From Story to Support: How Marketing Powers Nonprofit Growth

Ready to enter your digital marketing era, but don’t have a 25th hour in the day to figure it all out. Let Constant Contact help you scale that mountain. Our digital marketing platform offers email, social media, SMS and more to help you score revenue, build relationships with your Read More

Ready to enter your digital marketing era, but don’t have a 25th hour in the day to figure it all out. Let Constant Contact help you scale that mountain. Our digital marketing platform offers email, social media, SMS and more to help you score revenue, build relationships with your audience and become a household name, get access to hundreds of plug and play email templates, complete with branding pulled directly from your website and AI writing assistance so you can get up and sending in no time, build your contact list with easy to navigate sign up forms, group your contacts by interests, actions and more, and connect Constant Contact to other tools you use most think Shopify, Canva, Wix and beyond, plus set up automated messages to say things like welcome, thank you and Happy Birthday at just the right times. But we’re much more than just a pretty well timed email. After all, no one spends all day just hanging out in their inbox. Reach your audience in their feeds with social posting on their phones, with SMS and even in person by marketing an event. Tie it all together with a multi channel marketing campaign completely customized to your business and made for you in minutes, not months. Then view your campaign reporting in one consolidated dashboard so you can make business decisions that make sense. If you want to kick it up a notch, tap into the ability to create and manage ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google, as well as tools that will lend a little TLC to your SEO. Running a business is hard marketing. It shouldn’t be. Turn your mountains back into molehills with constant contact straightforward suite of digital marketing tools you

you ready to enter your digital marketing era, but don’t have a 25th hour in the day to figure it all out. Let Constant Contact help you scale that mountain. Our digital marketing platform offers email, social media, SMS and more to help you score revenue, build relationships with your audience and become a household name. Get access to hundreds of plug and play email templates, complete with branding pulled directly from your website and AI writing assistance so you can get up and sending in no time. Build your contact list with easy to navigate, sign up forms, group your contacts by interests, actions and more, and connect Constant Contact to other tools you use most. Think Shopify, Canva, Wix and beyond, plus set up automated messages to say things like, welcome, thank you and Happy Birthday at just the right times, but we’re much more than just a pretty well timed email. After all, no one spends all day just hanging out in their inbox. Reach your audience in their feeds with social posting on their phones, with SMS and even in person by marketing an event. Tie it all together with a multi channel marketing campaign completely customized to your business and made for you in minutes, not months. Then view your campaign reporting in one consolidated dashboard so you can make business decisions that make sense. If you want to kick it up a notch, tap into the ability to create and manage ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google, as well as tools that will lend a little TLC to your SEO. Running a business is hard marketing. It shouldn’t be turn your mountains back into molehills with constant contacts straightforward suite of digital marketing tools you

to enter your digital marketing era, but don’t have a 25th hour in the day to figure it all out. Let Constant Contact help you scale that mountain. Our digital marketing platform offers email, social media, SMS and more to help you score revenue, build relationships with your audience and become a household name, get access to hundreds of plug and play email templates, complete with branding pulled directly from your website and AI writing assistance so you can get up and sending in no time, build your contact list with easy to navigate sign up forms, group your contacts by interests, actions and more, and connect Constant Contact to other tools you use most. Think Shopify, Canva, Wix and beyond, plus set up automated messages to say things like welcome, thank you and Happy Birthday at just the right times. But we’re much more than just a pretty well timed email. After all, no one spends all day just hanging out in their inbox, reach your audience in their feeds with social posting on their phones, with SMS and even in person by marketing an event. Tie it all together with a multi channel marketing campaign, completely customized to your business and made for you in minutes, not months. Then view your campaign reporting in one consolidated dashboard. You. So you can make business decisions that make sense. If you want to kick it up a notch, tap into the ability to create and manage ads on Facebook, Instagram and Google, as well as tools that will lend a little TLC to your SEO. Running a business is hard marketing. It shouldn’t be turn your mountains back into molehills with constant contacts straightforward suite of digital marketing tools.

Hello and welcome everybody. Hi. My name is Sean Potero. I’m a DonorPerfect Training Specialist. Today I’m being joined by Matt Montoya. Matt’s session from story to support, how marketing powers nonprofit growth before we get started, let me tell you a little bit about Matt. He has crisscrossed the country over the last 14 years to 47 states, helping in person over 14,000 small businesses and nonprofits better understand how digital marketing can affect growth and what utilizing best practices can mean to the bottom line. In his 23 years in marketing, he has worked on nearly every kind of marketing vehicle around, from print, broadcast, social web and, of course, email marketing. He’s seen and had a role in it all before we get started, just a couple quick housekeeping items. You can download today’s presentation from the details section to the right of the presenters window. Please submit your questions in the Q and A tab so that we can address them during the session, and all sessions are being recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. Welcome Matt. Take it away.

Well, thank you, Sean and hello everybody. Very excited to be in front of you again for view. Not have the opportunity to meet me, either in person or via one of the many conferences and webinars and all sorts of ways that I’ve been communicating to the DonorPerfect audience. Hello. I’m going to give a little bit more of an introduction to myself in a moment, but I want to talk about our title, from story to support, in particular storytelling. So thank you, Sean, for such a lovely introduction. You mentioned how many nonprofits that I’ve talked to, in case this is the first time we’ve met. I did work at a 501, 3c before my time at Constant Contact, and I suffered from when it came to marketing, something that I’ve seen a lot of nonprofits suffer from, something I’m going to talk about a little bit today, in addition, which is our marketing was typically all about us. It was very hard for us. And I know that sounds really strange in the nonprofit space. I mean, many of you have that heart string pulling effect on people and yet, and we did too, and yet, we consistently talked about our events and our initiatives and US and US and US, and we didn’t employ the idea of storytelling. Many of you, if not all of you, have the ability to leverage storytelling in your marketing, showcasing how gifts can actually affect your community or whatever, whatever it is that your mission is. And so while I feel a little funny talking about storytelling to an audience that probably gets it, I do want to encourage you to take a step back as you employ your marketing and think it could this be better done in a story? Nonprofits have found nonprofit source found that nonprofits that nonprofits that effectively use storytelling in their fundraising efforts have a donor retention rate of 45% compared to 27% now think about the delta between those two numbers, 45% versus 27% that is more impact for community, more people you can help, more ways that You can change the world, more ways you can more effectively do whatever your mandate requires. So that is going to be the core conceit of today’s presentation. Now I am going to have a demonstration where I can show you how easily you can employ some of these ideas within Constant Contact and you might say, well, that’s great. I would have to go then get a constant contact account. You have a constant contact account. I’m going to say that gonna say that again, you have a constant contact account. Now some of you are going, duh, that’s why I’m here to watch you, Matt. But many of you may not be aware that you get a constant contact account with a DonorPerfect account, and so I’ll be talking about that towards the end. So my name is Matthew Montoya. My ridiculous title just means that I teach Constant Contact for a living, and have done so as Sean said for 14 years, and it is my absolute pleasure to be with you today. So here is our agenda. We’ll be talking about just the idea of digital engagement, what you can send to your audience, the power of storytelling, that’s our core conceit, and the importance of segmentation as it relates to storytelling. And then, as I said, I’m going to do a brief demonstration showing you how you can employ what I teach you. Today. So let’s start off with an introduction to digital engagement. So as of and this is hot off the presses. In fact, if you go get a copy of the deck, as Sean suggested at the top of the presentation, I actually updated this overnight. We had a 2023 stat, and I was like, You know what? I need to bring some heat for this audience and give them a new statistic. So this is hot off the presses. As of early this year, the current number of smartphone users in the world is 7.2 1 million or billion. I’m sorry, meaning over 90% of the world’s population owns a smartphone, and that’s going to be really important, because what do people look at their smartphone? Well, of course, they’re looking at videos and whatnot. I’m not really talking about the apps, per se, they’re using, but when it comes to marketing for nonprofits, smartphones are likely going to be where they are engaging with social media, where they’re engaging with email and, of course, engaging with text messages. And so we want to make sure that we are where our donors, our volunteers, our stakeholders are, and it’s important to have an omni channel marketing perspective of being in as many places as your supporters, your volunteers, etc, are, and most likely they’re going to be accessing those and of course, yes, SMS, you’re going to have to use a smartphone. They’re going to be on their mobile device. So our ideal goal as a nonprofit is to send the right message to the right people at the right time in the right channels. As I said, I’m not here as a commercial per se of constant contact. You already have a constant contact account. I’m not trying to sell you something. But if we’re going to drive action, Constant Contact is a remarkably effective way to do that, through your the fantastic integration with DonorPerfect. So let’s start off with to me, the simple one, email marketing. Forgive me roll your eyes, if you will. If you’ve heard me tell this story before, again, I have been in front of DonorPerfect audiences for over 10 years now. When I first got my job at Constant Contact, I was really thrilled I had, I will call it like it is, nonprofits are I’ve never loved a job more than my nonprofit. I’ve never worked harder for less, and so I was happy to make an income as much as I love my nonprofit that I worked with. But when I first got my job at constant contact. I was really excited, because this was software, and it was exciting field, and I was really excited about the role I got. And I had some friends go, Oh, that’s great, Matt, keep your resume up to date, because email marketing is dying. It’s not. In fact, email marketing is bigger than ever. And before you push back and go, well, we don’t market on email we don’t do email marketing. If you’re soliciting for donations, your email marketing if you’re soliciting for a vineton that’s using email marketing. So if you think about what’s on your in your inbox right now, there are large organizations, nonprofit and for profit, that are sending you email email marketing is remarkably effective, and we’re going to break some of these stats down for you. One, it’s a great way to take stay top of mind. Just because somebody donated to you once over the last year or the last couple of years, just because they volunteered for you once, just because they’ve interacted with you once, doesn’t mean they’re thinking about you all the time. I know you’re thinking about you all the time, but they’re not, and so it’s really important to stay top of mind. Now, many nonprofits that I talk to, they they’ll get their email marketing out whenever Giving Tuesday rolls around, or there’s an annual gala or whatever it is, but then they kind of go quiet. No, you need to stay top of mind with your subscribers when it comes to email marketing, because they may not be able to donate right now. They may not be able to take action on Giving Tuesday. They may not be ready to do something the moment you need them to do so you need to stay top of mind with them, so that when the moment occurs that they do have the ability to do something with you. Do something for you. They’re there. You’re there. Also helps you build credibility, so you can continuously tell people stories and other kinds of content that will establish you as a valuable member of your community, 61% of consumers enjoy receiving promotional emails. A lot of people go, Oh, I don’t want to bother people. You’re not bothering them. And I’m gonna explain to you the idea of why people get bothered with emails and why they don’t but I’ll give you a hint. It’s around segmentation. For every dollar spent in email marketing, there’s a $36 return. That’s why email marketing is so effective and why it’s still here. Now, as a reminder, you’re not spending anything on email marketing. It’s included with DonorPerfect, so you’re getting a great return on your investment. Email marketing is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and X alone. Now Constant Contact loves social media. We have social media functionality built into us, in fact, that is included with your constant contact account. Contact account, the ability to do Facebook marketing, Instagram marketing and LinkedIn marketing for no extra cost in your account. But the challenge when it comes to social media is that there are algorithms in your way. Just because you post something on social media doesn’t mean they’re necessarily going to see it, unless you pay to get your ad placed. Email. Marketing is really effective because people gave you their contact information. They gave you their email address, they want to hear from you. All the more reason to use it as a way to stay top of mind because they took that positive action of giving you contact information. But it’s also really effective because they rose their hand, they want to hear from you. And lastly, 91% of people check their emails daily, and 88% check them on a smartphone. If you think about your own behavior, you probably got up this morning, brushed your teeth, wandered out into the kitchen, pulled out your phone, right? Everybody, nearly everybody, does that. And if you think about the app that you probably access the most on your phone, maybe your email app, that’s because that’s because that’s where you’re getting information from friends and family and news, etc. That’s where you’re communicating with work colleagues, etc. Well, guess who else is looking at their email app on their phone? Your stakeholders, your donors, your volunteers. So want to make sure we’re using an effective channel like email marketing. Now next up, let’s talk about what to send to your subscribers. Firstly, let’s talk about having a strategy in the first place. I have met many nonprofits who just, and I’ll say this lovingly, struggle to get an email out the door. It’s very important to have a overall strategy. So I always encourage nonprofits. You know, here we are in the middle of the year, you should definitely be starting to talk about your Giving Tuesday strategy, if that’s something you do now, and you want to have a strategy that fits to your goal. So the example I always use is, if I were to go visit my new friend Sean up in Philadelphia, how would I know I’m live in Florida? How would I know I accomplished that goal

by shaking Sean’s hand, right? You can’t gage the success of something without having a goal in mind, and so sitting down and kind of working backwards is like our goal is to do XYZ. How are we going to accomplish the goal? What are going to be the touchstones, the moments that we need to employ? So that’s email, that’s text marketing, that’s social media marketing, that’s print marketing. What are we going to do to get people to the goal? And you need to set a goal of like, to raise x number of dollars to have this many more people at our conference, whatever it is you need to have a goal that you can actually track. You also need to have a goal in terms of your individual marketing success, meaning our goal is also to see a lift of 10% more people clicking on our link this in this campaign, or get this many poor people to like our social media content or comment on our social media content. Now, when it comes to your overall marketing strategy, try to make it as personal as possible. And that is also something I’m going to lean into, especially in my demonstration today. The more personalized you can make the experience social media, text marketing and email, the more likely people are going to pay attention. The reason for that, quite frankly, that we are a species that tends to be a little loving. When we see our names or other kinds of content, things related to us. In content, we pay a little more attention to it. The last bullet is something I I’m going to struggle with a little bit because so many nonprofits I’ve met, they worry about over sending, sending too many emails, too many texts, too many social posts. How much is too much? You do want to be mindful of not going overboard, not sending too much, but you do need to send regularly, email, text messages regularly. The reason for that is one to be effective at staying top of mind. Not everybody’s going to open every email, not everyone’s going to see every social media post, not everybody’s going to deep dive into a text message. So you do need to be in front of people regularly, but you also need to be conscious of the fact that the email, the text message, the social media posts that they read, it may not be perfect fit for them at that moment. So we want to make sure we’re staying regularly in touch with people, so that when the moments right, we’re ready, but you don’t want to go overboard. You don’t want to constantly. In fact, I heard an example of this today from one of the Constant Contact team of how they coach somebody, please don’t text message people every single day. Nobody’s going to care about your nonprofit that much to get a text message from you every single day. So be mindful of not going overboard. The other piece I want to talk about in terms of being mindful of being overboard is when it comes to email marketing. Gone are the days where you can have an email that you open and you scroll and you scroll and you scroll and you scroll and you scroll and you scroll and you scroll. And I still see nonprofits do this, of having overly complex, overly heavy emails. The average attention span for an email these days is only nine seconds. So if you have an email that’s talking about 15 different things, you have 15 different articles with 10 different links. You definitely want to think through segmentation. Again, we’re going to talk about that a little bit more in a moment. So how can you leverage email marketing? Well, of course, you can build and nurture those relationships that I talked about before staying top of mind. Obviously, I think the go to most of you would do is to raise awareness and educate people. Another common thing in the nonprofit space would be to promote events and get more fundraising. But it’s the last bullet I really want you to zero in on. That is the one I see. Nonprofits have the biggest challenge with one is they haven’t done any goal setting in terms of their marketing campaign. So if my goal is to not only get more tickets sold, not only get more donations, whatever it is you’re trying to do, but also see a lift in my opens, meaning, how many people open my email, my clicks? How many people clicked on links in my email? Well, if you’re not paying attention to the metrics, how do you know that you’ve met your goal? So many nonprofits will send out marketing without actually taking time to look at the results. And there is magic in the results. The ultimate reason to use a tool like Constant Contact to do email marketing is constant contact tells you who clicked on what meaning you now know that this person is interested in this event or that initiative or this campaign, and that is power. But how do we get them to pay attention to our email, to actually click on a link? Ultimately, you want people clicking on links because that tells you their interest. Well, any email needs to have these three essential elements. Now, many of you just naturally would do this, but I want you to zero in on the email on the right, because it’s very, very simple and it’s very, very targeted. There is no more scrolling after the bottom of that email. There’s not another article and another article and another article. This is the entire article. People need to know immediately. What are you trying to accomplish? Well, what is this email trying to accomplish? A donation drive that is crystal clear. Why should the reader care? Well, it’s giving a little bit of information of how this donation drive is going to help the community and what they’re looking for. And then what should I do next? Now that’s a call to action at the bottom saying, Please drop off items to 123, Main Street. But what is this email missing? Anything I can click on now I can click on that video, and I can gage a little bit more about what people might be that might be interested in this content. But if I had added a button, perhaps a donate button, at the bottom of the email, then I would have a remarkably effective email, because I’m giving people a way to accomplish something beyond just bringing items to donate. That is this is a powerful email structure, though, what are you trying to accomplish? Why should they care? And how do they do it, to get a little bit more effect out of your email marketing, and this is really going to be true for social media marketing, to try to share impactful stories. So many nonprofits I see will say, please donate. Please donate. Please donate $10 please donate $25 your annual gift, your recurring gift, it’s better to show how the gift can actually impact the community. Your $10 gift will do X, your $25 gift will do Y, your annual or repeating gift will do the z, and then turn those into story elements. So how does that impact your volunteers or your staff, or how does your volunteers and staff impact the community? If you can use video testimonials. Video is a really powerful tool, especially in email marketing, because, well, people have nine nine second attention spans, and picture tells 1000 words, an image tells 1000 pictures. And so you remarkable, a remarkably effective way to communicate to people. Instead of just telling people who attend the event, talk about what happened at the event, share video testimonials from the event, share video captures from the event, just always get people’s permission. Obviously, connect it all back to your mission. So your gift, your attendance, whatever it was that you did, how did it affect your overall mission? Your by attending the event, we were able to do X, how can the reader get further involved? And lastly, decide how you’re going to share your stories. So with that, let’s talk about storytelling. So firstly, why storytelling matters? Well, human beings are designed to connect to stories, and it’s something we can’t turn off. It is inherent piece of our biology, and what we’re always looking for is that compelling story threat, right? I could tell somebody you know, please donate, but instead I can tell them about how that donation is going to impact a person, or did impact a person. So it helps you build that emotional connection. Now this should be standard function for a nonprofit. Most of you probably have some piece of heart string pulling natural story, continuously tell that story. It also helps simplify complex ideas. So instead of going into some sort of wonky description of what your organization does. It simplifies a story because there is a person, there’s a challenge and there is a resolution. Person, a challenge and a resolution that is a core of a story, and it inspires people to take action. Why? Because they see a real person in the story. They see how it connects to them, see feel us. Sees how they connects to their lives and to their their needs. Ultimately, it humanizes your mission. All sales of all I know all of you are going to be throwing things to the computer. Well, we don’t sell. Yeah, you do a donation is selling. It’s a different motion, but it’s selling. All selling, I’m sorry, all buying is emotional. And so the more you can humanize your mission. And again, I. Know many of you have a very human story to tell. The more you humanize your organization, the more impactful you’re going to have a relationship with your subscribers and your and your followers on social media, it helps you amplify your reach. Because stories are easy to easy to share. I may not necessarily, and I’m just going to throw this out as an example. I might get an appeal email. Please don’t give us $25 I would share that with my wife, right? But if I saw a great story and it made me think about my aunt or my grandfather, somebody that’s passed, or how something has affected my life or her life, I might share that with her. She might share that with somebody, and somebody else might share that with somebody. So story is remarkably great way for you to spread and grow your mission, and it also helps you build trust, because people, again, see reality in your story. Do your best to focus on real people, not statistics. Use visuals with permission as much as you can, to move your narration forward. Always end with a call to action. Here’s a story, here’s how you can participate in a similar story, and do your best to align your marketing to your audience. Do your best to align your marketing to your audience. So what we’re talking about now is the secret sauce of successful digital marketing, which is segmentation. No one is the same. We all know that, right? Every person lives somewhere else, every person looks a little different. Every person has different interests, different

income levels, different educational experiences, different personal experiences, everyone’s different Gone are the days where you can market to everyone with the same thing in the same way. Savvy marketers, nonprofits included, savvy marketers, take a large group of people and break it up into smaller segments. The benefits to that is increased bottom line, revenue, right. Bottom line, donations, bottom line, attendees. Bottom line, you’re going to see an increase in behavior when you use email and you segment your large email marketing list into smaller, finite lists. You can expect higher uh transactional rates, 6% higher transactional rates. And when you don’t personalize your your marketing by tailoring the message to a particular group of people, you’re going to see an increased donation account or increased attendance or increased volunteers. Through proper segmenting, you can see a three time higher revenue per email you send out that number three times higher just by thinking through the idea of cutting a list into a smaller, finite group, you can see an increase in revenue. And when emails are not personalized, 52% are going to ignore you. You know, time after time, I’ve been asked Matt, I’m so worried about people unsubscribing, they’re not going to hear from me. Oh, whoa. How do I stop unsubscribes? Well, I could do a whole session on Actually, why unsubscribes is not necessarily a bad thing, but the bigger fear you should have is people ignoring your email marketing, not seeing your social media marketing. And when people do that, what happens is that they’ve gotten content that is irrelevant to them, that doesn’t speak to them. It doesn’t help them, it doesn’t there’s no storytelling to it, and they close the email. They get another email. It’s not for them. They close it. Pretty soon, those emails and those those social media posts become white noise or hidden by algorithms and social media, they don’t see it anymore. I guarantee you in your inbox right now are emails from organizations you care about that you’ve done something with, that you just don’t see anymore. And even worse, on social media, the less you interact with that organization you care about. Social media, just hide those posts from you. You won’t see them at all. And so it’s really, really important to think through the idea of segmenting your contact list, taking that large list and breaking it up into smaller groups and sending targeted information to that smaller group. And the same would be true for social media. Segmentation is simply taking the very large lists you might have in DonorPerfect and using DonorPerfect, great segmentation tools to push into Constant Contact, because there is an integration between DonorPerfect and Constant Contact, where your contacts will flow directly into Constant Contact, and then using Constant Contact tools, which I’m going to show you in a moment breaking those lists down even further. So how do we determine a segmentation strategy? Again, think through your ultimate goal like you’re setting your goal. Well, we want to see more of this group, or a higher percentage rate of this, or a higher percentage rate of that that’s going to fit into your segmentation. Continue to make it feel personal. Now you can take the idea of taking that finite list and make it even more personalized, as I’ll show you in my demonstration, and don’t again, go overboard. Don’t try to fit too much into in a particular email or particular social media posts, and understand your support or life cycle. So you don’t want to continuously hit up somebody that just donated to you, right? Who just volunteered for you? Be mindful of the actions people take. Constant Contact can make that easier. What are some ways that you can segment? Well, you can segment by geographic data. So for some of you, that might be important based on your mission, breakdown by demographic. Again, this is not one size fits all. For all of you, it’s going to be based on your nonprofit mission. So. Or their behavior. And behavior is my favorite one, because behavior, when people take action in your emails, again, they’re speaking to you. They’re talking to you. They’re telling you what they’re interested or what they’re not interested in. That’s my favorite kind of segmentation. Because then, if somebody is regularly opening my emails, regularly clicking links in my emails, what’s that tell me about them that is a much more highly engaged supporter than somebody that’s not so I might do something different with that group than people that are not paying attention to my marketing, the people that are not paying attention to my marketing, I’m going to try a different strategy. I’m going to use a different kind of model, because I need to get them woken up. I need to get them to pay attention to my marketing for nonprofits. The easiest one is, on, off, right? Don’t talk to your donors the same way you would talk to your non donors. The same thing would be another example of that would be in a for profit world, you would not want to talk to prospects the same way you would talk to customers. Why would I talk to a prospect with the same voice using the same methodology that I would for a customer that’s going to turn people off, that’s clearly not relevant. Well, the same thing in donors. Feed non donors based on their levels of contribution, right? So you may have different kinds of assets in your marketing based on the kind of interaction that they’ve had with you. Are they volunteers? Well, segment the volunteers out, give them a unique experience in speaking directly to them so they’ll be more engaged with you, and then again, with board members, you’d probably want to have a separate segment for that. Now I’m not suggesting that these four segments are the right segments for you, or the only segments for you. Using the model that I just showed you a moment ago around geographic and behavioral data, you could take these four and then break them down even further into smaller groups. Now Constant Contact, as I said, the real power of using an email marketing solution like Constant Contact is we tell you who opened the email, who clicked on links in the email, when they clicked on links in the email, and what links they clicked on. So it’s important that if you’re using Constant Contact, and again, in my opinion, you should be, because it’s included with DonorPerfect, then make sure that you’re paying attention to that data in reporting like you see here. Another thing you can do is, as you’re soliciting for people to give you their contact information, be sure to be mindful of asking questions of them that might help you. You might help you with segmentation. So if you are a geographic based nonprofit, you might want to know what zip code they live in. You might want to know what area, town they are in. If knowing people’s income level is important to your your your mission, you might want to ask that information their gender. You might want to ask that information Constant Contact is only as good as the data that you supply Constant Contact. Now, while there’s fantastic integration from DonorPerfect into Constant Contact, the tools I’m going to show you in my demonstration are only this somewhat as good as what comes into Constant Contact. Constant Contact cannot tell you where somebody lives. Constant Contact cannot tell you somebody’s gender. You would have to supply that information. So you want to make sure that you’re gathering that information whenever you can. I am going to show you how in constant contact you can actually have a feature where, when somebody clicks on a link, Constant Contact can book them into a unique list for you automatically also personalize your content. So you can actually have your content say somebody’s name, say their gender, say their interests, whatever it is you’ve collected. You can actually have the content change based on who that subscriber is, what their interests are, where they live, whatever is going to be important to your nonprofit. You can have the content change. I want you to think of this as like a mail merge, where the text can actually change based on the person that receives it. My very favorite feature, definitely one of the four I’m going to demonstrate to you, is our segmentation functionality. So I just mentioned we have the ability for people, for you, to use a functioning Constant Contact to make a link. When somebody clicks on a link in your email, we can copy that contact information into a new list, but we have functions that specifically can create segments for you. So you tell Constant Contact, who is it you’re looking for? You know, do they live in this area, town? Did they make a donation of that amount? Have they not donated? Have they taken action? Have they not taken action? And constant contact will go find them for you within your database. And this is an evolving living list. So as contacts are flowing in from DonorPerfect, they’re added to the segments so they no longer meet the criteria. They’ve changed zip codes, they’ve changed their interest. They’re moved out of the segments, and you can send to these segments, meaning you can send an email to the most highly qualified list possible. Have that email personalized to your audience, and do it really, really fast, because one thing I’m going to talk about in my demonstration is how Constant Contact has made everything that was easy even easier thanks to artificial intelligence, as you see here, as an example, we can create dynamic segments based on people. So we can set up I want to find people that are living in this zip code, that have made a donation of this amount, and are female Constant Contact. Will find those contacts for you. But with that, let me go into a demonstration. Give me one moment. Somebody is doing laundry, and the laundry is in balance and it’s making a racket. So I’m sure. You can’t hear it yet, but I’m having my kids run in and help All right, so let me hop into constant contact and demonstrate just a handful of functions related to what I talked about before. Now, I would encourage you to watch the many different videos and webinar recordings and even conferences where I’ve presented all sorts of different content. I just did one back in April that talked a lot about a I’m gonna show you a little bit of artificial intelligence, but I’m gonna actually show all of you something brand new. So in a moment, I’m gonna show you a function that no one has seen. This was just launched, so you’re getting something hot off the presses. Tell you a little bit more about that in a second. Let me first talk about generating that heart string, pooling storytelling content. Now I could come in here and I could type out that story, but I’m a busy nonprofit. I have a small staff. I’m pressed on time. Let’s have artificial intelligence help me. So if you’ve used artificial intelligence same idea as any other, AI, you feed it a couple of keywords, what you’re trying to do, and it completes the goal. If you haven’t used AI yet, don’t be afraid of it. It’s really, really so helpful, especially when it comes to marketing. So I’m going to have it write up a little bit of content about my my guinea pigs, and I’m going to say, you know, using a storytelling technique now I’m feeding the AI quite a bit of information. You don’t have to put it this, this much information. I’m gonna make this enthusiastic and create it does take a couple seconds.

Just like that, wrote me content, and you can use this in every part of your email, Constant Contact AI will write your social media posts, write your text messages and write your emails for you. Let’s do something actually kind of interesting. Let’s try this. My wife, her father, is Polish so she’s a Polish American, and in his honor, I yeah, let’s have aI write it bullish. Look at that now cons context. AI will support any language. I can have it. I’ve done it in Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, French Canadian. I can even get that distilled, pretty handy if your organization operates in different countries with different languages. All right. Next I want to highlight here for you is personalization. So right now I have this set to show Hello, first name, so it would say hello, Sean, if I send it to Sean. So I’m going to add this back in by hitting insert and a greeting tag, hello, first name. I can say hello, first name, last name. I can change the hello to ahoy. I could change the combo if I wanted. Now what will happen is, if I send this email to Sean and I got his first name, it would say hello, Sean. If I send it to Larry and I only got his email address, what that would occur is that the default will show so it’ll just say greetings, so you don’t have those awkward breaks and weird little spaces where you’re missing data. You can always have it say something relevant. So if you did get the information from people, it’ll show and if you didn’t, you can have it say something else. We can see this come to life when I preview this. There is, this is just a test. There is no contact here for it to show to. So let me put in an email address. I’ll just put it by and you can see how it got personalized. So as contacts flow in from DonorPerfect, if you have their first name, their last name, it’ll show here. If you don’t, let’s say greetings in the example I just showed you, but I can make any content dynamic. So let me go to contact details so we support any unique data about your nonprofit, as long as it’s coming in from DonorPerfect, we accept anything you have. So I have you know, are they a donor, registered student. This is all unique to my nonprofit. And then we have common fields like first name, city, state, sip, so you can have the entire content changed to be reflective of the person you’re sending it to. So that’s pillar number one, right? If we’re doing storytelling, that’s great. We’re using AI to help us do storytelling, that’s great. But I also talked about the importance of personalizing your content to further encourage people to take action. Now we’re going to talk about segmentation in just a moment, but I feel the need to show you that new feature that’s hot off the presses. Now, once you finish today’s conference, once you’re done with the conference overall, don’t go running to your constant contact account looking for this. We’re rolling it out right now so some of you will have this. Some of you will soon have this. We anticipate this being out by the middle of June for every constant contact customer. So I’m gonna switch this back to English just so I’m assuming many of you don’t speak Polish. Switch back to. English. Wouldn’t it be nice not to just send an email, but also send a text message about this, also send a social media message. I’m going to add to this campaign, and I’m going to feed it that same information about my guinea pig campaign, and I’m going to hit create. I’m yeah, there’s always a little bit of awkwardness when I have AI, when we wait. I have oodles of social media posts now, of course, I’m promoting national guinea pig day, and I have a picture of a dog and a cat. You can swap out any of the photos. You can change the text up to be a little bit more tight to your nonprofit. Wow, I just produced that for me. Look here a series of text messages, a series of different emails with my brand already in place. So if I want to add, let’s say, a social media post to this campaign, instead of just sending an email, I’m sending a campaign because I want to be in as many places as my supporters or my potential supporters would be, make sure I’m motivating people as much as I can across different channels. So now I’m produced an email, and I’ve produced a social post, and I can continue to add more and more to the campaign, and when I’m ready, I can hit, continue, oh, I got to choose a social channel.

Hit Continue, and it’s going to pull open my calendar where I can then elect to have this social post go on this date and that email go on that date. Now I’d encourage you to watch the recording the webinar that I did back in April. We also have a very similar but also somewhat different campaign builder, where you can tell Constant Contact the goal, and it will build you multiple social posts, multiple emails and multiple emails tied to one goal. But if your organization is one to do a bi monthly email blast and a couple social media posts, this might help you streamline it and have it simplify your life, because I’m not having to log into this tool and that tool in the other tool and write this social post might be a little different than this email. Constant Contact will do all of that for you in seconds. So if you are the nonprofit that’s pressed for time, not fully staffed, whatever the case may be, you feel like, oh, all this technology, I just don’t have time for it. Constant Contact, again, included in DonorPerfect. Can help you get the message out, motivate more people to take action really, really easily. So I’m gonna come back to this email, and honestly, we’ll pretend I’m schedule it for later. Now, I could send to a list, and that’s what many of you probably would instinctively do, but I can send to a segment. Remember, I described it before, segments taking a big list, cutting up into smaller groups, so that I send a more targeted message to them. And this is email, just to be clear. I was talking about social media a second ago, but it’s dynamic. It’s a living list, so I would choose whatever segment I want to send to and then schedule it out. But let me show you under the hood of how segments work. Now, the first way segments can work for you, let me go back to edit this email, is I can turn any link in an email to be dynamic, so that it pushes people to a segment. So here I have my donation link, and if I edit it, I have the ability to turn this click segmentation on. So when somebody clicks this link, of course, they’ll go to my page where they can donate to me, but I can also put them into a different list so I can track them. Now, for your donation, doesn’t really make sense, but if you have a particular kind of content like this, and I link this, and I link it to my cat page, in this example, it would be smart for me to enable this click segmentation and have people go into cats list like so that when I send out information about cat health and cat adoption or whatever it is, in this particular model, I’ve already segmented them, right? I don’t really necessarily want to send an email to cat lovers about dogs or birds or guinea pigs. I know they’re interested in cats, so let me send them information about cats. Well, that’s what this tool does. It takes people that are interested in something and puts them into a list that’s related to what they’re interested in. But let’s take that idea and take it up a step further. So I’m going to go into Contacts, and I’m going to go into lists and segments, and I get two options. I can create a list, but I’m going to create a segment.

So the way segmentations works is you tell Constant Contact a set of criteria. They look like this. They live over there. They’re interested. That’s criteria, right? And you can stack criteria on top of each other. So here’s how I would do it. First, you start with, Okay, what’s the primary criteria? Well, let’s say that I want to find people that I have marked as a donor, or is not a donor. We say donor. So I’ve marked them as donor the donor field is positive they have donated. Now let’s add a criteria. Let’s say I want to find people that

is in my friend Sean’s state of Pennsylvania. Now let’s add another piece of criteria. Let’s say that they have not clicked any email in the last two months. I’ve sent out two months of emails, and they did not click on any link. Now, as you can guess, I can continue to add criteria to further refine my list, but I’ll stop at these three. And if I save this, and I’m guarantee there’s nobody in this account that lives up to this list, but what I would get is a list of people that meet that criteria. And this is where the marriage between DonorPerfect and Constant Contact goes from great to awesome, because as data contact data is flowing in from DonorPerfect, you use the segmentation functionality already available for you in DonorPerfect, you can further refine it, especially around behavior, to get that perfect target audience. So right here, I have 18 people in this cleverly named test list. This is a living list. So as people meet the criteria they’re added to the list, do they no longer meet the criteria they leave the list, as I showed you, when I’m scheduling an email, I have the ability to choose to send to a segment rather than a list, meaning I am sending up to the second the most, the perfect email that’s got all that personalization in it to the most perfect audience possible. And there’s additional functionality that I would encourage you to watch videos or other kinds of content that I’ve been in where I talk about how you can even automate those follow ups. So as somebody comes in from DonorPerfect, they hit the segment, and then they can automatically receive emails and or texts from you, and it’s perfectly targeted to them. So with that, before I bring Sean up for questions, I want to double down on something I have said a couple times, but actually give you a little bit more information. Constant Contact and DonorPerfect are like peanut butter and jelly. We’re great individually, but we are really, really awesome together, and each Donor Perfect bundle comes with constant contact. Each DonorPerfect bundle comes with constant contact. Now, if you’re not utilizing Constant Contact, and you know, perhaps you’re using another tool, why are you paying for that other tool? Additionally, as I showed you, Constant Contact, Constant Contact comes with social media marketing. If you’re marketing your social media and another tool that might not make sense for you, Constant Contact does come with SMS marketing. Now, SMS marketing there can be dependent on the plan you’re in some variances on whether that costs a little bit more, but if you’re paying for another tool that doesn’t communicate doesn’t allow you to do automation or segmentation, it might not make sense to not use Constant Contact. If you’re using DonorPerfect Plus or pro, you get advantage of the AI tools that I showcase before. So doing all that content generation, the cool ability to create those multi channel campaigns with a push of a button to get started, it’s really, really easy. Just reach out to your DonorPerfect support rep for help. You know, I one thing I love about whenever I’m with my friends at DonorPerfect at conferences or at a DonorPerfect conference, is how many DonorPerfect Customers love DonorPerfect reps and the DonorPerfect support team. So you’re going to start with those friends and and on the question we often get so again, Sean, about a 10 second warning here before I bring Sean on for questions, one question I know he inevitably will get is, hey, I have a current constant contact account. Can I have it be part of the bundle? Do I have to continue to pay for this individual Constant Contact account? I didn’t know this news. Yeah, call DonorPerfect. They’ll help you take that existing account. You will not lose your data. You’ll have all of your reports. You will not lose your campaigns. It’s literally going to be your account now, within the dotaperfect bundle. So Sean, what questions do we have? My friend,

a very informative session. We have a lot of good questions in the chat. I’m going to get to these in no particular order, starting off with one from summer, a what is the best way to capture email addresses and build an email database fast? If you have any advice for that, their nonprofit has never tracked or captured email addresses from their donors, and I’m now starting from scratch. Patch and want to know how to build up from nothing with emails.

All right, so there’s going to be and you’ll learn this from me, Sean, and everybody watching, I tend to do long walks on my answers. So there’s a couple first. Let me talk about high level strategy. Do your best to never ask for people’s email address? What don’t make people giving you your email address the thing you’re asking for, like, if you have a widget on your website, if you have something on social media, whatever the case, may be saying, join our mailing list. No one wants to join a mailing list. No one wants to join a mailing list instead, suggest how people giving you the email address is going to impact your community. By sharing your email address, you’re going to help us affect 10 million blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? If you have the ability to when you’re requesting for people to give you their contact information, reward them. I don’t mean a financial reward. I mean, give them something useful that could be thought leadership, that could be a video, that could just be a video. Thank a video. Thank you from your executive director. Give them something even better, dependent on your nonprofit’s mission. Give them something like a checklist or a guide, something that they can actually take action with that’s called a lead magnet, giving people something of value when they give you their contact information. Second tip, Constant Contact has about seven different tools within it to help you grow your list, both for your website and beyond. So things like social media, things like events where you want to collect people’s contact information, people have the ability to scan a QR code and join your mailing list. So make sure you, if you are a constant contact user, person that asks that question, make sure you look into the list growth tools within Constant Contact but I’m gonna throw a pivot here at you, Sean, and talk about what they could do in DonorPerfect and efforts to help them grow their contact database.

So we do have online solutions for for sign ups, and we also include the ability to add that type of interest to any of the donation pages. So when people are going online donating, you know, are you interested in this newsletter, getting some type of information that they are interested before signing them up. Of course, within DonorPerfect, the database too, there’s 1000s of data points about all these people, very similar to the segmenting, where you can create these dynamic lists that flow over every single night. But I think enthusia, enthusiastic permission, is always a good way to go.

Last thing I’ll say to the person asked the question is, be sure you’re asking for people’s contact information everywhere all the time. Do live events? Well, a live event, if you think about it, if people register, they’re giving you the contact information, right? So be thinking that through you’re at a sister nonprofits event, well, collect contact information in that you’re at an exhibit show or something, that you’re doing something in a media day. Collect contact information. Make sure anybody that’s answering the phone. Collecting contact information you have physical footprint. Make sure you have a way for people to join your list there. Make it part of your mission to collect contact information every single time you interact with anybody. The power of getting somebody’s permission to email or text them is significant, and if you’re not collecting contact information, this goes for everybody watching. If you’re not collecting contact information, everywhere you are, you’re leaving donation revenue at the table. You are leaving potential volunteers from volunteering. You need to make sure that that becomes a culture of collecting contact information. What’s our next question?

Sean, so next we have a question from Anna. Since a lot of email clients now Mark emails as open when they are delivered, especially with Gmail versus actually open, are there strategies beyond just finding click through for segmentation to find donors who actually opened? All

right, so let me actually level set everybody’s education on that. So in 2021 or 22 I can’t remember now, can’t believe it’s already been a couple of years. Regardless, Apple upset the apple cart. So for to oversimplify Apple, it’s 2021, late 2021, Apple, to oversimplify Apple, now marks every email is open, period. It hits an Apple device. It doesn’t matter what inbox it is. They hit a Gmail account on an Apple device, whatever the Apple device is. Oversimplify it. They mark it as open. Now they do that for security, and they do it because they’re apple, and we’re anticipating other inboxes and a supplier. Is doing that it doesn’t matter. Don’t let that freak you out, because open rate has never mattered knowing if they open it never mattered if I go into my reporting and I see that Sean opened my email. Well, did Sean open it, or was it a preview? Was he just clicking through his inbox and that preview for a millisecond? That counts as an open Apple or not? What if Sean got an email from me and he goes, Oh, this guy again, and he opened and he closed it, why would I pat myself on the back over that right? Open rates have always been full of false positive and false negatives. It’s good metric for you to pay attention, like if your open rate is regularly just kind of increasing because you’re trying a new subject line. Well, great. That gives you some sort of baseline, but click through rate proves the email is delivered, proves it was open and proves it was read. And so in terms of segmentation and engagement, coming back to the specific question the person asked, I would focus on click rate as the ultimate metric that you can track in terms of the donor sentimentality, a potential action of a donor through Constant Contact, or past action of a donor in constant contact. But I would also pay attention to the other end of the spectrum, which is, did I go from the email to my website? What page of my website did they go to? So looking at tools like Google Analytics, or they clicked on link in my email, they clicked on my donation link. Did they complete that donation and DonorPerfect, right? Making sure that you’re connecting, not just the interaction with the Constant Contact, but wherever that link went, if you have the ability to pay attention to that as well. Sean, do you want to talk on that a little bit on the DonorPerfect side?

On the DonorPerfect side of things? Yeah, there is a wealth of information. Certainly, information is going into constant contact and stays there. That is the source for a lot of this interactivity. But if you have constant contact connected to DonorPerfect, that information is also going to be fed back into the database. So when you’re doing queries in DonorPerfect, you can incorporate whether or not the guinea pig email was opened, forwarded, what have you. So all of that information, by default, is going to be on the contact screen of DonorPerfect. And I’m wondering, double checking my schedule for tomorrow we do actually have some live demonstrations of what Donor Perfect side of things is going to be. Sarah Lalonde is going to be leading one such system. So we at least have one live demonstration tomorrow where you get to see that side of things. And I can speak a little bit more on that, because there’s a couple different questions about the integration, because you could have them separate and not connected. And we really want to see that connection in mailings and Constant Contact. Some people might have those things separately, but if you’re in DonorPerfect, you go to mailings, the drop down and go to Constant Contact. You’ll see that way for you to get connected from the DonorPerfect database to Constant Contact, and then what we have is a live back and forth connection from DonorPerfect to Constant Contact. You’ll be creating most likely dynamic lists that update every single night and flow into constant contact. So you might have some people that are over, just in constant contact, but not in your database. But if we’re pointing those people towards avenues to become donors, once they donate, they’re in DonorPerfect, and the cycle continues. One last tip I want

to give the person to ask a question, Sean. And sorry to everybody that has so many questions, but I do want to say another thing you could employ is automation as a further way to engage audiences that you have deemed a particular action they took is worth you doing follow up, which is constant contact, does have automation so robust that you can say, If Sean gets this email and he clicks on this link, send Sean this other email. If Sean does not click that link, but he clicks on this link, send him this other email. And so you can even automate that behavior based on their interest, based on their action.

Fascinating. Well, I think that is all the time that we have today. Unfortunately for questions. Love everybody’s engagement. Please reach out to our support department if you have any additional questions. Also join us tomorrow. We will be seeing more about constant contact in the very near future. Thank you everybody for attending Matt’s session. We hope you had some great takeaways next session on stage one is Tammy zonker with reconnecting with your work, how to think bigger, bolder and braver. And on stage two, we have Michael Blanton from Sage with the growth equation, fundraising plus finance equals healthy growth. No matter what session you choose, you will not miss any content. Since all sessions are recorded, thank you again, Matt, thank you everybody for joining us, and we will see you in just a few take care.