Make Recurring Giving the Star of Your Fundraising Strategy

Well, good afternoon everybody. My name is Kelly Ramage. And I am thrilled to be here, I happen to be the Learning and Development Manager for DonorPerfect. And I truly do love learning. And I am excited to be the one to get us started. And we are here today to learn more about recurring Read More

Well, good afternoon everybody. My name is Kelly Ramage. And I am thrilled to be here, I happen to be the Learning and Development Manager for DonorPerfect. And I truly do love learning. And I am excited to be the one to get us started. And we are here today to learn more about recurring giving. So you are joining the workshop, make recurring giving the star of your fundraising strategy. And I am joined by an amazing expert in the field. And I’m going to introduce her in just a moment. Some of you may know her her name is Erica, you can see her on the screen. But before we do that, I just a couple of housekeeping items to kind of get those little details out of the way. So first off, when it comes to today’s workshop, yes, it is being recorded. And we will make sure that you get that recording as quickly as possible. So you will receive an email with the recording and additional resources that Erica has put together for us. A couple of other things to just be aware of is yes, we absolutely encourage you to ask questions, we will try and answer them as quickly as we can. We do have different points throughout our workshop today where we’re going to pause and kind of do some quick q&a. I also have joining us two of my colleagues from DonorPerfect Lori and Janet, they are in the background. And they are also going to be fielding questions. When we get to the actual q&a sessions, it’s going to be very conversational. So we will try and kind of either read the question or rephrase the question and then provide the answer.
Last thing that is really important to me is that you have fun, fun with the learning and being creative, because that’s really what you’re going to discover today that this amazing topic of recurring giving is a place where you can be creative. Now I realize that some of you might be new to go to webinar, and that is the platform that we are using. And just a couple of details about that. There is like this little button or control panel that typically hangs out on the right hand side of your screen. And if you expand that you will see like a little window called or labeled Questions. But that is really where you are going to be posing questions to Eric and I. This is also where you’re going to be placing comments, this is going to be placed where you can place answers to questions that are asked of you. It’s really where you’re just going to be kind of interacting with us. A couple of people I’ve seen have already said I can’t see the responses or the questions. That is the way the platform works. So we will try and kind of keep everybody informed in terms of summarizing and restating things as we go. In terms of one more detail I have sent out I’m hoping broadcasted and so has Janet, a link to a scratch sheet. Now the scratch sheet is intended for you to take notes. So it has some leading questions and then a space for you to make notes, one. And you’ll notice that is broken up into different sections, which is pretty much what we’re going to be going over how we’re going to be going over the material today. So you may find it useful, you may not find it necessary at all, it’s there for you to use. A couple of other just housekeeping comments is that in the email, you’re going to receive additional resources that Eric is going to be mentioning throughout our workshop together. At the end, there’s also going to be a QR code for an amazing resource that I highly recommend that you grab, which is the monthly giving starter kit. So there’s a lot of information I just put out there about housekeeping but the one that is most important to me is the last one is to try and have fun learning and being creative in our time together. So with out further ado, let me introduce you to our industry expert. Erica was dorp. I don’t know how many of you know, Erica or any of her resources, but if you don’t, you are in for a treat. Erica is the president of a direct solution which she started in December of 2003. When I read that date and typed it up, I was like oh, that’s a long time ago but we will get there as she did that and has more than 20 years experience in direct marketing from both sides of the desk on the client side and the agency side and you’ll definitely hear that as she
Has our conversation with us today. She has worked with numerous nonprofit clients and on and off the cape. And she’s also done this internationally. Erica has been an industry partner of DonorPerfect since roughly we were kind of guesstimating, around 2015. She has worked on the monthly giving starter kit, which you will be provided, as I mentioned with a QR code and have access to at the end. Eric and I personally have worked on several projects together. I was thinking about that this morning, Eric. And I think this might be project number four or five
years, which is kind of crazy, but just a lot of fun. And I am thrilled to be able to co host this with Erica. So Erica, thank you for being here. We are excited to have you and learn from you. So where are we going to go before Erica starts us off here, we are going to be talking about what the latest data is telling us about monthly giving some really kind of interesting insights there. We’re going to be talking about how to use the tools you have to acquire monthly donors. The importance of not overthinking recurring donor stewardship and engagement, the value of timely and relevant interactions to retain recurring donors, upgrading monthly donors to higher levels is so totally worth it. And again, my favorite bullet point, you are absolutely not alone in this important work. So Erica, get us started. And I think we are starting with some of those stats. So thanks for being here. And what are we what are we learning? All right, so So Thanks, Kelly. So we want to start right off the back. If you want to launch the poll, like how many monthly donors do you have now? Just to get a feel for who’s in the room? Is it fewer than 100? Between 100 and 1000? More than 10,000? Or you’re not? Sure? And you know, to answer the poll, just type it in on your screen. And we can give you a couple of seconds. And I did see like there was one question in the in the q&a that asked if this is a CFRE eligible webinar? And the answer is yes, you’re gonna get two points for this. So if you’re in the you know, in the track to to get to for re credits, this is this is a great webinar to go for. All right, I see this a couple of more seconds to vote there.
And I know some of you if you can’t do the poll, just type it in. So not sure more than 1295. Okay. All right.
Go ahead and close that poll. Go for it.
All right, so 73% of you have fewer than 115% between 100 and 1,002% more than 1000. And then 10% is not sure. Excellent. Thanks. Thanks for that poll. So great.
Go ahead.
So
when you look at trends, I really excited about this one, because if you look at the fact that monthly giving last year, this is like based on the m&r strategic benchmarks, they look at online giving, and they look at and like more than 100 organizations nationwide and they’re even in the UK now as well. And they’re looking at like okay, what are some of the trends like what to unleash online giving doing for one time gifts, what’s online giving for a month a gift, and if you look at this, in 2022 28% of online revenue came from monthly giving. So that was up 4% That was actually the only piece that grew. So if you look at online giving, in general like one time gift was actually down but monthly giving was still up. So now if you look at like the next one is like how do you how do you get a look at that as your nonprofit? What can you expect?
I love pointing out this one. If you look at public media,
their percentage of monthly revenue of their online giving is huge. They are actually one of the sort of like some of the the pioneers, if you will, of monthly giving 45% in 2021 in 2022, they were up to 54%. So they’ve really grown tremendously when it comes to monthly giving. But if you’re like a cultural organization, typically the focus has just not been on monthly giving and that’s and you can see that if you look at disaster I mean again there’s like it’s so easy now to give online, right? So, so that’s growing environmental is growing. Human Health is growing pretty much every
thing is growing there. But you can see that the percentages of organizations and donors that are giving online monthly totally differs by organization. So highly recommend, if you haven’t looked at this study, pull it down, and you can actually go there and benchmark yourself as well. So that’s a really great, great thing. So these are just a couple of statistics, right? So now, if we look at why, why should why why are we talking about monthly gifts? Right? What what’s the what’s the big deal about this? Right? Well, the reality is the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now and boy that we see that during COVID. Right? Like, all of a sudden, it’s like, wow, what do we do to to bring in money that keeps on coming in, that keeps the lights on, that keeps our mission going, even if we can go out and do events, even if you know, like with this, like we can go out and meet donors face to face, right. So those are really key elements. Like, again, the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now. And a lot of the things that we’re going to show you today are all about planting the seeds. It’s always about keep planting the seeds. Monthly giving is not like something that you just say, Yeah, I’ll do something in January, and then I’m done for the year. No, it’s like, you always want to plant the seeds. And there’s so many opportunities that you can do that. So why are your monthly donors important? Well, because they provide you with that ongoing revenue. The next one of the reliable unrestricted revenue that that’s really, really key monthly giving is typically unrestricted. It supports your mission, its operating revenue, but also it’s very donor centric. Donors can give it away that’s comfortable for them. Younger donors love and guess what they are used to subscriptions, right? So that’s what recurring giving is all about. It’s also very efficient use of your resources, retention rates improve lifetime value goes up. monthly donors are typically six times more likely to leave you and they will. So start plant when you have monthly donors, right? Especially if you have like a couple 100 or so start planting seeds. What like a legacy gift, right? That’s the next step. So and there’s so many, many, many more reasons. But the, the biggest reason is, next one is that you can plan on that unrestricted money to be there, no matter what happens, whether it’s like a fire in Maui or hurricane, you know, Li your pandemic or war, this disaster is happening, sadly, almost every day now, right? So and you just don’t know what’s going to happen. But when you have these multi gifts coming in, you can plan on that.
The other thing is, if you look at the next one, it’s it’s like, hey, we would all love to get the big donors, right. That’s what we all we would love to get more big donors 6% of
most organizations, donor bases are made up of those big donors, the bulk of your donors are your smaller donors. They don’t give a lot of money yet. And there’s so many more of them. And that’s where your monthly donors are coming out of. So you have those nuggets in your database, you just have to start asking them. And guess what, just because you think that all? Well, they might give like a small amount and you know, a month doesn’t mean that you can’t upgrade them to higher levels. But you got to start there, you have a lot more of these smaller donors to work with. Right.
All right. So the other thing is like monthly donors give more money, and the retention rate increases. Let’s look at like some numbers. Sorry, like, I’m going really fast, Kelly. So retention rate increases to 95% If you can get a donor to give their their bank account information. So that’s the key. But also if you look at the retention rate from the typical, like donor base DonorPerfect, did some study as well. And you see that the donor retention rate on average that they saw from all of their clients was 85%. And then the median lifetime value that they’re saw was $2,400. Right? So that’s really powerful, right? And then what was the average monthly gift? It was $53 a month. So very powerful, right? So, so that last number needs to come up with
Yeah, so 5053 bucks of one, right? So that’s really again, really, really probably just think about it 53 bucks a month, that’s more than $600 a year, right? So if you look at the average, like one time gift that we’re seeing, it’s like maybe $100 a year, if you can get them to give $600 a year, that’s really, really powerful, right? So it adds up really, really quickly. So and again, you can see that in this next slide here.
What if you had more multi donors? Right? So a lot of you had fewer than 100? Well, alright, so what if you were slightly lower than $53 a month word, you know, industry average overall, is about $25 a month. So that’s $300 a year 100. Monthly dorms are worth $30,000. Now what if you can, you know, quintuple that? What if you can get 500 monthly donors, they were the $150,000. So it really, really, really adds up. So if somebody here has a boss or a board member that says these monthly donors are not worth anything, right, show them this slide. really crucial. So now, the next thing is,
and this is not a question or a poll, but it’s just like something to think about. And, and I asked like, you know, question all the times, like, Why do you think donors give monthly?
And the answer is, Because donors want to help. That’s the number one reason why donors give monthly, so and then the convenience of giving monthly, and it’s something that fits their budget. It’s easy. That’s almost like a secondary reason. But again, donors are so generous, they want to help, but you have to ask them, right? So and then again, the more channels you can use, the more likely they’re going to give,
you know, monthly as well, right? So all of your messaging ideally needs to fit together. So it’s a constant, like, Hey, I know you want to help, we gotta get out there to talk about the need, and then how do you now get them to consider a monthly gift? Right, so let’s,
let’s do a question here. And please use the questions box here is like, what is your biggest challenge when it comes to monthly donors statements? What What’s your biggest challenge? So just type in the question and while you’re doing that, I see a question Sophia says what is multichannel mean? So multi channel means it’s like you’re sending a mailing and then you do an email to support that mailing. So it’s basically the same story saying hey, a couple of weeks ago I sent you a letter you know, and then you might even do a text message campaign you might do a telemarketing campaign so all of the different channels all of the different messages get together on all focused on on monthly giving
all right, let’s see here. Okay, lots of it retention getting long time credit card fee processing getting folks to commit to IT staff were afraid of technology getting people to sign up finding them getting people on board to participate communicating impact choir new monthly donors. Yeah, having them switch from donations during the campaign and monthly.
Let’s see good marketing. Yeah, lots of lots of like, thing. There’s so many people on it’s like really hard to see it so quick. Okay, love war dropping off after year hard to start find them. Lack of community, small staff. Okay. All right. So when I first started a month ago, giving 30 years ago, believe it or not, 30 years ago,
we did believe, you know, email did not exist. online giving did not exist. It was mail and phone. So it was very, very labor intensive, very staff heavy, right. Yeah. Very, very expensive to now that has changed, you know, so and it’s kind of interesting to when When Kelly when, when we started when doing perfect, and I started working together on the monthly donor Starter Kit and the multi donor marketing kit. A lot of like, you know, competitor payment processors did not exist either. So, so don’t perfect is really one of the leaders in in getting this going and believing in the power of monthly giving for sure. Right. So.
Yeah, so Well, great. Okay, so yeah, so lots of challenges, right. So I’m hoping that we’re going to be able to address some of your some of those challenges today. It’s so Okay, so it all is about like how do you acquire multi donors right
No. And again, the reality is there’s a lot of different things that don’t cost much money anymore is just like small things. But the first step is the next one is to commit and have what I call a driver. Okay? And if you’re on this webinar on this on this workshop today, you’re probably going to be that driver, right? So somebody needs to say, yes, yeah, yeah, right, Kelly and Erica, were on this webinar, and we’re going to do this, right. So you got to commit and have the driver, because it will help you keep the program on track, right? So if there’s nobody really driving, driving it stuff falls falls through the cracks, right? So that’s really key. So what what are some of the key elements for growth?
It’s really not that different from what you’re doing in fundraising, that you got to have storytelling, you’re telling stories, right? You’re asking, you’re telling donors why they should support you, and how they can make a difference, right? You’re trying to make the donor, the hero in your organization, tangible amounts, that is always great if you can do that. So if you have tangible amounts in your one time gifts, translate them for monthly giving, and we’re going to show you that systems, you have the systems, right. And then commitment, that’s key. So one of the things I always recommend is that if you haven’t done that already, join your own program, make sure that you know exactly what’s going on, if it’s five or $10 a month, but start with your own program. Because if you’re asking other donors to commit, well, you want to commit as well, right? And this is same like major gifts, they always say like, Hey, make make a gift to yourself, right? So start with joining your improvement, then take a look at some other organizations that you say, Wow, I like what I’m seeing. They’re doing a great job. Are they kind of competitors? I want to see what happens, right? So and you can I mean, I learn from you guys, right? So you can learn from them. Right? You can see what are they sending? Oh, what’s your thank you letter looks like right? So so join a couple of other programs and invest like five or $10 a month in some of those. I mean, I personally give like probably like 4050 organizations, I don’t even know how many. So I know every January, we’re gonna sit down and look at all the all of the expenses, but that’s about that’s about it. Right? So again, you don’t really have to change your thinking, right? The only difference is that instead of asking for a one time gift, you’re going to ask for a monthly gift. But there’s a lot of different things that you can do. So Kelly, you’re going to share a couple of ways you can say, well, how do you how do we now get started? Where do we look? Right? Absolutely. So I am going to be doing some just demonstrating if you will, a couple of ways using DonorPerfect. So I recognize that everybody joining us today might be using DonorPerfect. But if you’re using any type of CRM, for this type of fundraising work, even excel, there are plenty of options in terms of selecting but I am going to be focusing on DonorPerfect. So I’m just playing DonorPerfect over here. And I’m going to be showing you four different reports. So as Eric has said, and as many of you said, some of the challenges in getting started is is like how do you find them? Who are they happy? Like what are their names? So there’s a lot of different ways that you could find your list of people, if you will. And of course, nothing ever goes perfectly in a live training session. So give me one moment here, I just have to refresh my login, it looks like it timed out.
Let’s try that again.
That what are the criteria. So sometimes an audience or a person who might be a good fit to ask or focus on are those people who you know they’re in your CRM, but they haven’t yet given a gift. So I am going to navigate to DonorPerfect Report Center. So going to report send Report Center. And there’s a whole slew of reports, I’ve chosen a couple of them, I’m just going to look at the simple one. That’s just their name and address because they haven’t given so I don’t know much more about them.
And I could get to know them. Who are they? How many of them do I have? I could reach out to them. I can see what kind of information I have about them. Hopefully you have email addresses for these people. But maybe you only have phone numbers or you know mailing addresses but it’s information that you can use so one audience or group or segment could be those people who haven’t yet given another kind of way of thinking about who might be a good candidate for becoming a monthly donor that you might
Feel comfortable starting with might be, you know, maybe based on the number of gifts they’ve given, or maybe it’s going to be based on the amount that they’ve given. So, there are many different ways that we could find this and DonorPerfect. I’m choosing a report called The Gift range report. So again, I’m in the Report Center, just using a different report. And with the gift range report, there are a lot of different ways that I could kind of segment this group, I’m going to look at the average gift amount, because I recall from a training session that I participated with Erica instructing me that average gift amount is a good one to start with just trying to figure out a little bit more about kind of what are the donors doing? What are they giving? And so this report, the gift range report is easily set up where I can analyze the giving of all of my donors, and kind of where where are they falling in their average gift. So this might help me not only see the count, but also kind of where to start in those asks, because I know there’s special formulas and all that that Eric is going to talk about. But this is just again, using the data that I already have, I haven’t bought a list, I haven’t imported anything, this is exactly what I have right now. And this would be a great starting point. Thinking about like the count of gifts. Okay, so you might be thinking, Well, gosh, do I ask people who’ve already been given gifts, Eric is gonna say yes, but if you are nervous about that, maybe you want to start with people that have given a gift or two, but they haven’t given a gift very often. So again, there are many different reporting options that we could choose from, I’m choosing to look at this more of a graphic image. So I’m going to choose a report in the Report Center called The Gift pie chart. And I am just simply going to look at this over the last two years, I’m just kind of surveying the landscape of what I have. And well look at that I have, you know, a small percentage of people that have given one gift a little few more have given for, and actually the largest slice of pie in my data set right now our donors over the last two years, only given two gifts. And I’m gonna bet if I were to ask Erica, is that a good candidate for asking to be a monthly gift? She is absolutely shaking your head? Give me a thumbs up? Yes, after a really good group. Yes. Another last report that I’m going to show you is let’s say that we weren’t so much interested in the size of their average gift, but like what is their annual giving amount? Like where what are we looking at for some of these people? Well, this is a different report that I’m going to select called the giving summary by select field. Now with each of these reports, I did a little bit of pre work ahead of time, so that it would make this demonstration a little bit faster. But with each of these reports, you can go in and you can specify your own criteria and date range, you can do several kinds of self selecting choices. In this report, you’re seeing what I’m doing, I’m entering in the date range and choosing to look at the counter gifts again, but of these people, I’m
sorry, I lost my track train of thought here of these people over the last two years that have given
a handful of gifts. So I’m just going to add a filter here. So you can see kind of how this all works.
And I’m just choosing my criteria. And the mechanics that you would use in your own CRM or data tracking tool, whether it be XML, or a DonorPerfect, hopefully,
is there’s a lot of flexibility here. What this is going to show us is here is the breakdown of the people I saw in my pie. In terms of the counter gifts over the last few years, I can see the count of people the number of gifts, they’ve given the average amount of those gifts and the sum total of all of their gifts. So I’m very quickly getting to know these people without really getting to know them. So I’ve just shown you four reports in DonorPerfect. I started with the donors names, addresses, phone and email. I then went and I showed you another report. So I’ll just go back here to the report list that I use. And I use the gift range report segmented by the average gift amount. The third report was Can I ask one quick question, maybe ask a question like is a gift range report looking at the yearly average or the overall average? This is the overall average.
The Giving summary by selected field was the average with the time period that I chose. So in that case, it was two years but if I had said a one
Your time period, then that would be an annual average great question.
And then the gift pie chart was a report that I set up. So I’ll just pull it up, because I see a couple of questions came in about it, I chose to set it up to look at it, a two and a half year a little bit more than that time period, where I was segmenting it by the number of gifts. So that’s what determined my pie, and the filter that I applied because I didn’t want people that were already monthly donors. And I didn’t want people that were haven’t given a gift yet, I chose to look at people that have given between one and five gifts within that time period. So you can see that it’s all represented here in the sidebar. And that is what I did get this graphic. So there are many more options in DonorPerfect, you find these wonderful people. But the CRM DonorPerfect definitely provides a lot of means and ways for you to determine identify as well as find who might be good candidates for becoming monthly donors. That’s, that’s Gary Keller, and you answered the question as well, like, the donors that are giving you smaller amounts are typically less than 250. But they giving you two or more gifts over the last year, they’re really good candidates for for monthly gifts. So, so again, so start with these reports. And then that will identify like, you know, who’s who’s available. So, I would never recommend that you send a mailing to your whole database asking for monthly gifts, I would recommend, again, because meals a little bit more expensive than email, right? So I would definitely say look at look at who you can best target. So I work with a small animal charity, and like, in the spring, in the fall, they send like a small tour and a piecemealing asking for monthly gifts, and then they follow up with some emails as well. So that’s, that’s a really good starting point, obviously, in the email, you know, like, you don’t necessarily always have the gift data, the last gift information available. So because that’s not that expensive. So you can typically, like reach out to more donors, you know, by email. So, all right, so to Thanks, that was that was great. So one of the things that I would like to ask you now is and pretend if you’re not giving money yet, okay, pretend that you give monthly. Okay, so and if you’re giving monthly, alright, so, answer the question like, why are you giving monthly? Alright, and if you have a number of monthly donors, and you’ve never reached out to them, asking them the question, Why are you giving monthly, send them a little survey? Send them a little handwritten note saying, thanks so much for giving monthly? We’d love to know, can you fill out you know, this? Can you answer this one question? Include like a little, you know, six by nine card, and one of those little you know, cards and, and a reply envelope. And you’ll be amazed at what wonderful testimonials, you’re gonna get back from those monthly donors. So again, so as a question yourself, Why am I giving monthly, then reach out to your existing multidose? Why are you giving monthly, and that will help you create what we call like, like a little story and knowledge, a testimonial. And once you have those testimonials, you can put it on your website, you can put it in an email, you can put in a text message, there is no end to it. Right? Especially and again, if you can talk to a donor and you know, like Kelly, why are you getting monthly hay recorded then now you can use that as video right? Ask your board members to tell you why they’re giving monthly, right? Ask your volunteers why they’re giving monthly, right? So those are like a couple of other, you know, prospect groups that you may not necessarily have thought about. Volunteers are create monthly donor prospects, right board members, sometimes they can’t write the big checks, but they can make a month again, right? And guess what, $85 a month is $1,000 a year. So if your requirements $1,000 for board, guess what? They can do that monthly, right? So, again, so So create some of those. I’m going to review that in a minute but just create some of these testimonials like we call them social proof knowledge, you know, they all help with promoting your, your mom forgiving. Alright, so go ahead. So so what I mentioned is like we’re basically trying to create a tiny story, a tiny nudge because you’re going to use that
Add in your promotion, try to make it as as emotional as possible, include the need, like, okay, a monthly gift will help the animals do this or will help the patients do this. So the clients do that. Right?
So and then come up with maybe one liners, maybe two lines of like, what does a monthly gift do for your mission? And you’re going to be using that. So to and obviously, we don’t have that much time to do this right now. But but as homework, think about what does a monthly gift do for your mission? Because you’re going to need that in reaching out to other folks. So let me see what I’m seeing here.
Okay, more affordable, easy setup and forget.
See, I believe in the mission, and I need to divide it out in order to give how much I would like to give. Okay, great.
Yeah, so the oh my god, there’s a lot of great questions coming in here. So this
Okay, all right. All right. So cool. All right. Let’s look, go look, what does that now look like? Here’s just a very simple, basic, you know, story that some of you may even be able to borrow, right? So monthly donation is the most effective way to help families year round. So that’s a little nudge. Or you can say Your monthly gift will make a difference every day and every month for neighbors in need. So So that’s like a one liner. Really? Tiny, tiny story, right. All right. Let’s see. Next one.
Kelly, we’re going to talk a little bit about like, how do you now incorporate that on your forms, right on your donation forms? Because there is a place for that? Yep, absolutely. So let me just go ahead and switch gears just a little bit. And in the world of DonorPerfect, we have two different form platforms, we have one that’s referred to as a classic form. But again, there is a place for tiny stories. We also have our VP forms. And here you can see we’re really kind of calling out, not that it would look like this on the form, but we’re calling it out at our slide. But there’s a tiny story that helps explain what we’re seeking from them to become a monthly donor. And there’s so many creative ways that you could do this through your pictures through the story itself, the impact of each individual giving amount. And one of the things that I think is really kind of fascinating is if you have a form, then how do you get them there? And Erica mentioned, you know, you It’s in everything that you say and everything that you do. And I think you know, in the last I’m gonna say two years QR codes have like an taking off. And so DonorPerfect has a QR code. And here are is a sample just to be very, very clear. If you were to take a picture of this QR code, it is going to a sample form and nothing more, nothing more. But QR codes and direct donors to your donation pages and websites. You want to make sure that you include those QR codes everywhere, your direct mail, flyers, posters, brochures, where else I bet if I were to open it up to you, you would have 20 different options. But it’s basically we’re trying to take that form that is going to be the mechanism for the donor to say yes, sign me up, I want to support you. And I want to do it monthly $10 every month. I appreciate this passion, this mission this cause I want to do this. So you’re directing them, they’re trying to get them to the website, but not everybody is going to go to your website, some people might be out on a walk and they see a yard sign and they take a picture of your QR code. And right then and there because of you know the technology that is available to us, they can become a monthly donor. So get the form. I’ll show you where that’s at and DonorPerfect in just a moment, build a QR code. I’ll show you how you can do that and DonorPerfect. And then have fun and watch your app, watch it grow. Now a couple of other things to keep in mind is email. Email is really critical. People would say well, I’m tired of email. But the reality is we also get a lot of email. We just live by that. So one of the things that you can do is take that form URL, so every online form again, which is the main mechanism by which people are going to sign up. You’re going to place that behind some text in an email. But what we have done here
We’re at DonorPerfect is we have partnered with constant contact. And within that application, we have uploaded many different email templates. One being monthly giving and we provide, like the framework to work from, but give you the ability. And we would recommend that you kind of modify it and customize it to your story, your brand, your colors. But in each of the each of them, you can see, hey, become a monthly donor, hey, thank you for being a monthly donor. But you want to make sure that you don’t send it out as it is that you make it your own. So let me just quick hop into DonorPerfect and highlight a couple of these things. And then see where that takes us. Give me one moment here. So while you’re doing that, Kelly, there was one person and I’ve seen a couple of membership questions. So memberships are great, you can offer donors to pay for the membership, on a monthly basis, the key with and guess what I said earlier, public TV, public radio was so popular. And that’s exactly what they did. Right. So they’re offering to pay for the membership on a monthly basis. But do recognize them as a member the minute they start doing that. So that’s that’s key, right? So yes, you can absolutely. Use monthly giving for donors to pay for their membership fees, but recognize them right away. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So I’m back in DonorPerfect. Again, recognizing that not everybody in our group has DonorPerfect, but I’m hopeful that whatever CRM or platform you’re using, you will have the same types of components. So the first component that I want to highlight is our form. So the form is going to be the tool that you’re going to customize. That’s going to provide a way for your supporters to sign up Yes, sign me up to be a $10 a month donor. So in go on our perfect, I’m navigating to apps, and here you can see that to form products, I’m going to just choose this first one.
And here, if you were to take have taken a picture of that QR code, it is going to bring you to this
particular form. So here’s what we were just looking at behind the QR code, this is where it would have taken you. And I just simply want to show you that here is where you can have your your image, here’s where you can add your tiny story, which is just a text box. And a couple of other things or places where you can tell your story is in the impact statements. So here I’ve made this form a monthly it’s defaulting to monthly giving. And I can see the different dollar amounts, I could take maybe some of the data that I gathered from the reports that we were looking at previously, to make sure that these dollar amounts reflect the donor audience. And then when I share this out, what you will notice is that I have a unique URL. And here is where I can turn that into a QR code. So again, a QR code is just that like blurry block. And behind it is a link that takes somebody somewhere. And we’re suggesting that the QR code is going to take them to your form. Now with this URL, what I’m going to do is I’m going to navigate back to DonorPerfect.
And I’m going to go back to apps, and I’m going to go to constant contact. And I’m going to attempt live training. It’s always a risk, but I’m going to attempt to log into my Constant Contact account.
And as that loads a couple of questions, do you get access? Paid? Janet was quick. Thank you, Janet. Does the QR code generator work with the basic DEP subscription? Yes, it does.
So again, this is always a risk. But what I’m trying to show you just so you know, spoiler alert is I’m trying to show you where those email templates exist. Okay, so here we go. I am back. And I’m taking a look at AI campaigns.
And maybe,
you know, Erica, when we were doing I drive around, she’s like, so how long do you think this demo is gonna take? And I’m like, it’s weird. We’re still within time. So why why you’re still like playing with that. So one of one of you. And again, I’m looking at the questions as well. So and again, keep keep them coming. It’s just so hard to make sure that they’re all in like sequence, right? So one of them. Because what it comes down to is like create that form, right? So you got to set up that form. Because then you can start driving people that’s the key. And then you can use the email and you know, you can use QR codes and whatever you’re in all your offline methods, but Oh,
But what if you, you, you know, what if you struggling saying, well, $25 a month can do this? What if 50 bucks can do that? Right? Well, then you can still make it more general. Because if one of you says, Well, we’re, we’re a
historic preservation organization, so, so you may have to send something, say something like $25 a month will really make a difference, will really help, you know,
support, you know, our mission, it’s, you know, it’s not as sexy. But that’s okay. Right. So so take a look at what you’re doing in your other fundraising and, and maybe translate some of those amounts of the key with with monthly savings that you don’t want to come across too greedy. You want to ask for some lower amounts and where you’re getting in your one time gift. But don’t go crazy. And it may be like, hey, dollars a month can help support this or, you know, $1 a day can do this. Right? So, so you may have to be a little bit more creative, but
but it can be done. So and again, don’t don’t overthink. I mean, I was thinking about like, wearing this t shirt says, Hold on, let me overthink this. So don’t overthink it. You can always tweak it, start with something and see what you get back, right? Get some feedback saying okay, what is a comfortable amount for you? And oh, why? Why are you giving $25 a month? Well, what does that do for you? Right? So absolutely. And I remember years ago, when I was learning more about monthly giving this amazing field expert kept saying keep it simple to get started, keep it simple to get started. And guess who that expert was? There she is you’re looking at her. All right. So here we can see in constant contact the DonorPerfect software, VP, monthly giving templates. And there are several to choose from, there’s six of them. And with each of them is the preview option. But I’m just pulling this up not spending a lot of time here. But you can see where we’re giving you some suggestions. And then places where you can modify but here potentially could be the call to action where you embed that URL to then direct them you send this out and they might then want to turn around, turn around and sign up. So just highlighting these templates do exist, and they’re intended to help get you started. So that is
getting started with our forms. And I think I’m going to turn this back now to Erica. So let me just close a few things talking about tiny stories. And there we go. All right.
Another question here. So do we include monthly donations, monthly options, along with regular donation amounts, okay. So on your normal form your when when somebody goes on your website says click Donate now, right, you will have the one time option and the monthly option. So you will have both options there is kind of like what they call like, organically. So some people get your forms a oh, I can make a monthly gift instead of a one time gift, right? So have it you know, on your one on your one time forms. But then when you’re really starting to promote monthly giving in a special email campaign, I recommend that you have a monthly only page because you don’t want to confuse people you don’t want to say well, did you want me to do monthly now? Or did you want me you know, so you really want to get a monthly only page. When you click the button say give monthly? That’s where you want to go. So I hope that answers that question. And again, there’s so many opportunities here to add the power button so you create your tiny story, you’re going to start working it everywhere you possibly can and then you’re going to add a button. So let’s look at what that looks like this is like the UN I love next after they do a lot of research on online giving always do a little experiments. Can you change the Kelly? Alright, so So you see here on the left hand side, it just had donate, right most homepages for organizations, they have a donate button on the top of it. Now what if you added a monthly give monthly button to that so you see that on the right here donate and give monthly and it says here give Monty light a candle at the shrine every month right? So and then donate bring healing and hope across the world. So, so the adding that button, guess what if you flip through the next two slides, please so that adding that button the next one, adding that button
generated 23% increase in recurring gifts, adding a button. So if you’re in the process of like looking at
Your website saying what can we do to make it more clear to donors that we want more monthly, monthly gift? Then add a button, what do you have to lose by testing that right? So. So here’s another example, the next one.
What that looks like this is a membership organizes, because I know we have some membership organization in the room, you see or join, donate, give monthly, give monthly goes to the monthly only page, donate goes to the monthly and one time gift page, right. And join is specific for membership. But again, they can pay membership on a monthly basis.
And then keep adding that tight story to to the next. So let’s look at a little, we’re going to take a couple of minutes here and ask you
to just give you a break if you need a bio break as well. So what could sit down and say what will a monthly gift do for the people, the clients, the animals, the patients that you serve? And how can you explain that in one, two or three lines? So you have that scratch sheet handout? So what for your organization? What will a monthly gift do for the people that you serve? Now Erica, one of the questions that caught my eye is is there advantages disadvantages to using the word recurring? Versus monthly? It’s great question. Okay. So
I’ve started to use more recurring over the past few years because more organizations are starting to offer multiple frequencies, like quarterly and weekly and, you know, bi weekly and annually and you know, all that kind of stuff. The Ria, I like to personally say monthly, because if you can get a donor to give monthly, they’re gonna give you the most amount of money. So I know there’s a trend like a couple of organizations, they’ve like started to look at an annual supply annual support, you’re not going to get the money that you can get from monthly. So I still like to ask for a monthly gift. But you are seeing you are seeing some options for other frequencies as well. So So but the more you push for monthly, the more money you’re gonna raise. And it’s for a lot of people it’s it’s still more and most subscriptions are also monthly. So I was gonna say, in the in the world bigger than fundraising and just our lives I think monthly is definitely more common. But it was a great question. And it’s something that I’ve been recently asked, I was curious what your thoughts were. So again, take some time, jot down your tiny story, use the spreadsheet. And Erica, I’m going to be brave and maybe after four minutes more, we will have a couple people share their tiny story. Totally, totally agree. And, you know, I’m just looking at like, we’re already halfway through the through the two hours, believe it or not, oh my god, you know, so yeah.
Yeah.
So somebody’s getting give us a five, five minute rule. Like, we’re like running away, you know, so yeah, yeah.
Okay. All right. Let’s see, we can we can scroll through some other questions if we haven’t.
Okay, when persons like challenges or benefits, I want to address that too. Okay.
Again, hold on, let me overthink this. Okay. So if you don’t have a huge benefits for monthly gifts, even if you don’t have a name, and we’re going to talk about stewardship in a minute, don’t worry about it. Okay, start create your form and start getting people to go to your form, right? When I started a month giving 30 years ago, it was all about join this club and you know, like it was much more belonging and kissing communities still really, really important, right? But it’s, it’s not about the name. It’s not about the benefits. donors want to support you because you need the help. Right? And they can see what the what what their money is going to be able to do, right? I’m so old don’t overthink it. I mean, the two benefits that I recommend you do and I saw like somebody asked a question to like should we send monthly thank tax receipts or whatever? No. Okay, so the two benefits, I recommend that you promise the donor, the monthly donor when they when they become a monthly donor is
they will get a tax receipt every January with an overview of all their gifts and they will receive updates on how
their gifts are making a difference. You don’t have to specify its quarterly by annually, how that what those updates look like. So that way, the donor just knows, hey, I don’t have to worry about keeping track of my gifts. You know, like this organization is going to do that for me. And every January, they’ll send me an overview. And then, hey, I’m gonna get updates on how my gifts are making a difference. That’s why I want I want to see what my gift is. Right? So those are the only two promises, those are the only benefits. Don’t worry about other benefits. Don’t worry about tchotchkes and you know, all that kind of stuff, right? So you can always do something surprising, right? Absolutely. It’s something like somebody says, Oh, my God, I get this beautiful. I mean, I see Kelly, you have your pictures from your, you know, like a picture in the background there. Right. So sign a picture from a kid, right? So you know, pop it in an email ticket, but you know, so you can just do so many things, right? And it doesn’t have to be like on the schedule, you know, so. So if something comes up, so, but those are the only two promises.
I’m seeing some great tiny stories.
Read some of these. But yeah, the tiny short example the pathway school students need you when you donate $25. Monthly, you’re helping equip a special education classroom with all the supplies needed for oops, it scrolled for something, I’m sure it was really fantastic for a full school year benefiting students who learn differently.
Awesome. Another one that I saw in this time rising costs and hard choices for our Senior Neighbors in this time, rising costs and hard choices for Senior Neighbors. A monthly gift of, let’s say a monthly gift of $110 will ensure one senior neighbor can count on daily meal safety checks and a visit from a friend.
Very good. That is a little high on $10 a month but you know, so I would say maybe $10 A month we’ll do you know we’ll do that. So yeah. All right. provides two warm meals to vulnerable individuals.
A small monthly donation makes a big capital letters impact.
Great. Oh,
let’s see here. Another one. What will your monthly gift do? New hospitals new doctors New Hope.
Great. So So again, there’s no end to what you can do anything. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Just started somewhere. Right? You can always tweak it right. It says Daddy story. It’s a web thing. Right? You know, I sent an email, right? So not so much. That’s uh, you know, I’m all for keeping keeping things simple. All right. So let’s say there she said it again. Keep it simple.
Keep it safe. All right. Well, welcome back. And he took a quick break. We’re gonna continue here talking about tiny story I believe. So Eric, are you ready? Yeah, go for it. Yep. All right. So let’s learn a little bit here about the penny stories. Yeah, so this is like world I mean, you know, and I’m sharing some examples of big organizations and smaller organizations because you know, that’s what I get in my email box right here it is WorldFish right. They test everything so well they’ve been doing this for awhile so on an every email they have the story the pictures and then you can help lift this burden give now and then on the bottom is like lasting change starts with you. Giving monthly is the most powerful way to donate give monthly and then that’s kind of where your tiny story would go right. So how about adding that extra button on your website and in your email this organization they started doing this this during COVID They work with you know people providing meals and they still doing it because it works right? Every email has two buttons Yes, I will give monthly is actually what they asked for first and then yes, I’ll make a one time gift this the second option. Typically this does not hurt your one time response but you will get some new monthly donors because of it. So it’s a button that give monthly goes to your month the only page right and the yes I make a one time gift goes to one time and monthly page right. So these are just a couple of examples. So where else can you put your tiny story? Think about what can you do in your organization? You can pop it in social media. Here it is. I you know I love Facebook Mata you know all those social media on but with monthly giving. I highly recommend that you always drive donors to a forum that feeds directly into your donor base. So it’s not a Facebook monthly gift
It goes like link to your monthly giving page there, because otherwise you go crazy. So, and I know MATA is really trying to help push that, you know, they may be doing another Giving Tuesday match or whatever. But
I didn’t see what the results were of that to be honest. But it’s just one more system you have to worry about. So like as you’re starting out as you’re growing this, drive them to your monthly monthly donor page. You could put it in an E newsletter, right? Every time you say if you’re doing an E newsletter once a month or once a quarter, have a little piece in there about what Monty giving does. Again, you can have that tiny story, right? You can alternate it’s one little piece of your email newsletter on your you could put it in your email, in your signature. In your own signature. Every time you send something to a donor or to somebody that you communicate with, hey, help give a local family is fresh start by becoming a multihull builder, tiny story, what is it do? And again, and then you click through to that multi page, right? How about like putting it in, in a welcome email. Again, there’s lots and lots of ways that you can automate your process to the minute somebody comes to your website, they get a welcome email. As part of that welcome email, by all means, put a little message in there, it’s easier in your budget, please consider a monthly donation, provide a steady stream of income to read, like they’re all year long, right? You help us be ready,
put it in a button, and a PS. Okay, all about planting the seeds, right? We always want to plant the seeds about monthly giving. And, again, it’s just amazing when you look at this,
again, 10% increase of you know, gifts that were new sustainers from just having that dual button there, right. So, and again, you know, I work with small midsize large organizations. So I’m just sharing some examples of organizations that started with adding these little things to what they were doing.
The other piece says, we talked a little bit about direct mail, direct mail. Again, this is pretty much become a best practice now that you always have the option to consider a monthly gift on your appeal reply forms. And that to you can have that tiny story to provide blessings all year long make the same monthly gift. This is on the back of the reply form. The next one is is also on the back of the reply for me, you see this year like credit card and electronic funds transfer. Right. So and again, we haven’t talked too much about it. But if you can get a donor to give you their bank account information, you don’t ever have to worry about those pesky credit card expirations. Right. And the retention rate goes to 95%. So because people don’t change their bank accounts that often. But there is a trend right now where
checks are starting to go away. You may not if you’re younger, especially you may not having checkbook anymore, right? You may just like go on your online banking on your phone. So a lot of the older donors over 60 tend to like, you know, a lot of them still have checkbooks. That’s how they were. They were raised, right. But again, there’s a trend going away. So so. So take a look at your reply forms. If you have the electronic funds transfer, ACH direct debit, you know, all the same thing, electronic bank transfer, if you have that on your form two stored, asking for the account number and the routing number on that form. So that way you have everything you need, you can enter the information for the donor to set them up
in your donor base. So so that’s something else. Now.
You mentioned earlier, the QR code, guess what? send a postcard, right? You want to go back to do you can send a postcard right? And again, what does monthly give do it betters the lives of Palestine Refugees. This is a Valentine’s Day postcard it’s a Valentine’s Day postcard with in combination with a number of emails. It was you know really great. And they used a little match, right? So so all the different things that you’re already doing in fundraising, you can apply that to a monthly gift but you got to ask for multiple gifts right? So make it clear to the donor what you want them to do right?
And you see a parts of the series of emails here you have a secret admirer or you know In, in our earlier on, we talked to the multi channel. This is an example of a multi channel campaign. So you see the
images that they have in the email coincide with the image that they have on the postcard. Right? So it’s all kind of going on the same thing. But how about adding the buck slip? In your appeal? Right? So on your reply form, you say, give him make a month ago, and then hear you say, will you be hero. And here too, you could put a QR code in there. Because we’re seeing like when people get direct mail, they’re going online to give right? Not everybody who sends in their reply form anymore. They’re going online. So make it easy for the donor to say, Yeah, I want to be here, or I can do $10 a month, right? And again, have that QR code there.
And then if you looked at earlier on, on your selections and your donors, and you say, Hey, I’m really going all about like growing this. And again, take a look at like, how many times a year? Do you communicate with your donors now? Well, can you fit in a special like monthly donor appeal? Because when I you know, I do a lot of these presentations on when I asked a question like how often do you reach out to your donors a year, it’s usually like two to maybe four times a year, right? So there is room in between to add a special appeal, not to your whole donor base, but to a targeted group of donors. And then especially if you can combine it with emails, so how about a, what we call like a recurring donor drive or a monthly donor drive. So the whole month of September, the whole month of January, is all about monthly giving, right? So again, you won’t, you will not get monthly donors if you don’t ask right. And then keep planting those seeds. This is a membership organization, they pop in like this little buck slip could have a QR code, or enter a URL and then put it in every membership renewal. Right, so So those are a couple of great things, great ideas that you can do to keep planting those seeds.
Now, the other thing is, the telephone is not dead. It’s just like direct mail was dead many years ago. No, it’s not dead. Right? Guess what? COVID gave it a resurgent right. The phone is not dead either, right? But it is it does look a little bit different now. Right? Everybody has this smartphone. Most people have a smart F a smartphone. So what you can do is
use it to send text. And I was talking to an organization, they did a text campaign, like two weeks ago, and they were blown away by how many monthly gifts they got from that campaign. Right. So again, you link directly to your monthly donor page in the text. Right. And Kelly, this is one of the I think John perfect has this as well, right now we do Yeah, we have an add on called DEP text. And it is exactly you know, what it implies it’s a texting application that integrates with DonorPerfect. And so if you build the message, because you can kind of create those message with a short link to your form, and you can text it out, they respond and it comes back in and they’ve been signed up to be a monthly donor. So it is an add on. But it is an amazing tool that their you know, generational data says this is something that is growing. So you know it is now is the time to start researching and seeing what’s possible. And it might seem like is it worth it? Well, when you do the math, as Erica has mentioned, a $10 month donor will pretty much cover all of the expenses for adding something like DP tech, so it’s definitely worth looking into. And it is, you know, absolutely one way to say the phone is not dead. In fact, it probably is coming back. So I know you have some other examples about the phone. So let’s let’s Yeah, here’s here’s this this great organization in, you know, I co presented with, with the woman who was behind this, and she was a really young, very enthusiastic, multi donor person and really excited. They did you know, it was a food bank. And every spring they selected those donors who had made two gifts or more, or they made a gift first gift in the past year and they call them up and say thank you so much for your gift, but he would you consider becoming a monthly donor. And if you do that if we can generate like 100 new monthly donors by XYZ deadline, you know, then we’re gonna get another $10,000 As a special match from his special generous donor. Right? And by just having that campaign to this targeted group of donors, they generate like 313 new monthly donors. And again, they did this every spring so once a year and
They worked with an agency. So that worked really, really well. And again, if you specially if you combine that with your mailing, and an e mail, and doing a phone call campaign, because, again, you can’t reach everybody by phone, you can’t reach everybody by email, you can pretty much reach everybody by mail. But together, you know, that is a really powerful message it all work together. Right. So So then social media, you had all of that, is that that part of that multi channel campaign? So one of the things that you’re getting as part of the handouts, and I believe that’s going to be in as part of the email follow up, right? So there’s actually this, this isn’t a sample, Excel spreadsheet. And every organization is different. Every organization has different number of donors, different number of email addresses, different number of campaigns. But this is a simple plan. And again, I’m going to share my email address at the end, if you have any questions when you’re working on this, but think Excel spreadsheet, and it starts with how many monthly donors do you have now? That’s your ongoing revenue that you can count on? Right? I mean, I kind of look at that as like, sort of like its own budget line item like, hey, you know, let’s start with that. Because I know I can count on that money. And then what can you do? Where can you add in opportunities for donors to consider monthly gifts? Is it your thank you letter a special appeals? Right? Can you do emails? Can you do some phone calls? Can you do some E News as right? And then fill in your numbers? What do you see because again, open rates are different click through rates are different. So so this is totally customized, but create a plan that you say at the beginning of the year, this is what I’m going to do. I already know the money that’s coming in from the people that I have, whether it’s 15 monthly donors or 1000, multitone that right? Here’s what I can count on. And then these are the things that I’m going to do to then come on, like, what does that look like on the bottom? How many new moms ignores I’m going to generate, and then there’s like, actually, like, there’s a second page that then looks at upgrades and extra gifts and lapsing week recapture and all that kind of stuff, right? So but here’s if nothing else, start here, start with creating a plan. Because just a couple of the key takeaways, if you will, from from the acquisition is like that generating monthly donors is really important. And it deserves focus again, those organizations that had multi dormers early on in COVID. They were sitting pretty, and it’s really ramped up. And during COVID, Dawn organizations were very happy to to generate new multi dormers. And again, that continues, right. So there’s so many different tactics, buttons and little stories, start there, start somewhere, pick with something that you’re comfortable with. Right, add just one more thing. So the next.
The next one is it’s not a poll, it’s a question like so. So think about and use your scratch sheet for this, like, with all of these different things I shared with you, what are some things three things that you’re planning to test in the next six months? And maybe don’t worry about it for giving Tuesday? You know, just like go start, like in January, right? So, so what are three things that you’re planning to test in the next six months? So So type that into your, into your scratch sheet.
But and put it on your bulletin board and saying, These are the things that I’m going to test? Right? For sure. Right? Whether it’s just adding a button to the homepage, adding a button to an email. It’s one email so many email, right? You know, so. So definitely, and now, September, October is still really, really great times, right? You know, so you’re not in the heavy giving season yet. So what do you got to lose by doing that? And while you’re typing that in, um, you know, so one of the things too, is like, as you’re creating your plan, as you’re starting to test, what, what,
how do you evaluate results? Right? Well, one of the things is, I recommend you always, always, whenever you talk to him onto giving talk, annualized results. So it’s a 12 month value, and then share you with Hey, we sent an email we got 10 new monthly norms, right. So so share that with people because a lot of people don’t know especially if you’re a bigger organization, you might have some major gifts people. They’re like, Don’t even talk to me until you get a $10,000 donor, right? And it’s like, well, but guess what, you know, we got a couple of these months.
donors, and now we’re at $10,000. So hey, you know, so So but you have to keep like, keep sharing those wins. I mean, again, I ran monthly donor programs, and I still had to keep sharing how important was right. So until we had 911. So so definitely keep keep sharing it. And one of the great ways to do that, to tally it is is what Kelly’s gonna show next. As I’m just switching over to talk about this, I don’t know, Eric, if you’re looking at the comments, about what where people are going to be trying, I am super excited for all of you like, oh, go go go, I’m like your biggest cheerleader here watching it come in. Because what’s most exciting, I think, for a lot of what I’m seeing is people are suggesting things that are very practical, which is exciting. So they’re really hearing the value of keeping it simple and starting small. So so that’s awesome. So I you know, please reach out if you are donor, perfect client. We are here to help. And yeah, as is Erica. But in terms of using DonorPerfect. One of the things that is in DonorPerfect our dashboard. So under the Reports menu, you will find dashboards and there’s actually three dashboards and the one that I’m showcasing right now specifically is a monthly giving dashboard. And it gives you information kind of in that year scope that Erica was just talking about. And you can see the monthly giving amounts, what was the average? What’s the total? What’s the count of donors to like, count of monthly donors. So here’s a very easy way where you can while your boards and you can like quickly, hey, guess what, we have 10 monthly donors or we have an 11, because you’re just going to the dashboard DonorPerfect doing the heavy lifting, you know, kind of calculating it for you. So this is included in DonorPerfect. And it’s found under Reports and the menu option called dashboard. So I’m moving on, I think we’re talking about stewardship and engaging our donors. So Erica, what do we what do we have? So and I just want to you know, like shout out a couple of things like that people shared with like, donate adding the donate button text to give email campaign. One of the caveats like what it doesn’t make sense to hold off on monthly giving until after giving Tuesday. So if there’s a way that you can test something in September, October, that would be great. But yes, I mean, if you’re like swamped, and you’re a smaller organization, and giving Tuesday’s like, you know, in your get your year end campaigns, your mail and all that, then, you know, just do it in January, because you get all those donors who just gave, and then you say thank you so much for your gift, but would you consider like, you know, supporting us on an ongoing basis. So, so again, it Kelly said it, I keep seeing it, I want you to be comfortable with this, I want you to be able to do it, you it’s not a lot of heavy lifting anymore. But again, start with what you’re comfortable with. Right? So but by all means start, that’s what that’s what I what I want, because you’re not going to grow if you’re not going to do anything. Right. So.
Okay, so how do we, you know, like, Okay, well, because that’s why we talked a little bit earlier, like, what is some of the benefits? Right, you know, the two benefits are getting the tax receipt and giving updates, right. But the key is also like, you know, it’s all about the donation experience. And I know, like, some organizations they use with the toggle with one time and monthly. And they say, Okay, well, we’re going to pre select the monthly every time somebody comes to a one time donation page, and I highly recommend Be very careful with that. Because donors don’t know what the colors of those toggles mean. So So unless it’s really clear, and says give monthly, give monthly, give monthly, donors are like, yeah, and they’re quick, especially Giving Tuesday and year end, they want to make a gift and they don’t read, right? So so just be really, really mindful with those toggle forms. That’s why again, another reason why I like to have a very special monthly forum. So it’s really clear what the donor wants because it is, you know, you don’t want to lose them right off the bat. Right? So and if you give them a bad donation experience, where they’re like, geez, I was just going to make a one time gift. But you know, Hey, I didn’t I never meant to, you know, make a monthly gift. And now we’re going to call you, you know, so they don’t want to do that, right? Because they don’t want to admit that they made a mistake, right? So, so make, you know, make that donor experience really, really clear what they want to do. And that will help you with your retention later. And make sure that everything with your form, you’ve got these email options, that it’s all very warm and fuzzy and it’s very clear that the donor one you know gets a
is now signed up to start making monthly gifts. So what kind of do you know if you want to launch the poll here? The next poll?
Like how are you recognizing your monthly donors? Is it yes, I’m doing that I have a special name where I have a special name, but I don’t have anything special in terms of stewardship. Yes, I have a special name, great stewardship, no special name but great stewardship, or I’m not sure. Right. So what are you doing now to recognize your monthly donors? And again, remembering that if you don’t do much, that’s totally fine. I’m just going to show you a couple of ideas on what you can do.
All right, and let’s see if there’s any other questions.
Because yeah, they’re like coming in fast and furious. So it’s like, really hard. Okay. Targeted storytelling.
We have an amazing group participating with us today. So I am super excited. Right? Oh, okay. So Michelle says, Can you repeat the plan giving statistic? You mentioned the beginning? Yes. So monthly donors are six times more likely to leave you in their will. And that actually comes from a UK study, because that there’s a gentleman there. They call him actually Dr. Death, believe it or not. And, you know, he’s all about
legacy giving an East he’s done. They read every weld is a company that read every well, that gets written up in the UK, so they could do a lot of research as to how many organizations nonprofits put in and well and, and what type of donate donors they were so
Alright, let’s see here. Okay. So 8%? Yes, what special name 11% went special mean to a percent? No special name or grade stewardship? Okay, there you go. And not sure. Awesome. Okay. So
that’s great. Thanks. So. And some of you asked a question earlier on, like, what should we be calling them? Right? So again, there’s so many definitions. And we talked about monthly donors, recurring donors, committed givers, regular givers, and then maybe specific names. So several of you said that you have a special name. So type in the questions box, like what are some of the names that you’re using? Now, if you don’t have a name yet, guess what, this is where I actually like chat GPT, this is a great opportunity to say, hey, create a monthly giving name, right. And you can, you can be specific create a multi giving program name for an environmental charity did it ended up and it actually had to think for a minute when I tried this, right. So and here is like 15 Different names that they came up with. So what this does is just get your creative juices flowing. So again, if you don’t have a name yet, don’t worry. But if you say I have to have one, and hey, I’m going to focus the next couple of months on getting it all squared away, then here’s an opportunity to start the creative juices flowing. And then make sure that it’s easy to use in a in a, you know, in a sentence and that it does feel like a community. And don’t worry, if you said well, I’ve got a monty Doran program. And I’ve never recognized them in any way. But I want to start, that’s totally fine. You can refresh, right? You can say, hey, I’m really excited. I want to tell you that we now we’re like offer, you know, we know, started the advocacy circle and your as a monthly donor, you’re a part of it, right? So you’re in it, and here’s what’s going to happen and you’ve got a person there, right? So so the more personal you can make the stewardship that you reaching out to monthly donors with, the better off you are right. So if you don’t have a name, don’t worry, you can always introduce them later. But
do the basics right. And again, you probably hear me say this a lot as well start with the basics. So no matter how the monthly donor came in, have a thank you letter that goes out as soon as possible. And make it as personal as possible. Make it look like something that you know comes doesn’t come from a machine. So this one I love this right. Hey, welcome to the Hildegarde host compassionate care circle, right. So if I got this really, really quickly, right, and then think about some ways that you can engage your monthly donors. You may also use this for your major. That’s totally fine. But it’s steal from them if you have something right because I know like sometimes organizationally, yeah, well I’m doing this and major gifts. Well guess what, do it for monthly bonus as well. Right. So if you do a virtual town hall or, or a webinar
or or you know, a question and answer session with your executive director or a field report, send it to your monthly donors. So this just no disorganization? Great, hey, we’re part of the heartbeat, right? And they’re doing a quarterly, you know, quarterly update, and they send the recording, if I can’t make it, right, so I might sign up and you know, so even if I didn’t sign up, they send me the recording, right? So and then
make sure to that you send the tax letter by mail, as well. So you’re probably going to get it via email. That’s great. But you know, a lot of people don’t necessarily look at all their emails all the time. So send something in the mail. And in that, again, you can say, wow, you’re my hero, you’re such so special. Here’s what your monthly gifts have helped do. Right. So that’s what you know, like that. That tax receipt? Does. It’s another way to confirm how the donors gifts are making a difference.
And Kelly, you?
Yeah, so you got, oh, awesome stuff. But you might be thinking, Can DonorPerfect help? And the answer is yes. So we absolutely value the power of you. And thank you, and sharing with your supporters how they’ve made a difference. And that can be done in a variety of ways in DonorPerfect One is in the email templates. And that could be part of the form, I’ll show you where that’s at in just a moment. In the email templates, and different places, using those constant contact email templates, one of them was communicating, thank you not necessarily, as Erica said, the official receipt, it’s this is how we’re doing this is how our program is working. This is what your monthly gift is helping to achieve. And then of course, there is the official side of it. So we can provide templates for that both in email and letter form. So let me just pull up DonorPerfect and show you where a couple of these things are. I saw a question that came in saying can we can DonorPerfect alert you when you are receiving a first time monthly donor? And the answer is yes, it can be done, I’m using a feature called Smart Actions. So you would set your your kind of your rules that this is a monthly gift. And it could be that this is their first monthly gift and you could be alerted to that. So that is something that could be set up if that was what you were interested in. But in terms of like that, thank you and communicating with your donors, just highlighting kind of from top to bottom in our form. So if we go back to our form, and this can be done in either the deep new forms or classic forms, each
online form, so this is the giving form. So if we go back to the one that I showed you earlier, has the ability to have an email message connected to it, and you can customize it. So it could be just a simple, where you again, you can have your imaging, your logos, your message, thank you for your monthly contribution.
Another advantage here is that it could be the DonorPerfect email template. So I’ll show you where that’s at in a moment. But the main takeaway is if your donor is signing up as a monthly donor, the email that they receive is going to be automatic sent automatically sent to them that is thanking them for their monthly gift. If I screwed into DonorPerfect under mailing, so I’m in DonorPerfect navigating the mailings and going to email templates, here is where the receiving email templates reside as well as our form template.
So here you can see is similar messaging. So we know that there is kind of that connection and increasing the trust that you as a nonprofit could have with your supporter. So here’s our email template. Another option to send out those letters is under Mail Merge templates, and here’s where you can upload your own letters so that you can quickly send them out and that can be done in a variety of ways. So you can have a variety of different letters. So here we have our letter and our envelope, very quick processing. A couple of other options that are going to be automatic to kind of help you in that communication. Should you choose is under Tasks and monthly giving is that automatic receipt now the receipt it’s using the word receipt can be official if you wanted to. But as Erica said it’s just that ongoing communication. And so this automatic sending so
their gift is processed every month. So if I sign up today, then on the 19th, or the 19th of every month from here on after I’m going to be giving my $10 gift and I could have, as part of DonorPerfect, send me an email to say, hey, Kelly, this is great. We appreciate what you’re doing. And the email is going to be message that you design under email templates. So it all kind of works together, working from the templates behind the scenes, and you can update those and refresh them, which we would recommend, so that you every message that you’re sending on a monthly basis is going to be new and relevant for your audience. So there’s a lot of great tools within DonorPerfect. And then the last thing that I want to highlight is if we were back in constant contact, and again, if this doesn’t look quick, I’m going to abort. But in the Constant Contact platform, we have those templates and it is not loading quick by went to apps, Constant Contact and then I would see the monthly giving templates. And one of them is Thank you. So there’s a lot of great ways that DonorPerfect can help in communicating in a timely manner with your monthly supporters. That’s, that’s great. Thank you so much. And now we gotta we gotta hustle it we got like 20 minutes left, oh my god, you know, so and we kind of have Kellyanne, we’re preparing this go, Oh, we got 120 slides. That’s great, too. I was, you know, we were fine. But okay. So, automate as much as you can send a welcome email as soon as you can. And, you know, send e newsletters, anniversary emails, I’m just going to go really quickly to see whether some of the things that you can do to steward them. Birthday emails, makes it stand out, right? So in your communication with your monthly donors, ask them for their birthdate, right, and send a birthday card. Great, you know, so maybe there’s some other special moments, you might have a Giving Day that works for your organization, keep going.
So you know, like you, you might have some giving days or special friendship days, you know, this like special months for a lot of different things, right? And then by all means, map it out. So in your handouts like you know, your follow up, you’re actually going to get like the little stewardship planner, and say, What are you what’s going to happen when a multi donor joins, like, what does that look like? Right? So map it out. But do yourself a favor, make sure it’s somewhere? Okay. So and then with this stewardship stuff, it’s like, oh, look, you will, you will watch your donor retention grow, right. So we’re going to skip the next one. So one, one thing to remember,
is just like, you know, again, it’s like homework, what are some of the ways that you can engage your donors right in your organization? There’s lots and lots of things and remember to do something surprising, but also adds, okay, you have my permission. Okay, you have my permission to repurpose, recycle, reuse. If you have a video that you made three months ago, and you put it on social media, by all means, put it in an email, right? So we use it if you have a story that worked really well two years ago, and generate a lot of one time gift. Quiett reuse it to ask for monthly gifts, right. So it’s totally fine to repurpose and reuse it. And we don’t have to, you know, donors don’t remember necessarily what you sent them yesterday. Right. So it’s okay to, to repurpose. Okay, now, how do we keep these wonderful monthly donors?
There’s a lot of different things. And again, it starts with that donation experience, it starts with that stewardship, the more personal you can make it, the easier it is to contact you and ask questions. But you may have to do some recapture efforts. Unfortunately.
Stuff happens, credit cards get compromised happened to me recently, right? So. So do yourself a favor, set up a retention day, once a month, maybe it’s every fourth Monday of the month, right? monthly donor Monday or once a month after the bulk of your monthly donors are charged, set up for the retention day and say take a look and say, Hey, how many payments didn’t come in? And then maybe you heard some feedback, something went wrong somewhere, right? And you know, hey, you tried this new form, and you might have gotten some more cancellations from from donors. So take a look and sit down and look at your program. And then take a look and say, How many monthly donors Am I potentially losing because their payment didn’t come in this month? What’s that annualized value? And again, you’re like, oh, but you know, originally, we’re looking at 10 monthly donors 25 bucks a month. That’s not the end of the world. You know, but if you look at the fact that it’s worth $3,000 A year
So, now you might say,
I should probably do some follow up, right? I might want to do some, some activities here, I might want to pick up the phone or might do an email. So take a look at again, another handout of
the next one, take a look at
what happens when your monthly gift doesn’t come in. and map it out. Sounds silly guys, I do this with small to midsize to large organizations, especially large organizations, the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. So map it out. And in you will make sure that nothing falls through the cracks, right? So again, so this is customized for your organization, there’s a little process flow that you can use to, to type in exactly how what’s happening right now. And then take a look and see why did these multi donor stop giving? Right? Well, typically they made payment methods feels they might have a change in life circumstance happened early on with COVID people were like, oh, all these multi dorms are gonna cancel. Guess what? She did not happen. Because they had a special save script in place where they offered the donor to pause their gift, or to lower the amount 30% of monthly donors that were ready to counsel were kept that way early on. And COVID disengagement with your mission could be a reason. But guess what, if you don’t do a good job of stewardship, and telling them how their gifts are making a difference, they’re not going to be disengaged with you. Right. So they because in the old days, we will be like set it and forget it. We don’t talk to them anymore. But now it’s like, yes, you want to communicate with them, you want to tell them how their gifts are making a difference. And skip through the Okay, so. So again, it’s like the donor wants to cancel, they call you Well, there is an opportunity for you to keep them if you have that safe script in in place, right. And that’s part of the handout as well. So keep the next one. Next one. Yeah. So this is an example of that same script. And then the next one after that is like, pick up the phone, send an email, send a letter, do everything you possibly can to follow up and then tap into some of these Dornan perfect resources. They have the tools. Kelly, you want to show those? Yeah, so just real quick, just because of time I under the Tasks menu and DonorPerfect is where we have the automatic monthly giving, which is going to process those transactions for you. So you don’t even have to remember to do it, the system will do it for you. If you want to communicate with your donors monthly to say thank you that is can be set up account. updater is a great service that Eric is going to speak to. But this takes care of the credit cards expiring, we do have an alert that will say hey, these cards are going to expire or have expired if you do not want to participate in this. But we also have this amazing financial report called the monthly giving report that is giving you the ability to review what would be lost if you do nothing. And sometimes that is really valuable for you to show, you know your board or your you know, team to say this, this is our motivation right here. This is what could be lost if we do nothing. So again, just a quick, you know, list of a couple of things that DonorPerfect can help with in this adventure that you’re on. Yeah, great. So, again, automate, you know, take what’s automated, right? So start there, but you know, again, you will still have to pick up the phone and send a letter and or a postcard in many cases, right? But, but if you know what’s going on and what is automated and what isn’t, then you know exactly what to do. So follow up early, you know, so again, if you look at the account updater it identifies those donors whose credit card expire, and it’s all set in the back end, it’s all PCI compliant, it does not cost much money at all. And it works in conjunction with DonorPerfect, so it’s, it works totally seamless, right? So if you don’t use DonorPerfect ask your your donor base CRM, if they have it most many of them have it now. So again, it’s not going to be foolproof, you’re still going to have to do some follow up, but it helps take care of that. And then as part of the handouts, you will get this multi donor retention playbook that has like sample messages, emails, you know, so that you can customize it to Word document. So definitely use that. So follow up early, often right away. I mean, you know and repeat, because I love this quote.
If you don’t change direction, you may end
up where you’re heading. So, again, that’s really true with retention rate. And I saw a study recently, like, I think 25% of nonprofits was not following up on monthly gifts that were at risk. So if you know you’re not following up, you’ve already lost them, right. So make sure that you really want to do that. Okay, so we got like a couple minutes left here to talk about upgrades, because I knew that’s like, especially for those organizations that have some monthly donors already. And, and you’ve not reached out and you have not tried to upgrade yet so. So there’s a couple of different ways to upgrade. I mentioned, asked for the ultimate gift. So in your when you send out your tax receipt, you can consider a buck slip to talk about legacy giving, right. Or if you’re sending an appeal to a monthly donor asking for an extra gift, you can plant the seed about leaving your organization in their will as well. So that’s like one, one way to upgrade to the higher level right? Then ask for an upgrade, ask for extra gifts. Six and a half percent of Monty donors will make at least one extra gift when asked. Giving Tuesday, for example, would be a great time to ask for a monthly gift for an extra gift. Or if you have a match would be great time to ask for an extra gift. Ask for an upgrade. Don’t do it too soon. So you want to make sure that the donor is used a month or is used to some your some of your stewardship, right. So I recommend that you don’t start upgrading until they’ve been given month at least six months, preferably even nine months, right? So but if there’s a specific reason where you say, oh, everything’s gotten more expensive, right, especially with food or gas, or, you know, things like things like that, then that’s a good time to ask for an upgrade, right 12% of Monty donors will upgrade when asked if you can do that extra gift, maybe a couple times a year, depending upon how often you reach out to your donor, right? And how often that you have matches and you know, special opportunities or special projects, for example, right? So you can totally still include your monthly donors in that. As long as you recognize them as a multi donor, that’s key. So but ask for an upgrade, and extra gifts, right? And ask for if you’re if your donors are giving by credit card, can I ask them to consider giving by electronic funds transfer, right ACH. And again, you can even do that, when you following up on the credit card that expired in earlier on build that into your emails, while you say hey, you might be even easier to give from your bank account. And then you never have to worry about those pesky credit card explorations. Right. So but the key key with all of this, the next one is that you want to have a special email segment. So the minute somebody becomes a month in order to have them be a special segment in your donor base, and in your email program so that you can do that. You know exactly where they are, you can send them a special email, asking for an extra gift, you can send them a special email asking them for an upgrade.
And version, your messaging your steady monthly support, right? So so again, having that and that could be the same as your one time gift email that you sending out with one little variation. You’re including a one or two lines, recognize them as a monthly donor right? Here is an example of you know, ASPCA is great, big organization, they got like 60% of their revenue coming in from monthly donors, right. So they’ve been doing this for a while, right? So in they, they know the power of it. And yet they still ask for extra gifts. But in there, as an ASPCA Guardian that it ended up were so grateful, you know, but and encloses my additional life saving gift, right? So it’s really important that when you send an extra gift appeal to monthly donors, that you’re not asking for a monthly gift, right? I mean, and I believe it, I’ve seen these things happen, right? So I see that these mistakes are made, right. So it’s a laser version in your appeal, right? So an ask them for an extra gift. One of the other things that you see this organization here, did they they do like the amounts they’re pretty sophisticated. I recommend that when you ask a monthly donor in the mail for an extra gift, leave the amount blank, so $1 sign blank. Here’s my additional gift of blank B
Because if somebody makes a $5 a month gift, you don’t want to base the amount that you’re asking for the extra gift on the monthly gift. So, or like an event, you know, so so keep it simple. Ask for a blank amount. All right, next one. Yeah, we’re almost there. Okay. So the key with upgrades, right, is that you want to make sure that the system works, that you test this. And unfortunately, Kelly and I were talking about this upgrading can be a little clunky, still for, for some donor base CRMs. So, so make sure that you know exactly what happens. And you may have to break out your email group in a group of donors that have given less than $25 a month to customize the asterisk that you’re using in the emails like, Hey, would you consider a small two to $3 a month gift. And then the other email might be for those donors who are giving you between 50 and $100 a month, where you’re asking for a $15 a month increase or freebie, for example. So I like to use like one quarter of the month a gift as a guideline.
But again, you know, do a little bit of testing, take a look and see what what are your donors, feedback now? What is the typical average gift, then base that amount that you’re asking for the upgrade on what you’re seeing on your typical average gift? So
I love the fact and I saw a question and Kelly and I were talking about about this a little bit. It’s like, I really liked the fact that if you’re asking for an upgrade, send them to a new form. So that way, yes, I’ll upgrade my monthly gift to and then you have new amounts. Right? That form can then be customized with a special thank you message that recognizes the donor for an upgrade. So and then also, because you have this new monthly gift.
You need to then and refresh my memory Kelly, I think then the nonprofit gets an email saying we’ve got a new month gift and then they can close out the old one, right? Yeah. So
yeah, so you can close that. So that way, you know exactly he, if you look at the donors record, Hey, okay, there was $10. And now it’s $12 a month, what happened, right. And if you don’t know, that, that was done by a campaign or an email campaign, with having a special form, you can say, Oh, I did an upgrade campaign in September, you know, and I got so many monthly donors to upgrade, right. So you can tally it, which is really important, right? And, and again, then, you know, they’re, you know, there’s no confusion because I was like, Hey, I see $10, but then all of a sudden, it jumps at 12. And I don’t know what’s going on what had happened, you know, so having that on that new form really, really works. And again, making sure that you close out the old one is, is is critical. But make sure that you test it, if you’re not using don’t perfect, you may have a different system, right. So and again, I’m seeing a lot of clunkiness. And, you know, feel free to reach out after, you know, to Kelly or I and say what are you seeing, you know, hey, can you send me some examples, you know, so, because even some of the fancier payment processors are
not ideal. And and, and I know sometimes people are like, Yeah, but we have this daughter portal, this is great. Well, and the reality is, guess what the Dorner doesn’t necessarily want to use it. So so you don’t get them to the donor portal, right? And you know, it’s not gonna happen, right. So you may still have to do something manually. So, you know, include upgrades as part of your plan, right? So just like a wrap up here is, um, you know, test some of the things that work for you. Okay, do one more thing, right? Because I know everybody’s busy, right? And then make monthly giving
aligner item in your budget. So because it’s going to grow, okay, so if you haven’t done this already, take a look and say how many monthly donors you have? What’s the annualized revenue that you’re getting now before today’s workshop, and then, you know, have that somewhere and say any word $100,000 here, right? And then start doing some of the things that we talked about. And then you see what the growth is in six months or a year right? But having that as a special light item. Is is critical. And then, you know, look at those wonderful dashboards. And you know, look at look at it regularly. And guess what, as you’re growing, you want to look at it more
regularly, right?
It’s all about chipping away at it. It’s a constant chipping away at
some of these things, right? It’s like I’m a golfer, chip away at it. I’m not very good, but I go straight. So, so chip away, so, so let me just like, you know, leave you with write down your story, write down your goals. So where are you now? Where do you want to be? And then, you know, we’re gonna skip the poll. I think so. So and then, you know, let, let me leave you with a few final thoughts.
At times, it may feel like you’re trying to move a rock. I know it, you know, I work with nonprofits, you may feel like you’re a spider in the web, and you’ve got all these different things, right?
Monthly gifts, monthly, you know, monthly donors, monthly recurring donors, they will help you plan on the funds to be there, no matter what. And this is my all time favorite. Great things are done by a series of small things brought together by fanciful call. So great things are done by a series of small things brought together. So we’ve got some checklist, Kelly.
Echo goes to the monthly donor starter kit.
Some more updates on that a bunch of additional research with a minute and a half to spare.
So and, and I know I mean, I think we’re gonna get like, I’m happy to look at some of the questions if they weren’t addressed and follow up. I’m happy to do that. So yeah, absolutely, absolutely. But that is everything. We will try and answer a question or two now. So Erica, if you want to scroll through, but I know people are gonna start hopping off. But thank you for sharing your your information. Here is Eric has contact information. So please feel free to reach out to her. And we are here to help. If you want to reach out to me myself. You can just use training dot services at DonorPerfect.com. Or you can use my direct email, but I’ll leave Eric his information. And
yeah, by the way, those are not my wooden shoes, right. I mean, my dad had wooden shoes. I never wore wooden shoes. Right? But I am.
Because they’re not. Yeah. Oh, fantastic. Okay. All right. Let’s see. Is there like, do we have one one question maybe going to check out? Here’s a QR code. Yes. Back. Here’s a QR code. Thank you, Jonathan.
All right. Yeah, send us some follow up. And again, we’ll we’ll get the chat and the q&a. And we’ll take a look and do some follow ups and maybe do a little blog or something like that. So because as you can tell Kelly and I love monthly gaming, right? I mean, if we haven’t convinced you for that, right? We absolutely love it. We see that power it we’re absolutely, absolutely yes. And you will be getting an email with the recording. And it will have the resources that Erica mentioned. And yeah, so
I’ll leave the QR code here. If at any point you are wondering, Am I going to get it didn’t get it go out. You can always email back to the registration link and we will follow up as well. So we are at a three o’clock so I want to be respectful of time. But thank you again and we wish you all the best and we look forward to hearing about your monthly giving successes. Alright, have a great day everybody. Thank you. Bye bye