Cultivating Connection: Strategies for Sustained Donor Engagement

Okay, we’re going to let some people file in here, and they’re coming in fast and furious. So good afternoon, and welcome to our webcast, cultivating connection strategies for sustained donor engagement. Presenting today is Mallory Erickson. Mallory Read More

Okay, we’re going to let some people file in here, and they’re coming in fast and furious. So good afternoon, and welcome to our webcast, cultivating connection strategies for sustained donor engagement. Presenting today is Mallory Erickson. Mallory is an executive coach, a fundraising consultant and host of the podcast, what the fundraising aimed at supporting nonprofit leaders at fundamentally change the way they lead and fundraise. Through her signature framework, Mallory provides unique tools to help nonprofit fundraise more from foundations, corporate partners and individuals. So welcome. Mallory, you’re all set.

Thank you so much. Lori, can I see if the chat is working for everyone else? I threw something in the chat, but I want to, I guess I will know by it either working or not. But if you could just say hi in the chat and let us know if that’s working. If not, it’s no problem. You should also have a Q and A function up there to submit questions. So if you have questions as we’re going through, put them in there, and then we’ll make sure we get time to answer at the end. Okay, great. I’m going to try to turn off notifications on my end so that I can stay focused on the content, because I have so much goodness in store for all of you today. Okay, let me see if I can make that go away. They have a new interface here, and so it is a little bit different to use, okay, so I am going to focus on the content in front of you. Lori, thank you for that introduction. It is so nice to meet all of you. I’m so excited to be here today. My name is Mallory Erickson. I’m the creator of the power partners formula, host of the podcast and now book, actually, what the fundraising. And you can connect with me on Instagram, on LinkedIn. I love hearing from folks who come to these about your biggest sort of takeaways and any questions that you have afterwards as well, and like so many of you, I became an accidental fundraiser. So first I as a managing director and then a nonprofit executive director, I started to have all these big fundraising responsibilities that came with my job, and I had some high hopes at the beginning around what that might look like and feel like for me, but the reality was quite different. And I call this my impact report fake phase, where I really felt this pressure to put up this appearance everywhere, like I had it all together. But the reality was it was a constant hustle. I didn’t have a donor pipeline that I trusted. I was working 12 to 15 hour days, I was sacrificing a lot of my personal life for my organization, and I completely and utterly burnt out. And at the same time I was trying to learn, like, what fundraising really is. You know what fundraising is all about? Nobody put me through an intro course. They were just like, get out there and build relationships. Right? I was told over and over again, relationships are the cornerstone of nonprofit fundraising, but I wasn’t given a lot more clear guidance than that, and so I felt a lot of ambiguity and discomfort around what does this mean? Like just build relationships, and then people want to give you money. And the reality was I wasn’t building real relationships with the donors or potential donors that I was talking to, because I was really afraid and uncomfortable about connection, about really being connected to some of the folks that we were talking about here and or we were talking about getting involved in our organization. Because actually like connecting with donors is really vulnerable, right? We use it very kind of flippantly when we talk about nonprofit fundraising, to just build relationships, but real relationships that are rooted in connection is a really vulnerable thing to do, and that’s particularly hard when we’re in a fundraising system or mode that is activating our nervous system. So in my book, I talk a lot about the elements of fundraising that really understandably lead to stress and overwhelm and burnout. A lot of times for fundraisers, those have to do with things like uncertainty and ghosting, rejection, pressure to meet targets, overwork, emotional fatigue, power dynamics, right? All of these things I was experiencing in my everyday life, and they were impacting my nervous system. They were leading to anxiety and stress, ultimately, chronic stress and burnout like I shared with you, and then all of that stress, all of that dysregulation that I was experiencing on a regular basis, actually took away my capacity for connection. When our nervous system is activated, when our stress is activated, our brain goes into survival mode, okay, the parts of our brain that gets prior, that get prioritized, are what allow us to conserve energy and survive. Life, okay? Those are not the parts of our brain that are wired for vulnerability and connection and deep relationships or innovation and creativity, right? So there I was trying to hustle my way out of these fundraising challenges that had fallen in my lap, and I was trying to just build relationships, while at the same time, the capacity inside of me to actually deeply connect with the folks that I was talking to or that I wanted to engage in my work were completely turned off. And so we’re going to talk about this today. We’re going to talk about what it means to actually cultivate connection, to have more sustained donor engagement in your organization. But I had to start with how this relates to you and your capacity for connection. We’re going to talk about that a little bit more next as well, because this is what directly impacts your ability to implement any of the other strategies that I’m going to talk to you about today. So today we’ll explore what true donor connection looks like, how to measure and sustain it, and strategies for re engaging disconnected donors as well. Okay, so we’ll talk about all those things. So as I was mentioning, supporters need to be in connection with other humans or a community to stay engaged, but most of our donors aren’t connected or engaged, right? We’re seeing a lot of FEP has been producing a lot of the Fundraising Effectiveness Project, a lot of data that can be a little bit overwhelming when you take a look at it. We’re not going to spend a lot of time here, but all of this to say that the data is showing that our donors are actually less and less connected to us, less and less engaged. And we’re going to talk today about going beyond donor retention. Donor retention tends to be one of the primary ways that we measure donor engagement, and I’ll explain why. That can’t be the only way that we measure it, but it is an important metric that gives us insight and information into how we’re doing with other things, right? And so I also just wanted all of you here are on this DonorPerfect webinar. I’m so thrilled that DonorPerfect created space for us to talk about this today. And if you are like, I don’t even know what donor retention is Mallory, then I would really recommend chatting with folks over at DonorPerfect. They do a lot around donor retention. They make it super easy to track. So if you need sort of that very intro piece to donor retention to start to understand a little bit more about how connected your donors are to your work. Go and talk to them. But as I said, donor retention is important, but it is a lagging indicator. So what does that mean? A lagging indicator? So it means it is the result of a leading indicator. Right a lagging indicator is sort of the end data point of a sequence of things that happen so donor behavior and whether or not that donor gives or gives again or gave last year and gives again this year. That is the lagging indicator. The leading indicator to whether or not or to how those how those metrics kind of behave, or how donors behave, the leading indicator is fundraiser behavior. Okay, donor behavior is a response behavior, and it is a response to actions that we are taking as fundraisers or actions that we aren’t taking as fundraisers. So does this mean that a donor never behaves a certain way, no matter, like, whether you know, we’ve done everything as well as possible, and a donor still shifts their giving, of course, right? But we’re not talking about outliers here. Okay? The vast majority of donor behavior probably close to something like 80% of donor behavior is driven by fundraiser behavior. And so as we talk about connection today, and as we talk about engagement, we’re going to be going back and forth between the inner play, between your behavior, your ability for connection, and the donor’s behavior and their ability for connection. And this is really, really critical, and why. I also started with helping you understand how connection and the ability for connection shows up in your brain and body as the fundraiser. So true connection goes beyond transactions, right? It’s about creating relationships where both parties can be authentic, vulnerable and committed to each other’s growth. So on what the fundraising I interviewed this incredible woman, Carol Robin. She was one of the co authors of this book, connect, building exceptional relationships with family, friends and colleagues. There’s a little citation at the end, and maybe afterwards. I can pull the podcast interview if you want to hear it. But she talks about what actually creates connection, like when we feel really connected to something or someone, what is creating that connection? And here are the six pillars that she talks about, you can be more fully yourself and so can the other person. Both of you are willing to be vulnerable. You trust that self. Closures will not be used against you. You can be honest with each other. You deal with conflict productively, and both of you are committed to each other’s growth and development. And it’s really important to share these things with you, because so many of these things start with how our behavior leads to the donor’s behavior, right? So one of the things she talks about in the podcast interview is like, when I let myself be more fully known, I create space for the other person to feel like they can be more fully known as well. So we talk about, there’s some research around fundraiser disclosures, right? What happens when fundraisers are a little bit more open and honest and vulnerable in meetings with donors? And what it demonstrates is that the connection is deepened, and ultimately, the fundraising results show that this is important as well, right for the longer term fundraising results because of that relationship with the donor. So what creates connection starts with us and then creates space for the other person to come to the table and connect more deeply with us, too, and we’ll talk about this a little bit more later. But this is not always on a one to one basis. There are ways to to model the things that are on this list as an organization, not just as you as the fundraiser. And so one of the first things, and I think it looks like maybe the chat is not working, since I can only see my chat, but that is okay, because I would know, I know that this would be going bananas in the chat if I asked this out loud, which is like, how many of you think about donor trust, right? We hear a lot of content out there around how important it is for us to be, you know, creating donor trust, and, you know, supporting donor trust and not doing anything to break trust. And yes, trust is really important. But why is trust important? Because trust is critical for connection to actually take place. Trust is built on authenticity, logic, empathy, credibility, reliability, intimacy and attention. I talk about trust, the science of trust a little bit more in my book as well, but I don’t want you to think about trust as this sort of separate element trust. The reason why trust is so important is because it is critical for connection to be able to take place. There’s a lot of kind of debate out there about, like, Okay, well, what comes first? Like, trust, relationships, connection, you know, funding, blah, blah, blah. It doesn’t really matter. Like the debate is out there, but in my opinion, all of these things are deeply related to each other. So yes, trust is necessary to create connection. Connections are necessary to create relationships. Relationships are necessary to create opportunities for funding. All of those things are true, but it’s not one sided, right? So how our relationship, how we honor that relationship, how we continue to show up in connection for that relationship that continues to build trust, right? And this is my very poor, graphically designed way of trying to show you that this isn’t linear. These are loops and cycles. Relationships are complicated and messy. I’m going to give you some really tangible strategies and steps today around creating more connected relationships with your donors. But I also just want to say something kind of out of the gate, which is that I know, I know we want the most reliable, clean Moves Management System possible to sort of understand where our donors are at what stage of relationship we’re in, what we can expect next, etc, etc. But relationships are dynamic and fluid and complicated and real. Can you imagine trying to put other relationships in your life on a conveyor belt of process? Right? Relationships real. Relationships are real, and so what that means is that there is a level of openness and flexibility and trying and testing things and being in real conversation that’s really critical if you want to be in real connection with your donors, if you want to be in real connection with your donors, and so that feels really important to say, because I mentioned at the beginning that there are all these elements of fundraising that lead to higher rates of chronic stress and burnout, and one of them is uncertainty. And I really understand that the uncertainty we often feel in sort of like, how is a donor feeling about us, or where is this relationship going, or is this person ultimately going to be somebody who shows up in blank actually makes us feel more dysregulated and stressed, and that’s why this webinar is not about that, but that’s why we need tools to address that stress, to be able to sit in some of the discomfort and uncertainty of new relationships that is a. Theory, normal part of new relationships, we need to invest in the strategies that we know build connection. That’s what I’m going to talk about today. The strategies we know build deeper connection and engagement and relationships. But we also need to know that this is not going to be a like one plus one plus one plus one situation equals four, and everybody’s timeline looks the same. Gosh, I wish you guys were in the chat right now, because I can imagine that this might even be a little bit hard to hear, and maybe you came being like I hope I wanted her to give us a one pager on how to make every single relationship deeply connected. But my job is to be honest with you, and we know scientifically, the things that build connection. We know scientifically that connection deepens engagement and relationships, and we know scientifically that engagement and deeper relationships increases the amount of money raised so but we cannot just focus on that lagging indicator in order to motivate our behaviors on each of those steps. Okay, so we’re going to, we’re going to jump into strategies. You’re like, okay, Mallory enough get off your soapbox. Like we gotta go. So before we go in, I’m going to give you, like, a five step process, actually, for deepening connection and engagement with your donors. Before we go into those steps, I want to give you something you can immediately start doing in order to connect more deeply with your donors. Okay, can do this one thing to start connecting more deeply with your donors, and it takes no additional time. Okay, are you ready? I’m imagining you in the chat saying yes, yes, yes, and that is being authentic. Okay? Authenticity means showing up in a real way. It is about transparency and honesty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and I would say especially when it’s uncomfortable, okay, I shared with you these six pillars of building connection, connected relationships and authenticity is deeply interwoven into all of them. Authenticity means being more fully yourself or allowing your organization to be more fully itself. How can you present what’s going on inside your organization’s the activities, the challenges in a more authentic, less curated, less perfectionisty way, how do you let the real, raw elements of who you are and what you do come through to build trust, to create space for other people to be more fully known, you can start integrating more authenticity into everything You’re already doing right now for no additional time. And my guess is it’ll actually save you a lot of time because you aren’t revising things a billion times or getting trapped in some of those perfectionist tendencies. Okay, so that’s my number one quick tip that you can start doing right away. Before we dive into my five steps, I really want, actually, for you to take a moment of reflection. And I want you to reflect on your current donor relationships these maybe you could come back to this later and spend more time here, because I know our time together today is limited, but I want you to think about, do you feel open to a real connection with your donors? Where are you experiencing resistance to that connection? Think about going backwards, right? What’s happening inside your brain and your body? Do you feel open to a real connection with them? And then if you do, if you don’t, then that, then there’s the work. There’s some work for you to focus on. But if you do that, I want you to ask yourself, how are you creating space for connection? How are you allowing space for your donors to be more fully known, to be able to be more honest with you, to be in real conversation with you, to navigate challenges productively in ways that even deepen your relationship. And where are your gaps? Where are some of the gaps in the opportunities you’re creating for that deepening connection, for that deepening engagement?

Okay, maybe you want to screenshot this slide. Come back to this later. But this is really important, because everything I’m going to layer on top of this, all of these part I already know. I’m going to get a lot of questions about Mallory. How many of this thing should I do? All of that depends on where you’re at right now, right? And so when we talk about different strategies, and you’re like, Well, how many of those Should I do a month? Or how many of those Should I do a year? The answer is, more than you’re doing now. And so you need to understand where you’re at right now. And then, I want you to just start with a little dial up. Maybe one more thing a quarter, maybe one more thing a month, right? It really depends on how much you’re already doing some of these things. But there is no secret number around touch points for all organizations, because if you have only been. Contacting your donors three times a year, and somebody out there tells you, oh, you should be sending a weekly thing to your donors. That difference from three times a year to weekly is going to give a lot of people a lot of whiplash. Okay, so everything about how you implement the strategies I’m going to share with you today have to do with where you are currently at and turning the dial up on those activities. Okay, so I gave you, I’m giving you a five part process. So the first thing is that I want to teach you directly the types of engagement, touch points that deepen connection. Okay, so as I was saying before, sustained engagement with donors relies on continuous communication, transparency and evolving with the donor’s journey. Okay, a lot of times we want our donors to stay stagnant. We’re like but last year they blah, blah, blah, yes, okay, and their life completely changed, and they’re a different person. This year, we want permission to evolve and be different, and we need to be prepared for our donors to evolve as well. Okay, so sustained engagement relies on continuous communication, transparency and evolving with our donors. Journey. We want to design connection points throughout the year that connect to the DonorPerfect their sense of trust and belonging to the right group, their belief that that their involvement matters, that them, why them, why now, and that fosters positive memories with the organization. Okay, this, these are sort of like the large umbrellas of the types of connection points that we want to be designing. So what are very specific engagement, touch points that deepen connection. Here are just four examples, impact stories that feature beneficiaries, and I would actually say impact stories that feature donors too, letting them share a little bit about what it’s meant to them and for other donors to see that in their community, right? That’s an opportunity for some of your donors to be more fully known and to give them that participation in creating content for your organization. Okay, so impact stories featuring beneficiaries or donors, virtual town halls or Q and A sessions, okay? Where they can’t, let’s say you just announced a new program or a new initiative. What are you? Are you setting up a 30 minute zoom call and inviting people to come and ask questions, maybe 60 minutes afterwards, to get feedback, to be in dialog with you about it, interactive donor workshops. So let’s say your organization, your team, is really grappling with understanding some new content, or maybe even changing a policy of some around something inside your organization, and actually you feel like your community, including your donors, could really benefit from that type of learning as well. I saw one of my organizations recently. They were they hired a facilitator that was going to do a facilitated training for all their staff around something, and they invited all of their donors and community members to come to that training virtually. How incredible, right? It created this interactive workshop opportunity where the donors were not only seeing how the organization was grappling with this live transparency, trust building, being fully known anyone, but also the donors were learning and we’re participating for themselves in the outcomes of those workshops, and then invitations to special behind the scenes events, right? And this, again, all of this is about authenticity, about realness, okay? About how you’re actually showing people how something works behind the scenes, okay? As opposed to creating a perfectly curated behind the scenes experience. Okay, so engagement touch points that deepen connection, they allow us to deepen our stories around the organization, to be in dialog with the organization, to learn alongside the organization, and to be invited to see more right to let the organization be more fully known, which creates space for them to be more fully known. So this is just sort of like the mic, the macro level of what are the types of touch points that create and deepen connection? And maybe as I went through those, you can sort of go through some of the touch points you currently have on your plan, if you have one, and say, Ooh, I see the ones that are that are really increasing connection to our donors. We’re also doing some of these other things, and I’m not sure if they’re really deepening connection or if we’re just doing them, because we’ve kind of always done them right? So it’s a good opportunity to think about, okay, what drives and motivates people, what builds real connection, and are we doing those things? Are we doing those things? So then after you identify either maybe you’re whittling down some of the things you’ve done, you add in a few other things that you’ve done, you want to create a plan to sustain donor relationships over time. So let me tell you something about how motivation works, and this is, I think, one of the reasons why we see. Really horrible donor retention numbers. We when we are so motivated to get a donor in that door, and we work so hard to get either that first gift or that first big gift, and then what happens after that gift is made is that our motivation takes a dive. Our motivation takes a dive. And so our motivation to maintain that relationship, to sustain that relationship, to have follow up touch points, is so much lower after that donation was made. This is just how motivation works. There is nothing wrong with you. If this is how you have been experiencing. Motivation ebbs and flows. Sometimes we’re the tortoise, sometimes we’re the hare, but knowing this in advance is really important, because you want to play a plan to cultivate and sustain donor relationships over time, and you want to implement that plan before you need it. So let’s say you’re planning your end of year campaign right now, and you are putting together your whole plan up until the end date of your campaign. How many of you, you can silently answer this, but I know it’s a lot, right? Have created a campaign plan that ends the day that the campaign ends. Okay? This is very normal. If this is you, I did not mean to call you out, but this is very normal. But what does this mean the campaign ends? Our motivation is low, and then we are not doing the maintenance, follow up, you know, stewardship, that we need to be doing, because we can’t motivate ourselves to take those actions after we feel like we just crossed the finish line. And so when you are designing a campaign, or anything, or your entire year, you want to create the plan to cultivate and sustain those donor relationships over time. When you are creating that entire campaign plan, it should be a part of your entire campaign plan, your annual plan, and you need to schedule time. Okay, when I was creating this slide, I edited it like three times. I was like, You need to find time for intentional cultivation. Then I was like, no, no, you need to make time for intentional cultivation. I was like, no, no, you need to schedule time for intentional cultivation and stewardship throughout the year. So right now, actually, I want you to open up your calendar if it is available to you, and I want you to put a two hour block on your calendar right now in the next three weeks. And I want you to find a two hour block in the next three weeks. I want you to want you to put it on there, and I want you to say follow up from Mallory’s webinar plan to cultivate and sustain donor relationships. Okay, and throw it out. You could move it around later if you need to, but I just want you to start to put it on there, and then part of what you do during that time block should be to schedule time for intentional cultivation and stewardship throughout the year. If it is not on your calendar as a priority, it’s not going to happen. Okay? So this has to get really worked into your work plan. It needs to get worked in to your calendar. Now, for everybody who’s on this webinar and is like, oh my god, Mallory, why are you giving us more things to do? I want to cry. I hear ya. Here’s what I want you to hear. So much of this is about intentionality and leveraging things that you are currently using or doing in new ways that create deeper connection. Okay, so here, like most of you, are doing at least two or three of the things on this list you have social media, email newsletters, websites and blogs, events and presentations, printed materials. Okay? I want you to think about when during your planning time, I want you to brainstorm out what are all the things you’re already doing right that have an impact on connection and creating connection and creating relationships. And then I want you to think about which of those things or which types of content maybe are applied to which segments of donors. Okay, so this is where customization and segmentation can come in. You can take kind of a big channel and then focus an activity from that channel on a donor persona group or an impact interest area, and I’ll explain this in a moment. So don’t get go, don’t get too overwhelmed. So I want you to think about all of the channels of communication you’re already using, you’re already doing. And I want you to think about, when you think about sustained donor engagement and cultivation, what are kind of like the buckets, the groups, the segments of people that you want to make sure you’re deepening connection with, okay? And then for each of these groups, you can create a really quick personal connection plan, right for the whole group, okay? So here’s like, a few very quick examples, right? You identify a segment of donors and you’re like, Okay, this segment of donors cares a lot about XYZ element of our organization. They tend to be local to the organization, and they’ve been giving for X number of years. Okay, so then create. Create a Connection plan for that segment of donors that involves an invitation to an in person event, asking for feedback on something related to that program, and then some type of personalized celebration and gratitude. And we’ll talk about personalization in a second right after this. Okay, so creating a connection plan. And again, there is no magic number. This is an example three month connection plan. If you’re like, oh my gosh, Mallory, this is so much newness, maybe you work in these three things to the entire year. Start small. Make it possible. Do more than you were doing yesterday. Okay, if it’s too much to think about this amount in a three month journey. Start smaller. The most important piece here is action. The most important piece here is action and change. Okay, in these touch points, you want to make things personal, but don’t let me explain what I mean by personal. Personalization goes beyond using a donor’s name, right? It’s about tailoring your message to their interests, giving history communication preferences. But once again, you have a lot of this data, and you can create these customized segments in order to do this in a one to many way. Okay, that is not always a one to one. Why does personalization matter? Okay, it matters because making it personal creates a peak moment. It creates that positive memory with an organization, okay? Making it personal can both be how you talk to them, like making a thank you personalized, right? And not just putting their name in a personalized way, but saying something that you know about them in that thank you as well. But personalization can also be about inviting them to do something personal in addition to their gift or in addition to coming to a volunteer work day. So you know you’re going to come, you’re going to volunteer on this day, anyone who would be willing to bring blank with them that’s really meaningful to them helps deepen their connection. It makes it personal, and it doesn’t add a whole big other thing to you, right? But it’s about increasing personalization and personal opportunities with whatever activity is already happening. Okay, okay, I’m gonna give you okay. So a lot of times, I think when we hear personalization, we think that everything has to be really big. So I want to give you 10 second personalization touch points. Okay, I wish I could see y’all in the chat, but I think when we hear personalization, we start to imagine like all these one on one meetings, or all these one on one phone calls or, you know, just like the personalized videos that have to go out to everybody and every you know, it’s going to take me five minutes a person, 10 minutes a person, 20 minutes a person, I would still argue that some of that is incredibly valuable, but I also want to show you that personalization does not have to be a big new thing. It can be a 10 second touch point. Okay, so here are some examples of how I coach my clients around this forward, a relevant article or resource that you are looking at anyways, to a group of donors that you think would be particularly interested in it. This can come with one sentence at the top, hey, blank, I saw this article today. I thought you’d be really interested in it, because I know how much you care about blank forward write that same sentence. Or if you know something even deeper about that group of donors, you can or about that particular donor, you can put that in the email, but these are 10 second touch points. Also that relevant article or resource can be from your organization. One of the strategies that I often teach my clients is forwarding newsletters, right? So your donors that you want to have these one on one touch points with, they’re getting the, you know, your newsletter, email, or whatever. It’s kind of format of email you send out as an organization, you forwarding that with one personalized line at the top. Hey, I really want to make sure you saw the thing three sections down, about blank. I know you’re really excited about that piece. Okay? All that does, all that does is let the person know that you are thinking specifically about them, right? It’s this moment of them recognizing that they’re not just one in a whole pool of people, but you’re thinking specifically about them. And this takes less than 10 seconds. Okay? Invite feedback on a small idea so similar to maybe that newsletter forwarding and saying, hey, I want to make sure you saw this point. You could say, Hey, I know you’ve been really involved in X program. Check out. Check out the recent announcement we have in the newsletter. Curious what you think, right? Or what do you think about blank name, or how do you feel about the new branding around x? Do you like the colors we decided for blank, blank, right? Or, this is the theme for this year’s garden event. You know? What do you think? Right? Invite feedback on a small idea that you actually care about too, right? How many times are we spiraling in our heads about like our donors might not like? Like blank or what if so and so, let’s ask them, right? They’re all these like hypotheses that we’re making in our heads about what our donors will and will not like. And what a great opportunity to get some quick feedback, deep in connection, deep in engagement, and answer some of our questions. Okay, another 10 second touch point can be a reminder of a special date or a memory you share. Okay, so let’s say you have, you know, they’re giving the anniversary is coming up, or an event is coming up that you know they attended the year before, and you have some photos from that, you know. You pull up the album from last year, and you just rattle off photos from that album, one to one. Hey, was just thing. I can’t believe this was almost a year ago, photo of you and that person. I hope you’re doing well, okay, 10 second touch points in this. I want you to think about this too when you think about donor, like appreciation, because I think this is another area where we’re like, oh my gosh, I have to, like, customize and curate a whole big, like gift package that’s perfectly tailored. No, think about 10 second touch points, okay? And this is where that piece piece around authenticity and vulnerability really matters, okay? So, yes, a handwritten note from beneficiaries or team members that goes a long way. Why? Because What that indicates is that you’re talking to other people too, about them, right? And your appreciation and your and your gratitude for them, personalized milestone updates. So being like, oh my gosh, we just passed this phase of that campaign. I just want to make sure you saw that and so grateful that you participated in that. When I think about donor appreciation, I really think about delight, right? So we think about appreciation a lot of the times in terms of like, in terms of like, these more formal moments of appreciation or gratitude. But I think delighting people by them being surprised about a moment of gratitude actually goes a lot farther. Like, I was just thinking about how you were one of the first few people that donated to the campaign last year. To start blank, we broke ground today. Just thinking about you, I’m so grateful that you jumped out in front on that campaign. Okay, that is a very, very quick way to personalize communication in a way that deepens connection. Also that email. Let’s say you had 25 people that joined. You’re like, oh gosh, I don’t have time to write that to everybody. This is exactly where you could create a segment and email that group of people, maybe with a photo of breaking ground, right? And you’re just like, hey, you were one of the first 25 people that joined us last year for that campaign. Today we broke ground. I just want to be one of the first people to say, thank you. I was thinking about what it took for you to jump out in front when we announced that I’m so grateful, right? Surprise and delight them with your appreciation. We don’t want appreciation to just feel like a strategy, right? And so when appreciation happens in these random, unexpected moments, it really indicates that, like we’re feeling grateful in that moment, okay, and that’s maybe another thing I kind of want to double click on all of these things, like we want to get out of just thinking about them as a strategy to raise more money. Will they raise more money? Yes, because of exactly sort of the can the thing that I explained before, right? Deepening connection in these relationships, which these strategies do, increases their engagement with the organization. Increased engagement with the organization, increases participation, which increases how much people invest in the organizations that they care about and are connected to. So yes, but we don’t want to be thinking about things like gratitude and appreciation just from a strategy perspective, because that changes how people feel and receive it. We want to tap in right before you send an authentic, delighted appreciation email, I want you to tap into an actual moment of gratitude, like experience for yourself in your own body. Gosh, I am really grateful that these 25 people stepped up before they even really knew a lot about this and just said yes, like, that’s so meaningful, right? And so noticing that and that, it’s not about the biggest donors, right? It’s about what they did, the actions they took, who they are, right? Them, demonstrating their connection to you. It goes so far, but it has to be tied to how you truly feel and your openness to connection inside of you. Okay, so, so, so, so we’ve talked about a bunch of different strategies, and also, I’m sure DonorPerfect will drop the link if they haven’t already, or it’ll be in the follow up email. We wrote a guide around beyond engagement, how to deepen connection, that has a ton of additional advice and resources in there. So do not worry. But I want to talk about tracking. Okay? Because tracking connection instead of more transactional metrics. Okay? Because I always say to people I’m like, don’t tell me what you care about. Show me what you track. Okay, you are on this webinar. You care about deepening connection with your donor. You care about deepening relationships and engagement with your donors, but if you leave this webinar and all you track is money, then you are not going to continue to prioritize the actions that deepen connection and engagement, and you can fall right back into those transactional ways of fundraising. So first, I want to tell you how to know if it’s working. Okay, what are signs of connection? And how do you track some of those in your data? Okay, so some signs of connection, I feel a little bit nervous to share this with you, but I’m going to explain them with limiting belief in a second. So sometimes some signs of connection are repeat engagement without prompting. Okay, so you see a random donation come through from a donor who usually gives that end of year, okay? That indicates that they’re feeling really connected to you right now. It doesn’t mean that there was no prompt. There’s always a prompt, but it means that Another prompt, externally made them think of you, okay, that is a sign of deep connection, willingness to ask critical questions. Okay, we often, I really want to double click on this, because often when we feel like a donor is being critical of us, and that’s a whole other TED talk around power dynamics and where donors should and shouldn’t be meddling in terms of like, the work that we’re doing inside our organizations. But I’m going to, I’m delaying that conversation at the moment, but what I want you to know is that their willingness to ask critical questions is actually a sign of connection, their curiosity, their wonder. How are you going to handle this thing? Have you thought about this thing right? Like their ability, their willingness to ask critical questions is actually a sign that they feel connected to you and want to be more deeply connected to you. So instead of taking those critical questions as they hate us, they’re never going to support us again. They think we don’t know what we’re doing. What if, when those questions happen, you were like, wow, here’s somebody really trying to connect. What does it look like for me to be open to connection with them in a way that feels good to me and will feel good to them too, okay? And then the third is increasing in personal investment beyond financial giving, right? So when we think about things like people volunteering to help with events, or, you know, participating in the organization in other ways, what those signs are, is that they are their personal investment is increasing, right beyond financial giving, and that demonstrates to us that they are interested in deepening connection. Okay, so here’s some just like very preliminary signs that people are feeling more connected to you, but things you can track other than the amount of money, to give you indicators of if you’re starting to trend towards more connected relationships, if you’re starting to build more connected relationships, are things like open click and response rates to emails, okay? And when you look at those, when you look at those, okay, please. When you look at click rates and response rates, you really do need to look at those in relationship to open rates, okay, not just in general and for open rates, I also want you to think a little bit about context and deliverability, because sometimes those metrics are not like comparing apples to apples, okay, but look at overall trends, right? Are you starting to see more engagement in emails? How are those metrics telling you that you’re writing content that people want to respond to, want to engage in, want to learn more about, Okay, another thing here, and this is not about amount of money, but frequency of repeat donations. Okay, these are ways to track connected donors. And again, I want you to look at this on an aggregate level. So last year we had, you know, 204 donors that gave more than once. This year we have 307 donors that gave more than once, right? So I want you to look at these in bucket in as like an aggregate frequency of repeat donations. How does that demonstrate in general? And you can look at this by segments as well. How does this indicate, in general, whether you’re building deeper connection? Okay. The third piece here is around engagement in two way, communication, filling out a survey, responding to an email, signing up for this thing, voting on blank right, advocating putting their name on a petition, right, engagement in any type of two way communication or like feedback loop or promoting something. Right? Do they feel like they are in conversation with you? Okay? And then participation in events and non financial involvement in the organization, okay? So I want to make sure, as you’re thinking about tracking and trying to track whether or not somebody’s, like a hot, you know lead, or whatever you know hot donor in your system, that you’re really looking at a lot more than just the amount of. Money. Now, as I said before, we cannot just focus on donor behavior. Okay, so what do I want you to track in terms of your behavior? Because your behavior is the leading indicator, the donor behavior is the lagging indicator. Okay, so I want you to start to look at the number of personalized communications that you’re sending out. If you have never tracked this before, just start by tracking it. And then for next year, I want you to just increase that number by 10% okay, the number of personalized communications that you’re sending out invitations to two way conversation. So not how many you had, that’s coming next, but the amount of invitations you made to two way conversations. Okay, then tracking face to face or virtual interaction. So how many times are you actually having those interactions? The reason that I want you to track that is because it motivates actually sending more invitations out. And then this last one is really tricky, and this is going to be different for every organization, but if you have a way to track the quality of interactions, I think this would give you a lot of information. So it’s wonderful if you have the ability to track the quality of the interaction on the donor side of things and the fundraiser side of things, not everybody has that ability, but in the contact record, when you’re putting the meeting notes, if you create some type of scale, quality scale around the level of interaction, and then you can start to look at that over time. That’s going to give you really, really important information about connection. And you can define quality based on how connected it is. And you can use some of the the terms and guidance that we’ve had in this webinar to start to manage that. Okay, before we go to questions, I’m seeing 84 questions, but my guess is that that has just been used a little bit as a chat. So before we go to questions, I want to make sure to talk about part five, which is how to handle signs of disengagement. So before I talk about that, I first want to ensure that there is data to support the idea that they are actually disengaged. And let me explain what I mean. Sometimes our interpretation of a donor’s behavior is really different than what that donor’s experience is, right? So we use terms like laps, donors, live events, reports, all these things the donors does not know that the donor might have given last year, you know, at the end of the year, or maybe they give in January, two years ago, and they do not realize at all that they are a lapse donor, and if they have been opening your emails, responding to things, showing up to events, that is a very engaged donor. Okay, so I want you to be really critical and make sure you’re pulling the right data that supports the idea that they actually are disengaged, and that we’re not creating a lot of limiting beliefs because of our own fear and because we took one metric and we’re applying a whole story to the donor because of that, Here are actual signs of disengagement, decreased engagement in communications, right? Reduction in giving frequency or amounts. But this is one piece, one piece of the puzzle, okay, lack of interaction on social media. Let’s say they were somebody who commented on everything, and now they don’t. They don’t participate also social media algorithms, totally bizarre, very hard to track. So again, this is one data point. The importance of this is that you are not looking at any one of these things as a standalone metric of disengagement, but you’re looking at it as an aggregate as a whole. Okay, so decreased participation in events, you know, shift from personalized to more transactional giving. If all of these things are happening, or most of these things are happening that might send up some of your signs that this donor is leaning towards more disengagement. Now, part of that could be maybe they changed their email address and they didn’t update it inside their system, and the algorithm is not showing them any of your posts anymore, right? So again, we don’t want to take this and create a kind of limiting beliefs from it. But these are just some indicators, some things to think about. If you’re like, oh, I should check in with that person, because I’m noticing sort of this culmination of trends that might be demonstrating that they’re disengaged, as I was saying before. Connection cannot just be something that we think about as a strategy. Connection is a felt experience. Okay? Connection is a felt experience in you and in that funder. Okay, but don’t panic if you’re like, oh my gosh, Mallory, we have not been doing this in any way, shape or form similar to what you’re talking about. This is just another great opportunity for you to be vulnerable. Okay, get feedback, giving yourself permission to learn and understand more about your donors on an individual level, on a group level, will help to reduce your fear by replacing the unknown with knowledge about how things have been going to them as scientifically proven to reduce fear, the more knowledge, like real knowledge, that we gain around. Something. So give yourself permission to learn and understand more about your donors, instead of making judgments about where you think this is coming from. Okay. How to Address donor disengagement. So assuming that you have really noticed for sure that certain donors are starting to trend towards disengagement disconnection. Okay? Here are some strategies, right, reaching out with genuine curiosity, reaffirming the impact of past contributions, financial and otherwise inviting them back in an inclusive and non transactional way, not like, Oh, you gave at this time for so many years, and now you didn’t. So can you just give again this time this year. Right? Engage them. Connect with them. Provide opportunities for involvement beyond giving and doing, like a small handwritten note, a small gesture that could be one of those, like forwarding a resource type things, okay, if anything feels too big, think about how you can make that action smaller. And I’m not telling you to do all five of these things at once. I’m giving you options so that you can pick the one that feels the most aligned with you and your organization and start to test that out and see how it feels. And I want to make something clear. When you do these things, when you ask for feedback, when you invite people to fill out surveys, then it’s our job to listen. And this is not about donor centrism. It’s about treating donors the same way we would in any healthy relationship. Okay, in any healthy relationship, when we ask somebody for something, or we ask somebody to give us feedback on something, then we actually need to hear them right and give them space to be more fully known. Think about those elements of connection. Okay, money moves in connection, but we have to start here, and we have to start and track and focus on the behaviors around what deepen connection, both inside of us and inside of our donors, and then we will see the results in our fundraising. But we have to move beyond just tracking for that. Okay, there was so much I wanted to give you guys today, and with not enough time, we’re gonna have like seven minutes for questions. I want to share with you that you know, DonorPerfect is so incredibly generous. So if you have, if there really are 87 questions, which I really hope not, but if you have additional questions after this, and you’re like, I just need a little bit more coaching from Mallory because of DonorPerfect support of the book, what the fundraising that’s coming out in a few weeks? I’ll give you that pre order link in a second. We also are giving folks a 30 just select folks, a 30 day trial inside the alignment fundraising collective. You can cancel at any time, but if you want 30 days with me to come on group coaching calls to ask for feedback as you start to implement anything we talked about on this webinar, I want to make sure you have space for that. We have two group coaching calls a month. We have a group channel where you can ask questions anytime, an incredible, incredible group of fundraisers who are really focused on fundraising in a more alignment first way. And if you want, so I’ll put that or that is up there. You can grab that screenshot. And then if you want to grab the book, which is releasing on october 1, there’s a little QR code. I hope that works. Or you can go to Mallory erickson.com backslash book, and you can pre order it today as well.

Okay, I will. I’ll keep that up there. And then Lori, do you have any questions for me in our final moments?

I want to say I have lot. What I’ve what I’ve done, though, is, is there are some repeats in there, so I’ll try to group them together so that we can get through them. I do want to touch on the first one that came in, and that’s from Dan. And he says, are you seeing differences between generations in terms of how much they are engaged. Seems like folks such as Gen Z really want to be part of something, not just a donor.

Yes. So yes, exactly. I mean, I think I always feel a little bit hesitant to make too many sweeping generalizations based on sort of particular demographics like I think about and so I think this is where it’s really interesting to create segments based on how people have indicated they’re interested in being involved, and also how they’ve sort of behaved in the past, like they showed up to this in person event. But yes, I mean, there is a lot of data to suggest that younger generations want to feel valued and involved in different ways. I definitely think kind of philanthropy and giving is changing, but truthfully, I think a lot of people want that right? The more and more we’re looking for culture and community and connection as individuals who feel more isolated in the world today, I think everybody is looking for different types of. Spaces, not always in that, like one on one setting like that, right? Like some people like, I’m too overwhelmed. I have too many things to do. I’m not going to meet with you one on one, but they want to feel sort of included in that community. So I think anything you can do to be asking people for personal like feedback and sort of like how they want to engage with the organization, and using that to drive your segments and your behavior is better, is like the best idea?

Okay, all right, so I have some questions. I’m going to try to put them together, because it really came down to where to start it. You know, if I just started, how do I get these connections to happen? How do I know how many to work with? You know, if I have 500 is that too many? And you know, how do I prioritize when it comes to that stewardship with all of that?

Yeah, so, okay, so those are a lot of a lot of very big questions. But I’m going to go back to my to what I said before, which is just start. So literally, if you go into your software, close your eyes, pull 20 people out and pick one of the activities that I said and do it. So let’s say you know a group of folks came to a recent event or volunteer opportunity, and then in the next newsletter you talked about it, grab the people who went to that event or that volunteer opportunity, take that newsletter forward. It to each of the people on that list and say, Hey, want to make sure you saw the shout out about blank event. We were so glad you were there. I want you to think smaller and less. It is like our perfectionism, which is also like a nervous system response to feel like we have to have the perfect list, the perfect amount of people, the perfect like everything. The most important thing here is action and to start small, so the number of people you should be doing this to that, there is no one answer for that. It depends on your capacity, your staff, team, the structure of your organization, right? Like, I can’t answer that in a way that will be true for everybody, but what I want is for you to start with one action that feels feasible, if for you that is taking one donor off your list that you have wanted to check in with for a long time. Do that email if you’re brand new look at who gave, look at who gave the most times last year. Shoot them over an email and be like, Hey, I’m trying to learn more about what excites our donor base and keeps them the most engaged. You demonstrated last year a ton of engagement. And I’m wondering if you’d be willing to have, like, a quick conversation with me so I can learn more about what you know, what you’ve enjoyed, about how we’ve worked with you, what you wish we didn’t do anymore, etc. And if you do that for one person, or you do that for 10 people, do whatever is available to you to start.

Okay, got all of them in there.

I don’t know. I’m not sure, but yeah, yeah. I mean, I know everybody wants the number, but I just might the number to start is small. If small for you is 10, start there, if small for you is one, start there, like whatever gets you over the action line and then do one more, or 10 more, or five more, whatever that number is for you.

Okay, Brittany sounds like she’s struggling a little bit, so I wanted to throw this one out there. She said, how would you approach a situation where the former staff member, Executive Director left a sour taste in the community for your organization? How do you combat prior reputations.

Okay, so this actually something I coach around a lot, and I think this is where vulnerability and authenticity is really, really important. And so obviously every organization in a situation like this has certain types of messaging, maybe guard rails around what they can or cannot say about whatever happened that left that sour taste in their mouth. But I think this is situation, if you can talk about certain elements, or at least how people feel, where you don’t just want to leave an elephant in the room. So saying like, Hey, I’m new. I know that there were some things that happened last year that have a lot of people feeling really disengaged and maybe even questioning their relationship to our organization. I’m I’m really, like, disappointed about that, because the reality is over here, we’re really committed to blank and I think for many years, we demonstrated in our relationship with you that we could do that together, and I’d still love for that to be considered, but I know we have some repair in front of us. I’m wondering if you’re open to a first conversation, to just sort of talk through clear the air, answer any questions that you might have. I think being demonstrating that we really are committed to repair is really important again. Accountability repair, and not just ignoring an elephant in the room, if a bunch of people got burned from a previous staff member, us being like, oh my gosh, you just like, want to come to this next thing again with like, how that doesn’t help. People feel seen. Feel like their experience matters. Feel like their feedback is important, right? All the things that we say about what deepens connection, like managing and addressing con conflict productively, none of those things are happening when we’re blowing over something like that. So my my recommendations always to use those as opportunities to be vulnerable and authentic and go deeper and learn how conflict can actually deepen relationships. Can I know we’re almost out of time, but can I answer one question I see in the chat or in the in the Q, a which is around two way conversation is a zoom call or a one on one meeting? No, a two way conversation is anything that inspires a response from the other person. So we want to think about, are we just talking at people, are? Are we inviting people to contribute to a conversation that could be on a community platform where you have and people are, or, you know, chiming in, or a Facebook group, it could be a response to a survey. It’s anything that allows for voice of the other person to be included in how you are. Like being in dialog in any of those ways. It does not need to be one to one.

Okay, thank you for answering that. Because I actually was going to throw that out there because I saw a few float by and I thought, well, there’s more than one. Let’s see if we can get that answered. Other than that, yes, we are out of time. I know that there were a few questions on how to track the fine, the non financial communications. And if any of you are DonorPerfect users, you know that on the contact screen, that’s where we track that. And I’m assuming there are other products out there. I don’t know how much you’re familiar with the products Mallory on how to track the non financial communication. Every,

every, every technology uses it differently, but I’m sure like for DonorPerfect in particular, you know, they have so many like guides and how tos around, how to create, you know, custom fields, or where those live. And so if you are not on DonorPerfect, I think doing that search on your tech platform or asking their support, where do you put? Where do you put trackable custom fields that would allow you to report on certain things? That’s what’s really important if you ultimately want to use those for segmentation or customization around touchpoints.

Okay, all right. I think we have all of the questions. And again, if it Mallory, I think you offered, if they have other questions or things that were not answered, they could reach out,

absolutely yes, absolutely whether you’re in the alignment fundraising collective or not, you can reach out on LinkedIn, Instagram, anything like that. I can’t wait to hear from you. Okay,

sounds great. Well, I appreciate you joining us today, as always, this has been a great session, and I’ve had a few people flip by saying, you know, even ones that had to leave, that that they didn’t want to leave, they were, they were really liking the content. So this has been great, and I can’t wait to have you back again.

Thank you. Thank you guys. So much. Thank you everyone at DonorPerfect. Thanks everyone for joining.

All right, thank you. Have a good day. Bye.