Igniting Donor Motivation and Engagement

Focus on our employees needs to happiness and well being, we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own staff that will always be there to help you. When you get Read More

Focus on our employees needs to happiness and well being, we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own staff that will always be there to help you. When you get started with DonorPerfect, we provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly, and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining what you need to succeed using a variety of training programs that cater to your preferred learning methods. Our customer care team provides ongoing support whenever you need it by phone, chat or email. They’ll answer your questions help you improve results and quickly become your best new work friends. While you focus on your mission. Our product managers and developers are incorporating your feedback and prioritizing your needs and concerns to deliver easy to use software that will enable you to achieve all your goals. When our customers and employees are asked what do you like best about DonorPerfect, they both say the same thing, the people, you will to learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with your account manager or attending a product demonstration webinar.

People are the heart of DonorPerfect. It all starts with our staff. By focusing on our employees needs happiness and well being we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own staff that will always be there to help you. When you get started with DonorPerfect. We provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly, and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining what you need to succeed using a variety of training programs that cater to your preferred learning methods. Our customer care team provides ongoing support whenever you need it by phone, chat or email. They’ll answer your questions help you improve results and quickly become your best news.

Good morning. Thank you for joining us for the 2024 DonorPerfect community conference spark. I’m Dr. Mike middlemen the president of Salus University where like many of you were absolutely passionate about professional education and development, especially in a rapidly changing healthcare landscape. We understand that for nonprofits, community is everything. That’s why we’re proud to share our space with DonorPerfect. Well, they deliver two days of virtual learning opportunities just for fundraisers, led by experts. Before we begin, I’d like to introduce you to your MC nonprofit coach Mallory Erickson. Mallory is named the number one disrupter in fundraising by Forbes magazine. Mallory is the creator of power partners formula, host of what the fundraising podcast and now author of a book by the same title. Mallory spate is her deep understanding of the complex motivations that influence donor behavior. She’s known for opening minds and challenging assumptions. So we’re absolutely thrilled to have her set the tone for your next creative spark. Mallory Pittaway.

Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you, DonorPerfect for having me. I could not be more excited to be here again, hosting this incredible conference. Before we dive in and get to talk all about what sparks donor motivation and your motivation. I just wanted to take a moment and acknowledge that even though we’re gathering virtually a lot of the DonorPerfect team is on the ancestral lands of the Leonie Lennart, a people’s also known as the Delaware nation who have stewarded Lennart pay hooking for generations. We recognized Lonard pay descendants, including the Delaware Our tribe and Delaware Nation of Oklahoma, the Stockbridge Munsee community of Wisconsin, the Muncie Delaware of Ontario, and monopoly communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and the indigenous people of the Turtle Island territories, where many of the DonorPerfect Canadia Canada team resides today. As we gather, we acknowledge the ongoing impacts of colonialism, genocide, land theft, cultural erasure on indigenous people. And we commit to uplifting indigenous voices supporting indigenous sovereignty, and being good allies and caretakers of the land we now inhabit. So we invite you to join us in strengthening relationships and learning more about the vibrant indigenous cultures and communities where you reside as well. So with that said, and with Mike’s incredible introduction, here is a little bit more about me, my name is Mallory Erickson. I’m so excited to be hosting this incredible gathering over these next two days. And I was really excited when DonorPerfect showed me last night who is in the room. And I think it’s really fun to see, we have folks represented from all over all over the world. But you can see some of the top locations there. I love my hometown and California. Seeing that as the as the number one location is really cool. I think it’s awesome to see the number of development directors here fundraising assistance, executives and board members. So hopefully, you can see all of that my five, clearly, okay, I just had something shift a little bit. And then of course, everybody’s here, we really see everybody here as a change maker, and somebody committed to driving, driving good in the world, moving more money into your organization means capacitating, the mission and the vision of so many incredible organizations out there. So we’re so excited to have you joining us. So my opening session today is all about igniting donor motivation and engagement. But when I was putting this together, I started to take it a little bit further and to start to talk about going from sparking donor motivation into sustaining it. So we’re gonna get into all the details of you know, me, you know, I’m going to bring in some fun science and then some practical application around really how you start to integrate this into your fundraising immediately. For those of you who are like, Who is this lady, I want to give you a little introduction into me. So like many of you, I became an accidental fundraiser, first in a managing director role, and then an executive director role. And I had a lot of big hopes for what fundraising was going to look like, and really a little bit of disillusionment, around, you know, not working more than 40 hours a week having donors come to me. And the reality was a constant hustle. I didn’t have a donor pipeline that I trusted, I was working 12 to 15 hour days, I was sacrificing a lot of my personal relationships for my organization. And I hit a real burnout moment. And I joked that this is my impact report fake phase, where I felt this pressure to put up this appearance everywhere, like I had it all together. But the reality was, everything was a constant hustle. And I got to a moment where I was like, I’m not sure that I can stay in the nonprofit sector. If this is what it means to be a leader here, I had an incredible sort of accidental fusion of life experiences, I got certified and as an executive coach trained in habit and behavior design and design thinking. And those frameworks really came together and fundamentally changed the way that I fundraised, it had huge financial impacts, I moved an organization from a million to 3.8 million pretty quickly. But more importantly, I started to really enjoy fundraising. And I always say, if that could be true for me, that can be true for anyone. But we have to start to think differently as fundraisers and we need to start to do some things really differently. And my work has sort of culminated into the creation now of a program called The Power partners formula, which brings together all of those frameworks to help people raise more from the right funders without hounding people for money. And something that we understand and we talk about a lot inside power partners is this idea that fundraiser behavior drives donor behavior. So we talk a lot in our sector, about our donors, like blank and our donors prefer this. The reality is, is that donor behavior is a response behavior. And it’s primarily a response to fund raiser behavior. And I don’t say this to like put a lot of new pressure on you, but to help you recognize really the opportunity that you have to inspire, to motivate to influence your donors to be able to make the changes that you both want to see in the world. Sometimes when we think about motivation, I feel like or we say, Let’s motivate our donors. I feel like people get a little like cringy like, oh, maybe I’m, you know, manipulating them or something like that. And so I really love this quote, I’m not one to quote Eisenhower so often But I really love this quote that motivation is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do, because they want to do it. Good motivation is all about identifying and aligning and inspiring people based on something that they really want, and helping them get over the action line. So that is like sort of my frame as we dive into all of this content together. So first of all, let’s just like back up for a second and talk about why motivation is important in the first place. So if you’ve come to maybe one of my webinars before, you’ve seen me talk about habit and behavior design. And so I talk a lot about the fact that in order for any action to take place, there needs to be enough motivation to take that action, there needs to be the ability to take that action, and you need to be prompted to take that action. So for you to join me right now, you needed to be motivated enough to want to come and probably believe that you are going to get something great out of this community conference, you needed that link in order to click on it the ability to join me here, no matter how motivated you were, if you didn’t have information about how to get into this virtual room, you couldn’t do it. And then you’ve been getting those reminder, emails from DonorPerfect, or maybe a reminder from your calendar, all of those things are the prompts to help you get here. So anytime we take action as humans, these three things come together. And they actually happen sort of on a continuum. And a lot of times in fundraising, we really focus on ability, we really focus on making the action as easy as possible for the donor to do that’s obviously really important and prompting them, right, inviting them to give reminding them about a campaign. But we usually think about motivation in a much more simplified way. And if we start to expand our understanding of motivation, it starts to open up a whole host of opportunities for ways that we can motivate our donors that feel really good to them, and feel really good to us as fundraisers to, I believe really deeply that when fundraising feels better to us, it feels better to our donors. And so I want to introduce you to all the different types of motivation that you have at your disposal, and that come into play when we think about our donors and getting them involved in our organization. So for the purposes of this of this presentation, we’re talking about four primary motivational drivers, emotional drivers, social drivers, psychological drivers, and rational drivers. And you have likely heard of all you know, some of if not all of the different things that are on this slide, but I want you to start to see how each of them connect to a different type of motivation. So compassion and empathy, personal connection, those are emotional drivers, things like community belonging, peer influence, social recognition, those are some of our social drivers around motivation. Psychological drivers are the sense of making a difference. personal satisfaction, right, right after we make a donation, how we might feel. And then rational drivers are things like tax incentives, and, you know, having different, like accountability checks. And each of these types of motivation correspond with a part of our brain that drives motivation. So we’ll get into that in a second. And those of you who are like, Oh, my gosh, this is too sciency. For me, just hang on for one second, while I show you a few pictures of the brain, because I want to help you understand how this really happens. So how motivation works. We often think I was talking to someone on the DonorPerfect team yesterday, I said, you know, we often think like somebody is motivated, or they’re not motivated, we think about it in these really kind of binary ways or these like black and white ways. And the reality is, is that isn’t actually how motivation works, motivation ebbs and flows. And for some types of activities, we just need an instant of motivation to get ourselves over the action line, when we when we talk about something that’s maybe more difficult or more challenging, the motivation is going to ebb and flow throughout the entire time. And so we can’t just sort of assume, okay, they didn’t take an instant action, so they’re not motivated. We need to understand that motivation is sometimes a long game. So I was explaining the difference to somebody this morning between a donor being motivated enough to click a button on your website and make a donation, right. That’s a simple task, to make a decision to come to one of your fundraising events might be a much more complicated task, they have to figure out if it works it on their calendar, they have to hire a childcare support. They have to, you know, arrange a few other logistics run X, Y, and Z. There’s all these pieces, right? And so their motivation and how we design for their motivation needs to be really different. So this is what I already said. But donor motivation ebbs and flows and is the result of multiple drivers of motivation. I want to refresh your memory around the four primary types of motivation and two really recognize that motivation is something that happens in our brain and body in different ways. I think this is really important because I think sometimes we get a lot of fundraising advice, like do this thing with your donor, but we don’t really understand why or why it’s important. And then it makes it easy for us to deprioritize it. So again, I promise it will not get too sciency. But I want you to understand that motivation takes place in four primary parts of the brain, the prefrontal cortex, the nucleus accumbens, I’m not even sure if I’m pronouncing that right, the amygdala and the hippocampus, okay, those are the primary parts of the brain that are involved in the type of motivation that we’re talking about here, which is more of a reward based motivation, which is the primary type of motivation that is involved when it comes to donor relationships, and connection. So each of those parts of the brain have something called hormones, neuro receptors are hormones that are associated with that part of the brain, okay? Some people call this group of hormones, like the happy hormones, right? A lot of these impacts how good we feel about a certain situation. And so there are a number of different things that we’re often told to do in our fundraising, create personalized connection, create engaging experiences, make sure your values aligned, recognize your donors. But it’s not always clear how the why those things really matter. And so I want to help you understand that each of those things is actually tied to one or multiple of those happy hormones. And our goal when we’re thinking about donor motivation, both both in the short term, and in the long term is that we have diverse opportunities for those happy hormones. So like, sometimes when I’m designing something, I’m trying to design something that’s going to activate some oxytocin, something, something that’s going to activate some dopamine, something that’s going to activate some serotonin, something’s gonna activate some endorphins, right. And I’m kind of putting it together a little bit like a puzzle, to make sure that people are having the experience the emotional experience that I want them to have in that moment. So I’m not going to go through this chart with you on this webinar, because I only have 40 minutes with you today. But you will get the slides and you will get this. This is just a breakdown of those different types of drivers that I already talked about which hormones they activate, and then why those are important, or what those do related to donor behavior. And so I thought this could be helpful for you decide, like, hey, I want to actually figure out in this next campaign that we’re doing, I want to figure out how we have an oxytocin experience, and a dopamine experience and a serotonin experience, I think it can be a really fun way to design our fundraising around those different types of motivation. Once we understand sort of how important they all are. Okay, you take a quick sip of water, because I’m already excited.

So as I mentioned, at the very beginning, I’m going to talk about motivation in two buckets. So I’m going to talk about sparking initial donor motivation, what gets people to get involved in your organization for the first time or make that first time donation. And then after we talk about those primary levers of motivation, I’m going to talk about how you move from spark to sustain and the things that you want to do with your donors to make sure that you’re not just motivating them for a one time gift or one time thing, but that you’re really thinking about their motivation and their experience with your organization in order to ensure deeper connection and long term engagement. Okay, so one time donation motivation, there are like three kind of primary pieces to this immediate impact and urgency, emotional appeal and ease of giving. Okay, and you can think about this. If you think about the Fogg behavior model, that makes a lot of sense, right? emotional appeal, immediate impact and urgency, you’re kind of like hitting all those motivations at once, with something like that. So immediate impact and urgency, what does that have to do it? So that’s around when we start to communicate high impact needs or a specific goal, or tangible outcomes. We do this a lot of times in our campaigns, right? We identify a very specific goal that’s going to have a very specific type of outcome. And we have it be immediate in order to get people excited about the moment right, a lot of motivation is answering why you why you the donor should be involved and why now why should you be involved now, we see in our sector, sometimes a lot of urgency created in like click bait ways that I know can feel cringy to all of us. And I think this is the way that some of us have been taught or maybe we see political fundraising, do it and we’re like, should we be doing that? The answer is no. But there are ways to create urgency and then I see people sort of swing the pendulum to the other side, like oh, I don’t want to be so like cringy and click Beatty with them. urgency. So now I’m not going to create any urgency at all. And it’s like, okay, well, urgency is actually a very important motivator. It’s a very important piece of motivation to get people over the action line. But how you can create urgency in real ways that don’t feel that way is to create urgency with relevance, right? When you’re communicating that immediate impact need, you’re communicating, highlighting an immediate need, the urgency is around the relevance to this moment in time, and why it’s so important for people to get involved right now. Okay. So create relevance, create urgency, with relevance, as opposed to sort of those those, those other strategies that we see out there. The other piece around this is the emotional appeal. So how do you create emotional appeal in a moment with your donors? One of the main ways we hear talked about in our sector are compelling stories. Right? So I’ll tell you a little bit about storytelling in a second. But we hear a lot of a lot of folks telling us to create compelling stories and personal connection. Okay, so activating that emotional driver in the moment for that one time donation is all about stories and personal connection. So why Why have I feel like in the last two years, storytelling has just become, you know, every we see it everywhere, right? Everybody is talking about storytelling? Why? Why does it matter so much. So storytelling is an incredible example of brain motivation in action. And it’s actually a little bit different than other types of brain motivation as well, because what happens is, when you start to tell a story, like a real impact story, and you follow a storytelling arc, you’re often presenting a conflict a problem in that story. When you do that, your brain is actually releasing cortisol, which is a stress hormone. Okay, so it’s not one of the feel good hormones. But what cortisol does is it helps us focus so it keeps our attention. And we know in this day of age, in this day, and age, how hard it is to keep anyone’s attention, right. And so cortisol helps us focus our attention on whatever that story is in front of us. And then when the story resolves, or there is sort of an example of how your organization stepped in and created a resolution, then oxytocin is released. And there’s actually been a lot of really cool research around the amount of oxytocin released can actually be tied to the amount of money campaigns have raised. So there’s a lot in here inside storytelling, but I want you to start to sort of see how all of these recommendations that have been made to you are actually a part of ensuring that you are using these different motivational levers in how you’re raising money, we don’t have perfect and I have done a lot of really cool content together around storytelling, and they helped me create this course, capture and create it is totally free, thanks to DonorPerfect. And so you can scan that you can grab it, and that will tell you a little bit more, it will be less in the brain science and more in the like, how do you find and create the right stories that are really going to resonate with your audience to drive to spark motivation to drive impact. So make sure you grab that. And of course, you’ll get these slides at the end as well. And then I mentioned ease of giving right to ease of giving is another really important motivation in those moments. So that that means convenient donation processes, and immediate gratification, right. So let me give you an example of sort of how this you’re doing this likely, but I want you if you’re going to start to think about, okay, we want to make sure we include all the happy hormones in our fundraising, I want you to see the ways in which you are doing it. And if you’re not some very easy ways to integrate it. So donation forms, for example, are an opportunity to create urgency to create social proof to create examples of other people participating, and to show a time box moment, right, they can have a deadline. So they can create that type of urgency, you’ll often see a story on the page itself. So you can sort of see how all of these levers of motivation can come together in a moment. And your donation form should be more than just a little box where people put their credit card you can use these moments to inspire motivation to get people over the action like to take the action that you want them to take and that they want to be taking.

One thing I wanted to make sure I said before I move into like from spark to sustain is I think sometimes there’s a little bit of a like break right here. We think a lot about how to motivate people to give how to motivate people to get involved in our organization. And then we sort of like create this other silo of thinking where we’re like, okay, now how do we retain our donors, and we don’t connect those two. And one of the things I really want to highlight is however you decide to motivate your donors to take those one time actions to get them involved in your organization to make a donation, you want to think about how you can integrate some of those same types of motivation into your long term sustaining motivation. So if you created a lot of personal connection, and inspiring people to give by telling them a lot of one on one stories, you know, anonymous stories that about beneficiaries in your program, and then all of a sudden, they give you a donation, and they never hear a story, again, a one on one story, again, that’s going to create this like disconnect, right? You’ve done all this work to motivate people to care about something really important. You want to make sure that you’re continuing to reinforce that motivation, when you start to look to sustain those donors and get them more deeply involved. And so these strategies should really be built like hand in hand, because we’re setting expectations with our donors, when we’re inspiring them to give, we’re telling them what we care about. And we’re telling them what they’re going to experience and feel if they get involved in our organization. And we want to really make sure that that’s true, because one of the really important components here is trust building, right. And part of trust is that consistency, and being who we say we are, okay, went on a little bit of a tangent, but I think that’s a really important piece that I don’t I want to make sure we don’t miss. So number three, moving from spark to sustain. So I told you the primary things to think about from a motivation standpoint, when you’re trying to inspire that one time donation, here are the four things I want you to think about when you’re thinking about sustaining donor motivation over time, and I’m going to be more specific here. But at the high level, they are building relationships, engagement, opportunities, shared vision, and values, and recognition and appreciation. So I’m going to go through each of these and give you a few examples. And I’m going to explain which part of the brain gets activated from each of these from each of these things. So when I talk about building relationships, that isn’t, that’s an oxytocin release element. And there are I think we’d say like, bit and I talked about this a lot. In my book, we talked about building relationships, really ambiguously in our sector, and I remember feeling a lot of uncertainty around like, how do you really build like authentic and real relationships or especially like, through your, your emails that are like one to many, you know, am I really building a relationship that way, and you can, and you should be. And there are a few ways to do that. One is giving things a personal touch, that can be as simple as personalizing your email outreach, to have somebody’s first name at the beginning of it and using, you know, using the whatever tech function you have inside your organization to put their first name up at the top of that email, that personalization at scale, that actually does start to release that oxytocin bonding hormone, because people feel like they’re being taught to, you might be sitting there being like, okay, but Mallory, they know, I didn’t write every single email that way. Yes, it’s true. But something about seeing our first name at the top of the email still releases the oxytocin. So it matters, it really matters. And it’s a really small way, you can have a big impact. The other piece here is around regular communication. So keeping your donors engaged, we have this big myths in our sector, about donor fatigue, and that we’re bothering our donors, and all those things, your donors likely want to hear from you more than they are hearing from you. Now, the one thing that they do not want is every time they hear from you to have it be an ask, okay, and so something that people People are always like, Oh, but people get so much communication, they’re exhausted with so much communication. So I want you to just like step out of your fundraising, take your fundraising hat off for a second, right? We all have those friends that literally every single time they reach out to us, they are asking us for something, right? They might communicate with us twice a year, but we are still kind of exhausted by their outreach, because every time they reach out to us, they want something, then we have those other friends, where we’re in this really mutually beneficial relationship where we know that they really care about us, they show up for us in all these ways. They check in with us, we tell them things, they know what’s going on in our lives, and maybe even talk to some of those people like every day, some of those people maybe even multiple times a day. But why are we not fatigued, we’re not fatigued because of the nature of the communication, not the amount of communication. So we really get this wrong. When we think about donor fatigue your donors want to be communicated with and part of communicating with them about all these things. Building a relationship through that type of communication is what builds that long term motivation over time. It continues to help them feel a sense of belonging. It reinforces your partnership. Okay, I could go on forever. I’m not going to do myself stop. Another piece here that I love around relationship building is personalized surprise and delight tactics. So I know we want routines, we want to know exactly what we’re going to do when we want donor communication that is planned out and operationalized and automated and all those things. But you know what, sometimes we need to recognize that like, relationships are built in these really special and sacred surprise moments. And so I love DonorPerfect, like video tool. And I think doing something kind of out of the blue, like, Hey, I was just thinking about you today, there’s no ask involved, you record it for 10 seconds, 20 seconds, like from wherever you are goes such a long way in building that relationship, and releasing so many of those feel good hormones in a really organic and honestly, like low intensity way for you. Even though they’re personalized, they still can happen really quickly and have an outsized impact. Okay. The second piece here that I talked about are engagement opportunities. So engagement opportunities can be anything like volunteer opportunities that you offer to different types of events that you offer, where engagement comes into play, in terms of our happy hormones is that they are really involved in our dopamine and our reward system. And volunteering, particularly if it’s a regular volunteer opportunity, that also helps convert things into habits. And so we think about that sort of like long term sustaining of motivation habits can be a really, really helpful part of that. Now, all of this being said, not every organization has easy volunteer opportunities or volunteer opportunities that are actually beneficial for the community or for the organization. I am not suggesting that you create them. Okay. Same with events you might not have, you might be like, Oh my god, Mallory, I was really hoping what you were gonna say is that we don’t have to do events anymore. Like that was the one thing I was hoping you were gonna say today, I am not saying that you have to do events, either. I’m trying to show you what these types of things do in terms of the donors brain, right, what type of hormone they activate. So if you’re like, we don’t have volunteer opportunities, and we don’t really want to do events anymore, then go back to that chart that I made at the beginning, and find other things that increase that create dopamine and a donors brain and see which one of those does work for your organization does would be an engagement opportunity that feels feasible and within your capacity, and maybe you could build a little habit around it. Okay, what’s really important to me is that you understand the role that these elements play in donor motivation, both initially and in an ongoing way. And that you feel a sense of choice around what you’re going to use and when and that you really tailor that to the capacity of your organization. Because these ideas are only as good as the capacity you have to implement them. So anything, you don’t have the capacity to implement, or you’re going to do like in a 1/10 of a way, cut it out, don’t do it, go back and find something that actually is aligned with your organization that’s related to that same hormone, and figure out how that fits into your plan. So we value and meaning this actually, I should have put the hormones up there, too. This is like dopamine and serotonin primarily. And part of what builds are sort of like ongoing sense that we are aligned with an organization that we have the same values that we want the same things, our consistency in our messaging, right? That’s up in our prefrontal cortex. But maybe you’ve heard the saying, Oh, my gosh, I’m going to complete like cognitive dissonance, which is like when we start to experience something that doesn’t align with what we thought about something and that can create a lot of space and a lot of disconnect for things. So if an organization Oh, I thought they said they cared about X y&z But now I’m not hearing anything about that with no explanation that creates some cognitive dissonance. So consistent messaging helps really reinforce it releases dopamine and serotonin. But it really reinforces that you sort of are who you said, you are back to that point around how we think about motivation in the spark we want to think about in the sustain as well. And then the same thing is true here around transparency and accountability, right? We want to demonstrate, you know, integrity, clear impact, we want to be transparent about what’s happening behind the scenes, again, not doing anything that might spark some feelings of cognitive dissonance. Now, I know there’s a lot inside our sector around like oversight that doesn’t feel good or kind of the ways in which we have to or we’re told to like placate donors by doing doing reporting that feels like outside of our wheelhouse or are not really showing the true impact of the program. Here’s what I want you to understand. There are so many different ways to show transparency to donors in ways that build trust and release these hormones. And so you want to find a way to do that that feels good to your organization. And that feels aligned with how you want to share stories and how you want to share things behind the scenes. The other didn’t like myth I want to dispel here is that a lot of times, we think we have to show impact just in terms of the final impact of something, right. And a lot of you are working on missions that are going to take a very, very, very long time to see true impact. And maybe you have some benchmarks of ways that you demonstrate impact along the way. But you want to be able to sort of show something for your work. But you don’t know how to do that when it’s going to take you six months or 12 months to be able to circle back around to sort of share how it campaign really influenced something. So I want to teach you my like, favorite sort of trick here a secret here way that I encourage folks to do this, because it’s very true that we don’t want to create this like expectation that all of a sudden, we’ve you know, solved homelessness in our city because we raised $15,000, to help address a group of unhoused people in our community, so and support them. So one of the ways that we can do this is through something called operational transparency. So it’s very funny, I don’t know who we have enough people on tell us in the chat. But I recently use this example, when I was in Wyoming. And I realized the moment that I got to the airport, and I could not find a way to get to the hotel, that this was probably the wrong example, in a lot of rural communities. So think about it in terms of any app that you might use, five or 10 years ago, we would have with like a car, if we were ordering a car to come pick us up on one of these rideshare apps, we would literally put in the number I’m not sure if it was an app at one point was a phone number, we call the number we’d say we want a car to show up at this thing. They’d be like, yep, your car’s going to come and like time would just pass. And we’d be sort of sitting there and you’d be sort of you’d be standing in the room being like, okay, at what point do I call again? Or like, is it really coming? Or did it get canceled. And you can say in the chat, like, if you remember these days, or remember doing things like this, like we didn’t have a lot of trust that like the car was really coming, we didn’t really know how it was getting there. Today, when you order a car, the little app says, I’m going to tell you where your car is in one minute and you watch the little thing, move and move and move and we located your driver and we’re going to tell you who he is. And another minute bing, bing, bing, here’s your driver all the way over here. And here’s the exact route that he’s taking to pick you up. And here’s how long it’s going to take to get you. And here’s how it’s impacting your ultimate destination. This is an example of operational transparency. It’s building trust by showing the steps of a process to ultimately achieve your goal. And we can do this inside the nonprofit sector in big ways and small ways. By big ways. I actually mean small ways. So like if you’re, if you’re, you know, goal is to is to, you know, create education opportunities in a rural community. And part of that involves getting computers there. How do you bring your donors along to show them the process of getting computers? Like, can you record a little selfie video on your phone? Like it does not need to be fancy people want behind the scenes content more than anything these days? How can you create more operational transparency to build trust, sustain motivation, and not always feel like you need to show your full mission fulfillment in order to be able to demonstrate impact? Okay, the last piece here is around recognition and appreciation. There’s a lot of conversation, there’s a big conversation here that’s very important around how do we avoid really over centering our donors, or, you know, placating our donors when it comes to recognition and appreciation. And that is a very important conversation. And I think it’s important to recognize that our brain releases endorphins when we are recognized and appreciated. And it doesn’t feel good to any humans to feel unappreciated. And so donor recognition and community building. And donor appreciation is a really important part of sustaining donor motivation over the long term, and to figuring out what that looks like for you in a way that’s really aligned with your organization’s values. But also activating these feel good hormones is a really critical component. One of the things that I really love to do with organizations is to send a little gift and by gift, I mean, it could be a little selfie video that you text the person, it could be a little email, it could be a poem that a beneficiary wrote, whatever it is something that recognizes their donation anniversary, they might not remember the date, it might not be important to them, but it’s it shows that it’s important to you that their involvement is important to you. And it creates this really special peak moment. I got too excited about the content and I’m looking at the time. So I’m going to go over these next few pieces quickly, but they’re really important. So DonorPerfect. You know, a lot of the work I’ve done with them over the years has been to really understand the capacity to segment and use really data driven approaches to be Feel belonging and connection. So we’ve been talking about how motivation is determined by how we feel in a moment and long term. And how and how we want to make donors feel is that they belong and that we see them and we recognize them for who they are and their identity. And so segmentation is a way that we can do this by looking at, you know, different categories of data and create more tailored approaches based on identity. And so I really want to encourage you, if you’re like, I don’t know, but I don’t know a lot about my donors, okay, ask them. There are so many different ways to do this, from from surveys, to interviews, to AV testing different messages, there are so many options available to you to help you start to create segments if you don’t already, or to test different segments to figure out who these different groups groups of donors are, and what they really want. And because we can’t go into too much detail here, we have another resource for you, I created this with DonorPerfect last year around identifying your donor segments. So take a photo of that, download it. And then this is a really important part to make sure that you’re really designing motivation around who people are and how you want them to seal and that personal identity piece, because that is going to do a better job of activating all of those different feel good hormones. So it’s me. And if you have been familiar with any of my work, you know that I will never talk about your donors and fundraising without talking about you. Because I think that everything comes down to fundraisers. And a lot of times you think you’re coming to my content to learn about fundraising. But what I also want you to learn about is yourself, and fundraisers. And I want you to understand that maintaining your spark is really critical to being able to spark others. So motivation always ebbs and flows. Like I said, and this is true for you, too. Sometimes you’re going to be the tortoise, sometimes you’re going to be the hare, you should not always be the hare, okay, nobody is always the hair. And so understanding and embracing the ebbs and flows in your fundraising motivation is what’s going to help you stay consistent in your efforts. Because if you don’t embrace the ebbs and flows, if you think, Oh, I’m always supposed to be the hair, then what’s going to happen is that when you’re not the hair, because you’re not always going to be the haircut, that’s not how things work, you’re going to start to experience self doubt. And you’re going to start to be start to have some narratives, I’m not doing everything I should be, I’m not as far along on this as I should be, I should be so much better at this, this should have happened already. Right? We should all over ourselves. And what happens when we start to do that, when that chatter and self doubt start to come in? What happens is that we start to disconnect, we start to pull back from relationships, we start to pull back from opportunities that would expose us to stimuli that might remind us that we aren’t as far along as we want to be. So what does that mean in terms of donor engagement and motivation, we start interacting with our donors, I did this really eye opening podcast, I’m with su chi Huang, I highly recommend you listen to it all about this, like what the relationship between motivation and self doubt, and what we do too, and what we should be doing to keep ourselves motivated. In moments of doubt, when we’re in tortoise motivation, there’s a lot inside there. Because if we can’t stay motivated, and I don’t mean hare motivated, I mean, tortoise motivated, if we can’t stay long term motivated, then we’re going to stop prompting our donors, we’re going to stop sparking them, we’re going to stop motivating them. And so we need to stay in connection with them. And the beautiful thing about connection is it increases motivation, not just for those donors, but for you to connection increases your motivation. So it might be your inclination, to withdraw, to hold back to not want to be exposed to those stimuli. But what you need as the fundraiser more than anything in those moments, is to connect with each other, and to connect with your donors and to be in community. The key to sparking donor motivation starts with sparking you. And I’m so proud and happy to be a part of this work with DonorPerfect helping to host this incredible conference where you’re gonna hear from so many of my favorite thought leaders and consultants in this space, my hope is that you leave here sparked, and that you it helps sustain you and you get to integrate these components, both into how you show up and how you support your donors over the long term. If you are new to my work and you want to learn more, my book is coming out later this fall, you can join the waitlist by clicking on that or taking a photo of that QR code as well. I also have a completely free community of folks who are looking to fundraise in fundamentally different ways. Here’s the QR code for that. Thank you so much. We have an amazing day and two days laid out for you so I cannot wait to get started. Let’s go Hi, Laurie. Hi. Hi.

Okay, so thank you for attending our first session of the day. And thank you so much for your time today, Mallory, we hope you had some great takeaways to begin your day and set the tone for what’s to come. Next up, we have fundraising ethics, why they should matter to you and your organization, and a presentation by constant contact. No matter what session you choose, you won’t, you will not miss any content since all sessions are recorded. So we’ll see you in a few. Thanks so much Mallory seemed a bit