How to Create Donor Personas to Better Engage Your Community

Kelly Ramage: All right. Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to our session, How to create Donor Personas to better engage your community. Before I do the formal introductions, just a couple of reminders about our session. There is a handout available, which you will be able to add to your Read More

Kelly Ramage: All right. Well, hello, everybody. Welcome to our session, How to create Donor Personas to better engage your community. Before I do the formal introductions, just a couple of reminders about our session. There is a handout available, which you will be able to add to your briefcase. Again, scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and that’s where you will find it. We love questions, so feel free to ask them using the Q&A panel on the sidebar on the right-hand side of your screen, but we will address as many of them in our built in Q&A session at the end. I am Kelly Ramage and we’ll be serving as a session hosts and co-hosts with Lou. I am the lead training specialist for DonorPerfect. I love the opportunity to meet and work with so many amazing people and organizations. I have the absolute pleasure of introducing your primary speaker, Lou Bruggman. Lou joins us as the lead strategist at Contour Strategies, but as you will learn and see for yourself, she is a passionate relationship builder and has experience in nonprofit development. She has the ability to link passion and purpose through philanthropy, by building rapport with individuals, corporations, and foundations, with 12 years of nonprofit and fundraising experience for specialization, guides clients to fuel their vision and fund their mission. Lou, I turn it over to you. Lou Bruggman: Yes. Thank you so much, Kelly, and sorry, I gave you some tongue twisters there in my bio. I just want to say, hello to all of you, that are tuning in and watching. I would say it’s good to see you, but I can’t see you. I would say it’s good to hear you, but I can’t hear you, but it’s really great to know that you’re there. I would love for you guys to just pop in the chat, say, hi, maybe where you’re from. I think that would actually help ease my nerves quite a bit, because I’m nervous about this today, because normally I know what it’s like to sit on the other side of trainings. I sign up for, especially the free ones, all the webinars and training sessions that I can, because I’m constantly trying to learn how to become a more effective and efficient fundraiser. I know that the time that you’re spending today doesn’t come without sacrifice, because I know that you have so many urgent things on your plate. I appreciate the fact that you took time to prioritize something that may not be urgent, but that is so, so important. I take that to heart, because I understand what that’s like, and I want you to know that I really want to try to give you just some practical takeaways that you can utilize in creating Donor Personas, which is something that can sometimes maybe feel a little bit impractical when you have a lot of things to do. To kick us off in our conversation today, I want to share something just a little bit more vulnerable with you that I don’t necessarily like to tell a lot of people. That is that I recently had a never say never moment and I bought a minivan. I always told myself, never ever, ever, ever would I buy a minivan. It didn’t matter how mom I got, how many soccer games that I chauffeured. I just absolutely was not going to do it, but the longer I set in those school pickup lines, the more tempting those sliding doors began to appear. Not only did I buy a minivan, I bought the minivan, and I really went all in. I was like, “If I’m going to do it, I’m really going to do it. I’m going to buy all of the features.” Of course, it has those fancy sliding doors. It has streaming capabilities. I have three kids, Netflix, it’s really great. I can’t even begin to tell you how awesome the cup holders are. Again, bought this van with all of these features, and for about two weeks, I knew how to do approximately two things with this minivan. I knew how to unlock the doors and I knew how to start it and drive it around. The reason that I’m telling you that story is because it’s very similar to my relationship with DonorPerfect. I inherited a DonorPerfect in 2013 when I was vice-president of philanthropy for a large boys and girls club. I knew how did you approximately two things on DonorPerfect for two years. I knew how to log into the system based on a little sticky note, hidden underneath my keyboard. I knew how to log in and search a donor’s name to find their number, their address, if I was sending a thank you note, and that’s really it, that was the extent of my experience. That’s because I really didn’t have a practical approach to how to utilize the software in a way that would make me much more efficient and effective in the way that I was communicating with donors. I’m proud to say in that eight-year span, I’ve come a long way. The things that I’ve done as an executive director, really learning how to utilize the system of maybe staffing, inadequacies or just I didn’t have the people that I needed. I learned how to utilize the tools that I had and also just from working with clients. As we go through our time together today, I really want to emphasize that I’m, one, a minivan driving mom, I am someone who utilizes DonorPerfect every single day with the clients that we serve at Contour Strategies. I’m someone that has a lot on my plate, just like all of you. Again, I really want to give you some practical and applicable tools that you can take home today to, again, address Donor Personas. That’s a little bit about me. All right. Let’s talk about, and I actually tuned into Mallory’s session and heard that she addressed donor personas as well, which I love that you got a little bit of the why there, but we’re going to go deeper. Donor personas, it’s really an excellent way to start thinking about the segmentation of your donor database. If that is something that has been intimidating to you in the past, or maybe you’ve just been segmenting based on transactional activity and data, this is just a really great way to start really personalizing that and finding a way that it’s effective for your organization. Then if you have really been intimidated by the process or you’re thinking, “How do I even have time to sit down and tackle this?” I’m going to provide a roadmap for you today that really shows you how you can do this and how you can apply it in a way that is going to increase your efficiency and also increase the engagement that that donor has with your organization. The next question is going to be, essentially, what’s my angle here, right? Because I can’t tell you in my work with conference strategies, how often we meet with a new client? One of the first things that they bring up is donor acquisition. I hope that I don’t disappoint a lot of you today, but I’m not coming at this from an angle of donor acquisition, because the fact of the matter is that we have a huge problem in our industry with donor retention. I feel like until we really address donor retention, then we are never going to improve our acquisition or if we do it doesn’t matter. There’s a really great book out there that I encourage all of you to read. It’s called Every Non-profits Buried Treasure, Retaining and Reclaiming Donors. It’s by William Hout, and I’m sure that we can put that in the chat for all of you guys, but he really outlines this problem that we have that so many of us within our organizations created this revolving door where we secure donors through a special event or social media campaigns. They’re stuck in this revolving door where they actually never even entered the lobby of our organizations to learn about who we are or how that they can truly feel that impact that Mallory talked about. Before you know it, they’ve gone out the door and they’re onto the next one. With creating donor personas and really looking at it through a lens of retention and better engaging the donors that we already have, we’re essentially creating a better front door where we’re opening it and it’s being more personalized. Then we’re sending someone to the back door too to make sure no one slips out, and before they do, we’re really checking in with them about how we can do a better job and better engage them. Again, to reiterate this point, last year there was a 4.1% drop from 2019 in the overall donor retention rates, it’s 43.6%, which is always a little bit shocking to me. I want to tell you guys that the organizations that we’re working with and we’re implementing this matrix that we’ll talk about today, they’re seeing donor retention rates between 60% and 70%. We would love to have personalized connection and conversations with each one of the donors in our database, but oftentimes we’re just understaffed and we can’t do that, but by utilizing donor personas, we really are able to increase our efficiency and make communication feel much more personalized to those that we serve, therefore really increasing our donor retention rates. Before I just continue talking on and on, it’s a subject I’m very passionate about, Kelly, I wanted to see if you just had anything that you wanted to add from DonorPerfect perspective about donor personas and why this subject is so important to you as well. Kelly: Well, Lou, I would love to talk about it. I think it’s a fantastic topic. I’m very passionate about it. I’m very excited about the possibilities that DonorPerfect offers. Not only with the existing data that’s already in there that goes really unnoticed and untapped, but also with some of the other types of personalized data that we’re going to be able to talk about later. In terms of really being able to bring data to life, I love where technology and personalization intersect, so that you can have more informed and more genuine conversations with your donor. I’m super excited about the idea of donor personas and how I have seen it through several different lenses, so to speak, as to how it really works and really does contribute to increases in donor retention. Lou: Great. Thanks, Kelly. All right. Just briefly, let’s talk about what is a donor persona? For those of you who maybe didn’t get to hear Mallory talk about this, or this concept is just totally new to you, they are fictional archetypes but I want to emphasize that they’re based on real data and research. As Kelly said, they already live within your database or in your organizational knowledge of interactions that you’ve had. We’re not just coming up with dream scenarios and dream donors. We’re really basing them off of the people that we know and the data that already exists within our CRM. They’re representative of a group of our donors that have similar characteristics, qualities, and attributes, again, so we can start lumping people together in those segments of how they’re connected to our organizations. I just want to say they’re developed from buyer personas that were developed in the late ’90s, and it’s actually a really cool story. There’s a guy by the name of Alan Cooper that was a consultant to a lot of software companies. He noticed that these companies were building all of this software and these products without really a particular consumer in mind, or if it was a consumer, it was more about the demographics behind that consumer. He thought, “Man, there’s got to be a better way that we can design this software and work with these engineers so they can really keep real people in mind and make it much more practical.” Kathy was actually the first buyer persona that was ever created. We take a lot from that world, of course, in creating our donor personas, but that’s the thought behind it is that we really want to, instead of just talking about segments and how we want to maybe communicate with first-time givers, if we can give that first-time giver a name and attributes and characteristics, and we can really keep that person in mind as we’re developing our communication plans and our engagement strategies, it just really gives it a different life and a different lens in which you’re seeing all the work that you’re doing through the lens of the donor, and you’re just becoming much more donor-centric, which ultimately is going to make your communication much more effective. Essentially, that’s what Alan Cooper found and that’s how buyer personas really gain traction and steam in the time that he works with these companies. That’s the history of donor personas, where they came from, and what they are. Let’s take a look at, this is actually something that DonorPerfect test created. Again, they have a lot of great resources in the knowledge base, but here’s an example of what a donor persona might look like. Again, they give these personas name, this is networker Nicole. They outline really what segment, age group. You can see all the things here. What’s interesting is instead of develop donor personas and putting it on a shelf to collect dust, actually, no organizations who have printed life-size cutouts of their donor personas and kept it in a conference room, or they have card and they print them out and leave them on a table where decisions are being made, because you can see how it really would change age the way your conversations and interactions occur. If you say, “Okay, we’re talking about a segment of donors, who’ve given $1000 for the last two years, let’s talk about our strategy,” and then you actually pull out networker Nicole, and you start talking about that strategy really with her in mind and the people that are in this segment. It really does make a difference when you give it a name, it becomes much more personalized instead of just talking about a segment alone. That is an example of what a donor persona can look like. I have provided a template for that, that you all can use and just plug and play once we go through this activity. Here is the big question, and one that I think I’ve struggled with a lot, if I’m being just super honest, is, are donor personas practical for nonprofit organizations? Because we all have a lot on our plate and we’re really always balancing what’s urgent versus what’s important. I really do feel like donor personas are so, so important, but it’s never going to be the thing that’s on the top of your to-do list. You’re always going to have to be very intentional about doing this process. You’re going to have to be extremely proactive if you tackle donor personas, and you’re going to have to give it some time. Let’s just talk about, in what ways are they practical, in what ways are donor personas worth it? It brings really your strongest donors into focus, meaning, and I’m not saying like, who are your richest donors? Really, who are the donors that really exemplify what your mission is about and who really help fund the vision of your organization, whether it’s through volunteerism, or maybe it’s through recurring giving, or maybe they’re social media ambassadors? It really helps you to see who are the strongest people within our organization that really help keep our wheels turning and who are assets and what was our engagement with them like, and how can we replicate that? It also really strengthens your messaging. I don’t know about you guys but when I was executive director at a marketing team, I found that a lot of times that we weren’t on the same page about who we were communicating with or how we were communicating that with them, or really what their motivations are. If you can complete donor personas as an organization or inter-departmentally, it’s really going to make a difference in how you communicate and what message you communicate as well. It also really informs decision-making as well. If you know the people that live within your database, who they are, how they align, really what motivates them, it’s really going to change the dynamic of how you have important conversations within your organization. Again, going back to networker Nicole, are we keeping this persona in mind as we’re making decisions about our organization and how we want to communicate, and where we want to invest money as well? Those are all really important things. I can’t tell you how many times I’m working with an organization and we’re talking strategy, and they’re unsure, they’re guessing, they’re throwing a lot of things at a dartboard and really seeing what will stick. If you have that knowledge about who your segments are, what motivates them, it’s really going to help you to make better decisions and better investments. When is it not helpful for nonprofits to really look at donor personas? It is time-consuming, if it’s not focused. You’re going to hear me say this a lot today, focus on a small group, just start somewhere, because you can literally develop hundreds of donor personas and they’re not going to do you any good if you don’t have practical way to apply and to utilize them. They can be very transactional if they’re based on data that is only demographic. If you are just segmenting or creating donor personas without– If you’re just saying who and what, and you’re not really focusing on the why of that donor persona, it’s something that’s going to end up on a shelf with a lot of dust on it. I would just say, be sure to have a well-diversified donor persona. Then they can’t replace donor identities. If you’re trying to create personas to get out of the hard work of relationship building, it’s not going to work. We continually have to build relationships with our donors, look for opportunities to connect on a one-on-one basis, especially with our major and planned gift programs. You’re never going to replace individual donor identities. This is really about communication, donor retention, and increased engagement. Kelly, anything to add to is the question, are doing personas practical for nonprofits? Kelly: It’s an interesting question Liv that I don’t consider myself an expert as I consider you an expert in this field, but again when I think about the information that exists in DonorPerfect, being able to generate some simple reports based on some of those segments, just a couple of those qualities, it’s very revealing just to see who’s in there. I call it just a quick data check, but it can be time-consuming. One of the things that I love to promote is that we have a fantastic technical support team. If you’re new because I’m seeing some of the messages come in to chat that there’s a lot of new people to DonorPerfect. Don’t let the daunting task of trying to figure out how to run some of these reports get in your way, reach out to us because we would love to partner with you to help you see who are your donors, what do you have in DonorPerfect? Don’t be a stranger is what I want to emphasize at this point because I think it’s a fantastic process, but I do acknowledge that it can take time, but we’re here to help and we want to be like that partner with you. Lou: Great. Thanks, Kelly. Let’s start with how it is practical and how this can really bring your strongest donors into focus. I would encourage all of you at your next staff meeting, when it’s maybe you, your executive director, your team marketing department, finance department, ask the question, who are our strongest donors, and what do they look like? Describe that person to you. You’re probably going to find there’s a lot of different answers about who your strongest donors are. I would say this process can really help you identify those things that I mentioned earlier. Our strongest donors are door openers, they’re ambassadors for our mission, they naturally talk about what we do, and they bring others to the table. When we focus on retention, again, acquisition will naturally occur, or they’re social media ambassadors, they volunteer to help bring people to our events or whatever it may be. Get away with from talking about your donors just in the form of dollar signs and really start thinking about who these people and how can I create donor personas based on each one of these attributes. Again, these are based on real data, real experiences that we have, and so as those people start to really come to light, what was your strategy with them, how are they engaged, why they are engaged? Retrace your history with those people that you’ve identified are your strongest donors and really say, what did we do right in this situation, and is that something that we could really replicate? Again, you’re getting everybody, you’re getting this interdepartmental connection or understanding about who your strongest donors are and how we can start to really communicate about this. Really I think that this creating good donor personas, it starts with asking some really good questions within your organization about how you see donors and what their strengths are as well. It’s going to tell you a lot about your organization and how much you’re on the same page or not. The process that we follow at Contour Strategies is we essentially look at those donors. Like I said, you look at the historical context, the strengths of your donors, who comes to mind, what attributes do they have, and then you really convert those actual real-life donors into personas. Maybe you get a little bit broad with that definition and then ultimately you find the people that match those characteristics and those qualities, and you turn them into priority groups or segments, which we’re going to go through that whole process today, but I just really wanted to outline for you guys that its real-life donors, personas, and then priorities. This is how it makes sense where you will actually apply. Your donor persona work for something that’s going to work for you and creating a communication plan. All right. When we start working with clients, this is how we recommend that they start thinking about those donors. Let’s just talk about annual fund donors. This is going to be different for every single organization that’s [inaudible 00:25:25] here, but again, this is just a hierarchy that we create. When we’re just thinking about annual fund donors, we typically have our major gift donors, our mid-level donors, monthly donors, potential donors, and lapsed donors. I want to talk about really quick just potential donors for– Again, we’re not talking about donor acquisition. For me, a potential donor is someone that lives in our database, that has high potential to move into that major donor or mid-level strategy, but maybe who is someone who’s not actively engaged. I did want to clarify that just really quickly. Again, we all know the general segmentation or makeup of who makes up a successful annual fund campaign, and so I would encourage all of you to start thinking about a person in each one of those categories and what their strengths are, so you convert again, those donors into personas. For example, we have major donor Mike, mid-level Molly, monthly donor Donna, potential donor Peggy and lapsed donor Larry. Again, what makes a major donor a strong donor for us, what does that relationship, or what does that context look like? Let’s take a major donor. Major donor Mike, for example. We can start asking ourselves questions. As Kelly shared earlier, there are some questions that we’re going to be able to answer very simply from our CRM. We can say, okay, we know that this person gives $10,000 or more each year, that he gave us first annual gift at the gala in a form of a check, he’s been giving for five years. Then there’s other things that we’ll just know more from our knowledge. I hope that you’re logging all of your contacts in the contacts tab in DonorPerfect, but if you’re not, this is where the meeting of the minds helps to fill out some of this information that we know that these donors are responsive to personalized communications. They’re usually introduced by someone else influential in our organizations. They are open. We always say that people that are generous with their money are also generous with their time and their information as well. Generosity is something that just flows through them, and so in this instance, we know that this donor loves to talk about faith and family, and they’re very generous with the information that they give us. We also know that there are some retired financial advisor, love to travel, and read as well. You can see, we can get a lot of information from our strongest donors in this category, and then overlay them into a persona that says, what would make sense for other donors in this category that they give guests over $10,000? Maybe they’re at a time in their career that’s not super demanding where they can be generous with their time and money as well, they have some longevity with the organization. Again, we can start to extrapolate from the real-life examples and build a donor persona and that we can then prioritize. It’s easy to do with our major donors, because a lot of times we invest a lot of time in those relationships, and we know who those individuals are, what they like. We prioritize them naturally, I think. What about a persona for this potential donor Peggy, who lives within our database? It’s harder to do because there are so many question marks that we have, or we may not know. There are some things, for example, that we can get from our database, that this person has given a $500 gift, that they gave that gift online, they’ve been giving for less than a year, and I love this one is rumored to have high capacity, because we hear that a lot. We heard, so and so can give a really big gift. How do you know that? What do you do with a donor, this potential high-capacity donor that you don’t have a lot of information about? Do you just guess in grading for a persona? That would really help segment and prioritize this potential donor group. That’s where I’m going to early introduce predictive analytics to you guys. It’s an amazing tool and it’s information that you already have in your database that can really give you so much more to create effective personas. I’m going to turn it over to Kelly to talk a little bit more about predictive analytics. Kelly: Thanks, Lou. Well, predictive analytics is a amazing intersection. It really is an intersection of how technology can really empower you to know information about people that are supporting you, but you don’t really know much about. We’re calling it DP insights. Technically, just so you’re aware, DP insights is really combining multiple industry-leading data sources and identity resolution technology to provide descriptive and predictive analytics. This is accomplished basically by taking basic contact information of individuals and appending it up to 1200 data points from a variety of databases in the United States. The attributes are then used in machine learning models to generate the descriptive and predictive attributes. Okay, what does that mean? Well, what that really means, is you’re going to be able to go into Peggy’s record and take a look and say, “Okay, well, this is what we know,” but then you can go a little bit deeper and discover that there’s interest that she has that there is an age category, a generational category that she’s part of. It’s giving you insight to information that you may not have been able to learn because you simply don’t have the time or the resource to do it. It’s a way that we can partner with you, the technology side, where you can then have those deeper, more meaningful relationships with your donors. You might be thinking, “Well, how is this different than a Well Screening?” Well, there’s probably a lot of ways that we could answer this, but one way that crosses my mind regularly when I’m talking to DonorPerfect customers about this is it’s almost like it’s a precursor to a Well Screening. It’s giving you, as I said, a way to just know a little bit more about them so that when you go to the table, when you make the call, when you send them a letter, you send them an email, or even a text because you’ve discovered their preferred communication channel might be text, you’re able to speak in a language that really resonates with them. It’s giving you the information you need so that you can learn more about them, and hopefully discover that they really do have the potential to become a more invested partner in your organization. If we take this intersection of technology and drop it into DonorPerfect, it now gives us a whole new way of thinking about our persona of Peggy, and giving you different ways that you can interact with them. I am super excited about this possibility and this technology. Lou, let’s continue and talk about how this might be useful in building more meaningful personas. Lou: Great. All right. Say, for example, we had a lot of questions about Peggy, who she was, what her interests are, we really need help filling in the gaps. Using predictive analytics, this is some of those questions that it can help us answer. You can see we took off that rumor that could give more or has high capacity and we actually see that she has a wealth rating of 86 on a scale of 100. Sure, yes, she has that capacity to give a larger gift, but also that she prefers phone or email, that she’s in the real estate industry, what her interests are, and then how old she is, and if she’s married. Again, this really helps you fill in some of the pieces to really think about someone that you’ve converted from maybe that category of they’ve given a gift, but they’re not really engaged with your organization, really looking at, okay, what were some of the things with that person? What are their attributes that we’ve successfully moved them into that major donor category? What we would call that is how do we move someone from a priority four to a Priority 1 segment? Predictive analytics can really help you fill in the gap for a lot of those questions that you may have about some of your donors. We’ll talk more about predictive analytics in just a few minutes and how it can help with that organizational decision-making piece. Let’s talk about strengthening your messaging using donor personas. We talked about we have the donors, we’ve created the personas, and now what do we do with them, essentially? What I would do– and I was reading some comments in the chat, and one of them was about how it can be tricky to develop personas when you have so many dynamic attributes and really saying like, “We could create a thousand of these,” and it would be one for each one of our donors, because they’re all unique and different. I would just encourage you to use personas, I think, just really in the decision making and the messaging process. It’s not going to fit necessarily everybody and that’s why we simplify from persona to then priority segments. What would make sense for people to fit into what segment, but then when we go back to talking about an actual communication plan or calendar, we’re keeping the persona in the mind instead of the segment because things can get just lost when we’re just talking about segments of people. I would just encourage you to think about the difference between those two things. We’re talking about, we have the personas, we’re moving into prioritization, and how we communicate to those groups of people. More often than not, I know this is really small but when I ask people like, “Let me see your donor communication plan.” I generally see something in this format. It’s donors, anyone in the database, and this is everything that we send to them. I love what Mallory said about if you’re sending something to everyone, it’s really being received by no one. I actually did a little test on my personal inbox. Over the last 24 hours, I did not check or unread anything in my personal inbox, and I received 79 emails. This is from someone that I unsubscribed to everything. I don’t want regular emails. I think 79 is a big number and it was surprising to me. There’s further research that says that as Americans, we’re exposed to anywhere from 4,000 to 10,000 advertisements every single day, through social media, or emails, the things that we see on television, the things that we hear on the radio. We’re just inundated with messaging constantly. If you’re one of those organizations that is still sending one type of communication to everybody in your database, that’s not going to be effective and there’s essentially a better way to do it. I want to go back to this thought, again, we have our personas and now let’s put them into priority segments. Some organizations do this in a pretty simplified way. They might say Priority 1 segment, these are our donors, this is the simplest way to do it, who have the highest capacity, and we have the closest relationship to. That’s our major donor segment. Again, we’re keeping Mike in mind when we’re communicating. Our Priority 2 segment, maybe it’s donors who are giving less than $10,000 but we have a good relationship with them. They’re responsive to our communication. For our monthly donors, what does that look like? For our potential donors, we know they have high capacity, but we have a low relationship, and then lapsed donors as well. You start to think about how we can segment our entire database into these categories in which we want to communicate. We’re keeping an actual person in mind when we’re having that communication, or planning our communication channels. That’s our conversion, how we make this make sense. This is the template that you have within your handouts that Kelly said you could scroll down and utilize. We do more of this matrix and we do it by month. I would encourage you [unintelligible 00:38:32] 11 by 17, I would encourage you to print this out. You can hang it on a bulletin board or you can blow it up and you can use sticky notes. I would first encourage you to assess what was your communication plan like in 2021? Use this model. Okay, our major gift donors, what are all the pieces that they received? Okay, what about our mid-level donors? What about our monthly donors? What about lapsed donors, what was our strategy? You’ll really start to see the holes within your communication plan or you’ll get to see, who am I leaving out? Who am I not communicating with? Then when you start developing your 2022 calendar, really think about Mike, think about Donna and think about Peggy and [unintelligible 00:39:19] how do I want to communicate with these donor personas throughout the year? I’m not saying that you have to have a touchpoint every single month, but each one of these lines should be able to stand alone as the communication plan. I hope that you’re not just sending one piece. My encouragement would be to use an omnichannel approach with them but again, you can get that more defined based on channel preference as well that you’ve created through your donor personas. Then have a quarterly touchpoint at least with these donors. This all funnels back into retention. If people feel like you know them, you’re seeing them, you know what their interests are, the way that they prefer to be communicated, and because you’re going to have those priority levels that you’ve segmented within your database, you’re going to ensure that everyone within your database is receiving some kind of personalized communication or something that really hits on the alignment that they have with your organization. It’s going to make– I know, and I get this because I’ve been in your seat. I know you have a lot to manage. It’s going to feel like a lot of work to formalize something like this on the front-end, but I promise it’s going to increase your efficiency throughout the year, especially if you will go through and you will either flag or what we often do in DonorPerfect is we’ll add a field for priority and we reassess this every year. We prioritize donors one through seven. I’ve just listed out five priority levels today, and then when I’m doing a priority five communication for lapsed donors, I’m able to pull my priority five report, or mail merge like that within DonorPerfect. It’s just going to increase your efficiency so you’re not guessing every time, who do we want this communication to go to? What segment do I pull? Am I looking at all donors from the last three years? You’ve already done that work through creating priorities and actually listing it somewhere within your database. Kelly, I would love for you to swoop in and talk about how we can effectively list segmentations or prioritizations within DonorPerfect in a way that really makes it easy for us to pull information and execute these detailed communication plans. Kelly: One of the things that I want to just emphasize is you can build donor personas in a variety of ways. It’s using many times, the segments that Lou was talking about, using what’s referred to as a selection filter. Whether you use DP insights or not, you have valuable information that you can sit down and work with this model that Lou is mapping out to figure out who your different personas are. When it comes to a communication strategy, there are mechanisms right within DonorPerfect where you can say, “I want to take my segment, persona Peggy group and I’m going to do these four different communication strategies.” You could use the contacts page because there’s ways that you can populate that page in mass so that you know that these are the people that received this communication on this day and because of some integrations, whether let’s say it’s an email communication, you can then analyze, “Okay, well, if we sent this out to 400 people that fit in this persona Peggy category, and we got 200 responses, then that means that there’s 200 that I need to figure out what didn’t work.” You can select using a filter for your different personas, you can map it out, track what they’re doing, receiving, and actually responding to on the contacts page is what it’s referred to, and then you can use all of that data to then refine the next communication. A lot of it is going to be driven by selection filters or segmenting as it’s sometimes referred to and you can save those so that you can look back and see what’s been done so that you can have those informed decisions of what needs to happen, or pivot and make changes as you continue to review the information. The contacts page, I know Lou mentioned it earlier, and several of you in the chat mentioned it, is a huge asset in DonorPerfect in this whole idea of building your donor personas and mapping out a communication plan. Lou: I would say contacts too, I know some of you mentioned like, “Wish that I could get Executive Director, someone to insert the contacts. I think if we can always emphasize, we constantly want to be evaluating the effectiveness and really auditing ourselves and our systems too. When everyone is receiving every type of communication, it’s hard to tell what’s effective and what works. You can really, at the end of the year, evaluate your communication plan and you can pull, through that selection filter that Kelly’s talking about, your priority four donors that are based off the persona of Peggy. You can say, “What communication did they receive this year? How did that communication really help us move the needle? How many of those priority fours are now converted to priority one, major donor segments?” Really, if you’re not tracking it, you have no ability to measure it. When you put this type of plan in place, I think that really emphasizing, this is something we’re investing time in and we want to make sure it works. We want to make sure that we can be effective. Therefore, everyone as we’ve created these donor personas and this communication plan, we have to commit to using that contacts tab and then really having a plan for evaluating at the end of the year. I’m a proponent of the contacts tab. I’m trying to give you guys some tools that might be effective in getting everyone to utilize that, which I think is a great segue into informing decision-making within our organizations. Really using donor personas, it can help in two ways. Do you make donor decisions based on the reality of your database? Are you living in that dream world where you’re thinking like “In an ideal situation, this is what we would do when our donors would adequately respond.” A story that I have about this is an organization that I work with. They were just completely sold out that social media was the way to communicate to their donors. They had invested a lot of time and a lot of money and doing social media appeals and campaigns. Then they actually went through the predictive analytics process with DonorPerfect, and they received a report back, which we’re about to show you what that report looks like. I am not kidding, 0% of the people in their database had a preferred channel preference for social media, zero. They thought, we were just guessing based on trends that we were seeing and recommendations for other organizations that we work with, that social media was the way to go and now that we’re really looking at the analytics of our actual database, that was a huge mistake. They actually saw that the majority of their database actually had a channel preference for phone. They actually started doing a phone-a-thon fundraiser and raised almost half a million dollars, doing what is maybe an old school phone-a-thon, but it was successful because they were making decisions about their fundraising based on the actual makeup of their donor database. I would love for you guys to see what that report looks like when you complete these DP insights and use predictive analytics. Kelly, do you want to talk about that? Kelly: Sure. I think the one thing that I just want to emphasize is that what everybody is going to get is a summary report and the summary report is going to provide some insight on things like demographics and generational information. Again, it’s information that you already have in DonorPerfect, but this process in the summary report is just going to organize it in a way that’s going to make it a little bit more accessible in a faster way. As I’ve been working with customers already, I am excited to hear their feedback and how it’s helped confirm decisions, or it’s helped them make redirected decisions with confidence. Again, think of this as just another way that it can help you save time, but you can do it without this summary report as well. It just takes a little bit more knowledge about DonorPerfect. The summary report is great, though. There’s a lot of great stories that we could share but so far, our time is going by so fast, so I’m going to stop talking and pass it back to you, Lou. Lou: Thanks. I think the next thing it’s really talked about, okay, what is predictive analytics? How can it really inform your decision-making within individual donor records as well, and so I just did one, let me show you this screen, where you have this DonorPerfect insight information. If you go through this process, and then you’re really looking to develop these personas based on real-life donors and real information that you have, you can have the predictive analytics where it shows you generation, give capacity, interest as well. It can really help you on an individual basis as well. I just wanted you to see those capabilities and what that looks like. I know I’ve thrown a lot of information at you. At the beginning I said I really want this to be practical. I’m really circling back to that, of where to begin in this process. As Kelly has said over and over again, start with information that you already have. Hopefully, the majority of that information lives within your DonorPerfect or CRM system, but maybe some of it lives within your head and it’s a good opportunity to get together as a team and really discuss your strongest donors and what are the characteristics that you see and what has been their journey, really, with your organization that has made it successful. Just start with information that you already have. Don’t automatically jump into predictive analytics. Pull some reports, see what data lives there and how you can utilize it moving through this process. The next thing is interview donors for each persona. If you go through those and you’ll fund donors that I was talking about, start that process and say, “I have a person in mind for each one of these categories that really represents a major donor well or a monthly-giving donor well.” Go interview them. When I was doing direct fundraising, I was always looking for excuses to interview my donors and make them feel like they had input within our organization, and looking at opportunities to get their advice. I think this is a great way to say, “Hey, we’re really trying to refine our communication and engagement. I would love to be able to sit down and talk with you. What kind of social media do you consume? Or when you receive a communication, what are those buzzwords or things that really move you to take action?” It’s just a really great opportunity to interview them and fill in some of those gaps, which helps you, I think, create your donor personas, but also, it helps you to build that relationship with that individual donor as well and really feel like they have a stake within the organization. Use predictive analytics. Kelly and I talked about that a lot. When you start having gaps and you don’t know, and maybe you don’t feel like you know your database or you don’t have the information there to really understand who makes up the majority or what some of those interest things are, it’s a great tool. DP Insights is a great tool that you can utilize. Prioritize donors. Don’t just create the personas and just save them somewhere or leave them on your desk. Really say, “Who fits into this segment? How does this make sense? Let’s move these donor personas into segments. Let’s flag it within our database, let’s make a communication plan.” It just starts to have a practical application in a way that it really makes sense for you to communicate. Again, you’re going to see increased giving and you’re going to receive increased donor retention rates because you’re using donor personas and really overlaying the other individuals within your database to make them feel seen and heard and adequately communicated with. The last thing is to keep it simple. I was actually talking with a client yesterday and we were talking about donor personas. She was like, “I feel like a lot of people try to make dating profiles through the donor persona process.” I’m like, “Yes, that’s so true.” You can have these long narratives and it can be so detailed. Keep it simple. I think the whole point of this activity is to keep real people in mind when you’re developing a plan of how you want to communicate and further engage. Rely on those donor personas. They don’t have to be overly complex. You can start with one. If you do anything between now and the end of the year, create a donor persona for a priority for or that potential major donor prospect and just map that out, what that might look like. Even if you just do one, that’s still going to make you more effective with that segment prioritization of donors. I think that that’s the rest of our presentation, but we would love to, in the time that we have left, answer a few questions, Kelly, if you see some good ones that have come through. Kelly: The one that jumped off the page for me speaking about donor personas that Judy asked is, can a donor have more than one persona? Lou: That is a really great question. When you move from the donor persona into the segmentation, I would try to keep people in one segment. You can overlay and you can say our priority one donors are going to receive multiple– They’re going to receive the same segment as, say, a priority three donor. You’re just mapping that out for each one. I would, just so it’s not too complex. Sure, they can have characteristics that match multiple personas, but when you actually move into the segmentation or prioritization, I would try to keep them in one channel until you get really good at that and then you can overlay them. Kelly: Great. Another question, this is more DonorPerfect-related, but I think we can both answer it, and it would be interesting to see is, how do you suggest including the donor persona information within DonorPerfect? Outside of DP Insights, how, Lou, in your experience as a consultant and strategist, how do you see this type of information being stored in DonorPerfect? Is it using the canned fields that every DonorPerfect system has or do you see that they’re keeping it outside of DonorPerfect, or are they creating custom fields? What do you see? Lou: I do see in my experience– We try to get as much in DonorPerfect as we can, just to create that organizational integrity. If one person leaves and they have the list stored somewhere, then we’re starting over again with this process. We always recommended getting as much into DonorPerfect as you possibly can. What we found really successful is that we’ve actually created a custom field within the bio tab that outlines our priority system. That may look different for you, but we use a priority one through seven with our clients. You can do global updates to do maybe all of your lapsed donors, things like that. We’ll go through and we’ll add priorities to all of our donors based on certain selection filters like Kelly shared. I know some organizations use flags. I’m not a huge fan of flags. I would rather have it as a field because it makes reports much easier. You could also create a filter based on your criteria as well that you’re just pulling over and over again for certain communications. You have your priority one filter, your priority two that’s funneling donors into that path. I think that can get a little bit more complex. I really like having the custom field in order to track those donors. Kelly: I would actually agree with that. There’s a DonorPerfect customer that I have worked with quite a bit over the last couple of years. They’ve actually decided to place a lot of those custom fields which everybody can create on their name page because they really wanted it to be front and foremost in their thinking and everything that they do. They have different teams. They have a major gift officer and then they have the annual fund team and so forth. They have different fields that they’ve created that are specific to what they need, but they’re using the data that’s already there and some of the standard behaviors in DonorPerfect, calculated fields and filters to help them create these attributes that are then helping them build their personas. I think we’re saying the same thing, we just place it on different pages. Lou: [crosstalk] get it within your system. Definitely get it within your system. I think that’s going to really help. Kelly: Absolutely. That will make it better for the long haul, absolutely. Because as I tell people, I don’t want to get anybody to get hit by a bus, but when you win the lottery and you leave, you’re leaving the legacy behind. Go ahead, Lou. Lou: I was just going to say too, if you’re fully using the DonorPerfect integration and you’re sending communications out, say, through constant contact or maybe you’re using the BCC feature to log contacts, emails, things like that, then you can pull those reports and essentially look at the effectiveness of those communications from the contact tab as well, but if you don’t have those segments within DonorPerfect, you’re just adding multiple steps to your process, which is exactly opposite of what I want you to do. I want you to increase your efficiency. If you take the time upfront to plug it into DonorPerfect, it’s really going to help you in that process, in the evaluation of all the work that you’ve done. Kelly: Absolutely. Again, this is one of those things that we would love to help you with. We have an amazing support team. We have an equally awesome training team. There’s consultants out there that are there to help. I think we have time for one question, we have about a minute left, but a question that came up several times in chat and as a natural question is, can you have a persona for corporate donors? Something other than individuals. Lou: Yes. I didn’t list that, but that is something that we’re finding with organizations. There’s this huge push in the realm of everybody wants to better engage their corporate donors. I would encourage you to create a donor persona and to add to that matrix of your communication. How are you going to communicate with your corporate donors sponsors? If that’s something that you don’t want to tackle right away, it’s also okay to add your corporate sponsors into a priority one segment because you know that they have a major gift potential. Maybe it’s your mid level because they come to your event every year. Definitely put them in some kind of channel, whether that’s a standalone corporate communication channel line, maybe that’s a priority eight, or if you’re absorbing them into other categories, I think that that really is important to address corporate. Kelly: Great. Well, thanks, Lou. Thank you everybody. There were a lot of great questions. I know that there were several of my colleagues answering some of the comments in the chat. I would encourage you to hop over to some of the lounges and rooms. I look forward to working and interacting with you as our day continues. Thanks so much. Lou: Thank you. [silence] [01:00:39] [END OF AUDIO]