Webinar: 3 steps to uplevel your team’s end-of-year fundraising strategy

so welcome everyone um we are really excited to have everyone here today uh this webinar is our three steps to up level your team's end of year fundraising strategy uh this is a webinar for for all of you fundraisers out there who are are having a a year uh 2023 we know has been a real challenge for a lot of organizations and fundraisers are at the heart of that in the heart of overcoming a lot of the challenges that nonprofits have faced as we come into our the Super Bowl of the Season uh the end of year giving campaigns uh we are really excited to be here and share some tips and ideas to help fundraisers get every Edge that they can in maximizing uh their success as they do the work to support your organizations in all the various missions um so to give you a brief introduction of the panel uh that we have today uh my name is Stefan bird Krueger I'm the chief analytics officer at Parsons TKO uh we over see a lot of a lot of different work and my skills in particular come on on the data side of fundraising how can we use what we know about our audiences to give them the most relevant appeals most relevant Outreach and build relationships uh long-term relationships with our organizations and their missions um I am and was to be one of your two panelists today unfortunately as we were discussing before the call I sound either like uh Barry White or perhaps James Earl Jones as I'm fighting cold so I I have a brought a surprise guest our chief growth officer at Parsons TKO uh Jamie I'd love for you to introduce yourself great well thank you Stefan for uh uh inviting me to join today it was uh it's a pleasure and um an honor and I'm excited uh to be participating and yes as Stefan said I'm the chief growth officer at Parsons TKO and uh actually was um at bonterra before this so it's a little bit like coming home to be able to be on a webinar with bonterra today as well um I have spent the last 10 years in the non-profit technology space uh helping with lead acquisition and fundraising strategy especially in the on the digital front and before that I was in the nonprofit space myself working on developing Community impact strategies and uh um improving the business development strategies of our non-profit community and so I'm joining from Percival Virginia today right outside of DC and I'm really excited to be here um with Janet and Janet I'd love for you to take a moment to introduce yourself oh you're muted I am muted sorry um thank you for having me uh Jamie and Stefan I am Janet Cobb and I'm coming to you from Chicago as a personal fundraising coach at bonterra I've been coaching with bonterra for since about 20 well before it was bontera et cetera Etc since 2014 I've been coaching non-profits across the country and strategy communication and fundraising um prior to that I've been in the non-profit Arena my entire life literally so I I was first a service recipient and then I worked in nonprofits um from the time I was about 16 years old so I bring all of that with me into our conversation today the wisdom that that I've gathered from the 600 and some non-profits that I've worked with so thank you for having me now Jamie is muted [Laughter] it's like we'll figure this out we'll figure it out it's like we haven't been doing this for years and years um well thank you Janet we're so excited to be joined by you and um over 600 non-profits definitely uh we're gonna learn a lot today and I'm excited to be partnering with you on this as well um so Stephen I I think I'll take it from here if that's okay with you but um yeah but yes um but Stefan is definitely going to be staying uh involved in this so that he can lend his expertise because Stefan and I come with um different um different uh experiences in the nonprofit space and so together we um we form a hole in many cases um so uh so Stefan and I put together this worksheet um that we wanted to that we're going to drop into the chat as a link and the reason that we're going to do that now is because we're hoping that we can do a little bit of Choose Your Own Adventure um small step Bingo whatever you want to call it uh but basically we've created this opportunity for you all as you're kind of going through our conversation today to pick out the areas that you think you want to focus on moving forward um and the reason that we're doing this is that we're going to be talking a lot about a lot of different tactics you can deploy it's not just three steps but we're going to talk about what we mean by three steps and then we're going to give you a lot of opportunity to discuss how those how you can deploy those three steps in a multitude of different ways depending on the capacity that you have inside your organization your willingness your greatest need and where you think you're going to be able to make the most impact in your donor Journeys uh this giving season and so we wanted to give you a little something that you could kind of follow along with and if you are confused or unfamiliar with some of the terminology that we have put in here we'd be happy to Define that just drop into the chat your questions about it and as we're kind of going through this we will attempt to Define some of the terms that we're sharing with you as well as we go through it um so yeah I think if there's no other questions or uh Janet you wanted to add anything to that we will move the conversation on and forward I I would just like to add that um some of these words you may know what you may be doing these things and not knowing it um just because everyone's vocabulary is different so please don't be afraid to say hey what is that because we'd like to explain it I mean we I even had to ask like what is that and and then as soon as they explain it's like oh yeah yeah I get that but that's not the word I use to describe it so you know there are no silly questions if you don't if you have a question please put it in that q a and and we'll take care of it hopefully today absolutely great wonderful okay well I'm going to start us out by talking a little bit about the way that why we decided to do this webinar and why we decided to do it now the first thing is is that I don't know if you've all been to Target but uh recently but fall is here whether you realize it or not um actually I think uh Thanksgiving is here according to Target um we skipped over Halloween I'm not really sure what happened there and uh we certainly uh uh ha are we're well on our way to um the giving season so um it's time to for us to start preparing now and if we wanted to give people plenty of time to be thinking about what they're planning on doing this year and giving because stuff is changing you know the our donors are changing the tactics are changing the technology is changing and all that requires us to try and uh continue to iterate on the fundraising strategies we've been deploying year over year in order to keep up with the times and keep up with our donors we know that they're giving USA report came out recently and there's lots of debates on what that means for the giving sector but I don't think we can ignore the fact that we are facing a little bit of a dip in donations and individual donors and what that means for you might be that uh your strategies need to be improved upon it might mean to shore up things that you may have uh neglected over the past couple of years during the pandemic it could mean a great deal of things and so we wanted to provide this webinar as a chance to inspire you and also remind mind you that it is the small iterations the one percent improvements that you take on this giving season that are gonna have the biggest difference and the more one percent you take on exponentially uh you see Improvement um versus doing one major overhaul and we'll talk a little bit more about what those tend to end up being and why they might not uh provide the return on investment you're looking for this giving season as much as making those small iterative changes that are a little bit easier to deploy and uh um and a little bit faster and easier to maintain as well and Jamie if I could also just I wanted to tap in briefly you know I think another perspective that we bring to this and our work as a consultancy we're working across lots of different departments we're working across lots of different systems uh different uh um you know ways of working um you know different types of giving that different organizations are managing and and the one thing we see through all of that is there is no one place in an organization where you will find these Solutions um you know when you were trying to find that that little Edge that you can get it's not just about looking at your data it's not just about looking at your technology it's not just about looking at your Staffing and it's the interconnection between all of these things and that gets at this core principle that we have our person's TKO of Engagement architecture is seeing that the relationships between all of these things is what creates the experiences and engagement that lead to more and more significant giving absolutely thank you Stefan and it's so true and yes that is at the core of what Parsons cko is all about is if your audiences are at the center your current your pillar or your engagement is your main pillar how are you building around that and what are the key little small steps that you can take in order to improve that structure and improve that process and improve uh the experience that your donors end up having with you this giving season and so I I spoke a little bit about this but to the idea that um it is the small steps that you take that make the biggest difference you know we see a lot of folks that uh look at their individual giving and are seeing a dip in um participation in their giving programs and think um we need to look at our technology and maybe it's a CRM switch or uh we need to launch a new channel we need to get on threads um we need to get on them it might be um we need to um expand uh our um our plan we need to create a planned giving program we don't have one right now these are big changes and big shifts that organizations can make but they take a lot of strategic uh planning and to the point of the engagement architecture they require bringing in a lot of different components within an organization to make that function you know thinking about a plan giving program you need legal you need digital you need major gifts you need Finance you need all of these different things in order to make that happen and it's a huge um Endeavor to take on and uh when you're preparing an up against a deadline of December 31st that might not be the best use of your time whereas if we're looking on the right side of the screen there's these small improvements that can add up in major ways like optimizing your calls to action on your uh in your email and on your website improving your donor acquisition strategy personalizing your follow-ups and your reoccurring asks these are small steps that might just require adding a thank you email after somebody donates or um at our providing or adding a part of your donation form online that gives people the option to make a reoccurring or monthly gift to your program and those are much easier to put into place usually for organizations they just uh they might require a little bit of time allocated to that process but once it's done the the Improvement that it has on your bottom line can be significant and sometimes more significant or have a greater return than some of these longer term more uh um uh more time consuming and resource consuming Investments that you might want to make over the you know over the years to come and so what we wanted to do is turn it over to Janet to talk about what are some of these small steps that you can take within the constructs of um the you know the best practices of a year-end fundraising program so Janet you know as we're looking at it you know one thing that always pops up is your segmentation and are you doing that well and that can be a really big game changer uh in so many different ways so did you want to share a little bit about your thoughts around this sure absolutely thank you um so segmentation many people when they hear the word segmentation if they know it at all they're thinking donor non-donor major donor not major donor right and that and they kind of stopped there but I think one thing that is really really important to remember is that all of your donor Communications are about communicating and if you're sort of lumping everybody into one group based on one criteria then you're not really communicating you're not you because you can't speak to all people um in one way right so I'd like to encourage people to think of three different new sort of ways to think about segmentation there's you know demographic you know age you know if you know the age groups of your donor base there's probably one at the higher end um because that's typical the typical donor age but how high is that high end is there a group a subgroup in your database that would be great targets for required minimum distribution and when they hit a certain age they've got to give some of their money away that's what the IRS says so are you speaking to them in a way that it resonates and reminds them and and puts you at the Forefront when they're thinking about that it could be their family situation you're done paying off your your kids student loan you know your kids college or whatever not the loans the college and you know maybe you have some extra cash you're speaking to some of those folks differently um are they White Collar blue collar no caller right like you know where did they operate how where where are their worlds and how are we speaking to them um the psychographic is more about how they feel and think and their view of the world right what motivates them um in their giving right are they more oh I want to be part of this big old team you know and let's have a social approach to giving or are they I'm an altruist and I just give to the world and I'm just a good loving person or are they the you know it's the right thing to do because my family has always given right those three people want very different Communications from you otherwise you're missing them they're not hearing you and if they don't hear you they don't respond to you so you really want to start thinking about who the people are in your database which brings me to one of the things on that spreadsheet if you don't know if you don't know the answers to those questions you don't know your donors well you got to figure that out so there's one of those surveys right how are you going to figure out who is in your database and it's August now so that means in September and October you might drop a survey or two to figure some of this out so that when you go to do your year-end you really can do some segmentation not just based on their their giving or not giving to you um then there is within that giving and not giving to you their relationship to the organization one thing that's often forgotten you know we look at Major donor minor donor but do we ever look at consecutive years you know there there could be people and I had a I had an organization once who was like 25 years old and they had never really looked at their consecutive giving they only looked at lifetime giving and when we went through that exercise the guy realized there were people who never hit his major donor Mark even though they had been giving for 25 years they had been giving small amounts every year for 25 years and so he made the decision to call everybody who had given more than 10 times in 25 years and actually have a conversation with them and it transformed giving that year because people felt seen and heard and understood right so so what is the thing in your database that is going to help you better communicate with those different folks right because if you're speaking the same to all of them you're not speaking to any of them you're not none of them are hearing you in the way that is gonna really motivate them to to to give at any significant level they'll give what I call go away money there's 25 I did my duty go away stop asking asking wonderful points and so and what I heard view say also is is there's two ways of going about segmentation and this is can be an exercise that you go through there's the the survey where you're being proactive in identifying um what your uh what your donors are interested in or maybe even not even your donors but those that you want to acquire or convert into donors so it could be people that have signed up for your email list have you asked them what they're interested in um could that sway them or convert them into being a first-time donor or it could be people that are reoccurring givers why do you give year over year that would be a great thing to find out from those individuals Morgan asked um can we share a survey uh that's that is an example of getting to know your donors and Morgan I think we could definitely um add one of those to our follow-up email I don't have one like on top of my head I don't know if Janet does but I was gonna I was I was I had just typed up an answer to you Morgan and I'll I'll say it aloud um I don't have a template for a survey like that um we can certainly give some guidance um but I think an important thing and one of the big reasons we don't have a template for that is a survey like that should be tailored it should be tailored to your organization's Mission and learning what people what connects people to your mission um and then also I think it should be tailored to the gaps that you have in your own understanding and not to mention data that you're trying to fill um you know you don't want to run a survey on something you already know about your audience um so it's there's a little bit of introspection I would want to put into a survey like that and then after that you know it's just sort of a survey design principles of you know you want it to be just long enough and just short enough and uh and overall written to what you know about your audience and what they'll respond well to and and I would say given that we're focusing on this year and um you wanna you want to think about one or two things you really want to know because that's what you're going to base your segmentation on but then having surveyed short simple easy surveys throughout the year not every day or whatever but you know over time right um you're going to slowly get to know your donors better and better this isn't going to happen overnight um so just pick one or two things I mean I can tell you you can Google a hundred thousand questions to ask your donor in a survey ask chat GPT right right you'll get them all but if you just plop those into Google forms you're going to have a mess right so so that introspection is really really important yeah I would agree and the other thing uh the last thing I'll add Morgan is that you can also um be looking at this as an opportunity to educate your donor bases well um so you know adding in a little fact or information about your organization prior to asking the question you want to ask can also be a great way of not wasting that communication or not using that communication in a way where it's creating a two-way conversation as well so that's another thing to think about is um you know is there a fact or something about the impact that you could add in that might also uh help to your uh donors understand you better and also be more willing to provide you with the answers to the questions that you're asking them I think one thing that's very popular on social media that might get to folks um in a way that could be very helpful is a quiz yeah right those are all combined a cause related quiz that you capture their answers um and you ask them some questions that you capture knowledge of them right so you you begin to see how much they know about your your organization or the cause area and then you capture knowledge about them as well but in quiz form surveys who wants to take a survey but everybody wants to play a clip you know take it especially if you can share it with other people afterwards I've seen a horoscope ones like what kind of you know I've seen those um Elizabeth uh Glazer pediatric AIDS Foundation I remember this was a while ago but they did one where uh it was it was kind of like a game show situation where it was helping you learn more about pediatric AIDS epidemic around the world um and it was kind of like uh test your knowledge uh kind of deal and then once you went through this the survey um it or the quiz said also asked you some questions about so what is that you know what what facts stood out to the most um uh What uh what do you feel would be the most impactful way that uh the foundation could support uh pediatric AIDS research and so it it got to uh those motivations and those passions in a little bit of a different way which I found to be interesting so that's like a proactive way of doing it the other thing uh Janet that you mentioned was a very reactive way of doing it or some reactive ways you could do it which is to and Stefan mentioned this as well is to look inside your database for the information you have in order to cut and uncover those motivations maybe it have you noticed um the re you know uh donating every year at a certain level so a lot of people have already done the well screening or the propensity to give but people fall under the radar a lot with those types of things and you have to be very careful of those pitfalls of not reaching a certain donation level and you know not being um detected by some of those well screening tools uh although both are you know that is another tactic that you should deploy if you haven't yet is to screen your file for those that have the propensity to give more based on their wealth um but in addition to that who's opening what emails you're sending or who is visiting certain pages on your website or who uh is volunteering or engaging in other advocacy efforts with certain programs that you're involved with those are great opportunities to start to segment your Audience by their interest areas in different ways that don't require you asking but more just being intuitive and looking at the trends among your segments of donors in order to better uh predict what they might be interested in or might be more responsive to in the future absolutely thank you Jamie yeah absolutely so what about this Janet what about engagement plans yes so once you have segmented and decided what groups you're going to sort of Target um you can't do them all at once right so pick pick a few that are going to be probably have the most impact like you know some of those major donor consecutive donor those people who are much more engaged with you that's where you want to put a lot of your emphasis um and and then you have a general sort of donor and then you have the non-donor or extremely lap Stoner right but within those segments you want to start thinking about how you're going to engage them over time right if you have been sort of communicating with them all year in the same way by about October you want to start creating your streams right of saying okay you know if if someone is say a volunteer and and they have a high capacity to give they have a higher propensity to give so how am I how am I communicating am I doing a phone call to this group are we having coffee are we just putting them in the email stream are we giving them a direct mail piece now ideally you do all the things with everybody but we have limited capacity so we can't so there's the standard that is running across the bottom of the slide everyone should be getting a direct mail piece but not everyone should be getting the same direct mail piece a major donor should not be getting the same direct mail piece as a one-time 25 donor volunteers shouldn't be getting the same Direct Mail pieces non-volunteers right you have to start thinking of these different groups and often you start with the same you know Source you know the Q source and then you just tweak the opening paragraph and the ending paragraph you tweak a line here or there you're not Reinventing the wheel for every single one of these segments in every single one of these engagement plans right but you start with the direct mail piece it's the longest piece right it should be at least about four pages right um lots of white space but four pages then you take that piece and you break those down you pick you pick pieces you snip pieces from it to create social media posts to create a series of emails but the relationship of these folks their largest gift amount their last gift date all of these things are going to determine how frequently you communicate with them and in what channels you're communicating with them so for example the direct mail piece you send it out beginning in November you have this segment of people who you know gave last year at this time if by beginning of December they have not responded part of the engagement plan for them is that they get a second nudge right they get a second direct mail piece a postcard a one-page letter something that's going to remind them the non-doners don't get that right you don't you don't have time and money for all of that so once you've decided your segments you then want to decide what is the engagement process how many touch points were will there be and where will they be what channels will they be through you want to touch all the channels at least once but some will get more emphasis on one or another and surprisingly I am amazed at the number of people who don't check if someone has unsubscribed or their email has bounced or you don't have an email and you send them one letter a year asking them for money because you've stopped sending a paper newsletter and you've stopped doing all of these things so take a look at that stuff early so that you can start getting some things out to them before it's too late I love that um some little things that you might want to think about doing in addition so Janet's points are wonderful and so data hygiene checking that early making sure that you have those critical communication uh channels you have emails they're good emails it's not Jamie Muller at gmail endnote.com right for instance I've seen that um uh what whatever the case may be you're missing area codes whatever the case um there's a lot of data enhancement tools that are out there that can help you kind of enrich your data in order to get that ready the other thing is is let's say in Janet's example you do have a direct mail um you have their address or their physical address you're sending the direct mail appeal maybe add a QR code to your direct mail appeal this year and uh you know get people to your website or to an area where they can put in their email address to receive email communication we do know that people don't love to get mail they do even younger Generations are absolutely loving to get mailed but they also are very Omni Channel and they want to engage with you in multiple ways so offer that opportunity a QR code through Direct Mail is a great way to encourage people to also uh connect with you on Facebook or threads if that's where you're going next or or through a newsletter um it's also a great way of re-engaging people that have bounced email addresses but they do seem to still donate to you to get them on different channels that just gives you other areas or ways that you can create those touch points the other thing that I'm just going to add in here and then I think Janet we should move on to the next one is uh this is a really great example of that engagement architecture that Parsons TKA was talking about at the beginning this requires coordination between your functional areas and I don't I think we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge that that can be very difficult your digital your cons your marketing your major gifts in some cases we all have there has to be some collaboration in order to get that QR code on a direct mail appeal that's that's your sometimes digital fundraising and um Direct Mail are in separate areas of the organization um and so it's really important to uh come together early around your segments your audiences in order to look at how can we make this the best experience for them across our functions across our channels across our giving platforms to ensure that we are are truly providing a great experience for uh each of our donors absolutely I think that um it's it's critical especially that any anyone who has anything to do with comms is involved in the fundraising conversation early on because what you don't want is to start planning and then I I mean I have an organization where the comms team has shut down everything the development team is trying to do and it's infuriating because how do you how do you fundraise if you can't communicate right um so I I think those departments definitely if you have more than one Department um in your org you definitely want to coordinate early um I think also this is where if if you have more than one person in the development office and your executive director or CEO you want to make sure your your clarifying who's handling sort of the VIP group the the the personal cultivation approach and who is handling sort of the mass Market approach this is I always say there's sort of two train tracks with the special events track running through the middle of them which that's a whole other webinar but uh you know personal cultivation that's for those VIPs and it doesn't mean that they're more important I'm I'm not trying to say that but that their relationship to your organization has a bigger impact on your ability to accomplish your vision in the world right so so you want to bring them in in a different way because you want to be creating conversation and building the relationship right and your mass Market approach is how you begin to identify new people to move from the mass Market to the personal cultivation right or from you know non-donor to donor but all things being equal the most important thing to do when you're talking about fundraising is donor retention over donor acquisition any day of the week hands down everyone's like how do I find new donors no no work and create better relationships with the donors that you have and that's you know can be through Mass Market but it's still got to be a conversation if all you ever do is communicate what you do and how good you are at it to prove your credibility you're not communicating you have a megaphone or you know bulldozing them with facts about you right but what you want to do is create a conversation where people who care about what you care about find Value in what you're providing to them you know this this idea of donor fatigue if we communicate too much or too often people get tired well you know my husband's a sports fan he never gets tired of it it's radio it's TV it's computer it's talk every conversation every event right it's not donor fatigue it's it's it's not because we're talking to them it's because we're not saying anything of interest to them right so we've got to get into a situation where whether it's Mass Market or personal cultivation we are really creating a relationship through the conversation right and that just doesn't mean keep asking them questions that's us asking ourselves how can I provide value to the community right what do they want from us instead of sort of saying even in your donor appeals we hear it all the time please help us accomplish our mission when really what we want to be doing is getting folks to to think oh they're helping me this organization is helping me accomplish my vision right so you have to be asking yourself how can we help donor a donor be donor C accomplish their vision of the world because that's how we know that there are people right if they care about what we care about we have a shared vision of the world and if we use certain language we know who those people are if we're communicating to them on a belief system on what we value in this world we're going to find those people and then it doesn't matter how often we talk to them because we're all trying to create the same world right so so you want to make sure that that you are doing this year round but especially starting in you know October at the latest right look at your your comms plan from August to October what are you sharing with them what are you saying about the world not just about your organization but about your cause area about the world you want to create if you are doing that well then from November and December it's the unfinished story of need you don't have to rethink them you don't have to re-report out what great success stories you've had because you've been doing that already and then come November and December it's the unfinished story of need where the donor can find themselves in these communications and say oh if I act today the story is going to end well if I don't act today we're still in this miserable crap of a whatever problem we're trying to solve right or the world's a worse off place because we've lost the Arts or whatever right um so so you want to make sure that as you segment and as you plan your engagement you are figuring out how you're creating conversation and building relationships so that those who care about the same thing are finding you you don't have to convince anybody you're just amplifying so they can find you you're so right Janet and I'm if and Janet is speaking to something that is has been researched a great deal as far as what brings about brand loyalty and Trust I don't know if anyone has seen I I'm a big fan of the Edelman trust barometer report and everything Janet is saying it it it's the same in the commercial Market as it is in the nonprofit Market that people are looking for um communities Brands organizations that align with their principles their values and their personal missions and so how are you helping these uh donors and supporters identify themselves as being part of your community and you all having the same goals Mission principles at play and the more you can do that the better you're you know going to be able to have these very natural conversations with your donors year round um Janet I I we did have a question about the orange and green lines and the and you know could you just give us a little bit more context to uh what people are seeing on the slide here as well so so really it was just to highlight that these are two different tracks one at the top one is the personal cultivation in those engagement plans the way you create conversation is through the phone calls the second mailings the let's have coffee kinds of things you can even do personal emails right so they're not getting the mass Market email they're getting one-on-one emails with really um personalized in person I think personal cultivation is personalized and personal Mass Market is personable right you want to be a person of ball you want them to feel like you they you know them but you're it's not taking the same time and effort you don't really know them as well so there's no significance that it goes from Orange and or green to gray it was just to show that the two lines are different um yeah and I saw a question pop up that I'd like to answer if I may um I think I saw it from what kinds of questions can we ask that help um us understand I think that there are two things that really work well one is when someone makes a gift especially a first gift always have a phone call whether it's five dollars or five hundred thousand dollars they should get a phone call thanking them for their gift with one simple question what inspired your gift you learn oodles from one question and that ten dollar donor could quickly become a ten thousand dollar donor if the core values match now if you missed that boat if they gave their first gift a long time ago and you don't know what inspired their gift that can certainly be one of your first surveyed questions what inspires you're giving to our organization right but the other thing is to in your social media posts in your email Communications in your conversations at your events start asking the do you believe kinds of questions right so do you believe that no animal should be abused yeah I believe no animal should be abused so if you're an animal organization and you ask me that question I might agree with you but if you ask me do you believe that all animals deserve the same compassion and autonomy as humans sorry yes I don't right so right there I am no longer your person if your emphasis is that the entire world has to be vegan now I'm pescetarian I'm you know but I'm not vegan I don't think the whole world has to be vegan if that's your belief you've lost me I'm not your person right if you want go ahead Jamie no go ahead go ahead sorry if you want to solve the homelessness problem I do too but if your organization serves the homeless they're not trying to solve the problem they're just serving those who are homeless you've got me there too but for some people no I don't want to keep feeding people I don't want to keep housing Emergency Shelters I want to solve the homelessness problem you're going to give to two different organizations it doesn't mean that one is right or wrong the vegan versus the abuse they're not right or wrong they're just different core principal values motivating me and the organization and so using do you believe kinds of Frameworks get people you begin to see who's drawing closer and who's pulling away and after you ask about three do you believe questions do you believe every child should have a quality education yes did you know that one in six children you know in you know some State don't because of a B and C are you interested in an organization that will help them have the quality education that you've said already every child deserves and then if they they've said yes to all of that and then they won't give you money they're kind of feel like jerks right right so so you've got to build that into the language that you use you know throughout the year because that's what's going to pull people in yeah wonderful the patented Yannick uh Don't Be a Jerk strategy I did I wanted to jump in quickly on this in the next couple slides I mean we've just thank you both Janet and Jamie I mean you've talked through so many different ideas so many different donor experiences that you can create and ways to create that long-term engagement um the two hearts of Engagement architecture of donor acquisition donor retention whatever strategy you're doing relationships with people is the heart of it um I think what I wanted to talk a little bit about is when you hear these things what does it take how do you put that into practice and I wanted to come back to this concept of Engagement architecture which we introduced at the top um the you know this stack your collection of strategy the people in your organization the business processes that you go through your workflows uh the tools and Technology your platforms that you're using to do this that's the place you know look inside yourself look inside your organization think about how you do the work and if you can jump to the next slide Jamie um you know if you took those layers and sort of spread them out as a deck of cards you can imagine looking into the different pieces of your organization and think through you know in your plans you know do you have a campaign strategy document where you have written out what you're gonna do do you have a campaign retrospectives from previous years that you can review and see how things went last time to inform your new strategy and then and the people side you know definitely understanding who is on your team what experiences do they have what are they good at or do you have skills on your team that you are under utilizing I think just understanding what you have at your disposal as an organization can really help you prioritize which of all the ideas that you heard today are the right ones for you to try just use that really practical sort of internally focused lens to understand to know thyself and and know your organization's capacity may I jump in right there yeah don't forget board members yeah don't forget volunteers absolutely yeah yes totally totally um you're the people your people as a very extensive uh uh list even other donors other donors could tell a story in a way that you can't right right yep use your influencers and I'm not talking about the macro ones but those are the afterwards on threads yeah not the ones on threads but the ones that are passionate your evangelicals use them and they want to be used in that way some may not be able to be your wealthiest donors but they certainly could be your wealthiest megaphones and their word of mouth is invaluable uh in this market and your peer and the peers that they bring to the table are wonderful so don't discount those as opportunities and segments that you should look at pursuing this um end of your giving and that's a big passion of mine for sure may I also mentioned one more thing from the last slide your website don't do a whole re-haul you know re-haul of your website but please please double check that it is responsive so it shows up on a telephone correctly because I don't know what number some astronomical number of people look at everything on their phones now right they don't use computers and also double check that your donate button links directly to where I put my credit card information in do not let the Donate button lead me to a page to tell me the seven different ways that I can support your organization you can have a menu menu bar for that ways to give ways to get involved but the Donate button how many clicks does it take me to give you my money if it takes too many you will lose me and if you require me to give you too much information about myself you're also going to lose me make it quick and simple giving is an Impulse buy at most levels at most levels so don't discourage that impulse great advice Janet wonderful advice very good thank you John um so yeah I think uh also moving on from from the previous slide uh you know one of the things buried in there was process and uh and here we are talking about end of year giving let's look really concretely at the process of running an end-of-year giving campaign whatever wherever you come from whatever organization you're in you have a process of some sort if you're at a big organization that might be complex and sort of bureaucratic and you have a lot of checkpoints and Milestones and schedules if you're at a small organization your process might be looking out a window until you remember who you're supposed to call whatever your process is just really think about it and it's going to look something like this there's going to be a planning phase where you think through what you're going to do what do you need to have in place what do you need to prepare what materials are you going to make what kinds of segmentation all those things we talked about the targeting how do you actually tell the difference between who gets which kind of treatment and some of the mechanics of actually setting up your your Outreach and your appeals and then optimizing in Flight once you go you're going to start to learn hey this ask this survey question um that I came up with uh isn't isn't doing as well as I thought I'm not actually getting the right insights um and and I thought of a better way give yourself that Liberty recognize when and where you have the opportunity to change tactics in the middle of a campaign because you have that freedom and sometimes it's just important to remember that it's there um in every one of these steps you have opportunities to introduce these new ideas um so I think that's just a light I want to shine and recognizing that however we work there is opportunity to change it um and so just going on to the next slide I think you know if if I have one big appeal that I always want to make in every webinar where we're talking about what you can do is think about what you want to do to improve your end of year fundraising and show me on your calendar when you're going to do it and I you know I would say literally do this as you get off this call the next thing you should do is have your calendar up and and actually think about when can I sit down and act on these ideas uh whether that's taking over an existing meeting you know if you have a development team meeting where you're all going to be together put go find the agenda and put your name on it because you have stuff to talk about you have ideas you want to bring to the team if it's a particular their production process if you've got a meeting with your comms team let's get it in there write it in your your standard operating procedures if you need to talk to a peer send them a calendar invite today literally get this on your calendar one way or another to make sure that you get momentum and you move forward with it um so that's uh that's that's my piece and my appeal to you well Stefan that's four steps but I will go back to the last slide and I just want to again reiterate and Janet said this so well is you need your comms team involved in your fundraising efforts as you're looking at um I don't know how to go back anymore but as you're looking at that last slide think about um who do you need involved in your planning process and maybe that iterative step that maybe that one percent Improvement is inviting another function to the table have you ever had your web analytics person involved in your end of your planning have you ever had um your finance department involved in your end of your planning could they add something could they contribute some knowledge Insight information or could they uh be prepared to help you optimize your campaign or look at your segments differently um I just that that is one thing that if you do nothing else broaden your internal engagement to bring that end of your giving plan um into the entire organization and make it uh an all hands on deck moment in time I think you'll find some surprises in there that could enhance your end of year program by you doing nothing else but just that Janet any last um question any thoughts questions from uh the audience anything that you'd want to add into bring us home um as much as I love the idea of bringing in all of the teams please do not allow editing your letters by committee oh yes do not do that right yes have all the teams you want involved in it until you've written it and then no committee editing yes no board no board approval of the letter that's right that's true once again just a reminder and I popped the link back in the chat we do have this uh worksheet that was designed to accompany today's webinar um this will help you think through all those steps that you can take and help think through the right ones for you and your organization um and then if we could jump forward just two slides real quick Jamie I also wanted to emphasize today's webinar is just one of many things that we have done for our community we have so many resources out there we encourage you all to come to our website take a look um uh we've got articles videos podcasts events like today's that are are all recorded uh and we'd welcome you to look through those um and with that I know we are at times one question from Yolanda though so I'm gonna have Janet answer that because I think we we oh Wanda asked on how many people should be involved in the fundraising and marketing process if you have five thousand uh five thousand uh list Janna do you think so I mean I I think it's how big how much is the mass Market approach and how much is personal solicitation would really determine that because you could send you know one person could manage 5 000 if it was all mass market right because uh weight the way your database is so I hate to say this but it depends you know that's a horrible answer and I'm sorry Yolanda but I'm sure uh I'm sure um if you follow up with Stefan or Jamie or feel free to follow up with me and if we knew a little more we could answer a little better yep we'd be happy we would be happy to talk more Yolanda about what strategies and the type of people within your organization might need to be involved in um how many people might be there um everyone thank you so much for your time and being so attentive and all the amazing questions that you asked it's been such a pleasure to have this conversation with you and I hope that you uh were able to get some in some inspiration and again the three things to think about really uh the three steps planning looking at your segments and evaluating who you're talking to and how you're talking to them and then optimizing the campaign as it's going on those are the three but the tactics you deploy within those are need to be your own and based on your organization and we hope that you've found a couple uh or a number of them in there that you can take advantage of this giving season and we're looking forward to hearing how it goes and we're happy and uh here to support you if we can be of any assistance along the way have a wonderful afternoon everybody