Segmentation That Feels Good: Moving Beyond Dollars to Donor Alignment

Speaker 1 0:10
Hello, and welcome, everyone. Hello, my name is Sean Botero. I am a training specialist here at DonorPerfect. Welcome to Mallory’s session segmentation that feels good, moving beyond dollars to donor alignment, and we already have a lot of Mallory fans that are in Read More

Speaker 1 0:10
Hello, and welcome, everyone. Hello, my name is Sean Botero. I am a training specialist here at DonorPerfect. Welcome to Mallory’s session segmentation that feels good, moving beyond dollars to donor alignment, and we already have a lot of Mallory fans that are in the audience, but if you’re not familiar, Mallory Erickson is the founder and CEO of Practivated, and executive coach and fundraising consultant, and host of the What the Fundraising podcast. She is dedicated to transforming the nonprofit sector by helping fundraisers move beyond transactional approaches to build lasting mission-aligned partnerships at Proctivated, which Mallory founded in 2024 she continues to drive innovation in fundraising through technology coaching and science-backed strategies. If you are ready to fundraise with confidence and alignment, Mallory’s work is for you. A couple quick housekeeping items: please submit your questions in the Q&A tab, that so we can address them during the session. And all sessions are being recorded and will be available on the DonorPerfect website after the conference. Help me in welcoming Mallory Erickson. Take it away, Mallory.

Speaker 2 1:23
Thank you, thank you so much, Sean. And thank you so much to everybody in the chat. You guys, I’m getting a little like emotional. I’m so happy to be with all of you and with the Donor Perfect team. This is one of my very, very, very favorite weeks of the year, favorite conference. So I just love, I love spending this time with you. I’m so grateful for the DonorPerfect team for bringing us all together, and I’m really excited to talk about something pretty new this year at the conference, new to me in terms of training at the conference. So we’re going to be talking about segmentation that feels good, which sort of feels like it’s bringing all the different parts of my life and my work together, from the technology to building deeper human connections, and thank you, thank you for all the love and the shout out in the comments. I’m sorry for those of you who do know me, you’re gonna have to sit through my little intro again, but for those of you who I haven’t met before, I want to introduce myself and give you a little background on me. Also, everyone, you’re all gonna have to bear with me a little bit, because allergies are bananas over here at the moment, so I have my big water bottle and my throat lozenges, but just stick with me if I get, if I lose my voice suddenly. So, tell me in the chat, which of you identify as an accidental fundraiser, because I became an accidental fundraiser as actually first a managing director, and then a nonprofit executive director. If this was you, you can put a little y in the chat, or yes, me. I’m already seeing those things come through. Yes, so this was 100% me, and I had all these dreams and ideas of what this was going to look like. I was going to be this empowered and confident leader. I was going to have donors coming to me. I think the kids these days call this DeLulu, but I was.. it was the opposite. It was a constant hustle, and I showed this slide to show I call this my impact report fake phase, where I felt this pressure to put up this appearance everywhere, like I had it all together, but the reality was totally different. I was working 12 to 14 hour days, I was. I developed chronic pain. I was sacrificing so many of my personal relationships. I ended up completely burning out, and so I gave up, which actually meant that I switched organizations, thinking that things would be really different somewhere else, but the same exact pattern happened again, and I remember sitting at my computer one day, thinking, How on earth can I do this? Like, a year from now, I cannot be sitting here clicking refresh on my emails, waiting for a donor to get back to me. So I ended up going down this research rabbit hole, testing all these different fundraising strategies. I got executive coach certified, I got trained in habit and behavior design, and design thinking, and all of those frameworks came together and completely changed the way that I fundraised, and not only did it have big financial implications, I moved an organization from a million to 3.8 million pretty quickly, but I also started to feel differently as a fundraiser, and that was sort of the initial, like, aha behind the body of work that I started in 2020 where the Power Partners formula was born, which brought together all these different frameworks to figure out how can we raise more and feel better doing it. One of the core underlying pieces to all of this is understanding the relationship between what we do and how donors respond, so donor behavior. Also, you guys, hi Krista, hi everybody. I, the chat, going bananas is my favorite thing in the entire world, but please don’t be offended if I can’t chime in on everything, because I’ve got so much I want to go over with you today. Okay, so one of the. Underpinning pieces of donor behavior, or one of the underpinning pieces of my work is understanding that donor behavior is a response behavior.

Speaker 2 5:09
All behavior is actually a response behavior, and it’s a response to a prompt, or the lack of prompt that happens before it, and the driver of the primary prompts for donor behavior is fundraiser behavior, so the primary drivers of donor behavior is what we do as fundraisers, and I don’t say that to layer on a bunch more pressure or stress or anything like that, but to help you understand actually the influence that you have on donor behavior, and to make sure that you understand that one of the primary drivers of your behavior as a fundraiser is what’s happening inside your brain and body, whether or not you feel confident to take an action, whether or not you have clarity on how to roll out those next steps, the thoughts and the beliefs and the emotions that you’re experiencing as a fundraiser is what directly drives your behavior, or maybe your paralysis in certain cases when stress is involved, and that is the biggest indicator of how a donor is going to respond. Okay, this is an important sort of theme to keep in mind as we talk about segmentation, because I think a lot of times in this sector, I remember this when I was fundraising, feeling like donor behavior was kind of happening to me, right? There was a little like, what comes first, the chicken or the egg, or I would say things like, our donors love to give at the end of the year, or our donors hate text messages, because one time this donor named Janet told me that she hated text messages, and so I decided all of our donors hated text messages. Okay, we have these ways that we talk about this, right? Our donors like this, our donors don’t like this, x, y, and z, but a lot of times those are coming from interpretations or assumptions, and then we create these self-fulfilling prophecies because we are, we are, believe or are acting like the donor behavior is happening to us. I do not even think that we know that our donors like to give at the end of the year. We ask them at the end of the year. We ask our donors so much more at the end of the year. We invite them to give in so many more ways at the end of the year, and they respond to those invitations, and the data really, really double clicks on this, because we have watched as giving days have started to show up at other times of year, donor behavior has followed when we as an organization change when we’re asking when we’re inviting people to participate, donor behavior changes with us. Okay? Are you still with me? I told you I couldn’t keep up on the chat, and then y’all stop chatting. I want you to keep chatting with each other, keep chiming in. I just don’t want you to be offended if I can’t call out every response, because I loved how fast that was moving. So, give me a why again if you are with me, okay? Does this make sense? Anything coming up for you as you’re hearing this, okay? I really want you to be able to understand the importance of embodying this role as a fundraiser, because as we’re talking about segmentation, say what is segmentation really about? Okay, before we dive into like the nitty gritty of like what, what is like segmentation, what’s on what list, or anything like that? We actually need to wind this back. Okay, because the purpose is not segmentation from a technical perspective. Okay, we need to talk about what makes human tick. Now, humans tick. Now, I understand that segmentation does have a technical aspect. That’s why you have amazing partners like DonorPerfect who can help you with the technical aspect of segmentation, but we want to talk about the point, like what is the point. Let’s not lose the plot here. Okay, so before we talk about segmentation, we need to talk about what makes humans tick, okay? And I want to talk about belonging. This is a word that gets thrown around all the time, around how important belonging is, and how important community is, but I want to make, I want to really make this clear in a scientific way. Okay, belonging is everything, but it’s not a fluffy word.

Speaker 2 9:11
Actually, when we look at a hierarchy of needs, some researchers even argue that belonging is even more fundamental than food and water, because humans actually freak out the fastest when they lose their sense of identity and being seen and belonging much faster than they freak out without food or water, and there are some, there are some scientific studies that I think you know these days are not actually even ethical, and it’s kind of sad to watch, but there were some studies done many years ago with moms and their babies, and the moms were engaging the babies in conversation. You see, the babies kind of cooing back and forth, lighting up, smiling. The moms really interactive with the baby, and then all of a sudden they have the mom kind of go cold, stop showing emotion, stop engaging with. Baby, and the baby is instantly losing their sense of belonging. Does she see me? Does she know I’m here? Do I belong? Am I loved? And the baby starts crying. The baby starts freaking out immediately. Immediately, that is how fast we are rocked when we don’t feel our sense of belonging, right? This is why ghosting is so dysregulating for us, right? This is like that’s why when we go on a date and then we don’t hear from the person, it throws us off immediately, right? Because we’re like, do you see me, am I here, do you, Matt, do I matter, am I lovable? Right, all these core deep components of who we are and what matters as humans, that’s what belonging is really about. Yes, all the babies are okay. It was only a minute to you guys, I promise. It still broke my heart too, but I think it’s really important to recognize just how important it is and how much it makes sense when we lose that feeling of belonging that that pulls us quickly out of connection. Also, thank you so much for sharing that, Aiden, in the, in the chat. I’m just seeing that. Okay, wait, I think that that I click too many times. So donors don’t give right because of $1 amount, even even saying something like $29 buys this, or you know, $100 can do this, that is not why your donors are giving underneath all of that, they are giving because of who they are and who they want to be, right? Identity, belonging, and becoming. Who am I? Who do I want to be, right? Those are the questions that drive every decision that we make. What people do I want to be with? Do I belong here? Will I be included? Do people like me do things like this, which is a Seth Godin quote that I mentioned all the time. Do people like me do things like this? And then becoming right, it’s not a purchase, it’s not a.. it’s not I do something that I have something. It’s.. it’s an act of becoming someone, right. And so when we treat giving like a transaction, when we see, when we treat segmentation rooted in those transactional mechanisms, we are sticking people in categories that become finite and past tense, and we don’t even give space and air an opportunity for identity, belonging, and becoming okay? Are you with me? Is this making.. are you with me? Is this making sense? A lot of times, as I was just sharing, segmentation kind of goes wrong in two different camps. Okay, there’s two traps. And before I say this, I want to say something a little bit of a higher level. People will always ask me questions like, what is the best way to do x, and my, the very first thing that I say when somebody says, tells me that is, Tell me a little bit about your organization. How many donors do you have? What’s your staff capacity like? How many fundraisers do you have? X, Y, and Z. What donor database are you using? Because there is no point in learning what is the best way to segment without taking those things into consideration, because if you are a one person team on without a CRM, okay, my answer to your best way to segment is quite different than a 25 person team using DonorPerfect, right, because different technical capabilities, different human capacity opportunities.

Speaker 2 13:47
There is no one best way to do everything, and it always has to take into account your capacity. Okay, your capacity and your organization’s capacity to do the action. So this is why segmentation goes wrong in two different ways. Okay, you might say, “Oh my gosh, I’ve never even heard of over segmenting. However, if you are like summer and me, myself, and I over in your organization, you probably have felt what oversegmentation can do to you, right? If you are a one person team with a spreadsheet and you are trying to create 50 segments, each with 12 people, to give the most personalized attention possible to these 50 different groups, like that would break my actual brain, like I would not be able to do that right, so segmentation can actually go wrong in these two different ways, too many micro segments, it can dilute your message, you’re not even getting kind of like core at those underlying principles of belonging and identity, and becoming the personalization is becoming performative at that point, because if you have this many segments, you might as well just individually email people and actually personalize something. It is burning you and your staff out, and it’s, it’s scattering your results, not actually and. Amplifying the core language. Okay, so over segmenting is absolutely a trap. Now, under segmenting is the polar opposite of that, right? That’s when we are sending everybody the exact same email. We are like, okay, we just had an event, I have 600 people in my database, there were 50 people at the event, but I have no way to just email those 50 people, and so 600 people are going to get an email that says, whether or not you came to the event, we want to thank you. Okay? Right. We see, we see maybe the issue there with that, like under segmenting, or we feel so nervous to do to insert a first name that we’re saying dear friend to an entire email list. When people, when an organization that I barely know writes me and says, dear friend, I’m like, it makes me feel like, like I would rather it recognize me for the role I actually, or the relationship I actually have with that organization, right? Again, it feels sort of performative, and the other way we can under segment is the same ask, regardless of a relationship. There’s a lot of science, and I’ve done other webinars for DonorPerfect about this over the years, around how folks who are new to your organization, they want to hear about how far along you are in a campaign. If they haven’t given to a campaign yet, and they are new to your organization, maybe they’ve given one time, you really don’t have that relationship with them yet, and you’re entering a campaign, you want to tell them how many people have already participated, how much you’ve already raised. Now, your long-term supporters, they want to hear how much is left to your goal. You’re like ride or dies, people who’ve been supporting you for multiple years, they want an email that says we only have 4000 more to go to hit our goal of blank and be able to do x right, so under segmenting means that we means that we miss a lot of pieces in, we miss a lot of opportunities to invite people in that’s in a relationship to our organization, there are implications. Thank you, Joy. I’m going to try really hard. I get very excited. So one of the things that I want to make clear here is that this isn’t just kind of like a nice to have, this has actual implications for what happens in the receiving person’s brain. Okay, so if we get a generic blast that says dear friend, right, the brain can register something like I’m not known here, right? It signals to them an absence of belonging, right.

Speaker 2 17:40
The trust response is pretty neutral, and the likelihood of taking action on an email like that, on an email like that, is actually much, much lower, because in order for us to take action, we need enough motivation to take the action in a moment, we need to be able to take the action in the moment, and we need to be prompted to take the action in the moment, and our motivation is not increased when we are referred to like we’re in a big group of people, and it doesn’t really matter if we’re there or not, right, when things are more aligned and personal, they, the brain registers, and again, look, look at what I put here. Aligned and personal did not mean that you had to know every single way, right? So, Kim, this answers your question. Is dear friend better than no communication? Look, there are other options. Look at what I put in the aligned and personal as one of our event attendees. Okay, so you’re still calling out, you’re not, maybe you can’t do first name for whatever reason, or you don’t have that capability, but you can still speak to one identifier of why that person is getting that message, right, of why one person is getting that message, so it doesn’t have to mean that it is like all or nothing, right, but it’s dear friend is really, really generic, right, it’s really generic, we can at least be more specific to trigger more of that, like trust responses reinforced. We know their last activity with our organization, or we know something about their relationship with our organization, right? There is a recognition that we see them, even if it isn’t dear Jeff, right? We can be more specific than dear friend. Okay, and maybe this isn’t true for any of you, but I remember thinking sometimes when I would hear things about, you know, how fast we had to turn around thank you notes or thank you emails or. Or when I would hear things about folks being, you know, upset when they didn’t get a thank you. Sometimes I would feel, as an executive director and a very small team, sometimes I would feel like, gosh, but don’t they know how hard we’re working to just deliver this mission, and didn’t they just give because they wanted to help us, not because they wanted a thank you, and so it would make me feel a little bit like, you know, that that wanting a thank you or needing a thank you as a donor was like way too donor centric of them, when really we should just be focused on delivering the mission, but over the years I’ve realized something really important here. The thank you test is like a human relationship belonging metric, right? It’s not about like, oh, I’m going to put you on a pedestal for doing what you’re doing, but it’s like I see you, I see what you did. It matters. Thank you for doing that. But I see you, I got it. And something I imagine regularly, if someone dropped off food at your house. Okay, I’ve had two babies, lots of people came by and left food. When somebody.. when somebody.. Oh my god, Aaron, don’t make me laugh doing this. Okay, if somebody came by and dropped food at your house, okay, and then you just never thanked them, right? You would text them, or you never got a thank you. Let’s say you dropped food at somebody’s house and they never wrote back, they never wrote you, you’d text them right, did you get it? Like, was it there? Did I leave it in the right place? Why? Because you’re wondering, did they see it? Did they get it? Though that’s part of that belonging, that’s part of us looking for that recognition that we were seen, that we matter, that they got it, that it connected right. And so this is why it’s so important that we’re building in these this recognition in our segmentation and in our thank yous to validate that sense of belonging to to make it clear that it matters that they were there, right, it matters that they gave, and again, especially as we think about more community-centric fundraising practices, and we think about recognizing donors, regardless of dollar amounts. This type of segmentation is even more important, right?

Speaker 2 22:35
So we’re not only sending personalized emails to certain people who gave over a certain amount, and then everybody else is getting dear gentle reader, although I really do like that suggestion. Okay, now one thing I want to say, in case any of this has felt like a little bit of a gut punch. Okay, I want to say that I 100% have probably sent a million emails that said dear friend at some point in my fundraising career. Okay, you guys can’t, the Bridgerton, it’s going to get me. Okay, so you aren’t always going to get this right, and that is okay. Right, that is okay. One of the things I want to make sure of, especially as you start to grow your capacity for additional segmentation, whether it’s because you’re adopting new tools like DonorPerfect, or your staff team is growing, or you’re learning about this and its importance, and so you’re going to integrate it into your practices more. I just want to normalize that you are not always going to get it right, that is okay. Okay, I remember, like four years ago now, I think the most I’ve ever cried in my business has been email fails. Okay, where I’ve accidentally sent an email where I shouldn’t, where I accidentally sent 12,000 people an email that said hello first name, and you know it didn’t, because I did it incorrectly, and so it didn’t pull people’s first name, and in every single one of those scenarios, the thing that I did was actually take accountability, and the thing I didn’t realize at the time when I started to do it was how much that accountability and that transparency actually built trust between me and my community. I remember the first time I had a first name fail like that, and I wrote everybody, and I said, you know, I think everybody here knows that I don’t hand type 12,000 emails every Tuesday morning, right? But I put your first name at the top of my email because I want it to feel like I’m speaking just to you, because I think then you’ll learn better from me, and so that’s important to me, that you feel like you’re included here, and like you belong. But yes, I use this automation to help me be able to do that, because otherwise I would spend my entire life sending emails, and I wouldn’t even be able to sleep, but I want to take account. Ability for it, and I’m sorry if getting this hello first name made you feel disconnected from me, because that’s the last thing that I really want, right? And so I took accountability, and I thought that this was really interesting, because recently, so yes, it happens, Jeff, it happens to all of us. Okay, and it is okay, and the best thing that we can do in those moments is to take accountability and be human, and and lean into connection, right, connection, which is so much more available to us in our imperfect human-like way of being, okay, and so they mentioned at the beginning that I’m the founder of Practivated, right, which is a fundraiser readiness platform, and we build skills, confidence, and muscle memory through on-demand coaching and practice donor conversations. The reason I’m telling, I’m telling you this is because I recently did a scenario inside Proactivated, where I was trying to get feedback from Tivi, our adorable octopus coach, inside the platform about trust building effectiveness, and I want you to listen to what she says about how I could have built more trust with this donor in this conversation.

Speaker 3 26:18
Hello, Mallory, how can I support you in improving the trust building effectiveness.

Speaker 2 26:23
What’s something I could have done differently that would have improved my score here?

Speaker 3 26:27
Mallory, you were already rebuilding trust well by apologizing sincerely and being transparent about the delay to bump that trust building score even higher. The one small shift that would have strengthened things is to briefly name what the donor can count on from you going forward. Donors relax when they know the future won’t repeat the past. Something as simple as I’m adjusting how I track follow up, so you won’t experience this kind of delay again. It signals accountability, reliability, and protects the relationship from any lingering doubt. If you had added that one sentence, it would have turned the apology into a clear commitment, which is what deepens trust fastest. What commitment or expectation do you feel most comfortable signaling the next time you’re in this situation?

Speaker 2 27:12
Okay, so what I loved. Okay, so what I’ve loved about this is what I loved about this is that, and I’ll give you guys a free – we have a partnership with Donor Perfect, Donor Perfect, and you get resells Practivated, but I’ll give you guys a free trial at the end. This is the tool that I created, and it’s called Practivated, and I’ll show you guys – I’ll give you access to a free trial at the end, or I can, I can drop it in the thing right now, but the thing that I wanted you to hear there was actually, it was not just about apologizing, it was also about hearing what I was going to do differently next time, okay? Right, it was not just like, okay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but that trust was going to be deepened by taking that accountability and telling somebody how I was going to do, do it differently next time to try to, to try to avoid that. The other thing I want to, the other thing I want to double click on, because I saw a comment, I can’t remember who said it, around Elisa, about a donor coming at you for getting a mistake about a mistake in your database. Look, y’all, there are always going to be people who have something to say about everything. Okay, your job is to make change in the world. Unfortunately, doing that and being and pleasing every person is not that compatible. Okay, some people are always going to have something to say, no matter how hard you work or how many times you double check an email, somebody is always going to have something to say. We cannot let, like I did with Janet and the text messages, we cannot let one piece of feedback like that take us away from the whole point and the way that we are building belonging and identity with all of our community members and with our organization, so you don’t want to avoid sometimes I see people avoid segmentation because it’s going to get somebody wrong somewhere. Yes, clean up your data as much as possible, you know, slow progress, data hygiene every day. I’m sure Clay is talking to all of you guys about all these amazing things. Okay, and mistakes happen. We are humans, right? We are humans. Perfectionism is an illusion. Perfect is an illusion. Excellence and perfectionism are not the same thing. And perfectionism is a nervous system freeze response. Perfectionism is designed to hold you back from taking action, it is not actually about being perfect. Excellence and perfectionism are not the same thing, and perfectionism is a protection mechanism. Okay, to hold you back from taking action, to hold you back from any vulnerability that anybody, anywhere, someday won’t be mad at you, right? Because it can’t. The difference between that donor who obliterated you and a lion’s gonna eat you in the woods, but there’s no lion here, y’all. There’s no lion in segmentation, and you can do it. Okay, I’m gonna do right before this I was started. Thank you, Aaron. Okay, I’ll come off on the cow at coming out of my TED talk, and I want to keep talking, though, about connection, because I think that that is the whole point, right. The whole point of all of this is around how we build more connected donor relationships, and what I was just showing you in this clip was how to lean in to deepen connection, even when something doesn’t go perfectly. Believe it or not, I believe that mistakes and conflict actually give us the opportunity to build deeper connection if we do not pull out of it, if we do not pull out of it, and, and hide. Okay, and so I’m gonna show you something. Who is with me? Y’all can judge me later for this, but who is with me in their love is blind obsession? I’m just gonna need some wise to come into the chat with the 872 people who are here right now. Okay, so I have, I have a little, I have a little obsession with love is blind, okay? And my husband is always like, I will not be admitting this, okay. Well, I am on a recorded line, so here’s the thing, though. There’s, here’s why I’m kind of obsessed with this show.

Speaker 2 31:27
So, I think what is so interesting. So, Love is Blind, for those of you who do not know, Love is Blind is where people meet in pods and they talk and get to know each other in pods, never seeing each other, they fall in love without ever having seen each other, and then they get, they like reveal, and they get to me in person, and they like live together. They go on vacation, then they live together for a certain amount of time, and then it, they go and have a wedding, and they say yes or no, and you get to see, like, is love truly blind? Okay. So, thank you very much. You can hire me for your next hosting gig, Nicoche, but the thing that I think is super fascinating about this show is that you get to watch connection be built in a very particular way, and then you watch when people come together in person. One of the things I like to pay attention to is how they come out when the reveal happens? Does it look like they’re really connected? And as you watch them navigate challenges, you can see these moments where somebody will disconnect, right? They’ll disassociate, they’ll sort of, you watch them shut down, and then you watch somebody else trying to open up. You can watch connection be built, and you can watch connection get disconnected. Yes, Jonathan, that was my.. that everybody, all 866 of you, please message “Love is Blind. I’m just kidding, I’m too busy. I have people I love way more than Love is Blind, which is you all. But the thing that’s really interesting about all of this is that it shows how connection can be built, how connection can be ruptured, how connection can be rebuilt, and I think what’s really interesting about this for you all to think in mind and to keep in mind is that the importance of segmentation is to continue to lean into connection to continue to put yourself out there to give other people opportunities to connect with your organization to give other people the opportunity to be truly known, and the piece about accountability and mistakes is to use conflict or mistakes or challenges to not pull us out of connection, but to give us an opportunity to lean in and deeper connection. Yes, summer, that is also true. But I really do, because it’s really clear when you watch it, you can see connection forming, you can see connection breaking down, and it gives really interesting insight, and we have some common disconnects when it comes to the donor fundraiser relationship that I wanted to pull out, because these come through in our segmentation work a lot of the time, and how we try to build deeper donor connections as well, some of the things that create disconnection, those moments of disconnection between us and our donors can be around language when we’re using insider jargon that feels really exclusionary, right. Our words can either open a door or they can close it. Sometimes what creates disconnect is money, right, obsessing over the ask amount or trending too much in a transactional way, or even getting to like $100 does this $250 does this. We’re using money because we think that’s what matters to them, but what matters to them is what the gift means for their identity, for the impact that they want to make, for the outcomes they want to have. We focus on the number they’re. Focus on who they’re becoming, and that can create a disconnect for for us if we are kind of trying to build this relationship with two different nucleus in mind. Another thing that can create a lot of disconnect is ghosting, and I mentioned before, around this is why it’s so important to respond or say thank you, but also sometimes what creates disconnect is our misinterpretation of the ghosting that we experience. Okay, so sometimes we will outreach to a donor, or we will send a segment of piece of information, and then we don’t get a response back that we expected, and we derive meaning from that immediately. They hate us. I did something wrong. I, you know, sent them in. I put them in the wrong segment.

Speaker 2 35:50
Okay, and we actually create self-fulfilling prophecies where we are pulling ourselves out of connection with that donor, because we are attaching an assumption and an interpretation to the fact that y’all people are busy, okay? People are busy. We just made it through May, December. I don’t know about you, but if I have one more school activity and conference and travel all in the same month, like, my again, my head might explode. Okay, so people are busy, they might love your organization, you might be such a core, it might be such a core part of who they are, and because they feel secure in their relationship and connection to you, they don’t think they need to respond to every single thing, because they think you’re in a connected relationship, but then we feel like, oh my god, we got ghosted, and now we pull out of that connection, we pull out of that connection, and we create disconnect. Okay, some of the things I want you to think about when you are building segmentation, okay, is around alignment segmentation. So this comes from my power partners formula, but I want you to think about transactional segmentation versus alignment segmentation, because this is one of the other pieces that can create a lot of disconnect and a lot of that friction, right? When we’re just segmenting by dollars given, like, what does that mean? You know, $250 to me means something totally different than $250 to a multimillionaire, then means something totally different than $250 to my sister, right? People that, what does that number mean? That is a totally transactional way of doing it. Wealth screening, okay, as a primary lens, or giving levels, being defining relationships, all of those things are transactional segmentation measures. Now I know we need these measures to give us certain types of information, but they should be the beginning of our curiosity, not the end of who we say somebody is and where they belong. Okay, those those data points are important, but they are the beginning of a conversation, not the end of our, of our work around who that person is, who they want to be, and who they are going to become. Okay, I’m sorry, Joy. I feel myself getting faster. I’m going to slow down again. Okay, I want you to think about alignment, segmentation in terms of values, identity, motivation patterns, okay, as primary lenses shared purpose that helps define the relationship to way curiosity and listening. Oh, and thank you so much, Angela. I’m sure somebody from DonorPerfect can drop. I have a webinar coming up with in a few weeks with DonorPerfect, so don’t worry, you’re going to see a lot more of me, and they can tell you where to sign up for that as well. Okay, I know Kelly, me too, and my ADHD brain, so I’m just going to go back and forth with my rhythm a little bit. Okay, but I want you to take a screenshot of this as you are looking at your segments. I want you to really be thinking about alignment segmentation versus transactional segmentation. Okay, in connection to this is the fact that your CRM is a belonging tool. Okay, I want you to think about your CRM as a belonging tool, and y’all, I was the person who was so afraid to open my CRM, so if that is you, I want you to put your hand on your heart and say I can do it, I can do it, I can do it. Okay, but I want you to think about your CRM as a belonging tool, and it is step one in the process. Okay, it is the starting point for understanding who someone is. It is the beginning of where your curiosity should be coming from. Wow, I’ve noticed they’ve given every single year on june 14 for the last five years. june 14 is not a day that we actually typically ask or we don’t have a campaign around that. I wonder what’s happening on june 14 for this person that they’ve given every year on that date. And then you know what, you could do, you could ask them, you could send them a little email. Thank you, Kenny.

Speaker 2 40:09
You could send them a little email and ask them, hey, I noticed that every year you give on june 14, and I’m so curious about the meaning of that date for you, it means so much to us that every year that date is your anniversary with us, and I’d love to learn more about that. Okay, we talk a lot about trusting our, about our donors trusting us. Okay, we talk a lot about building trust with our donors, and I am sorry. Yes, Deb, you can ask them. I believe in you. I’m just kidding. But one of the things I don’t think we think about a lot is, do we trust our donors? Okay, we’re like, we want our donors to trust us, but do we trust them? Trust is a felt experience, it is a neurological experience, a psychological experience, a nervous system experience. Okay, in both directions. So we cannot build trust, and we cannot earn trust if we do not also trust our donors. What does this mean? You know, one of the things. Yes, I’m going to go back to the last slide, and then somehow get my brain to go two slides ahead, but I’m going to give you a moment with that. One of the things that happened during Covid that I thought was really special was that we, we like let our guard down a bit, we were more authentic, we were more ourselves, we were more honest, we were more transparent, we were in our homes with our kids on our laps and our dogs barking behind us, and we were just more human, and in that we watched for the first time in many, many, many years donor participation increase, and then me too, Kenny, and then as things started to open up again, we, we buttoned it up back into our little perfectionist bubble, with, by the way, perfectionism, and things looking too perfect makes people trust us less. Okay, things looking too perfect, lots of scientific research here makes people trust us less. We buttoned it all up again, and we lost it. We lost it, and we can go back. Look, we didn’t maintain it. Okay, let’s just be honest about it. We didn’t maintain it, but it doesn’t mean we can’t do it again. We can do it again, and your donors want it. They want to be brought along on the journey, they want to be brought along for the ride. Oftentimes organizations will ask me, you know, Mallory, I, but we, you know, it’s going to take us so long to achieve our mission and our vision. How do we let our donors in when, or how do we say what the impact of their giving is going to be when we can’t show them how their $25 impacts ending, you know, I’m not even going to say something, getting all dogs homed in our community. Okay, operational transparency, okay, that is a way that you can create connection and transparency with your donors in micro bites. So, what do I mean by this? I shared this. Somebody said they were with me live in Stockton last week, so I shared this on stage there too. When you used to call Uber, okay, ride-sharing app Uber, I’m from the Bay Area, there are no taxi cabs here. So, when you used to call Uber, you would have to dial a dial a phone number, and a car would maybe come, maybe not come in 10 minutes. You’d start to get nervous, the car’s not coming, and you call back, “Hey, is that car coming right? And eventually, maybe the car would show up, and the whole time you’re nervous, “Am I going to get there? Is the car going to come right? You don’t trust it, you don’t trust it, you can’t see it, you don’t know it’s really coming. What does Uber do today? You open the app, you see how many drivers are around you at any given moment. You can select the car that you want, then it shows you, hey, we’re getting a car for you, we’re going to get a car for you in the next one minute. Oh, here’s the car that we got for you, look, it’s over here, we’re going to show you how it’s going to drive to you and when it’s likely going to arrive.

Speaker 2 44:19
All of those things are not actually getting you to your final destination, but they are increasing your belief that you are going to get to your final destination, because they are building trust with you that you are going to get there. Okay, it is building trust with you that you are going to get there. All right, don’t lose the forest for the trees. I’ve talked about this a few times. The point is connection. Segmentation is not the point. The point is connection. It is authenticity. It is letting your organization be more fully known. It is creating space for your donors to be fully known. I’m not. I’m looking at time, so I’m. Not going to go into this in detail, but you will get my slides. Do not worry, okay? I want you to be looking at motivation patterns, shifting your language to get that jargon out of there, building some of those belonging touch points. And then I want you to practice and iterate, I want you to try new things, I want you to test something with a particular segment. I want you to get feedback. I want you to learn, and then I want you to iterate on it. Yes, I do not expect you to get it 100% right all the time, every time on your first go. In fact, you probably won’t. So I want you to practice and iterate. Okay, the other thing I really want to double click on here, because sometimes this gets deprioritized for major donor conversations. Okay, the right segmentation in one to many communication should guide deeper relationships towards mid and major gifts. Okay, the primary thing to what gets in the way of it doing this. Okay, we think that it’s this, and if you feel like I just put through up a direct shot of your computer screen, I promise I did not hack any of you, but we think that the reason why we don’t, we don’t do segmentation is because of this, because we don’t have enough time to do it, but I’m going to be honest with you, what actually gets in our way is fear, fear of the unknown. If I ask an open-ended question, what if they say something I can’t handle? Fear of losing the gift, I don’t want to throw a curveball my own way when I’m so close. Fear of vulnerability. What if I share too much about our journey and they judge us? Stress-driven shortcuts. I’ll just send the same email to everyone. There’s no time to segment, and all of that, all of that, y’all, is based on fear. And where is it coming from? It is coming from our friend, the back brain, our amygdala, our lizard brain, that is driving our nervous system into fight, flight, or freeze. So, what can you do about it? I want to talk about readiness for one second before we answer questions. So, I built Practivated, because what I found was that training and knowledge and templates were not enough, and strategy was not enough, because fundraisers weren’t able to implement it the way that they needed to. Okay, so what we do at Practivated, and you can steal this, okay, is we build skills, confidence, and muscle memory at the same time, okay? Any behavior, any behavior that you want to start doing, you need to be building your skills, confidence, and muscle memory to take that action to have that conversation to say that thing in a donor meeting you need to be building those things at the exact same time, okay? If you aren’t, you’re building knowledge, and you’re only building knowledge in your prefrontal cortex, and that is not the part of your brain that comes online when you go to take action. Okay, that is not the part of the brain that is coming online when you are going to take action. Well, an error occurred. Are you guys seeing this? This is fun. Can you see this? Okay. Wow, okay. That’s the first. I don’t know.

Speaker 1 48:18
I don’t know if I’m needed, but I had never seen an error occur. We are near the Q and A session, but well, I’m, I’m here, I’m here for when we get to Q and A. You do your wrap up as much as the internet allows us

Speaker 2 48:32
to. Oh my gosh, okay, I’m very sorry, you guys. Let’s see if this, if this brings you back. Okay, cool. So, inside Practivated, and I’m going to give you a free trial again to this, you can start to build this this muscle memory through segmentation, you can go in, you can practice conversations with different types of donor avatars, you can check messaging with them, you can see if something resonates, how you talk about something inside the program, you can get on demand coaching from Tivi. Talk to her, say, “I have this group of donors. These folks seem to like this. These folks seem to like this. You can go in, you’re going to have a voice conversation. She’s way better than me, and you can go in, and you can problem solve around these different segmentations. And then you’re going to get, “Oh, yes, it’s always live with me. And then you’re going to get insight and feedback, okay. So this, because I can’t do this with all 876 of you around your organization, and the segments that you need in order to be able to put everything we talked about into practice, but I want you to be able to put everything we talked about into practice, and so that requires you to take all of this knowledge that we talked about today, that take all of this knowledge that we talked about today, and be able to apply it immediately to your use case. Okay, so grab the free trial. I will make sure you guys have access to all of these slides when you go into practiced. If you want TV to have. Help you on everything that we talked about today. You’re gonna go into practice. Look at this. I’m another proof point that this is all going to be live. Um, is you’re going to go into practiced. You’re going to see Tibby. How cute is she? You guys, she’s.. she’s the fundraiser spirit animal, octopus, brilliant, loving, protective, have a arms. It doesn’t get better than that. Okay, and I want you to add the slides from today right in here. You’re going to add the slides from today in here, and then you’re going to start a voice conversation with Tibby, and she is going to walk. Hello, Mallory, how are

Speaker 3 50:33
you doing?

Speaker 2 50:34
And then she’s going to walk you through everything for your specific organization. You can ask her all the questions that you need to take all of this knowledge from today and execute on it for your organization? Okay. All right. We had, we have a few minutes for questions. Sean, I’ll let you ask. Ask that.

Speaker 1 50:57
Yeah, absolutely. And I’m also going to pop. oh, I like the little octopus emojis that we’re seeing in chat. I’m also putting a link to your webinar that’s coming up in June for you to register, everybody, so there is the link for that, so we can see more of Mallory in the future. That is, it is a cute little emoji, and many questions, many questions from the audience, starting off with a simple definition of segmentation. How would you define segmentation?

Speaker 2 51:27
I would define segmentation as a group of folks of people that you want to direct targeted communication towards, because they share identifiable elements like a behavior, a motivation, a value, something that you know about them and are tracking. You are creating a group of those, you’re creating a data set of those people, and that’s a segment, so that you can communicate to them as a group.

Speaker 1 52:03
Love it. Thank you.

Speaker 2 52:05
I also threw the slides in. Did that work?

Speaker 1 52:13
As we did not. Oh, wait, no, I do see that in the chat. I just have given you my

Speaker 2 52:21
slides in

Speaker 1 52:22
live, love it. No, you’re you’re on top of it. Why am I here? Just kidding. I have a few other questions. Let’s go through here. Oh, Joy asks, are you saying that we shouldn’t say that your gift of $100 does this. We’ve heard a lot from other fundraising experts that it is best to explain a donor specifically how their gift were held.

Speaker 2 52:48
Yes, so yes, that is great, but you want to be talking about the impact, right? You want to be talking about their desired outcome. So, if we say $100 bought four books for what to do, what? What’s the connection between those books and your mission and your vision, and who they are? What do they care about? Do they care about literacy? Were those for math books, and they care about, you know, closing the gap between math literacy and middle school students. So it’s not about not quantifying things, but it’s around quantifying things rooted in their deep desires and who they are and their identity, as opposed to just a, as opposed to just like what it transactionally purchases.

Speaker 1 53:35
Excellent, fantastic. And we have enough time for one more question. Thank you, everybody, for your questions. Do not have enough time. Mallory is simply too popular. You’ll have to, you’ll have to come and join us for a different topic next month. One more question from Anonymous: out of 100 donors, ideally, how many segmented lists would you recommend to not over segment or under segment? Four groups of 2525 groups of four, somewhere in the middle,

Speaker 2 54:02
no. Okay, 25 groups of 4y’all, You’re gonna like go bananas, but also this question is a little bit hard base. I have a lot of questions for you before I even answer that question, right? Which is like, what does your organization do? What are the differences between the different segments? Are we talking about something like event attendance and not attending the event, or are we talking about like core identity components of who those 100 people are, where they would feel really, they would feel really like you aren’t talking to them if they got the email from somebody for a different segment. This is where I would go back to that slide around some of those, those questions, which one was that? Like, look at the alignment segmentation framework, and look at, and look at the, the slide 14 around, like why donors give, and then you want to identify. How many identity groups do I have here, but I would also really suggest you take that question to Tivi, because then you can answer, you can give her those details, and she will help you based on those, the details of your specific organization.

Speaker 1 55:16
Excellent, love it. Thank you so much, Mallory. We’re coming to a close now. Thank you, everybody, so much for attending Mallory’s session. Next up on stage one is Alice Ferris with I Am Not a Bot: Why Your Donors Are Counting on You to Stay Human. Or hear from Patrick Costa from Constant Contact on stage two when he discusses the digital concierge, personalizing the major donor journey at scale. Amazing, thank you

Speaker 2 55:42
so much for having me. Thank you, DonorPerfect. Appreciate y’all so much. Have a great day, everyone.

Speaker 1 55:47
Take everybody.

Unknown Speaker 55:48
Bye.