How to Connect and Manage Your Nonprofit's Technology in One Place

turn this over to our friends at Tap Network so they can take all their time and introduce the webinar. Over to you, Kyle and Julian. Thanks for being here. >> Thanks, Artha. >> So, uh, my name is, uh, Julian Grace. I'm the junior director of digital solutions here at Cap Network, and I'm joined by Kyle, our our co-founder. And I think today we're going to have a lot of, uh, helpful information, uh, just about, you know, you're managing a huge technology stack. You have all these tools. How could you bring them together? how are we going to make them work together? So, uh, we have a couple things on the agenda today. First, we're going to give you a little breakdown of, you know, who we are. Then, we're going to go into, you know, describe really laying out and describing the problem of this disconnected tech stack. Um, talk about integrating platforms, bringing workflows into those integrations, some some easy steps you can take, especially with small teams, uh, uh, to bring all these things together today. Then we're going to go into a demo of TAP HQ, you know, organized around not just um you talking with your constituents and your donors and things like that, but organizing the internals of the nonprofit as well. And then we'll have some times for questions and answers after the fact. >> So TAP, thanks Julian. So TAP, um we've been a marketing agency, uh growth agency for the past 15 years. We provide services everything from AI strategy down to PR just the common you know the everyday marketing um but we've worked at the enterprise and large scale level with state and local governments um with enterprise agencies and that's kind of where we got our start and realized a really a really large unmet need in the nonprofit space to be able to um either provide those services or for nonprofit um small to mid-size nonprofit organizations to be able to compete um at the same level using similar tools or the the methodology. So that's where we really fit in well especially with our partnership with Tech Soup and Strive to provide those services um to organizations like yours on this call today. So we know that you know um certainly uh like budget is a concern, capacity is a concern. Um, we hope that some of the questions we'll help answer today will help you um, be able to compete with some of those larger organizations uh, or with I would say competitors but also partners in the space um, to do your work more efficiently and more effectively um, at scale. So, the problem we're we're focusing around today is, you know, maybe you've you've been on some of these webinars before. You've been doing research on your own. You're starting to use some new tools to help you organize data, uh, make smart decisions, and, you know, create more information or touch points for your constituents, your donors, uh, your volunteers, things like that. But now you have this big sea of tools and no central point to really organize everything around. So a very common issue we're going to have is um you know a lot of people are going to be doing all these things independently. So the next slide we sort of break this out. We're saying okay we have you know in an example with three people you're going to have you know three separate people all trying their own things. Three separate accounts nobody's really sharing anything in there. Um, and a really easy way to bring this together is, you know, just to simply write down, you know, have everybody take stock of what they're already doing. Write down the three best setups, document them, turn them into a process so that other people can benefit. So, here you start moving into things instead of having, you know, these oneoff things that maybe somebody cobbled together once, you have a saved project or a skill that the whole team can benefit from. um you know if the work that one person is doing within their setup other people can then benefit from. It's not everybody is trying to you know own the whole process themselves centered around the one part that they play within there. Writing down is really one of the biggest things that can help because you know if you don't have it externally somewhere nobody else can you know read it look for opportunities for improvements. um you know you're going to be relying on your own memory or or you know the data saved on one machine. You really want to make sure this information is out there and shared. You know this something we do here at TAP quite often just making sure these processes are documented so that then they can be referenced and refined over time. Now one of the mindset changes that's going to help with this is a project mindset versus a platform mindset. So here on the next slide we break this down. really the project mindset is probably what you're going to be familiar with. So, um you know, you build something once and then you forget about it. Um you know, uh it's not really connected to other tools. You're thinking, okay, hey, maybe we want to, you know, uh redo this module or the way we're doing emails. Think, okay, we're going to take all the stuff we need for this um uh you know, put it together, just get this accomplished, and then we never need to think about it again. you know, in this project mindset columns, you know, none of these things are necessarily done out of uh uh negligence. It's just saying, hey, it's it's costing you time. Uh that can be in in misdonations and confusion in the organization and trust signals that you're missing out on. Um and the platform mindset, it's not necessarily about having a a bigger budget or or a special way of of of doing things. It's really shifting in how you're thinking about um you know, what a website is, what a project is. Um, and so with this platform mindset, we're going to be saying, hey, how can we set things up so they are continuously improved and optimized? Is it going to be integrated with the tools we're using to, you know, organize the data about the people we work with, about the way we reach out to them, about the way we report on the work we're doing, both, you know, digitally and in the real world. And now, um, this behavior can be tracked. And you can take the insights that you get from this behavior and feed them back into itself. So it's no longer, hey, I need to do this. It's one and done. and you're saying, "Hey, if I need to accomplish this task or or or this update or upgrade for anything, how can we do it so that it can continually be upgraded over time rather than saying, "Hey, we're just really going to stress for 2 months and then forget about it. How can we turn this into something that's going to be beneficial within the long term?" So, in order to do this, one of the things we're really going to need to do is integrate all these platforms together. So, we're going to talk about the website specifically because this is where everything really starts. It's the front door to your organization. And for most of the people you're trying to reach, it's going to be the first impression, the first ask, the first place that somebody goes when they're ready to act, whether that be volunteering, uh, making a donation, signing up for a program. So, this platform mindset, here's what it can look like in in progress. your website stops being a brochure, a passive piece of of uh technology that just displays information and it starts becoming the connective tissue within your entire organization. Somebody's going to donate, you want to take that donation and move that into your CRM. So you can see when you're looking at constituent data, hey, these are the people that have donated. You don't need to go over to your donation tool, compare spreadsheets there. somebody signs up to volunteer, um that goes to, you know, sends out notifications to the people uh that need to know, sends information to the volunteer themselves. Um you know, you're going to be driving people through your email campaigns, stuff that's relevant to them, not just these wide blasts that are supposed to hit every type of audience for every type of call to action. So, every one of these systems should be talking to your website, and your website should be talking back. So, a lot of nonprofits, you may see some of these tools that you're like, "Oh, yeah. Well, we have a donation platform. You know, uh, we do things on social media. How is it connecting? How is the stuff you're doing on social media connected to the way your website's organized? How is the way your website's organized connected to your CRM and how you're able to collect information about the people that are most passionate about your mission?" So, the platform mindset says the website is a hub and every spoke outside of that hub has a specific job. So we can start to take this and and build this tech stack around the website. And it's really helpful to think of this as layers. So these are, you know, if you're if you want to move to a high-erforming nonprofit digital operation, um the CMS, your content management system or your website is going to be the foundation. Um everything else is going to connect to it. So, here you have um you know the the website itself, whether that be on WordPress or Wix or something like that. Everything is going to be based right there on that base layer. On top of that, you're going to bring in your CRM information about the people that you're interacting with. Um HubSpot or Bloomerang. Uh there's lots of nonprofit tools out there to collect this, but your forms, um your registrations, your donations, everything that people are doing on their website should feed into that CRM. oftentimes that CRM is going to come bundled with an email tool. Maybe you'll have something separate, but that's going to be layer three. So, you want to say, okay, hey, all the campaigns we're sending out, you know, they're not just going to read the email and then, you know, materialize in front of us somewhere. We need to send them somewhere to the website. Um, so the campaigns are going to link back to your site. You're tracking those opens and clicks so you can see what's working and what's not. On top of that, you can bring in your donation tool that's going to go, you know, send the data from donations to your CRM. It's going to take those records, put it uh uh, you know, back on all the individual user uh, accounts there. And then you're going to have all your confirmation pages and your follow-ups and your thank yous built directly on your website. And finally, layer five is going to be the analytics. How are you going to see, you know, how your website's performing if you're not collecting data points around them? be that page views, custom events, form submissions, anything like that. You want to build this tech stack up from the website all the way to reporting on all the tools in between. Kyle, you want to talk a little bit about integration? >> Oh, Kyle, you're muted, unfortunately. Yeah, I was over here talking to myself. I have a a 10-month old now baby at home, so he comes running by the door screaming. and I have to put it on mute. Um, thanks Julian. So, we talk a little bit about why why integration matters and how the website's sort of the front door. Um, but I use house analogies all the time. If you work with me long enough, you'll understand. I mean, you'll get to hear lots of these. Some people hate them. Um, but once you invite someone inside, you want to make sure it's appealing and they can go to the right places and they understand like the flow of the house. And that same thing applies for your organization um, and your technology and the integrations. When I say and when I'm saying integration, I just mean that every action someone takes on your site, whether it's filling out a form, making a donation, signing up for a newsletter, it should automatically flow into the other tools within your your stack um where it's relevant. Like you don't you might not need it to go into, you know, some systems that are um you know, you might want donor data to go into your financial systems, but you might not need um some of the design information or something like that going in there as well. So, it has to go in the right systems. Um it starts with everything should go every form submission as an example should create a record in the CRM. The CRM as we talked about was the customer relationship management or consistent relationship management platform. So that's like donor interest volunteer application. Someone signs up for a newsletter. Um you import them into a database manually. people in an Excel spreadsheet or something like that that goes into um that CRM that allows you to take to follow those people along in their life cycle but also um add information as you you get more of that from that same person and also keeps you from having to collect information over and over again across different systems. Um then we can use that to to personalize the that user's experience. So if we know where they came in from, as an example, so in an email, if we know who it went to and we know what they're interested in, we can follow follow where they clicked on it. And then that decides where it takes them on your site. That could be a specific page. It could be a piece, you know, something on a specific page. It might be like a, you know, member portal or something like that, but then we can guide them further down that that path. Um, this allows you to be sure that like your donation data is staying clean. It's staying connected. We can follow along someone's giving history. We know when they gave. We know what they gave. We know what what they're likely to give in the future and we can tailor things like thank you messages and sequences based on that. So that you don't have to have someone manually reaching out to them or hey did I remember to reach out to Kyle and see if he's going to give to us this year or even go a step further and do like referral donations and stuff such like that like hey you gave you know $100. Do you have, you know, tell us five of your friends that could get that might be interested in giving $500 or $100 or whatever it might be and see where that donation stacks up and then, you know, move them into that system and you can see how it can get very complicated very quickly. Um, but having that, you know, that initial path and initial platform that people can go into and then from there now you can start to get into reporting and analytics and see what's working. You know which pages are driving more donations. You know which campaigns are working. You know where you're getting volunteers from. But you're also able to see where people are, you know, not so interested and falling off, whether that's your website or not opening emails and things of that. Um, and the value of this is now you have that, as we said at the sort of the base of this is you have that one record, but you've got multiple touch points for that record. So multiple things um that you can see where you've talked to them. You can see what, you know, what events they've attended. You can see, as we said, like if they made donations, you know, how did they volunteer and support your organization, who are they connected to? And then it starts to build this really strong profile out over time and then that way allows you to make educated and um databacked decisions and then decide where the money goes, where the time goes and make sure that you're being as efficient as possible. Um so that core connection that I just kind of talked through is having is tying your website into a CRM. Certainly there's platforms like HubSpot where it allows you to have maybe a website and a CRM all in one place. There's other ones where you know if you're not taking that leaps right now um you might have like a rudimentary CRM or something just attached into the website itself but making sure that that information is collected in one place. Um some common examples of this would be sort of we talked through like a visitor might fill out a form on your website that goes into your CRM um to update that so we know any information we collected about that visitor what what they gave um and then we're able to trigger that thank you automation off that. As I mentioned previously, one of the nice things about having them in there already, if it's not their first visit, we don't want to keep asking them for their first name, their last name, their email, their phone number, and things like that, if we already have that, it's really, you know, that just creates friction um when you're trying to get someone in there. So, having that CRM connected back to the website, so it can pre-populate their information, allows that form to be shorter. Um, it's a it's called progressive profiling. Basically, it also allows you to do things like add other information you might want to collect from someone, but you don't want these crazy long forms. So, if we already know information like their name, well, we know we want to ask make sure that we have the right email address so we can connect them, but we already have their email, we already know their name, we know where they live, you can ask if they want to update information, but you can ask another, you know, question to them that you might not want to collect on the initial form. It could be, you know, which of our, you know, initiatives or pro or programs is most important to you? And you can list those. That way you can again tailor messages to them in the future. Um some other examples of things that connect to the CRM as I mentioned would be signing up for a newsletter um or registering for an event. So we know you know especially a lot of community organizations will have events inerson events. It's really helpful to know who did I invite, who said that they were coming and who actually came. Um so that you can you can send out reminder emails. you can send out if you're using like an event management platform. Maybe you send out text messages um or inapp notifications, but then you can also follow up with them after the event. So, it was great to see you at this event. We're glad you could attend blah blah blah. Or the opposite. You might say, "We really missed you at our event last weekend where we did X, Y, and Z things. Um but we have some other ones coming up in the future. Would you, you know, be interested in learning more about how you can support our organization?" Um, and then even more granular would be something like tracking how someone's using, as we said, like your website or highv value pages throughout. So maybe they haven't supported you already. Maybe that they haven't given a donation, maybe they haven't attended an event, but we know a little bit about them. Maybe we know their um their salary ranges or we know where they live or something like that and we we say that they're like a likely to be a supporter or someone referred them to our site. If you can see what pages they're going to because it's being logged in that CRM, it allows you to uh reach out to them with more personalized, hey, you know, we saw you're interested in this thing or um you might not even be you might want to be that creepy to say, we saw you on this web page on our website, but you could say, you know, you could be timely in your responses to them. So, if I'm on the site today and I'm looking at how I can support an organization and I don't donate, if I got an email later today from that organization that would talk a little bit more about where my donation might go, that might bring me back in there to to make that donation or or offer that support. Um, that same example I just gave got leads us into like how we would connect the website to email marketing. So, we talked about how we want to get the stuff into the CRM, but this is also how you, you know, with within that CRM, you have start to be able to do things like build out your email um newsletter list, your um you know, volunteer lists. Um emails help you drive those return visits. So, if you're tracking things back to certain campaigns, so if it's a, you know, like a a running um a running event campaign to get someone to come to support, to donate, um you build that into one campaign, you drive that to different landing pages, to different social media pages, maybe to your YouTube channel. Um but now you're able to drive someone through sort of like all the the digital touch points and even the in-person touch points for you. Um once you've once you have them in there and you're tracking them across that CRM through that email now you can change their behavior based on um well you can change their behavior based on what they're doing based on their behavior right so if we know that someone comes to your website and they download your impact report because they might want to know where their money could go um and they don't donate to you typically we can send a follow-up email to them um based on you know what we know is in that report as an example or maybe we maybe someone keeps coming to the page and they don't donate and they don't download that impact report but they've never seen it. This is a great opportunity to maybe send that to them or send a little piece of that out to them. But what's nice about this is like again we're we're starting to talk about automation or personalization. So this isn't, you know, Julian sitting there and watching every person that comes to our website and sending them a specific email. This is us having a smart platform connected there so we know what they're doing. we know what messages um have resonated with audience audiences or people like that in the past and we know that we can you know use that at scale for them. Now, as somebody who has data solutions in in their job title, you might assume that I'm very excited about analytics and data points and and you know, I think it really is one of the most important parts because, you know, at the core of things you you're you want to do, you know, you're listening to the webinar, you you're hearing all these cool things, you want to start integrating them in your work and you're like, all right, where should we, you know, where should we start? What's working now? What's not? If you don't have data on, you know, all these systems, you're not really, you know, measuring things. You're not really optimizing. You're making guesses. And especially if you have multiple people who are going to be contributing to these decisions, you know, it can be really easy to get into, you know, anecdotal evidence. One person is like, "Oh, well, I feel like this is going to work better." Or like this other person over here saying, "Oh, well, you know, on social media, I saw more likes." And the donation person might be saying, "Oh, well, you know, I don't know that it's really increasing any donations. why don't we do something different? Um, you know, bringing this all together and and and being able to report on it is going to help you make more efficient decisions and smarter decisions. So, there's lots of stuff you can track, but as far as things that you should and can do today, here are are some are six metrics that are really easy to set up. you know, they're they're going to be very basic within Google Analytics, but it's going to help you um uh uh become more efficient and and more sophisticated in these things as you're trying to say decide what can we automate, what can we bring together, how how should we start to set up these systems, you know, you you can start to look at the traffic sources, where are people coming from, you know, is the work you're doing on social media driving people to the site or you're just getting engagement on that platform. Now, once they are on the site, what are the top pages? Where are people spending the most time and taking the most actions there? No. What's the rate of the people who visit the page versus the people who make a donation? That can help it, you know, tell you, is there something we need to change on our donation page to make it more attractive or easier to donate? Same thing with the bounce rate, the scroll depth. You know, if you have a very long page, you have lots of helpful information towards the bottom, but people aren't scrolling there to get it. You know, you might say, "Hey, can we break this up from sections?" So, we're going to set up anchor links so we can, you know, send people down the page a little bit quicker. And, you know, as as Kyle mentioned where we're saying, "Hey, we don't want to be asking people for the same information that we already have and have these big crazy long forms." We can see, hey, somebody start filling out a form and then just stop after a couple fields. Being able to have all this information helps you make those decisions about where it's going to be important to spend the time setting up, you know, uh uh those special form tools or things like that. So, it's really important to get this set up. Something you can easily do today and you're not going to get any data from the past. So, you know, the day you set it up is going to be the first day that you're you're going to see in your data. So, definitely something I recommend starting today. So as we have all this, you know, we touched on automation a little bit already, but you know, getting information from one system to another is good, but having it happen automatically for you is great. So getting these automations set up is really important because it's going to help make all this marketing and these optimizations feel less like a chore and more like a tool that you can rely on long term. So I want to highlight uh uh two right now uh Zapier and HubSpot. So, you know, it doesn't really just automate tasks AI, uh, but it helps decide what needs to happen next. Um, with these two tools, they have two different roles. Zapier connects your systems. So, it allows, you know, different, you know, tools to talk and share data uh within themselves. And HubSpot, you know, it's a tool that does quite a lot. Um, but you know, it's also uh uh something that can help you communicate with the with your constituents and it can help you act on the data. So, Breeze within HubSpot, you know, says, "Okay, hey, we have this data point coming in from all these tools and now meets this criteria. Let's enter this person within this email automation. Let's start to change the forms that can be seeing on on the website." So, Zapier here is is has tools within it to help draft these automations for you. So, it's going to use Copilot. They're called Zaps, these little modules that connect the uh connect the different tools, but there's no code. You don't need to be a developer or anything. Um, and there's not a lot of manual setup. And once you authorize the things you want to connect, it can bring it all together for you and set up these really complex data routes. It's going to remove a lot of this repetitive data entry, whether that be donation records or spreadsheet updates, because it's syncing all these things together. And you know, it's it's speed and setup is the real benefit here. You know, once this zap is set up, it's going to run the same rule every time. It's going to be reliable and send the information, you know, no matter how it's being entered or or how things are updated over time. With HubSpot, the breeze, it's going to read the contact's full history and give you recommendations for next steps. You can say, "Hey, this person used to donate monthly. Now we're getting something from them, you know, maybe once a year. Can we do a a personalized follow-up? Um, as people are coming in, you know, maybe they're filling out your interest forms, it can score these leads automatically. So, it can say, "Hey, out of all the form submissions that you received over the past week and you need to start doing these follow-ups, these are people that should be prioritized because of XYZ." You know, it's going to interpret the data, not just move it around. So, Zapier moving that data. HubSpot helps you understand it. this we know that I'm seeing questions in this chat as well, but we know that that um this al also probably seems daunting and overwhelming. We're talking about integrating a lot of different systems. Um but one thing you'll hear from us and then that you know we really try to emphasize is um sort of taking like a crawl walk run approach and not taking this you know how am I going to fix my whole department or my whole organization with one thing. Sure, you could put HubSpot or Zapier in there and you could go and try to fix all those different pieces, but we think of we want to think when we're thinking about maybe implementing AI tools or looking at integrating systems. Think in in terms of workflows and not the whole department as a whole. So, it's very unlikely you're able to solve every problem for a department with, you know, one or just a couple platforms because there's still going to be human in the loop. There's still going to be people that have to do things or move things around, but there's very frequently a lot of, you know, um, manual processes that could be automated or repeatable, um, things that could be automated or systems that might not talk to each other right now that we might be able to connect either through like the tools that Julian was talking about or some of the ones that you all are mentioning as well in the chat. Um, to get these things moving. So, think of those things in in forms of workflows first. So, what am I doing every day? What is the what is the information I need? what systems does it go in and what is the out outcome supposed to look like? Um, so we start with the source data and we see, you know, what needs to go into this? What do I need to collect? Where do I need to collect it from? And then but where does it go to a person at that point? Right? So when does someone have to be involved? Do I have to take it from Excel and import into a CRM? Do I have to take it from the CRM and put it in an email marketing platform? Do I have to take it from an email marketing platform and put it into like a mailing platform or something like that? Do I have to collect data back on that on the back end? How do I tie all that together? What does that workflow look like? And what does my time look like to to build something like that? What we want to when we do this, when we start to analyze these things, we want to look at the one that has the biggest sort of manual lift first, but might have the largest impact or might not have the largest impact. Sorry. So, if this is taking, you know, a third of someone's time each week, maybe it doesn't have the biggest impact, but it's keeping them from being able to do um some other things, some other applications or whatever or whatever. Let's how do we shrink that down now so that we can get them back to doing the things that do have the larger impact? you might find um hey I want to be able to automate donor followup. But if let's just say you only get a hundred donors a year, maybe it's really more worth your time to be doing more handholding with those donors and creating more um you know more relationships with them to show them you know how their their donations going further. So maybe you don't want to automate that step, but there's something else that you're doing that's keeping you from finding the 101 101st donor or something like that and cultivating that relationship. So picking the first one workflow, fix the bit the worst step and then measure outcomes of that before and after. Um and that's something we think that like you know even as spread thin as a lot of nonprofits are anyone on the team can pick something like that and find that um sort of sweet spot to get started. Um, another powerful use case here for like taking that datadriven decision-making, putting workflows together, uh, is that's very relevant for most nonprofits that we want to quickly walk through is identifying these high-v value donors. And you can sort of see some of the things that we've talked about so far today, putting these together, what that looks like as far as an outcome. Um, so we start with like the prospective donors. That could be people, you know, have already donated to you in the past and finding more people like that. So what do they have in common using starting to analyze um that information about them? What are the common data points that they have? Is it an age thing? Is it a location thing? Is it a um a net worth or something like that? Is it having, you know, attended a college or university that they're giving back to? Is it having attended a un a community event? But what is it um that we know about prospective donors? And then once we made the offer to them or or done the outreach um and turned them into a donor, now they're a first-time donor. So what do we know about them? You know, what how much did they donate? Again, we had this we had this list of prospects who we thought might donate. What did the people that actually donated look like at that point? So we're following that that data up this this uh this pyramid. What do they do? Um, then we can start to see like, okay, from this large list of prospects, let's just say it was 100 people, maybe we got 10 donors from that. What what was very specific about those 10 people, what do they convert on? What are we able to track? And then now we're trying to get them to the next level, the next rung of this ladder up. How do we get them to donate again? Right? Do we ask them more frequently? You know, going to have to do a little bit of trial and error there, but see what what works to get them to to donate to you again. And then now you're taking this list of 100 people down to 10. this list of 10 people, maybe that's down to three recurring donors. So, what do we when do they donate? How often do they donate? What's the average size of their their annual gift or their their gifts that they're donating? Are they doing monthly? Are they doing it annually? Um, but also, how else are they engaging with your organization? Are they just coming once a year and giving you $100, or are they coming to multiple events? Are they clicking on multiple social media posts? So, you're tracking them across this whole this whole life cycle so you can see where they're um where they're coming back or where they're converting on. And what that allows you to do is then start to uncover more. Okay, who are the people? The same thing the whole way up. But who are the people that are most likely um to be a donor of ours? And then how do I take that information and go back out here uh and find more people like them so I can start back at the bottom and drive them up to the top. The goal here is for people that are planning their their their spend or their donation with your organization. And back to my earlier example, how do I make sure that my you as the development director or someone in your organization is cultivating that relationship? Whether that's, you know, automatically or that's, you know, doing manual events for these donors. Maybe you're calling them on the phone. Maybe you're writing a handwritten um letter to them. Like we got one, I'll show one. We've got one here from like um we work with the Delaware Association for Nonprofit Advancement. like they or Delar Alliance for nonprofit advancement and their executive director sent us a a handwritten letter. Like it's very rare that you get those these days, but that one little thing that that that they've done will sit on my desk. It'll remind me that, you know, that that we did something for them. It makes you feel a little bit more special. But she was able to do that because she has, you know, these um these systems in place that say, you know, who did what when. Um, and then she also has these workflows that are running for her automatically so that she can spend the time getting back to her supporters. Um, all this is starting to bubble up as you can tell into automation and AI. So, how to work smarter not harder. Um, how to connect your systems. You know, this is where the the industry is going and where we're seeing the biggest um really leap so that you can take some of this stuff off your plate. So AI is starting is is able to do a lot of the stuff we just talked about on that previous slide and then through the the earlier parts of this conversation once you have it set up and integrated with with your system. So it can do things like automatically um tagging donors or tagging different people as a donor versus a volunteer or something like that. So we talked about setting up the CRM and integrating those systems together. Having an AI layer and automation layer in that CRM is going to allow you to do some of those pieces faster and at scale. Um whether that's looking at giving that your past data or past um analytics and seeing where people came from and who was likely to do what when they when they what what they did after they took those those steps um or creating segments or subsegments um of donors of supporters along the way. Um and then they can also start to put put together those analytics for you. So you don't have to like have these crazy analytics platforms anymore um that are connected to these things that have you know had to have been connected over years. You can start to put this stuff into some of these systems and have it identify patterns um and outliers and things like that for you. look at what's worked and what, you know, what is what's performed well and also what hasn't and then do things like make updates and recommendations for you on who to reach out to, when to reach out to them, what to say to them, what's going to get them to to convert. And it really helps you do things like re-engaging old donors, um, being more personalized. So that that handwritten letter I just showed you, maybe she didn't hand maybe she didn't think of that on her own, but she wrote it by hand. So like take that step out of it. Maybe that was like, "Hey, send Kyle this letter that just says this." and she was able to write it so she didn't have to sit down and think about what do I have to do in this situation. So it can take some of those um those steps out of there for you. It allows for better segmentation as I talked about. Um and what what's really powerful for it is where it's able to break things across multiple channels. So like t take one story and turn it into many stories. So, if you're a community impact organization and before you would publish, you know, your outcomes impact report uh and would talk about who you uh had a positive impact on or where some of that donation that money went. Now, with AI, you can really scale what that looks like. So you can create blog posts, social media posts, maybe emails that your different um pieces of your team send out to different audiences, but that one thing, that one great event now has like this longer life cycle um that can return for you sort of um you know, year after year or something like that. All this to be said, one of the the the big rule of thumb here is, you know, we don't want to lose the personal touch, especially um in our organizations, especially in those community organizations. So looking at AI first as a way to replace some of the repetitive work that people don't have the time for so you can get back to that personal touch so you can get back to doing the things um that really matter and then keeping the strategy and that storytelling aspect where the human uh is still involved. Um that leads us into watching what tracking what we're doing with this. So we think ours are the real honest metric. Um the real outcome that you're seeing for that all nonprofits can can benefit from. So you know every organization is different. You know we have different goals. We have different um teams and things like that. But if we can save some time we can do what we said like to be more personal to be more um to have more that human touch to be more strategic. So looking at what this what this looks like just as an example if someone's spending um 11 hours a month one person that's taking data from one system and turning that into a board report in the course of a year that's 132 hours that breaks out that turns into three weeks of three three or more weeks of that person's time um just working on some of those manual manual export put it in a system set it up into a PowerPoint presentation um and if you can think of where that time could be better spent you That could be three three it could be one event per day for three weeks, you know, spread across the whole year. That person's out there shaking hands, meeting people, listening to the community, still collecting information, still bringing them back into the system, but they're not, you know, head down just doing these these repetitive reports. Um, so when you're when we're talking about building these, you know, implementing these AI tools, look at those hours that you are spending on that before you start to build something because if you don't know what that workflow is costing you today, you're never going to know where it really helped. And we do think this is one of the kind of the easiest metrics to easiest things to to measure. >> Thanks, Kyle. So hopefully as we've gone through this, you've gotten some exciting ideas. You have, you know, a lot of energy that you're saying, "Okay, great. I want to move forward with this. Here's, you know, a basic outline you can take and and it'll help you move towards achieving this connected tech stack today. So, here we have, you know, the thing that really separates the most efficient, the most successful nonprofits. First one is just like Kyle talked about, slow down. Instead of saying, you know, okay, hey, I heard about this this cool thing, you know, how can I find a way to use it? You want to say, hey, let's see where we're actually spending the time. What are the pain points? What are the things everybody hates doing um but need to get done? Where can we have these repetitive tasks removed? Um you know, I I do, you know, woodworking and there's plenty of cool tools there, but I wouldn't necessarily go, "Oh, hey, this is cool. Let me see, you know, how I could do something with it." I'm saying, "Hey, what am I already doing in the shop that is, you know, uh annoying to me or or or things that I would rather not be doing?" And then that'll help you inform, you know, what tools you're going to want to integrate, what's going to be actually useful for you long term. So then you're gonna say, okay, hey, now that we have where all this time goes, what's this costly recurring work? Um, this could be something, you know, like moving that data back and forth, like doing this donor uh research. Uh, the third one is document this. So, uh, you know, the things that you don't necessarily need to bring, um, you know, these automations into, write them down so that they can still be optimized outside of, uh, the automation part. And for the ones that aren't working, you know, make sure they're they're documented this way so you can then see the benefit of the automations and the AI integrations later on down the line. Number four can be, you know, really powerful here. And this is saying, hey, we want to give a small group of people within the organization a little bit of of leeway to say, okay, hey, we're doing things this way, and this is, you know, what we're getting out of it. What if we took a look at things a little bit differently? Give them the power to uh uh take the issue they're working on, run with it, and see what solutions they can come up with. You could then integrate it, and then you do the whole process over again. You're saying, great, we put in some of these these workflows. Let's stop here. See where we're spending our time now. You know, are we spending more time managing the tool? Let's figure out a better way to set that tool up. And then you do the same thing within documentation and empowering these small groups. So great, we'll take a a quick five minutes um show you like how we can get all this data, all your standards sort of into one place, what this looks like. So right now we have I saw someone actually mention in the chat like one of the complicated things here is having a dozen or so applications and none of these things are connected. That's exactly what we're talking about here, right? So right now you got CRM data in one place, finance program data, different shared drives, you got Google Drive, One Drive, Dropbox. I know I've had that same problem. Um one or many inboxes depending on how many organizations you service, especially like when you're working with like United Ways or they work with multiple organizations and things like that. putting these things into different spreadsheets, getting those things into one place like where there's shared knowledge, shared memory, and the systems are all connected is the goal here is what we're talking about today. Um, and then where if we're able to do that, what becomes possible is you can have agents connected to that. So, one agent connected to that common that common shared knowledge base or common shared system. So maybe the agent's not connected to your QuickBooks or agent's not connected to your CRM, but if those two tools are connected into one central layer, now the agent can work on that. And that's where something like maybe like a HubSpot or even Salesforce might be um something that's more like typically typically works this way. So you can connect clawed agents to it or Grock bots or something like that. Your reports can then be built from that live data that are consolidated in that one system. And then it really helps with staff productivity. So when you bring a new person in instead of them having to learn all these systems and hey how many employees do we have or like what grants are we we we trying to go after how many donors do we have and things like that and send someone saying well you have to go here to find this out you have to go there to find that out and I have to give you a log into this system and they have to request access. Um that really delays their productivity and their time to impact. Um something that we try to measure. Um, this allows you to become more those that new staff or new people or new uh interns and things like that to become more productive in days and not months. Um, something we're really excited about that we're showing as part of this this webinar, but we work with a lot of our organizations on. We've been building that that sort of framework over time. We are just we've just launched a system called Tap HQ where allows us to do this at what we do at scale for large organizations. We built that same sort of layer um in for the small to midsize nonprofits. I mean any organization can use it, but some of the large enterprise organizations are going to want their own place, their own tool, and that's the type of work we do with them. Um this allows us to do that at scale. So this creates this sort of operational layer that any nonprofit can hook their systems into, load their data into, and then now they have that that scalable tool or system where all those systems can read from it. You can connect it to the different tools or it has agents itself built into it. It can you can run your automations right out of here or connect right to this. So it really speeds up that time to get these things connected. Um we also are as part of this webinar we're offering a personalized AI roadmap. So um this is a $5,000 value that we're fully funding for 10 organizations per quarter. So we're donating our time um for these to to do these workshops. Um, we know AI is moving really quickly. It's really hard to understand what do I do, when do I do it, where do I put my time, where do I put my money. Um, so what we are doing now is something that was is a paid service that we we offer. Um, but we're again donating this time. You get two hands-on working sessions. We work right with your leadership team. We do a discovery call and a road mapping call. Um, we build a whole discovery workbook out for you. It customized for you. It's ready for to be presented to your board, presented to your executive team. Um, and it outlines like this AI growth roadmap. So, it's not just AI, it's the automation, it's the integration, it's everything we talked about today to get the the organization um and the the systems all in one place and on one page. Um, this is only available through our partnership with Tech Soup. Um, there's no cost to your organization. You just have to apply to be selected. Uh, and we are right now selecting 10 nonprofits per quarter. So, there's just some some basic criteria to reach. Uh, we'll send you a link to that as part of this Um so here's the the link will be on the slide. The slide these slides will be presented after um after this webinar. If you aren't if you don't fit this criteria, we also have some other options available. You can just point you to the right resources um based on the stage of your organiz your your nonprofit your organization. I'm going to get to the questions here in a second. Um we also have um two offers two other offers as part of this webinar. So, our we call these digital marketing subscription packages, but this really covers sort of soup to nuts. Um, a full outsource team here at TAP Network. So, we have a standard that starts at $8.99 a month. You get unlimited support requests. You get 10 hours of support per month, access to all of our subject matter experts across all the different divisions we have. Um, this could do be be for things like CRM support, social media and blog content production, website support, um, upkeep maintenance, things like that. SEO analysis, AEO analysis, email production, sort of anything you would have to help your organization grow. Um, we also have a premium package. It starts at $12.99 a month. You get everything that's in that first one, but you also get more custom code development. Um, we'll work with you on integrations and automations. you you will have access to those experts so directly instead of just you'll still have the ticketing system the support desk um but you'll get one-on-one support and planning as you request that throughout the course of a month and then what we're offering is that platform I was talking to you briefly about and I will highle overview here um is if you sign up for either one of these now within the next two weeks we're including access to that tap HQ platform through at least December 31st of this year as we're bringing beta users into that so we're just asking you for feedback. Tell tell us what you like, tell us what you would change. Um, before I jump into questions, just going to do a real quick overview of this. So, we'll share the URLs to these as well. Um, but just kind of giving a high level view of what you get. So, this is that dashboard. This is the system we call Tap HQ. It's the headquarters of all your your your major um departments basically all rolled into one place. So, you have a a 10,000 foot view, but can get granular. um gets all the systems connected, pulls in a lot of the data and then you can either work from this platform or connect to this platform um from really any tool. We have MCPs so mono context protocols which you can connect to the common tools like claude copilot chat GBT gro. We also have API so you can pull data into your other systems or pull data from the systems into this system. It all starts with this dashboard so you can rearrange and organize this with all the information across your different system. There's like 90 some different widgets that are available. So you can track, you know, your grants, you can see what grants are available for your organization. Uh you can track your your website readiness, your health scores based on different things in your department, any upcoming deadlines. So a very strong compliance tool, you know, when are your different um filings due, when your insurance, when do your insuranceances come insurance come up for renewal, that type of fun stuff. Um track your financial health. We have these different HQs down the side here. So, let me just expand this. You have everything from like site HQ, which monitors your website, make sure that you stay in compliance, can uncover errors, make recommendations for you. There's compliance HQ, which is all your credentials, your documents. Um, it can actually start to preback prepackage things like your 990s and your state filings so that it's all all there ready for you and then it's ready to send off to your CPA. Um the one that everybody wants to see is the grant tracker. So you can upload grants, but you can also find grants within this system. Um you can see all grants from across different public and private available grant funding platforms. You can also add others if you know that there's like a a state level database where they post the grants. You can actually track those grants in this system as well. And then once you've got a grant that you want to track, um, you can, you know, build out like a whole pipeline of value of of that. So you can do like I'm using a bad example that's expired, but if I find one that's valid, I can create a a whole grant tracking program. I can assign um, you can see I'm on a on a test account here. So, if I have the pro tier, which you would have, um it'll give me all the steps to to assign different people for that grant. I can add notes. I can um add comments. I can have AI autogenerate um your pieces of this of this grant and give me a checklist of everything that needs to be done to apply for it. I can track this at scale. Um as I said, I just want quick high level overview of some of the things in here. We do everything from content to finance to um stakeholder HQs. You'll have you can have board portals as part of this funer portals, volunteer portals um to invite these people in, give them access to just certain pieces of information. A lot's in here, way more than I'll be able to cover in in this this webinar. But, you know, reach out um or, you know, inquire about this today. As I said, we that that platform usually runs between um about $125 to 275 a month depending on the organization, the scale. Um, this is being included as part all of our clients, anybody that's one of our clients now gets access to this. They all are grandfathered in. We have a couple hundred clients on this, but then anybody that signs up, as you said, the next two weeks is also going to get access to this um, as we launch the beta version of this platform. And now I will open this up for questions. So, I saw quite a few in the Q&A, so I'll answer those ones first and then I'll jump back through the chat. I see things coming through there. The problem with the chat is I get all these notices in there about people having free versions of Otter AI that's transcribed it. So, it's a lot to sort through. Um, somebody asked for a suggested SOP document creation tool. Um, any of the common AI platforms can help with this. So, instead of going to get another tool for that, you can have them um, you can either record like a Loom or like a video and then upload it to one of those and have it transcribe that. That's going to be the easiest. Put it into like a Google doc or a Word doc. Um, the platform I just showed you has that in it. So, Tap HQ has the ability to create SOPs uh and those documents as part of it. There is a whole AI agent built right into Tap HQ. So, you can ask it questions, it can generate knowledge bases, it can build a wiki all in that one platform. So, I would obviously recommend that one. Um, there are things like Scribe or Scribe now I think or Scribe how that that do that. Um, someone said for associations the platform would be an AMS. So they I think they're comparing that to a CRM. Certain certainly like an association management system can do that. But a lot of times the CRM um is a little bit more powerful than what's just in the AMS. The AMS is just for people that that are already part of that association. The CRM would be a level above that which would people that are interested in that, other supporters, other donors, other funders, um maybe some community partners. They might not exist in an AMS out of the box. So the CRM helps kind of cross that bridge or bridge that gap. Um, what tools do you use for these analytics? Google Analytics is a free tool that you can connect to your website and a lot of other platforms. Um, there's other things like Zoho Analytics. Um, if you have different levels of licenses for like PowerBI, um, Tableau, any number of tools and there's tracking platforms you would connect into those as well. The integration with CRM is interesting, but cost is always a factor. We mentioned Google Analytics for the website. Is this free? Yes, it is. Um, there's also a number of starter or free CRM that are available. We and a lot of times you just as we mentioned before like kind of crawlalk run. Don't bite off more than some than you can chew, but certainly make sure that whatever you are if you're taking you're using a free platform or starter platform that it can scale as you need it to. So you don't want to get locked into something that's only going to ever be one size and never grow can't grow with your organization. even if you can't afford the larger tool now if you're able to grow into that over time and know it has that that kind of head space or headroom there. Um, what do you think of NANN as an open- source alternative, less pricey? Certainly, we use NAND here. We've used it for a number of clients. Um, sometimes it can be a little bit more less user friendly, but it can certainly help. A lot of the other a lot of like the tools like Claude or Brock and these other systems also have automation that you can build in right in in those platforms as well. So, I would if you're already using one of those, I'd recommend try checking one of those out one of those out as well. Um, is workflow automation necessary if a nonprofit uses Salesforce? I would argue yes, even more if you use Salesforce? Seeing a lot of things happening in Salesforce. You saw Salesforce and Claw just partnered because um Salesforce is such a powerful and robust platform, but it's so hard for them to to scale quickly because it is they have I'm just going to call it technical debt. They have so much they've built over time uh and it is so much different things for different people. it's hard to add those automation layers. It's hard to add those AI layers. So, they're really good at working with external tools. Um, so I would certainly say that adding automation in Salesforce is going to certainly help help there. Um, there is are things like flow builders and stuff like that in Salesforce that you can set up, but that might not work with an external system. So, when you're t trying to tie multiple things together, you would certainly want some automation. We are implementing Odo because it's supposed to have it all in one. email marketing, website, forms, event CRM, and accounting. What are the key automations any nonprofit needs to establish for a seamless workflow? I'm not familiar with ODO, but that's certainly something like an all-in-one tool is very helpful and beneficial as we talked about. Um, key automations like I would just start simple like you know follow-up emails, donor donation requests, community impact like requests, uh, and then always letting people know what your organization is doing. So, highlighting the great things that your your your organization is doing. So, making sure that when someone comes in, you're tagging them as the right type of per type of contact. You don't want to send someone um who's asking for help from you to give you money, right? You and you you don't want to send someone who's giving you money like asking how you can help them if you're providing community resources for example. So, getting the segments right and then automating based on those segments. Do you have recommendation on an LM LLM posting service that nonprofits who have tight budgets can use? These type of tasks do not require the power of chat, GPT, or claude. Um, I'm not sure. There's kind of two different questions. Um, is it if you're trying to host your own LLM, that's let me know in the chat, I guess, or reach out to us. Um, or if this is about website hosting, we can make recommendations on those as well. uh for Zapier and HubSpot, how much work is it to integrate and manage this? We're a tiny nonprofit trying to set up and manage one or more technology seems overwhelming. Is it worth it? Uh if you take that approach and we kind of talked about like figure out the workflows that are taking up that time, especially as a small nonprofit and seeing if these can solve those and start there, right? So starting small, HubSpot can is can do so much. It can certainly be daunting, but having a a a defined path of what you want out of that and being realistic with what you are able to accomplish and what you need is where I would start and then deciding if it if it is the right tool for you. Um, where do we sign up? Uh, you'll have links to this in the um in the webinar recording and I think Zach put it in the chat as well. Do any of the companies programs offer discounts, tech suit discounts or grants for their services? Many do. Um you can find those in the tech suit catalog and you can also reach out to us if there's one of interest. Um and then tap HQ is not a CRM but a management dashboard. It can be a CRM. It will store the information. You can feed data into it. Um but it's actually it's meant to live it's meant to be that integration layer and live at the the center of the different tools and different departments within your organization. So it's a single source of truth where you can always get answers from that. So that as we said like if you add a new employee to your organization and they don't know where to go for things that's the place for it. But what's really powerful about it is it it become it is this developed quoteunquote brain um that t plugs into the different AI tools the different automation tools things like HubSpot. So it's structured data that you don't have to go out there and build on your own. So if you think about connecting Claude to your Google Drive it has access to your entire Google Drive. It doesn't know where to start. You might say, "Use my brand guide um to build me this social media kit." It doesn't you might our organization, you know, we've done hundreds or probably thousands of brand guides for or have them in our in our Google Drive at this point. If we just connected Claw to that, it would just pick the latest one developed by Tap Network. They it might not know that it's our actual brand guide, but Half HQ kind of points that stuff at the right place. So, you know what skills your organization is built on. You can ask it questions. As I said, like we have this I'll put this back on the screen, but um we have this thing called Tap IQ. It lives across the whole thing. You'll see it over here on the right. It'll be on the dashboard. Um but you can ask it at any time like you know how do I you can ask the questions about the system, but you can also say like how many employees do we have? Um and it will answer contextually based on this this on what's in this system or what systems this is connected to. So again, I'm I'm in the development thing, so it's not going to answer the question. Um, but on the live one, it will answer it'll say like, you know, you have 12 employees, you are trying to hire this many people, blah blah blah blah blah. Um, so it answers contextually based on what's here, but this is this that's the the AI tool that's built into this. It's not trained on it doesn't train on your data. It has zero day retention. So we take privacy and security as the the the primary thing here. So we're not sharing your data back with these these models. It also if you don't want to use our um AI platform, you can pick which model you use in in the tool as well, you can also bring your own key. So if you have a grant from like Claude or Chat TBT or something like that or if you are already paying for access to one of those platforms, you can bring the key like your your API key from that platform, plug it into our system and it'll never hit our our AI um our AIA layer AI layer at all. Um I was referencing LLM hosts such as Gro, Cberus, Parasale, etc. Yeah. So, um if you want to self-host those um we can send you some I don't know off the top of my head. I can send you some exam some places that you can do that or where you can do that. You just put it on your own um like local machine especially if like the budget's a concern. You can run them right off one of those tools and then either give access to like a VPN or something there. I got three minutes left, so I'm gonna go jump into the chat. Um, do you Sorry, a lot of stuff. Um, I'll try to get to some of these in the next three minutes. I see Zach answered a number of these in the chat as well. Um, what's available for small NPOS? Does this kind of integration even make sense for us tiny folks? We think so. Like I said, you know, kind of crawl, walk, run, take the find a place that becomes the source of truth from the start. It could even be Tap HQ if you want to load the information in there. There is a starter free version of that. Um, can you do you need to be registered charity to be eligible? No. For the discounts, you do need to be eligible registered as a 501c3 or a 501c organization. For Tech Soup, it needs to be 501c3, but you can reach out to them for more specifics on that. Um but we provide these services for all organizations or or yeah any type of organization. Um app HQ is not a CRM but a management dashboard. I answered that in the QA as well. It can you can use it as a CRM. You can use it as like your like HR management tool. You can use it as your your wiki. Um but it can also just plug into those tools as well. Um TXU has a partnership with number of software and tools other paid tier at a discounted race. Yes, that's we answered that one as well. Um, it's available for organizations in any country. So, it's not specific just to the US. And then I got one more, but does your 2000 grant for nonprofits we reward? Is there any advice? Um, I'm going to give the same one. kind of crawl up run like figure out what's going to have the biggest the biggest impact on hours for you but might not be the largest impact for the organization and it's going to give you some that time back to allocate to you know the services you provide. Um oh yeah to be clear the offer through tech soup is only for nonprofits with a budget over 2 million. So to the eligibility for the AI workshop the donation is for organizations that are um I think it's over $2 million in annual revenue. I you can still apply like you know we have a selection process we have to go through um but you can certainly still apply um but we do have other other options that are for um smaller organizations in there as well. Cool. Right up on time. So thank you all for your time. You will get a copy of this deck. You'll have links all the links you reached out to here um or all you all the links we mentioned will be here. You can also reach out to us um at infotnetwork.com if you have any questions. And I know Zach um posted a bunch of links in the chat as well if you want to follow some of those through to some of the different places we've covered. Thank you all. Thank you Julian and Artha and Zach as well. Have a good one.