The Giving Tuesday Cheat Sheet for Nonprofits

All right, Julia, go ahead and take over.

Thank you so much. It’s great to be here today. I’m so excited to talk with you all about the GivingTuesday cheat sheet and how we can get your GivingTuesday Read More

All right, Julia, go ahead and take over.

Thank you so much. It’s great to be here today. I’m so excited to talk with you all about the GivingTuesday cheat sheet and how we can get your GivingTuesday started. Before we get started, I would love to just no group that we’re speaking on today. So we’re gonna start a poll. So another if you wouldn’t mind. So this poll here is, as a fundraiser, how many giving Tuesday’s Have you participated? And so I mean, as a donor, maybe a million, but as a fundraiser as someone who’s part of an organization that is collecting funds for GivingTuesday? How many of you have been a part of five or more two to four? This is, we’ve done one prior or this is your first year, we’d love to hear your input on this. So we can now the the group here

Can we go? I’m not sure if they’re still moving. But so far, we have about 20% hooked on five or more. That’s awesome. I’m sure you all have many, many tips about GivingTuesday. And another the largest chunk is actually a group that is doing this for the first time, which is incredibly exciting and glad to have you all part of this webinar today. And excited to share some input with you about getting your GivingTuesday to be the best one. Thank you. Okay, so as mentioned, this is your GivingTuesday cheat sheet. I am Julia aka Bach, I work with DonorPerfect as the communications manager. Prior to working with DonorPerfect, I was actually a full time development director, I worked in the nonprofit space for 10 years. I love nonprofits, I know the things that you all have to do on a day to day basis. I’ve been in the trenches. So totally understand, as you look ahead to the next few months, the Doom made overcome you as you look at all the things that you have to do to get to your end. And we’re here to help you get through that in some bite sized chunks. Also, prior to working with DonorPerfect, I was a client of DonorPerfect. They were my CRM and and I learned so much about stewarding my donors and connecting with my donors and reporting on my donors through my CRM. So very excited to be with DonorPerfect and to share with you today about how your CRM can partner with you to make the best GivingTuesday.

And I am joining Julia, my name is Kelly Ramage, and I’m the Learning and Development Manager at DonorPerfect. And I am excited to be here as well. It was fun to see the poll come in and see that many of you are kind of learning the ropes for the first time. It’s an exciting adventure. And I am here representing DonorPerfect to answer those CRM questions that you may have that might pop up as we dive in to Julia, I’m gonna turn it back over to you to get us started. Sure.

So the presentation we’re doing today, we have tried to break up your GivingTuesday plans into three different phases. One of the great things about this is that it’s not on a calendar view, because we know that sometimes you don’t get to the things that you wanted to get to on the day you wanted to get to them. So we put them into phases. So you complete one phase and move on to the next phase. No matter if you have three months to plan or three days to plan. Well, we’ll walk you through some bite size pieces to get through your GivingTuesday planning. So the first phase is research and goal setting. This fifth phase is all informative to help inform you, as you prepare to make your asks or to communicate your goals, things like that. So you need to make sure your data is ready, you need to make sure that you know what segments you’re talking to, and that you have a clear audit on what tools you can use in order to communicate and in order to get the word out about your ask and your Giving Tuesday campaign. The second phase is all about writing. So making sure that you have a story to share with your constituents, making sure that you know what you’re trying to ask for or what you’re trying to say or why you’re asking for certain things. This whole stage is about making sure that everything is set up to communicate with your partners email marketing form building and creating the right stories. That all falls into place to and then phase three is all about executing and stewarding so this is the actual domain to save push. This is making sure that you’re sending cool updates or thanking your partners regularly and then following reports once the campaign is over. If you’ve been As your goal or to inform your GivingTuesday campaign for next year. So for the sake of this presentation, we have broken these tasks into different roles for different roles. The first is the strategist, the strategist is focusing on setting your goals and making, making clear where the funds will go. Next is the administrator, this is the person most concerned with your data and maintaining your data. Next, we have the communicator who develops the messaging and make sure that the things are on the correct platforms. And then lastly, is the networker. This is the person getting the word out, and kind of the hype person on the team. Now, I know that some of you look at these four things. And you immediately said, I am all four of those things. And I 1,000,000% understand that when I started my role as a development director, I was the only person on my team. So you know, the hour between nine and 10. In the morning, I was the strategist and then the hour between 10 and 11. I was the communicator and then our 11 and 12. I was the administrator, and then I was The Networker. So it depends on your organization, as how these roles will break down. And maybe you have multiple people on your staff and each can take on one of these roles, or maybe that you wear all of these hats. So we would love to find out who is in the audience today. So we have another poll for you to find out which of these most you most identify with? Are you the strategist, the administrator, the communicator, the networker, or do you do at all? So if you want to take a moment to take part in this poll, that would be great. Give it about 15 seconds.

Julia, as these are coming in, I’m not surprised at what I am seeing. We don’t want to give it away. But there’s Yeah, not no surprise whatsoever.

Through the results, you all can probably guess the answers as well. But go ahead, Julia. Yes.

So the results say that the highest group here at 66%. So two thirds of the people in this webinar are I do it all people. Again, this one he wants to know, I understand, I understand that you were every time your organization. I’ve been there before. So luckily, and this was the goal of this checklist is to move it into bite sized pieces, so that you can put on a certain hat and get through these bite sized pieces, and then move on to the rest of the phases. The second most common is the communicator, which is great, I love that there are organizations who have a specific role for communication, because especially with campaigns, that communication is key, there’s an entire phase on communication. So very excited to speak with you all about that. Great, thank you for sharing.

So as you kind of responded to the polls, and as Julia described the different roles and how we’re breaking this up. I love this because I am very much a list person. And if I had to do everything driven by the calendar, I’d probably make myself crazy. So I’m hoping that as we dive in here to the first phase of setting or getting to the goals and planning the campaign that you’ll be able to take a breath and realize that this is within reach. So what we’re going to focus on in this first phase is kind of digging into your data, and kind of strategizing a bit. So with those couple of introductions, this particular phase is really going to fall in the kind of into the categories of our strategists and administrator, or maybe better stated the hat of the strategist and administrator. So again, what we’re going to think about are these two specific roles that are probably a little bit more engaged in this particular phase of getting ready for your Giving Tuesday campaign. Now, in addition to breaking things up into different phases into different roles, we did break it down a little bit more into different steps. So first, this first phase, we are looking at step one, which is reviewing our historical data. And so when you think about like reviewing your historical data, this is giving you the opportunity to look backwards so that you can plan forward. And that is analyzed previous data and annual goals. Now keep in mind that if you are saying this is your first time with giving Tuesday, you might be thinking well I don’t have previous information. Well, you don’t have previous Giving Tuesday data, but you do have presumably some other data that you couldn’t look backwards on. And so Julia, I know, when we have kind of talked about this, this is valuable insight for people to hear like, what do they look at? Or what could they look at in terms of historical data? If this is their first Giving Tuesday? Do you have any insight that you could share? That might resonate and help some of the people who are joining us that where this is the first time? Yeah, that’s

a great question. I think this, the answer to this is twofold. So the first is any given history is important history. So whether that’s you even if you didn’t take part in GivingTuesday priority, maybe you do have some gaming history, like, maybe you know what your average monthly gift is, that is a data point that will help you to really figure out your goals. Maybe you know, the amount of people who have gave last year but not this year, maybe you know, your live audience. That’s an important point of data. So any kind of giving history can help inform your goals. And then secondly, there’s communication data, look into your email segments, see? Who’s clicking on what see what kind of calls to action, get people engaged? Are people clicking on videos when they’re embedded into your emails? Or are people clicking on links, finding out the best communication styles, finding out giving history, there’s so many data points beyond just a specific giving day that you would be able to tap into.

And I love that I love that you’re suggesting that at the early stages of all this, Julia and I absolutely agree where sometimes we think about goals and fundraising initiatives, and we often just immediately go to the dollars. And sometimes we need to kind of step back and look at other things like the volunteer hours, or as Julius said, their communication styles, which emails or or even, you know, if you’re not strong and email addresses and that kind of marketing strategy, maybe it’s other type of information. But I think that goes hand in hand with Who do you want to target? Who are your target segments. And if you have specific target segments, and that’s really where you want to kind of roll up your sleeves and determine what do we know about them, so that you can make some good decisions moving forward. So review that historical data. And of course, what goes with that is going to be pulling reports that are going to support your reasoning, because you might have to report to the board or committee with your decision decisions and rationale. Now, once you’ve kind of looked backwards, now you’re starting to look forward, and you want to start thinking about what are your needs. So here’s where you’re going to kind of really start thinking about your goals. And that a piece that’s important when you’re creating your goals is to also think about the infrastructure. So it’s not just the goal itself, it’s how am I going to sustain it? What am I going to have to do to be measure my success towards those goals? And so that might be things like, Do you have a specific program? So if your program is the focus of Giving Tuesday, and then if that’s your pro, a new program? Do you have the the staffing or the reporting mechanisms to report out the the success or the measures of success towards that? Another kind of piece in the determining your needs is, what’s the quality of your data like in your CRM, it probably is beneficial in my experience to to review that quality, kind of do a q&a check. You want to make sure that you have up to date address information and key donor information. So with DonorPerfect, one of the things that we offer is dp address updater powered by true givers. And this is a service that keeps everything up to date does the work for you overnight. So what a gift while you’re sleeping, your data is being updated. You also want to make sure that you have like the necessary fields to capture the information that you might learn about these new Giving Tuesday donors or returning getting Tuesday supporters. Do you have a mechanism to capture the information so that you can build on it for future years? And then you know, kind of one of the things that you want to think through that is really important in a campaign like Giving Tuesday is it’s an online, it’s a phenomenon. It’s a it’s a movement. And so you know, it has been shown to be very successful. If you have that online giving opportunity for your supporters. Is it easy? Is it mobile responsive? does it integrate with your CRM, because these are all things that can save you time, build that infrastructure and make it easier to kind of measure your success or identify when you need to pivot? So Julie’s gonna kind of dive in because in addition to the goals and looking backwards, you also have to kind of know the story you want to Tell and I know from firsthand experience that Julia loves telling stories. So, Julie, I’m gonna turn it back to you for a moment. I

do love telling stories, I think that stories are so powerful. And there’s so much information that can come from telling a story. I think sometimes an example, you know, you can go to someone and say, Hey, we are such in such organization, and we need you to give, or you can go to someone and say, Hey, our friend, Jesse, who was not able to stay in their home, because of a certain financial problem came to us. And we were able to partner with Chelsea, and get him back into his home. And now he is working a job and has a sustainable income. And that was through our organization. And there are so many more people like Jesse out there, we would love to be able to help more people, would you be part of that, there’s a huge difference between knowing about Jessie and just hearing that somebody needs a gift. So I just love that story. And wrapping, the importance of your organization in a story is such an important way to communicate a need. So for GivingTuesday specifically, it’s interesting, it’s giving Tuesday’s, for lack of a better term is kind of a flash in the pan when it comes to your year. It’s a very quick ask, literally, it’s one day, there’s one day that you’re asking people to give. So if you were able to wrap that in a theme, it will be able to stand out among a ton of other asks, many, many organizations take part in Giving Tuesday that just saying hey, today’s Giving Tuesday will you give is not a theme, because everyone is saying, hey, it’s giving Tuesday? Well, you give, what is it about your organization that they can give to, for example, here, you can see that this specific animal needs medical care. This is a story. And I’m sure that this organization knows the name of this animal knows what medical medical care that this animal needs. And they can wrap a story around this particular animal. I’ve seen campaigns where the the actual appeal is written by an animal and like there’s like a paw print at the bottom of the campaign. When the animal is tiny. There’s this whole theme of this character that your organization is helping through any gifts given on given Giving Tuesday. So making sure that it’s more than just an ask because it’s the day after Cyber Monday and you feel bad that you just spent a bunch of money on TV that you didn’t need. This is a better way to say why people should get instead of just the right time of year. So definitely encourage a theme that has to do with your organization specifically that will help you to stand out from other organizations. And then secondly, we want to determine viable avenues to share this story. I don’t know about you all. But there are many times where I as a development director felt like too many places to say things. I could spend my entire day posting things on different places, monitoring comments on Facebook, setting up a fundraiser on Instagram, finding MIT executive director to make some fun dance on tick tock, I don’t know there are so many places that you can post things about organization, but determining the Viable Places where people will be compelled to give meaning and the right place at the right time. So whether that’s their inbox, or their Instagram, you can find out the most viable way to ask and the best place to ask. And then next, I think this is something again, I just feel so like you have such a soft spot for this because I was the only one in my organization that was focused on fundraising, I was the only one driving our campaigns for a long time. In the end, I was able to have a few people help me out. But at the beginning, it was difficult to be the you know, the gone the constant Gong of fundraising. But I was not on my own. And I think that that was something that was really hard for me to notice at first. I had a board that believed in me. I had an executive director that wanted to make our budget for that year, I had supporters that gave to our organization gave financially to our organization believed in what we were doing. I had these people on our volunteers who worked in our schools, these people around me who were interested in our organization, and I needed to be able to tap into those people. So getting their feedback on you know how something looks getting their feedback on your goal. Hey, Executive Director, I know that our budget, in order to make our annual budget we need to raise $10,000 on GivingTuesday. Do you think that’s possible? having a conversation with As people who care as much about your organization, as you do is incredibly important. So bring them into the conversation, whether that’s coffee with a partner, and you’re asking them, Hey, will you be part of a matching gift? Or is that showing your executive director, the team that you’ve decided, and you want to know if that resonates with their generation versus your generation, asking the right questions, and making sure that there are other eyes on things, it’s incredibly important that scheduling reports is also a huge benefit, because you’ll keep the right people in the loop. We’ll talk about this a little bit more later. But making sure that in the beginning of things, as you’re setting up your infrastructure for this fundraising day, you schedule the right reports to go to the right people so that people can be part of what’s going on on GivingTuesday. And then, lastly, this is, I think, such a special opportunity to discuss your content for your donation page, we want to make sure that there are extra eyes on your forms. I don’t know about you, but there have been times where I would set up a form and it did not work. Or like we’ve maybe there was a broken link, or a you know what’s old or just having extra eyes on your form is incredibly important. And again, the people that can help you do this are your donors or your board or your volunteers, you can all look at your form and make sure that it makes them want to give form conversion is incredibly important. We’re lucky I don’t have perfect, we have a great songs product that has high conversion rates. And so making sure that your foreign product that you’re using is a great conversion module is important and having other people’s eyes on that it’s incredibly helpful.

Now, Julie, you bring up an interesting task about leaning on your network and the network being so much more than like the paid staff. And one of the things that I have always heard when I have interacted with a lot of nonprofits over the years is donors really like to be included in this, they’re willing to help and provide feedback and nothing is more gratifying to them that you’re you’re asking them for that assistance instead of always just like support us financially. So I think this is a great idea. This also leads to setting the stage and expectations, which right at the top of the list is learning that art of delegating tasks. Because while it might feel a little overwhelming and daunting of all the different little if you will check boxes of things that you might be thinking of that might need to be done, you do want to kind of prioritize. So you want to determine who or which donor segment is going to have prioritization, who is going to interact with them? What’s the message, how many people are hands on deck do you need to communicate effectively to those particular audiences who’s going to develop the message for the donation page, it doesn’t have to always be you, you can delegate the task. And one of the things that is really kind of a resource in DonorPerfect is that there are alerts and prompts within the product that remind you of things that you should be doing, like year round, but definitely when you’re leaving into a big campaign like giving Tuesday. Now, you know, it’s also it’s probably no surprise that the next thing that I’m going to bring up here is preparing the campaign tools and resources. So, you know, in terms of your strategy and your goals, what’s your audience? What are you trying to achieve? So if you’re trying to reach an increase your recurring donors, well, then do you have the tools necessary and in place, because you’re going to be positive you are going to get these people? Is it going to be a smooth transition to not only process their first gift, but then their second and subsequent gift? If your strategy is you want to convert your existing first time donors to second gift supporters, which is a really awesome segment. That’s my opinion there. Because the donor retention rate if you can do that is pretty significant. But do you have like the tools and the resources, the messages, the email templates do you have all of those things built and maybe not built with you know, the final I’m being guided and TV and cross but do you have like the plan in place so that you can just implement it once Giving Tuesday is underway. You want to also kind of you also want to develop a plan to acquire and retain donors, which I’ve kind of alluded to, but maybe if you are focusing on maybe a matching program, so you have some major donors. So there are some features in DonorPerfect where you can be prompted automatically when these thresholds are met. Another piece is, are you going to be communicating in the best way to that audience? So for example, you might have a segment that really prefers email. So are you going to email them? Yes, this would be the answer. Do you have an audience that prefers text? Well, then you want to know that and you want to have kind of a plan in place. So you’re setting the stage you’re preparing, you have your expectations, you know, kind of how you’re going to roll it out. And you’re building the plan using your CRM using the features in your CRM, that EP will you almost want to think about your CRM as an additional staff person, and so don’t have perfect does that Julia, I know can speak firsthand to that. I’ve heard her say that when she was at as a director, she looked at to DonorPerfect as an additional person. But now in addition to kind of setting the stage and moving on to the next phase of creating the actionable getting to say communications, this leads into the next phase. So I’m going to turn this back over to Julia, where she is going to talk a bit more about these communications and the messages themselves.

Yes, so this stage is all about the communicator, and we’re going to talk about how do we get this message out in front of people, this one will be mainly focused on the communicator, but they’re on tons of tasks for the networker. I don’t know about you all, for me, my executive director and my chairperson of my board, those who are my networkers, I still had to do the work to make sure that what they were posting on their social media or the emails that they were sending out or in line with our theme and or didn’t have typos. Still a large role for the communicator, even in the networker position. But it’s a great way to really deputize some other people to help you get the message out. So we’ll talk about us your roles here. So the first step is communicating the theme, which is the theme, everybody loves a good theme. And we’re going to really focus on creating the donation page content. So again, talking about conversions. From a, if someone sees a close in an email, they can click on, you know, give now an email and are taken to a donation page. Now, if that donation page looks different than what the email looks like, it may be confusing moments of the donor and they may leave and the page may not convert. So a great way to make sure that the theme that feels consistent and that the donor is going on a normal donor journey from a click and an email to giving on a page that looks correct. We encourage you to make your giving page themed giving this day. So whether that’s the image of the dog with the cone, or if it’s, you know, when you’re we did, we had a word with a bunch of light bulbs on it. And so we made sure that our email showed the word with the light bulbs and that you’re getting paid show the word with the light off, so they knew they went to the right spot. So definitely and include your donation page as part of your communication plan. And then for the networker on this stage, we want the networker to spread the word again, you may need to write what the network is saying The Networker is saying, but having them send it from their personal email address or on their social media will help to broaden your platform. It’ll give you new followers, it’ll give you new eyes on your content. And it’s a great way to have someone else share your message beyond maybe your organization’s main page, you can have your chairperson and your director and your all of your board members post something on their personal social media to encourage people that they know to give to something that they’re passionate about. So it’s a great way to include new people and acquire new donors. Awesome.

Now this next slide this next one is really kind of fun, because

we love this slide. So this slide shows you that you are halfway there. I know we’ve talked about a ton of things. But look at the time we are literally halfway through this presentation. You’re halfway through your GivingTuesday planning. This is a moment just to take a breath and say hey, this is doable. These bite sized things you can do and we’re excited to partner with you with this checklist to get these things done. It’s totally doable. This site is all about communicating the impact which again we love. Good story. We want to make sure that the stories that we’re sharing They are true and are full of impact. So a lot of full circle stories are very helpful. As I mentioned before with Bessie, you know, he lost his housing. But now he has a full time job and is able to be a sustainable renter for his housing. That is a long term story that you can tell beginning, middle and end. And you can see the impact of an organization based on Jesse’s involvement in that organization. There are many other people that you can tell a story about not just not just a beneficiary of your organization, that maybe volunteer, maybe they saw something amazing happen. And you could share that story and say, Wow, this volunteer saw this happen. And that’s what our organization is doing. And we want you to be part of that, or even a donor, one time event. We were sharing a donor just raise their hand at this gala and stood up. And the donor said, you know, I have a full time job, I can’t be out there doing the things that this organization is doing. And so I’m giving because I know the impact of my financial investment. And I’ve taken my time, so I’m going to get financially, what a great story to share that a donor is. So a donor wishes they could quit their day job and be out there, but they can’t. And so they’re going to make sure that someone else can, that’s a great story to share. It doesn’t only have to be your constituents. So I definitely encourage finding stories from different areas. And like I said before, some appeals can be written from the perspective of a dog or a school building or something, be creative with who’s telling your story and what story you’re telling. And then also these stories, that networker can share with their network, they can they over lunch, can bring it up, brief them on some of these really amazing stories so that when they’re out and about, and they run into someone, they’re able to share this story, in light of what’s coming forgiving to say, which is really cool.

So Julia, before we move on to the next step, I just want to do like a quick, you don’t need to respond. We’re not but just take a moment, like 30 seconds right now. And what can you think of as a theme or a story that you might be able to use a given Tuesday because hearing information is great. But if you don’t take that quick second, to just jot down some of the thoughts that you might be having, it’s kind of like a missed opportunity. So, you know, Julie and I both can, can talk and fill time very quickly. But I wanted to pause for just a brief couple of seconds to just give you opportunity to jot things down and then Julie’s gonna continue to talk about hyping the campaign. So okay, so let’s see, Julia, do you think we can be quiet for 10 seconds? I don’t know. We can try. I love that idea.

Okay, so now I think I think we’re probably done here. I mean, you guys are asking decided your campaign, your AD and DA right? This is a great next step, after you’ve made that decision. Maybe a story that you thought of or a theme, that is a great idea. Now we want to hide that up to anybody that will listen, part of the hype crew will be anyone that has ever been connected with your organization. You can tell people, all the things and hopefully, like I said, if they’re out to lunch with someone, and they think of your organization, and they have a story to share. How amazing is that? So we want as many people as possible to have this campaign. But from a communicator standpoint, we want you to create tailored reminders for each star segment. So there’s a graphic here that will show the process of rolling out your campaign. So early in November, you tell people hey, giving Tuesday’s coming. In this year, we’re really focused on getting 200 backpacks for students who are back at school and maybe don’t have the things that they need to have. This is here’s an image, here’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. And then in mid November, you say, Okay, just a reminder, we can’t wait to get these backpacks to the students. Here’s an example that student who was affected by our gift of backpacks last year, we’d love for you to be a part of it this year. And then a reminder, Giving Tuesday, the day before and then the day off. There’s communication that goes out that day, but making sure that you have a specific plan which this is the hall of famer, this presentation is planning it all out being able to know before giving Tuesday hits, because that day is crazy. Being able to know exactly what you’re trying to say When you’re trying to say it so that on that day, you can just fire these things off, it will be very helpful, the planning will be well worth it. And then we want to remind our networkers to remind their platforms about what’s coming.

Now, this is a fun step. But go ahead. Oh, no, this is fun. This is a phase that I like. But doing is going to talk a little bit about it first, and then I’ll continue. Yeah,

I love goals, which on a previous slide, I meant to point out there was a image with three kind of goal updates. I love that about DonorPerfect. That was one of the things that really made a difference to me, because I don’t perfect, you can see your goals right there on your dashboard, it’s incredibly important for you to be well informed about where you are with your goals. Because you need to be able to tell if your network or your executive director, your volunteer, that’s called you 15 times on GivingTuesday to know, the person who gave the matching gift. It’s important to have your goal right in front of you so that you are able to keep track. And then you want to be able to communicate that with the people that you’re asking to get, you want to be able to say, Hey, it’s 2pm on GivingTuesday, we’ve raised this much so far. And we have this much to go. I want your like I said we did a like a light bulb with things. When you’re a bit off a little more than I can chew. And we have 600 light bulbs 600 It was crazy. And we wanted to give updates based on how many light bulbs had been lit. So we had this graphic with a word and each letter of the word had a bunch of lights, and I and then based on how much had been given it was kind of like to thermometer based on how much a given number of lights had been lit up. And so then at two o’clock, the number of lights was different than the number of lights at six o’clock. So there was a major preparation that went in ahead of time to have those graphics ready. We made 600 different graphics, which we should not have done. It was crazy. And I do not recommend. But we made 600 graphics so that the moment we wanted to send an update to the lights that we were sending was the appropriate amount of lights for how much was raised at that point, being pre planning your updates, and how are you going to update is incredibly important. And it’s something that your donors want to be a part of, they want to know where things are at they, we had a donor one year that we had $1,000 left to raise, and they gave 2000 Because they said we want to make the end goal. And we’re going to do it right now. And it was incredibly helpful. And they would not have done that. We needed a certain amount of money to get to our goal. And then we want the network or definitely to be part of making the donors feel special. We I love the idea. Dark, perfect has a video, do we have DP video, ability to make a video and send it directly to a donor. We did this one year. And we were able to send a video saying, Hey, someone saw thank you so much for giving on GivingTuesday. Because you gave this much we were able to provide this many backpacks to this student how amazing that you made that kind of impact on this student’s life. And it was a very tailored message to that particular donor, which made them know that their gift was important. So there are many opportunities, as we mentioned before, tons of tools and integrations that can help you to get the tailored message based on the giver or the segment. Cool, How’s

everybody feeling, you’re now approaching phase three. But this is where you really can start to take a deep breath because the bulk of the work is over, here’s where you really kind of are in the moment, enjoying the day. And you’re going to then be able to start saying thank you in a variety of ways and reporting on your success. And as we kind of approach this phase, all four roles, all four hats, as it is are going to be fully engaged in this process. So first, Julia, we have our communicator. So again, there’s going to be and I’ll turn it back to her to Yeah, and

of course there’s these major opportunities for goal updates like I shared before with the live wolves are knowing what the actual most recent amount raised is also knowing where to post that so is it are most people following you on Instagram, if you have a brand new Instagram and that’s the only place that you’re posting your goal updates, probably not helpful. Maybe the best place to put that is on your Facebook. Maybe you have a lot of followers on Facebook, or maybe the best way is to send an email or to send a text or to send a quick video. There are many ways to send these goal updates, so we want to make sure that we’re writing them and creating them, so that it’ll go to the right people in the right place. And then again, The Networker has opportunity to share those goal updates to their constituents to their network. Definitely recommend you being part of writing whenever they’re posting, so that you can be sure that the message and the theme is consistent. And then making a plan like you see here with your times, you know, how many times how many times are you going to offer a goal update? Do you are you doing a match? Because if so, maybe you should make up announcement one I’ve just met, how many times are you going to tell people about where things are, what you’re doing, or how much time is left, making that plan is incredibly important and helpful to your constituents.

So updating is important, which then goes hand in hand with reporting on your efforts. So this brings back our administrator, which is just really reporting on your success within each target segment, and you want to be able to report on the amount raised that’s absolutely true. But you want to also perhaps be able to report on which email performed the best or if your online form was shared in different places? Which Where did you get the most traffic and traction, you want to determine the statistics or wins you’d like to share with the donors and nothing that I can’t see anything wrong with being transparent with your supporters? They believe in you. And they want to know, how did you do and you know, whether you are sharing the all of the wins, or if it’s a highlighted win? I think it’s important to be transparent. And you know, some of the things that you might learn might be part of your CRM, like, Did you increase your average gift size? How’s your donor retention rate? Did you get new donors, and these are, you know, some key performance indicators, but you want to kind of circle back to those goals, and see where they met. But then, what In addition, like drilling down almost is what you want to do. You want to think through like did a certain communication channel perform better than another? Now reporting and being transparent with your supporters doesn’t surprise anybody on our, you know, on the call with us today. Nor is the next step, a surprise. I think everybody understands the value of expressing gratitude. And some of the things though, that you might want to think about is saving yourself time those efficiencies. So you want to be personal. But you want to also make sure that you’re efficient. So take advantage of things like templates. So with DonorPerfect, we provide the ability to have mail merge templates, you can also have email templates, and and the advantage of templates, whether it’s a letter or an email is that you have those fields included, so that they’re pre populating with the donors information. And then of course, you know, one of the things that I love about DonorPerfect is you can spin off and add a bit of a very personal note, if you got a new major donor or you there was somebody of great influence that came alongside and did something, you want to make sure that you’re able to acknowledge that. And then I think in addition to like the official, thank you, and some people might refer to that as a receipt, you also want to make sure that you’re planning the post Giving Tuesday stewardship. And that could just be more about sharing the impact of what just happened, yes, we did meet our goal. So that means we can do X, we did, you know, raised this amount of money. So that means we can convert that into backpacks for children in schools. Or we can, you know, save so many dogs and say, you know, cover the costs of surgery. So you want to make sure that you are not only thanking that if you will, the official way, but you’re also thanking them above and beyond. And one of the things that we have found is that Giving Tuesday is a great day for kind of gaining new donors. But that’s also great day to show them about your mission and saying thank you. So saying thank you expressing gratitude can be done in a variety of ways. It may be it’s using the Form videos, maybe there’s an email, maybe it’s a public post, you know, on Instagram or Facebook, but I don’t think you can ever underestimate the value of saying thank you.

Yes, and just to continue with the theme of expressing gratitude. We do want to tailor the thank yous to the person we’re sending them to. So for example, if Someone was a monthly giver and on Giving Tuesday, they decided to upgrade our giving, we would want to thank them for upgrading their giving, it’s a very specific giving decision that they’ve made. And so making sure that we’re thanking them for what they have done is incredibly important. The way that you can do that is by pulling reports based on your, uh, you know, the campaign in your system or the Day of Giving totals, things like that you can pull out of your CRM to make sure that you’re thanking the people for the thing that they did. So if they, you know, you won’t want to send your matching a gift person, the person who said, Okay, I’ll provide a matching gift, you don’t want to send him the same Thank you, as someone who gave five bucks, you know, you there is a difference in the gratitude that should be shown for someone who gave a huge matching gift, we want to make sure to thank them in that way, that this goes throughout the network, or to just making sure to reach out to major donors, honestly, all through rivers. Although we don’t have time for all that. And I understand, making sure to reach out to these specific important gifts is, is a great way to keep your donors as part of your organization, let them know that they’re part of the overall mission and let them know that they’re important, because they are without them that you wouldn’t be able to do the things you’re doing. And you know that the you know, like, I think of the guy who stood up at a gala, if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t have been able to do the things that we were doing that year. And he is working hard every single day in order to give to our organization. And we’re so grateful. And we need to thank him for that specifically, because he is making a difference by going into his job every day and giving to our organization. Definitely encourage specific thank yous based on what people have given or send the person in this or how they gave a for example. And then people gave through, maybe you had like election on GivingTuesday. And people attended the lunch and they gave up the lunch. They should get it. It was so great to see you at the luncheon. Thank you for giving, as opposed to thank you for giving. It’s a much more personalized message. So definitely encourage personalized messaging, when it comes to thank you to partners. I know, I know, we have talked about so much today. And I appreciate I know I saw someone put in the chat, I’m so sorry, I do talk very quickly, especially when I’m passionate about something. So please forgive me. But we had so much to say today. And we’re excited to share these things with you. If there weren’t things that you missed, or that you wanted more information on here, this QR code you can use to download an entire GivingTuesday guide. And I’ll include helpful links. And I’ll include this whole checklist based on the hat that you’re wearing. And then we’ll close a lot of resources. So definitely encourage you to download that. And we’re so thankful for your time and for being part of this. And we’d love to hear some questions.

All right, thank you so much. I’m gonna turn on my camera. Hi, everybody. All right. Um, one question, Julia, there was a slide where you were talking about the timing of starting to promote Giving Tuesday. And I believe it was early November, which is about two weeks way than mid November than the day before. And then the day of Do you think it’s a good idea to ask people in those lead up emails to go ahead and donate or just mark their calendars and talk about it? What’s your gut feeling on that?

You know, that’s a great question. I personally would not ask in those lead up in the emails. It’s kind of like, you know, if you had a gala, inviting people to the gala is important. And then once they’re at the gala, making the ask, the whole goal is to set yourself up for success on GivingTuesday. And sharing this theme with people early on is a great stewardship thing. You know, your your partners don’t want every single email from you to be an Ask Us user story. And some of those laid out say this is something that really impacted our organization. Hey, PS, keep an eye out. GivingTuesday is coming. It’s a great opportunity for stewardship and to avoid an ask. Okay,

thank you. All right. We had another person Carol she asked. She had an unexpected donation Kate campaign fall in their lap someone had passed on. And the family requested that donations be made in memoriam. I’m assuming this happened in the last week or two. So she’s wondering, these donors that have just given do we put them in the Giving Tuesday dash year and fundraising cycle or do we sit on him a little bit and maybe wait till next year? I’m Kelly, what’s your instinct on that?

You know, that’s an interesting thing. I think timing is everything when gifts are given in memory. An honor. If it just happened within the last week, my instinct is you might want to share the opportunity but not do a direct ask. I’d be curious to see what Julia would take what her thought is on that one, though. Yeah,

I actually, I would say to include them and ask, but the catch is, I would include them. And I’m very small ask, like Kelly shared, moving people from a one time gift to a second gift is that huge jump when it comes to donor retention, if you can get that second gift, that’s a sign of retention. One year, we are going to stay goal was we want to our goal was to get 100 new donors. And so we had this very, very low asked, we asked for $2 to provide a bulk to a student. So in order to get as many new donors as possible, it had to be this low threshold, I think that that would be appropriate for these, these new givers to say, you know, hey, thank you so much for being part of that initial giving campaign. We’re doing another one. And, you know, if you give five bucks, you will provide a meal to a family who maybe won’t have one this week, would you want to be part of that. But it doesn’t have to be, you know, give $50,000 today, because you gave $50,000 before, so I think tailoring us to be sensitive, but to say, you know, we want you to be part of our mission long term, not not just out of memory.

Okay. Couple of folks are saying the QR QR code isn’t working. But I’m assuming you’re going to send a link to that in the email. That’s fine.

We will definitely do that for sure. All right.

And here’s the practical question. I always like these. Do you think it makes sense for giving Tuesday for a nonprofit to create a Facebook like event page, or just use their Facebook page to promote the campaign and kind of throwing in a bit of, you know, realism here, which is organic reach is pretty much dead on Facebook. So you can create an event page and you can, you know, promote it on your Facebook page. But how much do you think nonprofits should be spending on Facebook ads to promote their pain campaign? Let’s say they’re trying to raise $10,000? Should they spend $100 on Facebook ads? what’s your what’s your take on the whole promoting Facebook are using Facebook to promote it when it’s not that effective of a tool anymore?

Yeah, I share what I think and then I would love to hear what Kelly thanks for me, I think the ability to ask in multiple places as incredibly important. However, I think using your network or to do those things is more important than paying for ads. Because if you hear something from someone you know, and trust, that they are passionate about an organization than you, you know, if Kelly shared, hey, this organization is doing this really important thing I would love for someone I know to be part of it. I would be in like, of course, I believe like Kelly believes I want to be part of an organization that’s doing great things. But if I had targeted, I would think, you know, they they’re sending me this because they know way too much about me from me. So I think the endorsement of someone is important and like, like we shared, there’s so many people that could be your ad maker and share to a specific group of people who share the same worldview or values or whatever as the person sharing in the first place. Okay,

great. Yeah. And I think you know, Julia kind of said it, but I think people give to people and Facebook is a vehicle and I think the other piece, whether it’s Facebook, Instagram pick pick your platform, if your audience is not there, if that’s not where your audience is that like that is part of that prioritization decision tree that you have to go through, but I do think that personal element and that multi channel approach is always going to be a win. So you know, whether it’s Facebook or something else, I think I look at that more as just a vehicle so for you know, as you were saying, it may not be as effective as it once was, but if it still is for your organization, then by all means, but I think that personal element, and never losing sight of people give to people having your networkers or you with that networker had one is always going to be a stronger approach.

When you said networkers it made me what popped into my mind was is like a Giving Tuesday, Ambassador group or a Giving Tuesday influencers club? So have you ever seen a nonprofit do that? Like were they just the house maybe leading up to the days before our you know, share our campaign with your friends on Facebook. Any thoughts on that?

I’ve done that before with my nonprofit we did it not for giving Tuesday, we did it for a event where we did you know, crowdfunding and people being part of things. So we did a lot of things to equip those ambassadors. So we did, I wrote all of their emails, and I sent them to them. And I said, Okay, this email is going out on this day, this email is going on in this day, I sent them graphics, I have gave them a schedule, there’s this whole thing where you can really equip those people to be like you said, the massive errors they are going to carry the name of your organization is an extra platform where where people can really champion what you’re doing. I think it’s great. Okay,

great. And what about email? I just one person just wants to know, do you have any little tips and tricks for, you know, conversion, converting people click or open an email and visit the page, like any little secret tricks you’ve learned over the years of making email work for giving Tuesday,

strong subject lines, clear call to actions.

I think one call to action is incredibly important. And that one call to action is to give, you don’t want to send him to some page on your website to watch a video where a story is, and then they go from there to give, you want to also be right there. And then they’re sent straight to beginning pages. That’s a great way to get people there. And then again, once they’re on the Giving page, there’s major polls that you can use for conversion, like making sure that you’re giving pages themed correctly, like using impact statements, using a suggested gift. If your platform allows you to point to a suggested gift and say, Hey, this will this $20 will buy a Christmas tree. Making sure to use those pointed asks as many times as possible will help convert for sure.

Okay, great. Sounds like DonorPerfect does a lot of that. So that little 30 minute like online, here’s everything we do.

Yes, we do demos, and we would love for you all to be part of one of those demos, you can find them on our website or perfect.com. Okay, we’ve got one, Development Director, I am shocked for CRM and Demographics The best i Even though I work here, the reason I work here is because it’s the best one. Interesting. So

let’s just close on that one. Because I I’ve been thinking each year I write like 10 trends for the next year. And one of them is just kind of going back to basics. And I’ve been thinking about CRMs. And I’m surprised because when I you know, do a poll, maybe 60% of the nonprofit’s are using a CRM, but 40% don’t even know what it is or what it how powerful and how much time it saves. So either one of you like final notes on what is CRM and like thinking about 2023 and getting past that starvation mentality if something costs, you know, $150 a month? Oh, no, we can’t do that. But really investing in a CRM and why that’s so important.

Oh, go ahead, Julie. I’ll let you speak because you have first hand experience here for absolutely go for it.

I was just gonna say at the time it saves, it’s worth some money. The amount of time that I had someone on my team inputting data, their time cost money the same way that CRM costs money. And like Kelly said earlier in the presentation, it’s like another staff member. From DonorPerfect, you can set reminders, you can set up your giving pages through DonorPerfect, there’s so many things that DonorPerfect can do for you. So you can be out there with your donors or your projects. And it kind of gets you out from behind the desk because it’s doing the work for you. All right.

Kelly, oh, no, I was just gonna say I was gonna reiterate, what I said is I think if we think about the investment that you make in a person, and then the turnover that’s connected to that your CRM can be that person. And you don’t there isn’t a turnover, like it’s going to continue to provide for you and provide insights in the data and, and give you the freedom to you know, share your mission and do things that are probably more important than it other things. So I definitely think considering it as a true resort an asset is something to never lose sight of.

That’s great. Let’s close on that that also makes me think the Chronicle of Philanthropy. They had an article last week that for nonprofits to survive like the next wave of digital and digital fundraising, they’re gonna have to invest one out of $3 in technology was the point of this. I kind of believe it. Like, you know, we’re here. We got the technology. Let’s do it. Right. All right. Thanks, everybody. That’s it. Happy Giving Tuesday at six weeks from today, and happy fall DonorPerfect. We’ll get a link to the recording as well as this resource they have featured here and within 48 hours. All right. Thanks

so much.

Thank you. Bye