50 MINS
How to Refine Your Online Donor Journey: Turning Your Mission Into A Movement
DonorPerfect Community Conference 2023 session with speaker Dana Snyder
How to Refine Your Online Donor Journey: Turning Your Mission Into A Movement Transcript
Print TranscriptGood morning. Good morning everyone. And welcome to our session how to reflect on your online donor journey. Today, so she’s gonna be led by Dana Snyder. She is the founder of positive equation and a host of Michigan movement. As a digital marketing strategist she Read More
Good morning. Good morning everyone. And welcome to our session how to reflect on your online donor journey. Today, so she’s gonna be led by Dana Snyder. She is the founder of positive equation and a host of Michigan movement. As a digital marketing strategist she supported organizations like Movember dress for success, American Idol and USTA with leveraging the latest digital innovation, tools and strategies. She has helped nonprofits do social media ads to transform their online experiences and retain donors with their monthly giving program. Dana frequently delivers keynote at a conference says like nio summit cause camp, classy collaborative and the nonprofit storytelling conference. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in AD vertising and public relations from the University of Central Florida. She’s based in Atlanta and enjoys spending her time with her husband and Labradoodle outside, hiking, exploring new restaurants and traveling on so before I turn it over the data, Dana, Just one housekeeping items, all of our sessions are going to be recorded. If you’re looking for the handouts, you can find them in the bottom of this session, and for downloading. And if you want additional information about this session, please take the poll over on the side and answer yes. That said, Dana, I’m gonna remove myself and turn it completely over to you.
Thanks, Amanda. Hey, everybody. I know I see lots of static going choppiness. Can you guys hear my audio? Okay, am I coming through clear? Oh, Abby says go bowls. Okay, Avi.
Let’s Go Knights. Let’s see Abby. Shannon. Angie. Let’s see Carrie. Good morning. Can you guys hear me okay, before we get started, I just want to make sure that my audio is okay. Give me like a thumbs up. Give me some give me Yes, audio is clear. I want to make sure before we get started because that would not make for a good presentation. Ah, thank you, Jennifer. Thank you, Donna. Okay, beautiful. As long as we’re clear. We’re good to go. Yes, I got another good night’s from Brooke. Thank you. Perfect. Awesome. Let’s rock and roll and get started. So quick intro. Thank you, Amanda, for the lovely introduction. If we have not met before, my name is Dana Snyder. As she mentioned, I started my company positive equation six years ago, and 2017 which is wild to really provide organizations like yourselves nonprofits with the tools and the trainings needed to rock and online donor experience. And a lot of my focus is in the social media marketing space, with paid social media ads and with monthly giving programs. So if that is of interest to you, I want to share with you a link in the chat. I have a podcast that has over 70 episodes Commission’s to movements with amazing great clear case studies. Yay Mallory in the house. Okay, by the way, can I just give a shout out to Mallory for being the best host ever. This event, she and I are gonna see each other in Atlanta this week. She’s literally flying from Philly to here. So I get to see her in person, which is amazing. We are business besties. And some of them are actually we’re gonna talk about today Mallory and I have done together in our own businesses. So join the podcast if you have an interest in more marketing, case studies and information. So quick backstory, I have a wild career track. I have worked for a nonprofit in Sarasota, Florida. So lots of people from even the Tampa area in the chat. And I worked in New York City working on big corporate campaigns, I moved to Los Angeles, I worked on American Idol. And then I started my business. And it has truly been incredible. But the most incredible thing that has happened recently is I became a mom, literally two months ago, in two days, which will make me all emotional. Let the hormones roll. So I am a mom and I just came off on maternity leave literally today. So I’m really excited to be here with you guys. If you hear any cries i don’t have spit up on me currently I cleaned for you guys. Do you hear any baby cries Kennedy is two months old in the other room. And with that said, If you love seeing kind of behind the scenes of life, Instagram is my grant. I just shared it with you in the chat. So let’s roll. Thanks, everybody for the congratulations. We’re here to talk about you. We’re here to talk about refining your online donor journey. And with that, I like to start with a quick story. This is Emma. So I met Emma in 2005 in January, and I’m sorry she was born in 2005. And immediately her parents knew something was wrong. I met her you’ll see the timestamp on here. Remember there’s timestamps on our photos from 2009. And when she was born, she was born at Arnold Palmer Hospital in Orlando, Florida. And they realized that she had Multiple heart defects. And to fix it, she was going to have to have multiple open heart surgeries. I met Emma at the University of Central Florida. And I was sitting in our Student Union area. And Emma and her mom were like in this coronary and I was sitting over here on a computer, I was working on an assignment. And I was hearing the story unfold of these multiple open heart surgeries that this little girl up two or three at the time, had to have. And slowly from my work, I was turning around to think about like, what is happening in this corner next to me, so I was curious. They started to talk about Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. I was like, okay, and this program called nights on. So I turned around back to my computer and I started to Google search. What is night THON? What is Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals? Come to find out it’s a dance marathon program. Let me know in the chat, throw down some put d and if you’ve ever heard of dance marathons or been a part of one, there are over 100 of them. Yes, Amanda. There’s over 100 of them in the United States at different colleges. And essentially, you dance every hour on the hour, you raise funds all year long. It’s a student run organization to raise funds for your local Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. So for Emma, at one week old, she had her first heart surgery, her heart was literally the size of her tiny fist at six months, the second surgery, and that started to redirect blood in her heart. So I started to do research, I see lots of people with DMS, I started to do research, yes, fantastic event and I decided to get a part of it. So in four years, Mo went through four open heart surgeries and truly touched us all with her strength. And this led me to join Nathan. So I joined Nathan, I did all the research online, I signed up, I became a donor. And to date, anytime that I see this Children’s Miracle Network hospital balloon, if you’ve seen any of these app, Walmart’s cost goes I think I just saw one at Publix actually the other day, I will always give when I see something relating to Children’s Miracle Network hospital. And I mentioned Emma in the story, because she was really my start as a young adult and 18 year old college student getting into philanthropy, and I experienced a donor’s journey that still carries out today. And that’s what I want to talk to you about. So today our agenda, so we’re gonna talk about why do we give? I’m going to go through an online donor draining exercise with you a personalized ad strategy that gets people to our site. And then what can we do literally right now. So first and foremost, it’s important for us to understand for our individual donors, why are they giving when we literally quite literally have millions of options, right? Why your organization, we are bombarded. These are all different social ads we’re bombarded with on a daily basis. And there’s really three primary motivations. situation based, these are often triggered by sudden changes in the environment, individuals responding by given something big happening worldwide maybe or in your local community. relationship based motivations are when donors give based upon their connection to an organization or somebody that’s connected to that organization. And then identity based the closest to home is focusing on giving for release somebody to express who they are. So let’s talk about what can be different ones situation based, a great one is the Ukraine war, something huge situation based happened. So therefore we all wanted to respond by giving, even if we didn’t know anybody there. We’ve never been there before. It was something that took over the news. And we felt compelled to give and help others to relationship based I put here Movember and Children’s Miracle Network because they’re close home to me. My dad was diagnosed, diagnosed with prostate cancer a couple of years ago. And Movember is the largest global men’s health charity and one of their focus areas is prostate cancer. I happen to be working with them at the time as Amanda read off in the intro, and immediately my work with them became way more personal and relationship based. So when I see things that they do, I’m subscribing to their email list I’m giving when I see that Children’s Miracle Network balloon at a grocery store. So a little bit relationship based. Third is identity. So identity. Before I had Kennedy, I was dealing with some fertility issues. And so I was doing research, I was searching for organizations that I could give to that were focused on the fertility area and resolve is one of those. So I am a current monthly donor of resolve the national infertility association. So when we can figure out and identify and this is why CRMs are great when we can identify if somebody is giving to us via a situation or relationship or identity. We can then customize and start to think about our messaging. Which brings me into knowing the main who, who are we focused on that we want to customize our messaging For that we can design and draft personalized copy for sow and imagery as well really, on the screen right now, this is the website of the adventure project. Now everything here looks great, right? But when we look when we zoom in, let’s look at this text. It says Join hundreds of people just like you, who wants to build a world our grandkids can be proud of the adventure project knows their primary demographic of donors are women over 50, who might relate to that phase, building a world our grandkids will be proud of. They’re not focused on just speaking to everyone, right? They’ve identified looking at Google Analytics information, looking at their social channels, looking at their donor information in our CRM, and they have customized this language. Next up very similar. Another example with a really customized language, which is fun and bold and youthful is Movember. So they’re speaking to the Gen, primarily, the Gen Z and the millennial man. Right? So you might be saying, Dana, but we have lots of different people give to us. That is true, probably. But you want to zoom in on who’s the primary demographic? And how can we speak to look how clever their blog is, it’s called nuts and bolts, right? That grow a mo their language patchy, lopsided, itchy, or epic, whatever Mo, you grow this Movember, your face will raise funds and awareness for men’s health. Right? It’s funny, it’s catchy, it’s useful, the imagery that they’re using is diverse, it’s fun. So think about on your sites right away is your copy and your imagery speaking to the ideal donor that you’re looking for. So that’s the first thing that we want to break down, do your marketing visuals and your messaging, speak to that target audience. And there’s a great tool. And this is really kind of step one of an exercise to do after this presentation, is to build your ID a, your ideal donor avatar, and I’m going to put a link to a blog, that DonorPerfect has had and copy and paste it in here. There you go. They have five steps for this. And you can actually build a donor persona, right within the platform, which is amazing. And so you can break down really specific things here, right? Age, and I’m not saying age ranges, right? They put 57 housing, Family Education, like get to know this individual. So then all of your messaging can be customized. And if you’re thinking, I’m not a copywriter, I need help with this. What I love as of late is to use some AI. So chat, GBT has talked about a million times, let me know in the chat with a wire and and have you used chat GBT for anything in your organization yet? Let me know. Because this example that I have on here, let me go ahead and make it bigger so that I can see it. So I asked chat GPT provide three alternative headlines similar to and then I put in that exact headline from the adventure project. And then it gives me be part of a growing movement, building a better world for future generations together. And then if you notice, the second one, creating a legacy our grandkids will celebrate I really like the word legacy. Oh, Jennifer says no, Natasha, yes. No. Okay, we have some next people on here. So this is an example of how we can use chat GPT for our benefit, the third one, together, we thrive empowering local skills to strengthen and transform communities. I don’t love that one, I would say number two, or number one would probably be the best for alternative headlines here. Another example. So let’s say you’re starting from scratch, you don’t have a headline that you really love in your organization, you want to customize it for that donor journey starts right there on the front, right. So this is draft three website headlines for a nonprofit that works to end world hunger that would appeal to a 20 year old male. So I’m asking for three website headlines for a nonprofit, I’m saying what the cause does, and I’m saying a 20 year old male. So here it’s joined the fight. Empower your generation to end world hunger, Feed the Future Ignite, change and eradicate hunger together, make an impact unleash your potential really interesting keywords. And I think what’s interesting with that DBT is it explains Yes, Tina, she says she loves it. These headlines aim to appeal and they explain why the importance of their generations movement in the cause. Right? So really interesting when you’re thinking about your messaging. Number two, use technology to really help segment and personalize your emails. When I was talking about the three different ways that people can give to your organization, you can use technology on your site to create different forms to get people started in the right journey. So DonorPerfect has a great example of this where you can create different forms. So let’s say you had a blog post or even a separate landing page with content that was designed to speak to those specific audiences that you direct people to then in the back end, you know that somebody filled out form a or form B, or form C, for a specific call to action reason, right? They were guided there by whatever reason, then you can segment those audiences in the back end and communicate with them totally differently. This is one of the biggest things that I think is a missed opportunity that is possible with powerful platforms like this, right? So here, right? If you have somebody who, if you have a social post, and maybe the language is around a, like friendship, do you have a friend XYZ or tagging somebody who this relates to and then there’s a form as a blog that leads to a form, and they would fill that out. So it’s thinking about which we’re going to get to in a second, the different ways that people can find you, and then directing them to the right forum call to action, so they can chat with you and get to know your organization more. Lastly, is are you continuing to build a relationship after the gift and this is really, really, really powerful. So a big area that’s usually missed is this afterwards is people are on a high, right. So here, what I love from DonorPerfect is video, and email personalization. Right? So here in your emails after the fact, instead of just sharing a receipt, send a video, send a video that’s like a little bit more personalized, or even in your email, put an email in it. Yes. Let me see if I can put down. Here’s the blog post, and then the link or Chad BBT. Oh, thank you. They go. Perfect. Yes. And I will be going through if you have questions, put them in the q&a box. That’s the best place for me to find them. Or I will try and answer questions as we go through in the chat as well. Okay, so real quick, well, I just want to recover is messaging imagery, personalization and your donor personas, and then thinking people after the fact. And I think this is also very true. If you want to have different results, you have to take different actions. Here’s the thing. What do you so tired of doing? What are you tired of most of the time we complain about something right? What would you like to change? So in this next step, if there’s one thing that you can take, I think this is really powerful. Do you know your donors journey? Let’s go through a typical online journey. And this is interesting to ask someone who doesn’t really know a lot about your organization and watch what they would do. Let’s just say, really, usually, if somebody finds your org, on social media, or Google usually, right, that could be through a friend, it could be through an ad. And then when they visit your website, it’s normally on a mobile phone, right? And here, they either convert, or they don’t. So if they do, they’re giving to you. If they’re not, we’re hoping to get their email. Right? Then what normally happens, after they give an email, let’s try and retarget them on social media, they visited your website, they’re part of our email list, if they gave to us, oh, and after social, hopefully, we send them another email. And then if they have given to us, we’re going to send them that powerful email after the fact. And then we’re going to continue to communicate with them on social. And then hopefully, they’ll give again, maybe there’ll be a recurring donor. And what’s happening here is these are all individual beautiful touchpoints, that we have the ability to make an impact with these people. The question is, do we have tools at each of these different moments? Do we have messaging, the right messaging and each of these different moments? Are they up to date? And are they serving us? So I what I want to chat with you about and this next slide is what content are we sharing with them that’s moving them forward through this progression. So real quick, go ahead and take a screenshot or go ahead and put your phone over this QR code. I’m all about simple processes. And this is going to be an exercise I’m going to share literally this graph is what this QR code leads to. So go ahead and get that scan that QR code, you can download the chart. And you’re going to be able to do this chart work in a Google spreadsheet after the fact. So go ahead and let me know when you’ve got it. Just jot down some exclamation marks. And then I’ll go on to the next slide. And we’re gonna walk through how to use this together.
And let me know if you need any more time. And I’ll probably put it up at the end too.
Okay, we’re gonna go ahead and go to the next one. Hopefully everybody got it. Alright, so we’re going to walk through this online donors journey together and this is going to be my Children’s Miracle Network example. Okay. So this if we break this down, what I like to do and sometimes you can do it online and you can do it, Bob the dyno Thank you. You can also print this out and make it really big like on a whiteboard. So first time we have awareness consideration decision in each phase, we You want to ask what are they thinking and feeling? What’s the action that they should be taking? Where are what are they researching? And how do we move them along in the journey? So here’s my example. At the very beginning, when I met Emma, I was thinking, I couldn’t believe all this could happen to a little girl, I was little bit shocked. I was feeling compassion. I was sitting in the Student Union. So I’m thinking about, Okay, what am I going to do next? My action then was I researched? What is Children’s Miracle Network? What is Dance Marathon? How can I get involved? Okay, so you’re, you are putting yourselves in the minds of a donor in this situation? Where am I researching? In this case, because I was a college student to think about your ideal donor, again, I was going to Google, I was going to social media, which at the time was primarily Facebook in 2007. And I was asking fellow college students at the event. And then when we asked, how do they move me along the journey, they had the right content, a things came up on Google, they had the right content on their social media channels, for me to be able to take the next action. So I was all I was learning awareness in this case, right? Next for consideration. Now, what am I thinking and feeling? I’ve done a little bit of research, I’m excited to learn more. I really want to know like, how much of a commitment is this going to be? Is this going to be fun? Or other friends doing this? So therefore now what am I doing? Now? I’m diving deeper, maybe into the website, I want to see this, like, what is this really look like? What I’ve never heard of a dance marathon? What is it? So I’m watching previous participant vendor videos that attended the event in the past? I’m going on social media, I’m going on their website, is it easy for me to find these things? So how to move me along in my journey? At this point? I probably signed up for an email with information. Are they sending me an email with a write FAQs, knowing that, oh, she’s interested in joining this dance marathon program? Are they going to retarget me with social media ads, so that I continue to remember and I don’t forget that I was interested in this event. Right? decision phase. Now I’m at the point I’ve gotten all this information. I’ve seen multiple touch points about the event. Now I’m thinking and I’m feeling I’m pumped. I’m super excited about night, Don, I want to get friends together, I want to create a team. Now what do I have to do? Sign up? I have to sign up, where am I going to their website to register? Now this this last part, this last square is so important the decision how to move them along. We want to reduce as much friction as possible, because at this point, we’ve worked so hard to get me here. I need to sign up. So how can I sign up and then receive continued emails to show up and be excited about the event? So I would love to encourage you my little tuneup tip here is to go ahead and ask yourself, do you know your donors journey? And are each individual stage? How are you interacting with them? What’s the right call to action at what specific moment? And then really develop the right content buckets to align with each decision in that journey. So something I love doing imperfect has things called alerts on the back end that alert you if somebody’s at a specific gift amount, and you can send a very custom message to them? Again, with forms? How can you customize them to speak directly to that moment, right. So go ahead with that QR code, I’ll go I think everybody said they got it, I’ll go back to it at the end. But fill that out. And there could be, you can use that for lots of different things. Maybe there’s a gala, or an event you have coming up, that’s very different than maybe what it would be for just an online gift, scratch everything, and then go ahead and fill it out based upon an event and what you want them to get to I’m doing and I said unable to get the download, how can I get it, it should immediately open. When you go ahead and put in your information, it should immediately open either on mobile or phone, maybe do a refresh. Okay, so now I want to jump into something I love talking about is creating a personalized social ads strategy, how to get people to your organization, how do they find out about you? Okay, especially when organic engagement is 1.4% on Instagram is the average. And point one 3% average Facebook engagement, which is bananas, right? And at the beginning I talked about these are these are all ads, as you see it says sponsored. These are all sponsored posts. And there’s millions of options. Why? Why you? Right? So what we want to do is think about how can we really customize these ads to speak to who we’re trying to find and doesn’t start with a donation ad. I think this is the most common way that we often think about using social ads is the first ad that we’re going to run is a donation ad. And there’s so many more ways to use advertising. So for example, you can use ads to raise brand awareness, visibility, educate people. We’ll share a video to learn about your cause. remind people about what you do share impact stats, you can get people to sign a petition, if that’s something that your organization does, you can ask them to join an email list with a lead generation campaign, which I’m going to show you in a second, that has a valuable download about what you do. Or maybe you’re just sharing people to a podcast episode you’ve been featured on, or a blog post that you’ve written recently, so people can learn about your organization. You can even do ads to say thank you. You can Upload CSV files to Facebook, have a list of people that have given to you before, maybe it’s a video from your founder, literally saying thank you. And that’s a reminder and you’re popping up in their feed. And then of course, yes, donation ads, or any type of conversion. So with that, I have a video that I wanted to play for you. And let me see if Amanda, do you have the video here that we can go ahead and play real quick. Or if not, I can try to use Facebook’s ads library all the time to get inspiration on ad ideas, ad copy ad content, and one of my favorites is from IJM. They do an incredible job with their ad campaigns. And this one, this carousel donation post I think is amazing. It’s telling the story of a young girl that was trafficked and taken at the age of five Kashi. Now as we click through the carousel posts you see the journey taking place. At choose taken age five, she was trafficked and abuse at 15. She was sold cars She was then rescued, so you are ending on a positive note of hope. And then they have helped rescue and restore a child’s life to add itself is beautifully done through this carousel story. That copy is really well done. It’s very specific. It’s not asking you to donate it saying you can help rescue and restore a child like Kashi today. Now, the even more powerful thing is once you click the donate now button, you are taken to a longer version, blog like story of QA she’s experienced everything is specific, exactly talking about what you see on the ad and making sure that you are in the right place, and then giving you the opportunity to give awesome an example. Cool, okay, so let’s go ahead and go back to the presentation. So I wanted to play that video for you. Because it’s an example of a of using ADS library, let me know if you’ve in the chat wire. And if you’ve ever used ads library before ads library provides you with a ton of different examples for free, you can just search for an organization and be able to see the ads that they’re currently running. So that was IJM. And then what I also wanted to share with you in that example is a real that video was an Instagram real when we think about content, providing something that’s valuable. So I know on social my audience are nonprofits, and I talk about social ads. So in this video, I was doing a green screen real providing hopefully, educational valuable content on social. So I got lots of ends, nowhere is it you know what, let me go ahead and give you the link, totally free to use.
I will put it in the chat, are you Oh, that is Add Library. So you can literally search for anybody. You could put Nike in there, you could put positive equation, my company you can put don’t have perfect, maybe they’re running some social ads. And you can see any examples on there. And then what I think was beautiful, specifically about IgM is they were educating us about a story about a young girl, and talked about ads library, they have a call to action that was really compelling in their messaging. And then what you could do with this is you can run a video view campaign if they had a video, and retarget people who watched that video with the next step in your journey. But I loved how they sent people to this very specific page from the ad, right? So they know exactly where people are coming. And actually, this is I think this should take you. This is the IJM example. I just put it in there. So if you pull that up on a separate tab that’s going to bring you to the page and I’m showing you right now. And I think this is a great example of when you are running an ad campaign or even if it’s an organic social post, but you want to specifically start people at a certain point in the donors journey, and you’re leading them to a specific landing page. This has Yes, I’m getting lots of 100%. You know where they’re coming from, because only certain posts are guiding people to this page. So as you can tell in this link I just sent you they’re doing some tracking here, where it says paid social. So this people are only going to that page from paid with specific messaging. So they are directing people there. So there’s a bunch of different ways to do this. But that’s just one example that I wanted to share with you. So what can You do right now. And please make sure if you have questions, drop them into the q&a section at the top of the engagement bucket. And let’s go through an example. So, this presentation and what I do right is not just fancy title, I like to share things based off of real life. And this is a real life nonprofit case study. And it came from an email in my inbox that literally started like this. And I love getting emails like this, and said, You don’t know me, but I’m on your email list. My name is Hannah, I wanted to send you this email as a thank you, but also to share some data. And I love some good data. So what Hannah did, this is around lead generation and social ads. So getting people to her website and into their organization. Let me go ahead and share I did a full podcast on this. But she did this very clever ad last fall. So this is from St. Joseph Indian School. And it says Halloween is almost here, and we want your pumpkins to be the best on the block. We’ve made it easy for you to have the most unique jacket lanterns by using St. Joseph’s Indian School Limited Edition pumpkin stencils download. What’s also very cool about this, there’s 86 shares at the time that I screenshotted this 14 comments, right, so it’s getting a lot of traction, when she knows specifically who the ads going out to. And she can specifically now create a whole email series based upon people who just downloaded these stencils. Now, her budget for this ad campaign was $250. Her results were incredible. She got 430 Plus, because it was still running at the time when I got the report 430 Plus names and email addresses at 60 cents an email 60 cents. what’s so beautiful about this is this is not a donation request, right? This was running in October. This is Halloween time. It’s on brand free Halloween stencils. She’s a school, so she’s relating to her audience. And then in the emails that she’s sending, they are going to be customized based upon knowing that they started from getting a free Halloween Central, they’re not being sent directly into like, sign up and fundraise for our school. And that wouldn’t make sense, right? We have to think about where people are coming from. Another example that she ran is this Christmas recipe. The first one did so good at Halloween, that they did a favorite Christmas recipes book. And they put this together I think very quickly. It says How does toasted butter pecan fudge sound? How about candy cane kiss cookies, sour cream, sugar cookies, okay, all of these things are just gonna make me hungry. But it says we’re in the giving mood, we’re offering you our free Christmas recipes book to print, plus eight more recipes. So again, very simple graphic, you can make this in Canva. Shout out to Canva being amazing. It says Get your free holiday recipe book and again, download. So here, you can go ahead and same thing she’s going to know people came specifically from this favorite Christmas recipes book. And here, let’s see what her budget was our budget was $200. So a little bit less. And the results in just five days, she had 181 leads, which was 19 cents per lead. And then she continued to run this campaign 25 days was still the $25 budget had over 1180 leads at 17 cents per email. That is wild. That is amazing. That is knowing who your audience is creating something downloading that is of valuable interest. And then Deborah, great question. What was the benefit of these free downloads? Gained email addresses? Yes, of course. And then the idea is Yeah, over time, you hope that you’re educating this audience to either be an ambassador of the work that you do, maybe they’re going to be invited to an event, maybe they’re going to ask them to give, maybe they’re going to ask them to become a recurring donor. So over time, this is more of a long lead process. I think oftentimes we’re too quick, especially here to ask for a donation, when we need to be especially these are cold leads coming in most of the time. We need to be educating. We need to be educating, inviting, and then further be able to ask for that gift. So it takes some time in this drip email campaign that’s going on. But yeah, absolutely. The hope, Deborah, is that from this a portion of those? What was the other list 400 Plus almost 2000 people coming together as she’s ran, these campaigns are going to end up turning into donors and supporters of the organization. So what’s interesting about this is the average email open rate by industry and a look at nonprofits is 21.6%. Now, I’ve also ran very similar lead campaigns where I am providing a download that is of interest to my audience. So as we go through this, what I realized in my ads As I was finding that, my my audience on ads was interested in social media ads, I put together a social media ads checklist. So I had that checklist be sent via email after people did the ad. And I saw from this 21, average, like percent actually, for professional services, it’s even lower 14%, I was seeing a 67% open rate. So basically, what I’m saying is, if you create something that’s a value to your audience, and you have them open it via email, they are interested, they want that thing, they are a passionate group, they are more likely to open your emails because it came from a place of value to them. So 67% open rate, and there was a 22.3% click rate, starting through my workflow across all of the emails, regarding to leads. So Sara, so you’re saying knowing who the audience is, but where’s that info going right through the back end, usually, through the back end, in this case, if you have a 40 depends upon what process you’re using. And if you have a form that people are filling out through some through a program like DonorPerfect, then you can know exactly where they are, because they’re tagged and segmented. And then you can provide them with a specific email flow. Social, it’s the same thing. You can connect it with your CRM and know exactly where that or that audience is coming from. Exactly. Yep. So what I want to share two things, I have a and I’ll go ahead and link to this. If you want to create lead generation ads and have a step by step approach, I have a course that you can take totally DIY, you can do it on your own time, it takes about an hour, and made it very simple to follow. And because you’re here we’re doing our perfect, I have a 20% off my lead generation ad course, three simple videos to get started. And you can rock these, this is a really great time to build the generation in the summer as we get ready for fall and giving Tuesday and end of year. So that’s of interest, you can scan the QR code or use the link in the chat. And then also, as we prep for questions here, I have a again, a blog post leading to more information about Hannah’s campaign and breaking it down in a podcast episode about how she did that. And then, really, what’s cool about seeing the progression of building a passionate audience is it creates this movement, it creates a ripple effect. And to remember that dance marathon program I told you about when I was there, there’s actually a I have a frame rate here of my time, we raised 51 to like that year is 51,000. I think we got up to $80,000. Now the students at UCSF are raising $1.5 million, which is in sane and incredible.
So I just I excite you, hopefully through this conversation to really figure out who that primary audience is work on that donors journey for that audience, through messaging through imagery through copy through social ads, getting into the right place, and then building in the back end, utilizing the breadth and understanding the tools that something like DonorPerfect has that you can activate these audiences with so they feel personalized. I think that’s the biggest, I don’t even say it’s a trend anymore. I think it’s necessary when we think about how we interact with brands all around us and taking quizzes for our hair products. And we want to feel like things are created for us customized. So we want to think about that for our donors too. So I’m going to take some questions. We have a few minutes left, I would love to connect with you on LinkedIn, or on Instagram after the fact. And let’s see what questions we have. Let me go down to the bottom. Amanda, do you want to rock them? How’s your audio working right now? And you want me to do it?
Let’s see. I think my audio is good now. Yeah, I can hear you. All right, perfect. So the our top of photic question was how can we share stories with our clients confidential that, sorry? How can we share stories when our clients confidentiality is prioritized as it should be?
Yeah, good question. So I think part of what you can share is how can you do short stories utilizing a different name? So this is very common when I was working with even with Movember, right. There’s a lot of stories relating to testicular cancer, suicide awareness as a topic, very sensitive topics. So they just changed the names and they don’t use the real imagery of the person. So if that’s something that’s allowed within the organization, a lot of times you’ll notice little asterix, like this is not the actual name of the person. That’s the way to do it. Or another thing outside of stories was social content. Is there a teaching something that you can teach that’s relating to your cause area for somebody that might be going through and experiencing a situation that you might help with, like different steps. So really like flipping the script that you all are experts in what you do in your cause area, how can you be teachers, and that’s really beneficial on social content we want. Yes, engaging, entertaining when possible, but valuable educational content that’s going to help the person on the other end of the phone, I think we forget. We utilize those almost drop it, we use our phones one to one, right, I am on my phone as an individual scrolling. And sometimes when we think about it, really, oh, we’re putting this out to the masses, but it’s being consumed as an individual. So how can you teach and provide value for that one person? And then when confidentiality, see if you can not share the real name or imagery of the actual person? I hope that answers your question.
All righty, and then our next question was, what should I do if my organization does not allow me access to information about our donors journey?
Oh, well, you should definitely get that information, I guess I would ask further asked to that is why would they not share it? Because it all goes back to we want to create the best personalized experience for every individual that comes to us. So I don’t know. I guess I would ask why that’s not allowed. And then see if that’s maybe something that can be shifted.
mazing Alright, so I think this one’s due to the Halloween stencils and the Christmas cookbook, which sounded delightful. What was the benefit of free downloads, gained email addresses? Was there a financial return from that email campaign?
Oh, yes, we answered this one. I talked about this one during the presentation. But just quickly, the idea, right, is that you create a drip email campaign based upon the downloads. And over time, yes, the hope is that there will end up being a financial return through if you sell swag, or if you ask for donations or if they come to an event, or if they become, in this case, their school. So maybe their students going to enroll at their school. So yeah, the hope definitely, is that there’s financial return in some way.
All right. And Jasmine botter, asked, using Rails always felt uncomfortable due to the serious nature and history of the organization I work for, which is in children’s aid. You have any suggestions for how to navigate this?
Yeah, a ton. I would look at Jasmine, look at other organizations that might also be in a serious nature. And there’s tons of really serious reels content reels are not dancing videos, right? If you start to go through reels and just search. I mean, personally, I’ve shared things on my fertility journey that were very serious around IVF, I would absolutely look at other examples for maybe some inspiration and to see how others are handling that within Children’s Aid, and bigger big nonprofits that are also in that work and see what they’re doing. I think that’s the best way to learn. That’s why I shared ads library again, see what’s working, and then be able to kind of like tweak and say, Okay, what’s our unique voice and our story and what we share? And how can we educate people on what we’re doing? It 100% reals do not have to be silly, funny things. tons of amazing educational, serious content. And I will tell you, as a mom, now, I am using reels for so much education on being a mom. So there is there’s a lot of great educational content out there. And people will start to get, let’s say targeted, but kind of the more somebody consumes a certain piece of content, the more they’re going to see it.
So that’s why I get nothing but Husky reels sent to me. All right, so a question from Sarah. You’re saying knowing who the audience is. But where is that info going on? How they get to you through the ad? Can that be recorded in DonorPerfect or email system somehow?
Yes. So I think we talked about this one too. And I think one of your team members responded there is a way I think through the use of content. Constant Contact integrates with DonorPerfect, and you can sync social data. There are definitely ways that you can sync information from a social ad campaign into the back end of a see enough of an email system that then integrates into a CRM, take some like tech configuring but it’s super powerful. And then once it’s done, it’s kind of running on evergreen, so it’s 1,000% worth the time. I set mine up once and now it just runs until I stop it.
Mainly say let me just see here
are open rates dependent on what type of email you are sending is that only one point 62% The average open rate for all types of emails.
So that was an average. So I don’t have let me see, let me go back to the slide on my end. So that is based on all nonprofit emails that’s actually from influencer marketing hub. That’s for 2022. In general. So I’d say yes, 100%, it varies based upon the type of email that you’re sending. Always do some testing on your email subject lines. Whenever something’s up, and look, every organization is going to be different on this. But I feel like the more personality test emojis in subject line testing using the word you might always be different, just based upon the context of what you’re sharing, for sure.
And I can add to that, with our integration with Constant Contact, I know that constant contact does actually have that AB testing functionality that you can do with those subject lines. So something we definitely recommend. Yeah. All right. So I think that was all of the questions that we had from our chat, unless I missed something. I’m just gonna be
sure that you prevent donor fatigue. So that’s an interesting question. So I would say, a donor fatigue, as in, you’re asking too many times the same group of people, if that’s what you mean, one thing that I love is to go through if you can, your donor base and start to segment so that they’re getting different messages, like maybe this group of people needs to not get an ask so much, but they need to receive just more information value based content. Before that next Ask comes along, or a video, really look at how often this is why like having a CRM is great. Look at how often has this person been asked? Are they opening emails? Or have they ghosted you over time? Or maybe? Are we making the ask the same way asking for the same thing over time? Or is there something specific that we can ask for that maybe we haven’t identified this is why that at the very beginning, very beginning their primary motivations matter. Why is this person maybe not giving? We’re not like we’re not sending them the right message, or giving the right visuals or rewriting something that’s personalized, that feels like it impacts them. A great example of this is, let’s just use me, for example, with Movember, they, they work in helping with aid for testicular cancer, prostate cancer and suicide prevention. So they have multiple cause areas, but the one close to my heart, because my dad has prostate cancer had prostate cancer would be that cause area. So for me, it yes, it’s interesting to learn about the full some of what they do. But I would love to, like, have the messaging specific about prostate. So when, when I was researching them, specifically for my dad, I was researching their blog post specific to prostate cancer. And from there, there should be a forum on that blog post site to receive more information about what we’re doing in that area. And I would sign up for it. So then I would only be getting emails most of the time about that cause area of what they do, right. So then it’s like, Oh, I’m not being bombarded by every single thing in the organization that they do, I’m getting this one touch point. And then they can tell stories relating to me in that area, they can ask for me to support them specific to that area. And that’s going to pull at my relationship based motivator. That makes sense. So that’s why I’m breaking this down is that grid that I shared? is very important to go through I understanding that avatar, and then providing them with the right messaging and information should help prevent that donor fatigue. I know that was like a long answer to that.
That’s a wonderful answer. Alrighty, and we have a couple other questions. But unfortunately, we are at the end of our time for our session. Dana, thank you so much for a wonderful session. Lots of wonderful, great takeaways. We’re going to have about a 10 minute break between this section, this session and our next round of sessions starting at 1230. So come back around 1230 that check out our sessions, how to revamp your online donations, how to reposition yourself as an advisor, the major donors and how to correctly reassess your terrible receding process for Canadians. Diana, did you have anything else you wanted to add? Before we sign off?
I think the only thing is make sure to check out the session after me they’re gonna go through and dive through some of the specifics of DonorPerfect tools relating to what I talked about. So talking about the forms, there’s a new form. All of that is really crucial. So that’s the biggest thing I would say is these tools have amazing resources and new things popping up that we want to make sure we take advantage of in our Oregon donations. So yay I’m so glad you guys had a blast. Thank you for letting me be here DonorPerfect. You guys were amazing first webinar back from maternity leave. And I could hear the little one crying so then you guys for my patients on any mess ups. So now I think it’s Mom duty to go and make sure Kennedy gets her lunch.
Oh, thank you, Dana and you all have a great rest of your day.
Thanks, everyone.
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