Community Learning Lab: No Time? Try These Automation & Efficiency Tips for Your Donor Engagement

Kelly Ramage: All right, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our session No Time? Automation and Efficiency Tips for Your Donor Engagement. We are thrilled that you are here. Before I do formal introductions, just a couple of reminders about our session. There is a handout available for you Read More

Kelly Ramage: All right, good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to our session No Time? Automation and Efficiency Tips for Your Donor Engagement. We are thrilled that you are here. Before I do formal introductions, just a couple of reminders about our session. There is a handout available for you to download. We recommend that you add it to your briefcase. What you will need to do is scroll all the way down to the bottom and you will find it there. Sarah and I love questions. Feel free to ask them but try and place them in the question mark section of the panel on the right hand side and we will try to address as many of them as possible in our designated time that we have built into the session at the end. I am Kelly Ramage. I’m joined by my colleague Sarah Lalonde but I am the session host and co-presenter with Sarah. Sarah and I each have bios. You can read about us if you would like, but combined, believe it or not, we represent 30 years of training and development experience. It’s crazy because I don’t feel that old. I don’t know about you Sarah. We love what we do. Before you start figuring out our actual ages we’re going to go ahead and get started. We know you have many different segments of prospects and donors you can engage with but we only have one hour so we had to choose one. Before we reveal which segment we are going to use as our example, keep in mind that the tools and the features and the functions we show you will be able to be applied to many segments. Think about this as a bit of a model. We chose to focus, as you can see on our slide, on donor retention and one specific donor retention strategy of monthly giving. Monthly giving and donor retention are two very exciting topics in my book anyway. Before we dive into the details let’s look for a brief moment and think about donor retention using this graphic that we have here on the screen. What this graphic represents is actually DonorPerfect customer. This is all about your data and as it relates specifically to donor retention. Now, you may see just numbers and graphics but what I see are some great possibilities. For example, by having a donor become a monthly donor using automatic, yes, I said the word, automatic monthly giving, the donor retention rate is 90%. Thanking the donor the same day their gift is received, check out that number: 61%. In fact, just if you look at all of those numbers, all of those donor retention numbers are higher than the industry average right now. Look at that lifetime value of retained donors. That’s an amazing figure, $4,375. Pretty amazing. Now that you know our focus and where we’re going to be speaking from, again, keeping in mind it’s a model, we do want to hear from you. What we’re going to do is we’re going to do a poll. I don’t know if you’ve participated in a poll yet in any of the sessions but what we are wondering is how do you engage with your monthly donors? On the right hand side you’re going to see a little option for a poll. It has a little next to it. You can see it’s circled on the screen, and we would love to hear or see, rather, your response by clicking on your answer. We’ll give you just a couple of seconds to see how often the group we have together right now with us, which looks like it’s about roughly maybe just shy of 300, how often do you engage with your monthly donors? Sarah, we’ll give it about 10 more seconds. Sarah Lolande: Still see people answering. Kelly: All right, what are you seeing right now as the front runner, Sarah? Sarah: The every month is slightly above end of year only. It’s moving up. It’s moving up. Kelly: All right, in five, four, three, two, one, and time. What do we have? What’s the highest way that this group of participants are engaging with their monthly donors? Sarah: You should be able to see the results in the poll. It was very interesting how when it started it was a little bit of everywhere, and then it was ‘every month’; ‘end of year’. Those are quite opposite yet still common. Kelly: All right, good results. Every month does win out, and if that is you then maybe you’re going to learn some tips and tricks to make it more efficient. If you are not sure or maybe you only deal with the first gift or end of year, perhaps, some of what we’re going to show you might encourage you to at least consider maybe interacting with them a bit more. All right, as we dive in here and we move forward in our conversation, what we’re going to start with using the donor retention and monthly giving as our strategy, is we’re going to focus on managing donations efficiently. Now, you’re going to hear the words efficient and automatic and time savers quite a bit today. Everything that we’re showing you is actually going to help you do those things so that you can engage with your donors. You can spend time doing things that are most important. If you can imagine, just picture yourself making a donation online. What are some of the behaviors that you experience and you probably even expect? Your donors would expect the same thing, is that as soon as you press submit, you’ve made that donation, you’re expecting and hoping that you’re going to get an immediate thank you. That is absolutely true for our donors as well. Soon as they press submit at your site they can get an immediate thank you. That thank you email can be personalized. It can tell them how much you appreciate their contribution, their partnership and the impact of their gift. Now, that’s wonderful but now we want to put on a time saving benefit for you, is that it can automatically be brought in into DonorPerfect. You don’t need to worry about going somewhere else, downloading it into Excel and importing it. Then the other piece that it’s going to do is not only bring it into DonorPerfect but if it’s a new donor, which is an important group of people, but if it’s a new donor then it’s going to search for them add them as a donor in the system and then create the commitment which we call a pledge. All of this is going to just happen if you set up your system to do this. These are some great options, Sarah, that DonorPerfect offers right out of the gate to save time and be efficient. I know that there are other things that DonorPerfect can do that you are going to continue to wow our audience with. Now I’m going to pass the baton to Sarah. She’s going to talk a little bit more about a really cool feature. Sarah: Yes. Everything you said is true. The transaction can happen and we’ll create it automatically in DonorPerfect. We’re going to see some examples of that shortly. The other thing that you can do is you can let DonorPerfect do all the work for you by using our smart action. What a smart action can do is at the same time as this transaction gets created in DonorPerfect, automatically, that word again, automatic, it will send an email to a staff at your organization letting that person know that a new monthly donor has just enrolled into your monthly giving program. It will also create a task directly in DonorPerfect in the contacts table letting you know you need to call this donor to welcome them to say thank you. You can see those upcoming tasks at a glance are on our new homepage. Then just check them off as you go. How about I show you all of this in DonorPerfect directly. What do you think? Kelly: I think it’s a great idea because sometimes seeing is believing. Sarah: Amazing. Let’s imagine we have this donor that went onto the website and decided that they were going to make a commitment and become a monthly donor. I’ve prefilled this form up with my name but it’s that simple. You just fill in the form, scroll down, you get to the bottom of it and then you would just hit ‘next’. At the complete bottom I’m submitting my payment. I’m paying an extra $150 to cover for some of those credit card fees. I’m going to pay that every month to keep helping forever. Now, I get this here. This particular page, but I also automatically got my personalized thank you. My personalized thank you that I’ve received is going to look like this in this scenario because this is what I made it look like. It’s giving a little story about how we’re helping Nora specifically, or dogs like Nora, and giving in a picture, make you feel a connection to what you just decided to become a part of. In DonorPerfect, directly what it did, so now if I take you to DonorPerfect, bear with me as I navigate. In DonorPerfect, I’m going to look my name and here is the record it created. I have a brand new record created because I did not exist. I’m a new donor. I do not have a record in this system yet. It created the first payment, so I just donated my first $51.50 as part as my commitment. If I go here, it created the pledge which is the commitment to give $51.50 once a month. So every 5th of the month, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later, this is going to be processed. I also mentioned it could create a to-do list. What the system did is it created a task right here in the contact table where now there is a telephone call that was assigned to someone in the next three days, so you have three days to call this donor to welcome them. I’ve also received an email, so keeping what’s showing you my emails here– One second. I’m just going to show you. Here we go. Coming [chuckles]. There’s my automatic email that just came in that says a new monthly donor on the 5th of the month. That email could be customized, if there was something more you wanted, like you wanted to include the phone number or you wanted to include the email address, you wanted to include potentially if they had a choice on what they’re participating if you have different programs, all of that could be included. Then, finally, when you go to the homepage, you have your to-do list. These are the three phone calls that have been assigned to me that I have to do today. If I scroll down and I do show me contacts during the next seven days, I’m going to see the Sarah Lalonde one, so the one that we just did together, as well as all these other ones that are coming up in the next few days. If I’m doing my work, I can just mark this as done right here. I could add a note if I wanted to. About the phone call, I’ll grade it “1” and then I can save. Then I can keep going, and this one is removed. It’s as easy as checking out my checking a checklist. Kelly: Fantastic. Hopefully, in the short amount of time we’ve had together, you’re already thinking of ways that you can save time. As Sarah mentioned in the monthly giving experience is when we have monthly donors we want to welcome them because we know that donor retention is going to increase with recurring contributions. We often refer to it as monthly because that is the most common, but then we built into DonorPerfect, there is that word again, automatic processing. There’s actually two levels of this. We have automatic monthly giving. Automatic monthly giving is a daily process that DonorPerfect does for you that’s actually looking at the individual pledge details to determine if it needs to be processed. If somebody is supposed to be processed on the 5th of the month, they’re the ones that are going to be processed on the 5th of the month, not the 4th, not the 6th, not the 10th. When those days roll around, that’s when those accounts are going to be processed. We asked the question, how often do you engage with your monthly donors? In our group, we had just by a little bit ahead many of you saying every month. If we were to throw out a second poll, which we’re not going to do, of those, how many of you are taking advantage of automatic monthly giving receipts? Well, if you’re not, you should. If you are contemplating how can we save time and still engage with these donors and make it personal, then you should consider the automatic monthly giving receipt. This is an effortless way to say thank you and communicate with your supporters every month. The beauty of this though is even though it’s an automatic process, we are still providing the all-important way of being personal because if you think about your own experience, again, put ourselves in our donor’s shoes, we want to receive that personalization. We don’t want a “Dear Friend” email, we want a “Dear Kelly”, or a “Dear Sarah” email. Sarah, can you show our audience how easy it is to make a change to those email templates? Sarah: Yes, I can and I would love to. Let me bring back DonorPerfect onto our screen here. What happens is whenever a pledge is created, you can assign a thank you letter code directly in the pledge. If I go back to my record briefly and to my pledge that I have created– Here it comes. I am just opening a pledge. You have here the thank you letter that it’s assigned. This thank you letter, when it is assigned to a monthly pledge, can be sent automatically by using the automatic receipt that is found in tasks monthly giving. If you use our monthly giving module, you’ve been here before, you can either process manually or automatic. We have automatic processing on in the system as well as automatic receipts, meaning an email is sent to everyone as the gifts are processed. Then what Kelly was asking me to show you is where do I customize that email? Remember, I showed you the code that it’s associated with. When I go into mailings and email templates, I’m going to see here that I can create a different template and associate them with that specific code. Right now, the monthly donor thank you is assigned to my October email. I had a different one in September, but this is the current one that my donors are going to be receiving and it is set up in here so it includes merge-field the first-names, so that it is going directly to them and it includes a story about Daisy in this case and how great she felt recently, thanks to the help of our monthly donors. Then when we go back and we looked at September, you will see when they were receiving the September email, it was a completely different one, where they were getting to know Lucy here who needed a special diet to feel better. The idea is still customizing with the merge field. You can also include, if you have donors that donate monthly but to specific funds, specific categories, and include that in your email message, so that it’s really personalized to them and what they’re contributing to. I think that’s back to you, Kelly. I think you’re muted. [silence] Kelly: Even experienced trainers forget to unmute themselves from time to time. All right, before you go back to our presentation, Sarah, can you open up that email template one more time? One of the things that I often try and remember is I am not an expert at making things look nice when it comes to graphics and so forth. At the top here, you can see that there’s that editor and it’s as easy as clicking on that image tool so that you can get those cute pictures of Daisy and Lucy and Nora. It’s not anything hidden. It’s nothing extra. It is all part of DonorPerfect. It is something that I love to highlight because sometimes, when you get caught up in how sharp something looks, you think, “Oh, I can’t do that.” That’s absolutely not the case here. Thanks, Sarah. Sarah: You’re welcome. Kelly: All right, I don’t know if you are yet excited about all of the things that we’ve shown you and we’re just getting started. I think everybody would agree that one cornerstone or one key element of any non-profit success is knowing where they’re at in terms of their progress towards a goal. You might think of that as reports, and I would agree. We have a lot of great reports in DonorPerfect. Some of them are standard and give you common information like the gifts that you’ve received in a certain time period, the total dollars raised for your fundraising efforts whether that be a campaign or towards your general ledger. Then there are ways in some of those standard reports but also in very specific reporting needs using the easy report builder where you can choose to see what you want to see. Again, thinking about our scenario of donor retention, and we’re really zeroing in on monthly donors but not just all monthly donors, we’re going to think about new monthly donors. Because coming out of the pandemic, I’ve heard many times over that there’s a lot of new donors that people are getting and gaining and trying to build relationships with but it’s overwhelming. One way that you can zero in on not only the information you want to see but you can also target who you want to see. The example is the new recurring donor information. It’s a report. Now that sounds like it’s a lot of work. Well, one of the things that you can do with several of the DonorPerfect canned reports but definitely with the easy reports where you are designing it yourself is you can choose to set it up, apply a selection filter using some really cool functionality that we’re not going to spend too much time on today but just know that it can be done, and we’re going to schedule it. In a sense, I am going to go out there and say you can schedule and forget it because it’s going to arrive in your inbox so that you don’t have to remember now where did I go? What filter did I apply to get the results that you wanted to see? Sarah, take it from here and wow our friends with the schedule and forget it options as well as our dashboards. Sarah: This is an example here of a report that I received in an email. Before showing you how I got there, I just wanted you to see the results. This came attached to my email with a subject of ‘scheduled report’ and here it was, my new monthly donors for the month of September. If I’m going to DonorPerfect, to get to that, I got to go to Reports and then Report Center where all of our reports are found. In the Report Center, I created my own report called ‘New Recurring Donor Report’. I gave it that name and I created it using the Easy Report builder that I may not show you today but is actually called Easy Report for a reason. With the help of support and the knowledge base you can definitely do it too. In the recurring report, you have the option down here to schedule. When I hit ‘schedule’ right here, I can choose when do I want to receive this and where do I want to send it. So I can give it a name. I can choose my format, PDF, Excel, Word or CSV. I can choose when to receive it. Do I want to receive it monthly, daily, weekly, which day of the month, and then I can do it in the morning or after five o’clock. I can add a little message and I can send it to other people. If you have colleagues that want to get it, just separate the email address with a comma and include it to multiple people and then I would save. Does that sound great? Kelly: That sounds amazing. Sarah: Yes, go ahead. Kelly: I know. I was just going to say, in addition, Sarah, could you go to the financial report called ‘Gifts by Date’, please? As she just navigates there, this is one of those standard reports that I was mentioning that exists that everybody has that you can also schedule and send it. It would behave the same way as that Easy Report. Since I mentioned it, I wanted to make sure that Sarah showed you where that was at. Sarah, I think you wanted to talk about our dashboards. I know I love them but I’ll let you go ahead and continue the conversation. Sarah: That’s right. That’s where I was going to go next. I was going to go to Reports and then Dashboard and remind you in case you didn’t and if you knew already or tell you in case you didn’t know that we do have three fantastic dashboards available to you in DonorPerfect. The Organization Dashboard which will have a lot of metrics that the whole organization can see, the My Dashboard that can be customized for each user. Mine can look slightly different than Kelly’s and we could have different things on it. Finally, the Monthly Giving Dashboard. What I’m going to do is I’m going to show you a slide of the Monthly Giving Dashboard because I do not have enough data in the system but here you can see what that dashboard looks like. Right away I can see at a glance what’s going on month to month with my monthly giving program and in green here, you’ve got dollar amounts. This is really what is being received. Then below, you’ve got the donor count. I have 65 monthly donor over the last 12 months and my average would be $73.63. You can click on these numbers and you can measure your performance month over month really easily with this. The other thing that’s interesting is that at the top I have a $40 failed amount. That is showing up because someone’s transaction did not go through. Maybe it’s an expired credit card, maybe something else is wrong. This is to alert you so you can click on that amount, see what it is, reach out to that donor and, hopefully, get it processed before the next month. Kelly: Awesome. All right, we have so far covered how to get donations that are given by donors from an online form into DonorPerfect efficiently, how to communicate with those donors in an automatic way, and stay engaged with them using the contacts page and the homepage and we have talked about reports. Now we’re focusing on donor retention and we’re really zeroing in on monthly donors specifically with new monthly donors. A lot of the data in the industry really suggest that you need to let your donors guide you. What that really means is that you have to stop and listen. Sometimes that takes [chuckles] time and it’s not going to happen overnight. There’s so many ways that we can do this. We can have those personal conversations and visits and so forth but we can also use some of the features in DonorPerfect another type of form called a survey where we could provide a safe way for our new monthly donors to provide some feedback. What has it been like to become a new donor? Is the welcome pack effective? Really you can use that data as a guide. Sarah has here on the screen. She is the author of this form, so I will let her speak to it but use that survey data to your advantage. Sarah, what do we have? Sarah: Well, this is a survey that’s been created to send to someone who was a first-time donor and asking them, “Why did you choose us? What made you decide to give us some of your money?” Then we’re asking them, “How do you want us to communicate with you in the future? What would you like? Do you want us to send you a newsletter? Do you like to read updates on our website? Do you like to visit us on Instagram or on Facebook? If you have a project, what would be the best project that you would like to participate with? Build the kitty center or refurbish the kitty city wing, for example. What is it that interests you?” Finally, “Are you interested in volunteering with us? Is that something that you would like to help? Do more than just give us some money but really participate and come and help take care of the animals here at the shelter,” and this particular story here is an animal rescue. Really the idea of the survey is asking them, “What do you want going forward?” Maybe you just want to give us money and see what it’s doing once a month. Maybe you want more. That’s really getting to know them that way. Kelly: All right, one of the things that all of our online forms will do is it will be brought back into DonorPerfect. The data isn’t just going to sit somewhere, it can actually come into the record and that data then is, again, another level of information that you can dig into and review and it will also then help target specific messages. It will give you the ability to create those messages to those donors because you can find out what their interests are. It’s just you’re building that relationship. One of the things, one of the analogies that I love, I think it’s been around for a while but it seems to really have resurfaced recently, is that donor engagements is like a dating relationship. You want to keep learning more about your donors and use the tool tools to save time where you absolutely can, but then spend time interacting with them. You’ll be on time because you’re using some of the cool features that we’ve already highlighted. All right, one of the other things that DonorPerfect, I think, does a great job of is integrating with other applications. DonorPerfect is a fantastic source or a hub of information. We have a lot of integrations and integrations really summary statement for me is where you’re able to use the benefits of both applications and the feature we want to highlight right now is Constant Contact. Constant Contact, you may have participated in that session earlier right before this one where you learn a lot about what it can do but, what we want to highlight in this line of thinking about time saving efficiencies is that you can use the integration and set it up to have what’s referred to as dynamic lists. Now, a dynamic list is something where you are going to go in and you’re going to say, “I want every time there is a new donor record added to DonorPerfect, where it is recurring frequency as monthly and it is to this campaign, add them to my email list overnight,” and just do it for me. A dynamic list is a feature that exists between DonorPerfect and Constant Contact. We are having a little bit of a technical hiccup, so we’re just going to keep moving forward here. Don’t worry about it, Sarah. We’ve got it covered. What we’re going to do is we’re just going to talk us through this. Nothing like live sessions where things can go crazy. We’ve experienced crazy. We won’t even tell you what it is, but what we’re going to talk about is the integration between DonorPerfect and Constant Contact. Sarah, why don’t you start in DonorPerfect real quick, just so we can show them where this dynamic list exists. Sarah: In DonorPerfect you have an integration piece over here in the mailings feature called Constant Contact Email. That is how you connect the two together. This is not connected. You can’t ignore that piece. Here, you would connect it. Actually, I could connect it right now. Could I? Can do that since my slides are broken, let’s just go forward for now here with whatever’s going on. Here, I’m just going to connect with this system together and I am hoping I have the right code. Once they’re connected, whenever you go to that section of DonorPerfect, you’re really going to just see this here. This is showing you any emails that have been sent, super quick results, and the most important, the power tool here, the list management tool where you can create all sorts of lists. You can create lists that are manual, which is just a one time push. It still gives you the ability to create the lists right here without having to export, import data. You create it here one time and then magically in Constant Contact there is your list. The second thing that it does is that it lets you create a dynamic list, which is even more powerful. When I’m adding a new list, the system is going to let me choose which list I want to create. Here it’s going to give me the option of dynamic. When I’m adding a dynamic list, I get the ability here to create a filter and whatever fits my filter is what is going to be on this list. I’m not going to go into filtering details right now, but let’s say, for example, I want to have all of my monthly donors, just all my monthly donors. I haven’t segmented this yet. I’m just saying all monthly donors. I create a filter for that. I get a new monthly donor today. Tonight, the two systems connect to each other and automatically tomorrow morning when I’m sending emails that new monthly donor is included without me having to do anything. It just happened by itself while I was asleep. If we’re creating a list that’s based on welcoming brand new monthly donors, then we can also do that by creating a list that would specify new monthly donors this week or last week, this month, however we would want to do it and just add names to the list that way. Then when I go to Constant Contact and I have my list that exists already, yes, I’m still working, I can go to the campaigns and I can create a new campaign and a campaign in Constant Contact is basically the email that you’re sending. Here, we’re going to see some template selection. We have standard selection templates, but you will see up here DonorPerfect templates. That is, again, because of this integration, you can have pre-made templates on getting people to join your monthly giving program, some monthly giving thank you’s and a monthly giving newsletter, for example, that I can just take this as my base to start working from to then create my email. Kelly: Now, one other piece that I think, perhaps, Sarah and I get used to and I fail to highlight from time to time is that online form that Sarah started out with. Well, think about the online form and the survey. We could embed that URL into these email templates. Now you’re pulling it full circle and taking advantage of one little feature, but how you have DonorPerfect, you have an online form, and you have a Constant Contact Email template and how you can pull it all together. What the donor’s going to receive is a really sharp and classy email. Then when they respond, they open the email, that information’s going to go back into their record into contacts. If they respond and fill out the survey, you’re going to get that information in their record. You can start to see how all of these facets are going to be working together to ultimately save you time, give you the ability to interact with your donors at different level. We’re highlighting email. The other piece is you could do similar things with direct mail where you can have that channel where you’re engaging with your donors in, perhaps, a direct mail effort as well, because, monthly donors, you tend to get a lot of email addresses. There are other ways that you could engage donors that are different than email. Sarah, are you able to get into the knowledge base at all so that we can highlight the email template e-book? Sarah: Yes. Just bear with me as I get there. Are you seeing it on the screen? Kelly: Yes, we are seeing the knowledge base. Sarah: If we were to just write e-book, we’ll get a bunch of them. Which one were you speaking of? Kelly: I think you could pick the welcome the monthly giving e-book. You could pick the thank you digital email template e-book. My point in having her come here is that one of the things that we have made available to you are some resources that are taking industry standards, best practices, pairing it with DonorPerfect’s cool functionality and time savers and trying to make it broken down into bite size chunks or tasks so that you’re not overwhelmed in something if it’s new to you. The knowledge base is full of a lot of information, but this is another one that ties into our conversation that we’re having right now about donor retention and monthly giving. Sarah, is there anything else that you would like to show or speak to as it relates to the integration with Constant Contact or the email templates or anything, perhaps, that I am forgetting at this moment? Sarah: I think that you covered mostly what I was thinking of in terms of that integration. Fortunately, I don’t have anything else to add right now. I’m assuming or hoping everyone did attend a session on Constant Contact because there are more options directly in Constant Contact in terms of automation where you could preset in advance in a specific timeframe how often someone receives an email after they’ve received the first one, seven days later, seven days later, three days later, whichever, a month later, you can set all of that up. That is very cool as well. I think we could, maybe, look at some questions that we’ve been receiving? What do you think? Kelly: Sure, absolutely. Sarah: It was going to be the last section of our presentation and for some reason my slides are really broken. I’m going to just move on from that. Maybe I’m going to no longer present anything and we can take a look at the questions. Kelly: One of the questions, let me just scroll through here. Sarah: We got a lot, that’s why I figured it’s probably a good thing to have a longer question period. Kelly: Okay, so a question since we’re talking about Constant Contact is can DonorPerfect integrate with an email platform other than Constant Contact? In terms of true integration, no, that’s the only one that it does integrate with, but in DonorPerfect, you are able to create an email list through the export to file option and then you could import that. In terms of a true integration it really only integrates, for this mass email communication that we’re talking about, with Constant Contact. I’m emphasizing that because if you go to the Thursday session of our DonorPerfect roadmap, you’re going to hear about a really cool function where it’s one off emails, but you’re able to use your own email platform. Sarah: Yes, that is very cool. Apparently there was a lot of people that had difficulty finding the handout at the bottom of the screen, at the beginning of the session. I don’t know if that was resolved. Kelly: I’m hoping yes. Well, it should be there so, hopefully, it is and if it’s not, we will try and rectify that after the session is over. Sarah: Yes. We’ll try to make sure that everyone gets it for sure. Kelly: Okay, a question, Sarah, common one about online forms. How can you keep from duplicates being created when a donor puts their info in maybe slightly different than their current donor records? What do you find as some tips and tricks about that, Sarah? Sarah: There’s different things that you can do. Obviously, there are matching criteria that are used when the transactions are being downloaded into DonorPerfect. Reviewing those can make a difference so that if someone is putting in a different address, it’s not necessarily going to look at their full address, especially if it is the same address, but written slightly different. Maybe not looking at the full name as well would be another good advice on that. Kelly: Oh, a question. This is an easy one. Are there webinars on automatic monthly giving specifically? There is a webinar, actually a webinar series on monthly giving, but is there one that’s completely dedicated to automatic monthly giving? There isn’t a webinar that’s focused solely on that, but there is a webinar called The Ins and Outs of Monthly Giving, I believe is the name of it where automatic monthly giving is one of the primary topics in that. Sarah, go ahead. Sarah: I’m trying to go through questions and there’s so many. Someone was asking when I was speaking about those thank you that were done monthly, how would that be managed. I got a few questions in here. One asked me, do you a global update to change? Could that happen by itself? There is, obviously, a trickiness to it if the first of the month is on the weekend. In the example that I was doing, there was no global update needed because when the new template would be created automatically, you would just assign that one. I kept both in the system to show you both, but you could also always just edit the previous one so you don’t even have to create a new one or you could create a new one and then just assign it to the thank you letter itself. Right now, we can’t automate the changing which letter is assigned. It would be on the moment of creation that you would change it. In that case I would suggest doing it on the last working day of the month. Kelly: How can I tell if smart actions are set up to alert me to new donors? Sarah: You would want to go to the smart action. Maybe I can reshare my screen briefly and show you where smart actions are because there was a few questions about that actually. Bear with me as I do that difficulty, it looks like. One second here. Let me just share my screen. I’m still not sure what happened to– Kelly: All right, it looks like Sarah is disappeared from the session. I’ll answer your questions, but I will not be able to show it to you in DonorPerfect. Oh, wait. She is back. There she is. Now we have DonorPerfect. Sarah: Technology goes wrong. It goes wrong the whole way so bear with me here. I’m going to log in to DonorPerfect. Kelly: Just to clarify, the handout that goes with this particular session, since this is really a session where we are highlighting a lot of features in DonorPerfect, we decided that instead of trying to explain in our own words what they are, is to point you to resources that already exist. If you happen to find the handout, there are a lot of embedded resources that are about the given topic. Many of them are going to be knowledge-based articles. Some of them might be blog posts. Some of them might be an e-book. Okay, Sarah, it looks like you’re in so let’s talk about smart actions. Sarah: Smart actions are found in the gear right here and then right there we’ve got smart action, third one from the bottom, depending what smart actions you’re looking for. I’m going to show you the one that I have and the one that we saw in action. Then to answer the question to check if I have a smart action that does, I don’t remember what that exact thing was, this is where you would want to come. If you have none, then you know you don’t have it. If you have something, then you have to go look at what it does. Here, I’ve got my new monthly donor 1. If I click here on this little pencil, in my case, there’s a comment that tells me what it’s going to do. It’s going to create a transaction for a telephone call and send an email [unintelligible 00:47:48] created for a new monthly donor. What is good to know about smart actions is that the way that they work is they work with a trigger and then the action itself. The trigger is always something needs to happen for the magic to happen. What is that? In this example, it is the new pledge save. Whenever a brand new pledge is saved in DonorPerfect, it could be because it came from an online form or because I manually created a pledge and saved it. That’s my trigger. It will trigger the action. There’s many different possibilities of triggers. It could be just on a new gift saved, for example, instead. It doesn’t have to be monthly donors. It could just be a first-time donor, for example. Now, if I was to leave it as a new pledge save and not put a selection filter, as you may or may not know, selection filters are how I identify which records do I want this to apply to. If I don’t have a selection filter that means everyone, the whole database. Anytime a new pledge is saved no matter why it will automatically go true. I created a filter to specify that it had to be those that were enrolled in my monthly giving program. You could do that based on the fact that they have the monthly giving turned on. You could choose to only want to see gifts of a certain amount. You could choose to see the frequency monthly. There’s a lot of options filtering. The possibilities are endless. Wouldn’t she say, Kelly? Kelly: Yes. Sarah: That’s the idea I went with. Then, obviously, it’s active. Otherwise, it wouldn’t have worked. Once you have your trigger set up, then you got the action you can configure. In my case I have two actions the first one being I sent an automatic email to someone to let them know that a new monthly donor has now been entered. Right here it’s the message and whenever you see those percentage signs that’s because I’m including merge fields directly from DonorPerfect. For example, I’ve got the first name, the last name, the donor ID, and then the monthly amount, and when did it start. That’s the information that sent in my email. Like I mentioned earlier, I could add anything. I could add a phone number, I could add a lot more than that if I wanted to, what fund did they choose, for example, where did they decide to designate their gift? And so on. Then I created a transaction and the transaction is a telephone call that is due three days plus today, meaning it’s giving me three days after the day that this pledge got saved to do this call. Then this is the message that you see in my contact notes. Kelly: Sarah, one of the questions that came in that ties into this smart action, but also an online form email is, can we review the process to send an automatic email and assign a thank you? Basically, what’s going to happen is the automatic email is going to come from the online form, and perhaps Sarah can show us where that’s at where you can personalize that email. When that transaction, that recurring gift comes into DonorPerfect, you can build a smart action to be so smart that it’s going to say, “Hey, this is not only just a new donor, a new pledge, a new recurring donor, it was created by an online form.” When those two things are true, then assign a task to call thank you. Take it full circle then it’s going to show up on your home page. The system’s going to do all this for you. Part of the answer to that question is you’re going to build a smart action for those transactions coming in from an online form. Where can we go? Can you show us where in the online form we can personalize the email? Sarah: Yes, I would love to. I went really fast, but in the app links, you have all those different options than I chose online forms and here we’ve got different forms that I have, so that’s the survey, and then here is my monthly giving form and I can hit the little pencil to edit it, and set email options. You’re going to potentially notice that this looks similar to when I showed you the previous editor of email templates with a little toolbar at the top to help you figure out how to make things pretty. Again, to include a picture, all I had to do was click on this little icon, and then right here choose an image from my computer that I wanted to include. If we wanted to add Darla to this email, that’s how I would do it. It’s really simple to do that. Then here’s the text and you can just customize the text and you can use these functions to change your font and all of that. This is sent automatically whenever someone’s payment is submitted and gone through. Kelly: Yes, I believe that’s the automatic email that was being asked about. There was a question somewhere. I don’t know if it was in chat or question, but it was about Constant Contact. A couple of questions are, is integration with Constant Contact included in DonorPerfect? In large part, I’m going to say the answer is yes. Some of that might be dependent on the package that you have and how long you’ve been using DonorPerfect. I don’t know. The best solution to getting the right answer for your specific scenario is to hop over into I think it’s called the client room where our account managers are at and they can look up your account and let you know for sure. Another question that came in about Constant Contact in a variety of ways is if you have an existing Constant Contact account, can it be linked up to DonorPerfect? The answer is, yes. We actually have a great knowledge base article that will walk you through the process. Again, we have trainers and we have support reps that if you’re nervous about it, you can let us know and some of you I know are in the onboarding process. You can also let your onboarding coordinator know, but we would love to just talk through how to best do that for you, but the short answer is yes, that can be done. Sarah, it looks like we have time maybe for, if I’m looking at the clock, one or two more questions. Sarah, is there a question that you can see that you would like to answer? Sarah: Well, there was a super quick one that will take me just a few seconds to answer about when I send a report by email, can that be password protected? The answer is yes. Just wanted to point that out. I didn’t show it on screen, but when I was originally scheduling the report, and if technology works today for a brief moment, please. [laughs] When I’m scheduling, I do have this little walk, so I could choose to put a password right here. That was one question. Another question that came in, again, super quick, I’m trying to see quickly. Do you see anything? Kelly: The one question that I just want to clarify is that when we’re talking about processing online gifts for recurring donors for any type of donation really, you would have to use our payment processing solution. If you would like to learn more about that, we actually have a room. It’s, I think, called the save room. The lounge is also the same thing so it’s a smaller version. We have people there that can speak to you about the specifics and the options and answer any of those questions. I see a question, can we still do some of that payment processing for these recurring gifts, if you are using another company? The answer is no. You would have to use our solutions. Sarah: Right, but you could still do a lot of this. You could still personalize thank you emails that you’re sending, it just won’t be automated in here, but you could still use Constant Contact for newsletters, for example. There is a super quick question. Will fail gift receive a monthly giving automatic receipt or only those that are successful? Kelly: They shouldn’t receive anything if it failed. They shouldn’t receive anything at all. In fact, one of the things that’s built into DonorPerfect, which we didn’t get into all of these other kinds of oversight things which are important, there is a place in the program where you can go to see the transactions that have failed. You can also go to a place in DonorPerfect under receipts, where you can see if the emails were successfully sent for the automatic. While the benefit of the automation is really wonderful and powerful, there are places in the program where you can go to check to make sure everything is working as you would expect it to. That is actually time. I am thrilled that you’re here. Sorry for the technical hiccup, but I had a great time doing this and leading this with Sarah. Sarah, is there anything that you would like to end our session with? Sarah: I just want to say thank you so much for all your questions. If they did not get answered, I’m really sorry. I appreciate you so much, and I hope to see you again in our next few sessions, most likely tomorrow and Thursday, but I think there’s one more today, actually. [unintelligible 00:58:25] Kelly: Yes. There’s one more today. Check out the keynote speaker and then come back tomorrow and then come back Thursday for some more donor-specific content. Thanks so much. [00:59:12] [END OF AUDIO]