Nurture: Mapping Donor Journeys for Stronger Connections

All right. Good afternoon. My name is Lori skip jack, and I am the training Operations Manager for DonorPerfect. Welcome to Kelly ramages session mapping donor journeys for stronger connections. One of Kelly’s passions is helping others learn and work towards achieving their goals. She Read More

All right. Good afternoon. My name is Lori skip jack, and I am the training Operations Manager for DonorPerfect. Welcome to Kelly ramages session mapping donor journeys for stronger connections. One of Kelly’s passions is helping others learn and work towards achieving their goals. She has the privilege of leading a fantastic team of training professionals, and loves watching them in action. Kelly has been training and partnering with nonprofit organizations for over 20 years. Seven years ago, she launched software University, the company wide, learning and development platform for employees to learn more about the company’s products and the industries they serve. In her spare time, she serves on the board of two small nonprofit organizations. Enjoys outdoor activities and spending time with her family. Before we get started, I have a few housekeeping items. Remember, you can download today’s presentation and the DonorPerfect fundraising guide from the details section to the right of the presenters window. Please submit your questions in the Q and A tab so we can address them during the session, and all sessions are being recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. So Kelly, the floor is all yours.
Wonderful. Well, thank you, Lori. And as a personal greeting, from me to you, welcome and thank you for joining me on this learning adventure that we have together for the next what is it about 27 minutes where we’re going to talk a little bit about donor journeys. So as we think about donor journeys, I think we can probably all agree that every single supporter that you have, that you engage with, will have a unique and special relationship with your nonprofit throughout their entire journey with you. And while that path won’t always be straightforward. You can certainly as a nonprofit and partner with them, plot out the basics of their journey, and you can do it ahead of time, so that you can kind of gently guide them through the steps it takes to join your mission. So before I dive into the ways that DonorPerfect can help you implement donor journeys. How many of you can relate to this tangled feeling this picture elicit? I would imagine many hands are probably popping up where I’m getting head nods, and I think we would all agree it’s not a fun feeling. So really, my challenge and my goal, in the next 20 minutes, we’ll see how I do is to give you a glimpse on how DonorPerfect can help you untangle some of your thoughts and ideas and be informed about your constituents and donors. We want you to stay connected to them. We want you to be able to engage with them, and we certainly want you to be able to nurture them to have meaningful relationships with you. So how can DonorPerfect help? Well, I believe it can certainly help with centralizing your donor data one place for all those critical interactions. We offer automated workflows. So this is going to give you the ability to make sure that you have timely follow ups and engagement with them, segmentation and personalization. I know this has been a theme in many sessions yesterday, and it will continue to be today, and this is going to give you the ability to target your message for the different donor segments. Integrated communication tools, we want you to be able to stay connected and do it effortlessly. So we offer email automation, event management and reporting, to mention just a few of them. Of course, any great fundraising CRM is going to offer the ability for analytics and reporting, and we know that that’s valuable, right? Because you want to track retention, upgrade success and re engagement, and then, of course, fundraising optimization is going to provide you the tools to identify giving trends and optimize appeals. Now I know that the topic that I am talking about can be daunting, and you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed. I know I did when I first started thinking about this, and I’m not in your shoes. I’m in a similar role, but not quite the same, but I absolutely believe that if we take a big concept and we break it down into small little pieces, it feels better. So I tend to use sticky notes, maybe mirror board if I’m feeling a little bit. More in the digital space. But the bottom line is, I’m breaking it down. And the great news about this is I absolutely know from working with many of you in my own experience, that small changes can absolutely make an exponential positive impact. So I’m going to encourage you to think about this scenario I’m about to share for 15 seconds. So 15 seconds to just really just stop and think about this. You spend x amount of minutes on data entry, right? So I’m going to just choose some numbers. I’m going to choose 20 minutes on data entry for a handful of constituents. So this might include things like the name entry, maybe assigning solicitors, informing the solicitors that they’ve been assigned a new constituent, creating the gift records, or at least making the gift record, sure the gift records get to the right records, thanking the donors, documenting next steps, and so on. So you can imagine that that takes time. But what if I told you you could take that down, reduce that time to maybe 10 minutes, maybe five, if we’re feeling brave, and that would be done by automating some of the work you’re doing through DonorPerfect. Really, what I’m saying is, and suggesting is that you have given yourself time to steward your donors in more meaningful ways. Would you consider it? I hope you would. I hope that’s why you’re here. So let’s dive in. So we know that there’s a lot of different donor journeys that we could define. I’m going to suggest three common segments of donors and their journeys, new donor, retained and upgrade and lapse donor and reactivation. Since my goal is to give you a glimpse on how DonorPerfect can be used to capture donor journeys in this valuable data, I’m going to demonstrate some of the stages of the new donor journey as my example when we hop into DonorPerfect. But keep in mind the principles and the elements that I am going to be describing apply to every single donor journey. We’re going to identify a segment, map out a path of common donor experiences for that segment that’s going to create a cohesive plan, but it gives you the ability and the option for personalization so that you can really tailor the experience with that particular person, but not getting overwhelmed by the volume of which you’re doing it. And of course, one of the key pieces in this is to be able to measure your success and identify some key metrics. So let’s take a closer look at our first donor journey, and we’re going to start with new constituents. So we know that acquiring new donors is hard work and sometimes can cost quite a bit of money, but we also know timing is everything. So imagine this. I don’t know if you can relate to this, but I certainly can, and I’m now a board member, so I’m guilty of doing it, but imagine a board member gives you the name of some prospects. These are great people. We need to build relationships with them. I know them. They’re going to be get behind what we’re doing. Okay, great. So you’ve been given that name, and you’re going to enter it into DonorPerfect. But now with a little bit of setup, a little bit of thought about what’s important to you for this particular kind of segment, you’re going to be able to sit back and watch DonorPerfect come to life. So what are some things that you might find available? Well, what about getting an alert or receiving updates in your inbox? Well, this can be done with Smart Actions and scheduled reports. Or what if you want to add these valuable new names, these new people that you’re just getting to know, if you want to include them in your welcome email series? Well, we can do that too, using the email integration with constant contact. Or what if you’re one of those people that we you would like to see kind of what’s happening in the moment for that particular person? Well, great news. Because of the way DonorPerfect can be structured, you can see exactly what’s happening right in their account, and it’s going to be at a glance. You’re going to be able to see that movement from identification, maybe, to engagement.
So let’s fast track this a little bit, and let’s consider when they become donors and they give their first gift, that’s like a Hooray, right? Okay, so this is going to move them along. So we’re going to go from identification to engagement now to contribution, but we know it’s critical. It’s really important that when they give any gift, but especially that first gift that we really try and acknowledge and interact with, the donor really within 48 hours of receiving that gift. So the good news, and it is good news, is that DonorPerfect can help you meet this critical step, but we also know that you want to make sure that you do it with a personal. Touch their name, maybe include their gift amount. This can all be done. So absolutely, you need to be informed when that first gift is given, additionally, then after that first gift is given, and you thank them with that personal and timely acknowledgement. Well, then you want to stay engaged. You want to stay informed. So let me just pause for a second and rhetorical question here, but what does the first 30 days of a new donor joining your organization? What does your strategy look like? And it doesn’t need to be complicated, but it can be very simple. Okay, well, they’ve given or their first gift, we’ve acknowledged it, and we want to make sure that they get a welcome email, or we want to make sure that they get a phone call. So just you want to think about small steps, but then turn it into actionable alerts and DonorPerfect, well, one of the things that is really important to kind of keep in mind is being informed. Now I’m doing a lot of talking, and you might be thinking, yeah, yeah, yeah, but we haven’t seen DonorPerfect yet. Well, let’s hop into DonorPerfect, and I’m doing a little bit of a demonstration of some of what I’ve just highlighted. Now as we hop into DonorPerfect, I’m going to be showing you different options that may or may not be possible in your system, but it is possible in some of your systems. So for example, if you’re a busy director, you might want to be able to see at a glance what type of donors do you have in your different donor journeys. So this is one example where you might have and create a visualization of your donor journey data. Some of you might not want a visualization or not have that capacity in your DonorPerfect plan. That’s okay, because guess what? One of the things that everybody can do is create shortcuts to your favorite report. So here is another kind of option that you all have, that I have access, I can put my go to report so I can stay informed immediately. And when I look at this report, and this is just one of many, this is an easy report where I can quickly see who are those new people, those new names that I want to get to know. And many of these reports, not all, but many of them can be scheduled. So great news. You don’t even have to log into DonorPerfect, although I would encourage you to log into DonorPerfect. You could get these emails that are going to include those reports. So what I am highlighting right here, right now, is being informed. You could do this for new donors. You could do this for your retained donors. You could do it for your lapsed donors, but this is just a report. Now, let’s dig into the data and see exactly kind of how it is going to work. So this is going to be super fast, because remember, this is a power session, and I’m going to go relatively quickly, but make sure you check out our guidebook and the resources in the Learning Center for more information. Okay, so taking my new donors, and I have my new constituent for planning, and I have this wonderful person, Bill Brown. Okay, so I’m gonna hop into Bill Brown’s record, which I pre loaded just to save a little bit of time. You know, when you only have 20 minutes, you need to save time wherever you can. And what I’m looking at here is Bill Brown’s account. Okay, so I’m starting out I don’t have a lot of information. Shame on that board member for not giving me everything, but I have some critical information here, and one of the things that I’m scrolling down to is an option of displaying kind of where they’re at right now. So I can see that Bill Brown is on the new donor journey in the stage of engagement, and that happened in January, and there hasn’t been a lot of traction, but it’s it’s not a loss. Where is this information coming from? Well, where this information is coming from is context. So in DonorPerfect, context is all about interactions, where and how you’re interacting with them, and the information is going to tell me exactly what happened and when it happened. So one of the things that I did is they’ve been identified when I entered them into the system, and then Bill Brown was included in an email. And hey, great news. He didn’t just get it, he actually opened it. So how did this all happen? Well, let’s just quickly show you that with the integration of DonorPerfect and Constant Contact, I’m able to create what’s called a dynamic list. So again, I can’t explain all of this in great amounts of detail, but the bottom line is, as soon as I add something into the system with a dynamic list, it’s going to pick it up and shoot it over to constant contact in the email campaign that they’re part of. And the next time I send out my due donor communication, Bill Brown would have been included. Okay, so that is taking advantage of one solution I. Put the information in, and it’s starting to do the work for me. But really, how did that information get in there without me keying it in? Well, let’s just go back here a moment. Let’s go back to Bill Brown, and let’s say that he finally gave his first gift. This is reason for celebrating, so if I add a new gift, okay, so we’ll say that he gives his gift. I’m going to enter in the required information and I’m going to save it. And like any trainer, when you’re doing live training, you hope the stars are aligned and everything’s going to work as you expect it to. But if everything’s working as I expect, when I go to contacts, we’ll check that out. Now there is an added touch point, and he’s moved to the next stage in the new donor journey. How did that happen? Well, how that is happening is with some really cool features in DonorPerfect Calculated Fields, is one of them. And then Smart Actions. Smart Actions are those rules, those kind of behaviors that you wanted to keep track of, and it’s going to update the data for you. All right, then this would move along. I would certainly make sure I send out my thank you, and that’s going to move him into stewardship and so forth and so on. So you can see very quickly that you’re watching my hands do the work and how DonorPerfect is being updated. All right, I need to be mindful of the time, so I’m going to scoot back here to talk about some of the other functionality that’s available and be used in all of the donor journeys of retention, as well as lapsed Okay, so moving on here. Let’s talk about retained and upgrade. And again, this is just going to be a conversation, because we know that this is an important group of constituents, your current donors. They make up the donor retention upgrade journey. And this is any one in my definition of two or more gifts, and they haven’t lapsed. So this is a journey they will spend most of their time and how you as their community are going to stay connected with them and informed about them. Now we know that the current donor retention rate is hovering around 43% but I would imagine, like most successful fundraisers, you know what the average is. You know what your averages are, and you want to try and improve it. So how can DonorPerfect help? Well, one of the things that we’re going to suggest, I’m going to suggest, is that you’re going to take those same principles of moving them along, identify what is the action? Where can Donor Perfect help? You stay informed, so that you can stay in touch with your community, you can have important information alert you, because remember, maybe you want to know that they’ve given a second or a third gift, or maybe there is an upgraded gift. So we want to make sure that you make repeat donors feel special. So how might you do this? Well, this might be done maybe with a very specific communication, because if the data is in there, you can do a targeted communication. You can share impact stories. And so this might be utilizing that fundraiser bot that I know you’re going to hear about if you participated in Sarah’s session, and then also in Sean’s later today.
Additionally, you like to see the progress towards the goal. It makes you feel good. It makes them feel good. You can utilize information like, hey, donor, did you know that your lifetime giving is x? They may not have remembered what they’ve done. And then you can proceed to tell them how their their partnership, has helped you and helped you reach your mission. One of the things that I think is super important are those kind of upgraded gifts and donors as well. You want to make sure that you are celebrating. I mean, everybody loves to celebrate. To me, upgraded gifts are one of those reasons. So interacting with donors in a personal way is key. And with data in DonorPerfect, you can use it to create targeted segments. You can drop it into the email communications, into the direct mail communications, and I know for me, when I am treated that way, I’m more engaged, I’m more likely to give again. Maybe if I have the means, I can even upgrade my gift. Now the reality is we also have this third donor journey of lapsed donors. There are many reasons a donor may lapse in their giving, but we really we want the chance to course correct, right? I think we do. I think being informed on a regular basis of those who have lapsed or are about to lapse is really like receiving a gift you weren’t expecting. You have the opportunity to qualify the reasons for. And then create a targeted fundraising effort to learn more. And this might be handled with, again, another type of email campaign. Maybe you want to provide volunteer opportunities as another way to re engage with those who want to support you, but they just can’t afford to financially give. This can all be captured as data in DonorPerfect and utilized to hopefully re engage them, maybe in a different way, or back on the giving trend. So by having easy access to see which stage the of the journey that the lapsed donor is on, you can implement very strategic efforts to move some of them back. Now, I know you’ve heard about this. I know if you have any experience in the fundraising space, and even if you’re new, if you just stop and think about this for yourself, personalizing the experience is really important. So what do I mean when I say personalizing the experience? Know your donors, what motivates them? What interests do they have? What are their giving patterns? So one approach is potentially create donor personas, or fictional representations of the donor groups you’d like to connect with. Another option is segmenting your list group your donors based on shared attributes, like their donation frequency, maybe the demographic factors or the communication preferences. And everything I’ve suggested so far is really kind of the type of information that could be and should be, in my opinion, captured in DonorPerfect so that you can do this fairly easily. You want to make sure that the asks that you are asking of your donors fits who they are. So you want to use the donors giving history and capacity so that what you’re asking is actually achievable, whether that’s a financial gift or a gift of time, make sure that you’re customizing that thank you experience. Now I’m suggesting videos as another tool. There are a lot of free options out there. There’s also the option of an integrated solution with DonorPerfect called DP video, no matter what you’re doing, make sure that you’re saying thank you with those personal touches. And hey, by the way, it doesn’t need to be complicated. It can be done with a phone, social proof it, I don’t know that’s a fancy way for me to say peer pressure. Think about it. Highlight how other similar donors are engaging with you, like, what are other people who are like me doing? And then maybe speak to it. And then, of course, a clear call to action, whatever it is that you’re asking them to do, make sure that it’s clear, because we know think about yourself if it’s not a clear call to action, the likelihood that you’re going to do anything is very slim to none. All right, now, no matter how simple or complex your donor journeys may be, one of the things that I think is really integral is making sure that you have some key metrics so that you can measure your success and also give yourself the opportunity to make adjustments when necessary. So a couple of key metrics that I’m going to throw out there, and this is not a complete list, is going to be things like your donor retention rate. So for those of you who might be new to fundraising, the donor retention rate is simply the percentage of donors who give again in a specific time period. And why is this important? Well, retaining existing donors is more cost effective than acquiring new one, new ones and retained donors are likely to increase their giving donor lifetime value. Well, this really is the total net contribution a donor is expected to make over their lifetime. And this is important because it’s going to help prioritize donor relationships and acquisition strategies. Conversion Rate. It’s the percentage of people who complete a desired action, whatever that is. It could be filling out a form. It could be opening an email. It could be giving a gift, average gift size. This is one that I think gets overlooked, but it’s simply the average amount donated per gift, and this is going to help you track the impact of your fundraising efforts over time and identify trends among your donors, a donor engagement score. We heard a little bit about Moise suggesting that, and there’s many ways that this could be done, but this is really a composite score based on various engagement factors. This could be donor frequency, volunteering, event attendance. Now, again, I’m throwing a lot of things out there, and time is clicking by here, but I just want to show you very quickly that some of these key metrics that I’ve mentioned are available right here on the organization dashboard. So I’m going back into DonorPerfect, and I’m going to. Quickly. See, mind you, this is a training system. So these are not pretty shiny numbers, but I can see exactly what’s happening, the donor retention rate, the average gift, the donor lifetime value. Now, if you’re a data nerd like myself, one of the things is, this is nice. This is a pretty picture of where I’m at, but if I were to hop into the Report Center and take a look at a powerhouse report called the Comprehensive donor revenue analysis that all of you have. What I am going to see very quickly is a lot of valuable data that I can, like, dig into. I can put my hands in there and start figuring out what’s going on with my donors, and you can see I have active donors, retained donors, tucked into this. Guess what is our donor retention rate? We’ll see that there we’ll see the donor lifetime value, and there’s I could keep going, but time is my enemy right now. It’s going too quickly. But this is one report of many where you can see how are you doing, you can make those course corrections. So I’m hopeful that with this quick power session, you are able to see that DonorPerfect truly has the ability to help you with your donor journeys. It provides a space for you to mindfully map common donor experiences and keep it at a personal level. One of the things that I encourage you as we soon part ways is to not try and come up with a complicated donor journey, take maybe one donor journey and maybe identify one segment, and how would DonorPerfect be able to help you be more informed in a more timely manner of where those donors are at. We have a lot of resources available in the Learning Center, and the learning center can be accessed in a variety of ways, but right from your product. And if you search for donor journey, you’re going to find a lot of great resources. Thank you for joining me in this power session. And I think Lori, we might have time for a question or two. I don’t actually know, but this has been wonderful, and I look forward to hopefully interacting with some of you in the future.
We do have, we have a minute or two for some questions. The first one, Ebony asked, How can I create a smart action that emails a staff member when they become the solicitor for a record, but that same action isn’t triggered every time the same record is updated in other fields.
That is a great question, and it’s all going to be driven based on a selection filter. So with that specific question, talking about solicitors, if you are not capturing who is the assigned solicitor, maybe Portfolio Manager, major gift officer, whatever you know, language you might use in your organization. I would encourage you to do that. So in this system, it might appear as a bit of a drop down. And I think I have solicitor in this system, but you can imagine, I can’t, of course, find anything that I need right now. But what we would do is we would say, Okay, well, Kelly Ramage is the solicitor. And when Kelly Ramage is the solicitor, DonorPerfect, and there’s a new record created, then only inform her of that. And that smart action would look something like, I’m just going to highlight one here the elements. So here a smart action is made up of two parts. So I would basically say when a new constituent is entered and saved, and I would apply a filter that’s going to be the key, so that only that person gets informed about those kind of behaviors. And then once that trigger, that behavior that’s taking place in DonorPerfect is encountered then, whoops, there we go. See it’s telling me it’s doing its job. Okay?
What would happen is, in the actions, I would be able to send an automated email to a person, or if there’s you know, the executive director or the director of development that also needs to be informed, and I would enter in their email address, and that is how you would build that smart action.
Okay, all right, I don’t think we have time for any more questions, so I think I’m going to close out the session. So I want to thank everybody for attending Kelly’s session today and for Kelly and thank Kelly for presenting. We hope you had some great takeaways from this. I know. It was quick, but there was a lot. Next up, we have Donna Mitchell with maximize major donor impact, and Amanda cherdinsky With transform data into meaningful donor engagement. So we’ll see you there in a bit. Thanks all.