Share Your Story & Segment Your Donors to Spark Lasting Engagement

People are the heart of DonorPerfect. It all starts with our staff. By focusing on our employees needs happiness and well being, we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of Read More

People are the heart of DonorPerfect. It all starts with our staff. By focusing on our employees needs happiness and well being, we ensure they can best support you, you’ll quickly realize that working with our team is like having additional members of your own staff that will always be there to help you. When you get started with DonorPerfect, we provide a full data transfer and onboarding team to make sure your system is set up correctly, and that it matches your unique needs and ways of working. Our professional trainers will then make sure you get off to a fast start explaining what you need to succeed using a variety of training programs that cater to your preferred learning methods. Our customer care team provides ongoing support whenever you need it by phone, chat or email. They’ll answer your questions help you improve results and quickly become your best new work friends. While you focus on your mission. Our product managers and developers are incorporating your feedback and prioritizing your needs and concerns to deliver easy to use software that will enable you to achieve all your goals. When our customers and employees are asked what do you like best about DonorPerfect, they both say the same thing, the people you will to learn more about how DonorPerfect can meet your unique needs by speaking with your account manager or attending a product demonstration webinar.

Hello, hi my name is Shawna Taro. I am a DonorPerfect Training Specialist here and welcome to Sarah long session, share your story and segment your donor who sparked lasting engagement. Welcome back. Sarah. As some of you might have heard Sarah has been with DonorPerfect for over five years and has been working in training for over 10. She trades clients in both English and French and she loves teaching them how to make the best use of their system. In her spare time. She can be found enjoying her passion for reading and hiking and spending quality time with her dog Maisie. Now before I hand the session over to Sarah, like to address a few housekeeping items. All presentations are attached to the session and can be downloaded for your review. Please be sure to add your questions to the q&a tab so that we can see them and get them answered for you. All sessions will be recorded and found on our DonorPerfect website post conference. Without further ado, let’s give a warm welcome to Sara. Take it away.

Hi, everyone. I’m super excited to be here. Again, we’re almost at the end of our amazing conference. I hope that you got so much out of the last two days. And now you’re going to stick around till the end. But thank you so much for being here. So this session we’re talking about stories and how sharing your story can help you spark lasting engagement. So I love stories. I’m a big reader. So definitely I love stories. But stories are also a way to relate weight to evoke emotions and make some abstract concepts more tangible. Human beings are hardwired to respond to stories. And in the age of information overload that we live in the stories our watch can rise above the noise. With storytelling, you’re not just asking for money. You’re sharing a narrative that tugs at heartstrings and interns opens up wallet. i This is from Mallory Erickson, I hope that you had an opportunity to listen to her yesterday. If not go back. Look at that recording. And stick around for our closing remark. She is truly amazing. And she in the handout provided, you can find a link to our art up captivating storytelling, which is a mini course that she’s put together that you might want to check out about creating your story and the art of nonprofit storytelling. What I want to do today with you is to help you connect some of our DonorPerfect resources. So that to help you tell that story and reach the right donors and hopefully spark lasting engagement. So what do we need? What are we going to start with? So I’m going to be using an example of a animal shelter that is just simply running an appeal that they need to expand. So we’re sending a A, an appeal out to our donors, we need to expand our facilities. That’s the story that we’re starting with. That’s the idea we’re going with. And now what? So what do I need? What is the first question that I need to answer? Well, I’m going to need an actual story. What am I sending out? What am I going to tell these donors so I can start with the mission, I can start with, we want to save abandoned animals, we want to help them if they have medical needs, we want to feed them and we want to help them find forever homes. And we can use some very specific examples in in our story, so that we’re kind of reminding our donors what we just did before going ahead and asking for help to build that expansion. And then why would we need this expansion? Well, because our space is too small. Or second question that we’re going to address is I’m going to need a segment, I’m going to need a group of donors. So who am I actually reaching out to? Am I sending this to my whole database, everybody that I’ve ever collected information from? Or am I trying to target a specific group of people. So in this scenario, we’re going with I’m going to be sending this message to story this everything that I’m creating, to a donors that have donated recently, and I’m going to define recently, but in the last two years, but not the ones that donated super recently, meaning in the last two months. So this is my segment, this is the group of people that I’m going to be trying to reach. And I’m going to show you how to find them and DonorPerfect. And then our last question is, how am I going to be communicating with these people? What is my communication method? What is the channel that I’m using to send them this story. So it could be that I’m sending an email as often as possible. And it could be that I’m going to be sending a letter in the mail to some of my donors. And that could be dependent on if I have their email address or not, then their mailing address or not. So I’m going to show you both are you can create that letter and how you can get to the email and then some tools that we have to do those things. So let’s get started with the story part. So do you need help writing the story? So if the answer is yes, then you can try our DonorPerfect fundraiser bots. So if you were in my earlier session, or my colleagues, Shawn session, you might have heard about this wonderful DonorPerfect fundraiser, but I’m so excited about it that I decided to make two sessions about it today, to make sure that you could see its full potential. So I’m going to show you how to access it. So first, you can go to the DonorPerfect.com/bot website, and you will have access to this DonorPerfect fundraiser bot, everybody can have access to it 100%, free of charge. And this is what it’s going to look like. You’re going to want to fill in your organization name, your website URL, who is writing this message that you’re about to be writing right now. In the in on the second slide section is going to ask you what is your mission statement? What is your call to action URL and what is actually the call to action. So in this case, I’m doing an appeal. So I’m asking people to please give. And this is the link to my donation page as simple as that so that I can include that directly in the message. Over here in the specific detail, I can put some information. So what is this fundraiser bot doing, if you did not hear about it before right now is that it is prepared in chat GPT with very specific nonprofit fundraising information so that you can without having to know how to talk to Chad GPT. Without having to think about it too much. You are able to simply put in the information by following these prompts. And it’s going to give you the message to put in. So I’m going to hit Next. And then here who am I sending it to? So you have a lot of options of audience. What is the purpose? So I’m doing an appeal message. What is the length of my message so if I’m doing an email, which is the example I will use the robot for, but here, the DonorPerfect fundraiser bot can also generate an outline. It can generate a letter, it can text message, social posts, blog posts, you have a lot of options. So we’re gonna do an email and I can choose my tone. What do I want to create? Do I want something that is clever witty? Do I want something that is passionate, serious? So I’m going to go with optimistic I’m optimistic If that we’re going to get all of the money that we need to expand our shelter, and I’m going to hit Next. And then the fundraiser bot is going to create this message to help me out. And I’m going to let it generate, give you a moment to appreciate this magic

there it is. So when I have this message, you can see I have all this information, I could decide that I’m not sure this is what I wanted. Maybe I want a different message. So you can always go back and generate it again, change the tone if you want. If you want it to be clever, go ahead, click Next. And then it’s simply going to generate again, with some change. So when you do clever, it will usually put in some very, play fun play on words. So in my message, I was saying we’re thanking you for helping us save CHEWIES leg, we’ve saved 22 people, while 22 People 22 animals, the founder forever home. And then now here’s what we need. And then it’s simply taking us to this.

So once I have this message, or whichever version of it that I want, I can click Copy, and then I could take it somewhere else and use it, which take us we will talk about that when we get to step three of how I’m going to be sharing this story, this message. So before that, though, I’m going to need a segment now. So I did talk about our three things that we needed. So now we have the story part, we have the content that we want to send to our donors. And how am I going to now segment this in DonorPerfect. So simply, we’re going to build selection filters. So a selection filter is a list or a criteria or a list of criterias that we apply and DonorPerfect to find specific record. So if I don’t want to spend, share, send this message to everyone in the database, then I’m going to need some specific criteria so that I can send it only to those donors. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to be going into DonorPerfect, and build a filter so that I can send this message to the donors from the last two years, but not the ones that donated in the last two months. So let me show you in DonorPerfect. So I’m in my DonorPerfect system, before I even go to build a filter, I will show you the field that I will use to build my filter. So I’m going to this record just a donor record. And I have this section to giving an engagement profile, you may not have this section in your DonorPerfect system. But what I want you to know is that everyone has this field, and this field is the most recent donation date. So if I’m looking for donors who have donated in the last two years, this donor would fit the criteria, because she has donated the most recent flood gift she’s donated was June 2023. And it also is not in the last two months. So this field exists in all of your system, it comes with DonorPerfect. And it automatically will put in that little field, the date of the most recent donation. So I’m going to use this in my filter. And to be able to now send them my story. So over here, I’m going to go to settings and then filters to create this filter. Now you can create a filter either in the moment when you’re building the rapport, building the list, building the mailing list, the email list, I’m just going to build it ahead of time and then we’re going to apply it. So I’m going to go here and add a new filter. And when you’re building a filter, you always have these five questions to answer. So one, what screen is this information on? So I’m going to be building my criteria based on the last gift date that I just showed you and that is found on the main screen of the donor. I can then choose what is the field so select the field to compare. So over here I have some of my favorite fields. If I didn’t see the field that I wanted, I could also go all fields however it is right here, the last gift date. And then I could say equal to today if I wanted to find today’s donor, but that is not what I want. So in the third step, we’re choosing all Am I using this field? What am I doing? So really, if we’re repeating my statement, again, I want to send it to my recent donor. So donors that gave in the last two years, but not the ones that gave in the last two months, I’m really looking for a date range, I’m looking for anyone whose most recent gift was between two years ago, and two months ago. So I’m going to, say June, January 1 2022. And then all the way till March 31, that’s going to be my between date, so I’m going to choose between. And then in the fourth step, I’m going to put those dates. So I’m gonna go here. So January 1 2022, and March 31 2024. And I wrote too many threes. Missing. This is what happens, I’m typing. Okay. So here, I have my two dates. And then in the fifth step, I’m going to click add more criteria, what happens is that over here, the system is kind of translating this, what I wrote in here into the language, that DonorPerfect and read, to apply to whatever I’m going to want to apply it to, if I want, I can add more criteria, I can be more specific, this is for my mailing list. So I want to make sure to send it only to people without emails, because when they have any malice, and then the email, then I could add more criteria as to my filter. I’m going to stop here in our example today. And then we’re going to use it in a few moments to apply it to our different activities. So here, I’m going to save this filter as my spark filter. So I can find it in a moment. And click Done. Okay, so now I’ve got the filter. So I have a segment. So what do I have? Well, I have a story. I have created content. And now I have a selection filter, which is the segment of donors that I want to send it to others this all come together, and how can I now send this. So if I wanted to use emails, I’m going to use our integration with constant contact just sent my email to my donors. So we have an amazing integration with constant contact. That was a great session yesterday from constant contact directly if you want more information about that. And we’re able to track your emails directly in DonorPerfect, we’re able to use DonorPerfect templates if we want. And we’re able to use our selection filters to create our lists directly from DonorPerfect. So I’m going to show you now how you can create the list and then how you can go ahead and create the email. So I’m going to go to DonorPerfect again. And I’m going to go into mailings and constant contact email. From here, I’m going to go ahead and go to list management. And I’m going to be adding a brand new list. I’m going to call it spark list so I can find it and create it. And there are different ways that you can create lists, you can create a manual list or a dynamic list. Quick difference, a dynamic list is a list that will update on a regular basis based on a filter that you apply to it in manual list is a list that will update one time, which is right now and then you can manually update it later if you want. Okay, so if you’re doing something that is just a one time activity, a manual list is great. You can even make some manual changes to it. If you want a list that is happening on a regular basis, and you’re going to reuse the same list. Then you’re going to want a dynamic list. So I’m going to leave this one on manual. I’m going to apply my filter. So I already created the filter ticket with you. It is right here the spark filter. I’m going to select it and I’m going to click search. Right here we can see the list that it created. It is including secondary email addresses by default, which means that those donors that have multiple emails, they would include all of their emails, you can unclick that checkbox if you don’t want that and then you don’t have to see them all. In this case, I’m going to leave them on. I’m going to click Add Selected to list and then right here, I have my list of emails. Okay. As soon as this is clicked and done, I can now I log into my Constant Contact account. And if I go to contacts, and list, I’m going to see my spark list right there.

In here, right here, okay, so I just created this list just now. And immediately, no delay, it is right there in constant contact for me to send an email. To create my email, I’m gonna go, I could go to home, I could go to create, I’m just going to use an email I started already, so that we’re not taking too much time on creating the content. But here, you can see, I have the, the email started. So I added the name of the organization, I added a photo. And now I can go right here and put in my content that came from that. The robot that finds DonorPerfect fundraiser bot, it’s my new thing. I call it the robot. Okay, so here is my subject, I’m not going to leave it right here, I’m gonna grab this here. And I’m going to be able to, at the top here, go ahead and click on Email Settings. I can go here, change my subject. Save, I’m going to remove it, I should have just erased it from the start. Here we go. I can play around a little bit with how I want this to look. I want to make spaces. But a lot of it is going to just stay as is, of course, I can make different, I could have different options. There’s also the option here to have a button at the bottom, where I could just have them click on given now. So if I wanted to do that, and maybe I’ll put this thank you message right here. Maybe, maybe not. There we go. And I want this button to link to my donation. So I have it, the link is here. But you can also edit the link of this actual button over here. So that it also goes to your donation page. Okay, so I’m going to leave it for now. And here I have my email, I can preview and test this. If I wanted to. I can preview it, what is it going to look like on a computer? What is it going to look like on a phone, I could send myself a test as well, by doing the test option as opposed to preview, I can check for errors to see if I missed any links that I didn’t put in. And then I can hit continue. And when I hit continue, I’m going to now see over here all of the different email lists that exists in my cost and contact account, including the sparkless that I just created. And then I’ll be able to either schedule or send this email whenever I’m ready. And hopefully then just watched a donation come in so that we can start building that extension

so over, once we’ve done that, then maybe I want to also send some direct mail piece. So if I wanted to use a DonorPerfect fundraiser bought for a letter versus an email, I can also do that there’ll be a lot less hearts and emojis in it for sure. And you might be written slightly differently because we don’t communicate the same way. When we are communicating by email versus when we’re communicating by mail. Is the DonorPerfect fundraiser bot will really help you create your multi channel communication plan if you want by creating really different messages based on the communication method. In DonorPerfect, we’re going to be able to use our mail merge feature to either export a list or merge into a letter directly if you upload the letter into donor project, and you can even create QR codes and with a QR code. You can include that in in your letter or if you’re sending something small or even, you can include a QR code so that people can scan it and access your donation page directly from scanning the QR code. So what I’m going to show you is exactly what I just said. So just a second. So over here

sorry, just trying to go back to doing it perfect. I’m going to go to mailings. And this time, I’m going to go to mail merge. So if my goal is to create a mailing list, now the filter is so nice, it actually followed me and knows I like it, and doesn’t want to hang out with it. So it’s here. Otherwise, I could of course, simply apply it. Now if I had a specific filter for my mailing, I would choose that filter right here. And I can either export the mail merge file at the bottom, which is generating a spreadsheet of a donors names that I can then do my own mail merge send to a mail house or printer, or I can instant merge this directly into a actual

insert versus into my actual letter that I have uploaded to DonorPerfect ahead of time, I can also generate the QR code, which is really what I wanted to just super quickly show you. So over here, you can click this button, you can say try it out. And then what is going to happen is that it’s going to ask you for the link, which just gonna go grab from over here, one second.

And there it is, my QR code has been generated, I can download this image inserted into any letters that I want to create and someone scanning that is going to be linked directly to my donation for.

And it’s as simple as that. So when you receive the gift, then what can you do? Well, you can take your donor using our email templates and DonorPerfect, you can use Constant Contact to send follow up emails. So you could create a dynamic list that would be anyone who donates to this appeal, so that you can update them directly on that expansion project. And you can use the DonorPerfect fundraiser bot to help you create all of that regular content as well. So just to recap, this is a QR code that I generated using our QR code generated and you can scan it right now if you want access to the fundraiser bot, you can also go to DonorPerfect.com/ot. What I want you to remember, your story is important. Use the tools that are directly in DonorPerfect to communicate with your donors. We have a lot of those we have mail merge our constant contact integration, the QR code generator and our brand new DonorPerfect fundraiser, Brian’s going to take a look at the q&a. And see what I missed.

We had some good questions coming through in the live chat as well. Here’s here’s one that I that I had cherry pick people in the chat might have seen it already. But somebody wants to know Will there be a charge for the fundraiser bot? What does this thing cost? 2020 3050 $100? What’s the cost? What’s it

$1 million? What the DonorPerfect fundraiser bought is 100% free, you can access it right now if you go there is no no charge at all. It is available for everyone to use. I love

1. Love it. I’m also cherry picking one of my clients Tammy for it. Hi, Tammy. She wants to know, I’m assuming we can also customize this email, like a letter mailer by adding another filter to include maybe custom salutations for the first name. Yes,

so you do have the ability to include custom fields in an email. So in constant contact, the way that it works is when you’re looking at your integration with constant contact. So going back into mailings, and then constant contact email. Over here, I can go into my settings and then I’ll be able to use some custom fields mapping So I can map the DonorPerfect field salutation so that it can be inserted in my emails in constant contact. By default, without having to do any extra work, you already have access to first name, last name, and full address as well as email, of course, in the Constant Contact integration. So if you just want to insert first name, you can do that if you want the custom salutation, then you would just have to choose it here in your settings in your mapping, and then it can be inserted in your email in constant contact.

The more you know, I always love seeing the other side of things on contact contact.com really fluid and intuitive way to design those emails. But we have an anonymous user asking when you send an email from constant contact to a list of donors does DonorPerfect record that contact and the donors profile? Yes,

so you’re gonna be able to go to your, your donors record right here in DonorPerfect. And if you go to contacts, I don’t have any, because I haven’t received any emails, this is a bad example here. But you would be able to see it right here. And this is the section that’s going to get filled in over here. So you’re going to know the name of the campaign that you sent, you’re going to know when it was sent, what email was sent to so if this donor has multiple emails, but some of those emails are not included, and will tell you here exactly which email was sent you. So it could be your multiple times. And then the status. So did they afford it? Did they open it? Did it bounce? Did they opt out? What exactly happened? What? What did they do? So you’ll be able to see that right here. And then you can even use our easy report builder to build a report to see specifically who said we received that last email and then how many people from that received it donated?

Who is an audit trail? Love to hear it? And I swear, I don’t always play favorites. Potat before it again, is that. Okay, sometimes I do play favorites. Kit can deliver perfect. Also track appeals and the stories being told in those emails that then translate into actual donations. As correct track them for sending out those specific email campaigns, to people telling me stories, can we then track the donations that are fulfilling on the other end? Right.

So by having here, track record of whoever received this email, I can create a similar thing for whatever received the mailing and then I’ll be able to then see of all the people that received it on any actually donated to the appeal. Right. So ideally, you’d want to have a unique donation page for this particular fundraiser. So you can see who donated after receiving it versus we didn’t, I’m assuming that’s what you meant.

Yeah, yeah. Excellent. Joanne Nielsen asks, can we make this a segment in constant contact rather than a new list?

You can, but that would be done directly in constant contact. So it’s not going to translate the same way in your DonorPerfect integration piece over here. But you do have the ability to create segments right here in constant contact, if you want. But that will be done directly in your constant contact account. So it’s not a DonorPerfect feature.

Excellent. Let me see. Let’s double check, see if anything else came through.

And did see a question about does the boar bot work in French? And unfortunately, it does not it is right now only in English. If you wanted it into another language, I would suggest using it in English in English sorry, the end of a day, and then using potentially chat GPT to translate it into another language for you.

Nice, that’s a good workaround. I think the last one, unless you see any others is from carafate, he can the bot create a series of email campaigns as part of a campaign series of emails as part of a campaign.

So you’ll be able to really put in some of the specific details of what you want. So you could say this is the first email of this series and describe a little bit what step this is and then you would generate an email then you would go here and you would change that paragraph for this is the second email of a series happening at that moment, and then you would generate that. So yes, you would just have to generate it a few times.

Okay, so just using the power of chat GPT as long as you’re being very precise Send your wording there, it’ll be able to figure out that this is a part of a series of emails. That’s right. Excellent. Let me double check. I think we might have gotten all of them. That’s awesome. Yeah. Excellent. So we’re going to wrap up a little bit early. Thank you all for attending Sara’s session. We hope you had some great takeaways. Next up at 245 is closing remarks with Mallory Erickson. We hope that you enjoyed this year’s DonorPerfect community conference, and that we were able to spark innovation and efficiency for your organization. Thanks for joining. Bye, everybody.

Thank you so much.