2 HOURS 2 MINS
Developing Financial Resilience Through Dynamic Strategic Planning
Categories: Webinar, Expert Webcast
Developing Financial Resilience Through Dynamic Strategic Planning Transcript
Print TranscriptSo I’m going to turn it over to Kelly to introduce us.
All right, well, good morning and afternoon, evening, depending on where you’re at. As Amanda said, my name is Kelly and I am thrilled to have the Read More
So I’m going to turn it over to Kelly to introduce us.
All right, well, good morning and afternoon, evening, depending on where you’re at. As Amanda said, my name is Kelly and I am thrilled to have the opportunity to welcome you to our workshop, which is developing financial resilience through dynamic strategic planning. You are in for a packed full two hours, but fun at the same time. So a couple of housekeeping items before I introduce Amanda and Sondra is, yes, this is being recorded. And yes, you will receive an email hopefully by next week that will include the recording and some additional resources, which you should see as a handout in the control panel. I’m kind of hanging out on the right hand side. If you do not see the handout, certainly message us and Sarah LaLana, another colleague of ours and myself are going to be overseeing the questions and we will try and get it to you as quickly as possible. But let us know. And you’re going to do that by using the questions pane. So the questions pane is going to be where you ask questions. So yes, please ask questions. It’s also going to be potentially where you drop answers to questions that are asked to view by Sandra and Amanda. And it’s also going to be where Sarah and I respond to that questions pane is really important. A couple of other comments about questions, and you can absolutely ask them whenever they come to mind. And if it’s something that we feel Sarah and I feel that will be better handled kind of as a group discussion, we will notify Sondra and Amanda otherwise there is a planned q&a at the end. And last, yes, please engage with Sondra and Amanda and have fun learning. So I personally love learning. But there are times I don’t always understand what I need or what I need to do or how I’m going to go about it, or even where to begin. But I know in these instances, if I roll up my sleeves and dig in, I probably can get over the hurdle. And I suspect for some of you, you’re coming to today’s workshop, and you might be feeling a little bit like that. When you hear the word strategic planning now I personally like the idea of strategic planning and seeing the benefits from making a plan, turn into action. But if this is new to you, or you’re trying to brush up or get some new insight or creative ideas, again, you’re in the right place. So Sondra and Amanda have put together a great conversation and it is really that a conversation for you to be part of in terms of strategic planning. What do you think of? That’s not an answer that you have to type in the Questions pane. But what do you think of? I think of a map. When I think of a map, I think of a GPS because you know, where do you go without a map or GPS, you typically just in circles if you’re like me, but I am pulling up that idea or that analogy, because that’s what’s going to happen in today’s workshop, you’re going to hear a lot about developing your own roadmap for your organization. And you’re gonna see how DonorPerfect can be the GPS to help guide where you’re going to go and how you’re going to get there. So I’m going to turn it over to Sondra and Amanda here in just a moment where you’re going to be able to dive into more information. So Sondra Allen is joining us from Almora advisors. And if you were part of our conference, you may have heard her present at that point back in let’s see in June, but she is an expert on strategic planning Thank you Sondra, for being here. And Amanda Hadron ski is a DonorPerfect training specialist and she is going to be the expert. DonorPerfect. So ask questions in either lane and you will get great information. So sit back, I’d say relax, relax, kind of. But grab some beverage of choice, as Amanda said, and let’s dig in, Sondra and Amanda have fun. The platform and floor is all yours.
Thank you, Kelly. Appreciate it. Well, we’re really excited to be here with you today. And one of the things that I want to tell you is I absolutely love strategic planning. I think it really helps an organization do great work. And why do I think that I and I use my own example of thinking about I love to exercise and I think Oh, it’s great. I’m gonna go to the gym. I’m gonna have all these plans. But what happens it’s like it’s raining, oh, maybe I won’t go and I come up with all these excuses. But what I like is when I have a trainer, I’m like, okay, they’re going to push me to do what I need to do. They’re going to meet bring their expertise and that’s how I see my role in the strategic Planning process is really being that therapist sometimes being the person bringing the best practices and guiding along the process. So I want to bring to you today, some of what I’ve done with so many of my clients over decades. And what I’d love for you to understand is the important thing about strategic planning is really setting up a collaborative process, really engaging in all your stakeholders to buy in into this incredible process, and communicating that with some exchangeable goals. You know, we’re gonna talk today about really looking at how you use strategic planning with your organization’s vision and develop those action plans. We’re going to talk about this process that you need to go through. And it’s something that’s, you know, a lot of people think, oh, my gosh, it’s strategic planning, it’s gonna ruin my life, it’s gonna create all this work. That’s not what we’re setting out to do. Strategic planning should be your friend in this process. It should, like Kelly said, it’s going to guide you, it’s going to be that framework that’s going to bring you to do some great work. Amanda, tell us how you don’t imperfect and help.
Yes, so as part of that strategic planning process, a lot of times, we have to look at what we’re already collecting about our constituents, what we may want to collect, and also our past performance, so that way, we can have that roadmap for the future. So what we’re going to be talking about a lot today, in terms of the DonorPerfect sides are how we can collect effective and useful data, how we can then take that data and help inform our strategic planning process by using reports by using key performance indicators like the dashboard. And once we’ve gone through that process, and we have that roadmap, we have our direction, how can we then use DonorPerfect to track our goals and make sure that we are on track to succeed, or potentially have to take a short cut or a detour, if needed? So Sandra, my question for you, then as someone that came into this not quite 100% Sure what goes into strategic planning or even really what it means it all of that what it entails? Can you tell us what your definition of strategic planning is, and why it’s so important for our clients to invest in that process?
So I really see strategic planning this kind of thinking about those long range goals, you know, and I tried to look at long range considering three to five years because things are changing so much in our world on a daily basis, and looking at what are the goals that you want to accomplish? And then, really, the strategic planning process is that roadmap. But with that roadmap, you know, we really talk about communicating, and about the buy in, it’s a key component to strategic planning, because I really want everyone in an organization, whether it’s staff, or external stakeholders, I want them all to feel the ownership and the accountability in the strategic planning process. So it’s a really important thing that we communicate well, and we talk a lot about communication, because I think once plans aren’t communicated well, and there isn’t a groundwork set, it leads to a lot of confusion and leads a lot of stress around the organization, not really understanding how fun and yes, it is fun how fun strategic planning can be, and how helpful it can be to achieve the goals you want to achieve. The other thing I love about strategic planning is kind of like your insurance policy. So you’re kind of future proof. And you’re really looking at what can be the risks. And what we do is what once you’re going through the strategic process, we stop at a moment and we say, Okay, now tell me what the issues are. What do you see are issues that are going to arise that are not going to let you implement this plan. And we address them even before we start the implementation. And that’s a key piece because I think you’re really ahead of the game. But remember, and you’re going to hear this over and over again. It’s okay to pivot, it’s okay to adjust. This is the first time you’re hearing it. And I will repeat that many, many times.
I’ve made I think that’s a great definition there. So what goes into actually creating a winning strategy then for strategic planning?
So I think the parts that are important is really to understand and align your your priorities with your mission to how are you going to carry out that mission. And I think, you know, when you’re looking at this piece, you really have to look at the data and the analytics and I think that’s where DonorPerfect is such a great partner to strategic planning salutely You know, it really does. I mean, it’s, you know, I mean, I’ve learned so much even just working with you on so many other opportunities of ways that we could look at At EDA, it’s, it’s so wonderful to be able to measure the progress to look at the goals that we want to accomplish. And it’s not easy to do it without a tool, I mean, the you know, the ability to have a tool to kind of put that all together is so magical, it’s a, it’s a really wonderful opportunity. So we really want to engage our stakeholders is we talked about that whole buying piece. And when I’m talking about the stakeholders, we want this different perspectives. And we really look at all the different perspectives coming in to the strategic process, it could be from anywhere from people in the organization, as you know, could be like a competitor, even that could bring in something to that strategic planning process. And, you know, we look at losing the tools and the techniques in terms of using surveys. And we use a lot of different tools, interviews, focus groups, to bring in all of that creative thinking into the process. And again, monitoring and keyword adjust, you know, it’s okay, if you set these goals in your strategic plan. And as you evaluate after year one, you find that those goals are not achievable, then you need to just adjust, you need to really go back, or maybe you’ve reached the goals much sooner than you anticipated. So you have to push yourself a little more, and then you know, create some goals and reevaluate the goals and make them more of stretch goals. So I think it’s a really great process to really evaluate and adjust.
And DonorPerfect can really play an integral part in helping you create that winning strategy. We talked about making sure that we have good data in there, because that’s going to help inform our decisions, help us set those goals and be able to measure our progress. So I’m going to talk a lot later in the presentation about different financial reports that you can use to look at your past performance and measure that progress, as well as wealth and demographic data that’s going to help inform your decisions about what different donor demographics you want to target, engage and engage with. We’re going to talk a bit about how DonorPerfect can help you communicate results and stay in contact with your stakeholders, by looking at scheduled reports a way where DonorPerfect can actually automatically send those reports to the inbox of those stakeholders. We love any type of automation where we don’t have to actually do the work. And as Sandra and myself will probably just keep saying throughout the entire presentation, being able to adjust those goals as things happen. So we’re definitely going to focus in on our fundraising goal tracker tool, which allows you to set a goal for different fundraising efforts and monitor that progress. So you can keep your stakeholders informed and up to date, and also be able to pivot your strategy as needed.
So Sandra, do you want to tell us a little bit about when you’re beginning the strategic planning process, what goes into kind of engaging those stakeholders.
So that’s a really big part of our strategic planning process, one of the first things we do is that, you know, we asked, first of all, send us all the information so we can really get to know you. And then the second piece we do is really say, Okay, let’s look at your stakeholders, break them up into those that you would want us to interview those, you’d want us to survey and those that you would want us to have focus groups with. So it was just one of my recent organizations that I was working with, they kind of gave us the list of even having interviewing a landlord, because they felt they really brought in a lot of information we surveyed, you know, parents gives an a children’s after school program, we serve surveyed parents, we surveyed teachers, they really wanted some focus groups to look at that. And through that process, not only do we get a lot of information for our strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that we were able to pull in, but we also got information that the organization could use to really change some of the policies that they were working on. They also one of the things that we do is through this, the stakeholder process is really look at the mission and we gather valuable information through the mission. So we can show everyone the mission and we say, Okay, what do you think about this mission statement? And in that process, we get a lot of information around what their mission looks like. And in this particular organization, it said they had been, you know, serving children up to 10 years. Well, they had stopped doing that about 15 years later. So they obviously hadn’t reviewed their mission statement for a long time and it wasn’t relevant. So I think we do a lot of gathering information and then and all of that defines these these strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and what we really find that clients love to talk about their strengths, who doesn’t want to talk about how great they are. But what’s really challenging is to get them to focus on the weaknesses, there’s a lot of concerns about, I don’t want to hurt feelings, I don’t. But I’m constantly kind of pushing and guiding and say, remember, weaknesses are opportunities, we need to turn them into opportunities. And one of the things I see time and time again, from every client is a weaknesses. What do I do with my data? You know, I, how do I collect it? You know, what do I do with all this data? And how does it inform my decisions? It’s a, it’s a challenge. Amanda, do you know how you can help with this? Because I know, I love to give this advice to my clients.
Yes, I mean, time and time again, I work with clients. And they tell me I’m collecting all of this data, I have all of this information about my donors about their giving history, about how we’re engaging them. I don’t know how to pull it out in a usable way, or I don’t know what I’m looking at, and how that can actually inform some of the decisions that I can make. And when I was asking you in our conversation ahead of this presentation, like what are some of those areas that you tend to direct your clients to look at when they’re beginning this process? You mentioned looking at their giving history broken out by month to figure out what months are the most successful for their fundraising efforts? Or if the organization wants to focus on major giving, or monthly donors, looking at the average gift amount for their donors, so they can come up with what their definition for a major gift is, or when they’re doing monthly giving fundraising? What are the amounts we should actually be asking our monthly donors to give. So what I’m going to do is toggle over into DonorPerfect very quickly and show off two reports that I think will be able to help everyone on this call, begin this kind of analysis and get some of those helpful insights. Starting with that first piece, then, how to identify what months are the most successful for my organization in terms of fundraising. So if we’re in DonorPerfect, and we go to Reports and Report Center, which you’re going to hear me say a lot in this presentation today. If we go ahead and search for a report, donations by month, and year, this is a great report that allows you to say I would like to look at x numbers of years of my fundraising. Let’s go with three. So I have a little bit of a smaller data set to work with. And that year period can be in your calendar or in your fiscal year. And once we have that number of years set, and we said we wanted to look at calendar or fiscal when we run this report. And I’m going to run it without a filter, because I want to start off looking at all of my giving history. And then I can dive down into more specifics if I would like. What’s great about this particular report is is going to break out your fundraising by year. And then within each year, you’re going to be able to see the number of gifts, total dollars raised and average gift amount for every single month. So you’re going to be able to identify those months that are most financially successful, and perhaps the months where you’re maybe not getting as many donations coming in. And if we want to take this data and make it a little bit more specific, and let’s say I want to look at the trends for my individual givers, we can use selection filters or sidebar filters as a way to get that data whereby I can go into that donor type field and say, now take all of this data and just show me the fundraising trends for my individual givers. And now it took out anybody in the database that wasn’t an individual or a person donor, and I can get insights into their giving patterns and they’re giving trends. So this is a very nice way to kind of get that insight into when what month are we most successful. That what about that other side that Sandra kind of talks about with me earlier today, which is identifying amounts for major givers or identifying potential amounts for monthly donors. Is there a report that can help us with that? And there is Yes,
I know how excited I get About this, this is like the key thing because I think a lot of people don’t really know how to decide what’s a major gift for their organization?
Oh, yeah, there are many times we have a monthly giving webinar where we ask people, what’s your death fit or not a month, we’re giving a major giving webinar and we ask people, what’s your definition for major donors, and people are undecided. So this is a great way that you can make that data informed decision. Um, so the report that I’m actually going to point you guys towards is the gift range report. This is one of the most flexible reports, I think, when you want to look at donors broken out by different giving metrics. So for major donors, for example, there is a field in DonorPerfect that calculates the largest gift every single donor has given, it’s called Max gift amount. So when I tell this report to break out my donors by the max gift amount, and then drop them into these different buckets, so donors whose Max gift amount is between $1.09 99 donors whose largest gift is between $10.24 99. Once I set that field as my way to break out my data, and I set up my splits, which you can change these, but I’ll stick with what I have for today, for simplicity sake, when I screen this report, this is now going to show me my breakout of my donors by their largest gift. So Sandra, if you were looking at this data, if I were to present this to you, do you think you would be able to ascertain a good major gift amount for my nonprofit?
I think so. I mean, I’m feeling like really in the 500 to 999, it would be really, really great major donor for your organization.
Amazing. And if I want to know who are these people in this segment, or even these two higher segments, which are definitely I would say major givers, we can drill into that detail. And this will give me those lists of individuals that are within that category, what their largest gift is. And I can even come to the bottom and use an export template to dump data into Excel and do some further analysis, or even potentially share this with Sondra and have her look at it and get a little bit more insight as well.
And it’s a nice way to be able to look at that and say, because I have this conversation so many times and that data is so easy to be able to say, you know, for your organization, you know, considering $1,000 is really you know, you could consider it a major gift so that you have an A good starting point, your you know, it’s it’s nice that you can consider a major donor in that space, because it gives you a more robust major donor pool, because as we know, we want to move those major donors and we want to move them upwards. So as a start, we can then move them and I know we talked a lot about you having the ability to see the those moving up to through reports.
Exactly lots of flexibility to see that. And because I did mention monthly donors, I would be remiss if I didn’t point people towards the field, I would recommend looking at for those average gift amount. So looking at on average, what people are giving across all of their gifts. So you can see I just simply toggled it to a different metric. And now if I’m looking at setting up a form for my monthly donors and trying to figure out what my ask amounts are. And Sandra, you can let me know if you disagree. I would say somewhere probably between that 10 to $100 range seems to be where I would probably want to set my monthly gift amounts.
Absolutely. And I think I know is we you know we I talk a lot about the you know, the the founder of charity waters talks about if you were to do it all over again, what would he do, and he would focus on monthly donors, I think we really overlooked the monthly donors. And over time, they tend to give a lot to an organization. And I think they’re also committed to your organization. So I love the ability to understand where they’re coming from and what they’re doing. So it’s wonderful to have this
right and such an easy way to give because with DonorPerfect, you can set them up for automatic monthly giving and that money comes right out of their credit card or bank account each month. So making it really easy for people to give. Hello already. So as much as I would love to focus on those two reports all day and all the different ways you could run that data and get valuable insights. Let’s, let’s talk a little bit about the different dimensions or areas of focus we can go with for strategic planning.
Absolutely. So what we do is when we gather all the information we have all we’ve, you’ve given us all about your organization, we’ve set up the stakeholder interviews, we’ve done all that. And then at this point, then we look at setting what we call dimensions. And they’re really like, what are your priorities, we definitely review your mission. As I discussed before, we look at your mission, we want to make sure if you’ve drifted from your mission, that it needs to be reflected that you’re you have the populations, everything is in your mission that you are actually doing. And then we look at really making sure you have a vision because we want to look at what do you what’s your desired future state, we want to talk about that we want to, we want you to be able to have that to be able to share with your different stakeholders, one of the areas that we’re focusing a lot of our work and there’s a lot of interest in is in values. So we’re really having a good understanding of your core values. organizations want to work on this, because they really want everyone that’s part of the organization to have these shared values. And what’s wonderful about the shared values, it allows people to really engage with your organization, we know the better that someone as a donor engages with your organization, the better, they will feel like they want to support your organization. So it’s been really wonderful work to do this values work, we need to do programs, because we have to look at what you’ve been doing. You know what needs to be kind of retired, if it has been a program you’ve had around and it hasn’t been successful, or it’s very resource heavy. We want to make sure we evaluate those programs and the programs you’re doing well, let’s grow them. So let’s make sure that we continue to grow the program and tackle some new opportunities. So that’s what we do in the work of programs really focusing on all that. And I know when we were chatting, Amanda, you said you were you talked so much about marketing communications, how DonorPerfect can help? Can you share a little bit about that?
Yeah, so I think one of the real values of DonorPerfect is the ability to do marketing and communication on mass. So those one to many communications that we can do with Constant Contact, where we say find all of my monthly donors in the system. And every month, I’m going to send them an email that updates them on the impact of their support. That’s a really easy and time is time sensitive and cost effective way to engage with our donors. And then we have the one to one communication methods. So things like DEP video, sending emails, or even using the Contact Manager as a way to create a pipeline to say, for my major donor prospects, I’m going to send them a survey, I’m going to call them every month, I’m going to have an in person meeting, we’re going to be able to actually use all of those contact management tools to essentially make sure that we meet those seven touches that most people in our industry say we should be having with all of our donors. And in some cases, we can even automate that like with Constant Contact, and Smart Actions, which I’ll talk about a little bit later.
And of course, we need to focus on the fundraising, the fundraising is what fuels all of the work. So we want to make sure that we’re we’re really looking at that area looking at setting those goals. And I know we’ve talked a lot about how important it is to have the data from DonorPerfect to set some realistic goals that are SMART goals that can be accomplished. And do you want to talk a little bit about how you can help set those goals?
Man, I mean, there’s so many different ways in DonorPerfect that we can realistically set those goals. I will be talking about the fundraising goal tracker as a way to be able to set a goal and monitor the progress. Other reports like our solicitation analysis allows you to look at past performance. So you can see how successful you were and make that data informed decision as to what your goal should be for future. And that report in particular, lets you actually see the goal that you set in the report as well. I’m gonna be really excited to show that off soon. If
I love that because I think a lot of times I think when we’re talking with our with our clients, they’re really challenged, they really don’t know where to start. And I think that’s wonderful. We always incorporate dei into all I think that needs to be incorporated into all the dimensions. Some of our clients like to have it as its separate dimension and then we can focus on what you know inclusivity looks like so we do a lot of work to make sure that you that our plan is really very much focused with EDI lens. And then, you know, finally, but not least, is capacity building, I think is one of the most important areas. Because we want, we have all these great things that we want to do. But we want to make sure that we’ve given those that are going to implement this, we’ve given them the capabilities, the skill sets to do it. And we want to make sure that we’re really thinking about what they need in terms of, you know, professional development, wellness, whatever they may need. So we really do a lot of focusing in capacity building. And when we look at capacity building, it’s not only the staff, it’s also the board, we also spend time in the board work to make sure the boards engaged. These dimensions are like some common dimensions that we recommend that people include into their plans. But we have a really tailored approach. So sometimes we have organizations that say, I really want a dimension, that’s wellness, because that’s super important to our organization. So we really focus on that wellness dimension, or we had another organization really wanted to engage in, in community engagement. And that was really one of their dimensions. So it’s really not like, Oh, this is what you have to have yet, I definitely believe mission vision values has to be part of it. And some of these other components need to be part of it too. But there’s always room for tailoring to your specific unique needs of your organization.
So we really want to take all that information and all that data that we have, and really turn it into our advantage, because the data is going to help inform that decision making as I was talking about a lot before, you know, when I find clients that don’t have a lot of data, they don’t have a lot of information, it’s really hard to start the process because they don’t know where to start from. So one of the things I first say, Okay, I know you haven’t done this before, but the six spreadsheets that you have with names on them, it’s gonna be a little hard. And some of them will say, Well, you know, we did have spreadsheets, but that person left the company, I don’t know what happened to them. So I don’t want that to happen. So I always say, please have a data management system to kind of collect all this information, because it really helps you kind of set those goals and then really helps you keep them in define them define the purpose, you get the specific goals that you can set measurable, achievable goals, you can look at those key KPIs, and it’s really important to measure it. Because if we’re not measuring what we’re doing, you know, we can all write a beautiful plan, I can give you lots of wonderful like I can do great graphics and wonderful plan. But if we don’t measure it, I mean, what’s the purpose of the plan, because we don’t know if you’re delivering it. So I think it’s so important that we align the plan with the mission. And we measure what we’re doing to make sure that those high level goals are achievable goals.
And DonorPerfect can definitely play a really strong role in helping you build that strong fundraising strategic plan. I mean, Sandra has talked so much already about making sure that when we’re approaching this strategic planning process, that we’re making data informed, we’re doing words, I apologize, we want to make sure as we’re approaching our strategic planning process, that our data is informing our approach and how we’re going to go about this strategic planning process. So one of the ways that DonorPerfect can help you get that data informed information is looking at our Association for Fundraising Professionals, or AFP key donor metrics report. DonorPerfect is actually a partner with the AFP were part of the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. And we actually worked with them to put together one report with your DonorPerfect data that can help give you valuable insight into who are your donors who are upgrading their giving, who are donors who are remaining the same. And we have donors who are downgrading their giving will be able to look at that data and see oh, we’re doing really well. Lots of donors are upgrading what are we doing really well. So we can repeat that process? Oh, no, we have a bunch of donors who are downgrading, we might need to reevaluate what we’re currently doing and seeing can we be more personal in our approach? And if we do see that downgrade and giving, one of the ways that we can potentially improve and get those people to kind of giving the same level or more is making sure that when we’re reaching out to donors when we’re sending them appeals when we’re sending them emails, that it’s too targeted, specific and meaningful and timely to them. And some of the ways that DonorPerfect can help with that is our DonorPerfect Insights tool? Because that’s going to tell you your donors predictive or preferred channel. Does this person like to receive a text message does this person prefer email, it’s also going to give you age and demographic data, we can typically make some informed decisions, millennials tend to perform prefer more electronic forms of communications. Older generations are maybe a bit more tied still to those direct mail appeals. So being able to have that valuable data is going to help you inform how you’re reaching out to your donors. We also want to make sure that we’re being very smart and strategic and how we approach allocating our resources for different fundraising efforts. The solicitation analysis report not only lets you look at all of your fundraising efforts, and how much you raised, but you can also go in and put in the cost of running that fundraising effort, the cost of that event, the cost of that appeal. So you can see whether the costs are outweighing the benefits in the donations that you’re receiving. And, of course, we always want to make sure that we can look at our data over a longer period of time. So we can identify trends either in our fundraising campaigns, or look at trends from our different donor demographics like age, donor type, maybe even location. And the gift comparison by time period report is a really useful report that lets you look at your fundraising data year over year, month over a month, quarter over quarter. And you can break it out by those different demographics, both financial data points, as well as donor demographic data points. So what I’m actually going to do right now is go back into DonorPerfect and actually demo the solicitation analysis report. Now, quick show of hands, because I know a lot of people here are DonorPerfect users. I think everyone here is a user of DonorPerfect. Go ahead and raise your hand Have you ever run the solicitation analysis report, or at least have seen us talk about it in a webinar?
All righty, a couple hands have gone up. It’s one of our most popular reports that we tend to talk about in these webinars and webcasts. So going back to reports and Report Center, we’re gonna go ahead and look at solicitation analysis, which is included in everybody’s database. So if you want to follow along solicitation analysis is in everybody’s database. And the way that this report works is that you get to set a date range. So show me all of the donations from 2022 through today’s date. And once you set that date range, you can run this report. Then I’m just gonna go ahead and hide my sidebar here. And so what this report does is it pulls out all of your fundraising efforts, all of your solicitation codes that have had a gift assigned to it. And for every single solicitation code, you’re able to see the total revenue, dollars raised. If you’ve inserted your expenses, you’re going to see those also listed out. And then your net revenue, which is what you actually raised after all of those expenses. And that’s the informed decision part. Because if it’s costing us almost the same amount of money to run this appeal, as it is in terms of dollars that we receive in it may not be the most effective appeal, and we may want to rethink how we’re approaching it. Or if this is something we even want to continue into the future.
I also love that, you know, the monthly report tying in with this is really effective because you might know a good time to run an appeal if you have a month that’s like really a really high giving month for your organization, you know, in terms of its own awareness month or something like that.
Exactly. That’s definitely true, I think. And then another cool aspect with this we talked a lot about goal tracking, being able to set goals being able to monitor your goals and your progress. Word set. So within the solicitation analysis report, you can set that goal how much I want to hope raise for this fundraising effort, which hopefully you’re looking at past performance to be able to set that goal and make it achievable for your organization. And you can periodically run this report to check in on that goal and see how close you are to reaching it. And everybody in the chat is now writing in Amanda, how do I record these expenses in this report. So when you’re in this report, if you want to include the expenses, let’s say for my annual appeal 2021, I’ll include the expenses for there, even though it’s a little late, what you’ll do is you can click on the blue hyperlink for the code name a 2021. And that’s going to open up the back end of the code, where if it’s a direct mail or an event, you can record the number of attendees or the number of recipients, you can include your printing costs, and any additional costs that might have gone into that appeal. And you can type in your fundraising goal as well. So you can get that goal tracking capability. And then once you save these values, you’re going to close that little tab, which is your list of codes. And if you rerun the report, watch right now my annual appeal 2021 doesn’t have any expenses listed in there. When I rerun it with the expenses now, I’m going to see that printing cost other costs, who and then my net revenue is negative $1,000. So that wasn’t a good year for me. But hopefully, you guys are taking away now how you can put those expenses in where we can actually look at those goals, and how this is going to be helpful and helping you make those informed decisions for your fundraising efforts.
And even if you’re you know, I don’t think that you have to look at that as a negative because sometimes you do have these events. And all these are to really start engaging with Oregon with a different donor. Because it’s really the starting point. Once you start engaging with the donor in a way, then you’re kind of introducing them to your organization.
Right? If I attend an event, as a guest of one of my friends, I’m like, wow, this really aligns with my values and what I believe in, and now I’m a donor, maybe that negative $1,000 isn’t so bad if now I’m a monthly donor.
Exactly.
All righty. So how do we get all of this good data then, because that solicitation Analysis Report is only as strong as the data that’s in the system. And one of the biggest challenges I hear when I’m working with clients is I have a hard time collecting data, I have a hard time collecting data that’s actually useful for my organization. And that’s so important, because our data that we collect is what’s going to inform our decision making, it’s what’s going to inform the strategic planning process. So some of the ways that you can make sure that you have strong data in your system, is when you’re collecting online donations, making sure that you’re using an integrated DonorPerfect form, or our classic forms product if you’re someone in Canada, because within those forms product, you’re able to go in and say this is a form that’s going to be forgiving Tuesday 2022. This is a form that I’m going to use for my Endless Summer of Love direct mail appeal. And as people make donations to those forms, that information is going to push into DonorPerfect. And you’re going to be able to run those solicitation analysis those financial reports to see your successes. You can even potentially on these forms, ask your donor a question like how did you hear about us, which could potentially be a great way to find areas where you can acquire new donors. You can also maximize your impact by looking at including predictive information like our DonorPerfect Insights tool, which allows you to scan predictive demographic data like age and gender and people’s preferences for different causes. And when we have those strong data collection protocols, we’re going to be able to take that Add Data and incorporate it into many different DonorPerfect reports. So you can see the success and inform your strategic planning moving forward. And also be able to take that data and measure your success, being able to set goals and be able to see where we’re super successful. And of course, where are the areas that we need to improve, because everybody can find an area that they can improve upon. And as part of that measuring success project or process, we obviously want to keep our stakeholders involved, informed and up to date. But they may not be interested in the solicitation Analysis Report with all of those numbers, all of those metrics that can sometimes make even my brain heard of it. So if you are looking to keep those stakeholders informed, and up to date, which is really important as part of your strategic planning process, you may want to look at running one of our graph reports, because this lets you take your financial data like solicitation, General Ledger campaign, or you could take demographic data like ages, province, postal code even, and it lets you break that data out into pie charts or bar charts. So it’s a lot more easy to consume for those board members and other stakeholders.
I love that because I think that data being easy digestible, especially for board members are coming in their busy lives and they look at the they want the quick picture of the data. And you know, this is a really great way to present represent it.
All right. So standard, you want to talk a little bit about actual quality data, then.
That’s one of the things it’s always a really important thing, like what’s the quality of the data you’re collecting, because there’s so many as you can see Amanda’s really talking about so many different areas that you could really focus on. So we want to determine what data to collect. So we want to clarify, what are your fundraising goals? And I think this is a really important part to look at, you know, where are you in your cycle of donations? Where are you at, as you’re looking at an organization and the fundraising, you know, the fundraising component of a strategic plan helps you really dig deep into looking at what it is, you can sort of pinpoint what are the things you want to measure. Every organization has different things, they may want to measure, because they’re in a different in their journey of fundraising, they may be in a different place, they may not be as mature as some other organizations. So they may want to start with simple things. It just may be increasing the number of donors period, or they may not have monthly donors as we were talking about, or even major donors, or it’s a more sophisticated mature organization in the fundraising place. And they’re they’re looking at really growth, like how are they moving a donor from being a regular donor to a major donor. And some of those may be relevant metrics for them to measure. So we really want to determine what are some of these collection data points that we want to look at. And we want to make sure that when we look at them, we develop smart goals, because we want to make sure that they’re very specific, and then we can really pinpoint them so that they can be achievable. That’s one of the things that helps with the data collection to really define what those are. And we align that with our, you know, capacity, like what ability do we have in the organization to measure these metrics, we don’t want to create a plan that is so unrealistic that you don’t have the capacity in your staff to really accomplish these things. But what’s wonderful about using a data tool like DonorPerfect, is it it makes this so much easier. And it’s so much more time consuming, you know, when you’re trying to do it without a data tool. And with with proper like, and I know Amanda, we talked a lot about you really have to code properly, and you have to, and you have to set the groundwork well, but I think once you’ve done that it’s really, really successful. A lot of times people don’t spend the early time of prepping then they say oh well my events not till later. I’m not going to do my data system too much later. Now I say to everybody get from the start. So you really have the time you’re not rushing through because you know nonprofits are wearing so many hats. You want to take the time to really kind of get this all in place. So that you can really, really not have you know, a real Think about what data you’re going to send a measure. And then you want to make sure that you don’t get data overload. And I know we talked a little bit about that,
right? Yes. Like, it’s so great to have a lot of data about your donors. But when you’re deciding what data you want to collect, you really want to ask yourself the question, How am I going to use this data? How is this going to inform my decision? How is this going to help me build donor personas to identify my ideal monthly donor, my ideal major donor, my ideal mid level donor. So every data point in your system should have a purpose and should serve this wanting to be strategic and how we engage with our donor base.
So I think it’s really important when we’re choosing that data collection that we bear in mind that we want quantitative and qualitative, because we want to get that data that has the insight, not just the numbers, because I think insight is really such an important piece. And I think we’re going to talk a little bit later about how we can get some insight from honor donors to really help us as we’re doing this conversation. And I think the technology and the automation really facilitates so much of this easy collection of data.
Yes, because we integrate with many different tools like donor search, eye wave, and then our own Insights tool, which can really give you insights into capacity and donors affinity for your organization. But then we also have tools like surveys where you can build out questions to ask your donors and have them tell you, their preferred channel, their demographic, what they love about your organization, and why they donate. And I think that’s the most valuable data you can collect is data that your donor tells you.
Absolutely, because we want to hear how they want to be engaged. I think that’s a really important thing that we’ve all learned that, you know, it engagement is key to, to fundraising. But it’s how you want to get engaged, and everybody wants to be engaged in a different way. And we need to kind of understand that through, you know, a lot of the demographics.
Now, I know our next slide, we were going to start diving into some key performance indicators. But I would love to do a very informal poll real quick. So in the chat, and it can be a yes or no. How many people here right now, without looking at your DonorPerfect system? How many people right now know their donor retention rate? So you can write a yes or no into the question box? Do you know your donor retention rate? And I promise I won’t shout out any names or give anybody away?
All right. So we have a couple of noes and a few yeses. But Sandra, I think knowing those key performance indicators like donor retention, that’s really important in the strategic planning process, isn’t it?
Absolutely. I think a lot, you know, we talked a lot about what you’re measuring and how important that is. And I think one of the things I find is, I’m glad to see you’ve got some yeses, because it’s a question I really asked quite often. And, you know, people are like, Yeah, I think somebody knows that, you know, it’s like, we have to find the one person who knows that. And it’s a lot of like, I’m not really quite sure. We’re not really focusing, we’re focusing a lot on getting donors. But we’re, you know, I think it’s really important to focus on retention, because there’s so much that you’re contributing to getting a new donor, that you want to make sure you retain that donor, there’s a lot of costs associated with the donor. And then one of the things that we want to do is we’re looking at those average, we talked about those average gifts to really understand, you know, where are you as an organization, you know, where what’s major donor for you? What are your average gifts? You know, what kind of giving Do you have, I think that’s such an important piece. And for all of this, you know, we we know there’s a cost to the donor, but what we want to do is have this as much information to know, you know, are we keeping that donor? Are we doing a good job? So, why are we making those seven touch points that I know we talked about when we were planning? And I would say and you were asking me, you asked me a good question, you’re like, what does that mean? Seven touch points. Does that mean you have to, like have a, you know, in person? No, absolutely not. Because people are busy, seven touch points in a year with the person in person would be really hard. So we want to diversify. And we also know that people want different ways different given their demographics, they want different ways to be communicated with. So what we want to do is understand who our donors are and then understand how they want us to engage with them, so that we can really A track what we’re doing in the DonorPerfect profile is kind of see what they’re what’s going on. So that we can retain the donors because the better we know our donors, the better we stew, we do our stewardship, with donors, the longer we’ll have our donor along the ride with us.
And it’s so much easier to engage with someone that’s already engaged with your organization and is involved than it is to go out and find some random person off the street and motivate them to support you. Now, we do have a great question from Kate. And I know the DonorPerfect definition. But I’d be curious, Sandra, if you have a different definition, Kate asks, What qualifies as a retain donor? How long before we consider that person lapsed a year, two years?
I think it’s a personal, you know, everyone kind of determines that, you know, with the individual donors, and you know, sometimes if you know your donors, you kind of understand a little bit what their circumstances are, why they haven’t given if it’s like, did they not give for a year, I like to say, you know, if it’s been like three years, they’re a lapsed donor, I like to give them three years, because sometimes people, you know, kind of get a little distracted, if you try engaging them and you try bringing them back. And after three years of try, I think you can definitely consider them a lapsed donor. But one of the things we were talking about is and that is a great question. And one of the things we were talking about when we were discussing the presentation is I like to tell people to take that lapsed donor list and kind of give it a try, you know, give it a you know, your best try of communicating and engaging with those donors to see if you can bring them back in.
Yes, I think something you might have said and I’ve heard in other presentations is that one of the biggest reasons donors don’t give us that we never asked them, we don’t reach out to those lapsed donors and ask them to give again, so then they fall off the radar.
Absolutely. I know it’s time time. And again, I talked about that all the time, which is saying even not only lapsed donors, even like, you know, potential donors, they always say, Well, why didn’t you give to, you know, why haven’t you given and no one asked. So that’s one of the big pieces that I say, you know, when you gather all this information, when you have an event, you know, make sure you’re always kind of you got a call to action? Ask because if you ask all they can say is no. And that’s okay.
Exactly. All right. So we’ve talked a little about about those key performance indicators. So I would love to take us over to the DonorPerfect side of things and show you how DonorPerfect can help you monitor and keep track of those key performance indicators. And identify areas where you may want to focus and improve upon, but also identify those areas where you’re super successful, so we can celebrate those and continue them. So DonorPerfect, has our DonorPerfect dashboard, which are real time insights to your organization’s success, and update every single time we add a new gifts to the database. And there’s five of these indicators that I’m going to focus on for today. As well as an annual fundraising goal tracker, which is designed to say for this one year, we want to raise x amount of dollars across our entire fundraising strategy. Now, one thing you will want to keep in mind as we’re looking at this tracker is that all the metrics are based on a rolling 12 month period. So it’s going to be based off of from today, going back 12 months. So let me toggle over to DonorPerfect and show you how we can get to that dashboard. And this is where I’m going to take a pause real quick. And I’m going to offer you guys the opportunity because some people said they didn’t know what their donor retention was. My hope is some of you might walk away now knowing what that is. I’m gonna give you guys about 30 seconds. If you want to open up DonorPerfect and follow a law you’re gonna get that answer to what’s my retention, as well as a few other key performance indicators. It’s going to give you guys about 30 seconds to open that up
already in 30 seconds goes really really really quick. So assuming we are all now in our DonorPerfect systems. If we want that quick answer, what’s my retention? What’s my average gift them out? Carolyn’s already writing it into the chat for me awesome, Carolyn. We can Go to Reports and Dashboards.
And within the dashboard on the organization dashboard, you’re going to see those five key performance indicators that we want to focus on. The first one being your donor retention, which from DonorPerfect definition is a donor who gave in the previous 12 month period. And in this 12 month period, that’s DonorPerfect working definition. I’ve certainly seen other organizations that based off of their data, and what they know about their donors giving have slightly different definitions, but they made those decisions based on their data. I can look at my total donors, which is a number of donors who gave a gift in this 12 month periods. And my average gift, which is finding the average of all of the gifts given in this 12 month period, which is sitting right around $1,800. And my donor lifetime value, which is the metric everyone asked me what the heck is that. So donor lifetime value is a predictive value that says this is how much a donor will give to your organization before they churn or before they officially laughs and stop giving. And will notice that my lifetime value is really high. Which makes sense because the lifetime value is calculated by dividing my retention by my average gift. When we focus on donor retention, when we focus on retaining donors, they tend to give more over their lifetime, which means my average gift goes up for all of my donors, which means when that donor eventually turns, I can expect to have received roughly $9,000 for them. So a great way to really tell our board, we need to focus on donor retention, because this is what we can potentially achieve from our donor base. So those are the metrics that I’m doing really well in retention, average gift, lifetime value. But I also have areas for improvement. My number of donors is down a little bit. So I may want to focus on some acquisition strategies to really increase that number. And my Growth in Giving is down my total dollars were debt that total dollars raised are down as well. Which means potentially, I’m not asking donors to give the right amount, I might want to look at segmenting some of my appeals to ask donors to give amounts that are within their capacity to give. So quick raise of hand here, how many people looked at their dashboard, and now they know what their retention is, or they’ve identified a metric for improvement. So I’m gonna have you guys raise your hand if you can let me know if you found an area for improvement.
Alrighty, now, what’s great about these tiles is it’s a quick answer. So when our board asks, What is my retention, we can say it’s 79%. But sometimes you want to dig into the details, what are the donors that are making up my retain segment? What is my average gift, what are the gifts that are making up that group? So if we want the details, because these tiles are just a number, there’s no detail behind it. If we want the details about the donors and the gifts that are making up this segment, we’re going to take a look at a report called the Comprehensive donor revenue analysis report. That is a mouthful to say. But we’re gonna find it surprise surprise under Reports, and Report Center. So under Reports and reports center, we’re going to look up this report comprehensive donor revenue analysis. And if we want this report to match what’s on our dashboard, we’re going to run this with an ending date of today’s date. Running this report with an ending date up to date is what matches the numbers to the dashboard. If you’re someone that’s interested in running this and getting your KPIs for your fiscal year, or for a calendar year, you can set that fiscal or calendar year as your ending date, and you’ll be able to get those key performance indicators and details based off of those those dates as well. So very flexible in how you can run this report. Now, for consistency sake, I am going to run it on today’s date. So it matches my dashboard numbers
when I come down to screen to run this report so much good data here for us to look at.
But essentially what this report is doing is it’s taking your key performance indicators and breaking them out over three years. So I’m going to glean that insight How successful have we been over the last three years in terms of increasing the number of donors in terms of increasing our donor retention. And we can use this data as a way to potentially set goals for these different key performance indicators and be able to set a target for where we want to go. So to kind of break down very simply what this report is looking at active donors is going to be your total donors. Retained donors is going to show you your number of donors who gave a gift last year and this year. New donors are those folks who gave their very first gift this year. So these are the three people we want to get a second gift or have them sign up for monthly giving, so we can retain them. reactivated donors or lapsed donors that we’ve now brought back as donors and attrition are going to be our lapsed donors. This number of donors last from last year number, this is the group that Sandra said if we drill into the details, we probably want to print this list out and potentially reach out to these folks and see if we can motivate them to give again.
So the dashboard is going to be your way to get those valuable insights and get very, very quick answers as to where we are four different key performance indicators. And the comprehensive donor Analysis Report is going to be the details. And it enables you to look at those KPIs either on a rolling 12 months, or the comprehensive donor revenue report can be run based off of your fiscal year or calendar year. Whoa, I feel like sometimes talking about all of this data and all this report is a lot. So Sandra, once we have some of this data and some of this insight, how can we actually now take that data and put it into action?
Absolutely. So we talk a lot about you know, it’s so important strategic planning that you start working from where you are today. So many organizations are at different places and different levels of maturity in the maturity model. So we want to make sure that we’re creating action from our starting point. And that’s what we’re going to do as we look forward into this, the rest of the presentation. And this part where we’re looking at taking the data insights from the information you’ve gathered, maybe the information you’ve gathered, if you’ve been reading, you know, have some research for a couple of years, then that’s wonderful. If you’re starting new, then you’re you’re starting fresh, and you’re really going to start making sure you gather your data, because through the strategic planning process, we always like to say every year you’re evaluating your goals, you’re monitoring them, you’re seeing how you’ve done, you’re seeing how you’ve achieved, so you really want to take those goals and really align them with what the mission of your organization is, to get those objectives for the long term. We, you know, we emphasize again, the importance of that data driven decision making, because, you know, if you take an organization that has been really super successful, they’ve had a lot of things they’ve, they’ve been able to raise a lot of, you know, in, they have a really robust annual fun, but maybe they don’t have a lot of major donors, you know, so what we want to do is because that’s kind of like your annual fun group is like your low hanging fruit, you know, where you really want to take that analysis and look at them and sort of create them into those major donors. That may be where you are. So it’s really kind of saying where are you today? And how do we move forward? And you know, moving forward realistically, and I you know, I’ve been a board member for a long time so I have that experience. And I always chuckle a little when I you know here are bored saying, you know, well can’t um, you know, what do you call it? Taylor Swift give us some of her, some of her, you know, earnings towards our, our next fundraiser can she sing? And then you ask the board member? Do you have a personal relationship with Taylor? Oh, no, I just think it’s a good idea. So we really want to sort of create the ideas that are realistic. Board members love to say, Hey, can’t you just raise all this great money? It’s like, okay, well, how are we going to do that? So, you know, really setting realistic expectations are so important when we’re looking at taking that data, taking that information today and making it really actionable but actionable, that’s real, like we really want it to be successful.
It’s so funny, you mentioned that Taylor Swift comment, because we had a speaker previously that talked about board members that said, if Oprah could be a donor that would solve all of our problems. And our speaker made the point that if you’re not an organization that aligned with Oprah’s interests, even if you have her phone number, she’s probably not going to support you in the capacity that you think it’s going to be. So I think it’s also important to look at that affinity, does that person have that personal connection to your cause, to your mission, to the work that you’re doing? Absolutely. Right, so what are some insights? Do you think that we could track to have that enduring impact with our donors?
So when we’re looking at donors, we really want to look at what their interest is their engagement level, you know, a lot of times, you know, when we’re looking at what donors want to do, they really want to engage with your organization, they may want to volunteer, if that’s a possibility for whatever your causes. If volunteering isn’t a possibility, there’s ways to engage, where you can engage in like maybe newsletters, learning about what your organization is doing, or in other ways that they can sort of feel like they’re part of it, you know, the I talk a lot about that call to action of bringing in, you know, donors into your organization. So asking them to do something, what do you want them to do? How do you personalize the relationship with them? So a lot of what we talk about is really the having as much information, knowing how, and you talked a little bit about millennials, and you talked about personally, you love to be a monthly donor, I am not a millennial, I, you know, love to be the donor who gives that one that check, you know, or, you know, or an online donation, that those are the ways that I want to engage with an organization. So I think we have to really understand the donors know how they want to engage, know what their interests are, you talked about affinity. And it’s absolutely true. If the individual donor doesn’t have an affinity to what your causes. So if it’s someone who spent a lot of time, you know, doing work with women and children, then if your organization focuses on women and children’s issues, they may be interested. Or if your organization may have other components, but they have an educational component, then that might be the way to really engage that donor. So we really have to understand the donors. And it may not be a clear like, oh, they do women and children issues. Let’s do it. Because your organization may do other things that might be appealing. But having that information so that you know how and you sort of talked about like how you can survey in DonorPerfect to kind of really hear from them how they want to engage. And then there’s a lot of tools that you talked about that we could use and like talk, can you talk about some of those tools that we can use to gather some more information specifically about our donors?
Oh, absolutely. I would love to talk about nothing more than that. So first thing I want to touch on are some of those tools that come right in a DonorPerfect system. These are ones that every single person in this webinar has access to. And I think one of those most valuable tools that you can take advantage of are those survey tools, being able to say when someone makes their very first gift to your organization, sending them a survey to see where did they came come from? What motivated them to support your particular organization, or doing a very similar survey with your existing donor base to maybe glean some insights into who are my demographics who are my donors, why are they supporting my organization? So for everyone here, under apps and online forms, you have the ability to actually go in and build a survey form under signups and surveys, to actually collect that information from your donors. Try to see if I can find the tu tu tu tu tu tu tu tu tu Am I overlooking this? It’s the organization rating, or the mailing and contact list. These can both kind of be tweaked to fit that kind of survey format. So you can build those kinds of forms out, and what it would actually look like to the donor. If I look at my first time donor survey that my colleague Sarah built many sessions ago, we can ask those questions. Why did you choose us? We can ask our donors, how do you want to hear from us? Do you want text messages? Do you want a newsletter? Do you want us to share posts and videos on social media? You can even ask them is there a project that you would be interested in getting involved with into the future so we can find ways that are not just monetary support that they can come in and get involved with. And all of this data can get pushed into your DonorPerfect system and be used for getting those insights. On the other data point that every person has in the database that can help glean some of that engagement detail is the giving and engagement profile. So I’m going to pick on my colleague, Sean McClellan and look at his profile here. Every single person in this webinar on the main or bio screen is going to have a section called the giving engagement profile, which takes all of the data from the gifts screen, and gives you insight into your donors giving history both fiscal and calendar. But also can help you identify when the donor last donated to your organization. So you can identify lapsed donors, when they gave their first gift. So you can identify your new donors or your long term supporters. We can look at lifetime giving a number of gifts and number of years donated as a way to figure out who are dedicated supporter bases. And all the way back at the beginning of the webinar, I talked about the gift range report, average gift amount and Max gift them out. These are the fields that I actually pulled in that report to determine my monthly giving amounts and my major donor amount. So surveys and the giving and engagement profile come with everybody’s database. Now if you want something that’s a little bit more robust and can get put into your system for you, so some of that predictive data that we can use for our analytics, if you’re in the US, so if you’re a US client, you can look at purchasing and adding our DonorPerfect Insights tool. This is where I’ve been talking about predictive generation I’ve been talking about predictive channel method, predictive education level, and tracking a donors affinity DonorPerfect insight is data that can get put into your profile for your donor base. So you can get that valuable insight about your donor demographics. And let that data inform how you approach your fundraising strategy. And let that data inform what your ideal major donor is versus your ideal plan giving prospect versus your ideal monthly giving prospect. Now insights, this is an added feature. So if you’re not seeing this on your screen, that just means that it’s not part of your DonorPerfect system. For those of you that are in Canada, if you’re looking for a wealth prospecting tool, you can look at iWave iWave, as a wealth prospecting tool that will give you a score for that donors affinity to your organization, their capacity to give. This is data that can get pushed into your CRM through an API and be updated so you have the most current information for wealth screening. For those you that are in the US that are looking for a wealth screening option, donor search is our integrated partner donor search which the fields are typically on the bio and I will preface this again by saying insights donor search iWave. These are added on features these do cost extra, which is why I wanted to highlight the surveys as a free way to try to obtain some of this information. donor search is a wealth screening tool where we’re going to be able to get insight into this donors financial capacity to give, as well as whether they potentially have an affinity to give to your type of organization. So these are all data points that get pushed from other databases into your DonorPerfect system. And the power of having this in your DonorPerfect database, is being able to take it out and use it in an actionable way. So have I want to take all of this data and put it into a report because I want to start building personas to define what my ideal major donor is. So when I’m talking with my board members, I say no, not Taylor Swift, it’s actually going to be this person here. One of the ways that you can do that is through what’s called our EZ Report Builder. This is a tool that lets you take data from any field or any section of DonorPerfect, and put it into a usable report. Now, I’m not going to talk about how to build an easy report today, because I’m looking at the time and we are getting close to the end of our time together. But I will show you what the final easy report I built with this data looks like so you get an idea of what is possible. So I built a report with the EZ Report Builder. And I use the DonorPerfect insights data to only look at donors who have a vested interest in animal welfare, because that’s what my fake nonprofit is all about.
And right off the bat, I first took away all the detail because I wanted insight into my generational giving, how are my donor base broken out by generation? And Sandra, you might agree with me on this, I have a little bit of an issue because a lot of my donors are older. So eventually these folks while they’re probably good plant giving prospects, and that’s an area I should probably investigate, they’re also going to pass away eventually. So I’m really going to need to potentially focus on how do I engage these Gen X millennials, and potentially even Gen Z as they’re now coming up into this.
And the transfer of wealth is going to be huge to generations. So it’s a tremendous opportunity for you to engage with them having this data knowing that you’ve got to do some work,
huh? Oh, exactly. And if I take away the summary option and rerun this report to get the detail. What we’re going to see is all of that wealth, prosperous prospecting data, that donor search rating that tells us how likely this donor is to give to our cause that donors affinity rating. So I can focus on the really high affinity donors for my really personal outreach. And my donors preferred channel of communication is going to inform then how I approach engaging these different donor segments and building out who my ideal donor is for these different groups.
So if you’re a little concerned that that was a lot of potential information to take in on the handout, from the donor, perfect team, I do have all of these wealth processing tools listed out so you can get more information on them.
Alright, so now that we have all of this data set up, how do we plan for our strategic plan?
So I think we want to really look at what are the yearly outcomes going to be so we look at, we’re going to remember, we want our strategic plan to be three to five years. So we want to know what has been your past yearly fundraising outcomes so that we can determine what are the yearly outcomes? And what are the pieces that we’re going to look for as we move forward in the strategic planning process?
Yes, and so many of those DonorPerfect reports that I’ve shown you can already be a great way to look at that past performance and be able to see that outcome.
And then we want to always break make sure that we do I always talk to my all of my clients saying Do you have a system to collect these donations because it’s just doesn’t make sense if you’re kind of, you know, kind of have them on a notepad or you have them in a Excel sheet or something like that. I think it’s consolidating and all that like what you’re talking about. out with donor search, the that ability to do that is so helpful is we do this work when we implement fundraising from a strategic plan, that donor search piece and all the information and the insights that you’re gathering is so useful. It’s not just those metrics, it’s that insight that really gives to those conversations to get those donations. And, you know, one of the things that we talk about a lot is about how we communicate with the donors. And I think there’s a lot of really great ways to communicate with the donors through the touch points that we’ve talked about through the ability to kind of reach out to them, whether it’s in person, whether it’s through newsletters, or other ways to just really communicate and get information that you’re really telling them about your organization. So that you’re engaging, you’re thanking them, I think, I spend a lot of time talking to my clients to say, you can’t just reach your donors, as one of your points to be the next solicitation. You know, if they if they’ve given you a gift, you have to spend the time to thank your donors. It’s so crucial and important.
Oh, absolutely, I think thanking donors, it’s that first step in key donor stewardship, and every single person should be doing it. And DonorPerfect makes it super easy to either thank donors in a batch. So we can send multiple thank yous out to multiple donor groups. Or we actually have a relatively new feature thank donor from the gifts screen, which means that when you’re inputting manual donations, like cash and cheque, you can actually receipt that donor from the gift screen and even customize that receipt message before you send it out. So you can add that little extra personal touch. Because love letters always appreciate that personal touch. Absolutely. All right. So communication is so important. It’s one of the areas that I think as a member of the training team, we’re really passionate about emphasizing to our donors who have to have a strong communication strategy. And we love getting to show off all the ways that DonorPerfect can help facilitate and streamline those engagement opportunities. So making sure that you guys are taking advantage of the Contacts tab. The contacts tab is where we should be tracking all of our past engagements with our donors. And those past engagements should be informing how you approach engaging that donor in the future. So the Contacts tab can track those past contacts, as well as be able to allow you to plan future contacts into the future. And the nice thing about that Contacts tab is that you can manually create those contacts as you kind of identify opportunities to engage with that donor. But the Contacts tab can also be updated by other tools within DonorPerfect as well. The Constant Contact integration, which allows you to do those mass marketing emails, while still using the donor data to make sure it’s targeted and specific to a group of constituents. That constant contact data gets pushed into the contact screen. So you can see how many emails each donor has opened. What messages do they respond to best is email, even a good channel to reach out to this donor. For those more one to one interactions, the scheduled donor outreach, which you can find on your homepage, and I have a screenshot here of it allows you to actually see your list of donor touch points for that week, you can go in and mark tasks as done, include notes and even schedule a follow up task. So you can make sure that you are consistently going to stay engaged with those donors, so you meet those seven touches. And if we’re looking for a way to potentially automate the creation of those contacts, and also keep stakeholders and staff members informed, you can look at adding the Smart Actions package to your DonorPerfect package. With Smart Actions, we can set a business rule that says if we get a major gift of $1,000 and up DonorPerfect, create a contact transaction and assign that to Amanda. And then also send an email out to Amanda and a board member so that they can make sure they call that donor and follow up with them and properly thank them. So it is a great way to automate and make sure that those donor communications are getting put into DonorPerfect. And the team as a whole is aware when we get those major gifts, those new donors or their new monthly donors, so we can celebrate and welcome them to our organization. So I won’t go too much into these in terms of demoing today just because of time constraints. But I will share About the Contact Management webinar that we have that dives into each one of these topics and actually will show you how to use each one of them.
So with all of this in mind, Sandra, how can we develop a sustainable fundraising model then with all of this great data that we’ve collected?
So what’s really important is that you diversify it. And that’s one of the things that I spend most of my time talking is really telling people that you can’t just have one fun because things happen. And you need to, you know, put, you know, the government changes. So you if you’re dependent on grants, those might change. And then individual giving also is, you know, you don’t know what’s going to happen. COVID was an issue, some people benefited from COVID, and other people didn’t. So I think the key piece is to really diversify that. And to cultivate those relationships, as we talked about how important it is cultivate those relationships, to really maximize the impact, we know that it’s over, you know, and you can all take some guesses about how much money in the chat if you want to take some guesses how much money is donated every year from individuals, it’s significant, I can just tell you all I’ll let you take a moment, if you want to check, put something in the chat. But just so you know that the amount of money that is coming in is significant. And that what’s happening is that people are engaging through events, 85% through events, and through volunteering, that’s how they were first introduced to an organization. So we don’t want to lose those opportunities to really have those events and, and kind of find ways to engage your volunteers. So like really the way that Amanda was talking about how to communicate some of the things that you’re doing, asking, using that survey to ask some questions to gather some good information really helps us. So for those who are, you know, like kind of putting it in there is approximately about 300 billion given GM individuals every year. And that’s a significant amount of money that is, you know, getting going out into the world. So we want to capture that. So don’t you have to ask, remember, that’s one of the key points as we look into kind of do this fundraising piece.
Oh, right. I think all that is really helpful, insightful information. And now we’re getting to one of my favorite parts of the presentation is you actually went ahead and pulled some of the goals that you’ve actually worked with on some of your clients. And we’re going to show how some of those goals that you had set with your clients, we can set them in DonorPerfect and monitor that progress.
So we’re looking at, you know, as again, diversifying all these different areas, making sure like where you are on all of them, it’s important in in creating this whole big fundraising picture. So as we look at moving forward onto the next slide, we were able to look at the different goals that we’re setting, specifically. And this will look at what we’re going to do. So we have this draft goal here. And this is how we work with our clients, we you put in your goals, you know, we have those high level goals, you put in your goals. And if we’re using this as an action plan for fundraising, you put in your goals, and then we’re putting in a year by year. And then you’ll see the actual goals on the next slide, how we’ve created it. And this is actually when we look at these are the different areas that they’re looking at developing. And one of the ways that we were talking about it was looking at the individual gifts, and they’re wanting to increase. So Amanda, can you talk to us how they can look at using the DonorPerfect to maximize their effectiveness and using the metrics?
Yes, so DonorPerfect can certainly help with tracking the success of any one of these metrics, but we’re going to pick one, the individual giving, and we want to make sure that we’re tracking that our individual gifts are increasing by 20% Compared to the previous year. So one of the reports that we can look at when we want to look at the increase or shifts in our individual giving is another financial report. Specifically the AFP key donor metrics Association for Fundraising professional metrics, under Reports and Report Center.
We’re going to search for the report. AFP key donor metrics. And this report is very similar to comprehensive donor revenue. We’re at runs on an ending date. So this ending date can be today’s date, this ending date could be calendar year, this ending date could be your fiscal year. But whatever ending date you choose when you come down to output options and click screen, which is what runs the report. What I love about this report is it breaks out that individual giving from the organization giving, so we can look into both of those different components. And then total combines the two into one total amount. Now we’re focusing on those individual givers. So for wanting to track either the total number of gifts transactions, or the total revenue, for both of those metrics, we’re going to be able to compare the number for the current period to the previous period. And we’re also going to be able to see that percent difference between the two. So we can see have we actually met our goal of increasing our number of gifts by 20%, which I’m happy to see that yes, we were successful in that. And then within here, we can also focus in on was this because we’ve also upgraded donors who have given more, we can also look at some metrics around donors who remain the same, and donors who downgraded which can potentially give us more direction into the future. But this is just one type of goal that reports can look at, which is that trends increase and decrease in giving for our different donor segments. Thank you also have a couple of financial goals that you’ve put in here as well for us.
You know, we have gold around events, which is really one of the things that we really want to focus on. But as you could see, there’s also some different areas of really like maintaining an annual fund of, of donors, there’s a couple of other areas that we really look at this organization is pretty new to fundraising. So they’re really very highly funded by grants. So they haven’t really looked at corporate sponsors, they haven’t had any really an any individual donors. And they’re kind of sort of starting the event process. So I think it’s really they’re in the earlier stages. And it’s interesting to see how they’re going to like develop and every year kind of grow from where they’re starting. And I think the events will help them just because we had seen a year the year before with them, and they had had a small event. And that small event did build up some dumb their donors. So they think that’s a really good takeaway from this the to understand, once you have those donors how you continually engage with them.
Right, because events are a great way to engage with our constituency, it doesn’t just have to all be about the dollars raised. But if we do want to have one of those metrics be the dollar raise, like what we have here setting a goal for $15,000. The DonorPerfect fundraising goal tracker, I talked about this all the way at the beginning. And yes, I’m finally mentioning it and showing it off. Now. The fundraising goal tracker is a way for you to be able to set a goal for different fundraising efforts, and get those real time updates into how successful you are in terms of reaching your fundraising goal. And the best part is this is on the homepage. So every user who has access to DonorPerfect is going to see this when they log in. So all the staff members are aligned and informed. It’s also a great way if your board or your executive director wants an update on how close you are to meeting your goal. You can look at it get that number and be able to share that information without having to run some type of a report. And Sandra mentioned, events are a great way to potentially acquire new donors to your organization as well. The gold Tracker will actually call out the number of people who made their very first gift at this event, which can be a great way for you to glean some insight into our events a great way for us to acquire new donors. So how do we set a goal tracker, then how are we able to track this progress? Well over on that homepage of DonorPerfect. You can have three goal trackers only three. But you have the ability to remove and delete goals as they become irrelevant or as they’re not resets to this time, which is what I’m going to do with this event goal.
To set a new goal tracker, you’re just going to click on Create goal You’ll give the goal and name. Put in your financial goal. Set a start and end date for when you’re collecting donations. And then you’re going to pick from one of the financial fields from which you’re going to cool your data from. Because this is an event goal, I’m going to look at my solicitation field. And say, I would like to set a goal for my bids for barks, auction. And once I have that set, I can create my gold tracker. And I can see up, I haven’t raised any dollars yet. So I need to get to work to try to start bringing in some of those sponsorships and some of those ticket sales. And we’ve talked so much about adaptability and being willing to adjust our goals as needed, for example, all the way back when the pandemic started, and I was working with clients on converting their in person events to virtual events, their financial goals had to change their goals for those events had to change. So the goal tracker is super flexible in terms of the financial side, being able to go in and adjust that goal to be lower or higher, depending on how successful you are at that moment in time. Does he take away anything from today? It’s be adaptable, be flexible?
Absolutely.
So I’m going to turn it back over to you, Sandra to talk a little bit about mapping out that implementation process once we have these goals.
Absolutely. It’s, you know, we can create a beautiful strategic planning document, which will look wonderful, but it’s only as good as how well it’s implemented. So one of the things we do is really look at your systems do you have systems in place to implement that we can integrate into, but if you don’t, we talk to you about really kind of what could it look like. So we recommend as simple as a Gantt chart, or there are other tools that you can use, but we use a Gantt chart, so we know that you are clear as to everything that’s on those action plans are put into the Gantt chart, and we’re really knowing who’s going to do this, and by when. And then once we have really taken a look at what that’s gonna look like, then we’re able to define the goals and we spend our time after for the whole time that you if you have a three year or five year plan, we do check ins to really make sure that the goals that you’re looking to implement are being implemented. And again, remember, we pivot If needed, adjust as needed, we have to be flexible, we need to adapt, do we really want you to feel like even if we’re pivoting that it does not mean that is failure, there are circumstances we have a tremendously generous donor that comes in that you weren’t anticipating your fundraising goals are going to shoot up and you can change those. But if you have a donor that’s been giving to you for years, and then they decided to move away, or when something’s happened, then you’re gonna have to change those donations. So we want to really foster a culture of learning from what experiences you’re having. And I think that’s really important that you monitor, you evaluate your progress along the way, and really look at those key performance indicators regularly to make sure that you’re communicating your success.
Yes, I think that monitoring the success and fostering that culture of being flexible is one of those things that I’m really taking away from working with you and something that I’m really going to emphasize to my clients when I’m working with them on these different pieces. So to kind of wrap up our session, before we move into the q&a. Some of the things that we want to take have you guys take away is that you want to use that data in DonorPerfect. You want to use those fundraising goal trackers, those key performance indicators, those financial reports that data to stay informed and make those informed decisions on how you’re going to approach your fundraising. You want to make sure that as you’re getting those updates, that you’re engaging and updating your board and other stakeholders so they know how close you are to meeting those goals, the achievements that you’ve made, and also let them know about any challenges that you may have had. Because in those challenges, we could potentially identify technology or other risks. horses that we can take advantage of. So these pieces are less challenging in the future. We want to make sure that we celebrate milestones to boost our team’s motivation. So when we are at 95% of our goal, we’re going to celebrate have a party and then push ourselves over that last 5%. And let’s embrace those setbacks and use those as learning opportunities. Strategic planning can be kind of difficult, there’s a lot of pieces that go into that there’s a lot of opportunities to learn. And we can learn a lot from our past failures. And use that to refine our strategy and how we approach things moving forwards.
So we have about 30 minutes left in our time together for today. So what I would love to do is go back into the question box and potentially find some great questions that we can address before we kind of wrap this up. So if you have a question you want to ask, go ahead and pop it into the chat. But what I’m going to do is go back and see if I can find some of these questions for us.
And while Amanda’s looking, I want to make sure that, you know, bear in mind that you can go back and take if you have a strategic plan, you know, take a fresh look at it with the lens that we have, and maybe pull in some of the things that we’re talking about to your existing strategic plan.
Yeah, I remember and you said this, within your initial presentation at the conference, so many people get this strategic plan, and then it sits on the shelf, they don’t do anything with it. So I hope if there are people here who have that kind of situation, today’s session is going to motivate them to kind of dust it off, give it a look over and maybe try to implement some of those pieces now. Yeah.
And the important part really, is to really make sure that you you know, I think one of the things that I get asked a lot is, you know, we don’t have people that are engaged or committed to our strategic plan. What did we do? That’s a tough question. And I just want to say that people do, you know, you can try your best. But there comes a point that, you know, if you’re just have someone who’s kind of a roadblock, they’re going to, you’re not going to get through that. So what you can do is do your best job of really communicating, you know, the plan as much as you can do tell everyone why it’s so important. Ask everyone, you know, create liaisons and allies in the strategic planning process to really emphasize how strong this plan can be. And hopefully that’ll help.
I love that. Alrighty, so I did find at least one question in our chat that it’s very interesting. And I’m very excited to hear your thoughts on this. So Debbie asked the question, how do people or should people include in honor and memoriam donations in their donor retention calculations? Because these are very specific gifts that can typically be one time donations? So should we be including those in our retention? Should we not be including those in our retention? What’s your thoughts on that?
So what I recommend with that is if it’s going to skew your data from the few years, and it’s like going to be something that’s just going to be an outlier, then I think you would, I wouldn’t include it in the data, because I think it would be misleading. And I think then sets up for failure if you can’t reach those goals in the future. So that’s my thought. But sometimes what I do like with an organization, like for example, it has a big donation from a corporation that they know they’re not going to get. We just kind of mentioned it, but we don’t include it in the numbers so that people understand that that exists. And if you have those donations, you can talk about them, but say they’ve been excluded from the numbers. That’s kind of my recommendation. What do you think, Amanda?
I agree. I think if you know that for many times, and you get those types of donations, they do not convert into second time donors. And certainly you would want to look into your data to see do those in memoriam donors? Can we convert them into actual givers? But if that answer is no, then I would certainly look at when you’re running reports, like comprehensive donor AFP, giving history with complete donor profile, potentially looking at using compound filters as a way to keep those in memoriam donations off or keeping grant donations potentially off your reports because they can skew your numbers to be very large, if it’s a one time grant. So I think being aware that those numbers are existing, and that you can exclude them is going to be really important.
So there was The question around the retention rate, and I know statistically speaking, most people are seeking the reports will say it’s 62% of retention rate. Amanda, do you have different numbers? I know that’s kind of like the over the national number.
Um, I heard 43 as the retention rate. So it’s interesting that maybe we’ve heard different numbers there. Because I know I’ve heard 43. And unfortunately, from what I’m reading, it’s going down every year. Unfortunately,
I know, I have heard that, too, that it’s going down. And I think but I think in terms of what would be ideal, I think, again, it would be when to be looking at people’s history a little bit and seeing where you are, and how the growth would be.
For sure, and I think really looking at your data is what’s going to be important. If you’re a school, for example, and you have a lot of alumni like poor parents who donate during that four year and then their child graduates, your retention is probably never going to be as good as, say, an animal welfare organization that’s going to have people that are going to continuously give. Same thing, I work a lot with hospices in Canada, and that’s one of the biggest things that they struggle with is they know that their retention numbers are maybe never going to be great because of the nature of their work. So they focus their areas on other things, instead of that retention, it may not be as important to them because of that nature of their work. All righty. I’m gonna keep going. Off. Sorry.
No, go ahead. But I just think because, you know, I think it’s important just to kind of continue to do the right thing of thanking your donors, and hopefully, you know, continue trying to grow that retention rate, because it’s so much effort to get them you get that donor in the door.
Oh, exactly. Can we provide the graph one more time of development plan chart? Of course we can. So I’m gonna kick that back a couple slides there. So we can maybe take a look at that.
Okay, so while I’m doing that our organization’s fundraising plan is changing, what is the best first step to start the new plan? PS, I’m part time on a 1.5 person team. Oh, man, that’s like the use case or the standard DonorPerfect user. It’s like I’ve a team of one or two.
Very common for me to hear that. We work with a lot of organizations like that one of the things you could do is consider outsourcing some of it to a consultant to help along and do some of the busy work that you need to do. If that’s possible in your funding. If not, I think when you’re starting a fundraising plan, I think DonorPerfect. First of all, I would say if you don’t have a CRM, I would say get your DonorPerfect in place. So that you can you can really track all of the different pieces of your fundraising components and all of the resources that we talked about today, and looking at developing this 12 month plan. So I think what you would want to do is look at it month by month, what are the goals? And what are the things that you’re going to do? So it’s really an extensive process, because fundraising doesn’t end it’s it’s always ongoing? And like, what are the pieces? There’s so many complexities like, what are the pieces of how do you want to engage with individual donors? What are you going to do for grant writing? What are you going to do for fun for foundations and corporations? How are all those pieces going to come together. But even though it is a very complex comp, it is very complex work, I think just break it down to a month by month, and start tackling what you want to do. And I’m sure Amanda would say, you know, the end of the year is where most of the donations are being, you know, are being being given. So you want to make sure that now is a really good time to put in everything into place. So that when you’re getting into the giving Tuesday’s and the end of your giving, that you’re really all set up for that.
Yes, end of year, that tends to be when we see the most numbers, but I would also look at potentially giving days that are specific to your area. I know I taught I was part of one presentation where they were talking about I believe was Colorado. They have some type of a giving day that’s specific to like that state. And so the organization made the decision to not do Giving Tuesday because they found that they had much better results focusing on that state specific giving opportunity.
And I think we can look at and top of that to us, some organizations are looking at, you know, certain months, for example, if violence, you know, October is the month for domestic violence awareness, so they would hold all of their giving, they’re giving Tuesday on that, that time, that time of month. So I think that’s one of the things to look at is where’s your organization? Where’s a good time to kind of create, you know, an event for your organization? Where is a good time to create a place for your special time in the year?
Exactly. I want to know when the like Pet Adoption time holiday is. Those tend to be where I love to support. Alrighty, I’m looking through and I don’t see any other questions from the group chat here. But I’ll give it another minute. If you guys have a question, totally pop it into the chat for us.
Oh, can I show the slide that focuses on the strategic areas? Oh, the dimensions I’m assuming. Okay, perfect. So let me take a look and see if I can pull up that dimension slide real quick here for them.
And when you’re looking at the dimensions, remember, these are our recommendations of key dimensions. But remember, as I was talking about, you also can create the ones that are specific to you, that are important for your organization, important for what the needs are that you’re looking to address.
So I actually have a question about this, because we do have a diversity and inclusion team at DonorPerfect. And I think we really want to potentially look at ways where we might be able to track that type of diversity, what are some things that you tend to look at when you work with or clients that focus on that particular dimension.
So again, this is again, the point we’re talking about is like meeting people where they are, and people on the DI, D AI journey are in different places. So some organizations are really just beginning their journey. So we really kind of start with maybe it’s simply education, you know, what is because I’ve had, like, where I’ve sat where boards, and we’re talking about these things, and they’re like, what’s di so you know, that’s, that’s where they are, then I have other organizations that are like, we’re just taking holidays, and we’re really allowing people to select their holidays. So they’re at a whole different level, I think it depends where your organization is and where they want to go. Accessibility has become a big piece of, you know, AI, belonging is another big part of di so I think it’s just really kind of saying, meet you where you are, and see where you want to go in this space. And I think every little bit that you’re doing is really is wonderful, because it’s moving us in the right direction. And I think a lot of organizations get frustrated by the DI piece because they’re like, We want to go, you know, Ferrari kind of speed. And it’s like it’s not for our speed, it’s like really slow it down and do what’s right for your organization at a slower slow pace.
I know one of my clients that I worked with said that was one of their strategic plans was to implement more diversity and inclusion, one of the things they actually decided to do was have a field and DonorPerfect to track people’s pronouns. So they were able to actually make sure when they’re addressing people, they’re doing it in that respectful way.
And that’s a great way to do it.
All right, so I’m gonna seal one more question here that I saw pop in which was what type of reports can we recommend to implement for tracking strategic times of yours quarterly, monthly and yearly. So I did show the donations by month in year report at the beginning of the presentation. One that I will give you in addition to that, my personal favorite report in the Report Center, and I mentioned it, but I didn’t show it the giving history with complete donor profile. This report is so flexible. Oh sorry, not giving history with complete donor profile. It is the gift comparison by time period report. Gift comparison by time period. I apologize. There’s so many reports in here. Sometimes they get mixed up in our heads. Yes, comparison by time period is super flexible because you can set it date range for as wide as you would like. And you can split that date range out into week, month, quarter or year perspectives. And you can pick any field on the main bio or gift pledge table to segment your data by. So if I’m in the middle of a large scale campaign, because we want to renovate our animal shelters, and I want to be able to track the progress and see how successful we are, I can sort my data by my campaign field and get this answer where I can see my campaign data broken out year by year by year, and then see that total at the end. And I can do a similar thing and break it out by month or by quarter, I can change the data that I’m segmenting by and look at my demographics like my age is in my locations. So with that said, I have taken an extra minute pass our ending time here. But Sandra, I want to thank you so much for taking the time out to work with us. I know, I’ve learned a lot about the strategic planning process. And I’m a little less intimidated. Now. When I see that pop up as a topic. If people have questions, if they want to connect with you, how can they do that?
Absolutely. Please reach out. I’m happy to answer any questions. You know, I’m happy to give you any resources that I have. It’s my pleasure to really do this work, I enjoy it. And I really love to see. And thank you all for all the great work that you do, because I think it’s so important that you’re around doing this great work. And I love to see how I can be a part of it and support you all. Amanda, and I’m glad that I think maybe I’ve changed your mind and you’re loving strategic planning.
Love is a strong word. But I think I’m definitely less intimidated. And I’m going to be a little bit more excited to kind of use some of these tools that we talked about to help my clients with that strategic planning process. And for those of you that are maybe having some more questions about the DonorPerfect side of things, you can certainly reach out to the training team to look at potential training options. You can access our Learning Center to access webinars and virtual classes. And you can always access the knowledge base to read articles and watch how to videos. So it’s been an absolute pleasure talking with all of you today. Hopefully you have many great takeaways, and we look forward to seeing some of you guys in some future learning opportunities by now.
Bye. Thank you
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