Email Fundraising With Constant Contact and DonorPerfect

Hello, and welcome to our Giving Tuesday Webinar Series. This is email fundraising with Constant Contact, and DonorPerfect

My name is Donna Mitchell, and I’m a training specialist here at donut perfect. I Read More

Hello, and welcome to our Giving Tuesday Webinar Series. This is email fundraising with Constant Contact, and DonorPerfect

My name is Donna Mitchell, and I’m a training specialist here at donut perfect. I really enjoy working with your clients and I love conducting webinars. Now this webinar will give you some insight and tips to launch and execute your Giving Tuesday appeal. We hope that the information shared here will launch your fundraising into the stratosphere and set you up for a fabulous wrap up of 2019. Let’s begin with an overview of Giving Tuesday and some of the statistics surrounding the day itself, as well as our what our DonorPerfect community of clients have experienced.

So Giving Tuesday is a philanthropic event that falls on the Tuesday following American Thanksgiving this year, Giving Tuesday is going to be on December 3. Now, Giving Tuesday is a worldwide social media phenomenon that kicks off the giving season the same way that Black Friday and Cyber Monday kick off the shopping season. So just to remind you that Giving Tuesday for 2019 is December 3. So let’s take a look at some statistics worldwide forgiving Tuesday for 2018. So last year, GivingTuesday 2018, raised $380 million $380 million, there were 4 million donations by generous donors. And 150 countries worldwide participated and that money was received from those countries around the world. Now let’s take a look at what happened to our clients. So the DonorPerfect community of clients received over $29.2 million on Giving Tuesday, in 2018. The average online gift was $185. Donors covered 72% of online donation processing fees with the donors cover costs feature. So they were actually helping you pay your bills, which is kind of nice. And 35% of online gifts were made on mobile devices. So we’ll see what we can do with constant contact to make sure that people are able to get to our emails on their mobile devices. So what are some reasons for using Constant Contact, we’d like to share that with you just so you know. And especially if you’re new to Constant Contact, or you’re thinking about getting it or something like that, you’ll at least know some of the reasons why we feel Constant Contact is a great tool. So first of all, it’s the industry leading email marketing database, and we have a lot of that have come up that are that are around and they’re they’re very good. But Constant Contact is the industry leader. And we’ve partnered with them because we do believe that they are the best. Now it’s going to constant contact will manage your opens your unsubscribes your opt outs and bounce backs for you. That is right there. For me, that’s a winner because it’s going to report back to let you know, when people open their emails, if they unsubscribed and opt out, if you get bounces, it’ll tell you why it bounced. And those opt outs, it will actually update the DonorPerfect record to to mark that person is do not mail because they were a constant contact opt out. So imagine not having to do that manually. professionally designed email templates are available. If you’ve looked at done, if you’ve looked at constant contact and their templates, they are phenomenal. And again, you can start from scratch and do your own or if you’re you know feeling like hey, I need to get some other stuff done. Go ahead and use those templates. They are phenomenal. I’m not really great in constant contact, but I created a campaign using one of their templates and it was superb. I couldn’t have asked for anything better. You’re going to be able to target recipients using any criteria that you want, including giving history. So that integration between DonorPerfect and Constant Contact is more than just communication. It is a way of using your data and DonorPerfect to create targeted email lists and constant contact. So if I did want to find people who gave last year but not this year, or gave some year but not this year, or gave one gift this year. Sure, I can use anything I want any kind of filter to pull that record those records in. So the integration, I mentioned the integration, let’s talk a little bit more about that. So the integration between Donna perfect and Constant Contact allows you to create email lists using donors information. So that in itself is a gift. It is just awesome. Because, like we said, you can use any criteria you want. I want to see all of my first time donors this year, I want to see people that gave a gift in each of the last three years, and I want to email them, you can target based on any criteria that you want using your donors information, you’re going to be able to add Mert mail merge fields from DonorPerfect to constant contact. So if you want to put that giving history in that email, Hey there, Donna donor, thank you so much for your support in the past. Here’s your last year, fiscal year to date, total your last year calendar year to date, giving total Can you help us again, so any of the fields in DonorPerfect can be added as merge fields into Constant Contact, you’re going to be able to design and write professional emails. It is so there’s drop and drag capabilities. Again, you can find these awesome templates, it looks like you’ve worked hard on them. And you’re really just designing your message, because the templates are there for you. Really, really awesome. And they have so many different types of templates, you would probably be overwhelmed with as many as they have. But the good news is, we also have Giving Tuesday templates for you that we’ve created for you. So that you can use those at your at your, your wish. And you can schedule your emails or send them immediately Dev, this is going to be important when it comes to the GivingTuesday timeline that we’re going to give you for letting your your donors know about giving Tuesday and how you’re hoping to appeal to them. So being able to schedule these emails is really nice, because you can have an email sitting in somebody’s mailbox. And you’re still asleep in bed, right? Or you can send them right away.

So let’s talk about the setup the integration, what we have to do to set up the integration. So what we’re going to do is you’re going to go and log into DonorPerfect, you’ll go to the mailings icon on the menu ribbon, and you’re going to click on constant contact email, when you click on constant contact email, and log in, you’re going to be in the integration and I like in the integration as the bridge between DonorPerfect and Constant Contact, right, we can’t get anything from constant contact. Unless we go use that bridge, we can’t get anything from DonorPerfect unless we use that bridge. So the integration is the bridge. All right, so you’re going to access it by going again to mailings and constant contact email. Now, once you get there, you’re going to have to log in with your constant contact credentials. So your constant contact credentials are different than your DonorPerfect credentials, make sure you know them so that you can log in. Okay. Now once you log into the integration, this is what you’re going to encounter. All right, you’re going to see your campaign results from previous campaigns. And then you’re going to see a link right at the top. Above that that says settings, we want to click that first because that helps you define the settings of what Constant Contact is allowed to do with and to DonorPerfect. All right, we’ll talk about that in a moment. But before you create lists or do anything like that, you want to go into settings. Once we get into settings, it’s going to land or we’re going to click on the Sync Settings tab. Then when we click on that Sync Settings tab, this is what we’re doing. We’re telling Constant Contact, what we want it to do with and to DonorPerfect. What do I mean? Well, the first thing that displays here is this enable nightly campaign sync. When I click on that, check that box, what this will do is it will require you to set a time in the middle of the night, preferably when no one’s in this system, where the Constant Contact campaign details synced down into the DonorPerfect records. Okay. So again, if Donna donor is a part of this email campaign, and you sent it and she she opened it, you would get a contact record and DonorPerfect that says Donna Donna received your GivingTuesday 2019 email and she opened it and then the next night she might have forwarded it right you can see that or if the email bounced it will I’ll tell you it bounced, and why. So you want to check that checkbox. And again, this will happen every night in the middle of the night. And those that that three hour range. And these are based on Eastern time. Okay. Also, if you want to do a manual list, you can actually think the campaign deeds results with a click of a button there. But you want to make sure no one is in the system. If you’re doing that. The rest of these checkboxes without getting into detail, really say, This is what I want Constant Contact to do to DonorPerfect. And we’re going to leave all of those unchecked, because we really don’t want Constant Contact to completely update DonorPerfect. We don’t mind getting the contact information, but we don’t want it to change donors information. So we would we would assume that your DonorPerfect records are pristine. And if that’s the case, great, we don’t want Constant Contact to update any of that, that core information rather, just create that contact record. Okay. All right, and the integrations matches on the email address. So when we’re doing, it’s doing that, it’s gonna say, hey, there’s a Donna donor@gmail.com. And there, it’s matching on that address. And that’s how it will find that record. All right. So before I go to there, go back here, I’m going to jump back here really quickly. The other thing you want to be aware of is you can set the default contact that it’s assigned to. So if there’s someone in your office that’s doing that, you can use their user name, and then the default contact activity, you can select this constant contact campaign again, this, this will create a contact record on each of the donors that are affected. And you will see the status of the email campaign for each donor. Alright, so now let’s talk about creating your emails. Okay. So there are two types of lists that we use in constant contact and the DonorPerfect integration, we have dynamic lists, and we have manual lists, here are the difference between the two, your dynamic lists will be autumn automatically updated nightly. So that’s why we checked that box earlier. That’s that automatic nightly update, your dynamic lists will auto automatically be updated every night. The manual lists are not. And they are manual for a reason. They’re manual, because we have to a add and remove users manually. And we also have to sync the updates manually, right. So dynamic, automatic updates, nightly manuals do not your dynamic lists require a safe Selection filter. So your manual lists, as I mentioned, you can choose last name or donor ID, you can even use a filter, a saved filter, you have the option for your dynamic list, there are no options, the only option is to create a filter. So again, if I wanted to see all the people who gave a gift in the last three years, and all the people, or all the people that gave to Giving Tuesday, 2018. Right, I have to save that filter. And one of my recommendations is to create a filter folder for each function that you’re creating filters for, for example, Constant Contact, you want to create a constant contact filter folder to hold all of your constant contact filters. If you’re doing Smart Actions or anything like that, you want to create a folder for that this way, it will keep your filters segregated and people will not be apt to to delete them, or attempt to delete them. Okay, now manually updated will know dynamic lists are not manually updated. Why? Because they’re automatically updated. But manual lists are so you have to go in and manually update that list. And whether you can pick and choose your constituents, obviously not with the dynamic, but definitely yes with the manual lists. Okay. All right. So we’ve created our lists with a dynamic list all the people that I want to reach out to now I’m going to go and design and send my constant contact email campaign. So you’re gonna go into Constant Contact, and you’re going to create the email with constant contact itself. So you have the ability to get right into Constant Contact, and use all those beautiful templates. Now, if you want to, you can use the available templates that are there for you. We’ve created a GivingTuesday template, so you can use that right off the bat and just start creating your campaign. Or you can start from scratch whichever you prefer. Now the templates are reusable. And mobile responsive. So remember, we talked about earlier on that 55% of emails are viewed on a smart device? Well, that’s why we want to make sure when we’re creating our templates, that the templates are mobile responsive, and they are, which means they look just as good on your laptop as they do on a desktop as they do on a tablet as they do on your cell phone. Okay, so mobile responsive really means that it’s going to look the best it can possibly look and look gorgeous, on a mobile device. And once again, you can schedule your emails to be sent at a later time, or send them immediately. And another cool thing with constant contact is you have the ability to send test emails to yourself and other staff members. This is a wonderful idea. I never send out an email campaign without doing a test to myself and a couple of other people because I want their eyes on it, to make sure it looks right, everything is spelled correctly, it’s beautiful. And I also want us to experience what the donor will experience. Okay, this is what it looks like in the email box. When I click on it, this is what I see. So I want to be able to to see have that experience, so that I know what our donors are actually looking at. So make sure you take advantage of the ability to send a test to yourself and others.

And you can add a hyperlink for donation form. So as you know, you can either put a embed your link form your form, I’m sorry, you can either embed the link to your form into Constant Contact, right, you can create a hyperlink and link, embed that link. And they could click on that button. And it’ll take them right to your form. Okay, you can also use smart give, which is another awesome feature with our payment processing suite that allows you to create a unique URL for each of your donors when they admit that we associate with an online form. When your donor receives that URL in a constant contact email, they can click on that link. And it will take them to the form already pre populated with all of their demographic information. So these are things you want to be thinking about to make it very make your email campaign the best it can be. Now, as I told you ahead of time, oops, I opened, I opened the box before, I suppose to 55% of emails are opened on mobile devices. So having that mobile responsive form, or mobile responsive campaign template is ideal. If you take a look at this template, it’s just as pretty, right? And that’s exactly the way it’s going to look nice and pretty. There’s not going to be anything falling over to the sides and they have to move the thing around to see your text Nope, they’re going to be able to see your email right there perfectly. Alright, so we talked about all of the little bit seeds and details now we’re going to talk about things we need to think about when we’re beginning to create our campaign. So the first thing we want to do when we’re obviously we’re attempting to make an impact to give people to inspire them to give on Giving Tuesday. So just like any other appeal, you want to start with a compelling headline, right? Giving Tuesday, your way to give back Giving Tuesday. A lot of people use as metaphor, I think giving Tuesday uses it, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Giving Tuesday with their logo, right? So you want to make sure that you’re using that compelling headline to get people excited and interested and aware of Giving Tuesday, because you want them to be like okay, Giving Tuesday. I know we’re giving Tuesday’s you want them to know that all right? Tell a powerful story. If you tell a powerful story that will inspire people to give, if you want to tell them why to do it on GivingTuesday why it makes a difference. Right? We have Thanksgiving, we’re thankful for all that we have. We spent our money on gifts and stuff on giving on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Now it’s time for us to give back some of the blessings that we are so richly blessed with. So this is a way to tell that and make people inspire them to give you know, the help the dogs help the cats help the environment help these people, whatever it is, tell that powerful story that will resonate with people. You want to make sure you’re making giving as easy as possible. Again, I mentioned that smart give Link when they click on that link. The form is already pre populated with their information. All they have to do is put in the amount and put in there. Let’s put in their mouth and put in their credit card information. If you go to our online forums, Giving Tuesday webinar, they will be talking about that smart Good link. So you want to check that out. Okay. All right. So the plan. So this is really kind of it encompasses everything. We’ve done all the work. We know what we want to do we know who we want to hit, we’ve created our beautiful templates, we know they’re ready to rock and roll. So how do we get rolling? Well, we’re going to give you a before on the day of and a day after giving Tuesday timeline. So let’s talk about it. So before giving Tuesday, you want to tell everybody that can hear your voice that can see your emails, that can go to your website that you are participating in Giving Tuesday. And if you anticipate this to be the biggest and best Giving Tuesday ever, right, so you want to announce it everywhere you can, then you’re going to create a 30 day countdown, Hey, folks, you’re going to send that email blast out, Hey, guys, we’re doing 30 days out, we got 30 days, until Giving Tuesday, let’s do this, let’s you know, ramp up, here’s what we’re gonna do. Or maybe you’re gonna say all the money that came in, that comes in from Giving Tuesday is going to this specific thing, right? Something awesome, something gigantic, something compelling. And then you want to send a reminder the day before, make sure we’re doing that. Now on Giving Tuesday, you want to send off a kickoff email at 6am. Now remember, we talked about being able to schedule emails and Constant Contact? Well, this is a perfect way to use that functionality. You can say, Okay, here’s my email blast. This is my 6am email blast, I’m going to schedule it for 6am. And it’s going to be in their inbox at 6am. And when they come in, in the morning, or they’re on their phones, or whatever they’re doing in the morning, looking at their cell phones, they’re gonna be able to see you’re giving Tuesday email, right? Because most people read it on their phones, then you want to send one at 10am mid morning, right? So let’s just think about the average person who are mom or dad, who have to get the kids ready and up for school has to feed them has to get them to the bus stop has to fight traffic to get to work. And they get to work. And all right, it’s already past six, it’s almost 10 o’clock, send that 10am email. And a brief reminder, hey, you might have forgotten now that you’ve had your coffee and the kids are off in school, let’s go ahead and give us a gift on Giving Tuesday and make a difference make an impact, then you want to send your final email at about 11 o’clock PM, for last minute donations, a lot of folks don’t wind down until 910 11 o’clock at night, you may even want to bring it back to 10. Right 10 o’clock, right? That gives them a good two hours to be able to get a contribution in. So you want to appeal to them at that moment. So we’re up to 1234 emails, the day after giving Tuesday, when you all are wiping the sweat from your brow because of all the hard work you did, you’re going to send your thank you email, send it out. Thank you so much for participating. And giving Tuesday, you know, we hope to hit good records, we hope to get to this goal, we’re going to tell you what we did. So stay tuned, because Giving Tuesday isn’t over yet, we’re going to tell you, and then you’re going to remind donors how their donation will be used. Not only thank you for your gift, but also this is how we’re going to use it. Right. And again, if you had that specific target, you know, you’re doing something specific, it’s a major campaign you want to do and it’s you can tell them, it’s going to help that or whatever it’s going to do. If you tell people how their money helps you, they’re going to be more apt to give and more apt to give more. All right, so integration, we integrate two great products joined for one great campaign DonorPerfect, where we can use our donors information, including giving history to create email, campaign lists, and of course, Constant Contact that we use to create our beautiful templates. Again, if you want to be adventurous and create your own, you’re welcome to. If not, we have templates in there for you for giving Tuesday. You’re welcome to use that. And you’re going to use both of these wonderful tools together to create a wonderful Giving Tuesday 2019 campaign, you’re going to create your lists again, we’re going to be able to create dynamic email lists that will update based on the filter that you apply to it, you’re going to be able to use the Giving Tuesday template that we have in constant contact for you. And remember, those templates are all mobile responsive. They’re going to look just as good on a smart device as they will want someone’s laptop and then sending your emails. We have several crucial dates. The first is the 30 day countdown, right? Well I actually instead of the first the announcement, right, but the 30 day countdown Hey, it’s 30 days before giving Tuesday, start thinking about putting money aside after you do your shopping to help people or help the environment or whatever you want to send one out the day before giving Tuesday. Remember Giving Tuesday this year is Tuesday, December 3, and the day before is Cyber Monday. So remember, your emails have to be fabulous, so that they stand out among the bombarded emails that they’re going to get from Cyber Monday. And you’re going to send emails throughout the Day of Giving Tuesday 6am 10am and not 10 or 11pm. At night for those last minute donations. And then the day after, we want to be sure to send out thank you emails to thank everyone for participating. Again, this might even inspire someone oops, I forgot. Can you still take this? Yeah, I guess we could still take it, you know, it’s going to go toward that cause. Now, for you to get help and support. We’re always here to help you. If you need help with Constant Contact, then you will reach out to the Constant Contact help team. They will help you with building and customizing email templates.

They’ll help you with scheduling emails, and Constant Contact reporting. You can reach them at 866-289-2101. And if you have issues with nightly sync, or you’re missing campaign results in DonorPerfect if you need assistance with creating an email list with a filter, please reach out to DonorPerfect support. And you can reach us at 215-628-4343. I want to thank you so much for joining me for this webinar, email campaigns with constant contact and DonorPerfect for giving Tuesday. Be sure to check out our other Giving Tuesday, webinar recordings and we wish you all the very best in 2019 and beyond. Thank you bye bye