're here, the smartphone or Rita said you know that's a smartphone world. Most people read emails on a smartphone. And I want to challenge you after today's webinar now I know just for a fact that some of your multitasking. Some of you probably have your phone in your hand. So do or do not do this right now, but I challenge all of you post webinar to think through what the most used app is on your phone. Now this is a live presentation I'd be able to ask you and you'd reply back Oh snapchat Oh, Facebook Instagram, Google Maps, I'm going to say pay attention. You're probably using your email app, more than any other app on your device now it's funny because we don't think of our email app and I'm talking about Gmail or outlook whatever you used to read email. We don't think of that app as an app. It's a utility. It is so ubiquitous and something we're in so often that it doesn't necessarily feel like a specific app experience like Facebook or Instagram. Now it feels more like a utility like well of course I'm checking my email that's the must do. Well guess who else is treating their email inbox as a utility as a must do all the time every time. So we're going to take this idea of retaining existing stakeholders, finding new donors and stakeholders and saving you time, and we're going to distill it down into the smartphone world so what will we cover today, how social email and text move people closer to your goals, how to harness the strengths of each channel and how to create an overall great experience. Now I said at the top right before I officially began that you your little stories about what you do for the world move me and I felt very honored to present to you. Why, because I've been there. So proceeding my 12 years at constant contact, I worked at a 501 3C. I worked for a nonprofit for about four years and I can tell you I've never worked harder in my life for less money. I do understand what it's like our organization was a staff of two. I had to be the reception this is a bookkeeper the marketing director. I had to do procurement I had to do member relations so I know what it's like to have passion for an organization and what kept me at that organization I didn't make much income, what kept me there for that long passion, I was passionate about what we did and what we supported and I know just even by the way you responded to a reason questions that you're passionate about what you're doing. And so I'm really honored and thrilled to present this information to you today. My name is Matthew Matoi senior channel marketing and enable minute manager a constant contact fancy word just means I have been training I'm a teacher. For constant contact for 12 years and let's go ahead and teach you some things today. So let's start with how social email and text move people closer to your goals. So I'd go out on a limb and say some of you are doing email marketing probably most of you are doing social media marketing. Maybe some of you are dipping your toe into text. Maybe some of you are doing them all and you're here today to learn be more efficient or some ideas to help you get more results. But I doubt many of you're doing all three why while that can be really overwhelming you may be challenged to find time to do just one of them and the idea of doing social media and email social media and email and texting, it might feel too much well. What we encourage you to do it constant contact is practice the party principle. You want to think of social media as the big party great for engaging large groups of people meeting new people connecting to them. And then later as you identify and you identify yourself with them and they identify your themselves with you, they move into email emails the after party. You found the people to build deeper relationships with they now have a deeper connection to you. They say yes, I want to stay connected to you and that's what email marketing is. Lastly, texting is the VIP party. These are people you really want to treat very special because you connected them in the most personal place on their smartphone via text. The strengths of each of these channels. Social media that's great for sharing a beyond email and SMS it's a way to engage people and reach a new audience. Now one thing to be aware of the social media if you put all of your eggs in the social media basket let me pause for a second. I use social media as a marketer constant contact those social media tools I do not mean to throw social media under the bus here it's a fantastic and ubiquitous tool right. Now, just because somebody's connected to you on social media if you put all of your eggs in the social media basket you may not be reaching the audience you think you are why is that well, because social media has algorithms meaning sometimes they show your content and sometimes they don't. So one quick way around that is to make sure you're engaging your audience you want people to like your comments comment on your comments react to your comments share your comments, share your articles share your pieces that's one way to get around the algorithms, but you really shouldn't put all your eggs in this basket because it's a fantastic way to quickly connect to people but generally on social people social media, people learn isn't engaged with you that's where you get to the after party email. This reaches the audience directly and we think about it. When you gain a new subscriber, meaning they have given you their email address in order to send them email marketing. There is an inherent deeper relationship occurring there. They're basically saying, yes, I want to learn more from you learn more about you perhaps spend time with you perhaps spend money with you. This may be the first real yes, in your relationship. And so we want to make sure that we're treating this audience, a little more special than the social media honest because they're making a commit to us. You can send more robust messages to provide more detail. Everything is fantastic for keeping your organization top of mind. Repeatedly sending out email information that's motivating people to slowly make the connection to what you do and how they can participate in it. Lastly, the VIP party SMS is obviously great for sending short messages that are time sensitive. I want to employ SMS in terms of building long term relationships away email does are finding new relationships away social media does SMS is really fantastic for motive motivating people with information that is time sensitive. The way I see most nonprofits utilize SMS is for event notifications so somebody registers for an event you say, you know, a week out for the event the events. This date you share a link with more information about what the attendee needs to know and then an hour before that's a webinar you send them a reminder. That's a great way to leverage this powerful tool, but it is a powerful tool and you don't want to overuse it so we're going to break all of these up and talk about some best practices and some ideas for social media, email and text. Let's start with social media. That's the party right so this probably is a dumb moment but word of mouth obviously nowadays mostly happens online. It happens anytime someone shares anybody reviews shares mentions recommends or connects to your nonprofit in some way. Now on the screen we can see some examples of just how this can happen on social media sharing content information recommendations from people that say they're interested in because they shared it. Now your nonprofit has an opportunity to be more a part of those conversations to increase the chances of someone recommending you are seeking you out when they want to connect you in a deeper way. So, social media I kind of feel like this is a little bit old hat ideally you've been in, you've been an organization long enough that you're probably dabbling your toe if not fully committing your whole foot into the social media world. I do know from my time of meeting so many social medias and any social media so many nonprofits. I didn't even say this at the introduction. In my 12 years of contact I've had the opportunity to meet over 12,000 small businesses and nonprofits I've met a lot of nonprofits in my time in person. And one thing I have learned when it comes to social media is that nonprofits will sometimes try to find a nice way to say this, gravitate towards one social media platform. And you want to look at others as well generally that's going to be Facebook and obviously Facebook is really powerful, but you do need to make sure that you're broadening your message across different social media channels based on what you're trying to achieve and based on what kind of nonprofit you are. So, Facebook, obviously is great, but you are competing with a lot of noise there's a lot of communication occurring both good and bad on Facebook, and you also need to be aware that Facebook, just like all social media channels own your contacts and kind of own the relationship to be aware of that. Obviously Instagram is highly visual so some of you will play right into that so the examples we're going to share today for the most part are going to be around animal adoption and obviously that can be a very visual visually appealing way to market and organization, but others may not be as visually inclined in terms of their message doesn't translate as well to visual imagery. It's another very visual place where you can also not only share images but you can share ideas these boards that you can have people pin your information to as a way to broaden your exposure to a larger audience. LinkedIn makes a lot of sense for most nonprofits but not all, I would actually encourage if you're not already for you to have a footprint on LinkedIn regardless of the kind of organization you are in your mission, only as a way to establish connections and networking Donations obviously somewhat is also about relationship plays and networking and so LinkedIn is a fantastic way for you to broaden the network, but I did hear Lisa mentioned that one of you is working in job placements and things like that will obviously that makes sense and to be in the LinkedIn Twitter very very fast, very public news you are competing with a lot of noise there. My experience with nonprofits is most of you probably don't have items moving so quickly that you need to be committed to Twitter as a mechanism as a channel to market out to. And then, my opinion, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube is generally where most nonprofits see the biggest benefit. So, with YouTube, the benefit obviously is it's video based but one thing I've learned with nonprofits that I'm going to throw it a generality here. Okay, so don't yell at Heather who's behind the scenes answering your questions. Some of you would want a very polished very professional video output on YouTube, not all of you do and one really compelling thing to remember is that for most parts, most of you have a very compelling story that can be shared with nothing more than a camera phone recording a video that camera phone can be selfie and you're talking about your mission that camera phone be used to interview somebody that camera can be used to promote and show off your fantastic event. Most of you can probably get away with just camera phone based YouTube content. One thing that we need to think about when we talk about marketing today is that everybody's pressed for time and attention span has been squashed thanks to smartphones people don't read content as much as they used to and they certainly don't read it as deeply as they generally scan, we generally skim. So if an image speaks a thousand words we're able to convey more information through imagery well we think about video, a video speaks a thousand images so don't feel overwhelmed to dip your toe into YouTube. One thing we do encourage you to do though is that if you are going to try a cross channel approach across different social media, you want to modify your message for each channel. So we can see here Netflix, which we use as an example because most of you are probably familiar with what Netflix does, obviously not a nonprofit but they are applying this idea of sharing messages in different ways. So with LinkedIn on the left they have a much more article based thought leadership based piece that relevant that resonates in the LinkedIn world where on the right with with Instagram they have or Facebook they have an article that's a little more light hearted right so for you what I make sure you do is make sure you're altering things like your imagery altering things like your hashtags altering things like the actual message and even maybe the content. One thing I do see in the nonprofit space and this is usually used because of small staffs and limited time is I will see nonprofits blast the exact same message across multiple social media channels. That is a way to save time that that may not be a way to get the most donations the most activity. Remember our goals should be to retain current members so we need to make sure that perhaps we're sending messages that would resonate with that audience. And it can't only be about recruiting new donors new volunteers we need to make sure that we're staying connected to our current database. One thing you can deploy in social media is on social media you can encourage them to also follow you in other channels, aka email and text, and we'll talk about that a little bit. Now, as I said a lot of nonprofits will post the same message across multiple social media and I'm going to say the same message the exact same message. What I want you to do is focus your time in efforts to move all around these three goals make sure you're spending your time on driving awareness first, making sure that people understand what you do and what you're doing around the world, what you're doing in your community to do whatever it is that you're improving that your that your mission is right. You also want to make sure you're answering questions so this is another thing I see in the nonprofit space generally because of small staffs if you're going to be on social media. You're consistently and constantly paying attention to what's going on on social media. You don't want to have questions sit idly by a couple reasons why you don't. One is when somebody's engaging you want to engage them right you're continuing a conversation that's going to change the algorithms that's going to allow more people to see your post it's certainly going to allow that person to see more of your posts and more of your posts. But you also may learn something by that question. So one strategic thing you can do when it comes to social media is learn via the questions you're getting what your audience is most interested and then you convert that into content for especially email. If you consistently see a similar question over and over and over again by your constituency. Well that may inform you that I probably need to answer this. I don't know if you're interested in social media but perhaps you want to answer it with a dedicated page on your website and then have an article in an email that has a little bit of that content that links to that article. Lastly, you want to get them to take what action right so one of those actions obviously is going to be donate but another action can be attended an event. Volunteer and do not forget to ask people to join your mailing list through social media and I show you how to do that in just a moment. You can try repurposing content so you can on social media repackage your email content or repackage your blog content. You can also share user generated content. One thing I question I've consistently gotten when it comes to email marketing is, well, I don't have time to write all this content. How am I going to come up with all these ideas well, you probably have stakeholders board members, volunteers donors who have a personal story to tell, have them tell a story. The best place to look for content is sister organizations that are in your similar space you can have them write an article for your email or your blog or both. And lastly, don't forget about vendors vendors sometimes have really compelling stories to tell through social media blogs and email marketing. Just make sure as I said you adjust the message to each platform. Speaking of each platform let's pivot to email you're going to use email as that after party to deepen relationships so the first thing about email marketing I said it at the beginning is it's maybe the first yes you're going to get from a stakeholder first yes you're going to get from a potential donor donor. And so that success that kind of relationship begins with permission. You want to get them to say yes to receiving email. You also want to have clear opt in language on sign up forms. So you see here an example of a feature in constant contact if you're not using constant contact that's okay I understand. I would make sure that the tool you're using has this kind of functionality. What you're seeing here is called a lead generation landing page that's just a bunch of fancy words for an intake form. This form would live on your social media it would live in a blog it would live on the signature line of your outgoing Gmail or outlook emails. This would be something that you would share on print material as a QR code we'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. The benefit to this form is you can ask your subscribers anything you want their first name last name obviously their email address but you can also ask them specific questions to your organization. The benefit is that you are getting permission to have people sign up for your for your email. The reason why that's beneficial is one tools like on some contact or permission based you have to have permission to email. And again we want that opt in we want that behavior we want them to say yes I want this information because that's going to strengthen the relationship whatever you do I don't see this often in the nonprofit space but I have seen it. Don't buy email lists. There are folks out in the universe that will try to sell you an email marketing list right. Don't buy it reason why and I'm going to speak to the states I know we have some friends in Canada on this call today in the states it is legal to buy a list it is legal to use a list. What it is is that that cannot buy its nature be an opt in so one a tool like constant contact and I'll even speak for our competitors, we're going to catch up, and then you're going to you're going to not be able to use that list. The reason is is that a lot of people with if you're emailing people didn't opt in, they don't know you. How could they possibly know you and if we take a moment we think about that. We think about email soliciting for behavior right your case and be a donation be a vint attendance soliciting for business to people that don't expect to hear from them. Spammers, right. And so you don't want to act like a standard. Now what I do see in the nonprofit space is sister organizations sharing lists, you're kind of like my, your audience is kind of like my audience, my audience is kind of like your audience. Here's my email list why don't you send out all you send out to your email list you can't do that for the same reason they didn't expect to hear from you. Now what you can do with sister organizations is have them email out on your behalf and share a link to your sign up page for on your behalf and vice versa that is a strategy that is allowed in the states in Canada. You probably know you've already researched the Canadian anti spam law, you want to become familiar opt in is the only way in Canada, and buying lists and trading lists is extremely forbidden in outside the states. All right, you also want to segment your list so I talked to you a moment ago about that that lead generation landing page is a tool for you to ask people any information you want. If you really want to be effective in email marketing, one of the things you need to do sooner than later now if you've been doing email marketing for years I applaud you. And maybe if you've been segmenting for years I applaud you I do know about the nonprofit spaces that some of you are the best at segmenting lists. But if you are not segmenting a list or you're not segmenting your lists enough, or if you're brand new to email marketing or you haven't started it, you want to segment your lists sooner than later. So let me define segmentation. Everybody's different right, all of you are different from each other. I'm different than you. Aretha is different than me we're all different right we live in different locations we have different passions we have different interests and we take different actions. For each of your organizations, the segments that are important to you are going to be unique to you, but all of you your constituency you're downline your stakeholders they're all different and your mission is different the way that you talk to people and different. The idea here is taking one big list and carving it up into smaller groups. Now those groups might be demographic they may be geographic to maybe based on activity. But what you want to do with email marketing to be successful is to take your big list and carve it up in the smaller lists, and to speak to people through email marketing with different information in different tones with different calls to action. So that I learned the hard way now to be fair. This was over 12 years ago when I worked in the nonprofit and email marketing was relatively new so I'll use that as an excuse. So if you were going to yell at me so I wouldn't say it. I was emailing my members we were a membership based organization. I was emailing my members my non members and my vendors, just one email with the exact same tone with the exact same verbiage. And after a couple of years of okay success with metrics and getting people to do what we want them to do came up with a brilliant idea like we need to send out three emails one to each different audience. And we immediately saw an uptake and in donors and volunteers and membership renewals. And the reason for that is I was asking my members to get a membership. Well, why would I do that right. I was asking my members who are paying an annual fee to donate which means some of them actually did. But I wasn't speaking to my audience is uniquely as soon as we segmented our list we saw a lift in results, much of the content was the same I didn't need to change the content, maybe an article here maybe an article there it was the tone it was the way I was talking to them. The, the calls to action that I was using that I needed to alter. So if you really want to be successful the big secret sauce and email marketing is relevancy. The more relevant you can make the content, the more successful you're going to be. Now when it comes to designing your email make sure any email you send up bulk email email marketing answers three specific questions. Firstly, what are you offering so what is it that your email is all about. Secondly, how will it help the person receiving the email and lastly how are they going to do that. Now this falls into the idea of making sure that any email marketing you put out is very, very easy for people to understand very, very quickly. The average email subscriber only spends about 20 seconds in an email. Well that might sound intimidating but I bet that's the same thing you do as well the dirty little secret is we don't read anymore we scan and we scan and what we're doing is we're scanning. What is it that I'm being asked, or what is it that this email is about. What is it that I need to learn about it and how do I do it. You want to make sure that your email falls into this very basic concept right, because we want people in the email and out of the email as quickly as possible. This is especially important for a VIP marketing and donation marketing right so if we are trying to get people to take an action we want to give them the quickest route possible to do that. Now at this point, I guarantee you Heather's about to receive questions. There's behind the scenes answering questions. And there's probably receiving questions well I send out a newsletter and we have a lot of content in there well this comes back to the idea of segmentation. You want to make sure your email falls into some basic rules beyond just making sure that you have a headline and message in a body. You want to keep your email content to know more than about three images. You want to keep your email content to know more than about 25 lines of text overall, and no more than three calls to action, a call to action simply means the link that they're going to click on to go do something. Why do we want to do that what we want to keep that email as simple as possible. Why do we want them in and out of the email as quickly as possible. Well, the second that somebody clicks on a link in an email. They're already starting to think people. They're already thinking about attending or not attending donating not donating reading not reading they're already more engaged and they were when they first got the email. So we're already closer to getting that donation than we were when they just opened the email we're already closer to getting that volunteer already closer to getting activity, maybe registration for event. What we want that click is that tools like constant contact will tell you this person clicked on that link. And this is ultimately how you grow donations, especially from existing people in your universe, people that you already connected to an email that maybe never have donated. The reason for that is because constant contact reports who clicked on what so what you do is that's another form of segmentation. I collect a list of people that clicked on my donation list link, my donation link and compare it against recent donors. Let's say that Heather clicked on my donation link, but she never committed to donating. What might it be smart for me to do. Well, let's take a step back what do we know about him. Well, she was obviously curious about donating, but she never made the next commitment. Hmm. I probably want to send her a follow up email. And with a tool like constant contact you can do that automatically. And this falls into a common concern I hear in the nonprofit space when it comes to email marketing well I'm worried about sending too many emails. How many emails should I send well I'm going to answer that question for you right now. The answer is, it depends. It really does. So you need to consider your audience right and this falls into segmentation. How many emails. I need to send them to cause the effect that I want. One thing I hear in the nonprofit space is not so much worried about over sending emails over communicating it's worry about people unsubscribing. That is a realistic concern, but the bigger concern is making sure that, in my opinion, the bigger concern is making sure your content is relevant if your content is relevant people will accept more emails. That falls back into segmentation because the more I can cut my audience into smaller groups, the more likely I'm going to send relevant content to them. We want to consider the expectations we set when we got our subscribers in the first place. So did you establish a relationship that you would send to two emails a month or four emails a month, or one email a month. You can do in any kind of form, whether that's a form on your website, or one of lead generation forms like I showed you before, or even on the phone if you're taking in somebody's email address. Make sure you set the expectation that we generally send two emails a month we might send a little bit more in November we might send a little bit more around an event. But coming back to the idea of I don't want to send too many emails people unsubscribe. I get a two emails a week from an organization and I open every single one of them, and technically they're a nonprofit. Wouldn't two emails a week sound like a high number. I open up everyone. It's my my child's high school. I open every one of their emails because I want to know what's going on in the school. And that's because that's relevant to me now do I think you can send two emails a week no I don't but this is falls into the idea of relevancy. What we do want you to do is send or what we do suggest you do is send at least one email a month. Remember email marketing is remarkably effective at building relationships and strengthening relationships if you send less than once a month, you're losing mind share. So if you find up to your list they're expecting an email probably pretty quickly the fact of best practices to send an email immediately that's called a welcome email, and that is a piece of automation that can be found in constant contact. But they're right there they signed up for your list they're engaged as they're probably ever going to be. You want to make sure you're sending really regularly that what I do see in the nonprofit space is that nonprofits and flow with their email here in the States you get really heavy around giving Tuesday and then a couple of months dry up and then the next donation campaign the next event that comes up and you get really heavy and then it drops off. You want you want to avoid that kind of staggered sending because basically you're priming the pump every single time you send. The idea of people unsubscribing can be something legitimately concerning but the reality is somebody that's going to go through the steps to unsubscribe to you probably was never going to volunteer or donate or do anything with you. And so basically they're pruning your list for you you want to pay attention to the active subscribers in your email database. What you want to make sure of is avoiding becoming irrelevant. That's the bigger danger I guarantee you in your email inbox right now or emails from organizations that you have been passionate about that you've donated to that you've attended their events or even for profit organizations where you spot shop and spent money that you just don't even see in your inbox anymore you just don't even notice it why because at some point they taught you that their email marketing was irrelevant it didn't mean anything to your life. Not everyone you send to is going to donate the second you send an email so it's really important or volunteer attend an event or whatever you're asking them to do. So you want to stay top of mind know you do that is sending at least once a month for nonprofits the average good rhythm is going to be two emails a month stagger them every other week. Just make sure that that content is relevant in your segment. Alright so promotional emails so you want to make sure that when you're doing something like an announcement or a reminder last chance reminder. That's when you can increase your frequency as I said so around events. Maybe you do increase your send frequency for that event but then you get back into that that twice a month rhythm. Now let's pivot to sending texts. You want to use text for exclusive and timely messages so let's talk a little bit about text because text like email marketing is opt in is subscriber base. You need to have permission to text people. So some dues around texting do ensure they opt in you don't want to just pull out your phone and start texting people that's that's going to just end up really messy for you. You want to use a tool that actually has opted mechanisms. You want to confirm the participation so when they do opt in you want to send them a text automatically confirming their automation. You want to include disclaimers meaning you want to include legal use the talks about how often you're going to send your send frequency what hours you're going to send. And you want to set the expectations how often you can be expected to text them. You do not want to just add somebody to your text list just because you have their phone number. If we go back to that model I used before who sends random texts organizations who had no idea from organizations you have no idea who's sending this to you and why you got it. Well that's a spammer right you don't want to act like a spammer. All right some other do and do it when it comes to sending your message always give people the ability to opt out of that message so if you've ever gotten a text from a legitimate organization usually like you see here at the bottom. You want to have an ability to unsubscribe. You want to do keep the door open for them to return so a tool like constant contact allows people to resubscribe that they opt out then I'm going to get back in they can. You want to be mindful of the time you want to send only between around 11am to 8pm Eastern. The reason for that is that no one wants to get texts in personal hours, and you don't want to rely on area codes to decide when you're going to send a text because you see this a lot in nonprofits so if you're a regional or very localized nonprofit this may not matter but if you have a broader range or you're living close on divergent time zones or your national or international. You want to be mindful that area codes may not be the way you determine segmentation for when you send a text because people keep their phone numbers now I live in Florida I have my Massachusetts area code. This is very very common. Now how do you grow your text list that's generally what I hear most nonprofits talk about is you know they've been using social media for a while, maybe they've been using email marketing for a while they're very interested in SMS and text messages. They don't even know where to begin in terms of getting that permission. Well getting permission for text marketing is very, very similar to the ways you would get permission for email marketing. In person so at if you have a brick and mortar like you know if you have frontline staff getting permission there anytime you're helping a stakeholder somebody's on the phone, getting permission there, certainly at events so one thing you can employ is if you have an event registration page. Include the ability for people to submit their phone number and have them opt in to get text from you on flyer signage so print material any kind of print material you want to offer people the ability to join your text list along with your email marketing listen to give you an idea on how to do that in a moment, and then obviously online so on your website on blogs on social media in that email signature line, landing pages anywhere you're seen in the digital sphere. That's a fantastic place for you to grow your SMS list now this should sound very familiar to something I talked about just a couple of minutes ago because if we remember that lead generation landing page well if you have SMS with constant contact that page becomes a place for you to get email marketing subscriptions, but text marketing subscriptions. So when you enable SMS in constant contact you get this additional little window here where you can text and I've been changed that as a nonprofit obviously I would solicit for their text number and then there's that legally is we are going to only send three miles a month, you can stop hit stop to end or help hit help for reply you can see our terms and conditions so we're setting those expectations right there. You're going to solicit for text messages by the way this is nearly the same thing for email marketing, you need to include what's in it for them what will they receive now that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to give discounts or anything just means setting that expectation how many texts will they receive, and what might the text be about making sure that you're setting clear expectation for them, clear expectations with them is going to mean that they're going to pay more attention and take action. Do you remember to include disclaimers like your privacy policy and terms of service. As I said that's already baked into the constant contact tool. Now I respected not all of you use constant contact I would make sure that whatever tool you're using is offering they offer SMS does have this baked in. One thing constant contact also provides is we have quiet hours built in we have the from name built in for texting, and we have all the opt in mechanisms to make sure that you're compliant and following these best practices. When you're texting you want to make sure that you identify yourself when I talk about the from name. That's what you're seeing right here. Okay. So, you want to include the from name because that's what's going to immediately be seen in the text and that's going to remind people oh yeah I signed up for this and I want to read this right. The people that don't send a from name in the text are generally going to be spammers. Make sure your content is always timely and relevant so you don't want to use texting. It has a stop gap tool with information that you would typically share in an email on social media you got to remember that in texting with SMS, it's got to be a very timely very relevant message. You do want to stay consistent your texting about once a month right so this is the same reason that you don't want to send to infrequently with email marketing, you need to keep that that pump prime. If you send really really staggered people are going to pay attention to every text and some might actually unsubscribe or mark us spam because they've forgotten how they're connected to you. Keep your content really short you want to have no more than about 160 characters including spaces and things like emojis. I know I'm sound like a broken record but constant context that's the best solution does have a character count for you to so you can keep your message short. You have the ability to and I respect not all of you can but if you have the ability to try to make your text database feel like they're very exclusive because they are remember this is the VIP party. So you want to try to be, oh, I skipped too fast. You want to try to be exclusive, try to make it feel like it's something special if they're receiving text from you now you have an inherent way to do that because somebody that do dates to you as a very person, somebody who attends an event or registers for an event is a very very special person that you can bring that value that exclusivity into your texting relationship. You can also try employing being personal so constant contact does allow you to put somebody's first name in the text which makes it feel like your contents written specifically for them and try to be conversational think about what you're going to be paying attention to the results on in your text inbox right it's typically going to be family members friends and coworkers texting to you and it's usually very conversational you want to kind of follow that model as well. Now with email marketing and text marketing and social media marketing you always want to be paying attention to the results. One thing I have learned in the nonprofit space is that nonprofits are typically very very good at paying attention to the results. Well, probably limited staff with a limited budget so you want to make sure that you're getting the most effective value out of whatever you're doing. But if you're not paying attention to the metrics you need to and that's especially true in SMS so you want to pay attention to the fact of hey is my SMS list growing. Yes, great it's not I need to try some different ideas. You want to make sure that you're paying attention to how many clicks and you're getting how many conversations you're receiving in text like how many people are responding back. And conversion conversation conversions how many people are actually donating to you based on like if I send out my text and it has a donate link on it today and I see an increase in donations tomorrow or Thursday, there's a correlation there. But you also want to be paying attention to your marketing metrics and email so how many people open the email how many people clicked on links in the email and who specifically clicked on the links in the email that's going to tell you more about what your audience likes and dislikes. When it comes to social media you want to be there you want to respond to your content pay attention to what content is really causing conversation in that social media space. If you have an article in your social media profile and you're seeing more comments than usual. While your audience is telling you something perhaps that content would be read or better repurpose a little bit for email marketing perhaps you can distill that down into a social into a text message. One thing that's really cool about these three platforms these three channels, social media, email and text is that you can carve up your content into little pieces and share them uniquely to that particular channel, or have you take a little bit of content you share it on your email and you say hey, we have a broader conversation going on. I'm sorry, you share a little bit of content on social media, and then you say hey, we're having a broader conversation in email why don't you join up on our email list and so you share that lead generation landing page. And then in your email you say hey, we are going to be sharing out a thought leadership piece on SMS click here to join our SMS list. You can carve up your your marketing in a variety of ways like this maybe you start with text and you drive people to email I'm going to share an example of that. Next. So how do we create an overall great experience so you want to use your your channels and concert and so I just talked to you about how you can carve up your marketing in different pieces constant contact did just that. About a year ago we launched our SMS tool and we actually started months before we started months before on social media and we were engaging people in conversations about text marketing. Now that was doing two different things. One, we were learning more about how our customers think and how we should communicate to them around texting and what they found valuable what they found could be left behind. And then we crafted that into our marketing when we launched SMS we crafted it into our marketing we crafted it into our tool. On email we got more defined so we talked, not just specifically about the fact that we're launching SMS but really how to have the best experience with it and leverage best practices. So that's where we promoted something like a webinar which is what you're seeing here. And then we use text for media information so we reminded people that the webinar was about to occur. You can take one concept like this, launching an SMS tool and broaden it across your different channels to communicate more deeply in the way that those channels are best utilized. Regardless of what you do, regardless of what platform you use you need to understand the ecosystem of increasing word of mouth and increasing activity with your organization so I like to think of this as a big cycle. So here's your nonprofit. So it of course starts with building a quality experience now this is going to be car for the course for nonprofits. You know that you're doing something great in the world you know that you're affecting people's lives. A positive experience is probably based right into your DNA. And that also helps you enticing people to stay in touch now one thing you need to make sure is if you're providing a quality experience of doing something really great and it's very obvious. Make sure you're consistently asking people to join you on social join your email marketing less join you on SMS text marketing. You need to regularly engage with them so another place where nonprofits tend to fall is that they're not regularly engaging across all the channels you want to make sure that you're following a consistent since schedule for email. And if you're employing SMS a consistent text schedule there. That can help you also drive social visibility so if they're following you on text you can encourage them to also connect to you on social media they're following on email. They can encourage them to follow you on social media so we're increasing our exposure because one thing about social with email marketing you're just hitting my inbox with text messaging you're just hitting my text inbox. Social media is visible to the world. So you want to encourage people to connect to you on social media that are following you just on email that are just following you through SMS because that's going to be more visible. That's going to increase your exposure because you're going to have people on social media making comments liking your social media posts. Well that's visible to their friends and their family and their stakeholders. And so you're increasing the number of people seeing your marketing, and that elect allows you to connect to new pro prospects, which drive them into your nonprofit ecosystem, and we just keep going rinse and repeat rinse and repeat rinse and repeat. So, ideally there's been lots of questions in the background Heather warning we're about to get to the Q&A portion. I want to review what we talked about today so we talked about how you can own the smartphone so you want to use social media for awareness engagement you want to use email marketing to deepen and strengthen relationship, and you want to use text for exclusive and messaging messages. So we take our action plan what I'm going to do is I'm going to bring up that idea of challenges and remind you that your action plan post webinars. Focus on retaining existence of stakeholders, first and foremost, they are the most valuable asset you have in your organization beyond your fantastic staff and volunteers. These are people that are committed to you and we want to make sure we're doing things communicating with them. We want to regularly staying top of mind so that we retain them and have them connected to us for a long time because they're not only going to donate the future again, they're not only going to volunteer again and I would interact with you again. But they can actually introduce you to other potential stakeholders. Number two, that's where you want to find new donors and these two things are connected again if we're doing a good job here, they're going to help us grow here and that's going to be the exclusive way you're going to grow but that's one really big piece of your strategy. Focus on spending your time where it's most valuable pay attention to your reporting in your analytics and use tools that make it very easy for you to leverage your time. Now I would not be my job as an employee of constant contact and tell you hey constant contact is a fantastic way for you to do all of these initiatives. And in terms of saving time we have thousands of integration integrations that connect to constant contact that will save you time and one of our very favorite in the world is very popular in the nonprofit space donor perfect. A fantastic tool that helps you segment your donor database and that sinks directly into constant contact saving you time and helping you keep your content as relevant as possible. Now, before I get to the questions, if you're not a constant contact customer you can sign up today, you have 50% off, 50% off the lifetime of your subscription you do need to go through TechSoup first and then you'll have the chance to get that discount. But I encourage you that if you're not leveraging these three powerful tools to a full effectiveness email marketing social media marketing and text marketing to take constant contact. Give us a look. Now one thing I do want to say because we strive to be transparent is that email marketing and social media marketing obviously included amongst many other tools in constant contact text marketing carries an additional add on fee because of the unique nature of texting so I didn't want you to feel like I've beaten switch to you. So together here we go. What questions do we have. Great. Wow, that was a really wonderful. There's some great comments in the chat on the content and everybody's really appreciative. There are a couple of questions regarding demographics of email. So, Beth and G. They had a question on demographics of who uses email. They're wondering if the younger groups are using other platforms or what kind of feedback would you have on that I do have an article that I can share in terms of email marketing statistics. But just wanted to throw it out there would they be using different channels. You just went through a couple of different channels to reach different audiences. I think I think I think you said the name was Beth. Yeah, I think Beth already knows the answer that question. As many of you do. Yeah, of course, not everybody is going to be on the same platform and and generally younger people are going to skew towards social and especially text. But I'm going to argue a little bit and I haven't seen this article of Heather but I'd be willing to bet the article probably points on this too. I can't segment people that rosby, right, not every person in the younger generation is going to only be using texts and not every person in an older generation is only going to be using email. This is very personal and I'm just going to share it as a storytelling technique, but my dad texts me every day. He uses texts. He really can't get him to pay attention to email. He's on social media a lot. Now, is he an example of every person that's a baby boomer know, but you can't and shouldn't put all of your eggs in one basket and make assumptions. That's why we encourage all organizations to think cross channel to think making sure you're communicating as broadly as possible and that goes back into that party principle. You want to be careful in ignoring one platform one channel, because you assume your audience isn't there make sure though that as I said you're talking through each channel in the way that's best for that channel. So I would not use this exact same content when I say content I mean literally word for word in a text that I would use in an email and I would use the same word for word copy and paste kind of content from email and social media. I'm just speaking to each audience in the way that the tool requires. Awesome. There was a follow up question from Ascension and they had, they had suggested that they agree with the demographic aspect, and with the older perisher group sometimes I find a good old fashioned handwritten note by snail mail is the most appreciated. They speak to their comfort level with social media as well. So any words of advice on encouraging to use some of these digital platforms as complimenting. I would compliment it. Yeah, you know, I, we used to send snail mail pieces with my nonprofit and we sometimes send snail mail pieces a constant contact. Well, you know, and I'm not going to, I'm not going to throw that under the bus either, like snail bails really can be very effective the problem with snail mail is the trackability the lack of trackability is that a good expense. You don't know that it was delivered you don't know that it was read you don't know that they found it a value now eventually if they do donate attend you can maybe correlate that to your snail mail. So I would encourage again cross channel, you know, snail mail doesn't make sense for some of you. Some of you it does what I would do is make sure that you're sharing similar messaging on other channels so snail mail is just considered another channel. Awesome, thank you. So in the Q amp a Marsha had asked every week we send an email telling who is speaking on Sundays with a picture of the minister, the musician, the prayer ministry. So what's coming up for the week, we've never segmented and not knowing how or what it is and how to apply to our congregation. How would you recommend to send a short and simple email weekly based off of that information. Sure. So with religious organizations you have a little wider room to play. I don't necessarily think immediately that segmentation would be necessary based on what you just told me Marsha what you what a natural segmentation I'm going to go on assumptions here a natural segmentation would be maybe a generalized email to the bulk of the parishioners but then you have a limited marketing towards your younger congregants, and maybe something around unique offerings that you have for older congregants parishioners. That's the kind of segment I generally see in religious organizations, but let me pivot to the second part of the question because I think this would be applicable for all of you. One thing we see in the nonprofit space well two things we see in the nonprofit space. There's a lack of resources in the sense the lack of ability to quickly update websites. And that may be because of a lack of infrastructure or a lack of time. And so we'll generally get pushed back from nonprofits that well I have to share a really long article in my email because I have nowhere else to put it. You say I'll keep it down to 25 lines of text. How am I going to do that well, there's a couple pieces of strategy. One is with a tool like constant contact you can have people instead of clicking on a button to go to a website they can click on a button and get a download that's one thing you can do. But another thing you can do is leverage included service and constant contact which is landing pages. So you can create these little one page mini websites, and you can link to that one page little mini website. And so perhaps you just have a little bit of that and I'm going to say to use Marsha's example again of the biography of the speaker. Maybe you just have a few sentences about it and say click here to read the full biography. And it goes to a lovely page where you've created with their, their headshot and a long biography and you can share a lot more information. Those of you that use constant contact if you've not gone to the little create button and gone to landing pages you might be missing out on a tool that can help you make your emails not just shorter, but far more dynamic because you can share things like video and you can put in a lot of content in a landing page. Obviously the best place for you to link to as your website, but if you can't are in there situations where you shouldn't use a landing page. Awesome. And then just a follow up question for that. I think you already answered this question, but that big ask our organization web pages old technology or can we use that as a key role in our messaging. So kind of build off of what you just said, our organizations web page will know no you want traffic your web page now. When it comes to web pages, especially in the nonprofit space you want to make sure that you're consistently keeping it up to date one thing nonprofits will do is they'll buy a website they'll get their general information out and then it's just never updated. You could be seeding money to that you should be receiving if you're not regularly updating it. So really paying attention to search engine optimization and one thing that you can do a very simple way that you can increase the chances of somebody finding you on social media on search engines is making sure you're putting regular content one way that nonprofits can do that regularly is through a blog. And the benefit of a blog is you could let's look back to our email for a second and social media and texting. You know, one thing nonprofits can do is, if you create a blog and you write content for a blog well boom there's content for your social boom there's content for your email and potentially boom there's content for your, for your, your text messaging. So a blog to that's going to keep your content refreshed and new on your website and it's going to increase the visibility you'll have. No, you generally want to drive people to your website there's just organizations that may not be able to update their content regularly enough or it's just not an investment that they're willing to make but generally we suggest all organizations nonprofits enforced the first place you start as a website. Awesome, wonderful advice. Okay, so this one's a little bit of a technical question, and I can pop a knowledge based article in the chat, but Regina had asked, can the constant contact brand name be hidden on emails for a more personal approach. They can. You would want to contact our support line and Heather said she's going to share an article and how to do that. It's associated with that it's a one time fee. And we'll pull that out we can even for a one time fee change what's on the footer so you could have your logo and some verbiage that you want down there. What we will not do is remove the unsubscribe link will never do that. And then, unless we have any more questions come into the chat. I do have one last question in the Q&A from Miko. What would that look like as a workflow with a text email social and website. I would, as I said I'd start with websites so start with your content on your website if you have the ability to. And then I would actually kind of do all three in concert so I'm going to sound like a real constant contact salesperson I'm here for a reason. But I mean we offer all these tools in constant contact all in one username and password so what I would do is generally you want to start with your website content, and then you're going to take that content you're going to put some of it in your email and you're going to add a link to that website content now there's reasons you don't want to have it on your website or can't have it on your website. You can have it on your email, you build up your content there, and then you use some of that content in your social media so one thing you can do with constant contact is you can synchronize so when you're sending the email you can actually have it also share on social media, but you can actually have a slightly different message remember how we talked about speaking to people and different voices across different channels. You can literally repurpose your email content same images same headlines in a social media post and have it look different not just for social media, but look different for Instagram Facebook Twitter and LinkedIn so you can have each one look different. Then I would think about texting the hardest one for me to connect the dots for on this question is texting, because again texting is going to be slightly different animal we want to be thinking about relevancy and timely information. If you're going to have content what you're putting on the web is time oriented, especially in nonprofit space going to be around an event, then sure you can repurpose that content on on SMS. One thing you want to consider if you have the ability to do it as a nonprofit, some of you can and some of you can't is if you're going to follow this model that's this workflow and social media I'm sorry SMS texting is at the end of that flow. So, look at your content and say well how can I save a little piece of this as an exclusive like you're going to get this thought leadership piece or this white paper SMS folks. Or if you're not wanting to go into text maybe you keep it just for your email marketing folks. So I think it's a great possibility and how I can make that content feel really really exclusive. One other piece of transparency I need to apply because I do know that one person said they're from Canada is a constant context text solution is us only at the current time. So I don't want you to go into constant contact and go Matt didn't tell me this. We are only us based right now. Wonderful. Well, we are almost at the top of the hour, and I think we've answered all of the questions. So I think we can go ahead and wrap it up unless anybody has any additional questions I did. There was some request for the URL. Some people were watching on their smartphone. So look at them being super savvy. So we had popped the link in the chat, and then we will also follow up with that URL and our posts follow up communications. So you can also go to tech soup and just search for constant contact we have a listing on tech soups website, and that's how you will get started so tech soup. You'll go through their, their process and once you go through their process you will be able to access the 50% off discount for for constant contact. So thank you very much, Matthew. Wow, that was really great information. And there's just one last question how long is this deal available. So the deal of it is available because of the partnership with constant contact and tech soup. So it does not expire, you will get the 50% off on a monthly basis. So just head over to tech soup head over to that link head over to that QR code. And then, yes, like I said, we'll follow up with an email with all of the information that we shared. We'll share the recording will share some additional blog articles and some resources and the presentation. So with that, I'll say thank you from constant contact but I'll throw it over you, Matthew, if you have any additional parting words. I just thank you Heather for for being in the background there tackling those questions and thank all of you. As I said at the top I'm extraordinarily passionate about nonprofits I definitely want to see all constant contact customers succeed but I have a special place in my heart for nonprofits. I thank you for taking your valuable time out the listen to me for a little while and hopefully we assisted you in some way and everybody have a fantastic day and hopefully we'll see you next time. Thank you.