CONNECTION – Designing Donor Pathways That Work

Hi, hello everybody. My name is Sean McClellan, and I am a senior training specialist. Welcome to Kelly Ramage’s session, Connection: Designing Donor Pathways That Work, which is considered intermediate. One of Kelly’s passions is helping others learn and work towards achieving Read More

Hi, hello everybody. My name is Sean McClellan, and I am a senior training specialist. Welcome to Kelly Ramage’s session, Connection: Designing Donor Pathways That Work, which is considered intermediate. One of Kelly’s passions is helping others learn and work towards achieving their goals. She has the privilege of leading a fantastic team of training professionals and loves watching them in action. Kelly has been training and partnering with organizations that make a positive impact in the world for over 25 years, and in her spare time, she serves on the board of an organization that is passionate about finding a cure for pancreatic cancer coaches a high school girls volleyball team enjoys outdoor activities and spends time spends time with her family. A few housekeeping items: as always, please submit your questions in the Q and A tab, so we can address them during the presentation. And all sessions are being recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. Kelly, take it away.

All right. Well, thank you so much, Sean. And welcome everybody. It is a pleasure to be here. So, as Sean mentioned, we are talking about connection. We’ve heard a lot about it yesterday. I know that you heard about it in sessions earlier today, and if you stay with us through the end, you’ll hear more about it in those sessions after this, but what I want to focus on when we talk about connections is how we can design donor pathways using your nonprofit knowledge and DonorPerfect. When we talk about, or when I talk about a pathway or journey, we aren’t talking about a rigid funnel or a cold marketing sequence. I’m talking about mapping out a deliberate, thoughtful journey that takes a person from their very first interaction with you and guides them into becoming a lifelong partner in your mission. Over the next few minutes, and they’re going to fly by. We’re going to break down how to build these pathways first by understanding the concept, and then seeing it in action, so that you, in turn, can give this a try to create consistent, meaningful connections without you burning out, or you burning out your team. So, let’s talk about a fundamental truth. When we talk about connection, your donors, and your donors to be, don’t want to experience your donor perfect system. They don’t want to experience your spreadsheets, they don’t want to experience your codes. What they actually want and are going to have is an experience building a relationship with you. The technology is just the engine under the hood. Our goal with DonorPerfect isn’t just to manage data, it’s to help you intentionally design, track, and deliver that relationship, so every single supporter feels valued and connected to your mission. But here’s the rub, right? There’s always a rug when something like this is thought about or spoken about. Almost every nonprofit that I’ve worked with, that I’ve helped, and I’ve even personally experienced is this challenge, the transaction trap. And what I’m about to say is absolutely positively not coming from a place of shame or judgment, but rather an opportunity, too often our busy schedules and mount and mounting targets force us to treat fundraising like a series of checkboxes. Can I see some thumbs up? Yep, we know that to be true. We find ourselves hyper focused on individual campaigns, of course, it’s part of our job, reacting to events as they happen, rather than guiding our supporters and treating all donors with the exact same blanket approach, but when we look at it from the donor’s perspective, they aren’t looking for attraction. This is not new news. They are looking for an answer to three human questions: Do I matter? Does my gift actually make a difference, and honestly, why should I stay? Our job isn’t just to clear the next campaign hurdle, it’s to make sure every donor confidently knows that the answer to those questions. So, let’s look at how we might consider making the shift in our perspective right now, if we were to kind of just boil it down, our current state often has us asking the question, How do we get to the next gift? And again, I get it, I understand it’s understandable, it’s valid, but it really truly focuses entirely on our needs, not the donor’s experience, the the shift we need to make is asked is to start by asking questions simply what pathway or journey are we inviting them on to to help us think about navigating this shift I’m suggesting a building fund. Lot, so think about building something, and a common word that you hear in the building space is a four by four. It’s solid, it’s foundational, and it’s what is used in almost every building that I’m aware of, including my home. So, I’m going to suggest a four by four method as well, but my four by four is going to be four pillars and four steps. So, first I want to introduce to you the pillars. The pillars that I’m going to suggest are recognition, relevance, responsiveness, and progression. So, I’m actually going to propose that we think about these pillars in the form of a question. So, recognition – are we actively recognizing exactly where the donor is at in our unique pathway, like, do we know where they’re at?

Relevance is the message and the interaction we’re sending actually relevant to them. Responsiveness, how are we doing? Are we responding to their actions in a timely and an appropriate way, and last progression, is there a clear natural path for this relationship to progress over time? Now you can see why these four pillars, in the form of the question, are going to help us if we keep them in mind as we build these journeys and pathways together, so now that we’ve kind of focused, now that we’re focused on pathways or journeys, and I’m going to be using those words interchangeably, and we’re not focusing on transactions, we’re giving our spell selves that moment of time to just think about this a little bit differently. We’re ready to review our data, because what is going to make all of this happen is our data, and here’s where we’re going to start our four-step process. Remember, four by four, four pillars, four steps. So, the first step is defining our life cycle stages. I’m going to suggest three, but absolutely recognize that there are these are not the only ones. It’s also incredibly important to remember that different stages mean different needs. We can’t talk to a brand new supporter the same way we talk to someone who has been a loyal supporter for a decade. So, first we have our new donors. This is all about the initial engagement and creating a stellar welcome experience. Think of it as a first date. We want to make a great impression and build immediate trust. Some might think of this as spark. Next, we have our loyal donors. These are the folks who already know and trust you. The focus here is shifting to deepening that existing relationship and encouraging recurring gifts, like moving them into a monthly giving program, and finally our lapsed donors, these are the supporters who have drifted away over time. Our goal here is re-engagement, using smart win-back strategies to remind them why they cared about our mission in the first place, by segmenting our audience this way we can make sure everyone gets exactly the right attention they need. So now what I want to do is move to step two, where we’re going to define a specific goal. So step one is identifying your stage. Step two is defining the goals for each of those stages. So first for our new donors, our primary metric that I’m going to suggest is going to be converting them from a one-time donor to a second gift donor within the first 90 days of their gift. Why am I doing this? Industry data suggests that if you can get that second gift within the 60 to 90 day window of their first contribution. The donor is far more likely to stay with you for the long term. To do this, we can use many different features in DonorPerfect. I’m calling out scheduled reports with filters. Now, imagine I know you’re busy, but imagine arriving at your desk every Monday morning, so you don’t have to check over the weekend with a pre-filtered list of last week’s first-time donors already in your inbox waiting for you to review. Then you are ready to use a dynamic list, and you, being donor perfect, using Constant Contact to trigger an automatic welcome email or create a smart action to do task for a board member to make a thank you call, and all of those things are going to be happening in the background. Next, we have our loyal donors, as I said, these are the people who already love you and your mission. Your goal here is perhaps to upgrade their gift or move them into a recurring gift program. A review of the donor’s AI donor summary will provide a holistic view, help you get to know them better. Smart actions will become your best friend here. You can set the system to notify a gift officer the moment a donor reaches a certain cumulative. Total signaling it’s the perfect time for a personal conversation about a monthly commitment or an upgraded gift. Finally, for our lapsed donors, we want to bring them back into the fold through reengagement. To do this effectively, we first have to understand why they’re in this bucket or category in the first place, we can use many reports, but I’m going to call out the comprehensive donor revenue analysis.

This isn’t just a list, it’s a high-level look at when your donors are dropping off, because we have to identify those leaky spots in our bucket, so that we can target our outreach and get them back into the fold. We have to correct what went wrong. The key takeaway, we’re not just using tools for the sake of technology, we’re using them to ensure no donor ever feels like a transaction. Okay, so we have our goals and we have some of the tools and donor perfect identify. Now, step three is where we’re going to start talking about where magic can really begin to happen, and why do I say this? Because this is going to take the tools, the behavior, and triggers, and these are things that are like the donor is going, their record is going to tell you this is data in DonorPerfect. The idea here is very simple. We want to use that actual donor activity to determine what our very next step should be. So, instead of guessing when to reach out, we let our donor’s actions that are recorded in DonorPerfect guide us. I’m going to suggest five again. There are many, but I think you can see why I chose these five behaviors and triggers. So, we have our first gift. As I said, this is a spark. The moment a brand new donor makes their first contribution, it triggers the entire relationship building process. The second gift is a massive milestone. When this happens, it’s our cue that this donor is highly engaged and ready to be treated as a loyal supporter. I love this third one. This is a gift to you, time since the last gift. This is an intentional safety net. If a certain amount of time passes without an interaction, you can be flagged, so that you can like reach out and connect with them again before they drift away entirely. Event attendance, I know there were some of you in Sean’s session, but when someone shows up at your gala, a webinar, a volunteer day, they are giving you their time, not just their money. That’s a huge cue that deserves special follow-up. And the last one is engagement. This is looking at digital body language, things like email opens, clicks, are they doing something online? It tells you exactly what topics they actually care about. And the cool thing about all of this is this is data tucked right into DonorPerfect. You have hidden gems there by turning these into the by turning tuning into these five triggers and others like them, we can stop lasting generic emails and start delivering highly relevant, perfectly timed experiences. Nothing like getting tongue-tied, right? Let’s look at how this builds into an actual real-world pathway, and I promise I’m getting to donor perfect, but I really want to set the stage here with a process that we’re going to replicate in Donor Perfect. So I’m going to use a new donor pathway as my example to demonstrate everything as it can come into like a real tangible map, but remember there’s some guidelines, and I’m going to call this a golden rule, is that the donor pathway is not a single message, it’s a carefully timed sequence built with pure intention. So, let’s look at how this works over a 60 day period. So, we have the moment that first gift hits our system, the clock starts. Our goal is to thank the donor within the first 48 hours, this immediate acknowledgement builds instant trust and validates their decisions to give. Check donor perfect can help you with that. One week later, we reach back out, but notice we are not asking for money. Instead, we send an email sharing a powerful impact story. We want to show them exactly what their gift is already accomplishing, check DonorPerfect can help you with that. By the end of the first month, we send an invitation to deepen their engagement. This is where they’re invited to join a newsletter list, sign up for text updates, check out upcoming volunteer opportunities. We’re really offering them a community here, not a checkbox at checkout lane. And finally, after the two month mark, we make our second ask, because we’ve spent the last 60 days thanking them, showing them impact, and inviting them. They are primed and ready to make a.

Second gift or comfortably transition into a monthly giving partner by spreading these touch points out intentionally. We guide the donor naturally from a first time giver into a long term supporter. So now, what does this really mean? How does this look in DonorPerfect? Before I get there, let me just highlight that this is a suggested process, four by four, that’s going to help us shift our perspective and break the transaction trap. So, if you’re ready, we’re going to hop into DonorPerfect and do a review. I just want to show you something, and I don’t know how well it’s going to appear, but here is a map. Now, some of you might have, might have some digital maps, some of you might use documents, some of you might use a Miro board. You can just use paper and pen, but what I’m suggesting is that we’re going to take that four by four approach and walk through a process. So, what do I mean? So, which pathway or journey do I want to focus? Well, I’m going to focus on my new donor journey. All right, so with any map that we’re going to build, or a pathway that we want to build, we have to understand our data. So, using the tools in DonorPerfect, I’m going to go to this constituents page, and I’m going to start to learn a little bit about what I have in my system. So, since I’m talking about new donors, I want to see who has given one gift, so I’m just going to narrow this down to say who are my people who have given one gift, and I’m looking at what data is in here. These are like, remember those behaviors, those data points. Well, these are the people that have given one gift, and if I’m thinking about trying to like convert them, and I’m looking at industry best practices. I have to also be mindful of when they gave that last gift. Now, the other piece that’s in this constituents list are is a donor score, which is looking at recency, frequency, and monetary value. So, it’s also helping you do a little bit of ranking to understand more about these people, so I’m gathering intel, and I’m like, okay, I see that I have people that fit the criteria of that best practice. They have one gift, it’s within the window of time, and I know a little bit about who they are, I know their donor score, I know a little bit about their giving, so I am ready to go. So now my next question, step one, which, what, like, what stage am I going to be focusing on? Well, I’m going to be focusing on, like, that stewardship engagement stage. So, what’s my goal? My goal is, I ideally want to convert these first-time donors into becoming a second gift donor, and I would ideally like to do that within the 90 day window, recognizing that I’m a little behind schedule, perhaps in reaching out to them, and that’s okay. Real life happens, we have to be able to flex, but we’re going to use our tools. I have to be able to filter and get them, so filtering is segmenting them out, so I can pull like this list back out, and maybe do an email. I might want to have a scheduled report about them. I might want to have a smart action, so that when they give that second gift, like I’m starting to think about what tools in my DonorPerfect toolkit can I pull into play. All right, now I want to think about, okay, if they give a gift, what behavior do I have available to, like, make other decisions. Well, let’s back up before they give a gift. They’re not always just going to give a gift, they have to be stewarded. So I might send them an email, did they open the email, did they, did their email bounce? I might have to give them a phone call because too much time has gone by, so you have to start thinking about the data that you have available for you to say what’s my plan of action, what’s my pathway. So I’m going to suggest my pathway is that I’m going to send an email to welcome them and thank them for being joining us.

Okay, so not thanking them for the gift that has already been done. I want to say thank you for joining us. Let us tell you a little bit about us. That first date, now I’m going to use their digital body language to say if it’s open that’s going to queue them up to receive a second email, where I’m going to maybe offer them to join our newsletter list, maybe because of your data you might be ready to include that second ask. Here’s where you have to make some decisions, but you’re using the data that you have and the DonorPerfect tools available to you. And then when they give a second gift, because, oh, it will happen, then we want to make sure we don’t miss the opportunity to celebrate, so we’re going to have a smart action that can create a touch point and a task for somebody to maybe make a phone call, we might want a scheduled report, so that that’s going to the executive director, as well as your board chair. Now, I’ve mapped it out, I’ve talked about it. Let’s put it into practice. So, the first thing that I want to do is I want to create a filter, because I want to be able to replicate the this list that I’m seeing on the screen in other places. So, under settings and filters is a place where you can go to create your selection filters, and I did do some pre work, and as many of the team have already mentioned, we’re showing you what’s possible with a little bit of demonstration, recognizing that the resource center, or the exhibitor center, has our fundraising guide with many different resources available, knowledge base articles, videos, and hey, reach out and get some training, or what? You know, we’re here, we’re here to help. Okay, so here we go. Here’s my filter. This criteria that we’re looking at is exactly the same criteria that I had on the constituents list. Why did I have to build this? Because remember, my goal is to convert them, and I’m going to my pathway. How I’m trying to move them along is I want to get them to receive an email, so here’s my filter, and so what I want to do is now I am ready to say, okay, let’s go create the filter, but first let’s create the smart action, because what if they give right away, what if they go back and make a donation. We want to be ready, so I’m going to go to settings and smart actions, and this is where those business rules, though the automations are going to live. And again, I have one in here where new donor gifts second gift, and one of the best practices I always recommend is try and name things that make sense to you today and three months from today. All right, so here we have our second, our smart action for when a donor gives their second gift, and a smart action is going to be when they give their gift, it’s their second gift. What do I want it to do for me? Well, because we know relationship building is so important. I wanted to create a transaction, which is just like a generic word for a touch point, and I’m going to have it create a task for me to call them and say thank you. So, this is when they give their second gift. All right, so I have my smart action. The last thing that I want to have ready to go is a report, so there are many reports that you can choose from. Many of the standard reports can be scheduled, but because I’m isolating very specific information of what I want to see, and if you attended Kristen’s session, she kind of highlighted that as well. Is that a report? Is showing you the data that you want to see. The easy report is going to be a place where you can pick and choose exactly the data you want to see. So, here I have my new donor re-engagement list, and what I want to be able to show you is that I am interested in who are they, when did they last give, and what were some of their interests.

I’m gathering the information, I’m creating that like almost digital roadmap for you to review, so that you can then implement and roll out your pathways that are connected to those donors right where they’re at, so remember our four pillars: recognition, relevance, responsiveness, and progression. All right, so we have filters, we have smart actions, we have scheduled reports. Now the last thing is our dynamic list with Constant Contact, and that’s going to be found under mailings and Constant contact email, and what I have to do initially is I have to go to list management, and I’m going to be selecting kind of the the criteria that filter that I applied to say I want this list to be for these people only. So what I have here is, I have my new donor list, I have my filter, my segment, if you will, if that’s a language or term you’re familiar with, that’s not going to look at everybody in my system, just these individual first-time new donors. So, now that I’m ready, this is going to push out and over to Constant Contact. I’m not going to demonstrate how to log into Constant Contact and be build an email, but the cool thing about the integration that I love is we use the word integration, but it’s a bridge, it’s a bridge of information going back. And forth between donor perfect and constant contact, so the emails go out of constant contact, but how they behave, what they do comes back into donor perfect. So let me show you this person, Betty Bart, was my one of my first time donors on the constituent list, and here you can see that here is the campaign, and I have some really good information. Here is that not only did she get the email, she not only opened the email, she forwarded it. Now we don’t know who she forwarded it to, but that is indicating there is some interest there. She wants to, like, she’s fascinated by what’s happening here. Would you agree? I think that’s pretty cool. Now, all of this that I’m showing you is just part of DonorPerfect. You have to look at your data to make some of these decisions, but you can build this type of map out yourself, and with a little bit of building, remember my four by four building, you’re going to be able to have a solid foundation to build very personalized pathways for each of your donors. So now let’s show you what a smart action looks like. So here’s Betty, let’s just imagine, okay, that she opened this. She meets my criteria for the second email campaign in my pathway. So I’m going to go back to Constant Contact, and I’m going to go to List Management, and here I would have a new list, my new donor list follow-up, and this is going to go out, and in that email that is going out to Betty, because Betty is part of this list, right there. She is at the bottom of the list, the bottom of the list. There’s a, there’s an ask. It’s not in your face, but there’s an ask. Okay, so you’re just, you’re imagining with me. So let’s imagine now this is, you know, real training here, so you’re going to have to work with me here. But let’s say that she responded. Check this out. Now you’re watching me do this. She’s giving a gift. It can work the same way if a gift is given online, but I’m demonstrating an entry manually. So I’m just going to put in some basic information here. Going to choose save, and you’re going to see here as soon as this saves gift count was updated to two, and here under contacts is that telephone call. So now I am moving them along. It’s, it’s personal, it’s based on Betty’s behavior, so that’s one example. Pretty cool stuff. I want to switch gears, and I want to do a different example, but I’m going to go through the same exact process. So I’m going to go back to my constituents list, and I’m going to think about which pathway or journey do I want to focus. I want to focus on my loyal donors, now loyal donors are a bigger group, typically, because they’re the ones that are familiar, they’re already supporting you, they already love your mission.

So, these are the ones where you have to dig a little bit deeper, you have to know a little bit more about them. So, but we’re going to go through the same process, so it’s not that you have to know more should be scary, although I understand why it might be. We just have to understand which tools we can use. So, we’re going to start here at the constituents list, and I want to look at people who have given at least 15 gifts, so and I’m going to flip this order, and so I’m looking at least 15 gifts. All right, so what am I learning about them? Well, I’m seeing that some of them have a low donor score, some are in the medium, some are in the high. All right, I’m seeing some dates here that are a little disturbing, but let’s switch this around a little bit and see what we have. Okay, so we have some current dates. All right, so I need to do a little bit more filtering here, because the message that I might say to somebody who is really more recent than somebody who there’s a bigger gap of time is going to be pretty significant, so I’m going to say I have my gift count here, 15. I’m going to apply a filter there, it is after first year, and let’s see what we have. Okay, so now I’m looking, I’m feeling a little bit more comfortable about this audience. I know what I kind of want to do with them, so same process. Loyal donors is my pathway. I’m reviewing my data. I’ve discovered that the people that I want to work with right now have a gift count of 15 or more. The date of their last gift is sometime since january 1, 2006 and their donor score is ranging pretty much like we’re just going to say zero to 85 thereabouts. That’s going to capture the list here that I’m seeing on the screen now. Based on what I see here, what might I want to do. Well, when we’re talking about loyal donors, sometimes the effort is in getting an upgraded gift. Sometimes the effort is going to be moving them into a monthly giving program. I’m going to use the example because a little bit more data in refining and digging is necessary, but we’re just going to pretend that we’re going to be focusing on upgrades, and my definition of an upgraded gift is when somebody is going to increase their giving, but it’s twice as much as their average gift. There’s a lot of different ways we could think about this, so I’m going to be, my effort is going to be getting to know what the average gift amounts are of these individuals, and I’m going to put into place a pathway and a goal of trying to get them to upgrade to give two times their average gift. How am I going to do that? Well, I’m going to take a look at their calculated fields, which everybody has in their DonorPerfect system. I am going to use the AI donor summary. I’m going to have a smart action scheduled reports, and I’m going to use some scheduled donor outreach. So, there’s a lot of donor perfect tools I just mentioned there that all of you have access to. So, what behavior do I have available to me? Well, I’m going to pay attention to their giving history, I’m going to pay attention to their interests and their preferences, I’m going to pay attention to their event attendance. Absolutely, the digital body language, did they volunteer? And then, if I understand what’s my pathway, I’m going to start with a personal call. Then I’m going to invite them to a volunteer opportunity. Then I’m going to do a personal follow up, then I’m going to do the ask for an upgraded gift. If that’s successful, then I’m going to actually use DP video to say thank you, and also flag them as a VIP, so you can kind of see how that process, that four step process, is always going to be in play, what you use, and the actual pathway is going to be different.

So, reviewing again, I’m going here into filters, and I’m going to either build them, but because we’re kind of just reviewing together and learning together here, I’m showing you that my accelerated new gift is their last contribution. There, so most recent is two times. That’s my criteria. That filter is going to be used for my smart action. The other filter that I need is the replication of the list I was just looking at on the constituents page. Here it is. There’s my list, that’s who I want to focus. This is going to potentially be used for a scheduled report. This might be used for my email campaign. Okay, now we have our filters, we know who we know our filters. Now we’re going to make sure that we have a smart action, and you can see I’m going through the exact same process. I have a smart action, and this time when they give an upgraded gift because it’s accessing my filter, what do I want to have happen? Well, I want two things to happen. I want to have a video reminder, a task be reminded to say, hey, make sure you send out that thank you video, and I also wanted to up the update the record in the flags field to be VIP. And then I’m going to move over to the report center, and I’m basically just making sure I have all my tools sharpened and ready to go, and here I can use different reports, I, you know, I’m walking through the steps, I’m not going into the design, but I’m showing you all the different same steps. Now that I have my tools, let’s roll up our sleeves and get started. So I’m going to actually come back here to my constituents list, and I’m looking at the right people. Alright, so now what I want to do is I want to create a to-do. So, from here I’ve identified my people, I’m creating that personal touch. Well, what is it that I, my map is telling me I want to start with a phone call. So, I’m going to make my phone call, and I want to do that now. No time like the present, right, and I could assign a time. I’m going to assign it to myself, okay. Okay.

there we go. Let’s spell the words correctly, and then save and close. Alright, so what did that do? Well, that did a couple things. It’s absolutely creating the to-do in the donor’s record, but if any of you are familiar with the scheduled donor outreach, I’m also going to see the tasks here on my homepage, okay? So that’s creating a visible list of things that I need to do, okay? If we go back into their record, there’s my telephone call, so you can see how it’s all weaving together. This donor’s record is giving me some insight now in preparation for this call, because I want to be informed. I’ve identified that they’re a good candidate for an upgraded gift, but now I want to understand a little bit more about them. So, a couple of choices is everybody has right now on the main page, or can have on the main page, many different fields that are going to be like data points, behavior, and data points that you can use to get to know this donor better. This is more about their giving. When did they give? When were they first a donor? How many years have they given? All valuable information, but then I have to go somewhere else, and I have to look at their contact history. I know some of you learned about the info sheet, that’s another great report. But what if we could go to one place and see it in one view? Well, let me introduce you to our AI donor summary. Now, this is a summary of a pretend person, but it’s still working the same, but you can see here that this is summarizing their lifetime giving. They have an annual pattern of consistent giving. Okay, good. This is good for an upgraded donor. Their average gift amount is 963 so that kind of tells me that I’m asking them to make at least a $2,000 gift, because I want it to be two times their average, they last gave on may 6, so timing is going to be really important here, and they’re an active donor. I can see that their largest gift was 1500 and now I’m starting to look at what are some of their interests, what are some of their motivations, and you can see that it’s where it’s most needed. They had two gifts that were personal, so there’s something there that’s telling me they like that personal touch. All right, so now if we have our information, we make our phone call, we’re going to send out an email, same place, mailings and Constant Contact email under contacts. I’m going to see, yep, they opened it. You’re you. I hope you’re starting to see how all of this data is filtering into the record, and it’s going to give you what you need to create those personal maps, so it’s not personally not creating individual maps for every donor, you are creating pathways for different segments that have goals, but as you do that, your donor-specific data is going to help guide how they move along. All right, I know I am running out of time, so I just need to pay attention here. Let me show you one last thing, because it’s just fun to demonstrate is when they give that gift. So we’re just going to say that they’re very generous people, and thank goodness we all have generous donors, right? What just happened is the gift was recorded. I have the prompt to do the video, and they are now flagged as a VIP, so I am taking advantage of the tools in my Donor Perfect toolkit to help make my job easier to understand more deeply the donors that are supporting my mission, so as a review, DonorPerfect can absolutely make this work, but there is a saying out there: if you can’t see this sage, you can’t guide the journey. I’m hoping that in the time that we had together, you’re seeing that DonorPerfect can give you the visibility you need. We have options for seeing and tracking where the donors are, we can use reports, those custom fields, donor scores to really understand where they’re at right now. DonorPerfect is going to help us identify patterns by looking at the donor’s activity history. We let their actual behavior tell us what they need next.

Uh, segmenting this is, you know, really important, because that’s going to provide a mechanism for personalization. We use selection filters to build dynamic groups, and there’s so many, but we, one example is those new donors in the last 30 days. This is going to give you the ease to do this personalization, but at scale, and then, of course, automating for consistency. We’re using the behavior and data that’s in DonorPerfect about those individuals to trigger automatic tasks, emails, scheduled reports, so that you can stay informed. Consistency builds trust, and using automation in any format that you have is going to, yes, it will save you time, but I like to think of it as it’s giving you the gift of time to deepen your relationships. As I wrap up, I want to leave you with one final reassuring thought: you don’t need to redesign everything overnight. Reviewing all of this information I know can be overwhelming, and it’s easy to think you have to build a massive, complicated pathway or journey for every single donor type right away. I promise you, and please don’t. It’s not worth the frustration. The secrets to success, I absolutely believe, is start with one intentional step on one intentional pathway. Pick just one group that needs your attention the most. That does mean you have to review your data. Maybe it’s building that 60 day welcome experience for your brand new donors, or setting up a quick win back email for donors who are just beginning to lapse build one pathway, let DonorPerfect do the heavy lifting, and see how it performs, and then expand from there. Small intentional changes lead to massive long-term results for your mission. So, with that, I want to say a huge thank you to all of you for your time, your energy, and most importantly, your incredible work that you do every single day for your communities. If you have any questions about building donor pathways, please, please, please don’t hesitate to reach out. We are in your corner, and we want to celebrate with you. You can connect with me and my team at Training Service training.services@software.com and we would love to work together to illuminate your organization’s path forward. Thank you so much, everyone, for being

here. All right, Kelly, well, you’re not out of the woods yet. There are a couple of questions in the Q and A, and I think we have enough time to give them each a quick answer. Deb had asked, and a lot of people were upvoting this one. Sometimes the first gift is a memorial or tribute. How does that change how we should thank for first gifts or engage for a second gift?

That’s a great question, and I think one of the things, it’s timing, so it’s possible that if you have a lot of those gifts, what you might need to do is set a filter, like maybe you have, like almost like you focus on just people that have given a single gift that’s not connected to a tribute or a memorial, and you can alter your filter a little bit, but I would say that letting them know more about you is okay. They love that person that did support you, so it would be okay to say, “Hi, let’s get to know you, and let them tell you we’re not interested. I wouldn’t lead with an ask, but I would certainly not exclude them, but I do think timing is sensitive, and you may want to kind of maybe do a timing analysis in terms of when did those guests come in before you reach out to them and start building the relationship.

Absolutely, and then real quick question from Graham: Do you think it is more difficult to carry out some of these strategies when the donors are coming through another platform, or if the event information is received from external sources.

You know, I think honestly, if the data is in donor perfect, I think that’s what the key is. If it’s in, if you have different data in different platforms, and it’s not all in one system, it’s siloed. Then it will be more difficult, but I believe that there is always going to be a way to use your data to map out a pathway. It’s just understanding that initial, like, what do we have here, where is it coming from, what does it look like, and how can we use it? It might be a timing thing, because maybe you have an API where you have to wait till it gets pushed. It’s not an automatic sync, so depending on what it is, we have to be mindful of those things. But I don’t think it’s impossible. So, is it a little bit more difficult, potentially? But absolutely possible.

Alright, and then can you just pull up the email slide again for everybody to grab the training dot services email.

Absolutely, alright, and while that’s up there, I will close out. So, thank you everybody for attending Kelly’s session. Next up we have Amanda Todrinski with her Advanced Leadership Leadership Session Possibility using DonorPerfect to prepare for the future of fundraising, or you can join Janet Carroll with the beginner session. Possibility monthly giving reinvented beyond the basics to growth. No matter where you go, we’ll see you in a few minutes. Take care. Bye.