Lighting the Way Forward: The Future of DonorPerfect

Speaker 1 0:11
Well, good morning. Good morning. Welcome back. I am so.. look at this. We’ve already got folks in the chat saying hello, saying good morning. Bonjour, Quebec. We have folks all the way out in Sacramento, so it’s early morning on the West Coast for those Read More

Speaker 1 0:11
Well, good morning. Good morning. Welcome back. I am so.. look at this. We’ve already got folks in the chat saying hello, saying good morning. Bonjour, Quebec. We have folks all the way out in Sacramento, so it’s early morning on the West Coast for those folks. We’re so glad to see you this morning. Thank you, coming for coming back for day two of the Donor Perfect Conference. I’m Clay Buck, thrilled to be with you all this morning, and even more thrilled to be here to kick us off today. We’re in for a great session today, because we’re starting with Lauren Sheehan with lighting the way forward, the future of DonorPerfect. I don’t even have to say pop into the chat and say hello, because you all are doing that already. It’s nice to see where you’re all from, and there’s already good energy going. So, before we jump in, just a little bit about Lauren. She’s been a pivotal member of DonorPerfect’s leadership team since 2008 and ascended to the role of president in 2022 Since she’s been a part of DonorPerfect, she and her teams have helped 1000s of nonprofits raise more money, improve the efficiency of their operations through smarter, more strategic use of technology, something I think we’re all here for. She also contributes her expertise beyond the organization that serves on leadership and board service roles in the nonprofit sector and the nonprofit sector. Thank you, Lauren, for being a part of the Giving Institute. I know what great work the Institute does, and as the data provider chair for the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, which FEP is something that I refer to almost daily. Outside of work, Lauren is passionate about sustainable living practices, and I think we’re going to have to have a discussion about gardening, which I have just gotten into, not potatoes. Not, not, I’m not going into growing potatoes yet. Don’t talk about

Speaker 2 1:58
potatoes, right?

Speaker 1 2:00
You said we weren’t going to talk about potatoes today, but grows and procures her own food, which I think is fascinating. Just a little bit of housekeeping, if you remember from yesterday, or if you’re just joining us today. Mark, nice to see you. I’m just down the street from Bellevue, so good to see you from the West Coast there. Please do submit questions on the Q and A tab, so we can address those during the session. And please do remember that all sessions are being recorded. They will be available on the donor website after the conference. Give us just a little time to get them finalized and posted, but you will have access to all this information once the conference is over and posted there. But above all, bring your best self, bring your high energy, say hello, enjoy being a part of the community. And Lauren, let me thank you for helping to create such a great community and making this possible for all of us to be here. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 2:53
Cool, thanks, Clay. Thank you, thank you. So I am super pumped to be here. I was able to be in a lot of the sessions yesterday, and there was so much great energy, ton of great content, and we’ve got some excellent contact content in store for you today. You can see a little bit about me on this slide, and I’m providing my contact information. This is not like a throwaway slide, I would be so happy to connect with you either later, later today, or anytime in the future. So I am available to you and happy, happy to be here today. So just thinking a little bit about yesterday, reflecting on all of the great information, I’m really curious, what was your biggest takeaway from day one, or you know, the session that stood out the most? I know there was a lot of talk about potatoes and poutine. Go ahead and put it in the chat, everyone’s still saying hello until there’s people from all, oh, the importance of the 990 form. Yeah, I thought that that was a good one. Yeah, thanking donor segmentation. Yeah, there’s a ton of great information that was shared yesterday. So, as we get started with day two, I just wanted to take some time to give you an update on what’s been happening at DonorPerfect, where we’ve been investing, some of the new capabilities that we’ve introduced, and how we’re thinking about the future of fundraising and nonprofit technology. So, I have been with DonorPerfect for 18 years, just crazy, right? And I can honestly say that this next chapter that we’re embarking on is one of the most exciting in our company’s history. So, let’s jump in and get started. So, the theme of the conference, Illuminate Your Path Forward, feels like a particularly timely one. It has been a challenging few years for nonprofits. You are being asked to do more than ever before. The need for your services has never. And greater, and you’re doing it with fewer resources, less certainty, and increasing pressure from every direction, and yet every day, just like the sun comes up, you continue showing up for your missions and your communities. So, at DonorPerfect, we believe that our role is to help make that work a little bit easier to lighten the load, and we want to help you move forward with more clarity, more confidence, and more capacity. So, this free conference that we offer every year, this is the 16th year that we’ve been doing the conference, is just one of the ways that we’re endeavoring to help you. We see ourselves as your partners, and we are committed to helping illuminate the path forward, so this year we are celebrating our 45th anniversary, which is an incredible milestone. That type of longevity is so rare in technology and almost unheard of in our industry. It’s something that truly truly sets us apart, but that is not the only way that we are different. DonorPerfect is the only tech firm in the space that is 100% employee owned, and all of our other competitors are either owned by venture capital or private equity firms. So we are super proud to be different. We’ve never taken any outside investment, which gives us freedom to focus on long-term relationships, sustainable growth, and the evolving needs of our clients, rather than just short-term investor expectations. And in a market there, where there has been an awful lot of acquisition, and competitors have come and gone over the years, we have been the one steady and reliable technology partner. So, it should bring you, our customers, confidence that donor perfect the product that you rely on day in and day out will be around. We are here for the long haul. We are not standing still, and we are continuing to invest in the future. One of the things we are most proud of is the culture that we have built here, and from the very, very beginning, we believe that if you take good care of your employees, they will take wonderful care of each other and great care of our customers. So that philosophy has shaped our company since 1981 We’ve always thought of ourselves as a human first technology company, and while technology is obviously central to what we do, people always come first.

Speaker 2 7:34
So it’s reflected in the way we support all of you and the way that we build long term relationships with the nonprofit organizations that we serve. So, true story. Monday, june 1, we had a client celebrate their 40th four zero year using DonorPerfect Pasadena Christian School. So, I don’t know if they are – they are on today. We hope they are. It’s very early out in Pasadena, but they purchased the installed version that came on a floppy disk. We had to mail them out, and they did this in 1986 and they are still using DonorPerfect today. So, I’m curious, I want to hear from you guys in the audience. How long have you been using DonorPerfect? Since 2013 Yeah, the average DonorPerfect customer has been with us for over a decade, which is just awesome, right? So, over the years, that culture that we’ve built here has led to recognition as one of the top workplaces in our region many times over, and for a sustained period of time. But, honestly, the awards themselves aren’t the most important thing, it’s what they represent a team of incredible people who care about the work that they do, and helping you all to succeed. And thankfully, we think that philosophy is showing up in the experience that all of you are having with DonorPerfect. We love hearing directly from you, the good, the bad, the ugly. We want it all, and we want to know when we’re falling short. So, you may have noticed an uptick in our surveys, requests for ratings, or invitations to share your thoughts with our product team. That’s intentional, because we’re listening, right? We want our plans and our priorities to be shaped and improved alongside the people who are using DonorPerfect every day, that is what our partnership with you is all about. And because we’re thinking long term about those relationships, we’re also thinking about how DonorPerfect needs to continue to evolve alongside the nonprofit sector, how we continue innovating and investing, and how we continue expanding what’s possible for the organizations that we serve, so a perfect example of this happened late last year when we officially welcomed GiveCloud into the DonorPerfect family. Now we’ve partnered with GiveCloud for more than a decade, so we already knew the technology and the team very, very well, and we. Had become increasingly impressed with both GiveCloud has built incredibly modern, flexible, and high-performing online forms and giving experiences, and as digital fundraising continues to evolve and become an even more important part of the way that you raise funds, we saw a tremendous opportunity to bring those capabilities even closer into the DonorPerfect ecosystem. Now I know that in the nonprofit technology world acquisitions can sometimes create some anxiety. We’ve seen examples where transitions were rushed or communication was poor, and customers were pushed and forced to use programs before they were ready or make the switch, but that’s not how we are approaching this. We are taking a more thoughtful and intentional path, leading with education, ensuring that our clients understand the value and the possibilities that these tools can create for them, and we’ve been working hard to strengthen the integration between Give Cloud and DonorPerfect. We still have some work to do there, but as we make meaningful changes, we are going to be excited to share that with all of you and invite you to try out Give Cloud when you’re ready. It’s just another example of how we continue investing in the future while staying grounded in the relationships and the values that brought us here in the first place, we are extremely proud of where we’ve been, but we are even more excited about where we are going. So, I’ve covered who we are, what we value, and how we think about our role, our very important role in supporting all of you, but that only matters if we continue improving the product and the technology and deliver meaningful solutions to you, so that is exactly what we have been focused on, and we have been busy just in the last few months, we’ve introduced a number of new capabilities and enhancements designed to help you do your work more efficiently, gain better insights, improved donor experiences and stay better connected with your supporters.

Speaker 2 12:04
So, I am really excited to give you a quick look at some of what is new, and we’re going to start with our integrations. So, obviously, already mentioned Give Cloud – I’m still a lot of love for Give Cloud in the chat, but I want to talk specifically about why we’re so excited about acquiring Give Cloud and strengthening that integration. One of the things that stood out to us over the years was how intentionally the platform was designed around donor experience. If you met my friend Josh Bloomfield, who’s the CEO of Give Cloud, yesterday, if you were in his session, you just saw his passion about the donor experience, you could see it in his presentation, and so that team built GiveCloud to really delight donors and reduce friction in the giving process, and that really matters, because even small improvements in donor experience can have a major impact on conversion and fundraising results. In fact, GiveCloud consistently delivers some of the highest conversion rates in the industry for donation forms, so that’s more visitors completing gifts, fewer abandoned donations, and a smoother overall experience for your supporters. So we promise to keep you informed of our progress to strengthen the integration, and we’ll invite you to learn more about Give Cloud and move there when it makes sense for you. So, speaking of integrations, another new integration is our Mailchimp integration, designed to help you create more connected and streamlined approaches when, when it comes to your donor communication, by improving the flow of data between DonorPerfect and Mailchimp, organizations can better segment audiences, personalize outreach, and reduce manual work involved in managing campaigns across platforms. Right, we want to make sure that the tools that you are using are talking to one another. Now, we’ve had a longstanding partnership with Constant Contact, but this integration with Mailchimp provides our customers with a choice when it comes to email marketing tools that integrate with DonorPerfect, and you let us know that having a choice was important to you. So we move forward with expanding our integration. We’ve also continued investing in mobility and making it easier for nonprofit teams to work effectively from anywhere. As a reminder, DonorPerfect Mobile is available for both iOS and Android, and gives teams quick access to donor information when you’re on the go. Whether you’re heading into a donor meeting or attending an event, it’s easy to look up donor details and log call notes or meeting updates. One of my favorite things is the voice to text memos, because admittedly I get tired of typing, so all of this information that you put into the mobile app obviously automatically syncs back into DonorPerfect. And earlier this year, accepting in-person pay. Payments in the US became even easier with the introduction of our new Bluetooth connected card readers. You can now securely accept Tap to Pay donations directly through DP Mobile, and it includes Apple Pay and Google Pay. Receipts can be sent instantly, and again, all that information syncs back into donor perfect. It’s just another example of how we’re working to reduce friction and make fundraising more seamless, flexible, and mobile friendly. We have also introduced new tools designed to help organizations better understand and prioritize donor engagement, so one of those is Donor Score, which provides an at-a-glance insight into the relative impact of each donor in your database. Donor Score evaluates records based on recency, frequency, and overall giving patterns, helping you quickly identify highly engaged supporters and opportunities for outreach. We’ve also introduced a new constituent page, which gives you a faster, more streamlined way to access and work with donor records, organized by donor score and other key insights. Clients rate donor score and constituent page as the most easy to use parts of DonorPerfect. It is very easy. It is very intuitive, and good news: we’re planning to expand the capabilities even further. Coming soon, we’ll be adding additional sorting and filtering options, along with the ability to save custom views, making it even easier for you to personalize workflows and quickly focus on the information that’s most relevant to you. Together, these enhancements are designed to help you spend less time searching for the information and more time acting on it. And just last week, we released some significant enhancements focused on something every nonprofit struggles with at some point, keeping data clean and organized.

Speaker 2 17:01
One of the longstanding pieces of feedback that we’ve heard from you is that duplicate management needed to be more seamless and needed to be easier to address within existing workflows. So, we’ve introduced new tools that allow you to identify and take action on potential duplicate records directly from the places that you’re already working inside of DonorPerfect. With the new managed duplicate widget, you can quickly initiate merges by entering two donor IDs, launch the merge workflow without losing your place, and resolve records much more efficiently. Okay. I have some automation in here, so bear with me. So, we’ve also added a donor record duplicate widget that surfaces potential matches directly within donor records. So, you see that note at the top, Cooper Dejean has one potential duplicate record, and if that wasn’t cool enough, you’ve got a menu of actions to take when you resolve duplicates, so let’s see if this works. Boom, look at that. You’ve got a whole menu here, so you can merge the records manually, you can link related records, you can mark them as not duplicates, or save the pairs for review later. These enhancements make duplicate management much, much more integrated into those everyday workflows, helping you maintain clearer, more accurate constituent data without interrupting the work that you’re already doing. So, have any of you tried it yet? Okay, I see Jean has created a link on this feature. Love the new, came across it yesterday. Yeah, so try it out. Let us know what you think. If you get a little survey about, like, how you are liking it, please, please, please fill it out, especially if you have something that would make it better. So we are reading those surveys. We want to know what you think, and we’re really excited about this. This feature, again, it was just released last week, so if you haven’t seen it yet, you’re not, you’re not far behind. It’s another example of how we’re continuing to respond directly to client feedback and improve the day-to-day usability of DonorPerfect. So that was a lot, right? Those are just a few of the most recent examples of how we continued improving and evolving DonorPerfect over the past six months or so, and we are not slowing down. We are really looking forward to what’s next, and it’s not just about adding features, it’s about rethinking how technology can better support you in a rapidly changing world. One thing we hear consistently from our clients right now is this: there’s never enough time, not enough time to follow up with every donor the way you want to, not enough time to prep for that donor meeting, not enough time to dig through years of donor history, not enough time to train new staff when turnover happens. And at DonorPerfect, we talk a lot about our purpose. We even have it printed on. Socks, our company purpose is that we make it easy to do good, and while those are simple words, they carry an awful lot of meaning for us. Because the reality is that nonprofits already have enough hard problems to solve, and technology shouldn’t add complexity, it should remove friction, it should give you your time back, it should lighten the load, and ultimately it should help you create more impact. That is what we strive to do every single day when we show up to work at DonorPerfect. So we hope that that has been your experience, and we hope you’re excited about many of the new solutions and improvements that we’ve been introducing. And as we look to the future, we know that AI is going to play an important role in helping to solve many challenges for nonprofit professionals. Internally, we’ve been using AI-powered tools to help increase our velocity, accelerate innovation, and improve how we build and deliver solutions to you. Now, earlier I told you that we are a human first technology company. Similarly, I believe that fundraising is a human-first profession, and I also recognize that AI brings a mix of emotions for a lot of people, me included, right?

Speaker 2 21:14
Excitement, curiosity, uncertainty, and maybe even a little discomfort at times, because while the potential upside is enormous, there are also really important questions about important stuff like trust, authenticity, and the role technology should play in your very important relationship-driven work, and honestly, I think those are the right questions to be asking, those are the right concerns to raise, so for us the real challenge isn’t simply how to use AI, it’s how to use it in ways that genuinely help you work more efficiently and do more, while still protecting the relationships and the human connections that sit at the heart of fundraising, so that thinking has shaped the our setup of these guiding principles about how we approach donor AI at DonorPerfect, and that’s what I’d like to share with you next. So this is the lens that we are approaching AI at DonorPerfect thoughtfully, carefully, and in ways that are practical and genuinely useful to you, so this first pillar is continuity, despite turnover. One of the biggest challenges that organizations face today is the loss of institutional knowledge and high employee attrition rates among executive directors and development directors. So, someone leaves and years of donor history, context, and relationship insight can leave with them. We believe AI can help preserve that continuity, and we want to help you retain important context and relationship history over time, regardless of staffing changes. The second pillar is keeping humans in the loop. You’re going to hear a lot of conversations about AI making recommendations, but we’re also focused on helping nonprofits take action more efficiently, while still keeping people in control. This means building lightweight review and approval experiences within DonorPerfect that allow you to guide, confirm, and oversee AI-driven actions, rather than simply handing everything over to automation, and finally helping nonprofits do more with less, so building those action-oriented capabilities that help reduce manual work, not to replace people, but to give people more time to focus on relationships, strategy, and the very important mission-driven work that you do. Every decision that we make about AI has to support and protect the most essential elements of fundraising, the people and the relationships. So, in keeping with those pillars, I’m thrilled to share with you one example that is something that we are excited to begin introducing this summer AI-powered donor summaries. In fact, beta testing just started yesterday. I think we’ve got three customers that are using it, and if you’re interested, don’t worry, it’s not too late to sign up for access. But first, let me tell you a little bit about what it is, and how we think it’ll be helpful to, and save you loads of time. So many of our clients have tons and tons of great information and data about their donors. You’ve got donation history, you’ve got notes from your past meetings, campaign responses. It is all there, but when you’re preparing for a donor meeting, you have to click in an awful lot of places to kind of piece together the whole story, so you’re scanning through notes and clicking through different screens. So I want you to kind of reimagine that moment when you’re preparing for a meeting with a donor and imagine if DonorPerfect can provide all of the. Information on the same screen quickly and concisely, so instead of doing all of that digging, you open the donor record, and you can see the summary right there. You can see the key giving patterns, or noticeable or notable changes, or lapses, even the most recent engagements that you’ve had with them. So, it doesn’t replace your judgment, it just gives you a leg up, a head start. So, instead of spending time gathering information and doing all those clicks, you can just spend time thinking about the conversation you’re about to have. Right? What is that next conversation to have with this donor right now? What matters most to them right now? So, if you are interested in getting early access and participating in our beta test, just chat in. I want AI, I want AI, and our team will reach out to you in short order with the next steps. So technology should create more space for humanity, not less, and that is the future that we are building towards here at DonorPerfect. It’s not going to be built all at once.

Speaker 2 26:04
It’s built through learning and experimentation and listening to our clients. So today’s conference is all about helping you today navigate the future. It is designed to take what you already have, your DonorPerfect system, your relationships, your data, your experience, and use it more intentionally, more strategically, and more effectively. Whether you’re focused on improving reporting, strengthening donor communication, or improving your donor retention, today’s sessions are designed to give you practical ideas that you can put into action. So, here is our lineup for today. The DonorPerfect training team, you know them, you love them, and they are just so excited and energized to spend the day with you. Every single session today is designed to be practical, relevant, and immediately usable, so you can walk away not just inspired but equipped, and based on feedback that we received from past conferences, because hopefully you picked up the theme that we are always listening. We’ve intentionally designed sessions for different levels of experience, from beginner to advanced, so there’s room for everybody. Each session is labeled accordingly, making it easier for you to choose the session that best fits where you are and what you’re hoping to learn. In these sessions, you’ll see some of the newest functionality I reviewed earlier, but you’re going to see how it can actually be put into action, how it’s going to save you time and make it easier for you to do good. Another new item for this year was the open lounges with the trainers, so I think they were actually full this morning. So, you early birds, you already checked them out already. If you missed it, fear not. Our trainers are going to be available later this afternoon to meet with you. If you have any specific questions or issues that you’d like to discuss, just pop into the lounge and say hello, and I’m almost out of time, so I will simply close by saying, thank you, thank you, thank you for taking time out of your day to be with us and to learn something new. We feel truly lucky to work with all of you. I hope you have a fantastic day. I hope you learn a lot. I hope you have fun, right, we, if you’re not having fun, that’s no good, right. And I hope that you walk away with ideas that you can immediately put into action. Enjoy the rest of the conference, enjoy the rest of your day. And thanks for thanks for hanging out.

Speaker 3 28:38
That was great. Lot of questions, Lauren. Just so we don’t have time for those right now. What I can do,

Speaker 2 28:47
that’s no problem. What I can do is, I think we can get a printout of all of those questions, so I can get to work on answering some of them right after we wrap up here.

Speaker 3 29:00
Okay, we can do that. All right. Well, thank you so much for attending Lauren’s session to kick off day two. We hope you had some great takeaways. Next up is Sean McClellan with Clarity Shaping DonorPerfect to support your mission, which is designed for the intermediate user, and Kristen Harris with Insight Understanding insights, turning reports into results, which is for the beginner to intermediate users. So, you don’t want to miss that, and we’ll see you in a few. Bye.