 to the nonprofit show. We are so glad that you're here. We're also so glad that Micah is back with us again. We have with us Micah James from Bloomerang, and she serves as the manager of professional services. You know, perfect timing to have you back here, Micah, to talk about it's not over yet. And what the it's is the year, the year is not over yet. And so she's brought with us today some last minute tips for your nonprofit's year end success. So super excited to nerd out with you on that. If you join us in the green room, you learn Micah is a nerd through and through. There's no stopping her with that nerdiness. But moving on into us, if we haven't met you yet, Julia Patrick is here. I have to tell you, Julia, you're a nerd too, my friend. And you know that's a compliment. But Julia's CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy, I'm Jarrett Ransom, her personal nerd, but I can be anyone's personal nonprofit nerd, a CEO of the Raven Group. And I love having these conversations with our guests, and we wouldn't be able to have them if it weren't for our besties, our presenting sponsors. So thank you to the team over at Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, Fundraising Academy at National University, Nonprofit Thought Leader, Your Part-Time Controller, Staffing Boutique, Nonprofit Nerd, as well as Nonprofit Tech Talk. Most of these companies really have been with us on this journey from the very beginning, helped us to produce, ready for this drumroll, a thousand episodes that we passed 900, moving towards a thousand. I know, Micah, it has been phenomenal. And we've had great conversations, which if any of you want to go back and listen to them, you know, you can start now. I do not think you'll be done by the end of the year, but you can try. You can find us on streaming broadcasts, podcasts, and you can also download the app. And later today, our conversation that we're having right here and now with Micah will be uploaded onto all of these channels, and you can find us. So fun fact, ladies and everyone watching and listening, I'm traveling today through Sunday, and I know that I've got the non-profit show in my queue to listen to on podcasts. So again, glad to be back with us, Micah. You've joined us before. I was so glad to see your name on the roster for today. But again, for everyone watching and listening, if you don't know her yet, Micah James, Manager of Professional Services at Bloomerang. Welcome back. Thank you so much. It's always a joy to be here. Love having these conversations. Yeah. You know, I love having these conversations with you, Micah, because I feel like you are excited and engaged, but at the same time, you're very calm and manageable. You help us to say, yeah, we can do that. And I think for a lot of us in the non-profit sector, this time of the year, I mean, it's so stressful. We're worried about our goals. We're worried about our pace keeping up our health, our family, our coworkers. I mean, it's a lot. And so to have you on as a calm voice of reason is really good, I think at this point in time. Julia, she did witness to us. She's a parent now of six. Clearly, she can manage chaos and multiple everything. But yeah, let's do dive into, you're going to share with us, Micah, what is your year-end message? And this is really for nonprofits because there's a lot of messages going on out there. So help us identify how we find our nonprofit message. Absolutely. Giving Tuesday, I don't know if you've caught your breath yet from Giving Tuesday. It was just a few moments ago. But I always encourage nonprofits, whether it's for Giving Tuesday or anything you're doing between now and the end of the year, to be your authentic self. There's so much noise. And let's just call it what it is. There's so much noise between Giving Tuesday and the year-end because everybody either took a template and just changed a few words or goodness gracious, we don't have time. We don't have our own marketing departments. We don't have those kind of things. But if you can find a way to be your genuine authentic self in this season, do it. If you're a food pantry, show off food. If your children do something with children, show children's drawings or things that kids are doing and those kind of things. Don't just do cookie cutter things because cookie cutter things get ignored. And so it's really about connecting with not only your community. So where are you located? What's your context? But also what do you do in that community to solve that community's problems? And so I've worked for lots of nonprofits and we've done the generic and we've done the unique. And I will tell you hands down that it's the unique special things that connect with the community. I love that permission. That's what I hear, right? It's permission to really lean into yourself. And I'm right there with you. I feel seen, very validated. Like, oh, yeah, we're just going to change something from the previous year or from another person's campaign of what we've seen. And there is a lot of noise. That's something Julia, we've talked about a lot. Like there is a lot of noise with everything. So standing out within a $1.8 million registered nonprofits, that in and of itself is anxiety written. Yeah. And in a minute, we're going to talk about videos and segmenting and all of those kind of things. But remember, you don't have to send your message the whole world. You don't have to solve the whole world's problems. Like you are uniquely situated for a reason. Like, I'm here in Oklahoma. Like you may have people on your email list that are all over the country, but talk about what's going on where you are. And so whether that's what and talk about what's happening in 2023. And so we all know that there's been headwinds and micro donors, those small donors, talk about it. People need to hear about what's actually happening in your nonprofit. So if you're behind goal, it's okay to talk about, hey, this was our goal. As we head into the end of the year, we're at $800,000 towards a million. We're not there yet. Could you do this X, Y, and Z? And that will feed X, Y, and Z. Like talk about what's happening in your nonprofit. Show what it means in your context, in your place, in your mission. You know, Julia, that really catches me because, you know, we talk a lot about people want to join winning teams. And so, Micah, when you say, when you say like talk about your shortfall of funding, I wonder how many people are really comfortable with that. Well, think about, but we also have those people that want to help you get over that finish line to make you a winning team. Right? I have, I have been in those situations where I've been in a matching campaign. Think about matching campaigns. You tell people, like, I have $5,000 and I need to make $5,000, $10,000. How many people, I've had people call me and say, when you're short, I'll make the next thousand, right? So there are people who want to help you win. But if you don't tell them, they can't. So, I mean, I always have this mantra of like, you can't say no on behalf of your donor. Your donors have to be allowed to say yes or no on behalf of themselves. And it's not that you're not winning. Tell them why. Like, hey guys, look around. Groceries are more expensive. Gas is more expensive. I mean, it may not be now, but it was for most of the year. But like, tell them why. They're, they have common sense. Like, we don't live in a vacuum. So, I mean, I think people will understand that you're working your utilities off and like, you're still coming up short. And there might be somebody out there who wants to help you get over that, that finish line and help you win. You know, I love that you kind of pulled us back in to make sure that we are not answering those questions for our donors, that we are letting our donors say yes or no. And I think that's profound because I think we, we tend to think this ourselves, you know, we tend to make all this drama and create these scenarios in our head without ever reaching back out. And so, the next thing I really want to get your opinion on is how we do communicate to those stakeholders, understanding that we have different folks, you know, that we have the donors, we have the volunteers. We have board members. I'm always amazed in board service how often we are only communicated at, during the board meeting. And, you know, we're not used as a resource in what you just talked about. So, I'm wondering if you can kind of help us understand how we can refine this a little bit, segmenting some groups and what that's going to look like and how that might impact us. Yeah. I mean, we, we all talk differently in different ways in our lives, right? We talk to our children differently than we talk to a room full of professionals. Then we talk to our girlfriends when we're sitting around having, you know, a cup of tea. So, why wouldn't we use that same application when we're talking to different segments of donors? Not everybody's going to hear you the same way. Not everybody's going to be at the same level of giving. And, and not everybody's going to understand your mission in the same way. Your board members are going to have an intimate understanding of what's happening. So, they don't need you to speak in basics to them. They need, they might want very detailed understanding. Hey, y'all, you know, at the last board meeting, we told you X, Y and Z, this is where we are, you know, if each one of the board members did this before the end of the year, like, we could do this. Volunteers, these are some of your most passionate involved people. They're, they're, you know, sweat and tears go into, but lots of times we forget to even ask them for money. Yeah. Um, and so they may not have a lot of money to give, or they may even surprise you. And they've never been asked. And so these are the people you really need to talk about. You've been there. You've been in the, the workroom, the, the food pantry. You see how dollars turn into, to this, if you did this, then it becomes that. And when you come on your next shift, the shelves will be full, the, you know, all of those kinds of things and talk about, you know, what's happening before them. And then, you know, when we talk about other segments, think about how it's impacting them and talk about, you know, do you have a front desk crew that comes into thank you letters? Imagine if that thank you letter stack was this tall, like, just talk about different segments in ways that it's going to impact you. Now, every time I suggest something like this with a nonprofit, they're like, Micah, you're telling me to do too many things and I can't do it and you're making my list too small. Pick one. If, if the, you know, making a unique voice is the only thing you do this year, fantastic. If you've already worked on that and you're working on refining it and making it better. Great. tweak it a little bit and work on segmenting this year. Like, just add Legos. Again, you know, my world, like just add Lego bricks to the stack and exponentially, you will build, you know, a masterpiece over time. Don't try to tackle it all at once. You won't do it with excellence if you spread yourself too thin. So just figure out what you're going to attack one at a time, depending on the size of your, your staff and your volunteers and all the people that are helping you and then see how you can attack it. Makes so much sense, right? And, and I think about this, like, we forget perhaps that it's not a one size fits all. And I love how you demonstrated like, we don't talk to our girlfriends the same way as we show up to speak, you know, at a board meeting, just, you know, like there's so many different ways that we do use our unique voice and unique narrative, like, practice that. And then I also really appreciate how you, you know, if you choose one of these things, that will make a difference. And just keep doing that makes me think of James Clear, the book, you know, Atomic Habits. I don't know if you've read that yet, or, you know, but really looking at how do we continue to stack habits. And then before you know it, like, you have built this masterpiece Lego set of, you know, 5000 pieces or whatever that looks like. Talk to us how we can move that into video because you had mentioned earlier, you know, like utilizing video, we're here to tell us the value of a 90 second video on social platforms as well as email. What does that look like? Yeah, Julia, I think you and I were talking before everything got started today that, you know, in the, in the stack of your giving Tuesday emails, you only saw a couple of videos come through and all of the hundreds of emails you got kind of can exit back to that unique voice. Yeah. When I was doing fundraising, the last nonprofit I worked for was a homeless sustainable housing nonprofit. And one of the things we did is we did just a simple tour of our facility. It was during COVID, nobody could come in. So we were like, Hey, this is the day in the life of our, you know, facility. Let me take you back to the store room and let me take you around. It just connects people to you personally in a way that text can't, you know, going back, I'm a, I'm an old educator, going back to learning styles, you know, tactile, visual, you know, reading, you know, we have to open all the doors of how people engage with us and there's something about video that just says, Hey, I see Julia, I see Jared, I see Micah, like, I know them that brings the text to life off the page. 90 sections or less is like that perfect sauce of not too long, not too short of just letting me say, Hey, how are you? This is us. Come on in. Don't you want to be a part of this? And not, you know, I don't, if you summarize what's in the text, then they don't even know how to do the TLDR didn't read. And they're ready to click on the button and it's ready to go. You know, I think Micah, I love this. When you, the moment you said this, Jared, I was reminded of during COVID, we had that shelter, an animal welfare shelter. I think it was in the Midwest somewhere. And of course, all their volunteers couldn't come in and it was their lifeblood. And yet they still had animals they needed to adopt out and care for and fundraise and all that. And so the CEO just took her phone and said, I'm just going to walk down and show you what's going on. And they had some of the most successful engagement that they had ever had a pandemic aside. And so I think now today with phones being so brilliantly constructed and all of the editing software, even if, even if you don't want to edit, right? This is achievable. You don't have to hire a studio or agency necessarily to produce this, right? It can be a little bit of a style. And I think we worry about like, oh, it's not edited and it's not polished and it's a little rougher on the edges. I think, you know, don't make it too Blair witch, right? But that dates to me. But don't make it too shaky. But I think there's some opportunity to be like, hey, this is me. This is my phone. Like, come, come walk around with me as I do this important work. You know, there are some, some cautionary tales. I'm a real protector of privacy and those kind of things. I hate nonprofit tourism. So like, don't do a good thing and like show it off and those kinds of things. That's not what it's all about. But showing your donors the mission, you know, without showing faces of patrons and participants and all of that kind of thing. I think you can really communicate some really meaningful things in a kind of authentic rough around the edges kind of way. I'm so glad you mentioned that. And I'm right there with you on Blair witch, right? So for anyone that doesn't know that that reference, I'm not going to recommend that you watch that movie because I thought it was horrible, the cinematography for sure. You know, but there is some, some, I don't know boundaries we do need to be aware of right when it comes to this and there's so many other ways. You know, I love that you're saying that that we can still accomplish a video without, you know, creeping into that privacy space that is not where any of us need to be. That's really important. What about Mike? I'm really curious, curveball question. You know, a lot of staff work remotely, yourself included, myself included, a lot of programming now is done remotely. And so we really don't have a campus or a room or a shelter, like we don't have that brick and mortar to tour. How can we still accomplish this video message when we're all remote and even perhaps are programming? Very good question. You know, that that is a really good question. I think storytelling says a lot. I mean, just our conversation here today, caption on video, if we showed a 90, you know, second clip of this in an email, you know, if we went back to if our if our nonprofit was about moms, right? And we went back to that set like piece about us talking passionately about professional moms. I think a 90 second clip about our conversation could make a huge impact to somebody who feels compelled to support moms and professionals and those kind of things. So I think, you know, whether it's a conversation with board members and participants or staff people who see the everyday work, I think there are still ways that you can capture those stories, even if you don't have a brick and mortar place. Thank you for that. Because, you know, I think about how many organizations have shifted their program delivery and, you know, the staff workforce and what that looks like. And so I just wanted to ask that question because I'm sure we have viewers and listeners that are going, we can't do that. We can't do that. But guess what? Can. Absolutely. Yeah, some great opportunities. Let's talk about that landing page on the website, right? Like I believe at this point of time, absolutely everyone has a website, has a web page. What does that landing page now need to look like, because we're in this, you know, final push of the calendar year? Yeah, you know, in our world at Bloomerang, we have several options that you can make this really feel friendly and frictionless, and all of those kind of things to the donor. You know, that's the main point is you want to make it as easy as possible. Like, oh, I'm inspired, click, donate without a lot of hairy, scary steps in between. The other thing is just really, again, you know, from wherever they're coming, whether it's an email or social media or anything like that, you want to make sure that it continues to look and feel and sound like you. The thing that jars me the most when I go to any, you know, whether it's a website that I'm buying something from or donating to, is I click on that button and all of a sudden it's bare or it doesn't look like the company or nonprofit that I'm working with anymore. And then all of a sudden I feel like, am I in no person's land anymore? Like, is this the, is this, am I about to be spammed a lot? Like, is this, so you want to make sure that they feel safe and secure? And all of those kind of things, by making it colors the same, you know, if you can put a compelling image that's aligned with your branding, you know, all of that is possible with the right software. And so just making sure that the donor is comfortable and, you know, easy peasy all the way through. And that's really, and test it. Like, if you haven't gone through your own donor experience yourself, do it today, like before the end of the day, like donate a dollar and see how it feels all the way through. So you know what your donors are doing. Yeah, absolutely. And I so appreciate you saying this because I think one of the problems is that we internally become fatigued with what we think, we're attracted to something shiny in other words, tend to forget that consistency rules the day. So our colors, our messaging, our vocabulary, our imagery needs to be consistent. And I work with more nonprofits, they're like, yeah, we need to refresh our logo, we need, and it's like, generally you don't, you just need to make sure that everything's on alignment and that you keep moving forward. I mean, Jared and I say this all the time, 1.8 million registered nonprofits, there are a lot more out there that are not registered. That's the dirty little secret. But the reality is that, you know, there's a lot of competition for time and attention. So every time we deviate from that and we send a new message, we're just shooting ourselves in the foot. Absolutely. Yeah, I'm sorry, I had to get in my soapbox. No, no, it's absolutely right. You know, we're all, we're all hit with that. And, you know, I had an experience the other day where I'm just like, the website was green and blue, and then the landing page is like yellow. And I'm like, hold on, is this the same thing? Yeah, did I just get a pop up from, and so you want me like even, even simple things like that can make a donor go, hmm, and every time a donor go stops in the process, I'm a nerd, there's a formula out there that you can Google that talks about incentives and friction and all of the things that make a donor pause along the way. Every time you make a donor do that, that's less likely to donate anything. Right. Micah, I'm curious about the pop up, right? And this might be a curve ball as well. Is that something we should still have right now at year of end? Should we take it off if we have a pop up like on that landing page? What are you seeing is best right now? Right. Good. Very good question. Honestly, I think, you know, we have different ways of doing that. I think, you know, embedded codes and things that naturally pop up again, if it feels and looks like your website, it's less likely to be suspicious than things that are just like those ads of the olden days. Like I have nightmares about, you know, those old windows pop ups of the olden days. It doesn't look like that anymore if you do it right. And so if you do it right and you do it well and it looks like you, it doesn't have the same feel of the, so it's really up to you and what you want your experience to be. Yeah. Great, great question. Well, you know, we're glad that you pop up any time with us on the nonprofit show. We're going to, we're going to let you keep doing that because we love your energy. If you, if you were with us in the green room, Micah is the mother of six. I kind of am assuming these are younger kids too. Well, 10 to 18, all the range. Bless your heart. That's what we say in the South. Bless your heart. Well, it's really always such a joy to have you with us. You know, we love all of our friends at Bloomerang. Every time you come on, you bring something completely different and it's always super cool. And so thank you, thank you, Micah James Manager of Professional Services with our friends over at Bloomerang. One of the things that I'll say about Bloomerang and I know that, that Jared would echo this is that you do a masterful job at communicating a lot of best practices and strategies for free without any connectivity to your product. So if you want to get, you know, good information about what's going on across the sector, you can go to Bloomerang and really get educated on so many, many things that will, you know, weave into the success of your nonprofit journey. And so I want to commend you and your team on that because that's not an easy thing to do. And it's a really an amazing thing. Jared and I are so delighted that you would be here. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American Nonprofit Academy. Jared Ransom, nonprofit nerd CEO of the Raven Group. Again, we have amazing support starting with Bloomerang, American Nonprofit Academy, your part time controller, nonprofit thought leader, fundraising academy at National University, staffing boutique, nonprofit nerd and nonprofit tech talk. These folks join us day in and day out and it's really an amazing, amazing thing. Miss Jared, you're getting on a plane and heading south. I am. I know it will be here soon. So I'm going to miss tomorrow's Friday. Ask and answer. I'll be back on Monday. Micah, thank you so much. This is again, like a really, you know, timely conversation for many of us. We're all still in this whirlwind with Giving Tuesday, having just taken place, which, you know, still catching our breath and moving toward to, you know, really that end goal because December 31 is coming soon. But, you know, as we wrap up today, I just want to say thank you again to you, Micah, and to the entire Bloomerang team for joining us because every single month we have a representative from each of our sponsors that join us to bring conversations to like like this one. And it's always a pleasure. I'm always learning. Really, I am. I mean, I've been in the, you know, sector 20 years and I'm still learning. I still walk away with a big aha. So thank you for that. But yeah, as we wrap up today, we always end with this mantra. And Julie and I have noticed that even though we've said it nearly a thousand times, it always rings a little different, right? It's the same words, but it always has like a little different meaning. But it is to stay well so you can do well. Thanks, Micah. And for all of you that joined us, see you tomorrow.