Rescue Mission Fundraising Summit Recording Day 1

0:03  

All right, I think we’re gonna get started here, it looks like our attendees are starting to level out. We’re certainly excited to kick off this conference. My name is Darrell Moser, I’m Read More

0:03  

All right, I think we’re gonna get started here, it looks like our attendees are starting to level out. We’re certainly excited to kick off this conference. My name is Darrell Moser, I’m the Business Development Manager at DonorPerfect. And I’ve been here for five years, my focus really is in finding partner products that help extend the functionality of DonorPerfect CRM for fundraising. And in doing so, I’ve ended up working with a number of partners that have worked really well inside of the rescue mission space. I’ve been attending the Ag rm and what is now transformed into some new conferences, but very familiar with the space and some of the technical requirements. And we’re particularly excited about sharing some of those technologies and ways to make things more efficient inside of the rescue mission space. It certainly has been a challenging year for everyone. But certainly, in 2020, it’s been a unique challenge for rescue missions as well. So we’ll touch on that a little bit. And let that be sort of the foundation of some of the topics that we’re going to be covering today. So one of the things that, of course, I’m sure this industry is fully aware of is the impact of homelessness in the US, over 580,000 are homeless, and that represents an increase in 2020 of 2%. While 2% Sounds like sort of a small number, I know I serve on the board of a social service agency, it ends up taking shape in different ways, as far as the impact that it has in your organization. In some areas, we’ve ended up seeing the need for food and food banks tripled in its demand for those that are in need. And so that all ripples into the rescue mission space, as well. As people end up being closer to the cusp of being homeless. And the challenge that faces the rescue missions is with that increased need, what’s happening to funding. And while we’ll talk a little bit about the results that we’ve seen across the DonorPerfect client base, it does always present a challenge as to how will the rescue mission end up finding its next place where it can find efficiencies where greater funds to be raised. So we have some speakers that are going to be presenting solutions as well as coming from the rescue mission space. We’re going to have a great story in terms of how the Keystone rescue mission ended up bringing some things in house to help balance that funding versus needs. The other thing that I think a lot of people are asking right now, and it’s been just a couple of weeks since the pandemic is starting to loosen up the states themselves have actually changed a little bit on what some of their restrictions are, how is fundraising going to change how rapidly we all move into this virtual space, virtual for events and gallows? We’re now starting to see many of the conferences are starting to come back again, either in live or hybrid format. But what’s going to be the mindset of the donor. One of the things we’re going to touch on, I said, was the results of 2020 that we’re seeing inside of the data. And even though the human services area has not experienced as much of a tail off as some of the other sectors of the nonprofit space have. What’s going to happen after this will donors end up experiencing a burnout, and will they be harder to reach? So one of the things we’re going to try and really focus on here is problems and solutions. How can DonorPerfect help, at least in the technology area? We are a software company? And how can we actually improve on the efficiencies by which the rescue missions can pursue their goals and serve their mission? So I mentioned a little bit about the fundraising benchmarks report inside of our chat, we will actually have a link uploaded so that you can go ahead and download this report. We took a look at all of the data in 2020. And compared to year over year. And one of the things that we were trying to find out is what was the impact that the pandemic ended up having on the various sectors and the sizes of organizations that were out there. As you can see arts and culture and education had a significant drop off. And this is our growth and giving index is really trying to monitor year over year, how fast things are growing. Well obviously they ended up shrinking in that past year and the only sector that we were really able to see any kind of gain wasn’t human services. We have over 9000 clients 2300 of those are huge In services that had ended up weighing in on this. So it is a fairly sizable dataset that we ended up working with here. But it presented, you know, the gravity of the problem that nonprofits were seeing in 2020. And even to amplify that a little bit more, if you take a look at this graph, which is a month over month representation of what the Growth in Giving look like by sector, the dark blue line is the human services, which fortunately, remained a little bit more level than some of the other nonprofits that are out there. But there still was definitely a drop off, kicking off in February and March of 2020. And then gradually started to make some, some gains again, and pick itself back up again. But the question really will be, what does that look like, you know, after people believe that we’ve perhaps emerged from the pandemic or are coming out of it.

5:54  

One of the things that we’re super excited to announce is the DonorPerfect community now has a new section called the rescue mission user group, where anybody who’s attending this session or any of our rescue mission clients, can go ahead and login and start a discussion. One of the things that I feel pretty strongly about is that rescue missions do fundraise differently than a lot of the other nonprofits that we have. rescue missions are very dependent on direct mail, we’re going to hear some great case studies about that, going forward that other nonprofits don’t have that same reliance on it, they don’t have the same success with that. So there are definitely some unique challenges to being a rescue mission and trying to fundraise inside of this space. But and we welcome you to start up new topics and discussions inside of this user group. And again, it’s inside of the DonorPerfect community. Any of you who are existing clients today, if you go ahead and log into DonorPerfect, you’ll know how to get to the community and you can find the section in there. And for our conference, we are super excited to announce that bombas has helped to support this summit. And they’ve put together 500 pairs together with some that DonorPerfect has purchased for 500 total. We’re going to have a drawing at the start of our roundtable on day two on tomorrow. And one organization will win those 500 pairs for your clients. And Mama’s is certainly a unique brand, but it’s out there 48 million items had been donated, and their program is specifically geared towards helping the homeless. Just a quick overview of what we’re going to touch on today, as well as tomorrow so that you can line your schedules with the discussions. We’ve got our keynote this morning. From Justin Behrens, the executive director at Keystone Rex rescue mission, I got a chance to interview him months ago about how he ended up transforming their fundraising process and direct mail program and instituted some really, really great new resources on how to get the word out inside of their community. And we’re seeing some successes, not just in terms of the total dollars, but really in what the net is, in terms of what they were spending to achieve those specific results. So I think I’m certainly looking forward to hearing more about that, that detail. And then we want to do a little deeper dive on direct mail. How are people processing cheques and what have we been able to see in terms of improvements, some of the organizations that we know that use a cheque scanning tool have been able to recapture 2000 hours of labor inside of their team that they can then spend on other areas that will help them to fundraise more effectively, or by reducing their lockbox fees. So we’ll talk a little bit about how that product works. And where you will end up seeing the savings just so that everybody can sort of picture how that might fit into their organization. A little bit later today, we will talk about volunteers. And what is the relationship between a good volunteer system and DonorPerfect fundraising management. We’ll have Brian and Paige speaking from volunteer local, they’re a product that actually interfaces with DonorPerfect. So you can see the number of hours that your volunteers have put in together with your fundraising efforts all in one view inside of the DonorPerfect constituent record. And they have a couple of missions that they’ve put their solution in their two together with DonorPerfect that have really had some great results in terms of their efficiency and management. And then the finish up today, we’re going to close with email marketing design. From one of the best speakers that we’ve ever had in our DonorPerfect conference. Matt Montoya from Constant Contact is going to talk a little bit about how you can engage and motivate and grow your mission through an effective email campaign. As many of you know, Constant Contact is bundled with most of our larger packages in DonorPerfect, which many of the rescue missions would be using today. Hopefully, you’ll find good value, whether you’re Constant Contact Us or otherwise that you can still do. Just get the most out of what your messaging is, it’s going out to your constituents. A quick overview for tomorrow, we’re going to kick it off again at 1230. Quick little welcome code of the day’s events. And then we’ll speak about recurring giving, how to really unlock that and bring fundraising that crosses over the different generations that you might be seeing in fundraising, how we might be able to reach millennials with some of the micro giving concepts that are out there that are more palatable to a millennial. So hopefully, you’ll tune in and watch Kelly’s presentation on how to set that up inside a DonorPerfect. And then one of the other pieces we want to talk about is major gift fundraising. After you’ve done all those direct mail campaigns, and you’ve ended up acquiring new donors and people that you can reach out to knowing how much to ask for, creating a major gift campaign can have a huge impact on your bottom line. For years DonorPerfect was a member of the Giving USA and giving Institute where there were studies and still major major fundraising. Major gift fundraising is one of the key ways that you can build your total fundraising dollars more quickly than some of the other campaigns and events that you might spend your time with. So Frank from donor search, and Kelly will present on that just talk about how the features inside of DonorPerfect can work to do that, as well as some of the best practices that you may find as far as creating a process to review the donors that you have. And then lastly, we will finish up day two with a roundtable discussion, where we will bring a panel together of our speakers as well as DonorPerfect experts will take your questions through the q&a inside of our our webinar presentation tool and look forward to providing you with some timely freeform content and be responsive to whatever questions you may have. So that said, I am really really excited to announce our keynote presenter, Justin Behrens from Keystone rescue mission there is Hey, Justin, how are you? Ellie doing? All right. So I am going to give the reins over to Justin here. And he can walk through how the Keystone mission had a fantastic success. Bringing some new functions in house. Thanks.

12:25  

Thank you. I want to thank DonorPerfect for letting me speak to everyone here. And thank everyone for joining us. Let me start off first saying that I won’t be taking questions today. But I’ll be here tomorrow during the roundtable and if you have any questions, feel free to ask me then, if you can make it then my email is right here, it’s director@keystonemission.org. Feel free to shoot me a message. One of my big things is important. I think we have to work as a team to really get out there and get the donors to come in and really get the message of what we’re doing as rescue missions out there to the public so that they understand what’s going on. Also, let me tell you a little bit about Keystone mission. We’re 15 years old, we’re out in northeastern Pennsylvania, the population that we are around our area is coal mining, when you think about the coal mines back in the 1800s. That’s where this all started in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where people did a lot of the coal mining. It’s a lot of family oriented areas. It’s very Catholic based. And people really care about the community in which we live. And so I came on board about two years ago Keystone mission as their executive director, CEO, and no one really knew about Keystone mission. That was one of the things that really kind of got to me, I was a social worker for 15 years. If I knew about Keystone mission when I was a social worker, I probably wouldn’t utilize it. But I didn’t even know what it was when I applied for this job. Didn’t know what they did, didn’t even know what rescue missions did in the world. And three days later, after getting hired as Executive Director and CEO, I was shipped out to citigate conference and really found out what rescue missions do. And I was blessed. And it was an amazing opportunity. And I got entrenched into this whole direct mail. I was overwhelmed. There was so much they were telling me about direct mail, the ins and outs of it. And like most rescue missions, we use an agency to provide that direct meal process. So what I did was I started number crunching and I started looking at the numbers and I thought to myself, is it possible to do this in house? Could I do the same product, give the exact same product doing it in house and not affecting our revenue source coming in? Like Donald said before you know direct mail is something that we utilize and this is like the backbone of our some revenue. And so I was very nervous. I approached my board about this, I have a very good board that they backed me and they said, Justin, we trust you, what you think is the way to go, you know, we’ll work with you. And more importantly than my board, and more importantly, then my staff and Ryan, Mary Ryan Murray Ryan Buchanan’s on here also, as my development director. Not only did I utilize them, but more importantly, I used God. And I prayed. And I said, God, give me a call and give me a message. Tell me what you want me to do. And so today, I want to talk about four things, I want to talk about the message, I want to talk about the partners, I want to talk about the cost. And then the follow up. These are the four steps that God brought on me when we came when it came to direct mail. It was a very lengthy process. And I really wanted to make sure that what we were doing, we were being good stewards of God’s money, and that we were using the donors’ money that they donated to us in an effective way. Because the last thing I wanted to do was do it in house and lose everything and find out that our revenue went down. So it all started off with a message, right? And so he’s still on a mission.

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Probably not different from any other rescue mission, we try to help as many people as possible, right, we want to make sure that we’re making a change in the community. We’re trying to make sure that we do good. And then we showed our Christian values that, you know, we care and that that’s the way that we are and we want to make sure we are helping people in the right direction. Well, what’s interesting enough, is that here at Keystone mission, we sat down and we said, you know, are we really doing what we say? Is that who we are, and what we do? And so we’re sending out these direct mailer pieces out to the community, and they’re getting them and this is the agency that we were using, and they were reading it, and then they love these the these are the statements that were coming out the papers. But the question I asked the board, and I asked my staff, and I asked our volunteers, and even when, as far as asking our guests is, what are we doing? What is it exactly that we want to tell people here at Keystone mission and what we wanted to do? And that’s what came to us to find our vision. And our president of our board likes to always call it the mission of the mission. And I like to say that we tried to find what is our focus? What is it that Keystone mission, or rescue missions do? We’re known as we do food distribution, right, so we give out multiple bags of food every single day, during the whole COVID time, we gave out over 450,000 pounds of food, we give out clothing, we do that continuously every single month, we give our kids clothes, every single month, we go out to the community where the homeless army, hand them meals, and share the gospel with them, we go out and we do reaching out outreach into the community for the homeless, we have a day center where people come and say, for respite care, so that we can help them move forward and get them connected to resources. And we’re starting a shelter where we’re going to have a men’s shelter. But the problem is, we’re scattered everywhere, right? And our donor base and our people that are vested into our organization, they’re getting lost in the message. And they’re like, wait a minute, I’m donating giving them food. But then now I see that oh my gosh, I just saw on television and on a commercial or on a newscast. And they’re talking about doing a cold blue shelter. And they’re having a cold blue shelter where they have 50 people coming in, but I thought they were doing food, and our message got lost, and the vision got lost. And so I said to the board, we need to come up with a strict vision of what it is that we want to do? What is it that we’re going to get out to the public and tell the public? What is. And so we came up with the conclusion. By the way, this is prior to sending out any messages in house. This is prior to doing anything we wanted to do our research first, before we execute. And so we came up with the vision that was going to be helping those that are hurt, those that are homeless and transforming their lives. And that’s it, period. That’s the message that we wanted to put out to the public. Now that we have that message, and now that we have that focus, we now can say no, we’re not the ones that are giving out the food. Because we don’t want to enable people, we want to pull people into our direction. And so the next thing we wanted to look at is how do we target the market who we are dressing to? So we did extensive research and I’m going to be talking about this a little later in the slideshow here. We looked at who our donor is right? Are we looking at a 30 year old male or are we looking at a 50 year old couple? Are we looking at those that are Christian based? Are we looking at those that donated before? These are the things that we started looking at. And we started using programs to start extrapolating all that information, and really coming out with exactly who our target audience is. Who is it that knows who Keystone mission is? Who knows what we do, and who it is that’s going to be vested in Keystone mission and be a partner with us and moving in the right direction. The other thing we did was, and I should probably put this down as number four, because we started changing the language that we use here at Keystone mission. And mind you again, this is all before we send out anything in house. And so what we did was, we started changing, instead of calling them donors, we call them partners, instead of calling them clients or anything like that, we call them guests. And we started showing this family atmosphere in this partnership, and this, this working together as a team as cohesiveness. And that language started coming out in our direct mail. And so now we want to ensure that we were clear and precise in our message, what is it that we really wanted to do? And who do we want to talk to? And how is the language that we’re going to be using? Once we’ve established that we were ready to start then doing in house direct mail? Now, a lot of us were very scared here. She still mentioned doing the direct mail. I heard from a lot of my co workers that you know, it’s nervous in that, you know, what are the legs that we have to use? What are the steps that we got to take? How can we, you know, make this happen? Again, the what God is successful and got us in the right direction and moved us in the right direction was the partnerships. And that’s what I’m going to talk next about partnerships. So the first partnership we have is DonorPerfect. We obviously needed a platform that we could utilize where we could get a lot of the donors to come on board, a lot of extrapolate the information, right? We have a lot of input coming in. But we wanted to get the output to see what it looks like. We wanted to see where we were, as of 2019, and see what the numbers look like. So that we know a benchmarks as we go into 2020 and 2021. Are we doing better? Or are we doing worse? What are we looking for? And so we set up a lot of reports to make sure that we’re getting on the right track and doing what we need to do. The next thing is check scanning, you’re gonna be hearing about them later today. We decided to go on board with Czech skin. And why do we do that is so much that it relieves a staff member for us, right, I’m always paying a staff member prior to doing this, that would have to put in all of our solicitations, slips in, put them through DonorPerfect, put them in the computer, doing all that kind of stuff by hand. But using the check, scan and save time that I can now utilize that individual for in house mail. So now I started shifting our resources and shifting all of our good stewardship of our money into a direction where that we can now effectively produce a mailing piece. The next piece was if we’re not going to be using an agency to do direct mail, we need someone to be able to print our mail. And so we were blessed enough that God connected us with an agency up here, or a company up here in northeastern Pennsylvania, called PDQ, which they were the ones that worked with us to become the partners with us in printing our mail. Now, myself, my development director, we’re not familiar with the printing companies. Now we are doing this for multiple years. Now we understand what does it mean by RH? Or what does it mean by one black one? Color? What does it mean to black? What does it mean by eight and a half by 11, eight and a half by you know, we learned all these terms by over the time working with PDQ. And so what we did was we started developing with them a really good partnership. And what I loved about it, it was is that it was a partnership not only that they built with us, but they built with check skin, because all of our printing needed to have the barcodes on the bottom of our mailers for check scan to scan through. They also had to partner with DonorPerfect because we’re extrapolating all of our donor mail lists to PDQ so that they can mail them out. So this partnership was starting to work and starting to develop. Again, we were not mailing out yet we wanted to make sure that we got all of our research done and our ducks in a row. Obviously, we were another partner because this would never have happened if Keystone mission didn’t decide to do this. And I’m going to skip right now, donor search because that’s what we use after we started doing mailing. And then third party marketing agencies I’ll talk about a little bit later

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when we utilize them after the mailings. So after we built these four partners that you see in numbers one through four, we then said you know what, we’re ready to do mailings. And so we said what do we need to do for these mailers? And what we kind of do was almost like a little survey and said what do people want to hear about in northeastern Pennsylvania? And what is that message that we want to go to? And that goes back to our original thing is find your vision. We wanted to say who we are, what we do, and what we’re about. And so what we did was, we decided that our first mailer was going to be about Keystone mission and what our vision is, it was going to set the tone for the next two years until now, and continuing on for the rest of our time of what Keystone mission is about and who we are. And so what we did was we started educating our donors. And all it was, was an eight and a half by 11, glossy piece of paper, that on the front of it was a very short message quick told about who Keystone mission was, what we’re doing. And on the back was a letter from us. And on the bottom was a solicitation slip. But the part that change was it was personal to Northeastern Pennsylvania. We showed people from Northeastern Pennsylvania, we shared stories from Northeastern Pennsylvania, it got people so connected, that when they saw a picture of one of the guests that came through our doors, people knew who that was because that was the person who was also on the streets, that they prior prior saw that was maybe begging for money or was holding up a sign for like, I know that person, or maybe they saw a volunteer on one of our solicitation direct mail slips, and said, You know what, I didn’t know that that person volunteered. And they told their story. So we started sharing personal stories, staying within our division, we didn’t deviate to food distribution, because that’s what we were driving away from, we didn’t go over into clothing distribution, we talked about transforming lives, and how we want people to come through our doors, and transform their lives to get them off the streets. And that was a message that we continually went through. And so my development director, Ryan, and I sat down and we said, Okay, we’re gonna lay out a 12 month plan, of what month is the message that we’re going to share, and each one of those messages are going to be almost piggybacking off the next. So we talked about Keystone mission. And then the next thing we talked about was when helping hurts. And the whole philosophy of helping hurts people understand why we chose to make this move of sharing this vision. And then we talked about how we’re going to transform lives. And then we also did a son where he shared a story with a guest. And maybe that guests will share the story of how they transform their lives and share their story, share their lives with the donors that we have. But interesting enough about that, is that we came up with this idea that you know, maybe we could do like a b2b continued story, where now not only do they want to donate to us, but they want to find out what is that next story that’s going to happen? Whatever happened to Sarah, whatever happened to Joe, you know, you told us about Joe being homeless, he told about him coming to Keystone mission and getting help. But I want to know about Joe, did he get better? Did he not get better. So it’s almost like that, you know, sitcom where it’s, you know, to be continued story of what happens next. And so we started sharing that. What’s awesome about this whole direct mail piece is, we can work now with what’s happening in the media. So good example. It got really, really cold here in January. And we opened up cold blue. And so we said, let’s utilize it. There’s showing TV interviews, and they’re showing all this stuff on the TV about people getting hurt and, and getting cold and, you know, frostbite and all this stuff. So we said, let’s change our message and direct mail to match to that cold blue and match to the whole weather incident that’s going on. And what that did was it worked as okay, we had free advertisement from the news media, but also piggyback off of our mailer. So it matched that. And so what happened was is it was almost like, oh, yeah, I remember in the news, we just heard about that yesterday about someone, you know, almost freezing to death and had to go to the hospital. And now a mailer comes out and talks about how Keystone mission is looking to help transform those lives through the cold weather and getting them through there. And so now we can start marketing and start dressing to those donors. Look, we’re working with the media, you know, we’re working with what’s going on in the problems in society, and really, really being that flexibility of changing that. The next piece we said was is okay, we kind of looked at our numbers, and we said it looks like that we’re doing a shotgun effect. And what I mean by that is, is that we’re sending out these mailers to everybody. And we’re trying to get as many people as we can, but we’re not and going back to the previous screen. We’re not

29:44  

targeting the market that we’re looking for. And that’s what we wanted to start doing. And so how we did that, we changed it into a shotgun effect or to a rifle effect. And so we use donor search. And what we did was we scanned all of our donors, and we said Oh, Okay, we know we have this mound 1000 donors, and we were actually I think was about 6000 donors that we scanned. And we said, Okay, this is what they donor, this is what they liked. This is who they were, this is where they live, this is the area, we broke it down. And we said, Okay, this is the target area that we’re looking at. This is the population that we’re looking at. This is who we’re going to focus on. And then we started using third party, third party marketing agencies, and that’s radio, TV and digital advertisement. And we started targeting those people. One of the things they say is you need seven touches before someone who actually understands who you are, and will actually be engaged with you. I have a kind of a philosophy that it takes about five touches for that to be the coffee table or the kitchen table talk. If you were to ask in 2019, the average donor or the average person who Keystone mission was, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you, they probably would be like I’m donating to a Christian organization. I’m a Christian. And that’s what I believe in. And they weren’t really truly donors of Keystone mission, because they there was no vested interest it was they only invested into us because we were Christian based, they knew that and because we help people, but they didn’t know what we did. And so what we did was we started sharing our vision on radio, TV, digital podcast, and we did everything that we could to really share that marketing tool of who we are. And I can tell you now, a good example is just a couple days ago, I went to a graduation, they had no idea who I was, I mean, I knew who the person was that was graduating, but the families that were there had no idea who I was. But when I sat there at their kitchen table, they’re like you work for Keystone mission, I saw this, I saw one of your mailers, I saw what you’re doing. And we became Kitchen Table Talk. And that when that happens, things start exploding, you can start moving in the right direction. And that’s where we are now. And so we utilize this, and how do we utilize it, our radio, our TV, our digital match that month of what our direct mail was going out. So of our direct mail, talked about transforming lives, and how we want to bring people in and move people in the right direction. It started sharing that message in the radio, the exact same thing, it started sharing that message in the TV the exact same way. It started sharing the digital outreach that goes there. And when I mean digital, I mean, Facebook, and when you go on our website pops up that little screen, or they go on to a screen and type in with a Google search, and it pops up on the bottom that advertisement, they start seeing the same message. And it starts resonating, it starts clicking. And they’re like, You know what, that’s something that could be along with. They’re not just a Christian organization. They’re not just an organization that helps people, they’re putting the homeless in, and they’re starting to transform their lives by getting them back on the working path by getting them back into a housing by getting them back and saving their lives from addiction. That’s who they are. They’re not just a Christian organization. This is what they’re doing. They’re doing all this wonderful stuff. And they’re vested into it. They’re being part of our team. So with all this being said, we decided that we wanted to start making a little changes with our mailing. And so my development director who is amazing at taking information and extrapolating and really say, Hey, Justin, I think we should go this direction. What do you think? And then I’d be like, no, no, maybe we should do this. And we start troubleshooting, we will always do one little change to see if a numbers would go higher, or they would go back. And so one of the changes, which you guys might think is silly. But to us now that we understand this whole mailing piece of it was we went from eight and a half by 11 to eight and a half, I’m sorry, in half, by 11 by eight and a half by 13. So we extended the size of our mailer. Now, how does that affect anything, it gives you more advertising space. It lets you not have everything cramped up. It lets things not look like you know how you have that wording. It’s all tight. And now let’s just spread it out. And analysis sends out a better message looking cleaner looking crisper. The other things we’re talking about, maybe we want to change the way our paper is right? It seems silly. Like you have this paper that’s you know, maybe regular printer paper, but now we want to go high speed gloss or whatever it may be sounds silly, but we try these little methods to see if people are like, Oh, wow, you know, it attracts people. A good thing that we did to change was is the envelopes that we mailed out, we would put pictures of our Keystone mission guests or volunteers or staff members on the envelopes. So now when they get in the mail, they’re seeing someone in their community that they already know. They know what’s going on. Oh, that’s Keystone mission. I remember that’s Josh. Josh works at Keystone mission. I know who he is. And so we started personalizing everything. None of these things are cookie cutter messages. They’re 100% written. And I’m going to talk a little later about time because that’s what people are like, well, it’s going to take you forever to do direct mail is going to take me He, at least, you know, for me to do a whole month, it’s gonna take me at least 15 hours to 10 hours to do. It doesn’t take that long. And I’ll explain a little bit later on the cost method of how much time it took us. But it personalizes the message. And that’s what sells, we found out here at Keystone mission into our population is that personal message, that we’re not looking at cookie cutter, they’re seeing real life people, real life changes, and they’re getting to where they need to go. So the cost, we took a six month span I took is my development director to give me the numbers of the worst six months in a row that we had. So this is what we’re looking at. So we look at the agencies, and I’m gonna go through number one, and we look at the agencies, we’re looking at production costs, that’s how much it cost us to print, six months of direct mail. And so you can see that it costs us roughly about and I’m going to raise everything up to the closest dollar I can hear. So about $36,894, it roughly cost us to do a six piece six month span mailer, when we did it in house, it costs us 22,488 or $489. That’s including mail, right, the stamp, that includes also the postage, and we’re roughly mailing out to about 6000 7000, anywhere between six to 7000. donors. So you can see that we saw automatically, right, whether we got revenue coming in or revenue not coming in, we already saved money on the the production cost of it. All right. And so then we looked at the revenue side of it. When we use the agencies over those six months, we were we roughly brought in about $352,607. Where after we did it in house, we brought in for over those six months. 409,820. So now, how does that revenue apply? There’s a couple of things. We noticed that in the revenue section of it, that we were seeing a lot more people were engaged and truly wanted to become partners when we did it in house. And how do I know that is that? If I take two years ago, and I’m looking at our numbers here that I pulled from DonorPerfect just this morning, if I looked at two years ago, we had about 6418 active donors. Now the numbers are about to shoot to you, you’re probably gonna be like, Oh, my gosh, something’s going wrong here. But to me, I’m happy with the numbers. Right now we presently have 505,194 active donors. Now our numbers dropped drastically, about 1500. Donors right. And span. Now you’re probably saying to yourself, oh, this is not going to work. We did direct mail, the numbers are going down what’s going on here? Two years ago, we brought in with that 6418 donors. We brought $714,600 in. So 6418 donors, we brought roughly about $714,000. This year with $500,194. Or sorry, 5194 donors 1500 donors less, we brought in $1,002,536. That’s over a $300,000 increase that we did over the two years by bringing in direct mail. The message sticks, the message was being heard that 5194 donors that care about Keystone mission that are partners of Keystone mission, and that are one with us. The other ones did not hear our message or didn’t want to be part of that message. But the 5194 donors, they are part of Keystone mission. They are Keystone mission. Oh that the average revenue dollar went up roughly about $80.

39:09  

Of that our gift donors per year raised about 1.5. So we went from about two donors to gift donors a year to about three gift donors a year for donor. So you’re seeing a vested interest, you’re seeing someone that has an interest in Keystone mission, someone that cares about Keystone mission, someone that wants to be part of Keystone mission as a donor, as someone who has a vested interest, that all goes hand in hand that they now want to be part of volunteers. So this whole product that we did in house that we did ourselves, not only did it affect the revenue piece of it, now we’re affecting our volunteer, and this is a rippling effect that keeps going on and on and on. So the only thing that we’ve set aside, Ryan came up to me and said, Well, we’re doing a great job with direct mail. Justin, how about you think about acquisition? And I’m like Ryan, Ryan, Ryan Ryan, we can’t do that. Position acquisition is like one of those big things. You know, we’re not the experts. We don’t know what how to do that there’s a lot of algorithms that they go through a lot of calculations. And Ryan beam, right. And that’s what’s that’s what’s great about having a good development director you can work hand in hand with. So let’s try to figure it out. Let’s see what we can do. And so what we did was, we said, okay, let’s give it a try. So we did acquisition. Now acquisition with the agency company, we roughly mailed about almost anywhere between 400,000 to 450,000 mailers in there. When we did acquisition in house, we roughly mailed about 150 to 200,000. Why less, it goes back to that whole shotgun versus rifle effect. We were sending our acquisitions to people that we know are would be donors to Keystone mission, we’ve found that pinpoint person using DonorPerfect using donor search, and using our third party agencies for the rifling effect, to get that perfect person who cares about and wants to partner with Keystone mission. So let me go over the numbers with this. And I call this the new donors piece I call targeting. So we look at it two years ago, we had about 1443 new donors, not too bad. And we brought in about $88,100. By board would be happy, that’s money coming in, that’s new donors coming in, we can cultivate them, we can take them, we can move them in the right direction. Presently, this year, we have about 820 new donors. So that’s roughly about an 800 donor decrease of new donors. Now, you would expect that going from 400,000, down to 200,000, in acquisition. But here’s the piece remember, we are targeting people that care about Keystone mission, our new donor revenue that we brought in was 227,227. That is a phenomenal increase that’s almost over $140,000 increase the average donor per donor. And with 141,443, donors was about $61 per donor. With the 820 donors that we got, the average donor was $277 per donor, we were targeting the donor or the partner that cares about Keystone mission, we’re getting good donors on the front end, so that the back end, we can start getting even better donors. So let me go up to time because my time is about no pun intended, my time is about to be ending here. When it comes to time, when we use the agencies, it took us about five hours of communicating back and forth, emails going back and forth to the agency and us really taking up a staff members time going through it, proofreading making sure it matches everything. But on the flip end of doing it in house, with Ryan and I takes about five hours to produce one piece from beginning to end to go out of the house. So I didn’t even lose any time in the whole piece. And I’m getting a better outcome and what I need the follow up. The other thing I added on to this because it’s important to understand, and why we have such an increase also in donor revenue coming in is our follow up. The first thing starts about phone calls. You remember about that guy that I told you about that processes all of our stuff the old way into DonorPerfect manually. And now we use check scan. And now his time is freed up, guess what his new job is. He now calls every one of our donors and talks to them doesn’t share about hey, we want you to increase your money, we want more money from you. He just wants to share about the good stuff that we do here the rescue mission and say, hey, what can I pray for you? He calls on people’s birthdays and sings happy birthday, happy birthday to them on the phone, we start showing them that we want to be partners with them. And he starts cultivating him and dating them. And that’s number five, they thought about dating and really building them up and and saying that we want to be partners with you. The other thing too is everyone that someone comes out and sends a message to us or gives us a donation they get a receipt. And then there were seen as just a thank you letter saying hey, thank you for everything that’s going on. And then on the bottom of that is another ask for money. We don’t want them to donate to it. But we’re finding out that our receipts are going higher. So the donations that are coming in from receipts are going even higher. personal letters, we always write a personal note on there. If someone else donates between a certain amount, I write a personal note on there and make sure Ryan donates on his level to a personal note. I would say hey, thanks for that partnership with this. Let me tell you about Joe and what’s going on and give a personal note. Every one of our new donors gets a phone call from the one of our donor relations people and we’ll call and welcome to our family and show that you are part of it. Keystone mission, because we can’t do this alone. It’s not the staff. It’s not Keystone mission, it takes a whole community to make this change in the rescue mission field. It’s not just the rescue mission, it’s the whole community. And we want to welcome aboard and show that, you know, hey, you’re part of this. And then we did them. And this is where we came into the hole.

45:20  

Donor search, and that we did we start donating our donors, we did well scans on all the donors that come in, we see what their net worth is, and we see where they are, so that we’re not just asking them for the little bit, we’re asking them for what they know that they can feasibly give. And we start building that relationship. During COVID time, I probably had more interaction with donors than I did when it wasn’t a COVID time. And one of the most short examples I want to give you is I, I used to, we would go out to dinner or out to lunch with some of the donors and talk about, you know, Keystone mission and date them and that type of thing, where you couldn’t do that during COVID. But you can DoorDash. And so we will do a thing where we will come in on and we would do this, whatever we’re doing right now this zoom or Skype or FaceTime each other, and at the same time we do DoorDash, where we can break bread together and share a meal and talk about Keystone mission and build that relationship. He’s so mission, we have to as a rescue missions, we can’t settle for what the status quo is, we need to continue to work outside that box, continue to move forward and continue to start making a change. Because around us, it will change. If we don’t change with it, then we’re not going to catch up and keep moving in the right direction. So I want to come up with some takeaways real quick. Number one, if you decide to go in house, you need to make sure you stay focused, clear and concise message. If you’re sporadic and you’re all over the place, you’re confusing your donors, you want to make sure that you’re clear, concise, to get that message across. You want to know who you’re speaking to DonorPerfect has donor well, that they partner with, you can use that program, and you can start really understanding who is that my donor who are they at whom I send that message to, I’m no longer going to do a rifle or shotgun effect, I want to do a rifle effect and pinpoint to those people who they are. Develop a plan on how you’re going to share that message. Ryan and I meet every while we meet more than every six months, but we meet six months and give us six months span of what is that message going to be? What do we want to share, we’re about to open up a 15 bed Transformation Center in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, we know that our next six months are gonna be a message of sharing what we’re doing in welfare, we want to share where the donors money’s going to ripping that place apart, renovating it, fixing it up sharing that message. So they understand what’s going on partnering with those that will make your life easier. We’ve partnered with all of these agencies and all these different departments so that it makes our lives easier. So that we can start working together as a team so that we can partner with the community and partner with everybody, and making sure that we get the right plan together. And making sure those partners are very, that lasts a lifetime, not just for a couple months, but our lifetime goal, you want to save on the production costs and increase on the revenue cost. That’s a no brainer. We proved it with ours here at Keystone mission. We know that can be done across the other areas, it just takes a little bit of energy and understanding and a little bit of that numbers game and finding out who those partners aren’t. So we can get to where you need to go. And the last piece is that seven touches keep getting out there sharing your message, not only does you do direct mail, but you got to do it in other directions to get that message across. So that people understand who you are and what your message is. I truly feel God put on me that this is you know, in house can do it. And we know and I put all my faith in God ever since I you know got baptized I put all my I submit to Him and every direction that he tells me is where I’m gonna go. And I truly ask that you guys pray each and every one of you and say maybe in house is the way I need to go. And maybe that’s the direction that I do want to go and partner with all these other programs in these in these groups that are out there that are here to make sure that you get into that direction and you move that direction to make it easier for you. By I gave you my email before I’m gonna go right back to that screen. For those that didn’t get it. My emails director at Keystone mission.org I am so blessed that each and every one of you on the rescue mission field are doing amazing work. I’m blessed that I’m part of your family. I pray for each and every one of you. And I hope that you do an awesome job making change. And if you have any questions about in house direct mail, I am more than happy to help you guys out. Because why reinvent the wheel when we already got a wheel working and all I want to do is just push that wheels, so goes even faster. So I thank you I thank the owner perfect for this time. I know I was supposed to end at 120 and I think I just hit it right on the button if I’m not mistaken. Perfect. I will pass it back to Darrell and I appreciate it and God bless you all.

49:47  

Awesome. Thank you so much, Justin. And that was a great inspirational message. I hope many of you were able to get some takeaways on that. I think you know some of the things that I heard being around the industry for a number of years Have the local stories and the seven touches was was really kind of key for me to understand what’s going to be important from a fundraising perspective, if you’re a community organization. Next up, we’re going to be talking a little bit more about the part that Justin was discussing and how they process checks. And how he ended up transforming a person who spent all their time entering checks into DonorPerfect and making the deposits and using that for phone calls. So I’m going to ask Jim Cowen to join me here.

50:38  

area, yeah. Hey, Jen,

50:40  

hello out there.

50:42  

And, and let’s see, it looks like the screens are all moved over. So as I mentioned, Jim is the CEO of Accu bank, Accu bank has been a partner of DonorPerfect for more than five years. Originally, they were a product that was selling directly through direct sale, where a client would typically need to make an expensive, maybe $30,000, to get all of the equipment and components and so forth. Before they could even put a system like that in that eventually transformed into what we now call DEP check scam, where there’s a monthly program that is set up, and it allows organizations to more easily get into some of the technology that will save in time. But I’m going to spend some time, maybe at the beginning of this presentation, talking a little bit about what I’ve seen in the direct mail space. And in working with Jim and the clients that are using check scam, just in terms of this statistical perspective, as Jim will then cover a little bit more the details of how you can end up saving time inside of your organization by using the product. So why direct mail, up to 90% of direct mail gets opened, I am a technologist, I had been delivering technology solutions for almost 30 years at this point, I’d love to see an email, I think of the paper waste and all of those reasons why you may not, you know want to see direct mail succeeds, but the reality of it is does. And I started even researching a little bit deeper into this. And we would think that maybe people that are into technology that are on their mobile phones every day, they don’t want to see paper either. But we started seeing some stats that are out there that that even Millennials are looking forward to when the physical mail arrives during the day, it is something for them to open, it captures more of their attention. And as you can see, the stats of 90% gets opened 20 to 30% of emails get opened. If you’ve ever done an email campaign, and you look at those stats and can actually be somewhat disappointing at times. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t do email campaigns, they’re fantastic in their own right. It’s just the direct mail still has a space. And I think it’s going to continue to have a space going forward. Direct Mail requires 21% less cognitive effort, direct mail recipients purchase 20% more items. This is not just coming from the fundraising space. This is also what you’re going to see in consumer goods and direct person to person marketing that is out there. 73% of Americans say that they prefer being contacted by brands via direct mail, they can read it whenever they want. I mean, you know what it’s like trying to save the link to that PDF or you know, you’ve got to put the link in the website. So there is definitely a different platform. And it’s all a part of that multi channel approach. I thought that was one of the really cool things about what Justin talked about. And I hope everyone will come back and join on the q&a session, because I would like to ping him about some of those expenses for TV and radio, which I think are some non traditional forms that we end up seeing in in this space in the rescue mission space. And lastly, as I talked about 30% of millennials said the direct mail was preferential while 24% said email, they didn’t have a category for Tiktok. I do understand that that probably has its own space. But direct mail is still one of the key ways that you can be doing some fundraising. So the other thing that I ended up doing is I looked inside of the mission clients DonorPerfect and I wanted to understand what the spread of of fundraising effort turned into dollars for them. And when I say fundraising effort, direct mail, digital and then events. As I mentioned before, I’m a board member at a local food bank. We used to think that events was the only way to fundraise. We did two of them per year they made raised $15,000. This past year, we ended up doing a full on campaign with email and direct mail. And we ended up fundraising almost $270,000 A lot of it had to do with the messaging and some of the local communication things like what Justin was talking about, but I wanted to dig into some of the DonorPerfect clients and see what the actual split started looking like. especially as it relates to direct mail and digital. And so the one that I ended up reviewing, this does not include grants, right? This is just more of a person to person outreach type of fundraising, you know, not the application. But 60% of the revenue was actually being raised by direct mail as opposed to 17%. Digital. Now, a few years ago, the Giving USA reports, were saying that online fundraising was maybe more around the eight 10% range, it is growing. And by no means would we say that you should ignore it. But definitely keep in mind, direct mail is still going to be a major component of your fundraising and revenue that you bring in. Who did direct mail, Justin talked a little bit about that current donors as well as prospect lists, or I believe he called them acquisition. segmenting your donors screening them for capacity is what Justin was talking about. And there are lots of technologies that are out there today to help you improve by not mailing the ones that are not predicted to give. And I think you’re going to be seeing some new features inside of DonorPerfect coming forward in the future that may help you with that. As well as you know, some third party tools that are out there. And then prospect lists, certainly your agencies can provide those for the full on marketing experience. But even donor search today includes a component that gives you a marketing list, where there’s almost 250 different categories, that you can filter 250 million households in the US and obtain lists from that, so that you can then direct mail them, they come with direct mail addresses, they do not come with email addresses. So it actually is a pretty good fit, and something that you may want to consider as part of your direct mail campaign. Direct Mail is expensive. I remember hearing about the overall expense for a foreign campaign with an agency where you’re redoing your website, you know, Justin’s expenses, I think we’re almost conservative with some of the hundreds of 1000s of dollars that I’ve heard the rescue mission organizations investing to do the direct mail campaigns, why is it expensive, you’ve got the art and design costs, the actual cost of printing, maybe buying the lists, postage, and then you’ve got the labor that ends up coming into it. So to bring that all around full circle, I mean, direct mail is is a realistic fundraising tool, especially for rescue missions. But how can we end up reducing some of the costs that anybody is experiencing while trying to still use this traditional form. So labor costs, one of the things that our clients that are using checks can do they come back and they say, if they’re using it for, let’s say, 610 20,000 checks a year, many times, it ends up in being a full time, employees time can go back and other places, and 10s, if not even hundreds of 1000s of dollars. And lockbox fees can be saved, if you’re currently using your bank to process your checks. And you still have to end up bringing in that data DonorPerfect. So it’s not, it’s not as much time savings as as it might be deemed originally, even with imports, and so forth. So saving money by scanning checks. One of the things that would be cool if we had some in person is to maybe have some devices here and show you what a little bit of a hardware does. But I’m gonna let Jim sort of talk about the process that your organization might go through and how it’s changing what you’re doing today. As well as some of the key components, the hardware aspects that the the physical pieces that are involved in actually getting the job done and getting it done more efficiently. So

58:41  

I think if you look at the next screen up there, it’s hard to say I know that probably most of you that are on the call use an agency of some type. Very few I know from our own experience with DonorPerfect clients, very few are doing it in house. The main thing about check scan, a real advantage that it gives is certainly doing it manual. You have a lot of processes and procedures that you put in place over the years that slow you down, and they were put in place probably for very good reasons. To increase the integrity of the gift process to make sure everything was checked and rechecked. We’ve seen gifts checked sometimes up to five times so everybody’s afraid to make a mistake. If you check scan, one thing about it is it’s like your first and only chance to do a reset of that entire process. So as Darrell said DP check scan we originally started selling it as just a partner with DonorPerfect then DonorPerfect approached us about private labeling the product in Was it steepy, check scan and not no longer just Accu bank. It’s what falls under their umbrella products. And as a result, you can now work with and we do work very closely with a number of agencies. So that allows that each of you can bring up the next screen Darryl. It allows us to tailor lead to more screen. One more, please. There we go. It allows us to actually tell or how the OCR scan line will work. So with DP check scan, you have two flavors. First, we will actually pull data from the donor ID or as Justin called ID partners, solicitation code, campaign, et cetera, DL code to populate it into your books, etc. You can actually tailor that to each mission that we work with. By doing so we eliminate keying, they also make it a lot faster. So a lot of the upfront coding and how we’re pulling the information out. It’s all accomplished by what we call a system definition due diligence. So it’s essentially a 90 minute to two hour interview where we understand how your particular rescue mission works. And then the scanline is tailored to you. The how you will end up opening the mail will change completely instead of opening the mail and sorting by campaigns or by appeals will do what’s called a physical sewer. I’ll just open it by whether I have a coupon solicitation slip and a check, or whether I just have a check only. You’ll know more. So the sorting and opening process is tremendously fast. Most people can open and soar, generally about two to two 300 pieces in our

1:02:08  

engine is that using the automated opener,

1:02:11  

no, that’s just using it to open it on one edge and then pulling it out because they don’t have to do anything at that point. They’re just literally taking if this was a my vaccination card is the cheque and this is a solicitation slip, they’re just pulling it out of the envelope, bringing the two together and putting in a pot or they’re just putting it as a check only or they’re just putting it as a solicitation slip, there’s so it’s a very, you know, it shouldn’t take more than six to 10 seconds to open and sort one piece of mail. The advantage of keeping a solicitation slip and the check together is when they’re scanned together now you have full transaction integrity. So if you can do the buyer stream there. So if you notice you have the solicitation slip on the top and you have the check on the bottom, and check scan will attempt to read the check amount and will display that the amount of tried to read the has validated information. In addition, in the northeast corner arrow if you can use the pointer.

1:03:29  

Below the

1:03:32  

you’ll see a bunch of checkboxes which we call Vander Waals and DonorPerfect. Yes, that’s northeast corner. So that’s where we have our exceptions, we use drop downs. So the whole process is you cannot would check scan out of the next gift until you visually validated the degree of fear on which is important. So once this operator knows, is 100% Correct? Or maybe it needs some changes, but it can still be deposited, can’t go to the next gift.

1:04:08  

So Jim, are you saying that this screen would be populated as we see it on the right hand side based on the data that was read off of these pieces of paper? Correct. So all of the donor ID solicitation code sub solicitation code that’s all encrypted inside of this OCR not even encrypted, right? It’s just part of the numbering system.

1:04:32  

It’s just part those are the actual fields that are pulled out of DonorPerfect. And then the very last value at the end of that line, which I think is I can’t even read it’s too small, like a six or seven. That’s actually what we call it checksum and that mathematically validates that everything that we read prior to that number comes down so if that number is six and everything we read prior also Outstanding was six, we know we read it correctly, haven’t read it correctly, then it would display the field that needs to be corrected.

1:05:09  

And so the imaging also is reading the $28, that’s coming off of the check no matter

1:05:14  

how it’s written, correct, it’s not reading, it reads the amount on the check, and then it reads the legal amount, it then compares the legal amount to the numeric courtesy amount. And if it meets a certain threshold, and it displays this is what I read, the operator can just visually verify that it’s $28. As it reached that threshold, it would display blank and the operator would get. Now we do have a few clients that even though it would display 28, and it would look at 20, a enforce a rekey. So the operator would still have to rekey it for 28. But we’ve only really has one client that does a force rekey.

1:05:58  

Gotcha. So if if everything actually got scanned off of these two pieces of paper, and as you said, they didn’t need to check any of the boxes, there was nothing unique or specific about it, how many seconds did it take to actually scan this and bring it up on the screen.

1:06:14  

If you look at the entire process, most people that are doing it manually, which includes mail opening, sorting, posting into DonorPerfect reading the deposit for the bank, and either copying checks. Manual environment, you’re doing some around 20 to 30 check transactions per hour with DP check scan. Before we started working through the API, we were doing about on average 120 transactions an hour as dB checks, can we we increase that by another 20% to about 145 transactions now, if they don’t have to check any boxes or do any changes, seeing clients as as many as 200. Once per hour.

1:07:06  

Wow. Okay, that’s, that’s quite a difference.

1:07:11  

Cool. And the other thing, the thing about this is that you have full transaction integrity is you’re maintaining a full archive, we’re also passing to DonorPerfect a link so that you can as long as you have access to the file server. In addition, the last I look at it is this process covers about 95% of the process of getting perfect. Final 5% is we can also send checks to the bank electronically. So we have some clients where for whatever reason their bank won’t allow, it doesn’t accept a third party, check 21 file. So created, actually listing, you wrapped us around the checks, and you take it to the bank for the rescan it through the bank’s check scanner, or you’re going to about a third, they actually already done the scan, we create the check 21 file, and it goes directly to the bank. Gotcha.

1:08:21  

Okay, that’s some additional time savings. It’s in there. So and and once it appears, you mentioned about a lengthening and DonorPerfect. So again, with access to a file server, if I’m looking at a particular donors record, I go to the gift screen, I can click on that link and get an access to the image of the check inside of DonorPerfect without having to jump back into the check scan system.

1:08:42  

That is correct. So you can actually get in. If it’s was a transaction like this, you would have access to look up with the solicitation slip where you could separately look up the check.

1:08:55  

Okay. Okay. And one of the things that was always an eye opener for me, I used to think that well, the bank deposit is where the most savings is. But it’s actually from the point that they go to this screen into the DonorPerfect database is where the real team savings is whether you’re using any of the Batch Entry tools that are part of DonorPerfect. Or if you actually have to load up the donor or bring them to the gift screen reenter the gift itself. The majority of the time savings is really in that data entry process. Is that correct?

1:09:23  

That’s correct. And then the second screen if you go to where the pop up is.

1:09:36  

I think it’s one more screen. There we go. So one of the keys here is, well actually it’s two, because we’re talking directly to DonorPerfect. You can actually bring up the biographical information on that donor. So if it’s an existing donor, this might be this is what their existing information is. So let’s say I’m a donor and I right somewhere on the solicitation slip, I’m not an apartment three B, I’m an apartment three E, you can make that change right on this pop up. And when you hit save owner perfect is updated. Similarly, if you work with an agency such as Brewer direct Arkady as to where it’s at cetera, a wood on the acquisition periods like in the fall or the spring, we’re gonna go out those, as Justin talked about the name 450,000 names or whatever, those can be loaded by DonorPerfect. Now one of the keys here is if you owe these names yourself, your record count would go up by 450,000 names however owner perfect loads it and your Record Counts don’t go up. Because the file is just sitting there temporarily. This will show the data of what was actually mailed. Suggest that before you actually create a new donor would then go out browse the database and see of Joan Jett or John Smith or whoever it is that’s on that pop up is there not as it might be Jim Cowan was mailed to but James Cowan is already in the database. If I’m already in your database, you would just append the gift to my record. If I’m a new donor, there would be another button here on the pop up that said create donor and will actually create the donor right then in there, you would fill in the rest of the information if you need to, like provide an email, and then you would continue to process the gift as before.

1:11:36  

Gotcha. I was glad you mentioned about the Finder file. And you know, I think that is something that is a unique component. When you’ve when you’re actually doing an acquisition, you’re trying to find new donors that could be out there. And you’re buying lists from third party sources, whether it’s from any of the agencies that Jim mentioned, or maybe even donor search itself, where you can actually load those donors in. And the key to that is that the mailing that goes out actually includes a finder file ID as opposed to a donor the donor ID is that correct? Yep, that’s correct. And so with that, the DonorPerfect and check scan systems actually know, to look up based on that particular ID that is different than the donor ID so that we can get a match, and then the prospect files that ended up getting a gift remain inside of the DonorPerfect system. And we can then eliminate after the campaign is over any of those finder file records that did not actually produce. Is there anything else about that process, Jim, that you would want to highlight for for this group? I think the

1:12:40  

main thing is on the Finder file is that we’ve feedback we’ve gotten from clients is it saves about 95% of the time versus having to re enter all that data from scratch. It’s just a much more efficient way to do it. And the costs are stoner perfect allows that file to reside where other systems do not. It’s been really helpful for all of our clients.

1:13:08  

Gotcha. Gotcha. So one thing I did want to mention about this, this presentation is is if there are any questions if you want to use the question piece inside of the GoToWebinar, if anybody wants to ask any in there, we can review them at the end of this presentation and address them. One of the other pieces, Jim that I wanted to go back to was on that solicitation slip.

1:13:33  

This particular

1:13:34  

piece here, what goes into deciding the layout and and how much freedom do they have above that OCR coding to submit additional information.

1:13:47  

So they lay out tailoring of the OCR scan line is based on the system definition due diligence process is an approximately a 90 minute to two hour interview. So I will look at what it is first off how they’re done. donor information is how they’re find your file information. A lot of what’s involved is having to for the OCR scan line, you may have to actually clean up some of the OCR fields for solicitation, sub solution and pain, et cetera, from how you’re currently using them within DonorPerfect. So does have some homework that they will have to do between the time system definite due diligence takes place. Still DonorPerfect checks and is actually implemented. The amount of time that we’ve seen is only a couple of weeks of effort.

1:14:47  

We will

1:14:50  

it like I said it’s tailored for each mission that we work with. It’s not a hard process.

1:14:57  

Gotcha. Gotcha. Makes sense. Now in this particular solicitation slip, I see that some of them will actually have the ability to put credit card information on there. Are you seeing are you finding that the clients are getting more people putting credit card data on their solicitation slips? Or how does that play into doing direct mail fundraising. I mean,

1:15:20  

in historically, we’ve only seen for rescue missions about two and a half and 2% of their donors actually put credit card information on either the front of the back thing on who the agency is. However, we did introduce this year an option to dp GX scan that works directly with DonorPerfect safe save. So in the old way, you had to go into safe save, complete the credit card process. And then take a black magic marker wipe out part of the credit card before you scan the solicitation slip for archive and then could shred it. Now you can actually scan the solicitation slip with the credit card information on it. We’ll read the OCR scan line, the operator would key in the account number and through save save will actually verify whether or not there’s funds there. Assess the transaction was safe, say differences is that when the image is saved will redact or blank out. No, no redact means the credit card information and then we’ll also mask the credit card information within a data that’s passed the DonorPerfect.

1:16:39  

Gotcha. So you can also get some amount of automation in those credit card transactions as well part of that time savings piece and is PCI compliant.

1:16:49  

Yes, well, the PCI compliant is actually as part of the processor itself.

1:16:55  

Okay, sounds good. We did get one question that came in. One of our attendees asked what kind of scanner is compatible with the software? Can you speak a little bit about the different varieties of scanners that are out there are models you

1:17:09  

we don’t allow the anybody that uses DP check scan to purchase their own scanners. DP check scan includes a scanner. The reason we do that is we’re trying to minimize points of failure to the scanner heart all the hardware comes with, it’s required for DP chip comes with it. When the subscription is renewed, new scanners installed, the old scanners returned. If the scanner is already there, doesn’t save any money. And the issue is we have no idea what the condition of the scanner is. So if there’s a support issue, it just causes havoc that we don’t need.

1:17:53  

Right, right. And this is a mechanical device, it is something that being able to get pieces of paper to move smoothly through a machine, then various conditions when they come through the mail system and so forth it it can be something that you want to keep an absolutely top running order. There is a page scanner option available when when a client needs to use a page scanner over something that is more the size of the solicitation slip.

1:18:19  

Down generally like credit card, I mean with rescue missions, in particular, very little page scanning that I’ve ever seen. But if they do need it, there is an option to use a page scanner. If they had like a full page document and a check that they wanted to scan and archive would all go into the centralized archive as well. And like DB check scan, it would come with its own scanner as part of this the option.

1:18:47  

Gotcha. And you’ve also worked with some very large organizations debate, when do they need more than one scanning station? Does that ever come up?

1:18:56  

Generally, if you’re doing more than about 80,000 to 100,000 gifts annually, you need a second check scanner. Anybody that’s below the 80,000 threshold, one check scanner is sufficient.

1:19:14  

Make sense? Okay. Just jumping back to our presentation here. I know. We had some benefits. You talked a little bit about this earlier. 20% increase throughput. And that’s really that’s not highlighting the overall check scan solution. That’s just because the DonorPerfect API allows some additional speed is that right?

1:19:36  

Right. Well, it’s not just the API, it’s changing the process of how you open and sort the mail. So the entire process changes not just check scanning, it’s in and of itself. The having real time. I mean there’s no batching that has to specifically take place back and the batch into ends of

1:20:00  

The DonorPerfect. Gotcha.

1:20:06  

So another question came in. And actually this is an interesting one, because we do have prospects, meaning not current DonorPerfect clients, but certainly ones inside of the rescue mission space. So is it possible? And the question is for Monica, can both files be uploaded into Salesforce NPSP? Maybe maybe a broader question is not just to find your file. Question. But is there an integration between I know, DB check scan does not integrate with Salesforce, but Acme bank has other products or to tell them a little bit about what? What Salesforce integration there might be?

1:20:45  

We do work with NPSP. But we’re on a DonorPerfect seminar. So I’d prefer not to talk about it.

1:20:53  

I’ll get I’ll get, you know, the seminar first and foremost is about trying to bring information so so there are some solutions that are out there. And the clients that you’ve seen use MPSP similar process, or is that where you get into the 20% increase?

1:21:09  

Similar process with MPSP? I’m Wilson, we have a couple of clients that are on and that are rescue missions that are in PSP. They’re not seeing quite the 20% it’s probably closer to 15% increase. reasons it’s a little slower is we have to actually put the file in your file in many cases on our system as opposed to the Salesforce system.

1:21:40  

Right, right. Right. Okay. And I think that had some additional costs that came through. And so one of the other unique things about this as well is this is a system that physically gets installed on location, right? It’s not 100%, cloud based or anything. So it is something that you typically would have to work with the IT team.

1:21:58  

Yes, it’s an it’s not a cloud based solution. You have a physical check scan, or we reside on a physical PC. You have do have clients, now they’re using like, OneDrive or some of the other cloud based solutions for backup. But you do have to run a local.

1:22:22  

Gotcha. And as much as we talked about trends in the industry online giving versus check as sort of the beginning of this presentation. Are you hearing from clients that are processing checks are the number of checks that go through your system going down for clients? Are they going up in recent years?

1:22:41  

I would say overall, the in the general trend is it’s probably been flat. The pandemic aside, as you said in the beginning of the presentation, seeing the greatest increase in tanks and rescue missions. Now, of course, the challenge will be to hold on to those new donors. Once the pandemic really starts to recede as a community as a community ages, but I talked to millennials and they do tend to they write one check a year, they seem to write it to nonprofit. Okay,

1:23:27  

that’s that’s good information. Maybe that ties together with millennials and opening the direct mail to sounds good. Other points that you want to touch on as far as cheque scan things that they should know about the solution and maybe the process.

1:23:43  

I think that thing that keep in mind about check scan is generally takes about 45 to 60 days to implement. And now is really the time to make the decision so that you can be prepared for the Fall acquisition season. One of the fat one of the things that checks and really comes up against is looking at lockbox that you touched on in the beginning, it typically lockbox is anywhere from $1 to $3 a transaction so if you just use your 10,000 gifts, that’s the equivalent of 10 to $30,000 a year. And you still need at least one person inside to monitor the lockbox activity and post the gifts in the DonorPerfect for rehab to be using. So as a result, it’s a lot easier to in the same amount for probably half the money. You can do it in house. And as Justin said he was able to free up one entire person by using cheque scan.

1:24:52  

Gotcha. You mentioned lockbox and one component of this that we didn’t talk too much about is the time required from the pool. We give the gift arrival to the thank you letter in the hands of the donor. And I know for the DonorPerfect conference, we had even given awards for the nonprofit that could actually thank their donors the fastest because that’s a metric that we can actually pull out of the system. You talk about lockbox, any feedback in terms of the clients that are using BB check scan today, how quickly are they able to turn that thank you letter around? And what’s your opinion about actually soliciting for gifts at the bottom of the receipt?

1:25:31  

And answer the first part of your question, I feel that the size the systems typically so that they can do mail is received, say nine in the morning, it can be done the same day, the process a usually on peak day, it may go to a second day, but say 95% of the time it’s done within that single day. And then it’s just how they do their thank you letters. The only other thing is and they do the tear offs on the bottom, it’s just easier you can make it for the donor to give again, better it is even if you just show the tear off with this picture, the scissor and the dotted line, the donor send you back the whole letter a copy of it’s still going to make your life easier. Because we provide with DP checks scan a tool on OCR creator that allows you to pull the data yourself and put that OCR scan line on the bottom of each letter. Each thank you letter or receipt that you print in house. So when it comes back, you’re just treating it like any other gift your agency and mail.

1:26:42  

Excellent. I was going to ask that actually is is how is Justin actually generating the OCR for his in house printed because he’s not using an agency is using that tool is using OCR creator. Yes.

1:26:56  

Okay. Great. Great.

1:27:03  

Interesting question. So one of the Shannon asks if a donor calls and needs to cancel a donation is it easy to cancel the process, if it’s already been check scan,

1:27:15  

you can cancel a donation however, the audit trail that goes with every gift will show that it’s been cancelled. So you would pull it out, you would delete the images, but the audit log will still show that the transaction and what happened to the transaction. So your auditors will

1:27:33  

be happy. That doesn’t sound like a bad thing. Does this check 21 have any any implications on that?

1:27:44  

Have you’ve already submitted the item that back? 21 You’re gonna have to call the bank and have them that hasn’t gone through the bank that’s otherwise it’s gone to the bank? Gone? Gotcha. Okay, that it’s no different than if you had taken the checks yourself or scanned it through your remote deposit.

1:28:06  

So it would probably be issuing a refund or something at that point if that was the policy of the organization perhaps

1:28:12  

right. Before the checkout bounce. Right. Okay.

1:28:17  

All right. Well, we are right at two o’clock anything in close that you feel that our attendees should know about check scan or direct mail and this point,

1:28:28  

I think, you know, I know that we have probably about 15 us 27 That pretty rescue missions using the product as well as, as long as you’re willing to make the changes that are needed to optimize for check, scan, draw, usually all good. saves you a lot of time and money.

1:28:53  

Sounds good. Sounds good. Thank you, Jim, thanks so much for presenting and talking a little bit about cheque scan and savings of time that organizations can see. We are actually going to take a 10 minute break here from two to 10. So our next presentation is going to come from volunteer local Brian and Paige will jump on and they’ll tell us a little bit how rescue missions are using their tool to manage their volunteers and also share that data inside of donor. Perfect. Thank you so much attendees for the question inside of the chat. And we’ll look forward to some of that q&a At the end of volunteer local. So 10 minute break and we’ll look to have you all back here at 210. Thank you

1:37:47  

Right. Hello, everyone. We are back after break here with our next session. Page Pentagon from volunteer local and I believe Brian have a sath will also join her talk a little bit about how the rescue mission clients have been able to use volunteer local to effectively manage volunteers schedules, their whole time process. So at this point, I will turn this over to Brian and Paige, thank you so much. You should be able to take control of the presentation and go ahead and share I believe, let me know if that goes okay.

1:38:33  

And, Brian, I think both you and Paige are still on mute.

1:38:45  

There we go. I gotcha. Thank you. All right, I believe so, or the presenter. I’m going to share that window. How are we doing? We’re getting there. There.

1:38:59  

You’re just about there. I see it. All right, just go into presentation and our present. I think we’re all set.

1:39:05  

Thank you. All right. Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Assaf. I’m president of volunteer local, patriotic hours with me. She’s director of business development. And I’m going to hand it off to her in a little bit to show you around. First, for those of you that are not familiar with us, just a quick background. We been around a while in 2003. We were approached by the doin Arts Festival. And they asked us for a way to help manage their 350 volunteers that were coming through for the weekend. And so we built a platform specifically for that event, and it worked great. We thought that we should have been that surprised, but we were pleasantly surprised that they were happy with it. And started to challenge ourselves with was probably other people that can use this. So that next year, turned the product around and gave it away to local nonprofits. And we did that for about six or seven years. Following and the The benefit to that I’m giving it away to the local nonprofits is it really matured the product and started to teach us what nonprofits needed in order for this to be useful. And so the aha moment happened for us is when we accidentally became the product that helped manage volunteers for an Olympic qualifying triathlon, which was based in Des Moines, and that was in 2008. And so the the the idea that this could be used by people all over the country, if not the world, really kind of hit us at that point. And it was interesting as well, we still had a nonprofit focus, we were definitely gaining more traction with the festivals and the racing events, and things that you would definitely consider to be an event. And one of our core focuses throughout all of this was to make it simple for the volunteer, we keep a folder of in our inbox in our email program called the gushing emails, because the volunteers appreciate a simple platform where they don’t have to create an account, they don’t really have to sign up for something they don’t want to be part of, except to volunteer for your organization. So our commitment has always been to make it simple for the volunteer to come in, tell them what you need to know about them, and pick the jobs and shifts that they want. And so with this event, focus it again to serve the nonprofits. But we also recognize that running a volunteer program in a nonprofit is more than just the events. We just heard that in the previous presentation that this is about an ongoing relationship. And that’s always been part of our mantra, but we didn’t necessarily have the tools and features to match that. And so while the pandemic was horrible, I’d say for just about every part of the world, it absolutely killed off the event business that I should say killed off, it certainly paused it significantly in 2020. And so we found ourselves in a spot with a bit of a gift to focus our product development cycles on the nonprofit needs as it relates to running an application and a program and a process that is more than just the events that your volunteers attend. And so we had already started down that path of creating some some features that a lot of programs really flourish for the volunteers. But again, 2020 was that that opportunity to really double down and make that a reality. So for those of you that are new to us, a high level overview here, and again, I’m gonna hit it off the page in a second to have her take us through the platform in a bit. But at a high level. Again, we make it simple for your volunteers to choose the job and shifts that he wants to do for you. So we give you the tools to create a public facing website, capturing the demographic information that you need to capture simple checkboxes to let them know what they’ll be doing reminders and confirmation emails all built in. So again, keeping it simple. Behind the scenes, then, is a robust platform to allow you to create the jobs, application tasks, all the things that you need to do to run your unique program. As I said, this, this original technology was built in 2003. And here we are 1718 years later, supporting this. And it never surprises me that a new customer to us will have something that’s different that we haven’t quite seen before. And our customers can tell you, we’re committed to solving your problems and your challenges by way of creating a better platform. So we’re constantly taking feedback from our customers to make the administrative side as simple as possible. Basic things you can expect in the platform. Reporting communication is embedded email, SMS, and of course ability to track the hours whether you’re doing a mystery to check ins, kiosks or self check ends from the volunteers themselves. So there’s my show and tell slide. Let’s see if I can pass the mic here to page page, I believe if you click the Change presenter and then share your screen. And Daryl we’ve practiced for this that if we run in any technical difficulties, I’ll jump back in and drive so let’s give page share a second you might be muted page at the red microphone icon.

1:44:19  

Here we go. Sorry. Classic 2020 2021 mistake there. All right, so it shouldn’t be full screen here. Thumbs up Am I good? I’m so I’m a big fan of the chat feature. So feel free to drop your maybe something you’re excited about for your particular affiliate just moving into the world reopening. What are you excited about for volunteers now that things are starting to pick back up? So feel free to drop those words to describe your volunteers in the chat and I’ll go ahead and go over just a general overview of how volunteer local works and how that integration Brian We’ll take over and work through that integration with DonorPerfect. But essentially, the screen that you are looking at right now is going to be a dashboard, which gives you reporting options when you first log in as an admin user. And then you can create applications for your volunteers, different signup pages. So you’ll see that there’s a donation center, as an example. And if we drop down to the your events page, this is going to be where you can add different jobs and shifts that your volunteers are going to be working those hours can then be pulled into DonorPerfect. So you’ll have a public landing page for all of your different volunteer programs and opportunities. Brian and our team can make sure that those pages look identical to your website. So it’ll feel really internal, it won’t feel like your volunteers are interacting with another software, anything. So let’s just real quick look at the core pieces of building those different volunteer opportunities, you’ve got jobs and shifts by click on jobs for the donation center, you can add your different volunteer opportunities here in the left hand side, they’ll populate on the right. And then you can add as much information to a volunteer opportunity as you would like to so descriptions, password protecting certain things, one of the tools that we added, especially during the pandemic, just in that shift toward focusing more on nonprofits and groups like yours that have these ongoing opportunities, and sometimes opportunities that aren’t necessarily shifts specific. So day to day things that maybe the volunteer is just hopping on the phone and making some calls for you or organizing or anything like that. And you don’t need them to sign up for a specific shift. We now offer self reporting. So you can still pull those kinds of outwell volunteer hours into DonorPerfect, attaching documents, locations to different shifts. So you’ll build all of your volunteer opportunities, and then add the shifts to those opportunities if they have them. Very straightforward. You’ll choose a job, add shifts to that specific job, your date, your time range, how many people you need, especially for, you know, your programs, which are going to be ongoing, and not necessarily just one off shifts, but a pretty consistent volunteer calendar, we do have the ability to kind of copy your shifts in bulk. So you could create a week’s worth of shifts for your donation center or your food bank, and have that just repeat for the rest of the year. So it’s not going to be a lot of manual inputting of stuff. There are some quick and easy ways to make sure it’s streamlined for you for the rest of the year. If I head back to the your events page, the other core pieces of building your volunteer program here, volunteer information. So obviously, you’re going to want to collect information from volunteers, you have a lot of freedom as to what kind of information you’re collecting from them. If you choose from this drop down, you’ve got file uploads, Date fields, drop downs, all of that. We also have hidden fields, which come in handy for communicating internally for you all as coordinators and kind of running the back end of things if you need to keep track of information about volunteers without their them seeing it on there. And you can do that easily. Back to the your events page. It’s also worth noting, while you’re not seeing it on the screen today, we do have a volunteer application that can be tied to any of your signup pages. So this donation center is an example of a signup page, and the application is going to allow you to just collect a database of volunteers. If I’m a volunteer, when I believe the first thing that I was Keystone mission, then you know, I give you my information, I’m in your volunteer database. And when I go sign up for another volunteer opportunity, because I’m already in your database, I won’t have to fill out all of my information again. So it can kind of serve as that catch all. And then you can send an email to all of those volunteers in your general database when you’ve got new information. So all of that can then be pulled into DonorPerfect confirmation settings. That’s the email that you’ll send to hold that will automatically go out to volunteers when they have first signed up for shifts. This is kind of a basic canned message, but you can make this as beautiful as you would like to. You can even add emojis now since that seems to be the direction a lot of people are moving after the pandemic. Images links to other events if you’d like to recruit people for you know, maybe an event that’s coming up or a fundraising thing that’s coming up in the next month, someone signed up for a shift that count Information messages a good opportunity to also say hey, if you’re interested in more, use this link, back to the your events page, last piece, waivers, disclaimers, COVID releases, whatever that might be, can be tied to a sign up page, and you’ll collect a digital signature from your volunteers. The volunteer facing piece of that is pretty straightforward. Again, these pages can be wrapped with your website, so that it all looks streamlined. With your branding. Volunteers can decide how they’re viewing those different volunteer opportunities, especially for your ongoing programs may be calendar view, Date Range job. So the volunteer chooses a shift or multiple shifts, and then puts in their important information here at the bottom with those questions that you were building. So right now, these are just some examples. But you can make that as detailed as you would like. You can ask volunteers, especially through the application for their preferred volunteer opportunities. And if you needed to fill a last minute shift, you can run a report for anyone who has indicated that they would like to work at the food bank, that sort of thing. They’ll read through the waiver, and then sign up to volunteer. And they’ll get a an email, that confirmation email that has those jobs and shifts that they felt they signed up for. We also do have text messaging, if you want to be able to communicate via text message with your volunteers. Before I hand it back over to Brian to dig deeper into that DonorPerfect integration, just so that everybody’s aware, we do have communication tools built in. So that’s something that can also kind of streamline things for you, you can send, schedule and send emails, even from templates that you pre build. So you can get all of your different types of emails that you might send to your volunteers, built ahead of time to save yourself some time. So that might be manual schedule change, or you’ve added a new volunteer, or maybe you need some last minute coverage for volunteers, you can use the communication tools to schedule those messages to send emails to small groups of volunteers or your entire volunteer database. The texting looks really similar here too. You can use templates there, if you want to send maybe a last minute alert, there’s a storm coming through town and you need to pause all volunteer efforts, you can send a text message out to your volunteers to get that done quicker.

1:52:28  

As far as tracking hours since that is kind of the meat in the bones of that integration, we do have different options for checking volunteers in so if you drop over to that Events tab, the check in screen and check in kiosk check in screen is going to be more of an admin facing tool. And the reason for that. So if I choose our donation center as an example, just pull up everybody here as examples. The reason for this being an admin facing tool, if we click on I’m going to pick on Brian here for a second. If we click on Brian’s name, it’s going to bring up a volunteer profile from an admissions perspective. So the volunteers perspective is going to be much more simple in terms of those hidden fields will not be visible to a volunteer. But the admin view is going to have a lot more thorough, detailed description of that volunteer their picture their different notes about them, you can see someone’s service summary and Brian’s gonna dig deeper into this DonorPerfect integration here in just a minute. You can move and copy them into different shifts, run background checks, whatever you need it to track from those volunteers as volunteer information questions will show up in that profile. To check a volunteer in you just click the clock icon, it’ll capture the time the volunteer checked in, click the clock again, it’ll capture the time the volunteer checked out, you can bulk check in and check out volunteers as well. So all that math will be done for you and then again can be pulled into dinner perfect. The Kiosk Mode is going to be very similar. So if I go to events and drop down to check in kiosk, the core difference between kiosk mode and admin mode is going to be the kiosk is more meant for volunteers to walk up to a computer to a tablet or mobile device and just sign themselves in. So a little bit less lift on on your end as a coordinator. So I’m just going to create a really basic kiosk. They can open that link with that passcode you can on a device and the volunteer just walks up types in their name and clicks check in so really simple and straightforward. Again, multiple different ways for you to track those volunteer hours. And then Brian can show you how all of that integrates with DonorPerfect. So Brian, you want to take back over Oh, you’re muted page All right. There we go. How are we back? Excellent.

1:55:09  

All right. So ahead of the integration with Doug perfect. Obviously, we operated in our own silo, the data was here, you could come and report on your various events, you know, drilling down, digging down, finding out, who was where search capabilities, export all the things you might expect from a volunteer management system. And so we started integrating with DonorPerfect, I want to say, I’m gonna leave that to Darryl, maybe we’ll put their own spot to answer that question. It feels like a very long time. And it’s been a good long time. And there’s been actually two iterations of our integration. So I’m gonna geek out for a second, if you can’t tell, I’m the developer. That’s why I talk way too fast. I can’t wait to get off camera pages of your work with if you’re interested in learning more about how our solution works. So if you’re not familiar with API, think of it as Legos, you got two Legos, and they’re gonna fit ones red ones blue, but doesn’t matter. They can connect to build your castle. And so we’ve got DonorPerfect and voluntary, local. And in your DonorPerfect account, you can acquire an API key, I believe you can ask for for that. And they will provide you an API key that is not very reader friendly. And that’s intentional. When you paste it in here, you will click the Save DonorPerfect API info. And you’ll get this gray box of all this goodness, these are all the different settings that we have built in to make this integration. Hopefully, everything you dreamed it would be. We do have some plans to take it further. But just to walk through some of the things that we can do in this just to head off any questions that might come up. So first things first is we can synchronize information, only the volunteers checked in checked out if your organization is relying on the reporting that proves the person was there, and then was also checked out. Page mentioned, we can do bulk check ins checkouts, we can also do automated checkouts. So if your processes that we check you in and we assume you work your hours while I’m at the checkout, we can do that. So that’s the first option you have is to only synchronize information if they’ve been in and out. You also have the option to synchronize upcoming ship information. So if you use your CRM, see if Jim is coming in next week, you can do that. And you can synchronize those hours. If you don’t care about what’s coming up in your DonorPerfect system, you only care about historical hours reporting, you can leave that unchecked. So next, we do our field mapping. And I’m going to show you in a second where this data ends up. But your fields and DonorPerfect need to align with the fields in volunteer local, and this is where you pick that and make those selections, your account will be different than our demo account. But you’ll do those mappings. And then you can control whether or not we can create new contexts. Obviously, it’s very critical. Your database is sacred as it should be. We started earlier in the keynote how important those relationships are and how important it is to have accurate data on your constituents or donors in your volunteer. So you can control whether or not voluntary people can create your context. If you do want to allow us to create new contacts, there’s a series of rules that we will follow. Next up, you can let us know which fields to synchronize over, that’s version two of our integration. I’m going to come back to that. So I’ll come back to that in a minute. For now, then, let’s skip over to our report that I’ve got my seconds all squared away, I come back to my event. Or as Paige mentioned, you might have an application which is a database of all your volunteers, you’re gonna have this button right here called Data Sync slash integration. Ignoring this bottom part, and again, I’m going to come back to that in a second, you have the ability to sync based on filters. So if you know you want to synchronize June’s shifts, you could choose to synchronize shifts that only start from June 1 to June 30. And likewise, you can also synchronize only shifts on based on when people signed up. So we give you a couple of options there to limit down what you synchronize, when you do synchronize the shifts based on the hours, we’re gonna switch over to dark, perfect here. And I’m going to run this live here in a second. If you’re not familiar with it, the other tab is a place for companies like us to put the information that maybe doesn’t fit anywhere else. And so for volunteer local, we use the other time to be able to insert records that relate to an event, a job, the date of the shift, how many hours worked in the ship itself. So for example, a one on four shift is three hours. And then we have a column here called check in hours. So again, depending on how your program manages the hours piece, we can synchronize those different fields. So that was version one of the synchronous of the integration. We’ve had that up and running for a few years now. From here, it’s up to you, right, this is the power of DonorPerfect. You can take this data, produce your reports, anything else that you might want to do with that data. So let’s come back to my settings. I’m just going to service again, I already kind of touched on. But we also have now in the second iteration of our integration, which we finished about a year ago, we can also push volunteer local data, the fields we’ve captured, first name, last name, favorite ice cream t shirt size, all the information you might not have already in your database for things that are getting updated. We showed you earlier how easy it is for a volunteer to sign up for events, and shifts. It’s also just that easy for them to update information. Every volunteer has a profile link. Again, they don’t need an account or a password so they can get right to their profile, and update pertinent information such as address again, or T shirt size. I know I put on what you’re doing the pandemic, I’m from a large XLR, I need you to know that you’re gonna give me a t shirt that can fit. So the fields that are part of your dorm, perfect integration can be put here, we save those. And then what happens, just start over when we come into the donation center. And I do my data synchronization, I can see now the fields that I’ve allowed to

2:01:02  

be synchronized. I’m just gonna fill

2:01:05  

out a couple of these out before we do real time things. But our mouths where our money is that the right way to say that money where our mouth is, let’s add page. So I am manually I’ve been taking stewardship, which is part of our system as well. But page may have also signed yourself up.

2:01:35  

Alright, you’ll notice also kind of went over this or I’ll go over this in a second. But there’s $1 Perfect ID that’s hidden, talking back and explain that. So I’ve saved I’ve added Paige she did not save into disclaimer because I’ve added her manually. And let’s go into sync to DonorPerfect go in progress, one of four records being synchronized over to done perfect. Earlier when I ran this. No one wants to see me fail at this demo, it was doing one out of three sub pages my fourth, She’s new. As it synchronizes these it is doing a lookup to see. And based on those rules I checked earlier, we check email, we check first name, you probably have volunteers that share an email address. That’s a super critical thing. We do account for volunteers that sharing email address, whether it’s husband, spouse, or maybe a parent child relationship. Once that record is created, we stored the DonorPerfect ID back in our system to make the synchronization faster in the future. So we’ll give this a second to finish up. And those last ones are a lot faster. Because there are me I think if it page first I had to get her information over. Okay, so that’s the search page. Thank you.

2:03:04  

Don’t blame the internet and IO at the moment. I’m not sure what they’re doing there’s page. So this is a brand new record, I can tell by the ID author trust me on that they created the record of page in the platform, a certain nicer First Name, Last Name, Email justice created as well. And as I come here to the other tab, don’t remember what I synchronize, there we go close sorting hours worth checking numbers, she hasn’t checked in or out yet. So that will come through a zero. So we worked very closely just to give you a bit of a case study here. Victory mission based in Springfield, Missouri, was our first client to really walk with us hand in hand on this integration. And I at the last minute asked him to jump in and come talk to us. I was hoping they would but I was behind the ball. So they weren’t able to join us today. But if you’re curious about their process, I know they would be willing to share with you. But what one of the first things they did is they had a separate database of volunteers that we brought into volunteer local, and they started using the platform that was intended but they brought those in, we do have an import capability. And then what they did is they wanted to get that data that was in volunteer local that represented some more updated records synchronized over to DonorPerfect. It it. I don’t want to I didn’t get permission on this. But let’s just say it was somewhere in the 1000s of records that they pulled across. And so that that took some time to run. But while that’s running in the background, able to leave the system and go use it other ways. And we’ll run that synchronization in the background. It completed I think there was like five records that we had to go look at every one of our synchronization kicks out a log to us so you can go through and comb through your data. I can’t stress enough how significantly important it is to us that your data is not messed with by our integration. So we show you everything that happens between the two sides. Some seem go through and verify. And double check data, we let you know when there’s conflicts, all the things you’d expect from integration like this. So when we pause here, and Daryl, you able to join back in with us. And if we have any questions, we’d love to talk through that. And generally don’t get we work closely with you. Maybe if you got some things that you know, we’ve left out again, I go a little fast sometimes that’d be great.

2:05:28  

No worries, no worries, Brian, yeah, actually, I did a little research. And so it turns out that we started discussions in 2016. And looks like you had completed the integration at the beginning of 2017. So this has been around for a while, and a good number of clients have put it to good use. I did see there were some questions that were being asked and Paige was, was responding inside of the q&a chat. But one of them I wanted to kind of pull forward, you had talked a little bit about matching. One of the complicated questions was, if you’ve got a donor, perfect record where you’ve got husband and wife, or both of them in there, will it matched the second one? Or will it end up creating a second record for perhaps the second one that comes along with an email address? What’s, what’s the matching logic? And you can cover that again, please?

2:06:16  

Yep, yeah, so a unique record to us as email address plus first name. So let’s say Paige and I, not husband, wife. But let’s say we’re sharing an email address. So we’ve got Hello, a volunteer local when we both registered under that, if that is in the in both systems, for that matter, we will first do a lookup of Hello plus page. And if that’s found, that’s donor ID number 17, then we’re good to go that will lock down number 17. and balance your local. And that’s what will push the data as it works through the integration, then it comes across Hello again, what Brian will look for that. Now if there’s no first name. That’s that’s obviously a bigger problem anyway, but we will match on just the email address at that point. And again, unless you check the box, it says no, I require an email address and first name. So if you recall from the settings, you can control that. So you say no, if I don’t have a first name, I don’t want anything to happen. There another one of our shared clients, New York City relief, which recently brand rebranded to city relief in New York City. They match on first name, email, and skip the email, and will do first name last name, which a lot of waste makes a lot of sense. They might not have emailed us as everybody, but they do a good job of having good clean data to have first name and last name, and they feel comfortable, confident that they’ll match on those records.

2:07:35  

Gotcha, gotcha evictions. One of the other people Marsha asked about the comparison between the united way volunteer United dotnet, which I guess, if you’re perhaps a member organization, I know the nonprofit that I’m a part of is supported by the United Way, they have required volunteers to tool. I’m not sure Brian, if you’re familiar with it, I guess, you know, the key thing that I would say as far as a difference, or a feature might actually be the integration component. I know with other volunteer systems that are not volunteer local, the DonorPerfect manager needs to either do an import that we’ve seen with some of the other tools that are out there, or the data just gets managed independently from that. But I think, you know, from a full feature standpoint, to where volunteer local would fit. If you could talk a little bit about the rescue missions that are using it, and the types of jobs that they’re putting in there. What are you seeing in terms of maybe volume of volunteers in those systems, if I can put you on the spot for some of those,

2:08:37  

sir, the pandemic was unique, a lot of the food distribution and food sharing was something that we saw. Paige alluded to it, but the self reporting feature took a huge precedent back in March of 2020, because we knew we were distributed. I will get to your question in a second. So the distribution of the tasks being done introduced this idea that I’m not going to necessarily create a shift for Wednesday from eight to 11. I’m just going to have volunteers that will do this task on their own time. So so a handful of the I can drop some names here just I’m not sure who’s on the line. But the some of the groups that we work with, I’ve mentioned victory mission is really been a big driver for this new life mission, Bridgeport rescue mission Ventura County rescue mission and then rescue mission in Middle Georgia, Thurston County Food Bank. Broadly the jobs and tasks that we’re seeing our distribution products and supplies and then the food side and organization, on average of those that are dealing with a volunteer database in the hundreds by the mid hundreds. Everybody’s different, but that seems to be the case. There are 1000s So this is not a music festival, we might have a couple 1000 volunteers coming through, these are a core group of people that are coming through on a regular basis. So we see also group Volunteering is a common thing. So somebody will have a group leader, and they bring five to 10 people with them, which we can support as well. The other point and lost me here, but oh, the, um, the Thurston, Thurston County Food Bank, the kiosk system has become a big part for them. It started as it’s a touchless, center to some degree, you know, they gotta wipe it down and all that, but the idea that someone would come up and kind of do some self service was a big deal. And, you know, for them to have 20 to 30 volunteers come in for a particular shift and be able to manage their own process, in that that was important to them, to be able to just have a smaller groups come through at one time, do the warehouse tasks that they were signed on the spot. So everybody signed up for a warehouse task, they didn’t know what they were doing until they got there. So the need in real time drove the assignment.

2:11:06  

Gotcha, gotcha. One of the things that I get asked a lot is, as it relates to volunteers, a lot of the volunteers that come into the human services agencies into being older, maybe not technically savvy, and so forth. I know the nonprofit where I serve is a little bit like that. The How much have you seen the progression to where a volunteer will actually self manage on a volunteer local web portal versus what’s the experience like for the volunteer manager, that actually has to sit deal with the 30 or so volunteers that just won’t touch your computer? Yeah.

2:11:44  

It goes both ways. And I’d love for your feedback here too, on this, as you’ve talked with a lot of our prospects, I hear it both ways, I hear hear some organizations that are very adamant of we’ve got an, obviously an older demographic that doesn’t want to touch the technology. But their volunteers are so important to them, they’re okay with that. And so hopefully, we’re providing the right tools to make that job easier for them. And so things like being able to accept a volunteer in the system that doesn’t have an email address, and still track them appropriately. You know, the email address is a key identifier, as we talked about with the integration, but there are ways to get around that and not have to force a volunteer to have an email address. Creating the ability is as long as the volunteer coordinator is willing to answer the phone calls from that volunteer who doesn’t want to get online, talk with him and say, Okay, if you wanted to come in next Tuesday, and fill that information out, that I would say the programs that are a little more solidified, and like this is how we do things we don’t like change. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because again, these volunteers are getting their time and that’s worth gold. keeping them happy is very important. However, we do see some of the new paradigm change, you know, the new volunteer quitters coming in and and realizing that their time is very valuable. And so we’re going to utilize technology to streamline my time, because I can be doing something else other than taking phone calls and filling out spreadsheets of when volunteers telling me they can come in. So we see it both ways. We have not taken a hard line to like force the technology on anybody’s throat. We fully recognize that people want to value their volunteers and let them serve in any way they can. So you’ll never hear us say no, I’m terrible saying no. And so you know, the programs needs of the programs needs. So that’s important to us. thing to add to that.

2:13:33  

Yeah, I think I was just gonna say that. I’ve never come across anyone in my three years of volunteer local that has actually, there have been people who have expressed a concern about that, potentially being an issue, but never anyone that’s actually struggled with that as an issue because there’s so many workarounds. So I think that yeah, that’s been my experience is that it’s it’s not, it seems like it could be a flag, but I have not come across anyone who’s actually had a struggle with the integration and volunteers who are not as tech savvy. So

2:14:14  

gotcha, gotcha. Well, I think the key thing and if I interested, if somebody phones up and says I’d like to take the Tuesday slot at eight o’clock, you know, the person answering the phone can go into volunteer, local and make a record for them, right. So there’s ways to record the data properly, whether you’re an individual or whether you’re, you’re actually doing it yourself on a web page, it looks like you had answered another good question, because I was almost gonna ask about that as I was looking at it, the verified first logo that was on the one screen. And so that is your background check. And can you talk a little bit more about that process? There other options that are available to that? Maybe where does it integrate into the process? Can they not volunteer until they’re finished with it?

2:14:57  

Yeah, Brian, do you want me to touch on that or Okay, Okay, cool, um, verified, first, we’re integrated with verified first. So technically, that would be, you know, a separate conversation with them. But I mean, it’s very simple, you can open up a volunteers profile and click a button and run, whatever, you know, situation you’ve set up with verified first, you can run it within a volunteers profile. With that said, that I mean, so many organizations still use volunteer local to track background check status, we don’t run the background checks unless you’re with verified first, but you can still create data points within volunteer local that if you’re running them through a local group, or whatever that might be, you can change the status of a volunteers background check within their profile to, you know, yes, no need more info, whatever those fields are, that you might need. So for those that already have background check systems in place, you can track the status of those in volunteer local, which, especially if you’re using our applications feature, can be really beneficial in terms of a different stage of an application, right, so someone has applied background check in process approved, you know, they can sign up for their shifts, whatever. Like I said earlier, a lot like playdough, whatever your flow is, whatever systems you have in place, volunteer local is not going to be a platform that says you have to change your systems to meet our mold. We can, there are so many different ways for volunteer local to be structured, that will meet the mold that you have have built because it makes the most sense to your your group. So verified first, if you’re interested in learning more, I’m happy to connect you. I put my email address in the chat though I know it lives in other places, as well. It’s in terms of the resources for today’s sessions. But if you already have your own background check stuff, we can help you make sure that that information is tracked within the platform.

2:17:09  

Yeah, that’s good. So we have one of our larger clients, Ironman Triathlon Ironman races, they brought their own background check company that they embedded themselves and did the criminal type background check they wanted to do and we haven’t integrated with background checks are tricky, because some of these run one six months ago doesn’t necessarily mean that’s still the case. So we are within integration, introducing some some better automation of check the background at the time of application check at the end when I push this button. So so two pages point, your relationship with a background check vendor is your relationship. So negotiate your fees. We hope someday to bring that forward and be able to provide that to our customers today, though, it is kind of a two step process of establishing relationship with the provider. And then we’ll integrate it with our platform. So you can see the status of that background check in the profile.

2:18:06  

Sounds great. Sounds great. One other question that I had, and it kind of goes maybe more in the best practice area is finding volunteers. You know, your system can help manage and track but what what would your advice be to organizations if they struggle in any way trying to find qualified volunteers or they just need to increase their pool? What are organizations doing today to help meet that gap?

2:18:33  

So what I’ve been noticing, so our application, the volunteer application does not have to be called an application. You can, you know, label it whatever you’d like. And so my recommendation on that front is to create an application and call it an interest form. And you can use that link and post it on Facebook, you know, Instagram, different, whatever your website is. Your current database of emails can be important to volunteer local, and you can send push it out that way. Obviously, word of mouth is great. But I think you all are in a unique position right now coming out of the pandemic and just people are itching, to be more involved and to feel like they’re part of something bigger after we’ve all kind of, you know, gone through the wringer in the last year in our own ways. And I think right now is is a unique opportunity to recruit volunteers who actually want to be there because they want to feel like they’re part of a bigger thing. And so that would be my recommendation. That’s what I’ve noticed a lot more people doing is creating an interest form. And then you have now that information about people whether they you know, show up for one shift or 100 shifts. At least having those touch points can be really useful and it can be a simple, simple interest form, first name, last name, email address, you know, I want to learn more and that can be integrated with your website. But I think you know, in the tech era, using social media is the way to go in terms of just gauging interest. And so that’s what I’ve noticed, in my position. Brian, do you want to add anything else?

2:20:17  

Yeah, a couple thoughts. One Creek meaningful opportunities. So you know, pay, just talk about the channels that we can reach them, but now have a plan. So whether we’re using our system or not, make sure you know what you want out of that volunteer? What are the tasks? They do? Can they feel like they’ve made a difference made a change? Are they going to feel appreciated when it’s done? anybody that’s interested, we have a very thorough presentation that was given to IFTA international festivals and events Association, that talks about volunteers across the generations. And it breaks down the baby boomers versus the Gen Z years, and millennials and they’re all all of those generations are motivated by different things. And we happy to distribute that to anybody who reaches out to page will get your copy of it. And you can you can take it in and that it doesn’t necessarily help you recruit more, Darryl, to your original question, but at least made me think differently about if I’m using Instagram. Or the baby boomers on Facebook, I’m not social media. But like, as you think about the messaging on those different things, and how you entice people, at least you can frame up a message that would be appropriate to that audience.

2:21:26  

I think that’s a great point. I mean, the idea that you could do that interest for them and maybe put links, links to it on social and so forth, to find some of the new people that are out there is a great way to sort of spread the word. One of the other pieces that we were talking about was recording the actual self recording the hours and I believe volunteer local has a mobile app, right? So if I’m a frequent volunteer, I can load that mobile app onto my phone, and what am I able to do on that today.

2:21:51  

So you can check yourself in check yourself out, you can send a message to the volunteer coordinator, if there’s any sort of, you know, something you can’t find or do so you can send a message, which particular it’s delivered by email. And then if you allow cancellations of a shift, you can cancel the shift as well. So the app has been around for a while. We still love it, it still works. But we are investing more into our mobile web experience. So the volunteer will open up their profile without having to install an app. There’s, there’s pros and cons, some people just don’t want an app on their phone. So the mobile view works on their phone much the same, giving you more flexibility, one of the things that we’ll be launching very soon is the QR code check in. And so you’ll be able to print the QR code at the station, the volunteer opens up their camera, it’s pretty ubiquitous at this point, they just show that picture. And voila, they’re checked in. And everybody’s happy. So that’s, that’s the mobile web is definitely on the technology front where we’re gonna go. Broad. So I this is on my desk. And I didn’t plan to plug this, because it’s fascinating. This is called a snowshoe stamp. Darrell, we talked about this yet. I’m not sure if it looks a little unique to me. So this is this is called a snowshoe Stamp. This company’s been around for a while. And I want to say they’re out west and Portland, maybe or, or Washington somewhere out there. Those five points I just showed you are metal. And they represent kind of what can be considered your five fingers touching a phone. So each of those points is unique across all the devices they’ve ever issued. So you work with snowshoes dam is send you your device or devices, you can wire this up to a post or give it to a volunteer. And the idea is now the app which is integrated with their service. When I touch this to the phone, it knows the thing was right here at this time, it’s an app checking in, purchase the ticket, whatever. There’s all sorts of uses that this thing is doing today outside of just volunteer management. But I’m excited for that, primarily because we get asked all the time do you have an app where we can scan QR codes, and I’ve lived that life. And now you got to now use an organization, you got to have the device, it’s got to be powered up, it needs internet, all the things right. And instead of the script, have the volunteer or the whoever they brought their device in as internet, it’s charged, they just have to show it. You have this device that’s basically plastic and a little bit of metal touch. And we’re done. So there’s a little plug for 16. But very cool. Movie. I agree with that at some point this year.

2:24:17  

I think that’s great. Thanks for sharing that. I mean, you know, we are technology companies that are that are getting together here to talk to the rescue missions. You know, what one one other piece? And you and I have debated this over the years. Is there a correlation between a donor of money and a donor time? And, you know, do do individuals like to be cast as one or the other both? And is there anything from a technological perspective that would after they signed up and they’ve shared their interest in volunteering inside of the email that you might send out to solicit volunteers. If you could invite them to volunteer or if this isn’t the week that you can do it? Here’s a link that you can donate to our organization, because we can still use the funds, whatever that might be. What are your thoughts on that? Do you feel that there’s a divide? Or what? Where’s it at these days? Sure.

2:25:11  

personal perspective? I’ll be short here. No, we’re in a certain time, I really want the answer on this stuff more than mine. We’ve kept it from a technologist, and we’ve kept it separate. Because there’s, there’s a lot of really great options and people, including people in this session tomorrow that can help with that. And so we’ve really focused on just the time piece, right, we want to value your time, make sure you feel appreciated. At no point those are technologies stop a rescue mission from soliciting their volunteers for a donation. But I think, in almost everybody should agree with this, there’s the right message the right time, the right place, right. And hopefully, you can segment your database appropriately, to get the best impact. So I’m not anti soliciting volunteers for money, but definitely know what the value of that is and what you might lose out or the press you might make upon over soliciting or suspending runway.

2:26:02  

Yeah, I mean, it’s such a complicated question, right? Because it does kind of undermine the purpose behind volunteering to an extent, but especially with younger generations, I’ve was a high school teacher for the last nine years. And like, it’s like pulling teeth sometimes to get people to do something, if there’s no return, I think that in a digital era, feeling a benefit from something like a volunteer experience is so different than it was, you know, even two years ago, and so, I think that nonprofits and just organizations in general are going to have to get more creative with what it looks like to celebrate people and make people feel validated. Because, you know, validation is different now than it used to be. There’s so many more digital spaces for that. And so, you know, we’ve seen it in terms of like, trades are really successful, right, you volunteer X number of hours, you get, you know, an experience of some kind, or like a ticket to something or a discount on something that you know, and I think, especially as a large, a lot of larger companies and corporations are moving more towards social purpose in in their own mission statements, you’re gonna see a lot more trade based pieces with volunteer load or bump with volunteering, rather than like a specific financial number. But yeah, I’m still I’m still navigating my personal opinions on that issue. So

2:27:36  

it’s great i honestly, and these are topics that have surrounded the nonprofit space for a while and I know they affect the rescue mission as well. Even as we were talking about the checks, Canis whether or not you solicited donor on the receipt for another donation after they’ve just given you know, the there are so many opinions that are out there. But thank you for offering your insight on those topics and sharing a little bit about the volunteer local program. Also, those clients that are in the mission space that are that are using the tool, I think it’s a fantastic solution and a great one that integrates as, as we are going to bring up our next guest, Matt from Constant Contact, we’re going to talk about email and how to craft a good email. One of the cool things about the integration with DonorPerfect and Constant Contact is you can actually take the data of volunteering and incorporate that and build lists specific. So you can message them appropriately depending on which category that they fall into, or the areas that they might work in. Together with some of the other you know what’s happening in our organization, things that a CRM would do. So some of the moves during dynamic components will work out. But in parting, any final thoughts Brian page,

2:28:44  

feel free to reach out if you would like to know more, and we’d love to chat.

2:28:50  

Darryl, thank you for having us. Thanks, Donna. Perfect for putting this on. So I hope this was valuable. And thanks, everybody for your time and attention.

2:28:57  

Cool. Great. Thank you both. Right. All right. All right. Let me make Matt a presenter here and see if you can join us via the webcam. There he is. Hey, Matt. Let me unmute you.

2:29:21  

I should have done that myself. I just wanted to make sure I had my screen ready for you. All right. There we go. Good to see our good to see you. He’s doing the best I can hang in there. It’s a stormy day here in Orlando. So if anybody hears some thunder, sees some flashes of lightning. It’s a typical Florida summer.

2:29:40  

Oh, wow. Hopefully the power grids all up and up.

2:29:44  

That’s the fun of doing webinars in Florida.

2:29:47  

There we go. All right. Well, I am going to leave you to it. I see you got your slides up. And I will join back up towards the end if there’s any questions that filter in and I will go ahead and ask and we’ll we’ll have a wrap up conversation. Thank you.

2:30:00  

Awesome. Thank you, Jeremy. All right, well, good to see everybody today. Thanks for joining me today. Just a little bit about me. My name is Matthew Montoya. And I am the channel enablement and marketing manager at constant contact. And I’m very, very passionate about nonprofits and about what you’re doing. And that’s really the core message of today’s presentation is to help you grow. And of course, the topic of our conversation today is going to be about email marketing. But we really need to think about some challenges that a lot of organizations like yours run into, when they’re considering email marketing, or they’re undertaking email marketing. The kinds of things we constantly see is listed here. And this can basically be the agenda of our talk today. Often we see organizations like yours if they’re if they’re undertaking email marketing. And one thing I want to I should have said there just a second ago, everything I’m gonna share with you today is product agnostic, we want to see you be successful, we’d love to see you use Constant Contact. And if you’re using Constant Contact, thank you. But this is product agnostic, we want to make sure that you’re successful no matter what tool you’re using. So the kinds of issues we see listed here. Often, often we see emails that are much too complex. We’re going to lean into that today and talk about how we want to simplify our email and have some strategies around why we need to do that and how to do that. Along with that, when an email is too complicated, it’s often offering people too many choices. Now that can mean too much content choices, that can mean too many calls to action, we have to be very wary of that the way that people are communicating today. People also organizations like yours often put in too many images, too. And you’ll see an example of that in just a moment. The core theory here is if we give people too much to look at do a read, he ultimately may not do any of them. Another issue we commonly see is organizations that don’t link up enough and don’t link the right things. So the whole point and purpose of email marketing, of course, is to inform people and motivate them to do something, make a donation, volunteer care, learn about your organization take action. Without links, that becomes much harder. Not only is it become much harder, it’s very hard to understand whether your email marketing was effective or not. We also see that a lot of organizations when they don’t use linking enough or at all in an email, they’re not really driving people to the website, or to social media to a blog, we’re not driving them there. And that’s where ultimately they’re going to make a decision, a decision to donate a decision to attend a decision to volunteer, whatever it is you’re trying to motivate people to do, they’re ultimately going to do it not in an email but somewhere else. And so we want to get them into the email and out of the email as quickly as possible, because that’s where they’re going to spend more time thinking about how they can help you and taking action to help you. Next would be assuming that you need a big list to get started. You don’t, you don’t need a big list to get started. What you do need is the foundations of the kinds of education I’m hoping to share with you today to be successful. And a lot of organizations, especially in in your, in your group, often don’t take mobile design into consideration. And you’re going to see an example of that based on a real email. And that can have considerable down downstream problems for us as we try to motivate people to take action. And lastly, we do see a lot of organizations like yours, not use bulk email services. Now what does that mean? Well, what we want to think about is what I’ve coined here regular email, what is regular email, Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, those kinds of tools, see a lot of organizations use those it Look, I get it, you use those tools all the time, and by all means are great for one off emails or for a few people. And it’s not the worst place for organizations like yours to communicate information. But you have to be careful if you’re going to do any kind of solicitation in that kind of email. Now. Some of you may recoil and say solicitation, I don’t solicit way you may. If you’re asking for donations, you’re soliciting for money. If you’re asking for volunteers, you’re soliciting for behavior you’re soliciting for if you’re asking people to attend an event, you’re soliciting for behavior as well. So that’s solicitation. And when you do that via a tool like Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, those kinds of tools, there is a federal law in the United States that says you can’t do that. Why? Because you’re not giving people the ability to unsubscribe to an email like that. Of course, we don’t want to see anybody unsubscribe, but you have to give them the ability to do that. On top of that, there’s a slew of other issues and using an email service like Gmail, Outlook, Hotmail, again, they’re great for one off emails, emails around the office emails to stakeholders. But if you’re going to solicit for any kind of behavior, then there’s other issues we may see and using tools like that. Mostly you don’t know what Whether they opened it, whether they read it and what they read, you don’t have the ability to create an email that that motivates people as effectively as you could use in bulk email services like Constant Contact. So why email in the first place? Well, because it causes effects. 38% of online donors are inspired, or were inspired to give via an email solicitation. And email is really reliable, especially compared to social media. Now, I’m not throwing social media under the bus with you, social media is a fantastic tool. But email and social media really have a lot of power. And if you rely solely on social media, to reach people, for instance, Facebook, you may not be getting in front of as many people as you may think. But I told you at the beginning, we talked a lot about design and the way people read today. Now you might have read between the lines and kind of saw where I was going. But let’s keep it let’s dig in a little bit deeper. What’s the most used app you use on your phone? Think about it. If this was a live presentation, and I hear you talk, you might shout out Instagram or Facebook or this or that. But I’d be willing to bet, no, it’s probably your email app. Most people are constantly in their email app, it’s an effective place to get a message across because they’re always in it. That’s where most people communicate pretty constantly. But the whole core concept of this presentation today is around mobile, because mobile is highly used. When it comes to email marketing, 91% of people read their email daily, and I’d be willing to bet, maybe even some of you are reading an email right now on your mobile device, and 88% check their email solely on their smartphones. So your work now is more important than ever? How do we produce an email that will be as effective as possible? To answer that, I’d like you to look at an email, I’m going to show you an email based on a real rescue mission. I’ve removed anything that mentions that rescue mission. But I really wanted to find as real an example as I could for you. And this is that example. So what I’d like you to do is look over this email, and think through but challenges of faces. Now, I only gave you five seconds to do that, I only give you five seconds to review that email. Now, why five seconds? Well, that’s the first big lesson today, the average email subscriber is only spending about five to 10 seconds reading an email on a mobile device. Now, they may spend more time because of the kind of organization you are in the work you do. And I could hear some of you probably shouting at your computer saying that. But the reality is, especially on a mobile device, it’s unlikely they’re going to read that much content. So let’s think about this email again. So the first issue was of the amount of content that they’re providing people. This is just way too much content on a vehicle like a mobile device, or even on a computer for somebody to really dig in and understand what they’re being asked to do or the information they’re trying to share. Additionally, another big issue in this email, is that there are no calls to action, there are no links for people to click on and take action. And that’s a big mess, especially if we’re trying to gain donations or volunteers or any other kinds of behavior. And on a mobile device. Mobile devices will stack things on top of each other. And when they stack things on top of each other, an email that was long on a PC or Mac will get even longer on a mobile device. So we really have to consider how we build an email to be effective on mobile first. Now tools like Constant Contact, they are mobile responsive, meaning they read this redesign themselves based on the device, but we have to consider mobile first. And when we design because of that a limited amount of attention that people give an email. Now some of you may be saying, well, most of my audience is this out of the other and they’re probably reading an email on a PC. Well, the reality is a PC or Mac. Because attention span is so short, even on a computer people are unlikely to spend a lot of time reading, a lot of content are very likely to be overwhelmed with too much content. So let’s break this out into actionable tips for you. Tip one, images are really powerful within email, and especially with what you do, I’m probably not saying anything surprising to you. Images can be very motivating to people. But the reality is with a five to 10 second window of time with an audience. Well, the old saying an image speaks 1000 words couldn’t be more helpful when we have a limited window of time in front of people. If an image speaks 1000 words, that’s fewer words, we actually have to put in the email.

2:39:48  

You always want to make sure you have your logo and I’d be willing to bet most of you would do that. But you also always want to link images. Linking images means that when somebody tries to click on an image, they go to our call to action. That’s all Often overlooked in most people will actually try to click on an image to take an action. So if we’re not linking these powerful images, to some sort of call to action, we may be missing more donation volunteers, attendees or whatever we’re trying to do. Now, there are additional calls to action, you can include it in the email, and I’m gonna talk a little bit deeper in that just a month a moment, it’s called a button. A button is a powerful tool because it’s a button. And so what we encourage people to do is to include images that are linked and a button call to action. But you do want to limit it, you want to limit it to no more than about three, three images, not including your logo. And if you have something really important to say, and you really need people to be hyper focused on it, only include one image, don’t overwhelm people with any other content, one image and a little bit of text. Now another thing we see a lot is organizations to build an email. That’s 100% damage. And some of you might be saying, well, you know, we have, we have this flyer, we built it in publisher, and we’re just going to make an email out of it. Well, the problem is, is that well, images are extremely powerful. Images do get blocked, be willing to bet you’ve gotten an email where the image is blocked, and you have to download it? Well, if an email is all image, that’s not that may not be what we want to do, because of the emails all image and it’s blocked, and we’re sending people nothing, you want to have at least an email that contains no more than 80% image versus text. But I don’t mean to throw images under the bus either, because, of course, 90% of information is processed by visual content, and with a short window of time in front of an audience. Well, that image can speak all those words for us. Now a couple of tips around using images, always make sure that the image isn’t overwhelming your email. Again, we don’t want an email that contains mostly image. And the reason for that beyond having the email, the image be blocked, is that and I’m going to need you to imagine you’re looking at an email on a phone if you’re not doing it right now. There’s an imaginary line that we use in our industry called the scrollbar. Which means that’s the moment somebody has to scroll up to see content. If we have an image that’s overwhelming the email, it’s the largest part of the email, and it’s especially towards the top, then people may not be able to see the rest of our content, and may just end up closing the email before they see our call to action or actually see any text content. Of course, avoid copyright issues. Don’t go to Google and find an image you want to try to use your own images, if applicable. And obviously there are some dangers in using images in what you do. And ideally, you know what guidelines your organization has around using imagery. stock images are perfectly fine. Just make sure that if you’re if you’re using stock images, you’re also considering how they may be interpreted by the public. All right, the next step around the next step. Alright, color, always use consistent colors, consistent colors are really important. Now what do I mean by consistent colors, the same colors you use on your website, the same colors you use in social media, the logo, other kinds of associated imagery you want to use in your email, you want to be really consistent because color represents brand recognition by 80%. Meaning that when they open the email, they can immediately feel an emotional impact from your organization because of other interactions they’ve had with you. You want to keep those colors the same email after email after email. And that’s actually upside down from what I see a lot of organizations do, especially around holidays or special events. They may have their brand colors in the email regularly. But then they change it up to celebrate a holiday or special event you want to sell celebrate that with imagery, you want to celebrate special events with text content, you want to keep your brand colors, the same email after email. Because we do have such a short amount of time in front of the audience. We want them to understand the relationship they have with us, and then move into our content. Make the email personal. And I imagine that this is probably something that comes pretty easy to you. Meaning that as personal as you can make the email both literally saying their name in the email, something you can do with Constant Contact, perhaps even saying their name in the subject line, again, something you can do with constant contact. But you also want to make the content as relatable to the people that you’re sending it to as possible. Now this concept is called segmentation. What we want to do is make sure that we send as applicable content to audiences as possible. And the benefit of taking a large list of people and breaking it up into smaller groups so that we can send relevant content to them is actually the way that we can also help ourselves. Not send really long, complicated emails. Often I’ll run into organizations that will say well, my audience loves our newsletters. as well, they may not need every piece of that some of them may need one piece, some of them may need another. And so the best you can actually make the content as relatable to your audience, the better when you do that, it causes more action, because it’s relatable to them. And the danger here dependent on how you gain subscribers, email addresses. The danger here is if we don’t send relevant content to them, and it’s not speaking to their needs, their passions, or the abilities they have to help you. Then the next time we send an email, they may not open it, the next time we send an email, they may not open, it eventually becomes white noise. And we’re losing what might have been a supporter of ours, we don’t want to do that. Now I mentioned earlier, use buttons. So buttons are really powerful buttons are nothing more than a button, add a piece of an email that looks like a button. The benefit of buttons is that their buttons, if you give people a button to push in an email, they’re going to push the button, they know what they’re supposed to do. So having an image link to a website, or a blog, or social media and a button can greatly increase behavior. The other benefit of button goes into what I was talking about with images. Remember, I said that images get blocked? Well, a button does not get blocked, meaning that your call to action that’s easy for people to do, never disappears. You want to think of your email as a not the destination, but a billboard for the destination. The email is supposed to entice them to go somewhere else to take action. Now why don’t we want them to go somewhere else to take action? Well, of course, I told you that that’s where they’re going to spend more time that five seconds become a couple of minutes. That’s where they start to think through how they can help you. They’re likely not engaging to that depth in an email. But the other reason we really want them to go somewhere else’s, because that’s how we know we were successful. And that’s how we can change our behavior if we need to. Now a lot of organizations obsess about open rates, meaning how many people opened my email? Well, the average open rate for you is about 22%. Right now. Now open rate is great for taking a look at broad trends. A lot of people a lot of new people opening my email is my open rate going up great, that likely means your subject line model is really good. But the problem with open rate is it’s actually full of false positives and false negatives. See, if an image is blocked, then that’s the only way an organization like ours or any of our competitors know that the email was open is because when that image shows up, we know the email was open. But if we really think about it, open rate really doesn’t tell us anything. The problem with open rate is that it doesn’t say they opened it, because a tool like Gmail, a tool like Hotmail, like Outlook, all these tools provide previews of an email. And a preview can count as an open. Right. So they may not have even opened it and read it at all, the preview just flashed the email and that counts is an open. But if we really break it down, they may have opened it glanced at it and closed, it doesn’t really tell us they cared about it, right. That’s where it clicks comes in, we really want people to click on things in the email, because we know now that they got the email, they opened it, they read it, and specifically what they found most useful. That helps us know that in future emails, we may want to provide more content like that, to this group of people. That’s really important. We also want to pay attention to clicks because that can help us segment people out. So people do telling us by clicking on this, that or the other that they’re interested in this, that or the other and we can provide them more content around that. Now I mentioned earlier that you want to keep your email as succinct and simple as possible. And by the way for for you, your click through rate should be around 8%. Now, that also includes calls to action. So links, the more links we give people, the more things that they’re going to be able to click on, the less likely we’re going to get behavior. So we want to keep those calls to action as limited as possible, no more than three. Now again, if you have something really important to say, if something’s really important for you to convey. If you’re really getting trying to get people to take action, then perhaps we only have one link. Now you can have more links and future emails. But to make sure people are hyper focused on the thing we’re really trying to communicate out. We not only want to keep our image content simple, but we also want to keep our link content simple. Now there’s an additional piece that we need to think about and that’s text. The amount of text in your email also needs to be simple. No more than about 20 lines of text overall.

2:49:49  

Why clicks ultimately because that is how we’re going to get them to take action. We want to get donations we want to get visits we want to get news even news occur. For us, then we want to include links because that’s ultimately how they’re going to do it. But of course, they can’t click on links unless they open the email in the first place. Right. So let me talk to you about some ways to get your email opened. Firstly, upside down from what a lot of organizations think the subject line is not the number one reason people open an email. For this, I also want you to imagine you’re looking at your phone zipping through your inbox, you’re likely not going subject line, the subject line, the subject line, you’re likely going who sent this to me who sent this to me who sent this to me, when the name is familiar, then your eye pivots a little bit. And now you’re read the subject line. So the most important thing to consider and getting your email marketing opened, is who’s sending the email? Now, this probably comes the right answer probably comes naturally to you. The answer should be your organization. But I do see some organizations actually have the email come from a person. And there are plenty of studies that say that an email comes from a person can increase your open rate. And that’s absolutely true. The issue is, is that if you’re sending email out from a person, and that person for whatever reason leaves, while they’re taking that open rate with them, they’re taking that brand equity with them, meaning that people get used to opening an email because it came from a person and that person departs the organization, we may not see the opens, because now it’s going to be coming from a new person. So the best practice is to have an email come from your organizational name, build that brand equity through the name, and no matter who’s sending out the email, you should see consistent opens. Now there’s also a little hidden piece that a lot of people don’t think about. And that’s called teaser text, or preheader text. So the next time you are looking at your inbox, what you’ll see is the senators name, the subject line, and a little bit of text right underneath or next to the subject line. That’s called preheader text. And without a presentation like this without some education, if you didn’t know what preheader text was, generally most people don’t pay attention to it. And generally, it’s the first sentence of an email. And that first sentence may not be compelling enough to get people to open the email. So totally Constant Contact gives you the ability to edit this important bit of text to give context to your subject line, it’s a fantastic way to get people to be motivated to open the email beyond just the subject line, the preheader text is really fantastic to either share a little bit more information. So for example, if you have an event, and you’re in your subject line talking about the event, then the preheader text, you could give details about the event. Or you can do what you see here, which is literally teasing people with a little bit of information and forcing them to open the email to find out more. So as I said, the front name is the most critical part, you need to also consider that your reply email is also important. Now what that means is that if somebody replies to your email marketing, then you need to make sure that it’s going to someone in your organization that regularly checks their email. I know that sounds silly, but this is an often overlooked piece, meaning that the email will come from the organization, but in the reply to will go a distribution list or something like that, that people don’t regularly check. So you want to make sure that the reply email address is to someone that’s regularly checking your email. And you can have the email come from one or one person or one email address and reply to another. Now, I also don’t want to make this subject line seem diminished, the subject line is important, you just need to consider that it’s that from name and that preheader text that really motivates people the most with the subject line, the key thing is to keep it short, a lot of organizations will type out a really long subject line. And unfortunately, that gets cut off. So about 47 words is the maximum, the fewer the better. For that all important preheader text, you have a little bit more space with about five to eight words. Now speaking of words, some subject line models to avoid. And I do see this a lot in organizations like yours, repeating the same subject line email after email after email. Now the issue with that is we’re not motivating people to open the email there, they may ignore our email because they’re assuming they’ve seen it before. And it’s not actually telling them what the content is going to be about. Another another thing I see a lot is that you’ll a lot of organizations will include their their mission, the rescue mission name in the subject line. Now the problem with that is that if you’re if your emails coming from remember that important from a part of the component, if the email is coming from your organizational name, and then right below it in the subject line, you have your organizational name. Well, that’s a little duplicated right, and we’re wasting space that we could be using to motivate people with our powerful subject line. Another thing to avoid is all caps. I doubt many of you would do this, but you want to avoid all caps because that can get Your email into the spam folder where you don’t want it. You also want to avoid triple punctuation in the subject line, meaning that you’re going to use three question marks or ellipses. That’s also a spam trick, perfectly fine to have punctuation spread out through your subject line, just don’t do it in a row. And in the same spirit, avoid symbols like these repeated update for the same reason your email could end up in the spam folder. So what about some things you could try? Well, one of my favorites is questions. Questions are really powerful. Because one, if you write your subject line as a question, it doesn’t, in my opinion, require too much creativity. But the benefit is if you pose your subject line as a question, how can people find the answer by opening the email, right, so it’s a natural way to get people to open the email. Another tip to use, especially if you’re a little more creative, is alliteration, alliteration and simply repeating the first letter of every word. Alliteration is really powerful because of the psychology of the inbox. So when we’re looking at our inbox, you’re being met with a lot of information all at once. And what your brain is naturally trying to do is make order out of this chaos. By using alliteration, what we’re doing is we’re forcing a pattern into the eye. So when they’re scanning through their inbox, and they see that pattern, they’ll notice it. And that’s really important, because if they notice it, and they slow down, they may open the email, you can try quotes. Now you want to make sure that if you use quotes or other kinds of pop culture, information in your subject line, you need to make sure that that’s going to be understood by your audience. Now, the powerful part about using quotes in that can be biblical quotes that can be movie quotes, song titles. The benefit to that is it’s familiar. And because it’s familiar it to slows people down, and they’re more likely to notice notice it, you just again, want to make sure that it’s going to be understood by your audience, or they may not notice it, because it doesn’t make sense to them. Numbers is maybe the most powerful subject line concept you can use. Now numbers is something like three tips, or three ideas or three waves. The benefit there is that because people naturally don’t want to spend a lot of time in an email, you’re telling them what the content is short, it’s fine. That’s really beneficial, because we’re taking into consideration that this is only going to take a little bit of their time. Now a couple of tips around numbers. Firstly, obviously, you’re going to need to have numbered content in your email for this to work. Secondly, odd numbers get higher open rates than even numbers. And the three best numbers to use are three, five and seven. Don’t go above nine, or now your content seeming a little too long. Chunking is taking a subject line and not writing as a set. Most people write subject lines as a sentence, they can’t help it, they naturally do it. But there’s no reason you have to the idea around chunking is to make the subject line into small little pieces. The fact that it doesn’t look like a sentence because it’s not a sentence means that the AI is going to be more likely to latch on to it and take action. The last tip is personalization. And I mentioned that a little bit earlier, making the content personal. So with a tool like Constant Contact, you can put a person’s name or any other information into the body of the email. But you can also put their name into the subject line. The benefit, there should be fairly obvious. When people see their name, they slow down. And again, we’re trying to get them to slow down just by using personalization. You can expect 11% higher open rate. You use personalization with any of these other tips, and that could easily go higher. Now, one thing that I definitely want to share with you is that don’t take my word for it. Test your assumptions. One thing that I encourage any organization to do is to make sure that you don’t rely on the same old thing because it may not be working for you. And that’s especially true around subject lines. So with a tool like Constant Contact, you can actually split test your subject lines, meaning that you can offer people randomly to different subject lines, so you can break up your audience randomly and automatically. And Constant Contact we’ll test with that audience which subject line would work best and then send the remaining emails to whichever subject line works best. But regardless if you use Constant Contact or not, make sure that you test your assumptions if you’ve been doing things especially with subject lines the same way time over time over time. Occasionally try something else and see if it’s effective. So let’s review all of these tips.

2:59:48  

So first tip, again, keep your subject line short. You don’t want to have too many words there. It’ll get cut off. Make sure you’re aware of that all important preheader text, whether you’re using Constant Contact or not. If you’re not using Constant Contact, we’ll look into whatever tool you’re using, they likely offer preheader text editing. If they don’t, the preheader text will be the first sentence of your email, make sure that that first sentence of the email is going to be effective for you. The most common thing we see with preheader text, when people don’t edit it is the following. I’m having trouble viewing this email, click here. That’s generally the first subject or the first sentence of an email. The problem is, is that that’s not motivating at all. So make sure you investigate it if you’re not using his contact. And if you are, do you know, you can edit it, you want to also again, include that recognizable from them, make sure that you’re using a name, that’s going to be the most recognized your audience for you, I highly suggest that that’s going to be your organization’s name. That way, no matter who ends up sending the email out, it’s going to be recognizable to the audience. And one thing I want to make clear, the from name and the from email address are two different things. So the from name can be honestly anything, the from email address, ideally should be recognizable to the audience. But that can come from a person. You want to limit the options to people. So you want to minimize the number of calls to action you give to people, no more than three is the best practice by giving people fewer things to look at and click on, we’re more likely to see increased engagement. If we see increased engagement, we’re more likely to actually see people take increased action. And that’s, of course, the whole reason you’re actually sending out an email. Now that can of course, be a donation, ask, that can also be a volunteer ask. But that can also just be to share news and information. Remember, we want people to click because that’s going to tell us what kind of news is most effective to this audience. By pulling together the group of people that clicked on one of these links, we now know something about them that we can send them more relevant content in the future. Next, you want to make sure that you avoid putting in too much text content, no more than about 20 lines of text. Now, this often provides a challenge for people. Remember, we want to drive them to the website where that where That’s where they can read more content, that’s where they’re going to be willing to read more content, or to a blog or to social media. There’s nothing wrong with having verbose content, you just don’t want to share it all have the email, drive them somewhere else, and you’re gonna get all the benefits of the click, and you’re going to be sharing more information. Now, one thing that does come with Constant Contact, if you’re currently using it is landing pages, which means that if you don’t have a website, or you have a website, that’s hard for you to update quickly, you can create a landing page and drive people to that where they can read more content. But be aware that the more content we give people in an email, the less likely they’re going to actually read any of it. And a dirty little secret of email marketing is that no one actually reads email. What they do is they scan it, they skim it, and so the less content we give them, the better because they’re more likely to absorb some of it. Use buttons and you can see an example of buttons. several places in this email. Buttons are fantastic call to action, because they’re people inherently know they’re supposed to click on buttons. Be consistent with your colors. The colors you have on your website, the colors of your logo, the colors you share on any printed collateral, you want to share in your email too. And don’t change it. Because the color is so powerful your your brand colors are so powerful, and representing your message. Remember, your logo is an image too. And remember, the images can be blocked, so you can’t rely solely on your image to carry across who you are. Communicate through your images though, make sure that your images are the right size for the email, just don’t put too many images in no more than three not including your logo. Include a clear call to action above that scroll line. So remember that imaginary line on a phone or even a computer. Whatever the most important information you’re sharing, you need to share above the scroll on the scroll down and see more information but you want to make sure that you’re kidding their eyeballs with the main purpose of your email. And of course, use social media in your email. The best practice is to have it at the bottom of your email. Having social media links at the bottom can increase your social presence and your social followers. But occasionally, you can put social media links at the top too if you’re trying to do a campaign around growing your social media followers. Now I’m going to take some questions in just a second but I do want to tell you that if you’re not using Constant Contact and you’re considering it, we have teamed up with DonorPerfect to offer you a free trial. You just visit CTC t dash DonorPerfect to learn more. And now I think Darryl, you’re going to come back. We’ll take some questions.

3:04:50  

I am I am So as Matt announced if anybody’s got any questions about the presentation, feel free to put them inside of the q&a section for the webinar. I did see one, which is a question about, can we share these slides, which I know we are recording this session. So all of this content will be available to the registrants that are out there. So if anyone else has any questions, feel free to go ahead and put them in that channel. And thank you so much Madness has always, always always so meaningful, that the keys that you put in there, I can’t tell you how many times I end up receiving an email that does not abide by these things. And it’s just too easy to put it into, into the trash container.

3:05:33  

Yeah, it’s, you know, I with nonprofits and rescue missions, when I did some research for this presentation, and I did see in about nearly every email that I looked at for rescue missions, the number one thing I saw was emails that were just too complex. And most of them were just just pages and pages and pages of text. You know, if we think about that scrolling that I talked about, on a mobile device, easy emails would have taken six or seven squirrels to get through. And the reality of the way that people are looking at their phones and these little brief moments of their life, they’re just simply not going to sit through that much content and read it all. Or they’re very unlikely to unless they’re extremely dedicated. They’re very unlikely to and the problem is that, you know, a lot of organizations really worry about unsubscribes. And that can be a concern people unsubscribing to a list. But the bigger and more realistic concern is people just tuning you out, they may have joined your mailing list, they may have volunteered, they may have donated, they may have interacted with you in some way. So they’ve shown passion, they’ve shown interest, they’ve actually shown behavior. But if we overwhelm them with too much content in our email, whether that’s images, texts, or calls to action, and they close the email, they realize, okay, I don’t have time for that today, you’re planting a seed in their head that they don’t have time for that tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day. And so we want to make sure we’re engaging people regularly. And the way you do that is making sure that the content is relevant to them, and giving it to them in bite sized chunks.

3:07:00  

Interesting. Would you say it’s better for in for, is there a way that we can tell whether or not somebody’s absorbed the three bullet items of content, deletes the email is perfectly fine with it and chose that today’s just not the day that I’m going to act on it? Versus the? No.

3:07:21  

So there’s a couple of things you can do. First of all, not everybody is going to take action. Might. So what you want to pay attention to is the

3:07:30  

check your mic, Matthew, I’m not sure if it’s, I was getting a little bit of a war muscle was me. Anyway, so just a bit of distortion, I can understand you, but it’s

3:07:54  

well, apparently, my fancy mic is cut off. So I’m actually having to talk into the mic on the camera. Can you hear me?

3:08:00  

I can. Again, that’s fine. That’ll work. So yes, we were talking about the the idea of how you can tell between like the the three bullet emails and I liked it, and I’ll delete it. I just don’t want to act today.

3:08:10  

So first of all, understand that everything is going to take action. That’s that’s just true. One of the most important things that people can pay attention to is is two things. One is the reason why I’m kind of dancing and hemming and hawing is because I definitely want to stay product agnostic, I work for ConstantContact, I’ve been working for about 10 years where a partner no environment, but I respect that, you know, other organizations, people may be using our competitors or nothing at all. So I can’t speak to what our competitors have constant contact offers, did not open report. And what that does is you can humanly see who has not opened the email, that’s a great way to identify people that have completely tuned out. And perhaps you want to target that group. And you want to use acuity. So over a couple of minutes, a couple of months, pay attention to that report, maybe reach out to them with either a different subject line, different kinds of content or different kinds of piece of communication, because they’re tuning you out, and you’re likely losing. The other thing to do is to do pay attention to the clicks. And one thing you can do is when reports are constantly looking at the people in regularly clicked on any link in any email going back any amount of time. So you may not have gotten in this one email. But looking at that report, you’ll know that you got it in the third or the fifth. That’s quite powerful report because now you know who your most passionate people are. And maybe they’re people that haven’t taken a step to interact with you yet. They’ve been clicking, they’ve been taking behavior in the email to see okay, how they donated and they volunteer, what kind of what kind of behavior they provide. Gotcha, gotcha.

3:09:50  

I did get some chats in. They were saying that it’s too distorted to hear so I’m not sure if you can flip to a different mic or just reapply the one that’s maybe inside of the laptop, that’s some really great information to know that you can actually take a look and see some of the statistics in terms of, you know, whether they’re just completely ignoring it or not. One of the things I was curious about you talked a little bit about, you know, positioning on that first page. And if there’s a call to action button, you know, how, how high should the button be on that first page?

3:10:26  

I can you hear me now?

3:10:28  

Yes, you’re good. Okay.

3:10:29  

I just, I just unplugged the mic and plugged it back in. And we’re gonna. So yeah, so I actually I use that in the example that I mocked up. So what I did in for the presentation is I took a real actually gives an amalgamation of several rescue missions, emails. And then what I did is I put that I applied best practices to it. And if you saw on the slide, I actually had the donation button right up at the top right next to the logo. Because remember, that scroll line is so critical, we want the number one thing we want people to do to be as visible as immediately as possible. And so for organizations like this, I mean, I know that some people may not feel comfortable with putting a donation link in every email, I respect that I would think it’s actually advantageous to do every single email. But having it right off the top is an effective way to get people to notice it. And I would actually double down and also put in other parts of my email. So I wouldn’t rely solely at the top, because donations are the lifeblood of so many organizations. I also have it maybe at the bottom, and in the example that I showed you, I actually had a donate button adjacent to content as well, because we know that people are scamp. They’re skimming the email. And so they may not notice that fall first call to action, we want to make sure they notice subsequent ones.

3:11:47  

Wow, great, great advice. I know we sometimes hear that too, in terms of the websites and you know, where should I put my donate button? How loud should it be. And so many times, it ends up getting hidden inside the graphics that they’re putting in there. And people just can’t find it, or they’ve got a level of indirection to the click. And it just, it loses people before they even get to the forum. So

3:12:09  

if I can call back to your earlier guests, there was a really important point there about asking your volunteers to donate, I really liked what they’re talking about there. And that kind of sinks into the concept of what we’re talking about in my presentation about segmentation. So for those of you watching, who say I don’t feel comfortable having my donate button at the top, well, maybe you don’t have to for certain groups of your audience, you can break up your list and maybe the volunteers, maybe you include a donate button somewhere in the body or even at the bottom just in case that maybe you don’t shout it out at them because you’re segmenting your groups and you’re communicating solely your volunteers, but to the pool of people who have supported you in the past or have shown consideration to support you by supplying your email address. I include that donation button right there at the top. Right. All right.

3:12:56  

Great advice. Great advice. As always, Matthew, it’s been excellent, excellent information. I think we’ve got the extent of the questions that we’re going to get today. So hopefully, our rescue missions can really take off and launch with some of this information, improve their fundraising, maybe increase some of the fundraising that could be a knee jerk reaction to what we experienced in the pandemic. And while Human Services maybe had grown a little bit, you just want to make sure that we don’t end up with with donor boredom. As a reminder, we are going to get started tomorrow at 12:30pm. Eastern time. We’ll have some opening remarks. And we’re going to talk about recurring giving major donors and then we’ve got a roundtable discussion where we will look forward to having some of our speakers back and some DonorPerfect experts to answer the questions that you will put in the channel. Thank you so much. And a big thank you from Shannon to you, Matthew. Great to close with today. And thank you all. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you, Darrell. Thank you everybody. Thanks

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