Social media campaigns for donor acquisition: From social to CRM

Sean: Good afternoon, and welcome to social media campaigns for donor acquisition, from social to CRM with Ed Ehrenburg and Angela Den Tex. Ed is the CEO and co-founder of charity, a donor-perfect partner and platform for purpose-powered peer-to-peer sharing across social networks with Read More

Sean: Good afternoon, and welcome to social media campaigns for donor acquisition, from social to CRM with Ed Ehrenburg and Angela Den Tex. Ed is the CEO and co-founder of charity, a donor-perfect partner and platform for purpose-powered peer-to-peer sharing across social networks with a background in technology and application development. His expertise extends across philanthropy, social impact, and mass communication. Ed is passionate about helping organizations and brands grow their share of voice and impact through authentic customer-driven marketing.

Angela is the CEO and co-founder of charity. She’s a proven nonprofit marketing professional with a strong understanding of technology. She enjoys helping charities customers make the connection between brand action and their community. As charities product owner turns market feedback into platform improvements. Now, before I hand the session over to Ed and Angela, I’d like to remind you all to be sure to add your questions to the Q&A tab and that’ll be the little question mark icon there. That way, we can see them and answer them at the end of the presentation. Questions asked in the general chat area may not get answered due to the constant scroll of the screen but we’ll do our best to monitor that for you. Ed and Angela, take it away.

Ed: Great. Yes, thanks, Sean. Thanks so much. I’m Ed. We’re really excited to be here today to tell you a little bit about a brand new tool, that Donor Perfect is offering and it’s called DP social campaign. This is a brand new product. It’s designed to create and manage social media campaigns that are specifically designed for new donor acquisition. Instead of telling you all about the product, let’s just take a look at how one organization used it to create a social movement and to grow their donor base.

Let me introduce you to a great nonprofit Bring Change to Mind. They are in the mental health space. They are specifically focused on teams dealing with mental health challenges. It was founded by the great famous actress Glenn Close. Now Chuck Thomas handles both the organization’s fundraising and their marketing efforts. He’s wearing a bunch of different hats like I’m sure many of you do. Chuck was actually supposed to join us today for this presentation but sadly, he is undergoing emergency dental surgery right now. Just wishing good luck to chuck, get through that. We’ll just handle it from here.

Let me tell you a little bit how we first met, or when we first met. I heard about the organization through Chuck. He told me how they got started really through Glenn Close’s network of friends and celebrities. Like many nonprofits, these major donors were instrumental in getting the organization off the ground and rolling. Now the org held galas primarily, initially, to keep money rolling in from that audience. Leading up to and then especially during the last few years during the pandemic, those events totally disappeared for a few years. Even without a pandemic to contend with, the organization recognized that it needed a new strategy to continue to grow. This is not the first time we’ve heard a similar story from an organization like this.

Bring Change to Mind needed to reach a larger audience and they wanted to start to reach small donors also. That would help them to lessen their dependency on major gifts exclusively, but also to get them out there in a bigger and more sustainable way for the long run. The organization simultaneously had big plans to dramatically expand its peer-to-peer support system. There were already 8000 students participating in these clubs and groups and they wanted to really grow that considerably. Using social media really seemed like a natural for Bring Change to Mind, it seemed like they had a really modern cause that should be able to spread in social media and bring them new fans and data very quickly.

They really tried to do this but they had a lot of issues. They wanted to get the new sponsors of the new supporters and grow the brand. What they found out like I’m sure many of you have found out is that it’s really hard to gain a share of voice in social media without at the very least paying for costly ads and doing that really very often. This is a problem that we have heard time and time again, Facebook and other social networks are designed to really keep consumer data locked up within their own garden. It’s really their business model to have you their customer pay and pay and pay again, to continue to reach people without really ever getting any data to turn it into a two-way conversation. You can reach people, but you can’t reach back out.

At the same time, Chuck and Bring Change to Mind actually had quite a bit going for them. There were a whole bunch of assets that they already had, first of all, they had a bunch of celebrities. Now, these celebrities would show up at their galas, and they would make donations. There was presumably another way that they could also lend their influence to the organization. It couldn’t be heavy, it had to be something that was really easy, a very light additional ask that could help magnify that influence. They also had plenty of students who are participating in their programs.

These kids were actually the perfect champions for the organization, and showed the genuine nature of the cause. Then additionally, they did have a small donor list that they could leverage as well to spread a campaign. We helped them initially to use what became DP social campaign, and using it Bring Change to Mind was able to take those existing audiences and benefit from the influence that their friends and fans had in social media where it’s so important, and in many ways, easy to get a message out there, if it can spread on its own. They used the platform to really get the word out in a big way and create a social movement. Most importantly, they really expanded their email list with new names for donor cultivation. We’re going to take a quick look at how they did it.

Firstly, they connected this social media campaign to an existing awareness period and that was mental health awareness month. In doing that, they were able to create, you know, some additional urgency around the campaign, but also an umbrella to tie all the content and posts that were going to be created and tie them all together. Mental health is a difficult issue to get people to really open up about, it’s a difficult topic, and there is a stigma around it. The organization is there to help break down those very stigmas. We needed to help them to do something that would be easy to join, but wouldn’t be too revealing or too difficult to get people to participate in.

By creating a series of photo frames, they lowered the barrier of entry to simply be adding a photo. Now people could join in, in spreading a message, and the slogans that appeared on these photo frames, I’m going to show you how this all works in a minute came from some focus groups, they ran with the actual teams that were in their programs. That allowed them to sort of take the complex thoughts that these kids were having, and turn them into understandable messages that evoke recognition and also compassion. This ranged from things like sometimes my thoughts are on spin cycle.

Sometimes I feel like I’m on an emotional roller coaster, sometimes things can seem a bit sideways. There’s an overarching message here, which is it’s okay to not feel normal all the time. In fact, there is no such thing as normal. So there was a great balance of poignancy here, but it was also still fun it had a real sort of fun element to it. It was very safe and easy to participate in the campaign. To start, the organization invited some celebrity supporters to adopt those frames and post them on social media. Here are a few examples of the posts that kicked this campaign off. They also extended that invitation to all those students that were in their clubs.

They also promoted it on their existing social media channels and to their email list. This was a way to get the word out there with a very simple ask, and that ask was, claim the frame and open the conversation. Yes, so that really created this movement of support. Turns out there are thousands of people who are willing to add their own faces to this message and to share it with their friends to grow the movement. They were able to watch this campaign grow in real-time, one beautiful photo at a time and now we’re going to get into the real mechanics of how this work and how it was built, and how it was orchestrated using DP social campaign. Angela is going to take you through that right now.

Angela: All right, thank you, Ed. The first question we often get is, are these Facebook profile frames and the answer is no, these photos that you just saw, actually represent posts that are shared across really any social media network and in this campaign, Instagram, in fact, was the most popular in any way, a Facebook Profile Frame only tells the Creator how many times it has been used and provides no other data, and certainly no names or email addresses. Bring Change to Mind was able to see much more like the demographics across all of their participants and they could earn that valuable data, like the emails, oh, and they also could see every photo that was shared and they own those photos too, and could use them to promote their own campaign.

Now, here’s how they put that all together, they built a custom branded digital campaign using the DP social campaign and this is a new platform that has a visual builder that really requires no coding at all. They simply walk through the steps edit their frame art, edit their campaign copy, and then we’re ready to launch and that’s where the magic happens. The celebrity supporters, the teams, they all kicked it off. This is an example of what their own promotion look like in social media, a visual invitation to claim the frame join the conversation about mental health. I wanted to just briefly take you to the user journey, the consumer journey. If you had seen this post in social media, you’d simply click to open the campaign, right inside the in-app browser of the social network that the participant is already on.

Facebook in this example, but it works the same in Instagram, Twitter, or any other social network. There is no signup, there’s no app to download and this lack of friction really means that conversion rates in this process are very high 52% in this campaign. Participants join by adding their photo to one of those branded frames and that photo usually is something they already have on their camera roll, but they can also take a selfie on the spot and as we showed you a little earlier in this campaign there were multiple frames that they could select from and you can choose those frames from those little buttons or icons that you see underneath the photo here and when the participant is happy with the piece of content they’ve created, they click next, and are presented with a message that is in the voice of the participant but written by the organization.

Now, this is something that they can edit, leave as is, wipe completely, and replace with something from their own heart. In this way, it was both easy to get people to share but also there was a way to capture meaningful testimonials. Next, participants pick the social network to share too and the icons you see here are customizable, they could be reordered and sharing is prominent and easy. It’s in fact encouraged right from the start of the campaign and it’s no surprise that social sharing rates were really high 84%. At the very end of the process, participants were invited to add their name and email address and for those who chose to share to Facebook, we automatically prefilled this data.

Now the range of email acquisition can vary anywhere between 30% to 75% of full participants, it was rather high in this case, it is totally optional but a lot of participants were happy to opt-in to stay connected with the organization or new participants whose journey we just follow now has their own photo page and each of those pages have their own unique trackable link and when a person is on their own page, they are invited to share again to a different social network. I’m also showing in this example, a secondary call to action button. You might ask people to take a secondary action, like make a donation and that button could be linked to any donation page you’d like.

Now, things are really happening, you’re looking at the social media post that was created by our new participants and this post doesn’t just expand the reach of the campaign, it also becomes an entry point for new participants to join and when those friends join in, they’ll know exactly who invited them and we can track all of those connections and referrals. The campaign grew very quickly and every photo that was added appeared in a photo gallery. Now, this is what the campaign and that gallery looked like on desktop, and seeing that photo counter rise and the photos in the gallery, that provide a proof for new people to join when they landed on this page.

In their password-protected dashboards, the organization themselves had an administrator view of the campaign, they could curate that public-facing gallery, and bookmark favorite photos to use in marketing. They can highlight celebrity participants and pin them to the top of the gallery, add a verified flag, they could also hide entries that may not meet their brand standards and if any negative content was added, it was easy to delete it and the leading content would break any links in social media. In this campaign, by the way, in most campaigns, there really was no examples of negative content. Now, the dashboard also gives organizations access to growth metrics, a leaderboard of influential participants, for instance.

This allowed them to measure not just their own impact, but the impact of their community. Names and email addresses were sent directly to their CRM and they also had the ability to download a complete data export of more than 40 data points. This included what frame someone picked, what social network they share to, and where in the country or in the world they joined from. I’ll hand it back over to you.

Ed: Okay, this campaign ran and it turns out, it was the single most successful social media campaign that Bring to Mind has ever run, and furthermore, they didn’t spend one cent on ads, they were able to leverage the reach and influence of the audiences that they already had access to, to get the word out to people just like them on their behalf and that’s something that works without celebrities, it works. If you have influencers that great, but individuals who really care about the cause, or what’s going to also spread this from friend to friend. It’s really a loyalty-building activity, to engage existing constituents and bring new ones and the ask is a much lower barrier of entry than for example, asking for a donation off the bat.

In this campaign, Bring Change to Mind brought in just over 2200 new names, and emails for donor cultivation and this and the other data points they collected is really the true trap value we call a trap value. That’s the data that normally is hidden behind the walls of the social networks, and doesn’t go to your organization and this platform will help unlock that for you and it had chuck in here today and again, I really sorry about what he’s going through right this minute but one of the things he said about the platform is it allowed Bring Change to Mind to take advantage of social media in a way they hadn’t been able to before.

The best part was the incredible growth of their donor database and next up for Bring Change to Mind is a similar campaign but this time featuring a corporate partner that they just secured and this campaign will use another feature of the platform, which is the ability to unlock a corporate donation made for each photo that is uploaded. This allows the participant to facilitate a donation without actually opening their own wallets, at least to start. The message would be something like every photo unlocks a $5 donation from our generous sponsor and there are some other functions in there that we haven’t gotten into detail today, that will also continue to really help you take these digital campaigns, deploy them very quickly to as many people as possible and turn it into the kind of data that it did for Bring Change to Mind.

We’re going to open this up for questions now, whether you want to ask about how the campaign worked or Bring Change to Mind, or about the new product, which is DP social campaign, which by the way, I believe is available starting right now, to all our perfect customers. Let’s open it up for questions right now. Sean, I think you’re muted.

Sean: Second time today. All right, I have everything sorted by most voted to leave. We’ll start from the top and we’ll go through until we’re out of time. I think a question that everybody wants to know the answer to, is how exactly is this going to integrate with the clients donor perfect databases?

Ed: Great question. Excitingly, once you sign up for your DP social campaign, and you start running campaigns on the platform, all of the new constituents that you capture will flow directly into your donor perfect database, along with a flag indicating where they came from. You’ll be able to immediately benefit or even instantaneously benefit from using that information to start that two-way conversation.

Sean: All right. Excellent, do you have any recommendations for how an organization can avoid becoming discouraged from low engagement or I suppose maybe a little differently, how can your product help avoid becoming discouraged from low engagement?

Ed: Oh, this is an Angela question.

Angela: We find that because the content that is shared is not coming from the organization itself, it tends to stand out more in social media. When the message comes from a friend and especially when we see our friends’ photo, it’s more thumb-stopping than a post from an organization. Now there’s something else that happens too. The social networks themselves prioritize organic content from people over content from pages because pages like organizations, they want them to pay to be seen. The same is not for people.

Once you can encourage your existing supporters or a base, and that can even be an internal base or volunteers to start sharing this content, something beautiful happens in that, this campaign will grow by itself from friend to friend.

Ed: We don’t want to call those ads because they’re not, they’re personal endorsements, but they function similarly to the way that ads do with the added power of it coming from a friend. It’s not about, oh man, this is getting pushed at me from some group that’s looking for me. It’s more like, oh, my friend is doing this and they’re asking me to do it.

They’re not asking me to make $100 donation. They’re just asking me to share my photo and my influence. Oftentimes that is the key to changing a call to action from being low engagement and hard to get people to join in, to being a highly engaging and personal experience where one person can bring in dozens or even in some cases, hundreds of people behind them.

Sean: The next question, is this offered as a standalone product from the Donor Perfect system, or do they have to use it with a DEP database?

Ed: This time it is only offered through Donor Perfect, but I will tell you that I think you’ll be really pleased. This is an extremely low-cost offering. Now, there has been a version of the platform available for enterprise organizations and brands for a number of years but this product brings the best of all that into the Donor Perfect ecosystem at a true fraction of the cost that you pay to use this separately.

Sean: Nice. Now, another question is this application a one-stop place as in, can I create and share across all of our social networks from one place, even if we aren’t well-rehearsed in all of the social media networks?

Angela: I’ll take that one. I do want to differentiate that this product is not a social scheduler. It is a campaign builder that also has a tab that tells you how to promote to grab channel-specific links, for Facebook, for Twitter, for Instagram, but you would then use the tools that you normally use for posting to social media, whether you do that directly or through a scheduler, and then all the data will flow directly into your dashboard, so it is a campaign builder and manager, not a social poster.

Ed: You’re going to have unique links created through the system to share like Angela mentioned, and then however you choose to share them is up to you. You could share them by making a Facebook post. You could do an Instagram story post, you could put it on LinkedIn, which is becoming more and more prevalent. You could use it to send an SMS blast using BP’s text tool and get it to as many different people.

The beauty of the product is it is fully agnostic when it comes to social networks and there are no integrations that need to be added. Out of the box, you’ll be able to use this to share pretty much to any social network or other way that you’d like, right off the bat.

Sean: Cool. All right. There’s three questions that are very similar. I’m just trying to figure out the best way to ask but they’re all asking a variation of, is this primarily like a photo campaign tool, that utilizes different frames or what are some additional functionalities beyond that?

Ed: Angie, you want to take that?

Angela: Yes, so a photo is part of all of our templates but there are different templates that accomplish different things. Now, the reason we start with a photo is that, once a person has added their photo to the invitation, they’re almost 100% likely to complete participating and sharing in social media. It’s a very loyalty-generating exercise and they want to share that. That said, we apply that construct of adding your photo to a branded frame, to various templates that cover a wide range of use cases. There is a photo petition, for instance, that can replace a traditional issue petition that does not have a photo counter, but instead has a progress bar where you’re tracking towards a goal and where the call to action button might say, sign with your photo.

Those campaigns also can have additional data points that are collected at the end of the flow and then as mentioned, as we were talking about what’s next for Bring Change to Mind that the platform also supports cause marketing campaigns that have a sponsor, and those could be co-promoted with the corporate sponsor. In that case, we’d have two counters, one that tracks photos or participants, and another that reflects on raised donations from that source. Photos are at the heart of it, but lots of huge cases that can be applied to that.

Ed: Yes, probably just want to add it’s not available yet, but one of the next pieces of functionality that’s going to be added to the platform is an add-on to enable our event functionality, which can be used at physical events as well. What’s great about that is it essentially turns any phone or tablet into a little photo booth that will allow people to adopt the frame, having their photo taken from a volunteer, for example, and then sent to them via text message.

You could take a digital campaign and also have a physical aspect to it where you can actually turn some of the people who attend that event, who you might not have contact information for, into digital participants with contact information. That’s [inaudible 00:27:15] actually going to be available as an add-on really shortly, for the product as well.

Sean: I think that’s going to make a lot of people happy, looking at the time. I think we’ve got one more question. Does the Donor Perfect social integrate with constant contact for users to share their initial contact support from email to their social medias?

Angela: Sean, that might be more of a question for you.

[laughter]

Sean: As long as their email address is making its way into Donor Perfect and they would qualify for one of your list filters, there shouldn’t be any issue with the flow of information going from the social program into constant contact. I think the short answer is yes. The long answer, of course yes but we got to make sure everything’s lined up for it. I just want to be respectful of everybody’s time. Did you have any final remarks?

Ed: We just want to say thank you to everyone for taking the time to join us today and we’re really excited about bringing this functionality to you. If you do have questions, feel free to get in touch directly or through Donor Perfect. We look forward to working with many of you very soon. Thank you so much for taking the time today.

Angela: Thank you.

Sean: All right. Thank you everybody for attending our session and thank you again to Ed and Angela for taking the time to present today. Next up is what is an Oreo cookie without the center? What is your nonprofit without middle donors, and a presentation by Queue Give storytelling as part of a multi-channel content marketing strategy.

No matter which session you choose, you will not miss any content since all sessions, including today. This one are going to be recorded and shared out. We hope to see you in at least one of those sessions. Take care, everybody. Bye.