CONNECTION – Strategies That Keep Donors Engaged

Hi, my name is Roberto Campo, and I am a training specialist at DonorPerfect. Welcome to Arlene’s Lessee’s more advanced session connection strategies that keep donors engaged. Most of you know Arlene has spent the last 25 wonderful years making an impact on our DonorPerfect Read More

Hi, my name is Roberto Campo, and I am a training specialist at DonorPerfect. Welcome to Arlene’s Lessee’s more advanced session connection strategies that keep donors engaged. Most of you know Arlene has spent the last 25 wonderful years making an impact on our DonorPerfect clients, training 1000s of nonprofits. Arlene loves problem solving and finding ways to streamline processes in DonorPerfect. She also works with a local chapter of Special Olympics, and has some passions for hiking, travel, photography. She recently welcomed her first grandchild, a new joy in her life, and looks forward to spending her free time in her retirement with him. A few housekeeping items before we get started. Please submit your questions in the Q and A tab, so that we can address them during the session. And a reminder that all sessions will be recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. Thank you, everyone. Arlene, take it away.

Thank you so much, Roberto. And thank you to my fans out there, or hopefully soon to be fans in the next few weeks as I wind down my career here at DonorPerfect. So, what we’re going to talk about today is strategies that keep donors engaged. So, some of you may have heard this adage before: about 80% of your nonprofit’s revenue typically comes from 20% of your donors. Anybody have any reaction, whether it’s a positive confirmation of that, or you have looked into that and you find your numbers to be different? Okay. Vicky, great. Carolyn, good. Good. Yep, yep. So that core of 20% of your database is going to be critical that you hold on to them, that you retain them. So that is kind of the key word that we’re going to be looking at today. Our objective, we’re going to start with a discussion of retention. We’re then going to talk about lapsed donors. Those are things we don’t want. So, what do we do to prevent donors from being lapsed? And we’ll suggest some strategies, and we’re going to see how you can measure your success towards the goal of preventing or reducing the number of lapsed donors, so for those who may not be aware of what retention is, retention is defined as the percentage of donors who gave a gift in the current 12 month period and also in the previous 12 month period compared to or divided by the number of donors who gave in the previous 12 month period, so for those of you who like numbers like me, yeah, we might want to see how it is calculated, and here on the left we see donors who gave last year and this year a hypothetical 1220 We take that number divided by the number of donors who gave any gift last year, and that in this example, 2007 48 and gives us about 44% If you’re, if you have not read the statistics, we’re looking at about a 43% average or baseline for retention. So, anything above 43% would be great. So, why is donor retention important? Why am I discussing it? So, good donor retention is vital to sustainable fundraising, as the cost of acquiring a new donor is significantly higher than the cost of keeping existing donors. Maybe some of you can also attest to that statement. So, what are some strategies? What do we want to do in and with donor perfect, fortunately to help us either boost that or keep it at the level that it’s been, so we’re going to talk about those strategies, but first let’s kind of address the donors who you’re not retaining, those would be your lapsed donors, so How can you find out who are your lapse donors? Well, in the financial reports folder of DonorPerfect, within your report center, there are two reports that have built-in filters. You don’t have to create a filter to use them, that would be the. Libunt report. How many of you know what Libund stands for? Okay, Libun being good, good, good. Exactly. Now, sometimes you’ll see it with a y at the end, but regardless, we have Libunt, and there’s the equivalent called Sybunt last year, but unfortunately not this implied year, some year, but unfortunately not this year. Now, when you’re running these two reports from your financial report folder, they are hard coded again. The filter is built in, but they are hard coded to look at donors who, excuse me, gave last fiscal year but not yet this fiscal year, or some fiscal year in the past, but not yet this fiscal year. All right, so side bun, Jodi is some year, but unfortunately not this year. You may see it written sometimes without the unfortunately, but it is implied that it is unfortunately. All right, you got a destiny last year, but not this year. That’s really a more succinct way of saying live on some year, but not this year, is your side buns. Let’s say you want to get a little more creative, and you want to go beyond the fiscal year comparison. We have some other options for you.

So you’re going to either go into the listing reports folder of the report center, you could also use the mail merge from the mailings menu of DonorPerfect, or for those of you who have easy reports, you can definitely design an easy report and build custom filters with any of these three options, so you can excuse me, use a live bunt or sidebunt filter that comes with DonorPerfect, and in the standard fundraising filter folder you’ll have the fiscal and calendar year filters that you can use for live bunt or sidebund, so the great thing is it’s already designed, you don’t have to do anything to it, but if you want to get a little more pizzazz to it, you could instead of those filters create your own filter with, for instance, last gift date is less than date x or any particular date of your choosing. Keep in mind, if you did that filter, and you have maybe 20 years of history in your DonorPerfect database, you might get donors who are severely lapsed. So that third item there maybe could be last gift date, which you’ll find on the main screen, is between, and give it a range, a more manageable range of maybe 36 months or a 24 month period, or anything of your choosing. And for those who are a bit more adventurous with filters, raise your hand, anybody use SQL filters. We’re not talking about squirrel, but SQL standard query language. All right. Okay. Jody, glad, glad that this is right up your alley. Glad to know that this is helpful. So, if you’re either you’re shy away from SQL filters, or totally beyond what you’re used to doing with your filters. No worries at all. Our support team will be happy to help you with some SQL expressions. You’ll also find an article with examples in the fundraising guide that you’ll find in the exhibitor part of this presentation of the of the platform. All right, so let’s go into DonorPerfect and kind of play with a few of these. All right, so first of all, Where is retention in your system? Hang on, let me just refresh this, so you’ll find the retention for your organization from the reports menu. Go to dashboard, and from there make sure that you’re on this organization dashboard. Lots of great metrics or KPIs. If you’ve heard that term, you can set your budget or goal for your fiscal year, and these statistics will update with every single donation that you receive, and that’s reflected in DonorPerfect. So here we see. That this organization is doing great with a 69.9% retention as of this minute today. Okay, so that’s something that you can keep your eye on. Now, let’s shift over to reports and report center, the financial reports that I mentioned, I’m not going to run them, but just showing you that if I type L Y B, here is your last year but not this year, and S Y B will bring up the sum year, but not this year, and you simply click on the report name or under actions click open and then send the report to screen or to Excel. What I’d like to show you, though, today is in the listings folder. This is where the reports about your constituents, hopefully mostly donors, can be found in the listings. My favorite report here is the constituent summary. It gives me name and contact info, and a little bit of the financial information, but what I consider to be some of the most important statistics. So, let’s click on constituent summary. Be aware of whether you want to include no mail names or not. Make sure that we click clear values, and I start off, and there’s no filter selected. So I’m going to apply a filter. I’m going to now add a new filter, and when it comes to their last gift date or last contribution date, you’ll find that with other calculated fields on the main screen, and if it’s not visible on the main screen, you’ll find it in the main file.

So here I’m going to, I could leave it on favorite fields, and you’ll see hopefully this field that says last gift date or its field name, proper field name is last contrib date, and either I’m going to say less than, meaning prior to a particular date, or I might want to use a date range because I don’t want my severely lapsed donors on this report, so I might just put in one 120 21 through 1231 2024 I could add more criteria, but for now I’m just going to leave it as is. Click continue. I’m not going to save it, but if I were to save this filter as lapsed donors with last gift 21 to 24 You might want to create a folder to put it in and call that maybe Stewardship. All right, so you would add a new filter folder, and this filter would aptly go into a stewardship folder. I’m just going to click done and run that report to the screen. I’m Oh, good. While we’re waiting for this, we’ll wait a little bit. Glad that Kate had a great support chat to get a SQL Lib filter. Wonderful. All right, we’re going to keep smiling and hope that the report shows while I’m still doing the presentation, I Okay, well, I might take a sneak peek back there, but wanted to show you the constituent summary and building that type of filter. So, all right, well, you know, in rehearsal this worked fine, there were no issues, but I guess the donor perfect guides are maybe on lunch break right now. Okay, so let’s continue with our presentation. So, again, we’re talking about lapsed donors, and in order to boost your attention, we need to stay on top of and make sure that our lapsed donors do not grow in number. So, how do we prevent our donors from becoming lapsed? Well, you’re going to segment your donors. You’re not going to deal with every single donor who hasn’t given in the last, I’ll say, one to nine. 19 years, we’re probably going to segment them and have strategies that are specific to those groups. We might want to approach it by analyzing the donor score. We’ll create stewardship strategies, so that if we have this information. What are we going to do with it? It’s great to run reports and have great analysis, but if we don’t act on it, that analysis is meaningless, correct? And lo and behold, we hope that you’ll use smart actions to help you stay on top of donors and make sure that you’re engaged with them, so let’s look at these areas. So, in order to segment your donors, what can you do? Well, take my suggestion from that filters slide a couple slides ago for lapsed donors, whether it’s the pre-built ones for sidebund, live, that’s a great start, or you want to hone in and get a little bit more cry, a little bit more criteria in your filter. To do that, you’re going to make those custom filters again. Last gift date would probably factor into that filter. You may want to use the donor score tiers now. The donor score came out in the last, I’ll say, six months, and I just love it because it’s so easy to look at your donors and see kind of who’s whom, which are the donors that maybe they’re okay and don’t need to be touched virtually or don’t, don’t need to be touched as urgently as the donors who may be in that medium tier. All right, so let’s kind of explore some custom filters. These are some examples, but please adapt it to how it would fit to your organization. How many of you have solicitors or gift officers or relationship managers? Put that in the chat with a why or yes. Okay. All right. And depending on the size, yes, yes. If your office is maybe three people or more, it might be appropriate. Some of you, though, the solicitor is yourself. You may be a one person show, right?

Okay, so to the extent that you do have board members, maybe volunteers or staff who are responsible for stewarding your donors, you can use a field on the main screen called solicitor and simply fill in the options in that drop down, so a possible filter would be find the donors who are assigned to a solicitor and whose last gift was before, in my example, April one of 2025 Now, keep in mind, excuse me, depending on how far back your fundraising goes, if it is 20 years of history, then I probably would not use the less than April 120 25 I probably use between, as I showed in that previous example. Here’s another example, maybe a little more pizzazz to it. Find the donors who have given two or more gifts in their lifetime that their initial gift is between two dates, and that their last gift date is between two dates, I’m suggesting to put an initial gift date again for those of you who have 1520 years of fundraising history in your DonorPerfect database. Am I looking for donors who maybe have a seven to 10 year period where they didn’t give, or am I looking for donors who have been giving, maybe not consistently, but let’s say in the last five years. Sorry, everybody. Last but not least, another suggestion for those of you who have had a screening with Donor Search, you could filter on the DS rating field, so your top tier of donors are going to be those where the DS rating field begins with DS one, but they haven’t given in the last 12 months time to reach out to them, don’t you think? All right, so let’s pop back into DonorPerfect, see if that constituent list came up. Looks like it did, and I’m also going to show you with the constituent list how to use this second filter as an example. All right, so this is my constituent summary. I can hide this sidebar panel. To see more of the report, and here I see the donors, but I love this report because I have most recent gift date, most recent gift amount, their fiscal year total, lifetime giving, and over here the number of gifts that they’ve given in their lifetime. Now, if you love that report, you can either just print it out up here, or most people like to work in Excel, and you can download this report directly to Excel. All right, or should you want to mail to them, you can use the export using template, and use the fields in that export template, and you’ll be able to get assistance from support, should you want to do that, or use this filter in the mailings mail merge area of DonorPerfect. All right, so let’s go and remove this filter. Let’s talk about that one that was a little more interesting. Add a filter. These calculated fields live in the main file, whether they are visible on your main screen or not. So, make sure we select main bio. I’m going to come to all fields. I’m going to look for the number of gifts, so number of gifts here is greater than or equal to two gifts. I’m going to add more criteria. Look for the field that begins with an I that the initial gift date is between I personally type the dates, but it’s up to you if you want to use your calendar picker, 1231 2022 and that their last gift date is between one 120 23 and 1231 2024 and click continue. All right, if you want to save that filter, you’ll give it a name. Here, you would put it in the stewardship folder if you’d like, and if you’d like to share the filter with other colleagues using DonorPerfect, make sure to check the share across all users. I’m going to click done. Let’s see if this comes up a little more quickly. Yeah, it did. Okay, so first of all, I would notice that the number of gifts over on the far right is going to be more than one, okay. Ah, in this case, I only have four donors. Well, if you haven’t noticed, we work in a database that has a few 100 donors, so I may not get large numbers as a result, but I did get donors.

We see the most recent gift date is in that 2023 or 2024 timeframe, right? So these are the donors that we might want to reach out to. Anybody else want to put something in the chat for a filter that either comes to mind right now or you may have looked at recently, and Janet, your question, Who would we be mailing to? Whether it’s this filter or the Libunt donors. One tip I would suggest is I would run the Libunt calendar filter, probably in October, because donors are interested in making donations before the end of the calendar year, so if you haven’t tried that strategy, you may find that you’ll get, you’ll be able to boost your end of year donations by using that live on calendar filter in the fourth quarter, you all right, okay, and Laura might be more put in her filter that they’ve given to a specific campaign, beautiful, beautiful, okay, so those are some ideas of filters, the sky is the limit, so this is a snapshot of what your constituent summary looks like. Not only are the filters unlimited, but the reporting or output options are unlimited, so you could create an export. Template for those of you who like to use export to file, you may use the export to file on main bio information. Your filter could be one of the ones that I’ve suggested. You might want to check include no mail names, maybe you’re not going to mail to those owners, but you may want to drop an email or call them, and as we show here on the bottom, the export template can have the columns or fields of your choosing, whether it’s calendar year totals and or fiscal year totals or lifetime gift giving in column K here last contribution amount, so the amount of their last gift, etc. And then once it’s in Excel, you can sort or feel free to hide columns, etc. All right, so another way to segment your database is by donor score, if you were in Roberto’s session earlier today, you were introduced to the donor score in his presentation. Well, every donor, once they give a gift, every donor has a score and segment. The segments will provide a quick insight into which donors may need stewardship, follow up, or re-engagement, and your individual donors are scored completely separately from your organizations. Along with the donor score comes a new area of donor perfect. Right from the tabs up at the top is your constituent tab. So that constituent tab or list or screen is fantastic. I use it often to kind of hone in on maybe my mid range or my mid-tier donors, those are the ones who I really don’t want them to slip down to the low tier. I want to elevate them into my high tier. For those of you, if you’re not familiar with the score, the score is really based on recency, frequency, frequency, and monetary amount, the acronym of RFM applies, and approximately 1/3 for each, but you can reach either reach out to support, or in the knowledge base, the donor score is defined there, and you’ll know the exact percentages, but roughly 1/3 for each of those three aspects. Okay, so in the constituent list it’s super easy to filter. I can either click on columns and say that I want the values to be equal to a certain, or want that column to be equal to certain values, or between, or greater than, etc. I can also change the columns that are visible on that constituent list from the columns that you see here. Simply check them if you want it visible or exported to Excel, or uncheck it if you don’t need that info. All right, so let me show you that. So, here we go to the constituents tab. I’m going to say no to that filter on the constituent listing report. This is my constituents page. Alright, so my database only has 340 names, but I still have and can use so many features in DonorPerfect. Here is my highest tier. These are the donors who score from 70 to 100 My medium or mid tier is 40 to 69 So I probably, in terms of engagement, would want to look at, would want to focus on the donors in my medium score.

Maybe you want to work with donors where their score, instead of equals, I can pull this down and say that the score has to be between 40 to 55 and I’m going to click apply, and voila, we now have those donors listed here. Another focus, though, could be your high donor score. Yeah, that’s great that they’re in that highest tier, and we’ve got the filter overriding it. So, let’s reset it. There we go. Roberto, you’re famous. You’re right here with an 82 score. Alrighty, but there may be donors who were at the bottom of this highest tier that need a little TLC. Okay, so we can filter on them. So I love this, and then the ability to change the columns, all right, which would be over on the far right, there we go, we’re just going to scroll over, and here I can edit the columns that I see and feel you want the email address, great. And then you can export to Excel, and maybe contact them individually with an email. All right, so I just mentioned the key word, that’s one thing to have the analysis, but to just sit there and read it is not going to get them to reengage. What are we going to do to get them to reengage? Well, we need the resources, we need gift officers, or your one person shop, then you might be the person who is going to reach out and connect with your donors, so we recommend that you track those engagements or outreach in DonorPerfect on the contact screen. You’re going to track, hopefully, historical outreach as well as future touchpoints, when you do that on the contact screen, that will sync with your calendar. I know how everybody pretty much relies on our calendar for meetings, right? So you can put that appointment in your Outlook or Gmail or Yahoo calendar, Google Calendar, that is. You can also see those contacts and update the notes on the DonorPerfect mobile app, and last but not least, in the homepage you’ll see those appointments. Alrighty, so we’re going to try and speed things up here. So, on the contact screen, this is what the grid would look like, and on the mobile app you can put in the historical touch points or future touch points, and on the homepage, so I’m going to quickly look at the contact screen for a donor, let’s say a Helen Lockhart. So, on the contact screen, I’m going to add a contact that says that the due date.. hmm, I’ve got some things to do after the conference, so I’m going to wait till next Monday, and the activity might be a telephone call, and I want to make sure that it’s assigned to me, and I might put in notes to see how she’s doing, check in on her, and hopefully reengage her. When I save that, I have now an icon, so that I can put that in my calendar program, and when I go to the homepage, as long as I’m showing this homepage, I would see, oh, Roberto, whoops, I didn’t mark my engagement with you, my telephone call as done, but in the next seven days I will see Helen Lockhart, and I can mark that as done. I can view the details, or I can also set a follow-up. You can also create a to-do item here from the constituent page. All right, so I’m going to try my best to finish up some of our slides here. Okay, so if you have a larger database to work with, which is wonderful, I’m jealous of you. How are you going to do this if you have several dozens or hundreds of donors that you want to track the engagements. Well, yes, one way is to do this manually on the contact screen, and or assign solicitors on the main screen manually, or an app. An option would be exporting out key fields from DonorPerfect, filling in the solicitor assignment in Excel, and also filling in the contact activities or future touch points that you’re going to make, and then import that spreadsheet into DonorPerfect, and we have a template that you can use to do that. So, either reach out and look in the knowledge base, or support can guide you. Last, but not least, we can use smart actions to notify solicitors of gifts from their portfolio.

Now, Roberto also did demonstrate this, but if you missed his session, let me take a couple minutes. So, assigned solicitors can be done manually on the main screen. Or in settings code maintenance on the solicitor field. All right, so smart actions, greatest invention in DonorPerfect since sliced bread. Okay, smart actions are automated business rules that are defined by you or your team. They help you work smarter, and you get to define the trigger, and you set the resulting actions. So, these are some examples. Maybe a major gift comes in, and you want to alert, in terms of sending an email to a gift officer, and assign a contact follow-up for that person, great. That’s probably the most common example of smart actions, the most widely used. Or what about a donor who you didn’t think was going to be a major donor and gave you $1,000 gift, and that donor was not assigned a solicitor or gift officer, maybe the smart action can fill in the solicitor field with the development director’s name or a given solicitor’s name. Oh, what about a gift from a lapsed donor? So this might be a pop-up alert that the person who’s entering the gift would receive, and we could have a smart action send an email to the solicitor of the gift, solicitor of that donor when a gift from a reactivated donor comes in. Wow, and have it create a contact record, right, because all of those engagements are going to be tracked on the contact screen, so create a contact record for that solicitor gift officer to call the donor, so I’m going to quickly try and review a smart action. Alrighty, let’s go, we are Roberto, if you’ll allow me to indulge, I have a report that I’ve created called Arleens at Risk Donors. Now you can design this easy report with whatever columns you want, but the key is the filter is that their last gift date is between 10 and 12 months ago. Here I’m saying, and the solicitor is me. But if you need assistance with this sequel again, support would be happy to help you with that. So these are my at-risk donors, I and I would say that the last gift date, yep, July of 25 I don’t want them to really become a lapsed donor, so I have those donors, and I’m going to show you the smart action. I have this smart action as a reactivation gift, so the trigger, meaning what’s happening in DonorPerfect, is when a new gift is saved. Ah, but my filter is the last contact made with that constituent is in the last 30 days, and it has to be Arlene’s donors. I’m going to send an email to myself. Okay, I’m going to create a transaction for me to make an send an email or possibly a call to thank that donor for reengaging, and I like to confirm that a smart action is working by displaying a pop-up message. All right, so let’s see this at play. I’m going to go into Tim Tarkanston’s record, he was my one of my two at-risk donors. I’m going to say that I reached out to Tim, and I’m going to fudge the truth and say that I did that on Monday, made a telephone call, and it was assigned to me, I would probably fill in some notes, but I’m just going to quickly save that. All right, so I have a contact transaction for reaching out to a donor. Tim definitely says, “Oh my, I didn’t realize all that time has gone. Let me give you a new gift. All right, so whether it’s over the phone or he sends a check in, or he goes online. I’m going to add a gift, and I’m going to put in a nice, could be large gift of 1000 and general ledger. I’ll just fill in some things here. My solicitation would be a phone call, and maybe I would. On a major donor. Thank you. All right, let’s see how this works. I’m going to hit save. Tada, that is what triggered my message, my pop up. There would also be an email in my inbox telling me that my at-risk donor has re-engaged with us, and on the contact screen, Arlene has to send an email out to this donor who has reactivated. Isn’t that amazing?

What this smart action can do. All right, so donor score changes are one way to monitor your success. Hopefully, you’ll also keep an eye on your retention rate. Maybe you’ll get some anecdote, anecdotal comments from your donors as you reach out to them, and maybe you’ll take away from this session implementing some smart action. So, I hope we have a few minutes. Roberto, I’m sorry about that. If you could send me a question or two.

Yes, I have here a question that’s been the most upvoted, and they’ve noticed when a donor is marked lapsed that sometimes a gift comes from another entity, for instance, they gave through their DAF, but because the gift is posted as soft credit, they’re still showed as lapsed. Is there a way that we could act and make this donor active instead of last?

Interesting, interesting. So here I assume that we’re talking about when this banner says active or lapsed, and lapsed is hard coded to be a donor who hasn’t given in 12 months or more. What I would recommend is that in settings parameters you might want to in calculated fields include soft credits in calculated fields. Now, if you do this, there’s kind of a little bit more to it, so I would approach it cautiously. You might want to consult with either a trainer if you have some training time, or with support, but that would be one way to do that. I’ll just say that. Make sure when you’re doing an end of year letter, you’re going to uncheck that and take that setting off.

Thank you, Arlene. And this is, we don’t have much time for other questions. I just want to say thank you. We all know this is your, your last DonorPerfect conference, and as I mentioned, you know, at the beginning of the session, you’ve spent 25 years helping our clients, and you’ll be retiring now at the end of June. So, I just want to wish you the very best from the part of our team, and you’ll definitely, definitely be missed. And next up, next up is Amanda, everyone with her advanced leadership session possibility using DonorPerfect to prepare for the future of fundraising, and Janet Carroll with the beginner session possibility monthly giving reinvented beyond the basics. Drop on by. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, arleen.

Thank you.

Bye.