New, Current, and Lapsed: Why You Need Different Donor Journeys

Good afternoon and welcome to new current and lapsed why you need different donor journeys today, Cherian Koshy will be presenting alongside DonorPerfect Learning and Development Manager Kelly Ramage. Welcome to you both now, before we get started, please note Read More

Good afternoon and welcome to new current and lapsed why you need different donor journeys today, Cherian Koshy will be presenting alongside DonorPerfect Learning and Development Manager Kelly Ramage. Welcome to you both now, before we get started, please note that you have access to the chat as well as the Q and A section. So if you have a question, be sure to ask it in the Q amp a section, so that others are able to see it and they can be answered. The Chat can get pretty busy at times, so you want to make sure that your question is seen and it might be missed if you throw it into the chat. So that is my housekeeping So, Cherian and Kelly, you are all set to get started. Awesome.

Thanks so much. And welcome everybody. And once the chats enabled, let us know where you are calling in from, where you are located, and what the weather is like. That’s kind of the standard thing to let us know about it is sunny and warm here in Des Moines, Iowa, we’re grateful for all of you taking some time here and, oh, raining. Sorry to hear that for those of you, lot lots of sun, apparently. So that’s great, fantastic. Good to see you all here. Thanks for taking a little bit of time over the middle of your day. For most of you, looks like to talk about these different types of donor journeys, and we’re going to split this up, and I’m going to take the first half, and then Kelly’s going to jump in for the second half and and talk about kind of how to exactly implement this, particularly in your in your DonorPerfect setting. So the first thing that I want to give you, that’s, I think is probably really, really simple and really straightforward. You’re probably thinking, this is a little too obvious, but it really bears repeating. It doesn’t matter where I go, anywhere in the United States, anywhere in Canada, anywhere in the world. People ask me about how to get more donors, how to get new donors. This is top of mind everywhere, and it has everything to do with the fact that there is so much out there around declining donors, the number of donors decreasing. And no matter what you feel about that, no matter what you feel about how there is a decrease in donors, and what is causing that, and what is impacting donor retention rates, and all of that. We’ll get into that in just a moment. There’s a simple truth around donor acquisition, and this is the big takeaway. Like, if you fall asleep for the next 50 minutes of this conversation, this is the big takeaway, if you acquire more donors, but you cannot keep them. There is a hard cap on the number of donors that you will ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be able to acquire. So if you have your phone handy, open up the calculator app, because I’m going to show you how to how to demonstrate the hard cap on the number of donors that you will ever have in your organization. People are like, I just need more donors. I just need more donors. Give me 1000 more donors, and I’ll be good. I’ll be good in my organization. But ultimately, the number of donors that you can have in your organization is the number of donors that you can acquire divided by your attrition percentage. So you can I’ll show you how to manipulate this based on however number you have in your organization. But just do this math. Assume that your organization acquires consistently, 50 new donors per month. 50 new donors per month now divide 50 by 5% so on your phone, 50 divided by 5% you’ll get 1000 donors, which means that no matter what happens if you don’t change that top number, or you don’t change that bottom number, if you keep doing what you did, you’ll keep getting what you got. So I hope high school coach used to say, if you keep doing what you did, you’ll keep getting what you got. So you can change this however you want, based upon your specific numbers. If you want to change it by yearly new donors or your attrition rate is different based upon your yearly attrition rate. And we’ll get into kind of benchmark numbers in a moment. This will tell you your numbers for your organization, and this is ultimately kind of your maximum donor base if you do not change anything. So it’s your if you want to do it for annual This is the calculation your monthly new donors times 12 divided by your annual attrition rate. Very straightforward, very simple number to calculate. Very important for you. You to understand before we get into the different donor journey types and different approaches. So this is your donor number ceiling, if you, if you get, if you acquire more donors than this, but your attrition rate stays the same, you will always end up falling below your donor number ceiling. Why? Because your number is a percentage. You will end up losing a greater percentage of those donors, that, or, sorry, the same percentage, but a greater number of them. So you will always hover around that. You’ll see that it’s like right around that, because it’s not exact. You’re not precisely losing 5% every single month or every single year. There’s a little bit of variation. You’re not exactly getting 50 donors every single month, so there’s a little bit of variation. But the point is that you’re going to stay within that band, unless you do what we’ve been talking about now with DonorPerfect for several months, which is thinking about, how do these different types of donors interact with your organization? How do we engage them in a unique fashion? So I mentioned before. We want to talk about benchmarks and and how does this apply to your specific organization? So if you don’t know your current numbers, this is where you want to start. The benchmarks across the industry. These come from things like the Association of Fundraising Fundraising Effectiveness projects. Sorry, Association of Fundraising Professionals. I should know the organization. I’m on the board of the AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Project. You could look that up, AFP, FEP, and you’ll get this information. We have data through third quarter of 2024 sometime soon around AFP icon is usually how that comes out. Usually when that comes out, you’ll get the data for all of 2024 that’s something to pay attention to for industry benchmarks. But remember that industry benchmarks are just that, like this is what’s happening in aggregate, aggregate over 1000s and 1000s of organizations all over the world, a lot in North America. So if you are somewhere in Europe or somewhere in Africa, does it? It probably doesn’t index to you as well, but you’ll see here 57% donor attrition. So you can reverse that for donor retention. 43% donor attrition, donor retention in 2022 that number has been declining through 2024 so there’s some you want to figure out that number for your own organization. What is your donor retention number for your own organization. I think sometimes we take that for granted and we’re not paying attention to it because we seem to think like, oh, we generally have that number. We generally know what that looks like. But there’s a few other calculations that hopefully you’re thinking about and paying attention to, as you put into context why donor journeys are important, why the work that we’re doing here today, but just in general, why that’s important? What’s the cost to raise $1 How much does it cost to get a new donor in the door? Some people think of this in kind of very overly simplistic terms. So like, you know, I just need a new donor. And if we can just do an event, if we can do a gala, a golf tournament, a run, a walk, whatever we can get, we can get more donors in the door. And they don’t necessarily think about it in terms of, if we spend $1,000 to get to do one of these events or whatever, we’ll get X number of donors, X number of dollars. So as you think about how those pieces play out into immediate dollars in the door, immediate numbers of donors, you also then want to think about what is their average gift size. If you’re doing an email appeal, lots of people are like, I’m just going to send out an email appeal, or I’m going to send out a a social media appeal is the average gift size, $20 $200 something. You know, what does that look like when you are thinking about that average gift size? That helps you understand the other piece of the equation. So, how many, how much does it cost for me to get $1 in the door. In general, acquisition costs more than retention. The kind of benchmark there is that it costs about $1.50 to get a new dollar in the door, $1.50 to get $1 in the door. And then average gift size is all over the place. It just depends on kind of what you ask for. And then, how often do your donors give? Do they give once a year at the end of the year, when we typically ask them for an end of year gift? Or do we try to encourage them to give more often with a special appeal in the middle of the year in you know, some organizations will ask. Multiple times a year. This is why there’s a lot of push around monthly giving. This not only do they have a higher retention rate, but frequency of giving drives a higher level of of retent of you know that frequency of giving lends itself to other features of that piece as well. So

as you are thinking of how to get past that static one that number that I gave you, your number might will be different, but that $1,000 donor number ceiling, there are literally only three things that you can do to impact that donor ceiling, there’s only three things that you can do. You can increase the number of donors by retaining more donors and acquiring more donors. So those two aspects of the number of donors, you can get more and keep more those two things, you can increase the average gift of the donors that can be at acquisition or upgrading gifts, and you can increase the frequency of giving. You can increase the frequency of giving. So as you’re thinking about what is your strategy? Let’s say you are getting 5050 donors a month, and your attrition rate is 5% then if you are looking at $1,000 or 1000 donor cap for your organization, that’s your example. You can impact any one of these three, or all three of them. So remember what I said before? A lot of the organizations I talked to, they’re like, I need more donors. I need more donors. I need tips and strategies for getting more donors in the door. Hopefully, what this slide tells you, what this slide tells you, what this slide tells you, is that there is more than the just getting new donors in the door that will help you to grow your organization, to grow revenue for the long term in a scalable way that you can do more than just get new donors in the door to impact the growth of your organization. And actually, if you do the math, which we’re not going to do here today, if you move all three of these levers in a meaningful way, you can significantly raise the revenue of your organization by flipping each one of these levers. So by impacting the the acquisition, of course, the retention, of course, a bit, by changing the average gift a bit and by increasing the frequency of giving a bit, you will have a significant change in revenue for your organization, and you will do so in a sustainable way, without just spending a ton of money on donor acquisition. Remember, donor acquisition costs you a lot of money. These things combined don’t require a whole ton of money and a whole ton of effort in moving people new to your organization into your organization. So that’s the point of of this slide as well. There’s a significant cost reality to acquiring new donors. The part that we don’t say out loud is that there’s a lot of staff time involved in getting new donors into the door. We love to say, like, Oh, we’re just going to host an event. Every single one of you in this conversation, 705 of you in this conversation, knows that that is a significant toil on your day. Those events cost a lot of time, sending out an email, working through the text of the email, sending it out to the right people, figuring out how to do it on social media. It involves a lot. I can see in the chat people chiming in. This costs a lot of staff time, time that is not spent doing other things. There’s costs that involve all of the other pieces in acquiring those donors. So want to be mindful of that. If you’ve been involved in the other the other webinars that we’ve done, the donor journey workbook that we created, there’s a QR code that was on before. They’ll be it’ll be up again. You saw this pathway that we’ve this life cycle that that we’ve outlined before, acquisition into new donor, and then off into laps to dormant donor back into recapture, over to an upgraded donor, and then up on the top side that renewal to a current donor, and that can be into an upgraded donor as well. So there’s lots of ways in which we can impact little, small things across this life cycle to. To address the the ways in which our donors engage with our organization. All of these pieces are touch points. All of these pieces require time and resource investments. But if you think about it, and we talked about this in the last webinar, lots of money over acquisition, lots of money less dollar if you get them as donors, if they’re in this new donor spot, then we can spend less dollars around the renewal piece and around the upgrade piece to emphasize our engagement with the organization. So we’re going to focus on these three things that you came for. These three things that you came for are new, current and lapsed donors, and how to if we’ve got them, if we’ve got them inside of our organization, how can we amplify that so that we don’t have to worry as much about acquisition? We can use that as leverage to get even more engagement out of these donors so that we can focus on building relationship and sustaining relationship. So you’ll see, I put little stars around the three places that if we enable growth in these areas, if we put more time and investment in these three areas, we’ll have outsized returns, if we will, if you will, we’ll over index on these three spots. So let’s start with the the new donor reality. The benchmark is the the FEP data says that approximately 20 to 30% of new donors never give again, or, sorry, 70% of new donors never give again. There’s 20 to 30 that remain donors. If you have 100 new donors this year, only 20 to 30% of them will ever give again in the next year. That may not be true for your organization. I get that however. You need to diagnose why that is happening inside of your organization. Why is that happening inside of your organization? It’s true industry wide. We have the data to prove that. But why is that happening inside of your organization? I will say that for a lot of organizations, what’s dragging down the average is because they didn’t really plan to be a donor to your organization. They were involved in something that was sort like they came to an event, a gala, or whatever they were, they made a donation, but they didn’t see themselves as really a donor. They just didn’t see themselves as planning to be a recurring donor. There’s a book on the back of my shelf, back behind me from Lisa Greer, called the philanthropy revolution. If you’ve ever heard Lisa Greer talk, she’s a donor, and she wrote this book because she’s like, I didn’t realize that once I made a gift, I was supposed to make a gift every single year that that was does that was the goal, like, that was the plan. She’s like, I wasn’t ever told that was the rule. That may be true of your donors. It may not be, but you have to diagnose that, and the best way of figuring that out is to ask them, to ask them. So there, from having done this for a really long time, I can tell you there are three critical touch points. It’s that first 48 hours. Yeah, Kate, it’s philanthropy. I’m just going to grab it and hold it up for you. Philanthropy revolution, by Lisa Greer. It’s this orangey cover. You’ll find it on Amazon or wherever you buy books. So there’s three critical touch points with a new donor that you have to focus on. The first is that first 48 hours, and the reason for this is because the moment after they click the button to donate. The moment after they write the check, the moment after they swipe the credit card, there’s a moment that you have all felt as consumers, and that moment is doubt. Did I actually do something worthwhile? Did I do something that I should have done. And my guess is that you have done this when you have scrolled through Amazon and you’ve made a purchase that you shouldn’t have made. I’ve done this with baking equipment like every week. So the idea here is that you’ve got a donor who clicked on something on social media, clicked on an email, and they’re like, Ooh, maybe this wasn’t did I? Did I do something that was worthwhile? Should I have done that? Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Is this a real place? Are they going to use the money the way that I thought I was going to I should have used them that I thought it should have been used for? So that first 48 hours is really critical to confirm that they did something good, that they did something that matters. So in that first 48 hours, you are confirming trust. You are making sure that they know that they did something good. In the first 30 days, you are. For amplifying that effort. That’s where you want to remind them of what they have accomplished, and in that first 90 days is where you can reaffirm and try to encourage them to make a second gift. The data is really clear that if you can get them to make a second gift in the first 90 days they will they have a much more significant lifetime value to your organization. So as you’re thinking about Kelly’s going to talk about the actual implementation of this, but time to the second gift for a new donor is a really important metric to monitor if their next gift is a year from now, let me tell you a lot of things happen between December of 2023, and December of 2024, in your donor’s life, a lot of things happen. They forgot. They plain forgot. What happened between December 23 and december 24 how are they responding to your communications? Are they picking up the phone? Are they replying to a text? Are they answering are they replying to emails? Are they opening emails? Response to communication is really important to to monitor, and then any sort of engagement actions. Are they? Are they showing up to events. This all depends. I mean, obviously there’s hundreds of you on the call here today. It all depends on the different things that you’re doing with your constituents during this time. So Kelly’s gonna give you some examples of exactly how to do that. But as you deploy, it all I’m suggesting to you during this time is that you have something during the 48 hours, during the 30 days, during the 90 days, to be able to benchmark, to be able to say, we have a touch point. And as long as you do that, you’ll be able to measure some sort of engagement. And I would recommend doing something that allows you to make a reasonable ask for a second gift within 90 days. So for your current donor, um, folks that have been there, they have made a gift at some point in the last year or so, that retention rate is 43% current retention rate is 43% industry standard, again, for your organization, you have to make an assessment of why. Why is that retention rate? The rate it is. Your retention rate may be 70% or 80% I promise you, it’s not 100% people die, they move away, whatever. There’s a very, very, very, very low likelihood that’s 100% so that means that you’re losing donors for some reason, and we need to figure out why that’s the case as a result of that. So what are some things that you can do as touch points, as opportunities, during that current donor journey? Pathway to create opportunities. One might be to invite them to a regular giving program, like a monthly giving program or a quarterly giving program. It may be to invite them to an event, something that is, you know, a donor engagement type of event, a tour, or something else like that. One other important one, and there’s lots of good information around this is to involve them in volunteerism. They made a gift. Now, having their hands on it and engaging in that way will help solidify their in their engagement on that process, progress updates on the work that’s being done. I donate to an organization that builds wells around the world that is not charity water, and they will send me periodic updates. Here’s how the well is going, and that’s really helpful in kind of seeing how that process occurs, feedback opportunities on the the the organization we’re doing some of these things we’re in you know, what? What is your feedback on the stories that we’re telling? What is the story? What is your feedback on the reports that we’re offering? What is your feedback on whatever it might be. Those opportunities are great to get the actual feedback, but don’t forget that the feedback opportunity is also just an opportunity for them to be heard. Advocacy opportunities, if this exists, for your organization, to write a letter to an elected official, to engage with some other kind of advocacy for your organization, that would be another opportunity to kind of have a touch point of milestone as well

for a lapse donor. Lapse donor reactivation rate is very, very low. So if someone has not given a gift in a couple of years or so, their re engagement with your organization is going to be industry standards about 10. Percent again, sort of broken record here. Why is that the case? Why are why are they not? Re engaging with your organization? So some touch, some warning signs for why someone would lapse, things like reduced giving frequency. If they are a giving multiple times a year, but not on a monthly basis. Is there giving velocity starting to decrease? That might be an indication. Are they decreasing their engagement with your organization in terms of event attendance or communication? Are they not clicking on as many emails? Are they not attending as many events? Are there any sort of communication changes. Those are things that might be good indications that there’s something that needs a pattern interrupt, that that’s something that I would be tracking and then pick up the phone, do something else for that would allow you to get in front of them, to engage them. When that occurs, you need some ideally, before it occurs, but even after it’s occurred and they have actually lapsed, you do need to think about what are those reactivation strategies? These are really around the key ones that have worked for me are personalization and accomplishment. We drafted what I call we miss you letters, and they were literally like, we miss you. And we called originally, when I worked in a performing arts center, we called them Norma letters because there was a person named Norma who stopped giving, and I wrote it to Norma. I said, Dear Norma, we miss you. Over the last seven years, you have had this impact inside of our organization. And we literally did an Excel spreadsheet for all the normas and said, of your lifetime giving, all the gifts that you gave, we divided it by the number of performances that Norma had enabled. This was the cost of the performance against her lifetime giving. And said, You have enabled 17 kids to be able to go to performances. Thank you so much for making that difference. But we see that you haven’t made a gift in a long time, and it was sort of like, Is it us? Is it you like, what? What is the thing that’s that’s keeping back? We’d love to welcome back. We’d love to to see if there’s anything that we can do to get you back. Um, giving and making this possible again, but if not, that’s okay. We understand creating these inflection points, these kind of moments that matter, like, is there something that can jump start that right now we have a matching gift opportunity. So if you come back, your $20 would make a another unlock another $20 in giving, or there’s a special something, something, whatever it is that you could do to create some sort of inflection point for this donor, to essentially incentivize them to come back. The thing that I don’t see a lot of organizations doing, which is really important, is if you have an onboarding process for a new donor, you need a welcome back process for a lapse donor, re engage them because they’ve been out for a while, so they don’t necessarily know everything that’s been going on with your organization since they’ve been out. So there’s a there’s that song, right? Like, since you’ve been gone, right? Like whatever that is for your organization, you want to make sure that you pull them back into the fold in a way that is like we’re going to make sure that you hear and see everything that you’ve been engaged with or that you haven’t been engaged with in that time. Don’t forget that all of these pieces require a resource allocation, for acquisition costs, for retention efforts, for reactivation campaigns. And that’s not just a budget side, like the cost side of it. It does require the time and the technology to put all of this together. It is absolutely worth doing, because, as we first talked about, if you put these pieces together, it’s enabling all of these systems and processes to work together to amplify your human effort, to amplify your human effort. So I’ll close and hand this off to to Kelly by saying that our goal here is that people want to give, and we want to enable them to make giving a habit. It is a habit. It’s something that people want to do. We just need to unlock that potential by sort of not getting in their way. By making it as easy and frictionless as possible. We have these data driven insights inside of our CRM that will drive actually smarter fundraising strategies if we are able to look at some of this very simple, straightforward math to be able to put this together. Some pieces of this can be automated. There’s a little bit of like functionality that can be automated to save time, so that you can do the real human part to stay in touch with your donors. And once you get this sustainable system. Running and people are working within the system, then those engaged donors can be ambassadors for your organization, using that to bring in even more donors, which creates that virtuous cycle that helps build acquisition for you. That acquisition is actually free. That acquisition enables you to get more donors without costing you money, and that, my friends, is the secret to continually scaling your organization. So now Kelly’s going to take over and show you how to do this piece. I’m going to answer some of these questions by typing them out, but Kelly, take it away.

Great. Well, thanks, Cherian. And I am thrilled to be here. And one of the things that I want to emphasize before we dive in is to kind of recognize that for some of us, this is perhaps how you’re feeling like this is all great, but it’s it’s all kind of jumbled, and I’m using DonorPerfect. But how do I do this? So how many of you can relate to this feeling of being tangled in your thoughts and trying to break it down? You don’t need to necessarily say yes or no, but it’s not really a fun feeling. And my goal in terms of where I’m going is to just kind of highlight how you can get some clarity and some maybe ideas about your constituents to help you stay connected to them, engage with them, and enable them to have meaningful relationships with you. So what I’m going to be doing is representing and being the voice of a group of people at DonorPerfect that came together to really kind of hear from you what you are needing with regard to donor journey. What do you call it? What is it called in the industry? So people like terian, you know, partnered with us and helped us understand this even more deeply. So how can DonorPerfect help? Well, DonorPerfect is going to provide that centralized donor data, pretty straightforward, one place for all donor interactions, it can provide some automated workflows to save you that time so that you are going to make sure that you have those like timely follow up and engagement touch points, segmentation and personalization. This is going to give you the ability to have targeted messaging for your different donor groups, because we all know one size does not fit all integrated communication tools. This is going to be things like email automation, events management and reporting, analytics and reporting, track retention, update your success, excuse me, and be able to measure like the RE engagement strategies, what’s working, what’s not working, and then ultimately, fundraising optimization is going to give you the ability to have a glimpse and identify giving trends and then make adjustments to your various fundraising efforts. So as I said, you might be feeling a bit tangled, and this is a big, big topic that sometimes you have to just pause and say, what’s really necessary? Where do I begin? So I, admittedly, I am a sticky note person. I have them right here, and it helps me break down very like precise thoughts, and gives me the moment to say, Okay, I know where I want to go, big picture, but how do I get there? What are those individual steps? So the good news in all of this is that small changes will make an exponential positive impact. So even if you just start doing one thing, using DonorPerfect, maybe differently or more efficiently, it’s going to have an exponential positive impact. So whether you’re focusing on new donors, your current donors, or your lapsed donors. So here’s a scenario that I want us to think about for just a mere 10 to 15 seconds, if you are spending, let’s just say, 20 minutes on data entry for a handful of constituents. So maybe that’s name entry assigning solicitors or portfolio managers or gift officers. Then you’re informing those people that they’ve just been assigned a new profile. You’re creating and tracking the gift records. You’re thanking the donors, you’re documenting the next steps, and so on and so on. But you could take that down to 10 or even five minutes. You could reduce it by automating some of the work through DonorPerfect. Would you consider it? I’m imagining that you would all say, of course, I would. What do I have to do? So I’m in essence suggesting that what we are going to kind of do a quick tour of is that you’re going to be able to give yourself more time to steward your donors in a more meaningful way. Alright, so what are we going to do? We’re going to kind of walk through the three donor journeys, and we’re going to start with brand new constituents. So we know that acquiring new donor. Is hard work and costly. We’ve just we’ve just spoke about it. We also know, and I saw coming in in the chat in the Q and A, that timing is everything. So imagine your board member gives you the name of some prospects. However they choose to do that, scraps of paper, business cards. It doesn’t really matter. It gets entered into DonorPerfect. Now we’re thinking about this a little bit differently. So instead of doing all the manual work, what if you could enter it and then let DonorPerfect take over to keep you informed. So for example, what if you could get an automatic alert or an email that lets you know, hey, you have a new constituent? And this could be done using tools like smart actions or scheduled reports, or what about if you have, like, a workflow, a strategy that you’re putting into place, where you want to put these people into some sort of a welcome email you’re educating them about your mission, about who you are. Well, you could use the email integration with constant contact. And what if you really wanted to not only know that that was happening, but you wanted to see the results right in the constituent record? Well, you can. And not only that, what we are suggesting is using what DonorPerfect offers as a solution is you’re able to now not just do that work, but then be able to identify these people that they’re in the new donor journeys like journey, as in the stage of identification, and you want to now move them to engagement. So we’re taking a big topic and breaking it down into small steps. So now let’s do a little bit of a fast tracking here. So fast tracking and webinars is always fun, because we wish this were true in real life, right? You talk about something two minutes and then two minutes later they’re a donor. It’s not that easy, but if we were to imagine that this new name became a donor, they gave their very first gift, we want DonorPerfect to update that and reflect that their stages. Now they’re in the contribution stage, but you also know that that 48 hour clock is ticking, you have to connect with them in some way. So you want to be informed check. We can do that, but DonorPerfect can not only help you be informed and thank them, but you can do it in such a way because it’s timely, that it’s personal, and it’s communicating that you care, that you appreciate them, and you can use the data that’s in DonorPerfect. Hey, we were talking about and cherry and mentioned the first 30 days. What does your first 30 day journey look like? Well, that might be that you want to send something along the lines of an email that’s targeted for first time donors only, or perhaps you want to make sure that they get added to a newsletter list. Maybe you want to have a report about who these people are that you can receive on a weekly basis. Just you can see what’s happening. Are they opening my emails? Are they not opening the emails? I see information that we have on them bad, because it’s bouncing with the data about these donors and these interactions and DonorPerfect, you’re removing guesswork and providing yourself the confidence that you can move forward to provide opportunities for these people to get involved and potentially give that second gift. So now let’s move on to the second journey. And this is our retained, upgraded journey. And this is an important group of constituents, or donors, your current donors, we, we would all agree on that they make up a large majority of your donors, hopefully, and they’re going to kind of sit here in this journey the longest now I say sit. We don’t want them to stagnate. We want some movement, and we want to keep them engaged. So what we want to do is we want to kind of think about that current donor retention rate, as Cherian mentioned, the industry average, is hovering right around 43%

and I believe the goal is going to be whatever yours is, to keep it where it’s at or build on it and make it better. So how can DonorPerfect help for you to see the movement of your donors along the various stages? So they might be an engagement, they might be in stewardship, maybe their upgrade, maybe they’ve moved to advocacy, whatever it is you want to be able to see that movement. So there’s a lot of options that you could be implementing in your fundraising strategies, but the bottom line is, you want to stay in touch with your community. You want to know and learn more about them, capture that information and DonorPerfect so you can have important information kind of be like alerting you when they give their second gift. Maybe what you will want is a report that’s going to show you, okay, here’s the amount of time from the first gift to their second gift. Can I improve it? Because as. Ryan was mentioning there’s data that supports we have these windows of time that works. Your organization may be performing better or worse, but it’s data that is in DonorPerfect that we can extract out and have it sent to you. You don’t have to keep digging repeat donors, sometimes referred to as monthly donors, but they’re really a very special group of people because they believe in what you’re doing. So perhaps again, a special communication to them, inviting them to be exclusive partners or part of an exclusive program or get a sneak peek to an upcoming event. It’s not going to cost you money to do these things, but they’re going to get that that care, that they want to continue to support, and then maybe become an upgraded donor, and then you can capture that, and then when they become an upgraded donor, they can become an advocate. So it’s all kind of building off of each other, but what’s what I’m hoping you’re realizing, utilizing some of the tools and DonorPerfect such as smart actions, scheduled reports, using the data in strategic ways is going to be able to give you the insights that you need, or create and share an impact story. I love a good story. I like to know as a donor, I like to know what’s happening at the organizations that I believe in, that I’m supporting, and it’s and I don’t want it to be just fluff. I want to know really what, what’s the need? How has it been used? And so, you know, this always gives me pause when I talk about stories, because I don’t know how many of you would consider yourselves a good writer. I’m not. But the good news, in addition to all of the tools and the movement and tracking of donor journey and donor journey stages, is we also have a fundraiser, but that you can use to assist in getting started, instead of staring at a blank screen for these different types of stories, I like to see progress towards a goal. I think everybody does. It makes you feel good again. As a donor, you that your gift is being used. It’s making a difference. But I think, as Cherian mentioned, why not take that a step further and keep like the in the dear normal letters? He was talking about laps. But I think this is also really good for retention and upgrade to say, Dear Kelly, did you know that your cumulative giving has had this type of impact? Here’s where we’re wanting to go. Share with them where you want to go. And I, I’m, I’m pretty confident that if I were one of your donors, and you sent us a communication to me that was personal. It spoke to me. It reflected my interest. I would want to be more involved. And yes, all of this can be done using DonorPerfect things like Calculated Fields, capturing information, some of the DonorPerfect fields where you might be using our donor interests, the flags, there’s all sorts of fields that are available for you to pull information from a constituent record into your different strategies, perhaps you want to include and record when people are invited and participating in events or volunteering, because all these things lead to and contribute to retaining donors and spreading the word. Because, as Cherian said, and I know he didn’t necessarily use the words in this particular session, but in the last session, your donor lift, you want your stone donors, your supporters, to become advocates. And that’s really important, because that’s, again, that’s not going to cost you anything, it’s just expanding that reach as I mentioned, upgrades. You know, we want to make sure that we draw out upgrades, because this is a reason to celebrate, right? An upgraded gift is a great opportunity to celebrate, to say thank you in different ways that might be done in a personalized email. Excuse me, a personal Well, could be personalized email, but I was thinking video is what I wanted to say. So it’s really critical that you don’t miss those opportunities. And much like I’ve been saying is, if you have the data in there, you know that they’ve just become an upgraded donor, you won’t miss those opportunities to celebrate. Okay, let’s move on to the third journey, and that is our lapsed donors. So there’s many reasons why a donor laps in their giving, but if you don’t know who they are, you don’t have a chance to course correct or re engage them, and I personally think being informed on a regular basis of those who have lapsed or are about to lapse is kind of like receiving a gift you weren’t expecting. You have the opportunity to qualify the reasons for lapsing and then create targeted fundraising efforts to learn more. This can be again, done in a variety of ways. Days it might be though we miss you. It might be the dear normal letters, but it could potentially be that you’re just offering special opport volunteer opportunities to re engage them, because they just simply may not be able to be able to financially give a gift, but they want to support you. Maybe there are times where people are lapsing because they stopped hearing from you, you didn’t realize it, or maybe there was something that you did that upset them, but you didn’t know. So perhaps you know some surveys, phone calls, and again, I’m giving suggestions that I don’t think are new to anybody, but if you don’t have the data and you’re not utilizing it, and you’re not informed, you can’t do anything with it, and that’s where DonorPerfect is really going to be able to help. So a couple of things to be mindful of, and I’m just looking at the clock here, and I want to make sure that I show a little bit of how this is going to work in DonorPerfect is personalizing the experience. And I’m not necessarily always saying thinking about personalizing it from the donor’s perspective, perspective, but I’m also encouraging you to kind of think about this is, know who your donors are, what motivates them? What interests do they have? What are their giving patterns? Are you capturing that in DonorPerfect or your CRM? Make sure that you take advantage of the ability to segment your list, group your donors based on shared attributes, the demographic, information, communication preferences. So I just saw a clip of somebody that’s at their nonprofit. They’re really trying to say that if a donor gives online, you respond by email. If they send a check, you send a letter like really understand what their communication preferences are, personalize the asks, use the donors, giving history and capacity, so that when you ask them for a gift, it’s going to be achievable, not a pie in the sky dream. As I mentioned, those custom thank yous. There’s a lot of free tools out there. We do have integrated solutions, but it’s a nice touch. It’s refreshing. Social proof. Let us let a donor know what others like them are doing. And I remember talking with Cherian exactly about this is make sure that whatever you’re doing and whatever you want them to do, it’s very clear, because otherwise they probably won’t do anything at all. There’s a lot of ways that we can measure your success, but I would encourage you to not only think about the individual steps, and there’s great suggestions in the eBook, but to make sure that you’re also going to be able to identify. How do you know when you are being successful or when you need to make adjustments? And there’s a lot of key metrics that are you know that you’re familiar with, such as donor retention rate, donor lifetime value, a conversion rate,

average gift size, and then a unique one, in the sense that it’s a custom calculation, but it can be done as a donor engagement score, where you can kind of take a composite score based on various engagement factors. How many times did they give? Are they volunteering? Are they attending an event? But it provides a holistic view of their involvement and their interest beyond contributions. So now, with all of that, let me just hop into DonorPerfect, and I just want to do a quick like walk through of what’s possible. So here you can see, I’m in DonorPerfect, and I’m looking at the organization dashboard. And one of the things that I think is really valuable and where DonorPerfect can shine is, not only is it the hub of your data, it’s it’s informing you, it can communicate with you. And I love when cherry and I were talking this week like, lean into the CRM. Don’t fight it. I don’t know if that’s his exact words, but that was his sentiment that he was trying to say, is really just trying to understand, what does your CRM or DonorPerfect do? So here’s one example, where I can quickly hop into DonorPerfect at any time. Look at a tile, and I can kind of see where are my donors at in the journey. And like many reporting options, I can drill down and take a peek at what’s happening. So here I can see I have three different of my of my new donor journey stages happening, and the one that kind of catches my eye is this one right here, the new donor contribution? Well, goodness, are they brand new donor? Did I not know that they were first time donors? What’s going on? And the beauty of this is I’m able to quickly get into the record. Take a bit of a review of their account. I can see what’s happening. And when I’m looking at kind of where they’re at in the process, I can say, whoa, wait. They gave a gift in January and there’s no recognition. There’s no record of a thank you. Well, the good news is, one of the things that can be scheduled is a report to say, hey, Kelly, you have donors that have given their very first gift and they haven’t been thanked you. Better go fix that. That’s that course correction where I can go in and rely on the data and the CRM to tell me. And so if I were to come in here and say, Okay, I want to take care of that right away, I can look and say, yep, there’s the gift. I’m going to fix this, and I’m going to send out a letter, because, based on their preferences, I’m going to send Anna a letter. So I’m going to quickly create this letter. And quickly, as always, you know, like a interesting word when you’re in a live demo, but here I’m quickly creating that letter. It’s going to stamp that it’s been thanked. But more importantly, what I should also be able to see now is that now they are in a different stage along the way, and so this is a way that we are able to demonstrate and implement donor journeys in DonorPerfect. As we kind of get closer and closer to the end of our time, I want to just kind of summarize some of the features or functionality in DonorPerfect that can be utilized to implement successful donor journeys are going to be truly just a CRM, putting the data in there and reporting as I highlighted, but also using things like the automation tools. We refer to that as Smart Actions, some of the automation, scheduling of reports, some of the calculated fields that can be both standard and custom using the integrations with donor, excuse me with Constant Contact, direct mail, appeals, event management forms, online giving. All of that’s going to come together and be captured in DonorPerfect so that you can be more informed in a more timely manner. So donor journeys really is a mindful map of key donor experiences. And I believe DonorPerfect can help you with this. And it’s really what I’m trying to convey is that this is a way, a space for you to mindfully map out common donor experiences. If you haven’t already downloaded the donor journey ebook, I would encourage you to do so, and I appreciate your time. I know that you are extremely busy, and you chose to spend it with us, so I hope that this has been helpful to kind of hear from Cherian, and then from myself, that this is a possible outcome. You can do this, and we are here to help. So thanks. And I think maybe we turn it back to Lori at this point and take it from my

Okay, I’m gonna leave this up for a second so people can scan that to download. But I do want to say thank you to Cherian and Kelly. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your insights. I think it has certainly given us a whole lot to think about. There were a lot of questions and a lot of comments. People were chiming in with what they do, and I was amazed at at everybody’s different way of thinking and how they do things, and then being able to share that with others was great. So thank you to those who also attended and helped out in the chat. Keep in mind, a recording of the webinar will be sent out in the next few days, and we look forward to seeing you in some of our future webinars. So I hope you all have a great rest of your day.