1 HOUR 1 MIN
Unleash Your Nonprofit’s Potential: Mastering Email Campaign Design with Constant Contact
Dive into the essentials of creating successful nonprofit email campaigns using Constant Contact, automated workflows, and free templates. This webinar is ideal for nonprofit professionals who are looking to enhance their email marketing skills and create more engaging, effective email campaigns.
Categories: Expert Webcast
Unleash Your Nonprofit’s Potential: Mastering Email Campaign Design with Constant Contact Transcript
Print TranscriptGood afternoon.
We have numbers coming in. We’re just going to give it a minute before we get started.
Okay? I’m just thankful that I’m based in Read More
Good afternoon.
We have numbers coming in. We’re just going to give it a minute before we get started.
Okay? I’m just thankful that I’m based in Orlando, Florida, and the hurricane has come and gone. Yesterday was quite rainy and windy, as you’d expect. Lots of tornado warnings and watches,
nothing like when I have a webinar scheduled and there’s something like that would get very nice, and you’re crossing your fingers. Yep.
Okay, all right, so good afternoon, and welcome to our webinar. Unleash your nonprofit’s potential, mastering email campaign design with Constant Contact. Presenting today is Matthew Montoya. He’s a senior manager for partner GTM at Constant Contact. Matthew, do you want to introduce yourself and kick us off? I would be happy to Lori, hey everybody. Matthew Montoya, crazy, long title. That title just simply means I teach Constant Contact. Taught Constant Contact for living, digital marketing for a living for 14 years now. This is probably my 100th webinar with with DonorPerfect. So some of you may already know me, but forgive me if you’ve kind of heard this feel before. I am insanely passionate about nonprofits. I’m insanely, insanely passionate about your success, and the reason for that is because I’ve lived your life to a certain extent for three years preceding my time at Constant Contact. I wore those multiple hats. I worked at a 501, 3c
we were a two person staff, and I know what it’s like to be the marketing person and the receptionist and the bookkeeper and have all those roles and try to get something like digital marketing done. So I’m extremely honored anytime I get asked to present to nonprofits. And the other reason I’m really passionate is our partnership with DonorPerfect. I always describe it as peanut butter and jelly. We solve two challenges for nonprofits. Can you do it without Constant Contact? Just use DonorPerfect, sure. Could you use Constant Contact not use DonorPerfect, sure. But you’re not getting the best of both worlds if you do that Constant Contact and DonorPerfect, it is peanut butter and jelly. DonorPerfect. Users save an average just on its own, of $40 by using the Constant Contact account you have. If you have DonorPerfect, you have Constant Contact. It’s included if you’re paying for something else.
I told Lori. I warned her I was gonna get real passionate today.
Y’all
don’t, uh, non profits generally, got you got tight budgets, you got thin margins, and
definitely save money where you can together, we are stronger. And so you’re going to kind of hear that throughput, like if you’ve not looked at Constant Contact if you’re unaware that you have a Constant Contact account. And for those of you that do have a Constant Contact account, you don’t know that it’s connected to DonorPerfect, talk to you a little bit but if there’s one throughput in today’s presentation, it’s going to be
you’re sitting on opportunity, in my opinion, and I think some of the statistics that I share are going to really illustrate that. So I am going to do everybody a favor, and I’m going to turn off my camera here at the beginning of the presentation. Through towards the end, I’m going to come back on camera to answer your questions at the end, but just to give everybody full screen and not see my face,
I’m going to go off camera, but I’m still here, alright, so in case you’re unaware of Constant Contact and why you should be potentially, should be using this fantastic opportunity. Again, Constant Contact is included in your DonorPerfect offering. Well, in case you’re unfamiliar, Constant Contact is an industry leader. We have been doing email marketing, digital marketing, for over 28 years. 28 to eight actually pushing 30 years in software. And when you look at the legacy of DonorPerfect, again, it’s peanut butter and jelly. We are two software companies that know what we’re doing and what’s going to be important for you is, I’m often asked, well, you know, we use this, we use that. Why should I use cost conduct? One of the big things about our legacy that’s 28 years is that 97% take us take a quick stare at that. We have the industry leading deliverability rate. Now that’s a wonky terminology that what does that mean? It means we get the most mail delivered, most emails delivered, right? If you build an email, and we make it awfully easy thanks to the DonorPerfect integration, the DonorPerfect relationship we have, if you build an email, it’s going to get delivered. Now, the reason for that is our legacy. We invented this space. We were the first to market a software solution like Constant Contact in the market. And so the Googles of the world, the Yahoos of the world, the Microsofts of the world, all of these companies they know and trust Constant Contact to beat, to keep bad actors out. People want to use Constant Contact spammers, those mean.
People. They want to use this because of that deliverability rate, but we lead the industry in keeping folks like that out. Now, another reason for our legacy
is our award winning support. So I have had the absolute pleasure to go on site at conferences with DonorPerfect. And one thing that just warmed my heart was all the people coming up to the donor. Perfect staff, going, we love your support. We love your support. Then they come to me, we love your support. Peanut butter and jelly, if you like donor. Perfect sport, Constant Contact. Support is also top of the line. Tip of the spear. Fantastic. We have award winning, award winning free, free, free customer support. These folks, interestingly enough, only handle about 20% of the calls are only are about technical questions. 80% of the calls are marketing questions. And that’s proof positive of our easy to use, intuitive tool. And I will say, over the last year, easy to use has become really easy thanks to artificial intelligence. So two big reasons we’ve been in business for 30 years, free customer support and fantastic industry leading deliverability, ease of use would be the third one. There another thing about consecond You may not be aware of is we are more than just email. If you do know us, you may have maybe poked around Constant Contact 10 years ago, 15 years ago, that’s one of the challenges. When you’re in business for so long. We offer far more than just email marketing, from social media posting to SMS landing pages and more. We have the tools to help nonprofits succeed, and if you’re using three or four different tools, you may not need to, I may be able to save you even more money. In fact, this is going to be the unusual webinar. Unusual webinar where I’m not selling you anything. I don’t have a special offer. I just want to make sure that as you look at your bottom line, you’re allocating your resources in the best place possible. So I’m going to break down a few of these campaign types and talk you through them. Really, the core of my training today, my discussion today is going to be in a demonstration. I’m gonna actually show you how Constant Contact and DonorPerfect are that peanut butter and jelly. Now I gotta call it like it is, even though we have more than email. Well, gotta start talking about email, because that’s our that’s our bread and butter at Constant Contact. So if you’ve not heard the statistic, email marketing drives a return on investment of $36 for every dollar you spend Constant Contact is included in your DonorPerfect account. It’s going to take not much for you to get that ROI back right, but let’s go through some of these bullets. You have 100
customizable nonprofit templates waiting for you in your Constant Contact account. Now I’m going to do a deep dive on these templates in just a moment. We talk about being teed up for success. When you leverage your Constant Contact account that is tied to your DonorPerfect account, you get access to these fantastic templates.
Number two, all your data is flowing in all your data from DonorPerfect is flowing into Constant Contact. You don’t have to flip switches. You don’t have to
twist knobs. It’s already in your Constant Contact account. And again, I can’t help but be passionate. I have taught 14,000 small businesses and nonprofits across the last 13 years in person, not webinars. In person. I have taught probably 10,000 nonprofits in person, looking at their emails, talking to them about their strategy.
Just uploading lists can be a challenge for people downloading lists. They go in this list, they go in that list, and then you add in the complication of, I gotta build the email. This has been done for you. This has been done for you. It’s really
amazing that nonprofits don’t take advantage of this. This opportunity you can automate your marketing. So you can automate email and or text messages, those contacts come flowing in from DonorPerfect. Boom, you send a welcome email. Boom, you have a volunteer onboarding series. Boom, you have a donor support series of messages going out. And the buzzword of this year, artificial intelligence makes easy even easier. So let’s get back into those templates. You have all of these pre formatted email fundraising templates available to you now. This is leveraging DonorPerfect 35 years. Talk about making us look bad at 30 years, 35 years of fundraising industry experience.
You don’t have to guess, you don’t have to wonder, you don’t have to spin, spin a lot of wheels. You have donation templates waiting for you just sitting there. All you do is bring in your logo, update a little bit of text to reflect your mission, to reflect your nonprofit, and you send it out, and you get donations, and you get activity right
teed up for success, you.
These templates cover, you know, the most common fundraising campaigns you’d want to run, and all you have to do is a little bit of tweaking to get them out. Now, in my business, when you’re doing presentations, when you’re doing training, there’s always kind of a sizzle slide, there’s always kind of a mic drop slide, right? Make your big case. Here you go. You
uh, DonorPerfect, uh,
people that have DonorPerfect, right? DonorPerfect customers, nonprofits using the Constant Contact integration that is included in DonorPerfect, can see a 47% open rate, and look at that 7.3 click rate. Now, two Constant Contact customers who are nonprofits, the average just for nonprofits. So these are not going to be people that are necessarily using DonorPerfect. They’re just doing it on their own. Open Rate, 42% okay, that’s pretty close, but look at that click rate, 2.6 now, if you’re
uninformed, and that’s okay. In Email Marketing and metrics, most people obsess about this number, right? Wow, that’s really good. This number actually represents likely donations, or donations, likely attendance, likely volunteers. This is the number to pay attention to, because this proves the email was delivered, proves it was open, proves it was read, and tells you specifically what people read. When we look at the click rate, we know that the people that got that email were interested in taking the next step, and maybe did take the next step. So if I’m coaching nonprofits, and I see a 7.3
click rate that is way above the average, and I have to assume that the power of that number is driven by those DonorPerfect templates and the integration of data coming in. We got to think about those poor nonprofits that are not using DonorPerfect, that are not using Constant Contact, and they’re out in the wilderness doing this alone. So this number represents 10s and 10s and 10s and 10s of 1000s of nonprofits that are out there in the wilderness doing it on their own. No guidance, uploading lists, segmenting lists, manipulating lists, not leveraging powerful templates created by the industry leader in non profit support and donations.
You may be unaware, as I said, Constant Contact has SMS. Now, do know SMS is in the United States only, but you can supercharge your marketing. Let’s call it like it is. SMS marketing is kind of also the buzzword. It’s very effective way to communicate people. Now, there’s a lot of best practices and industry things you need to know and guidance around regulations. The good news is Constant Contact. Solution takes care of that for you,
all the regulations, all the things you might worry about being out in the wilderness, are done for you. We have an easy to use, intuitive tool. You can automate your messages. You can even leverage artificial intelligence. Now, do know SMS is included in the Pro Plan? I’ll talk a little bit later. If you want to add it to core or plus for DonorPerfect, you’ll want to contact your DonorPerfect rep, but fantastic way to really interact with your potential donors, potential volunteers, or donors, volunteers, etc,
and all of those regulatory best practices and regulatory guidelines are built in additionally. This is a big wow one. This could almost be my mic drop anytime I’m demoing Constant Contact. People are really surprised. Wait, you do this like, yeah, yeah. We do this in core, Plus and Pro. You can post to Facebook, Instagram and or LinkedIn. You’re going to see this all in the demonstration with just a push of button, just a couple of clicks on your mouse, couple of strokes on your keyboard, you can post to your social media platforms all in one place. Now if you are in Plus and Pro, you also have the ability to schedule these to a year in advance, you can put your marketing hat on, build an email, perhaps, build a text, build social media posts. Walk away for the week. Walk away for two weeks. Walk away for three weeks, and just let it run.
Too many mic drops today. All right, so what I’m going to wrap things up with, and the demonstration I’m about to show you is how all of the tools I just briefly described to you, with a little bit of artificial intelligence magic,
become a incredible experience. And we talk about that 35 year legacy of DonorPerfect, that 30 year near 30 year legacy of Constant Contact. This is a super peanut butter and jelly sandwich. This is one of those, like, you know, seven pieces of bread stacked together, eight pieces of bread stacked together. It’s like insane bit of peanut butter and jelly because when you mix in that data import from donor, perfect. When you leverage those templates, when you leverage the power of constant content.
Recommend amazing 97% deliverability rate. Well, things just go from good to great, really fast. All right, so I have a few more slides at the end, but I love actually showing you the magic that I’m talking to you about. So first,
I am in a nonprofit account right now, and I want to show you two things in this account that I’m going to do the rest of the work in my personal account so I don’t mess up their account. First thing I want to show you, you probably think I’m going to start with those DonorPerfect templates. Now I’m going to actually start with something that makes those DonorPerfect templates even easier to use, and that is the brand kit. So Constant Contacts, brand kit allows you to upload and tie in your logo, your color scheme, images that you want to reuse in templates over and over and over again. But look right here, all I have to do is put in my website, and Constant Contact will grab my logo, grab my colors, grab those hero images, and something else really magical happens, and you might be able to see it today. It also helps teach the artificial intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is all over the place, in Constant Contact, and if I put my URL in here, well suddenly the artificial intelligence starts to learn my nonprofit’s voice, my nonprofit’s mission, the marketing looks even more human generated because artificial intelligence is contextually,
pulling that information from the URL. So I would actually start here with a brand kit scan my website. Now this is a real donor, perfect nonprofit user, so I’m not going to follow up their account, but I needed to go into this account to show you the next thing. So if I go to create I create an email, I’m
I could be just like one of those nonprofits out in the wilderness, trying to do things on my own, not leveraging industry leading tools. I could go through and I could find a template and sure, I could update them, right? I could change them, add my logo, if I used a brand kit, some of those elements might show in, show up. But look right here.
DP, monthly giving. Welcome series, crowdfunding giving, Tuesday, end of year. Thank you.
I can choose any of these templates, and these have been created by people who know fundraising, right? This isn’t I’m gonna throw my own company under the bus. We’re really good at software development. We’re really good at Digital Marketing. We’re not necessarily in the trenches with nonprofits. You know who is DonorPerfect?
They know how this content should be developed, and they are delivering this content. And if you’re not using your Constant Contact your included Constant Contact account, well, you may be doing things the hard way. All right, all I need to do is preview one of these, select it, and off I go. Now you’ll see that there are things I’m being coached to update my logo, my color scheme, etc, etc. I’m gonna show you how easy it is to do that if I’m using the brand kit. Even more of that’s done for me, but it’s that easy. No more
doing it myself out in the wilderness. So I switched accounts just because I don’t want to follow up that account that I was using in that demonstration. So let’s pick it up where I left it off.
Here’s that same template I’m
we can see a future email starting to develop here,
and I’m getting yet another account open for another part of my presentation, so forgive me for the pauses. Try
to make it as seamless as possible, all right, so we can see that there’s text here. So if I click, oh, well, we get a Microsoft Word, like text editor. So I can come in here and update this information if I wanted, by replacing it. But
it’s just as simple as replacing the text. I can also change out this logo placeholder,
upload my logo,
make it bigger.
I can change things like this placeholder,
and this is what I’ve learned. Well, bring my passion back in. I love Canva. I adore this included integration in Constant Contact. I build stuff in Canva all the time, every day, and so what this Canva integration will do is it will allow me to pull images from Canva and push them into Constant Contact. But I’m assuming, just because I do teach
so many nonprofits that many of you use Canva. And I’ll show you a pro tip
if you’re designing a campaign in Canva and you go to share it, as you will, most of you would probably download it. I’m not going to download it. I’m going to go here to more. Type in a couple letters, Constant Contact and look at that. I can.
Push images directly into Constant Contact as I’m developing content in Canva. Now, I like to do it this way for two reasons. One, I’m here developing content that I’m going to use in Constant Contact. Why not just push it into Constant Contact? The other benefit is that if I use this part of the integration again, this is free, it’s going to only allow me to pull in what’s called poster size images, which is fine, that’s optimal for email marketing, but something like this image I
wouldn’t be able to fetch, that’s because it’s long. Poster size images are gonna be those portrait style images I like to have, things like shadows, curves, circles in my email kind of break up some of that blocky look that the email might have. And so if I push from Canva, I can push any size image for noxtrophy. This is included in that Constant Contact account that’s included with your DonorPerfect account.
All right, so I can continue to edit up some text. I can even add more pieces of just because DonorPerfect developed this template for me, I can still bring in more images if I need to
just that easy. And there’s so many other things that I can do in my email, I can do things like, let’s add in a button,
alright, so we’d have this button say, you know,
pretty common link you might have
if I link that button, we have a feature called click segmentation, so anybody that clicks on a link can automatically be copied into a new list for you so that you could do more targeted follow up. And all this data is pushed back and forth between note of perfect and constant content. But let’s go ahead and let the robots in the room. Let’s have some fun. So I’m going to bring in some text. Let
me get rid of this boilerplate text, and let’s write some text with artificial intelligence. So
what I’m going to need to do is feed the artificial intelligence a couple of keywords, a couple of sentence fragments, and let it take over.
Now I want you to notice I’m telling AI to ignore some things and to use some other things. That’s because this account I’m showing you, the artificial intelligence is trying to write content for another company. Because I do demos all the time. I do demonstrations all the time, and so I’m coaching it. Please ignore this, this particular Academy. Let’s see if it does it for me.
I
look at that.
Kapow, Mic drop.
Thank you, robots. Now I can still edit this. I can still review it and alter it. But I know from experience, from teaching so many nonprofits, and I’ll tell you these nonprofits, I used to do eight hour class nonprofits twice a week for five years,
writing content is a struggle. It’s a struggle for for profits, but it’s a struggle for nonprofits too. That’s let the robots write the content for me, just that easy and I can I could use this over and over and over different emails if I wanted across different kinds of content that I wanted to develop. But let’s go back and take a step back. You’re already using the industry leading software, DonorPerfect right for for nonprofits, for donations, right? And then I’m tying that data, that data is flowing in. For me, I’m using those DonorPerfect templates have that exceptional open and click rate, and I’m using the power of artificial intelligence in Constant Contact to help develop content. But how could we make this even easier? Well, I know that ideally, you’re going to be using those DonorPerfect templates. They’re really great, but occasionally you’re going to want to use your own go, you know, you have something that you want to do that’s not in those templates, perhaps promote an event, right, something like that. So I’m going to go here to the content generator,
use that same information, except this time, I’m going to have it write an entire email. We’ll make this an announcement, and we’ll make this informative. I’m
uh, awesomeness takes a second.
Almost there,
boom. It built the entire email for me. And if I open this up with that brand kit set in my logo would already be here, my color scheme would already be here. I could still edit it, and I should humans need to review this stuff,
but in a matter of what, 30 seconds, I created content, and I’m gonna try something I didn’t try in my rehearsal. But I’m feeling really confident today.
Let’s just see if it doesn’t.
So so far, I’ve done with this with about 11 different languages, and every single time it works,
and now I probably do myself,
almost there i.
Look at that. Y’all,
I hope that, I hope you can hear my excitement for this. In my excitement comes from I used to be the guy that had to do the emails at the nonprofit. I used to have to just write all this content. And I we, you know, we sent out three emails a week to different segments of our audience. I wish I had this technology when I worked there, although ultimately it just would have been I had more time to work on member recruitment and other things anyway, so I don’t know, but wow, just taking easy to use and making it even easier. So I could go on and on about email. There are so many functions that are available in constant conduct. You can personalize email. You can segment your emails. There’s all sorts of AB split tests for subject lines. AI will write your subject line for you. I would refer you to previous trainings and webinars I’ve done through DonorPerfect. This is just showing you the power, kind of the big picture of what’s available in Constant Contact. So let’s pivot here into a different kind of campaign. So
I’m going to get a different account open, because this account does not have SMS enabled. Oops.
Do I have to go here and get this account open one second?
I’ll almost there.
All right, I’m gonna have to do it the hard way. Bear with me everybody while I get into SMS for you, I’ll just do it from this account.
Best laid plans rehearsal, and it’s still not letting me into this account. Interesting. I
Hmm,
all right, Third time’s the charm across my fingers.
I really wanted to show you SMS y’all. I
try one more time,
open it up all sorts of accounts, just because I really want to show you this,
try one more thing, and then I may have To call it and show you some other things I’m
I
don’t know how good my mic is, but that’s the sound of me furiously clicking my mouse
looking good.
All right.
Sorry about that, everybody. But I’m using four different Constant Contact accounts to show you this demonstration. So you can imagine I’ve got four screens working furiously right now. All right, I want to show you SMS because I want to show you how easy SMS is to use, and I also want to show you the regulatory guardrails that kind of take this new marketing initiative, like not many nonprofits are using, texting can be scary, right? Well, we’ve got your back. So the first thing is, when I go to edit my message, this is going to be my future text to my volunteers, my board, my members, my potential donors, and I’m clicking as hard as I can. I’ll move my mouse really close here to the mic, I’m clicking as hard as I can. I can’t edit my nonprofit’s name, although this clearly not a nonprofit that is regulatory, right? I There’s a problem in the texting world where people are pretending to be someone they’re not. I bet you’ve gotten text messages from, you know, United Way, and it’s clearly not the United Way, or Delta Airlines, clearly not. Clearly not Delta Airlines. They’re trying to pretend like they’re another company that’s called spoofing. Constant Contact prevents that by requiring people that use text to register. So you do have to register to use our texting solution, and that’s how we are able to verify that you are who you say you are. Yeah.
And that means I can’t just suddenly click in here and pretend to be Delta Airlines and change my name. Another regulatory backstop is as hard as I might I cannot remove the unsubscribe. That is regulatory and it’s something you don’t have to worry about. If you text through Constant Contact, then it’s just as simple as putting in my message.
You can see my future text starting to show up, but look right here. AI for the win, but in the same details that I used before, we’ll keep this as an announcement and contextually. Ai knows it’s writing a text. It’s going to try to keep it as short as possible. For me,
I’d still want to edit it down, maybe get it down to one message, but there’s some places here I could cut down. But boom, the robots helped me here as well.
Now it’s a matter of scheduling the message. So I choose a list to send to, and this is another regulatory backstop. Constant Contact requires you to have permission to text people. It’s a unique kind of permission, different than email permission. So this list, even though has hundreds of people on it, only one gave me permission. So you don’t have to worry about like, are they? Did they give me permission? They not give me permission? Constant contacts. Got Your Back there, and then I can send this out now, or I can schedule it up to a year in advance. Pretty keen stuff. Now let’s move into a whole nother campaign. So all of that work, and now I’m back in this main Constant Contact account. I told you that this is generally like eye opening when people see that Constant Contact has this included. If I go to create and I go to social posts, I
on
Facebook, Instagram and or LinkedIn. So the first step would be for you to tie in your different accounts. It’s one time you have to do that same thing with Canva. By the way, I only have to tie in my Canvas account once, once I have signed in for my social profiles. You can see here I can add more. So if I have two or three Facebook groups of Facebook pages, two or three Instagram, I can have there’s no limit to the different kinds of social media accounts, as long as it’s Facebook, Instagram and or LinkedIn. And I can then put in my message, so I can type anything.
You can see it showing up there in the preview, but look at this, hello, friendly robots. So this starting to sound familiar. I’m going to make this an announcement. We’ll make it informative.
Give it a second,
contextually. It knows. It’s writing a social post. It’s adding things like emojis, hashtags, right? So it’s contextually, knowing that it’s writing a post for me. Goodbye, writer’s block. Artificial Intelligence just wrote my email, built my email, wrote content for my email, built my email, built an SMS, text message, and wrote my social content for me. So suddenly that hour
maybe more than I’m doing. All my marketing for this week has now become 20 minutes, right? I can also create variants. So I could have Facebook say something slightly different than Instagram. I could use different images for LinkedIn than than Facebook. And speaking of images,
there’s Canva again,
so the same image gallery that’s available to me in email is also available to me in social media, and because of that, I have that Canva integration. And again, I can create variants for this. So right now, Facebook’s the only one that’s using that image, but let’s go with Instagram. Let’s use a different image,
probably not gonna work. So yes, too wide.
Do I have a square image? Why I’d use Donald and
Goofy, but it kind of works anyway. So next choice, I can post this now. So if I’m using plus or pro, I can schedule this for up to a year in advance. If I’m using core, I can only post it right now. But if I am using Plus and Pro, plus or pro, I can schedule it up to a year in advance. So again, coming down to that, I always built my marketing on Monday. So forgive me if you don’t, but when I was in a non profit, my marketing Monday, I would write my three emails, have them scheduled out. I’d do some social media posts. I didn’t have the ability to schedule it back then. Had a big kind of calendar where I had all of my my campaigns that I was going to do that week. It’s all here in one place, already in your DonorPerfect Count, already data flowing in those templates available to you. But it gets even better. Let me go to my social inbox. So let’s pretend that I posted that silly picture,
and I’m going to go take a look at my social posts, and monitoring Constant Contact has what we.
Call a social inbox. Now it’s not an inbox for like direct messages. What this allows me to do is monitor my social activity.
So these are all the posts that I’ve made through Constant Contact, right? So I can see the reach, I can see the impressions reach for my posts. I could copy the post, so if it’s mostly the same content, rather than copying and pasting or rather than writing stuff new. I can copy former posts, but I can also listen to what people responded to. So I can actually see comments on Facebook, Instagram, right here to my post, and I can even reply to the comments. I can also see things like my reach, my audience, my audience growth across my profiles,
pretty flat.
I can see my demographics, and I can see my top locations for my social media, Facebook and Instagram accounts, all in one spot, included in Core Plus Pro sitting there waiting for you right now. You can do all of this
All right. Next up, let’s automate some marketing, right? This is you’ve got precious time. I I know what it’s like to have small steps. I’m not saying all of you do, but when you do it’s it’s hard. Let’s make things a little easier by automating. So I’m gonna go here to create and I’m gonna create some automations. I’m
so if I’m using core or plus, then I’m going to just have templates. Now I’m in core, I’m going to only have one kind of automation. It’s called a welcome email, and it’s when somebody is added to a list, I welcome them to my list, and that’s a great place to put a donation ask. It’s a great place to share your mission, but it’s relatively limited that that’s all you get. If I’m in plus or pro, then I can use, I’m sorry, if I’m in plus, then I still can use a template, but I get a lot of templates, and if I’m in pro, I can create my own path however I want, but I’m going to go with the plus experience,
and really kind of the same in the sense that they automate marketing based on what’s called a trigger. So what is going to be the initial action that fires off additional marketing? Now with the pro version, I get to really tweak those triggers. I get some more triggers, and I get some additional workflows that I can develop, but I’m just going to use
a welcome nurture series. We can see somebody
added to a specific list. We use this one. I add somebody to a list. I’m going to wait one day and I’m gonna send an email. So let’s work on this
one. So the first thing is, okay, what list are they coming into? So I’ll use children’s ministry. You can see I can have multiple lists ready to trigger. So as I’m adding them to a list right now, I’m waiting one day. Let’s let’s shorten that up. Let’s make it one minute, but I can make it a year if I need to do and then I’m going to send an email. So my choices here, I can copy an email that I’ve built in the past, so I could copy one of those great, DonorPerfect built templates that I’ve used in the past, or any template. Or I can create an email from scratch, right here. I’ll just
pretend like I copied an email, all right, so we’ve got somebody joining a list, or I’m adding them to a list. I’m waiting one minute, I’m firing off an email. I could walk away. This is basically what you get in core. You don’t have the time delay, but you get
this. Let’s add some pizzazz to this. Let’s add in a conditional split. So conditional splits are only going to be available in Plus and Pro, and let’s have a condition. So let’s have the condition be
if they’re subscribed for text, if they are, I’m going to slide this over here, and I’m going to send a text message, which I’m going to get a flag saying you don’t have SMS in this account. But we’ll pretend that I have a text message set up. Same idea. I can select a previously used SMS message, or I can craft an SMS message again. I can use AI if I wanted to.
But if they’re subscribed to receive text, they get a text. If they’re not, they get an email. But let’s take another way. Let’s look at this in a whole other way. Let’s say
they click a link, any link, or a specific link. Let’s go with any link
in this email.
If they click the link,
maybe I follow up with information about what they clicked on. If they didn’t click the link, maybe I make another more pointed appeal. Now I’m probably gonna put a time delay here.
It’s still I don’t have a link there. I probably put a time delay here because I don’t want to like, if they didn’t click a link, just immediately send them a follow up email. So let’s broaden this out. Let’s wait. Let’s give them one month, and I can keep adding to this and adding to this automate your marketing.
Number one email that’s ever open, highest open rate in the email marketing world is the welcome email, typically, 80% open rate. That’s because of some.
Joins a list. If they give you their contact information, they know you, they know your mission. They know what you do for the community. They know what you’re doing for the world. They’re showing a very positive interest. Well, they’re signing up for a list, or they’re giving you their contact information, they’re expecting to be contacted. And so if you automate this, somebody gets added to a list via you, uploading them, or that great integration from DonorPerfect, fire off an email, fire off a welcome email, fire off emails and or text. That is how you take a contact and drive them to take action, whether that’s getting a donation or attendance or volunteers or whatever it is you’re trying to encourage your audience to do automate it. Then you don’t have to really spend time doing all of this piecemeal, one by one by one. So let’s kind of stick a circle back. We just save time by having using those fantastic DonorPerfect templates right just save time by having artificial right content. Just save time by having artificial intelligence build a needle. Just save time by having artificial intelligence build me a text. Just save time by pre scheduling my social posts for the month, and I have all these automated emails and or texts going out too. Wow, that’s probably the end, right? That’s probably the mic drop I can’t think of. Oh yeah, the big one. Let’s tie it all in a bow. I’m
going to go here. And didn’t mean to go to Content generator. I meant to go to campaign builder. I’m gonna create a campaign.
Build me a marketing plan. So again, back to my experience, both as a nonprofit employee and as a trainer for nonprofits across 14 years.
The big challenges is one, I don’t know what to write. I’m not a copywriter. I’m too busy. The other is, I’m just spinning a lot of wheels trying to do campaigns that I got to do this thing, I got to do that thing. Remember, I talked to you about my Monday mornings. I sit there and I make my posts. I make, you know, my schedule. Let’s just have the robots to it all for us. All right, so I’m going to go with, let’s go with, keep people informed. That’s going to be my goal. And what is it that I am promoting? What is it on marketing I’m going to use that same fake, phony event that I’m running
now here is where I can have the artificial intelligence change based on who I’m writing to. So if I’m writing to a particular area of town, particular, you know,
geographic area, from writing to a particular gender a particular group, the tone will actually change. It’ll be reflective. The marketing will be reflective of who I’m trying to talk to. You can see here realtors in Nebraska as an example. I’m just going to go with everyone. And then when do you want to run this? Well, this is a November event, so probably a good idea that I start the campaign
about a month out, and we’ll run it right up to the 13th. And What channels do I want to post to? Well, I’m gonna just leave it set through all four channels. It’s gonna give me an example of
my content. And I’m also monitoring questions I’m getting from my fantastic coworker in the background. The answer is no word on Canada, but coming soon, Priscilla and
the other question around submitting, I think they’re going to need to run that by DonorPerfect. I
think it would work, but they’ll want to talk to DonorPerfect first. All right, so gave me an example of the content, and I’m getting to all your questions coming up really soon. I just have that coworker hit me up with a couple she needed some help with. Alright, so what’s my campaign goal? I’m going to keep people informed, yep, yep, that looks good, yep, yep. I’m a nonprofit. Build me the campaign.
Now this does take about two minutes, and so rather than have you wait and watch me for two minutes
like you had to when I was building my text, I’m going to show you the end results, so much like a cooking show where I showed you the ingredients. I wait two minutes and I get this.
A multi channel campaign, multiple dates,
multiple campaign types already written for me, the contents already developed for me. If I have that brand kit set, which is why I started there, my logo’s there, my color schemes there, all I need to do is review it again. Humans need to review this stuff. Maybe tweak it a little bit, but boy, if that’s not taking a lot of the effort out of my marketing, I wish I had this 14 years ago when I was working at the nonprofit. It would have saved me so much time. Once I review it, I can then agree to the schedule. So right now, it’s suggesting this fire off on the 14 this fire off the 21st if I want to change it, sure I can. If I want to Unschedule it, I can. But what this is doing is a couple things. One, it developed that content, but it developed it, Omni channel, multi channel, multi channel. Omni channel just means that I’m not just putting all my eggs in one marketing basket, aka, I’m not just using Facebook, I’m not just using LinkedIn, I’m not just using email. I’m using an omni channel to reach people where they are. It may take them getting an email then seeing a social post, then getting a 10.
To actually make that appeal come to life, to make that attendance come to life, to make that volunteer opportunity to come to life, it may take multiple touches, and this does that automatically for me,
that is my mic drop, but my more boring mic drop is to bring it back home to my life as a marketer at a non profit.
I could spend two hours showing you all the power within Constant Contact. There’s so many really great things you can do. And I kept bringing up my Monday calendar, right? This is how I used to live my life. I had a calendar. I had all my marketing built in. Well, Constant Contact has included in Core Plus and Pro a calendar for you, if you’re like me and you live on your calendar, I can see all the campaigns that I have scheduled up. I can see the I can see the campaigns that I’ve scheduled. I can see the results, so if I did something I sent out, I could see the opens and clicks for that email campaign or the clicks for that SMS campaign.
I can also synchronize it, so I can synchronize my calendar from Constant Contact into my, let’s say, Outlook calendar, or my Google calendar. So I’m living my marketing life in the same place that I live my nonprofit life in my calendar where I’m coordinating, oh, this big event’s coming. This national holiday is coming. This season’s coming. Put all your ducks in a row. Get out of the wilderness and and get effective marketing pretty much done for you. All right, so Lori, our one minute warning before I come back for questions. But let’s talk about some next steps for you, if you already have a Constant Contact account, if it’s not part of your your DonorPerfect account, maybe you got an account years ago. Maybe you didn’t even know that you had this opportunity. This is where we can save you some money, because you’re going to save some money. You can, in nearly every case, move your account under the DonorPerfect partnership and take advantage of all of these functions and features. If you’re downloading data from DonorPerfect, uploading it into console Connect. Quite frankly, if you’re downloading and uploading it to other tools, I don’t know why you would do that. Make life easy. All you need to do contact DonorPerfect sport, they do this all the time. Hopefully you know the number, but there’s a number for you. Now, if you’re not doing this, I don’t know what else to tell you. Like, if you’re not using Constant Contact included in your DonorPerfect account, if you’re not taking advantage of this integration where that data is flowing in and out, if you’re not taking advantage of those templates, not taking advantage of two very, very loved support teams, if you’re not taking advantage of a 97% deliverability rate. Call, call your DonorPerfect support team, call your reps. They can show you where to go. It’s already there, and then get your account up and running for you. And you can take advantage of all these things. But with that, I’m going to come back on camera and invite my friend Lori,
and I am sure we have lots of question
that we do. I’m going to tackle one off the top that I got from Priscilla in the background before. So um, is so two, two answers here. So first, yes. Again, there is a plan to bring SMS not just to Canada, but around the world. I don’t have a timeline, but we’re working very active on that.
I would say it’s going to be sooner than later. The second part of her question was, how do we get permission to text people? Well, there’s a couple of ways,
depending on how you collect contacts.
Period in your nonprofit life, you just need to have an overt like, Would you like to receive text from us? If they answer in the affirmative, then you can text them. Now, what Constant Contact requires is a date of that permission. So as long as you have a date of permission, and you have their permission, you can do it. You can also, if you’re using Constant Contact currently, you’re currently, you’re deciding to add on SMS to your core, your Plus account again. Pro already has SMS included. You can send out an email and so listen for people to give permission. So your email contacts, you can say, hey, we’re on we’re texting now, give us permission. That’s another way that you can text people with permission.
Lori,
okay, I was trying to flag them. They were coming in
very fast, and
we were both typing away because it was a it was a whole mix of questions. I I’m just going to go with one of the first ones that came in, and that was from Lewis. And he said, How do you access the brand kit? Again, to have Constant Contact, learn about your brand from your website,
you go to the top navigation, let me see if I can get my Constant Contact account back open here,
some reason I closed it. I.
That would be why.
So it’s a blessing and a curse. Laurie and everybody. When you do so many webinars like I do, and you have four screens, the challenge is keeping up with everything.
Give me a second while I log back in, and I will show him where to find the brand kit.
Go to Tools, go to brain kit.
And then you just
now, right now, I’ve actually already adopted a brand. So this is a different account that I showed you earlier. The first time I come here, you’re going to be met with that window to put in your URL, but at any time you want to put in a new URL, you put it in here, and it will scan for the brand.
And I will not close that window this
time
i Okay. So Christina asked about showing the content generator, or where you went to start the generator.
Go to Tools, content generator, now, artificial intelligence. I had it on a slide, but I didn’t really make a big deal about it. You need to be using plus or Pro to have all this AI magic. So if you’re using core, talk to the folks DonorPerfect about upgrading to plus or pro. A lot of advantages beyond Constant Contact there. But if I go to Tools and then generate content with AI, there’s actually two ways to use this. I showed you the one way, where it’ll build the whole email. But if I want, I can also just have it write content. So if I want to have it write content for a blog or my website or something of that nature, I can do that here as well. Now I would not have it write
a social post. I would not have it write a text message, because that’s all built in directly into the Constant Contact frame.
Okay, we had a couple questions on analytics. First one from Nakia. She said, How is scheduling, slash posting, social media content through Constant Contact affecting your analytics. It’s
not going to affect your analytics other it’s really about time savings. You’re not going to see any change in the algorithms, it’s not to your advantage. You’re not going to have people see the post or not see the posts other than it just allows you to be more frequently in the game.
The other thing that’s advantageous is if you’re doing that social listening now that social listening only works if you do post through Constant Contact, if you post, if you go directly to Facebook and post directly there, you’re not going to see not going to see the analytics and the other things that I showed. But one thing that can change the needle in social media is being regularly engaged with people, and so seeing their comments and responding to them, being regularly interactive with people. Anything that makes that easier is going to give you a bit of an advantage on social media, but nothing per se is going to help you crack the market by using Constant Contact, or, quite frankly, anything else. And I have a question from Priscilla in the background, any plans on doing a live webinar? She didn’t give me your name, so sorry if this was you a live webinar on using Constant Contact for dummies.
Yeah. Yeah. Lori, you just heard that we can do a really kind of 1011, day.
I know everybody. What I just did for you was not training. I moved really fast. And I, you know, had trouble with my SMS account.
I was mostly just showing like, whoa. There’s a lot more to Constant Contact than I thought.
Yeah, we can certainly tee that up.
Yeah. Okay, my I
think somebody hit a button and resorted. I lost my list. I do remember one of the questions, though, they were asking about
how the social media platform compares to Hootsuite. Would you have any idea
HootSuite? I love HootSuite. I used HootSuite
after my time at the nonprofit.
It depends on how you’re using Hootsuite, and are you fully utilizing the power available to you in HootSuite,
there’s a lot of things. I mean, we’re not a Hootsuite. We’re not trying to pretend like we are. We’re just trying to give nonprofits as many tools in one as they might need. We’re not the industry leader in social media like Hootsuite, some other tools are. But if all you’re doing is posting, and you’re posting in one of those three channels, or all those three channels, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and you’re doing simple posts, just an image, text,
why pay for something else is kind of my point of view. One thing a tool I didn’t show you was our survey tool. Like it’s, it’s a perfectly great survey tool. There are survey tools that are industry leaders, that’s their business. But if you’re doing simple surveys, why use something else? Just try to, try to save that bottom line for you. Yeah.
Okay,
here’s a question you might be able to answer, because it’s, I think I’ve had at least five or six come in asking about automated emails doing things like you’re receiving things along those lines.
What I think you’re asking is kind of an automated email, like, Thanks for your gift type messaging, right? You can do that. You can do that. I mean, I’m going to push that back on you a little bit. Lori, because you guys do that too. You do transactions. We do we have emails that go out. We do have receding for DonorPerfect. We don’t have automations that necessarily go through Constant Contact, and I think that’s where their big question is, because those emails going out of Constant Contact are,
you know, they’re, they’re a bit more a little fancy, exactly, you can do that. I mean, all you would do is just point your list for gifts and keep me honest on the on the DonorPerfect site here. Have that be a list that you’re triggering emails from.
So, you know, new gift. I don’t know that’s kind of a dumb name, but
first time giver, have that come to a first time give her list, and then you have that email teed up so as soon as they hit that list, they’re getting that email, emails or texts.
Yeah, that’s a the texting was something big that everybody was asking about. Just going to double down on the texting again, it is an add on for core and plus. So if you’re in there, there is an additional fee. Most everything else I showed you today is included
for Pro users, there’s allotment of text you can send every month that’s included.
There is a regulation driven form you have to fill, so you’re going to have to answer some questions about your organization. But in a tax ID number, this is how we verify you are who you are. It takes about seven days for that
to be processed because we have to run it by all of the vendors.
But once, once that’s processed, and you’re able to start texting,
will give you a chance to take a breath and look through the questions I got another one from Priscilla.
This person is trying to connect their organization to social media, and they keeps trying to get their personal information. So this is going to be a little hard for me to read. Hard for me to recreate, but I’ll do my best. So I’m going to create a social. Let me actually just go to social.
So what this person is seeing is is he’s trying to find his nonprofit, but it keeps showing his picture. It’s his personal profile. When you when you add in accounts, you’re
going to see yourself, right? But then if you connect profiles, then you’re going to see other profiles that you manage. So these are all pages that I manage, even though this is me, if I want to connect it, I choose that. So the person asked Priscilla that question, you’re going to look for Connect profile.
She had additional question. I It’s, How do I find campaign builder? I’m gonna go to create, build me a marketing plan. If you don’t see this again, it’s not available in core. It’s only available in Pleasant
Pro, okay, and what about the Canva integration? Anna said she tried the Canva integration, pushing a design to Constant Contact, and she received a notification and said, it will it will not support it.
Uh, you can call our support line. I mean, without seeing her account, I really can’t troubleshoot on that. I’ve not had a problem with mine being connected. FYI, this is your first time kind of hearing about Constant Contact. This is where you find that Award Winning Customer Support. It’s always in the top right hand corner. Additionally, we have award winning knowledge base, and a lot of this is videos. So if you want to take things a step further, the two really great resources right here, but I think they’re, they’re gonna have to take a look at the the situation on their side. Yeah, I, I asked it only because I wasn’t familiar with the integration with Canva, and if they needed anything in particular to make that happen, no, they don’t need anything extra. I’m gonna kind of do some troubleshooting here, right off the top, which is always dangerous.
But
if I go to share this the first time I go to here and then I go look for Constant Contact,
be connected, it’s going to open up a little dialog window where I put in my Constant Contact, username and password. That is, I’ve had, well, I’ve never had a problem with the other way, but this is how I built mine. I started in Canva. First
try that. Try starting in Canva, if the person asked that question, if you haven’t, see if that connects for you.
Okay, okay.
All right. Well, we are actually at two o’clock
quick hour.
Yeah, yeah.
So we’re gonna get ready to close up. And I apologize for those or to those people who did not get their questions answered. There were fast and furious ones coming in a lot more towards DonorPerfect and their accounts and things like that. So my recommendation is to either reach out to your account manager to find out what plan you have, or reach out to support if you’re looking to get things connected
other than that. Do you have any other closing thoughts? Matt,
I’m always here to help nonprofits win, so I’m happy to happy You had me today, and I look forward to seeing everyone again in the future. Yeah, well, we appreciate you hanging out with us again, and hopefully we can get something put together for your your webinar for dummies. Yeah, we’ll do that. I will sit in front
All right. Well, thank you. Have a great afternoon and Matt, I hope see you again soon. Thank you. Thank you very much. Take care, everybody. Bye, bye.
Read LessRelated resources
DonorPerfect Scheduled Outreach
Nonprofit Expert Podcast Episode 17 – Unlocking Donor Engagement
Crisis Fundraising Templates: A Nonprofit Guide to Emergency Communications
Get a demo