Measuring Reporting and Communicating Monthly Giving

Hello, good afternoon everybody, and welcome back to some of you. Day three of our webinars, Thursday. Today’s the last live webinar that we have for the week. There’s another one at the 3pm eastern time slot, but that one, as always, the 3pm eastern webinars are prerecorded ones, Read More

Hello, good afternoon everybody, and welcome back to some of you. Day three of our webinars, Thursday. Today’s the last live webinar that we have for the week. There’s another one at the 3pm eastern time slot, but that one, as always, the 3pm eastern webinars are prerecorded ones, so almost like a TV show. We have an informative hour long session that you can’t interact with, which is not true of this one, because Hi, I’m Sean Patero, training specialist that works here at DonorPerfect, teaching people how to use DonorPerfect to the best of its abilities, and I will be your guide today for DonorPerfect. We’re going to be focusing on reporting today, as well as communication tools that we have at our disposal, and for those of you that were here for Tuesday and Wednesday, I might even redeem myself a little bit. I had some, I had some reports that were being obstinate yesterday that should not be today, because I was testing everything out right before this webinar, I There it might, it might be waiting for the live portion to throw me an issue. Let’s say I also have more resources that I promised earlier this week. There is a tool called the Monthly Giving Success Kit, the Monthly Giving Guide, which we have a quote from here. I’ll be sharing a link to that with everybody today. Acquiring new donors involves spending time and money on engaging and educating people around about your cause. Strong donor retention allows you to spend less time and money converting new donors year after year. Instead, you can spend your valuable time sharing the significant impact your growing base of donors are having on your mission. I’ll be sharing this a little. Hey, Esmerelda got it already. I believe they communicate a little bit of this stuff in advance. Esmeralda got it, and I will show everybody else how to do it today, even if you’re not in one of our DonorPerfect clients yet. That’s still a cool guide that you can download and use. How to identify monthly donors, who are they potentially, or who are they already? How are we recording this information? Bare minimum, you can get away with a date and amount, or maybe a date and amount, and a general ledger, but beyond that we have all these fields that we can use to organize our information to identify our monthly donors, collecting all that information and analyzing it in different views in the report centers. What DonorPerfect is all about. Definitely, today we’re going to be measuring our success with some different tools. How we can set and measure goals, one that you can even download, and communicating success. This is where some of you might not have Constant Contact. That is the only feature today that not everybody might have, except for payment processing in general. You could always just have DonorPerfect the database and use all those great tools. It doesn’t have to be automatically processing things for you. It’s best if it is, in my biased opinion. And we partner with Constant Contact for mass emails. They are our best friend when it comes to emails. You might not have them. It is free to sign up. DonorPerfect will pay for your invoice, and you can send out the.. you just get your own account that you can send out emails through. It’s a win-win, because you can disperse your information far and wide and connected to them might be one of those donation forms that we talked about yesterday, and then how to track ongoing improvements for the future, and besides just maybe not everybody having constant contact. When we look at the individual data entry screens, you can rename things, you can reorganize things, and what we see in my webinar database might look just a little bit different from what you’re used to seeing, especially when it comes to how a monthly donor is identified. If you’ve been with us earlier this week, we’ve seen some of these drop downs in my system already, and I’ll repeat what I said last time, which is never here to say that anybody is doing anything wrong with these drop downs, but these drop downs are important. The options that we put in them then are the same ways that we find.

Am later on in a report or for communications, and within DonorPerfect, it is the gift and the pledge areas that share these codes, especially in the case of monthly folks, they are going to have a pledge, and that pledge that’ll have the billing amount and the frequency of monthly, if not some other automatic option. The fund it’s going into, which I, anytime where I’m talking about donor perfect, the general ledger field is none of my business. That’s whatever your accountant says. How is this money being used so that we can correlate our reports and donor perfect with the QuickBooks or whatever accounting service that you’re using. Beyond that, we have campaign solicitation and subsolicitation, of which there’s a, there’s a bit of an art to it in our system. Anything that is recurring monthly gets a campaign of monthly giving program that is the umbrella title that we give to anything that is recurring, and then as a subcategory of that campaign we have our solicitation monthly giving and a year specific tag, we’re going to see monthly giving 2026 in mind, and just by virtue of the way that we do data entry when we run reports today in this system, I’m going to be doing them that way. You might have them just a little bit different, and no matter what coding consistency you come up with, as long as you are consistent in its use, whether it be online or maybe you’re working with another company, and they give you a spreadsheet afterwards, you have to import all that information into the database. We can still have that detail on the gifts, and if you want to know about importing, we do have that live pre-recorded one at 1pm today. About importing anywhere where we might be getting a gift, we might be seeing some of these codes, and those are the codes that we control. The drop-down menus, the coded fields is what we call them. It’s a drop-down menu, and the different options in that drop down are just referred to as codes. That’s what we call them. And there is a plus symbol next to it. You can always add your own codes and edit the options that are within them, and you have leeway over what goes in there. There’s also some fields that you don’t really need to be concerned with for data entry. Some things just happen in some of these fields, as long as you’re doing data entry correctly. There’s some fields that we could use to locate our monthly donors, which is what we’re going to get into first. So, what qualities might some of our monthly donors have? Sure, plenty of variety that’s going on on the gift screen, but there’s some universal truths here that are going to be true for all of us, like let’s take Roberto, for example, Roberto has a pledge, we can tell that right away, because there’s a little purple dot next to it, happens to not have the monthly indicator lit up. I do believe when we were looking at him yesterday, I think this fella is lapsed a little bit, but on the pledge screen, this is where those ongoing commitments go, whether it’s monthly, quarterly, annual, many of these frequencies will work, as long as it’s not unknown or unusual, and this is what they get if they go online and they sign up monthly, or if you’re doing it for them, maybe you’re insta charging them, like we talked about yesterday. Certainly, we have all of these other fields here, but oh, the field in question that I wanted to point out is actually hidden, actually hidden. Oh, let me, let me go off to the side here real quick. I don’t want to get to get distracted in screen designer, but I should have unhid this field earlier. We could still use hidden fields for purposes of reports, but there’s this field called record type that we have hidden here, it’s a little bit more.

Uh, apparent when we go to the gift screen, the record type field, which is hidden on pledges, and actually more than I think about it, I believe that record type field is also going to be hidden for all of you as well on the pledges screen, at least, because from a technical standpoint on the back end gifts and pledges are kind of the same information, they have the same dropdown options, more or less, but what makes them different from one another is this field called record type. These two tables, these two screens, these two areas, they share a lot of the same fields, and even though we can’t see it, that record type is over there on the pledges, and that record type is not gift, it is pledge. Something else that they’re going to have automatically is a checkbox, this checkbox is set to display. We should be able to find it very easily. That just automatically gets checked if it’s a pledge payment. It doesn’t even necessarily have to be automatic. It could be somebody that’s giving cash or check on a regular basis. There’s a checkbox that’s always going to be checked. We might also consider looking for certain created by values when that pledge gets added to the system. If it wasn’t a person, it’s going to have a certain created by value of either WLA, if it’s the old form, or DP forms if we’re looking for new ones. We might also just narrow down by the gift types. If they paid online or they have some type of virtual payment that they’re using, we could use that as an identifier as well. If you’ve ever been to any of our reporting webinars, you’ll know that reporting always starts off with knowing the field name, where is it located, what is it called. There’s hundreds of fields that could lead and do lead to great levels of detail in the report center, but there’s so many of them, so what I’m doing right now, even by getting an example of my monthly donor open, is a great tip for everybody. Let’s pull up somebody that we expect to see in the results and ask ourselves, what field is it that qualifies them for it, and then from there we can build ourselves a selection filter, which I’m going to do, independent of even running these reports. Before I run these reports, I can build the selection filters. Now, the gift that I did happen to be editing was not a pledge payment. If I go back to the first page of the gift screen, we can see that I have a column for pledge payments. You may as well, you might have a column that shows whether or not it’s a pledge payment, and is it is a checkbox, either yes or no. If it’s not, it’s an N. If it is, it’s a capital Y. We have at least one pledge payment here. Yeah, we have one for him. And if we go over and edit it, we can see that field. I would be surprised if pledge payment is hidden. It is just there, and if this was well, this one happened to be check, but whether it was manual or automatic, pledge payment just gets checked off. This is a checkbox, but it is. I’m clicking it right now. I can’t toggle it. That is just what it is. We could use this field to easily find all of our gifts that were created in a certain way. We could certainly use the type of gift. There are some generic online options that are in here. We could also focus on the credit cards more likely to give if we have electronic options, and if we scroll down to the very bottom, we can see that created by fields that I was mentioning earlier, here, this would be created by a person. This is definitely a user ID. If it had come online, it would have the name of the online portal that was used to make that gift, but let’s, let’s make a couple. Simple ones, pledge payments. If we just want to find all gifts that are like this one, a pledge payment, we can do that.

Now we’re going to go into the report center here in a minute, but first I’m going to go into the blue ribbon at the top settings, and we’re going to go down to filters the ever-present mechanism of donor perfect all over the place for any type of list making, it does have its own home and the settings drop down, so I can make some of these monthly giving filters before I bring them into the reports that actually show me the data as always reporting on donor perfect is two halves, the selection filter is just my instructions for what I want to see, and I made a couple yesterday. Let’s make a new one where I always breaks down into four steps. Step one is to pick where my field of interest lives. Let’s do one for the pledge payment field, which is universal. Everybody has the pledge payment field, as long as we have the pledges. This will be a reliable way to find those recurring in box number one, we’ll select where our field of instruction lives. Pledge payment lives on the gift screen, and then in box number two, we have some popular ones: campaign frequency, we can maybe use to find specific monthly frequencies over the annuals or quarterlies. Here’s that record type that I was talking about earlier. Record type shows the difference between gifts and pledges and soft credits, even another gift screen entity, but yeah, even solicitation is there, the thank you code, the type of gift, not pledge payment, because it’s not one of the favorite fields at the top of box two. I’m going to have to click on all fields where it is now throwing at me all of these fields. I don’t care about them. We started off on our example. I know Roberta is going to show up, and I know that it’s this checkbox that’s going to make him applicable. Ignore all those. We can start typing. Let’s find our pledge payment option, where you’ll notice box three is going to shrink itself down as soon as I select this checkbox for dates and amounts and drop downs, plenty of options we need to analyze those, but if it’s a checkbox, we’re just looking for yes or no, and for pledge payment, I would want it to be yes, and I’ll give it a name, so I don’t have to make it again, we’ll find this again in a few minutes, and I’ll put it in my folder. Now that’s one filter I could use in my list of instructions here. Pledge payment is yes is one that I can continue to use. Yesterday I made one for the pledges itself, where automatic processing is set to yes, and as another example, if you have monthly giving in, oh, and this one is an outlier. This one actually was not coded correctly. This one should have monthly giving on it. We do definitely have a monthly giving campaign, monthly giving program that could be another selection filter. I happen to pick an example that is an outlier, but we should see in the reports. I might be wrong about this. We’ll see in the reports in a little bit. Roberto might be showing the truth here, but let’s see on the gift screen this time we’re going to the campaign field, and as a drop down, it already has the correct option selected. If I want just one, which I do in campaign, I want it equal to monthly given program, do

Okay, and these exist entirely separately from the second half of finding information, which is the report center. Here with many different options in it, I’ll be showing you a handful of more options that you can add to your list of tools for reporting on campaign success, starting off with one that is highly customizable to cross tabulation, and then getting into some other ones that are niche, we do a lot on reports, but we don’t talk about some of these very often. Right now, from the white ribbon at the top, I’ve gone to reports and report center, which is where we’re at now, and now I’m going to find the cross tabulation report, if memory serves, I have it as a favoriteed report with a yellow star. I believe you do too. Where we have a familiar looking sidebar? Yeah, this fiscal year is probably a good comparison, and now I’m kind of curious, because Roberto, that was definitely a pledge payment, he had a pledge that was the payment, it was checked off, it was connected, and I know I’ve seen that other campaign used, I’d be curious if I put a selection filter here, because we need instructions. I could just have the date on there, but if I want to find the monthly gifts or the recurring, at least, let us put on my last selection filter, which I love our selection filters. I like that we can add folders and we can save them for later. What I find a little frustrating is now that I’m back here, I just added two sets of instructions, two sets of selection filters. They are in this folder, but the folder is always listed alphanumerically, which isn’t too helpful, I don’t think so. Instead, what I usually do is click on the id button. All of these filters have ids, and if you click it twice, the biggest filter id will be your newest one, and then there it is, pledge payment equals yes, and you know, not as concerned with the general ledger right now, um, you know, like Roberto here, did we have, did we have a lot of annual campaigns that were unsolicited that ended up in monthly, that’s a very valid, reasonable thing to happen. We might not be campaigning for monthly donations. This could genuinely be unsolicited. General Ledger, and my system isn’t necessarily going to show me that. So, let’s select the campaign field. This dropdown has all the fields on the main and bio and gift and pledge screens, lot of different ways we could run this, but let’s do campaign and solicitations where pledge payment is equal to yes, and those are the instructions that are visible to me. That date range and the checkbox is good to go. Always scroll down, make sure that you or the other person using this prior did not have any other instructions down here that could be getting in the way, and that we run report and Oh, we’re having a, we’re having a repeat of yesterday. That’s fun. Let’s try that one again, do ah, okay, different selection filter. When I reset it, it reset everything. So, let me try again. All I want to do is switch to look at the campaign and There we go, but my, my selection filter is looking for the campaign, which is good. It is good to see that along the top, the campaign that I have narrowed it down to is just being used in conjunction with, ah, well, not just monthly giving our spring appeal did have one recurring that made it in there, but let’s see what that other selection filter. There we go. Oh, we might have, yeah, maybe some inconsistencies, definitely annual appeal, a little support, a little surprise to see bequests and to see grants come up in here, but I didn’t give as thorough of a caveat as I did yesterday. The webinar system is difficult to maintain, to have this get even close to be representative of real giving information is difficult. We had somebody from the programming team help us. This thing, you know, automatically resets itself. We do an okay job, but that was a do as I say, not as I do. Do we have grants? Yeah, you know, we might have grants that are a fixed commitment over several years. Yeah, absolutely.

Actually, as independent of monthly giving, if we are working with a foundation, that large amount of money might be dispersed over a period of time. So that’s actually not too unusual, I don’t think, and that’s cross tabulation. Pick two fields, narrow it down. How are they being used? This next one is not favorited, I don’t believe for anybody. It’s going to be in the financial reports, and it’s called income analysis with gift splits, and there’s an option for a calendar comparison or a fiscal comparison, where with this one, what we’re looking to do is track progress. Right now we have the calendar option selected, and if the ending date is today for today for 920 26 what this one is going to do is compare how well this calendar year we’re doing, January 120 26 up until today compared to the last year, and it’s going to do that in by splitting them into different ranges. Let’s put back on our campaign, so we can exclude the grants and other ongoing commitments. Campaign equals monthly giving, and in a report like this, we absolutely have to use a selection filter, no sidebar for us. We do have an ending date that does act as a filter, as does this drop down. What field we want to segment by, and here we have general ledger in our output, instead of printing Excel or Word screen, we’ll show it in DonorPerfect, so, and this is a breakdown of how all of our different monthly giving funds are doing. We might have monthly giving for scholarship, other restricted efforts, unrestricted, maybe a bigger bucket, trying to keep the lights on. Current April amount for unrestricted coming up with a big zero for this year for all of these ranges. We didn’t have that campaign shown in this general ledger this year, at least up until April, which is not the same last year, so we did have a drop from last year for those groups. Annual fund, though, had a had an increase, had nothing for annual fund last year, but this year we’re stepping in the right direction, and gosh, hard to look at such sparse data. Income analysis, I wish this report would come up more. Or without a selection filter, if we are just looking at the big picture, very quickly we can see trends, but highly dependent on how we’re doing the data entry, like we’re seeing a breakdown by fund here. I actually think if you’re using campaign as an overarching category to describe all monthly giving, that if we run income analysis by campaign, that I think that would probably be the easiest to look at to see those trends, because now we’re comparing our annual campaign and any other big picture efforts like a new building campaign or a renovation campaign? We can see that this year we’re down 80% compared to how well we were doing this time last year, and that is income analysis, two different options for that one, income analysis by calendar or for fiscal. This next one is favorited. It’s called comprehensive donor revenue analysis. We bring this one up fairly often. This one does have restrictions on our selection filters. We have to use a selection filter if we do just want to narrow it down to our monthly giving efforts. I’ll leave it as an ending date of today, but my monthly qualities are not a donor filter. The more complex ones, they restrict the type of filters you could use, and a donor filter, I don’t know why they label it like that. A donor filter is using a screen from the main field, from the main field from the main screen area, the donor type organization, what state, what province, what flags do they have? If the main screen or the bio, a dense report like this will refer to that criteria as a donor filter, but we’re using gift information, so we want to switch it over to a gift filter, and I’m going to pull back in monthly giving. We shouldn’t have as much missing data, because this one looks at three years.

let’s get our campaign back on, and then for output we will screen, and right off the bat, seeing a lot of red over to the right, a lot of the times I recommend running this one without a filter, because it’ll give you your overall success for the current year for everything here. Though the numbers we’re seeing are just in regards to that one campaign, so for current year my ending date was april 9, so my current year column will be looking at the last 365 days, and in the last 365 days we had 15 gifts that had that campaign. They are in the active column. Last year there were 24 and of those 24 from last year in the retain section we can see that we have retained only seven, which is, oh, which is why it pang it hurts me to do this webinar a little bit, just because this is not indicative of real donor retention when they’re monthly 29% that is below average of even, you know, non monthly donors. Oh yeah, Uma, that’s a good question. Uma will, I’ll show you those other reports, but you’re going to go to, well, Uma, tell me this, uh, if you go to tasks and monthly giving, that’s all I had to say about the comprehensive report, reactivated new monthly donors, perhaps, and definitely shows, uh, shows trends, but, uh, but Uma, and anybody else that is process. Giving through donor perfect underneath tasks and monthly giving, and this is for any pledge, not just the monthly ones, it could be annual or quarterly. We have automatic processing on, and then beneath that we see all the different batches, so yesterday on the eighth, another one on the fifth, and let me from here, recent batches, and if you’re following along, you would want to do this too. You would then want to go to view all batches, because right away we’ve, we’ve had successful ones, nothing has failed in this system yet, but if I click on view all batches. Let’s scroll, and we’re looking at this failed column here. We’re looking at the failed column, and it’s all zero. That’s what we want to see. And then, oh, it was this 1215 2025 Let’s see, there was two that day, but one failed. We click on that, 770 yep, one was a success, one was a failure, and then from there we can get the person’s profile information, and well, really this this specific example, they deleted the pledge, which is my heart’s broken, because no, no, if something went wrong, we don’t delete the pledge, you don’t ever delete the pledge. This was a mistake. This person should still have a pledge here, even though it failed, and what we would want to do is, well, we would take this information, reach out to support if it’s some gibberish like this. If it spits out a code, talk to support, they’ll translate for you. More often than not, it’ll be English bank declined, invalid card number is insufficient fund, card close, that kind of thing, and you would reach out to the person and see if they have a new payment method. You could then put that new payment method on there, and then update it over in the accounts. And really, what we want to be doing in here, though. Absolutely, we can run reports to find them, but what we should be doing is at the bottom of the square. If we go to edit settings, we should have at least one email here, and you can have more than one, just separated by a comma and a space, and then the successes and the failures, you’ll be notified about right away, because even though not entirely real, this pattern is true, you will see this too, that it will try once we have a day to intervene tomorrow morning, 5am eastern, it’ll try again, and if we don’t have a working payment method, it just, it just stops, and really, with this one that I’ve found, we should have never deleted that pledge. Don’t ever delete a pledge. We should have really stopped it and started a new one for them, probably after we talked to them.

Obviously, you’re not doing anything without anybody’s permission, and that’s underneath tasks, tasks, and monthly giving everything else in the report center, taking a trip down into the other report, where we’re going to look at what I think is the best report in the other reports folder, the gift pie chart The gift pie chart fills in the gap of donor perfect having a medium-ish amount of charts, I think. Could use a few more, but gift pie chart, that’s all this thing does, is give us charts. But let’s select, let’s do solicitation. Actually, solicitation for, you know, what if I remove this selection filter, and I have a pie chart that is showing me a breakdown of solicitations, and if my monthly giving efforts have a specific monthly giving code, I should be seeing how well monthly giving stacks up to the other programs. Oh, maybe not as big of a slice as I would want. Oh, yeah, that’s looking like it all falls into the other category. Really, probably should put a filter on there, I. And now let’s see, yeah, that is, that is a pretty big date range. Let’s narrow this a little bit. Let’s do, say, 2024 because super specific example, we have different monthly giving tags for different years, but when we narrow the range down of time, so I’m now looking at 2024 through 2026 just for that one campaign. If I zoom in here, oh gosh, why is that not making it clear? Monthly giving on the right, we have a breakdown of different years, and even though the date range is 2024 to 2026 in 2024 22% is still monthly giving from 2021 that means that somebody in 2021 started a recurring transaction, they subscribed their goodwill to your organization, and we’re still seeing that money come up years later. This is a very real pattern that you would see with this specific coding convention, and what I like about it is this report could literally be for anything. Maybe we want to see how our monthly giving program is breaking down by state. Pennsylvania, that’s where a lot of us live. Sure, they’re in the lead, Indiana, second place, so on and so forth. Or maybe we want to see.. I would, I would be surprised and very happy to see a non-individual as a, as a monthly donor. If we have, like, local businesses, usually it’s the foundations that have those ongoing commitments, and of course, anytime we have a report that does a grouping, if we have bad data entry, like an empty donor type, that’s going to be highlighted as well, and now all of these reports that I’ve shown so far, so far, all of those you could be reporting on monthly giving success if you did not have payment processing with us, because that would just require you to have a coding system, a campaign, a solicitation, maybe a general ledger. It’s up to you how you’re going to code that, but if it is automatic, there is an automatic report that I can’t remember if my webinar system will show us anything. Let’s see, for any of you that have automatic people, if monthly giving is turned on, this next report will show you how well you’re doing. White ribbon at the top, the pie chart icon for reports, and instead of the report center, whereas we’re where we almost always go, we’re going to go to dashboard instead, three different flavors to the dashboard, the my dashboard, the organization dashboard, and then the monthly giving dashboard, which fingers crossed, fake database, fake transactions, fake monthly giving dashboard. There it is, there it is. But something with our automations is only showing data from March. If you’ve been doing this for years, you’ll have those data points right here. your conversion rates retention – we can’t click into any of these, but it does supplement some of the other reports that we were looking at before, and earlier I was talking about some resources, talked about it earlier this week, as Marelda has it already.

Let me show you all how we can get to this monthly given calculator, I As soon as I get rid of my laser pointer, okay, here we go, here we go, now they’re going to want a brief quick survey, which, uh honestly, it’ll take anything you put anything in there, it’ll give you the file. Here’s the link, which I did not send to everyone. Here’s the link again. There we go. So that, that is the link that will take you here to the hub for the Success Kit, and then. In, if you do put in your real email, it will email you a copy of all this, even though it’s going to present it to you in a moment here, and conceivably add you onto a marketing list as well. Usually, how these work, but good resource behind it, espataro@donorperfect.com I am. Hey, I work here software, that’s our company role. I do it all, and I’m already a Donor Perfect client. And then download it, is going to get emailed, but give it a few moments, I Hey there, we go. So, an email’s on the way, or we can click here. Where. hey, let’s see this. Sometimes I was Esmeralda likes it, super helpful, lots to look through. There’s a lot in here. Oh, good, yeah, great. Glad that you like it. And if you don’t want to, I’m curious. I just put a link into the chat, can somebody click on that and see if it opens up to this PDF that I’m looking at, because this is directly the PDF. It would be cool if I could just send you the PDF without the marketing thing, because if that link works, hey, it works cool. So you don’t need to sign a, you don’t need to fill that thing out. There it is. Follow, and then, and then download from there. So, once it opens up, probably in your browser, at the very top, you can download, and this is made by our marketing team, and all of our marketers were plucked from your world. They were all fundraising executive directors and developers and database coordinators, and yeah, they market our product for financial gain, admittedly, but there’s so many resources. Also, the blog, if you go to help the blog, they’re really on top of that. There’s a lot of industry information in there, and it’s a way to be social with each other too. What’s what’s everybody got going on there? And a lot of stuff we talked about. Who’s in charge of it, who’s in charge of our program, whatever, what are our best practices. And here is the monthly giving calculator that I was talking about earlier. You can click on that link, it will redirect, and then it’s not going to let you edit it, so we’re going to go to file at the top, we’re going to go to make a copy, and there we go, if we’re looking for our average amounts and our number of active donors with our efforts, we can track what our monthly revenue could be for the future, where we are getting these average monthly amounts, perhaps from the report we ran yesterday in the report center, going to be in the financial reports, the gift range, the gift range report. If we run the gift range for average amount, avg underscore amount, and yeah, I have a filter here for just my monthly giving campaign. This will exclude the grants, we can see that our averages are, yeah, 25 to 5025, to 50, not, you know, maybe even between like 10 and 50, we’ll say, and that’s specifically just for monthly giving a higher, a smaller amount for a higher frequency for those people, which compared to the whole, if we were to remove that selection filter and look at the whole data set, where I maybe have like 250 in here, total 216 the average constituent donation actually trends a little bit higher in the 200 to $500 mark, and industry experts say maybe 1/3 I don’t need to be doing. This, I know what 1/3 of 200 is, but, uh, hey, 66 that is a good asking amount, I think, and take that into our aspirational monthly giving calculator, communicating success as we go along, everybody has the option to say thank you. We talked about that yesterday.

Whether or not you have Constant Contact is up to you. It’s free. You could be using Mailchimp. You just get an Excel file out of the database and give it to Mailchimp. It’s more work, but that’s an option. So, first first, no paywall behind the email templates. Not everybody is thanking the recurring donors, though. Big caveat behind that. If we go to mailings in the white ribbon at the top, mailings and email templates, we have all of our different ways to say thank you. Some people, if you’re in Canada, you’re probably doing a consolidated for your recurring at the end of the year. In the US, I would say most don’t, most don’t, but all communities are a little bit different. I would just say anecdotally, my friends that they give the wildlife sanctuaries, or especially the ones that have an animal adoption agency, they want to see what’s going on every single month, at least my one friend does, and if that’s, if that’s you, you might benefit from mailings, email templates, and just coming up with an email template that speaks to that recurring purpose with a heavy reminder to update it at the first of the month, because it’s really boring to see the same thing every single month, and what are they doing with our money if we’re not getting any new updates? There also underneath mailings is constant contact email and if you are using Constant Contact underneath list management, you can have your different lists. We have one already down here for all of our monthly givers. Who has Marelda at your last job? You like to thank monthly donors, but some disregarded you, unless the donor requested not to be thanked monthly. I thought it was a good touch point. That’s always been my thought. Honestly, that’s been my thought, and that is what some of the industry experts that have come through our virtual halls are also saying specifically Erica Wazdorp and our friends at the, oh gosh, we work with the nonprofit center at Jefferson University in Philly, and Allison Tremarco, who is a a consultant expert extraordinaire? She also champions that as well, and a lot of the times when I’ve said that, some people chime in to say, oh, my people don’t really bother. I would encourage it, let them. Yeah, great minds do think alike. I’m on Team Esmeralda. Let’s, let’s thank people, and then if they tell you they don’t, they don’t, they don’t want to be notified about this, then by all means, it’s, it’s easy enough to do. You make the email template, and you can still have their pledge if they just don’t want to get it automatically, you would have the pledges preference be do not acknowledge. Do acknowledge constant contact, though. Constant contact also, we have a column here for selection filters. If we are going to be making a dynamic list that updates every single night. It is going to need a selection filter to give it instructions. Where this time I have to be careful here with which specific filter you’re using. Yesterday I made one that was only looking for automatic processing, so if automatic processing is set to yes, they can be included on this. Use a selection filter, and then takes a few moments. It sends all of their information over to Constant Contact, where you could then send out that well-designed email, and yeah, Esmeralda, I’m wondering if you.. this is.. oh, this is.. we’re almost done here. I appreciate you sharing. In your thought at your last job about how thanking monthly donors was a help, but I’m wondering if there’s anybody else here that had anything else that they’d like to share, anything that they were successful with, any trials, tribulations, anything you tried and didn’t work. Did you know why it didn’t work?

I struggling for an anecdote, except for one that I said yesterday about a client that lost a lot of her monthly givers, still haven’t come up with what the exact solution is yet, but did have a client recently that lost when there was a fracture in the nonprofit, and they lost her environmental side of the nonprofit, lost all the child program, so that was a, that was a struggle for her, but I definitely see other nonprofits that do have some type of family or child centric mindsets that those are a little bit more likely to get included, Uma, including stats and impact of their contribution and acknowledgement letters, makes difference. I like that. At even more reason to send out that thank you letter. They’re donating every single month, and yeah, it feels a little dishonest when we’re not thanking them. I have heard at least one person say if we’re not sending them a receipt, hey, they might forget about us, like, like that stamp subscription you got 18 months ago and forgot about Hasmerelda. We tried to do a monthly alumni donor program, and that was not very successful. Seems young alumni are not accustomed to giving in general, but I guess it was a good way to try to get them used to do it. Yeah, younger. Yeah, I’m not sure I’ve seen much data on Gen Z or Gen Alpha, and the ways that they give. I’ve, I’ve, for alumni giving programs, the most success I’ve heard of is if you have, like, if you’re at a high school, or maybe even younger, if you have, like, some volunteer kids to do the phone calls, it’s good for them, keeps them out of trouble. A harmless ask. Hey, here’s one of the bright young minds that you’ve helped out in the past, by young ones, the ones that were fresh out of high school, yeah, yeah, there’s a, there’s a lot to be said about that, that I’m drawing a, drawing a blank on, because I, well, at least for me, I was, I was already volunteering when I was a kid, and yeah, fresh out of high school, not as, not as much to give monetarily, I do believe they are more likely to give their labor, for sure. They don’t have the money, they’ll give you their backs, and the strength that they have. Do you have a different approach for communicating with monthly donors who give through DP forms versus those who give through workplace giving. Oh gosh, different approach. I love this question. I love this question, because I talk about, oh my gosh, I had not even included the employee monthly giving programs. I will say anecdotally that, and I’d love to hear from the audience, how everybody else is doing it, but they will. So, payroll comes in once or twice a month, and we add that as a direct donation, or maybe a soft credit if it’s coming from another organization, if they’re not your employees, if they’re your employees, you just give them gifts. In either sense, that isn’t that is another case where I see a lot of people not sending them acknowledgments for it, and that is especially true if the workplace giving is being recorded as a soft credit, the soft credit bulk acknowledgement process, and donor perfect could use some room for improvement. Another reason. And that they won’t do it is just because it’s smaller amounts, often if it’s payroll deductions, but those clients of mine are also more likely to have a separate year end tax letter, everybody else that’s donating throughout the year gets the one tax letter, but for employee employee donors they would have a different template at the end of the year, so they’re not getting individual emails and letters, but are at the end of the year. Oh, I like that. Esmeralda, having that as a part of your annual report doesn’t have to be quarterly, but if we are reviewing it on a regular basis, if something is broken, we want to know to stop no sunk cost fallacies. What’s not working here? It was a great idea to try to reengage our alumni, but yeah, this just brings up more questions. What is it about this group of people that are less likely to give monetarily or less likely to give on a recurring basis?

And that’s that is, I can only late 30s, I’m not young anymore, I got to stop thinking like that. Adjust your ask amounts, run that gift range report occasionally. If we’re successful, those averages are going to go up. Identify upgrade opportunities and update your message on a regular basis. So, to recap, have a way to identify monthly giving donors. If you’re not paying attention to those drop downs, there are ways for you to code them with our coded fields, maybe a solicitation, the thank you letter. Definitely, we might have a monthly giving thank you code, and a handful of reports all listed in the handout that would have been emailed, and it seems like everybody got a hold of the monthly giving guide, that’s a great resource, and the monthly giving calculator within it. And thank you, everybody. This has been measuring reporting and communicating monthly giving success. I have been Sean Patero, and you have been a great audience, as always. Thank you for being here this week and being engaged. I love talking to people and helping everybody out. Nancy, you’re welcome. Thanks for stopping by, appreciate it. Oh, thank you, Uma, and thank you, Osmorelda. Oh, gonna miss you too. And hey, see you all next week. It will be somebody else, but we have fun. 1pm Eastern Standard Time. Stop by, hang out, ask some questions. But take care, everybody. Enjoy the rest of your week.

Bye.