Tools to Engage Your Donors

Darryl Moser: Hello, everyone. We are about to get started here. Just letting a few other people file in super happy to have you, join our session today. Just give it a few seconds here and then we’ll get started. All right. Looks like things are pretty well synced up. My name is Darryl Read More

Darryl Moser: Hello, everyone. We are about to get started here. Just letting a few other people file in super happy to have you, join our session today. Just give it a few seconds here and then we’ll get started. All right. Looks like things are pretty well synced up. My name is Darryl Moser. I’m the business development manager here at DonorPerfect, and I’ve got 30 years of experience in leading software companies and I’ve worked with nonprofits through every step of that career, but in my role here at DonorPerfect, for the last five years, I actually look for software tools that allow our clients to extend the functionality of their system through an integrated solution. I also serve on the board of my local food pantry/social service agency and I get the opportunity to look through the eyes of a nonprofit organization when I choose some of those products, and I look for some of the efficiency and ease of use. Today, what we going to be talking about are the tools that will help you to better engage your donors, but not just your donors. Our first session is actually going to be talking about volunteers, and then we’re going to follow with a review of engagement tools, including our texting product and a few other brand-new solutions that we’re really excited to tell you about, that extend the abilities of what you’re able to do, and actually make the relationship stronger with your donors and your constituents. Many nonprofits actually rely on volunteer hours as strongly as they do donor dollars. Both resources are needed to deliver on your mission, but my question is do donors and volunteers expect everyone in your organization to know their contribution, whether it’s time, or money? In my nonprofit, that answer is yes. Like theme of our conference, it is in the spirit of relational connection to your donors, volunteers, and all of the constituents that are a part of your organization. Today with me is Paige Pennigar from VolunteerLocal. Page has been with a VolunteerLocal for three years. Prior to that, she spent nine years teaching high school and working with national-based nonprofits, focused on educational equity before moving into a full-time role as the director of business development. Excited to be a part of VolunteerLocal’s shift to focus more on nonprofit needs over the last few years, I would now like to turn it over to Paige to explain to you how VolunteerLocal actually helps nonprofits tie together their volunteers together with their donors, and make their volunteer experience more efficient, so Paige with that, I’ll let you take it away. Paige Pennigar: Awesome. Thank you, Darryl. Super excited to be part of this conference, thanks to all of you for joining. As Darryl said, my name is Paige. I’ve been with VolunteerLocal for just over three years. Was in the part-time capacity while I was still classroom teaching, so shout out to any of you that are in the educational nonprofit world and have really been part of our shift over the last few years in terms of having time, especially with the pandemic, to really focus on the needs of nonprofits. We’ve been working with DonorPerfect for a while now. That integration has really started to evolve over the last year and a half so we’re really excited to see a lot more of our DonorPerfect and VolunteerLocal customers take advantage of syncing hours. As Darryl said, using both donors and volunteer hours to leverage what you’re trying to do with your mission. I’m going to just give a really quick overview of VolunteerLocal and then focus more on the integration pieces. Just at a glance, VolunteerLocal, we are pretty straightforward in what we do. We give you the tools to create your volunteer calendars, add those last-minute opportunities, those ongoing opportunities, and have your volunteers choose their shifts, sign up for whatever your events might be, again, be those ongoing or one-off events. We offer communication tools, both text message and email. Reporting tools, checking your volunteers in and out for those shifts to track those hours, and then, as we’re all here for, to really look at how that integrates with DonorPerfect. If you’ve got volunteers who are also donors, we are able to essential send all of that information into DonorPerfect so that you can see everyone’s profiles, both ends, the donor side and the volunteer side. Just to show you briefly our website itself, the admin view, I’m happy to show any of you, if you’re interested in learning more about our us, just the actual overview of what our platform is capable of, but you’re just building signup pages where volunteers are able to choose their shifts, give you that information that you want to collect from them, manage waivers, all of that. Then once those volunteers have checked in for those shifts, you’re then able to track that information in DonorPerfect with the click of a button. What I’m going to do is just walk you through the ins and outs of that integration, what kind of information you’re able to send over to DonorPerfect from VolunteerLocal. We provide support on this front as well, so we’ll make sure that you are getting all of the different fields that you would like to send over to DonorPerfect there. Obviously, volunteer hours are going to be a huge part of that, but you might want also to get mobile number, addresses, any other demographic information, you can control what kind of information is getting sent to DonorPerfect. In your VolunteerLocal profile, we will help you manage this section of your profile. We’ll get your API key, set up all of that, and then this entire section of your profile will be dedicated to managing that integration, so it’s not going to be a scenario where you have to export data and then import it into VolunteerLocal. We’ll get everything set up with you so that you only have to click a button when you’re in your VolunteerLocal account, and are ready to send that information over to DonorPerfect. Here’s an example of one of those pages with the shifts and hours. You’re able to push your volunteers upcoming hours into DonorPerfect, and then once a volunteer has checked in or out for that shift, you can sync that information into DonorPerfect, so these are just some examples of those checkboxes. Again, if you have some unique data points that you would like sent into DonorPerfect, we are happy to help get that worked out. You are also able to control how VolunteerLocal will find the matching records in DonorPerfect, so it won’t necessarily create a new contact in DonorPerfect, you won’t find yourself in a big mess of data. We typically use the email address as that unique identifier. We’re very capable of making sure maybe you’ve got families who are owners, or multiple partners that use the same email address. We have the tools to make sure that that data still transfers over to DonorPerfect without duplicating things or creating new users. I’m going to sit on these pages just for a minute, so in case anybody wants to actually look into these screenshots a little bit more, Darryl, assuming these resources also will be available afterward if people need them, is that right? Darryl: They will. They certainly can and actually Paige, we did have one question that had popped in here whether or not VolunteerLocal includes a mobile app and/or a URL to be able to sign up and recording the hours? Paige: We do have a mobile app for volunteers. We’re also in the process of rolling out QR code check-in for your events. Given the scope of the new reality we all are part of, contactless check-in might be something that you’re interested in, so we can help you get a QR code check, or set up to check in and out volunteers. In terms of the URL, you’ll have a public landing page. We can wrap that landing page and any of your VolunteerLocal pages to look identical to your website so they’ll look and feel just like your website, so it’s not, your volunteers won’t be seeing VolunteerLocal branding, they’ll be seeing your branding, so hopefully that answers that URL question. Each individual scheduling page has its own unique URL and then you also have a public landing page. If you wanted to see a bunch of your volunteer opportunities listed on one page, let’s say, I go to your website and I click I Want to Volunteer, it’ll reroute to their signup page, which will be wrapped again with your website, so it won’t really feel like the volunteer’s leaving your websit. Then if you’re recruiting for a specific event, you can use that individual signup page URL to post on social media out or email out to your current base. We do have the ability to import volunteer data, so if you’ve already got a pretty robust database of your volunteers, we can help you get that into VolunteerLocal, and you can send out opportunities right away. Darryl: Great and actually, I see that there was a follow-up question on this, and I’m not sure if you had a screen that might actually show what a volunteer might see. I think your example about the events is a really good one. For example, if my nonprofit was about to hold a 5k or something like that, and I wanted to communicate the volunteer opportunities to all of the people that I know that have volunteered in the past that are maybe in my DonorPerfect database, would I email them out of the VolunteerLocal system or is it best to bring that link back into DonorPerfect or can I do it either way? Paige: Yes, so you should be able to do it either way. Obviously, I can’t speak as much on the DonorPerfect side in terms of communication, but they’re all very welcome to jump in on that, but you can easily import all of your donors, or all of your current volunteers. We do offer a volunteer application. Some nonprofits will call that an interest form or registration form. Essentially, that will be your database of volunteers. You can email them when there’s a new volunteer opportunity or Darryl, I’m assuming you probably can speak more to communication tools in Donor Perfect. If you wanted to send an email to all of your donors, you’ll still be able to use that unique URL for a specific volunteer, or event, or ongoing volunteer calendar. That link can be sent in any communication tool, I would imagine. Darryl: Got you. Then once they actually do register to be a volunteer, are they given a username and a password or what are the credentials? Paige: Great question. One of the most popular things about our platform from the volunteer side is that there are no usernames and passwords. Everything is going to be tied to the email address and first name combination. I can actually pop over to VolunteerLocal here. If I were to use a volunteer application, that application then becomes the gateway into a scheduling page. If I were to go to a signup page, if I’m using the application, instead of giving me this list of jobs and shifts right away, it would actually ask for my first name and email address. If it recognizes that first name and email address, and we do have the ability to do whatever your application flow is. As an example, a lot of nonprofits who work with children, you will require background checks. We can support whatever those tools you use are in terms of tracking, and then you can change the status of a volunteer’s application. Once a volunteer is approved, they can go back into your scheduling page. You can email them, you can send out automatic emails, that lets a volunteer know, “Hey, thanks for applying, here’s the next steps, we’ll send you an email when you’re eligible to sign up for shifts.” Then the volunteer will use their first name and email as a gateway to get into that scheduling page. They will always have access to their profiles through their email address, so it’s still secure in that the volunteer can’t view any of that information without using the link that they have in their email. Your communication tab tools will all have the merge tag, so you can create templates for your emails that that volunteer profile link is going to be what replaces a username and a password. Darryl: Great, and actually one other questions popped in, does VolunteerLocal also support doing a text message communication as your reminder? Paige: You can actually schedule under our communication tools and again, if anyone’s interested in a free trial, I’m more than happy to show you around and get you set up with an example of how, but our communication tools, you can build text reminders, schedule those to go out, schedule them later. We support different times zones. Schedule them now, maybe you’ve got last-minute emergency notification. We also do have automatic reminders through email. If I go into this example event, I’m going to scroll down to Messaging and Automation. If I wanted to schedule a reminder template to go out 24 hours before every single shift, I can add those that you don’t have to think about scheduling reminders for any given event. You might want to send your thank-you email 24 hours after an event and that sort of thing. You can schedule both text messages and emails in terms of setting an automatic one that goes out every 24 hours or every time a shift happens. Right now, that’s just for email, but you can still schedule text messages to go out, so down here where it says Schedule for Later, you can send a text a week before to remind people to double-check their shifts or whatever that might be. Great question. Darryl, I have this one pulled up. Darryl: Yes, actually well, and it ended up going back to the question of registration. Has there ever been an issue with access to personal info with the login being just an email address, if somebody happened to know that? Paige: Yes, we have never had any complaints to that. Again, anytime you’re sending information to a volunteer, they have to be able to login to that email address, and so, can access the links that you send, or reminders that you send through their email. We’ve never had any complaints for any of our customers on that front in terms of security. Obviously, if a family member has access to someone’s email, they might be able to do that, but to my knowledge, we’ve never run into any issues with it. If anything, people take a sigh of relief, when we say there are no usernames and passwords for coordinators, any volunteer coordinators, that’s going to be a lot less work on getting constant emails from volunteers asking for their password to be reset. You can always put that volunteer profile link in any of your communication. Darryl: Got you, and actually I’m going to post to your email community address inside of the chat so people will know how they can get in touch with you afterwards. Then one of the other questions and I’ll touch on this a little bit, when we get into the DP Text areas is does the person who’s actually agreed to getting the texts, which there’s going to be an opt-in requirements. That is probably part of the form that we use now to sign up for VolunteerLocal that you would actually verify that you agree at this. Paige: You can add obviously whatever questions you need to collect from volunteers, you’ll check this box to validate that number, and then when a volunteer either signs up for a one-off event or fills out your application for, they will get a text message for a five-digit code right away, asking them to confirm their mobile number. They have to respond okay to that text message. They’ll get an email, letting them know that they’ve confirmed their mobile number. You don’t have the ability to send text messages out that way, only you will through your account. They won’t be signing up for anything, it’s just our internal communication tool that you can then schedule and send a text messages to go out. Darryl: Great. I know you’ve been showing us a little bit of the back end as we were going through this, as well as, I think you have a tab open from the volunteer’s view. I guess I was just wondering, maybe from the volunteer perspective, it might be helpful to just walk me through signing up for a job, and the correct process and the finished process. Paige: Of course, so again this is an admin view. I’m logged into a demo account right now. This is an example event. You can create different jobs, add details to those jobs links, locations. We have password protection. Self-reporting is also an option now in response to the pandemic if you’ve got virtual volunteer opportunities that don’t require a shift. You can get really detailed with what kind of opportunities you’re offering, shift scheduler’s really straightforward. I’ve already created a few examples shifts, choose your date, time, how many people you need, and then once you are ready for your program to go live, you can turn it online. Again, here’s your public landing page. If I had a bunch of different events that I was managing, they would all show up on this example landing page. In fact, I’ll show you an example landing page real quick. Ironman has given us permission to share out some stuff. Ironman uses VolunteerLocal for all of their different races in North America. You’ll notice that we’re at volunteerlocal.com. However, this page looks and acts just like the Ironman website. These volunteer opportunities, if I was a volunteer, let’s say I wanted to volunteer for the Arizona Half Ironman. I can easily choose that event, see any of the opportunities that are available, sign up that way. I’ll open up again, this is example one, we’ll choose the shift, so if I’m a volunteer, everything will look like whatever you were nonprofit’s website is, I’m going to use an example email here. Again, you can customize these questions, volunteer signs the waiver. There will be a scroll box. Especially in COVID times, if you’ve got COVID release, codes of conduct to all the different things, there will be a scroll box there. You can customize what the confirmation info is that shows up on that page. I can actually pull up this example email here in just a second. Here’s an example of a confirmation message they’ll get and this is all customizable. You can make it look much prettier than this example message. They’ll be able to see whatever they signed up for. Click the Open their Profile button. This page would also be wrapped with your non-profit’s website. They can update their info, they can add their shifts to their calendars. Again, all of those hours can get synced with DonorPerfect, cancel shifts, open the page to sign up for more. Again, you do have complete control over that volunteer flow, so if you are going to be needing to approve your volunteers for some events that maybe you don’t just want the general public to be able to sign up, you can make a lot of, any of your URLs private in that regard. Darryl: Got it. Yes, and something that I’ve learned about VolunteerLocal is it can go from a very basic level of volunteering, very simplistic jobs to– when I was looking at some of those Ironman jobs, and having 1,100 jobs within an individual event, and I’m sure you’ve got shifts, and profiles, and different qualities that you need to know about those donors, it gets very sophisticated fast. You can go from one extreme to the other very, very smoothly, that’s great to see. Then, of course, after they’ve signed up for it, it becomes a check-in process where they could either download the mobile app or are there other ways that they can actually do the check-in to say, “I’m here to hand out water at the 5K.”? Paige: Like I said, we’re about to roll out the QR code check-in which allows QR– everyone’s using QR codes these days. You have just a printed QR code at the door of your nonprofit or onsite, a volunteer can just open their phone, scan, and check-in that way. We also have, and I’m just kind of showing this in the back end right now, if you were creating whatever your application flow is, you can totally customize that. If you’re interviewing your volunteers before they’re approved, onboarding, you could do all of that within VolunteerLocal. In terms of the check-in tools, this is an example check-in screen. This is an admin check-in screen. The reason for that is that it will have sensitive volunteer information, so if you are wanting to manage your check-in process, you can just click the clock icon, check the volunteer in and out. Here’s an example of the admin view of a volunteer profile, change their applicant status, you can do notes on them, you can move them around to different volunteer opportunities, and any of your email and text templates, you can send those from within the volunteer’s profile, see their service summary. That’s the admin-facing check-in tool. We also have a very similar one, which is kiosk mode. That allows you to do walkup volunteering, or just build a basic kiosk where you have that open on a tablet or a mobile device. Volunteer walks up, and just types their name and clicks Check-in, so it protects their personal information, so if you want your admin users to be managing the check-in process, you can use our check-in screen, and if you want volunteers to be checking themselves in, you can either use kiosk mode, the mobile app, or QR code check-in. Darryl: Wow. It sounds like there’s a lot of options there. Paige: There are. Darryl: [chuckles] One of the other things that comes up, and I know in my nonprofit that has between 400 and 500 volunteers that go ahead and serve the community, one of the debates that they have is there’s one administrative person that manages a spreadsheet today, and they feel that they need to do that because the clientele is not ready to go ahead and do self-signups and so forth. Do you bump into that and what do you truly find as far as maybe an organization that serves seniors and has a lot of volunteer seniors, are you finding that the adoption is actually better than what those managers interpret it to be? Paige: Yes. It’s kind of a mixed bag, and the good thing about VolunteerLocal is that it doesn’t have to be volunteer-driven in terms of them signing themselves up. Because there are no user names and passwords that do help with a lot of those pieces, but you can also make it so volunteers can sign up even if they don’t have an email. Obviously, you wouldn’t be able to communicate with them, but you’ll still be able to see that they’ve signed up. The other option is here, under volunteers, I went down to report, you can look at any of your different volunteer programs, see all the jobs you’ve got, the percentages to which they’re filled. If I click on a job, it gives me the ability to look at each shift, if I’ve got current volunteers in that shift, I can see these example volunteers, also access that volunteer profile from the admin view here, and I can manually add volunteers. If you do have some of those volunteers who prefer to call and say, “I’m going to show up on these days,” or, “I’m going to show up every Monday,” you can always manually add a volunteer, and because you are the admin user, you can break the required question rule. If someone, if Joe calls, and Joe’s been volunteering for 20 years with your organization, you know who Joe is, you don’t need to put everything in, you could just put their first name in and still track them. If you put a volunteer’s email address in because they’ve already worked with you, it’ll prefill all of this information for you. Darryl: Fantastic. One thing that I saw on your screen there, and I know I wanted to touch on it was the background check. What’s the process today to get a background check? It’s so important in so many of our social service nonprofits. Paige: It is. Right now, we are officially integrated with a background check system called Verified First. That allows you to run a back background check directly in a volunteer’s profile, so if I were to open an example profile, there are volunteer links. This is also where one of the DonorPerfect sync links would show up, so you can sync with DonorPerfect within a volunteer’s profile or within the overall report if you just want do everybody at once. You could also, if Verified First were enabled, there’s a button to just run a background check right within a volunteer’s profile. If you have your own local, maybe your government agency runs this for you, what we will find is that a lot of people will create a hidden field question in volunteer information, and just call that background check status. There are a lot of different ways to collect info, so we might do a dropdown, call this Approved, Denied, Need more info, as an example, and then anytime you hide a field from a volunteer, it’s still going to show up in a volunteer’s profile, so if I go back to an example profile here, but it will not be visible to the volunteer. If I get an email from whatever background check system you’re using that so-and-so’s approved, I can easily pull up their profile, change the status of their background check to approved. It’s also worth noting that we are actively trying to integrate with more background check systems for the same reason that Darryl just mentioned, that those are becoming increasingly more important, and so if you are already using a background check system, feel free to email it to me, and I can add to our list of possible integrations. Darryl: Awesome, and I did put your email address in the chat, and we can certainly provide that afterwards, and you may also have on your profile. I do see another question here in the Q&A that is, can we set a time before their commitment date when they can no longer cancel, example three days before the event? Paige: Yes. If I go into event detail, this is going to be where all those smaller behaviors live for any of your events. You can disable the ability to cancel a shift, so if you wanted to a few days before– we are working on a tool where you can set automatically to disable it a few days before. We also have a shift swapping feature now, so if you wanted volunteers to not be able to cancel, but to just offer their shift out to other volunteers, that’s an option as well. We can also accommodate minimum and maximum shift requirements. You’ll have complete control over your signup page content, layout, all of that. Darryl: Awesome. One other question that came in, and I was hesitant to jump on the answer to this, is the data stored in the US or Canada? Paige: In the US, in Virginia, we do use Amazon, and I’m happy to send our data and security info to anybody who might need that. Darryl: All right. Perfect. Excellent. I think we’ve got most of the questions covered at this point, but certainly, the other areas that you would want to cover, maybe talk a little bit about the integration or go through that a little bit? Paige: Yes. Let’s take a peek at this, just so people have a better idea of what that integration is capable of. Again, you can control how those records are matched. We’ll make sure that all of the hard work is done on the back end for you so that essentially all you’re having to do is click a button that says Sync, so our team will make sure that everything is good to go with your DonorPerfect ID. The sync will happen very quickly. You can click the button 20 times, it’s not going to duplicate your information. Again, you’re able to build out your own sync profile so that you can choose what pieces of information are getting sent to DonorPerfect. Again, this is all the DonorPerfect section of an admin profile. Obviously, your volunteer is not going to be doing that. You are simply going to have a sync to DonorPerfect option within your report. You can also do certain date filters to control when that information is getting pushed. Right now, we do have to click a button to perform a sync, it’s just one click, but Brian, who is the developer and lead of all the things at VolunteerLocal, he came up with VolunteerLocal about 13 years ago for a small Des Moines based group, and it’s really sprouted into something beautiful, so Brian, is the brainchild of all this, and he is working on a way to basically run the automatic reports, and syncs into DonorPerfect. Hang tight for that, but right now you do have to click one button. You’re able to also create sync profiles. Sometimes you might want to send just a certain window of hours. Sometimes, you might want to have a full sync, so you can create different profiles for what a volunteer sync would look like. That way, you are able to manage your data the most efficiently. I won’t dig too deep into all of the weeds with this, though I’m happy to, like I said, schedule a time to chat with any of you that wanted to talk more about the tech side of this integration. You can select multiple fields, get certain ones. We’ll help you make sure that that data looks the way you want in DonorPerfect. Once you’ve run a sync, you can set up an email. Essentially that email will allow you to review that sync so you can see whose information was synced, if there were any potential conflicts. Maybe you need to merge some Donor profiles and Volunteer profiles, see what kind of tasks were sent over, so you will get a email to review of each sync. That’s about it on that front. Obviously, I’ll be in the virtual lounge if anyone wants to chat more, my email address, I know Darryl put it in the chat, it’s also on the screen, and I’ll make sure that the link to this presentation’s available. We do have free trials. They default to two weeks but we’re really flexible, especially with nonprofits. We know that time windows are unpredictable for everyone these days. We’re very flexible if you need to try out our software with a few of your volunteers to see how they feel with that, I’d love to chat more. We can run through a demo of whatever makes the most sense for you and your org. We are offering a special for any of the conference attendees. Our pricing plans usually run for a calendar year, and so we are offering anyone who does schedule a free trial with us, a demo with us by the end of October or October 29th, and then upgrade by the end of 2021, which I still can’t believe we’re almost at the end of 2021. I said 2022 the other day and I was like, “Wait a minute. Aren’t we still stuck in 2019?” If you sign up by the end of 2021, we’ll make sure that that first year that you’re with us was actually a 15-month. so three additional months of service at no cost. Darryl: Awesome. What a great deal, as well as a thank you so much for sharing all of the details of VolunteerLocal. As Paige mentioned, there is an integration that goes to DonorPerfect. You saw where she was actually matching up the fields, and I think one of the things that many of our users expect with the volunteer tool is to be able to see the number of hours worked inside of the other info records in DonorPerfect. That is what you will experience with VolunteerLocal, so you can get that cohesive view and I want to call them a constituent, because they may be a volunteer, they may be a donor, but at the end of the day, there’s somebody who’s very passionate about your organization and you need to be able to see both sides of that. That’s the key to what we’ve been doing with the relationship here. Feel free to put any questions that you might have inside of the chat or the Q&A as it relates to the volunteer solution that Paige just presented. I see that there’s about 160 of you inside the room, so surely there might be a question or two, and we’re also going to then transition to the other part of the presentation, but I think Paige will stay on with us in case you think of something else that actually comes up while we were chatting about some of the other solutions that are out there. Don’t hesitate to go ahead and ask any questions that you might have. Let me go ahead and queue up the other presentation. All right. Other than I think there is a very sincere Iowa fan, I think we have the chat covered at this point. Thank you, Josh Nelson, for that one. Our next topic is to really talk about other tools of engagement. Sincerely, we just heard from volunteering, which is perhaps one of the most sincere forms of engagement in your organization that you could experience. Somebody that’s willing to give up their time to be knee-deep into whatever your programs are that you’re offering, but as we just talked about, we need to cater to a diverse donor population, right? We heard all of that yesterday, about personalizing the experience for the donors, and that requires a diverse set of tools. You need to be able to meet the donor where they thrive, and whether that means meeting them for lunch, whether that means because they prefer email, or some other form of communication, your choice of communication may make the difference as to whether or not they become the loyal donor or not. What engagement methods do we see most nonprofits employing today? Well certainly, there’s a website. People can find you through Google search, or you may also use social media. Ideally, all nonprofits here are probably using both of those. There was a discussion yesterday about events and how events have transitioned to virtual and now they may go hybrid, but certainly that’s another way that you can engage people, and inform them of what you’re doing inside of your organization. Email. We had a great presentation from Matt, from Constant Contact yesterday about how to write emails that will be more effective, especially during this time in the transition of the pandemic, but we’re also going to talk a little bit about some, I don’t want to call them new methods, but we’re seeing adoption just continue to increase using SMS and texting to communicate with donors and using it as a fundraising technique. We’ll talk a little bit about that feature next as well as the impact that video has had on communicating your message to your donor, whether it’s a real-time video, or even just using video to describe the mission that you’re working on. Personas and preferred channels. I know we sometimes, as a nonprofit community, have to look to the for-profits, as they oftentimes will lead the way in terms of how they use their marketing, and what channels are actually working to communicate with their clients, are things that we can model and use to communicate with our donors. One Twilio study found that consumers prefer email and text when communicating with brands, but wanted to make sure that I included a little byline underneath this, that out of the 2,500 people that they reviewed, there was a large dissatisfaction in terms of how businesses were approaching communication. However, they were very willing to reward the businesses that adhere to their preferred channels. If you’re a person that wants to get texts, then your nonprofit should be offering that as a solution, and that will make me happier as a person who wants to digest that kind of content. I know for me personally, there’s certain content I prefer in email, certain content I prefer in text. Maybe there’s a mobile app, maybe there’s different forms of communication that might be out there and it just depends what the subject matter is as to where I want to put it inside of my channel. The 2021 texting preferences. Which type of business communication was the most effective for reaching you quickly? Now, I think there is a qualifier here, in that quickly is important. A large percentage of people wanting to have a text message. What they’re really discussing here are things like reminders for appointments, but also a great discount on a product or service. Now, a discount could be something that would correlate to perhaps a donation, or a drive, but if you’re going to text a donor every day asking for a donation, you will probably quickly get disconnected from them as they shut down that communication path. It’s no different than email, but for each one of those channels, there is probably an expected form of frequency, content, and delivery expediency that they expect. Now I’m going to talk a little bit about our partner product called DP Text, and how that can deliver on some of these needs that are out there. Clearly, the most popular form that we end up seeing is preparing for an event. It has become almost the de facto standard that at your events, that people will want to give via text, because it’s something that they can do right there, while they’re sitting in one of those chairs, that they could go ahead and make a donation but there are a few things that you might want to keep in mind as you prepare for your event. Texting does require opt-in, we talked about this during Paige’s presentation. You can do that in a variety of ways, either a part of the registration on the weblink form. You can ask them for their mobile number and a check box to go ahead and opt in. You can include a widget on your event website or your actual homepage website, to allow people to enter their mobile number and sign up, or at the event. You can say text whatever your string, is to whatever the phone number may be, and that is an implicit opt in for the event as well as QR codes on the table. That’s a new feature that came about in the last few months from our DP Text product, so that you can go ahead and scan that and opt into it. Then the question comes up is after you’ve opted into the event, what other information should be provided? You can let attendees know that you will be offering texts to give at the event, so that they can prepare themselves for it. Pre-event emails and texts, maybe what will be on stage, whether or not you’re going to have an auction, as well as including signage on the tables to let them know that this is an option that’s available to them, and getting your speaker at the front of the room to tell people about it, and to maybe invite at them multiple times, as long as they’re asked, but to go ahead and give them the very easy instructions that if you just text this to this number, putting it on the screen behind you, you can then go ahead and contribute to the event. Then of course, throughout the evening, you want to make sure that you’re giving them goal updates, and you make the ask, show the progress bar. Here’s an example of a text message, and you actually can go ahead and try this yourself. We have a demo set up for it. Our demo nonprofit is called Coral Acres. You can see here that on my first response, I was given a link that I can go ahead and complete my donation form. When you make a donation through DP Text, it’s actually utilizing the DonorPerfect, or any of our partner product online giving forms, that will actually feed directly into DonorPerfect. That’s actually what gives you the thermometer effect inside of your event. I’ll show you a little bit of that in some of the following screens, but the other thing I want to communicate about DP Ttext is that is actually has a scripting language. You can tell it to give options like this bottom text down below to say volunteer to donate your time, which would actually give you a signup that would register in a report that you can run out of DP Text, or you can even type in the word video, and they’ll send you a link to a video, newsletter, a gala, all of that is completely programmable. Here’s an example of launching into what a mobile web link form would look like after you’ve sent out that DP Text message, or taking them to your YouTube feed for the video. Then of course, as I was talking about, in the event fundraising page, and this is really important to show your progress throughout the night to see how close you’re coming to your goal. Of course, the closer you get, the more intense that the asks can be to try and get you over that edge, if you will. This actually updates by reading the data inside of DonorPerfect. Even if you had checks that were written prior to the event, and they get input and coded into the DonorPerfect system with the right solicitation and campaign and date range and so forth, the meter will actually pick up that content and can be displayed at the front of your room. You get a very holistic view that is out there today. Then when your event finishes, how would you continue to use texting? Obviously, a thank you message to everybody that came, that used the text-to-give feature. You can send out links of the event videos or photos, that might be out there. Of course, everybody likes to see themselves after the event. Any status updates on the funds raised, as well as the ongoing and the long-term communication that you may use via emails, how the funds were used, and then maybe providing monthly updates thereafter just to keep them engaged with your non-profit today. While I want to say that 80% to 90% of our DP Text clients actually start with it being an event-based text-to-give system, the longer-term implications is you just opened up a communication channel with your donors that you can use to push out some of the additional info that occurs throughout the year to keep them engaged within your organization. I pasted in a DP Text screen. This is actually the ability to do a one-off text, where I could say, “Hello, board members we had a great, whatever the event was. Here’s what our updates are.” We can actually segment your text users so that they’re going to get distinct messaging. One of the other things, and now that I know that Josh Nelson is here with us, from our product perspective, is we’re exploring ways that we could possibly put a one-to-one texting tool inside of DonorPerfect, where right from the donor’s record, you would be able to click the text button, and go ahead and send a message right to that donor, as long as they have a mobile number inside of their system. Certainly, if there’s a suggestion vote or something, that you wanted to go ahead and chip in to suggest that, we’d like to hear from you to see whether you feel that that would be a useful tool for you and your donors. Lastly, you can jot this down. If you want to try and explore using our text-to-give the product, as I showed you, it’s actually scripted, so you can run one of the scripts by texting the word CORAL to 501-200-4449. Again, this video is available to you. I can also paste that information in to the chat when we get a chance. This is a way for you to go ahead and try that. While we’re on the subject of engagement, I wanted to also touch on two other ways that you can keep people, your donors, really motivated and engaged. The DP Video product has been something brand new that we released the tail end of last year. Actually, everyone that is a DonorPerfect client has the opportunity to use this free trial. It’s interesting. I go to conferences a lot, and I mention to people about the new things in DonorPerfect, and mention this, and it’s hard for us to even get the word out into your inboxes. It is available to all of you to go ahead and try 10 free video emails, and see how it works, but let’s talk a little bit about what it is. I’m just going to do a quick check, a check in the chat here. One person that commented that for-profit organizations mirroring, yes, definitely. The texting product is available now in the US and Canada. We can support both. There’s been some weird things that have gone on with the SMS messaging rules and regs. The old shortcode system that we used to use in the US is really no longer available. That’s why you’ll actually see that we are using 10 digit numbers today. Thank you, Josh, for that suggestion vote idea, and Catherine for your enthusiasm, for the one-to-one texting, but back to DP Vdeo. Right from your DonorPerfect screening, I circled the Send Video button. Again, this is free for you to try for 10 videos, go ahead and click that button. Then you’re presented with a form. It’s actually going to pop open a new tab for DP Video. It gives your name, your email address, and it automatically will pull in who the recipient email is. I can actually type a little message. When I click the Record Video button down at the bottom, I am brought to an actual live screen inside of my browser, that I can go ahead and record my video, send you a message, smiles, all kinds of things that I might want to be able to pack into that. If you think about the personalized handwritten notes that so many nonprofits send to donors, think about how much more personal and actual live video from the executive director is. We are seeing this as the technology replacement for some of those handwritten notes. Again, maybe they don’t completely disappear, but it’s about personalizing that experience and helping that donor to feel like you are actually catering to them that makes a huge difference. Then of course, once the email is sent, this is what my inbox email preview looks like. I get a little snippet of my video. If you’re familiar with the GIF technology that is out there, it’s actually a GIF. It’s a bit of a motion video that appears inside of your inbox. As soon as you click the link, then you’re taken to a landing page where they can go ahead and play the video. No YouTube ads,, so you’re not sharing it out in that format. This is actually a hosted-by-DP video product. You can define your own background and messaging, and you can even put a Donate button that is out there. The product itself, the video is shareable by social. We also get some feedback on the number of email forwards that we see on these DP videos messages that are going out to individuals saying, “Isn’t this cool? My nonprofit just sent me this personal message from their executive director,” and then they forwarded it to 20 of their friends. That ends up promoting some of your donor acquisition that’s out there. Lastly there, of course, is an integration. The DP contact records are updated whenever you send video email to one of your constituents. Quick reminders here, the DP Video product is a free trial. All DonorPerfect clients at any level have it, you’ve got 10 free video emails to try use them. Selectively send them to your board, your major donors, maybe your volunteers even, to give you that personalized message, and go ahead and give it a try. Certainly, our support team is ready there to go ahead and handle anything that should come up with it. Let me just go ahead and check some of our messages and questions that we might have that are out there. Is there a new discount for current DP users? I’m not sure if that was the DP Text or the DP Video one. I think both of these products actually have some special promos as a result of the conference that you can take advantage of. Can that mass video messages be sent at the same time? There actually are two levels of the DP Video product. The basic one that I just showed you is a one-on-one intended solution. Then there is also a premium version of the DP Video product that allows you to do mass-market email videos, where you could actually attach a video of your message. Really, really, quite great questions there. Let me just check my Q&A here. Looks like there’s some volunteer questions that are out there. Great. Questions have been completed, awesome. All right, any other questions about DP Video or sending video emails? There will be a Dp Text promotion that will be going out to signup for a future year, which is 10% off in that coming year. All right, the last product that I wanted to touch on is something that is quite new. It’s from a partner has been up there for some amount of time. Again we’re under the headline here of engagement. There’s nothing like keeping your donors fully engaged by thanking them, and thanking them quickly. Josh Nelson could even chime in with the prizes that we used to give out for the client, the DonorPerfect client that actually had the fastest response times to thanking there donors. It is really key to making sure that your donors are engaged. One of the things that we were searching for was this idea if we could automatically thank with a direct mail piece. Now, we’re in the world where I can give an online donation and within seconds, I get an email thank you. That may be perfectly fine for me. Industry statistics say that you should thank a donor as many as seven times for the gift that they have given. Those thank-yous probably should be coming in different flavors, so tou’re making sure that it’s reaching them. With a AppealMaker, what they’ve done is they’ve actually built an integration to create automatic printed thank-you letters. Literally, “Look mom, no hands,” I don’t have to touch anything because once you setup the integration, you choose a template inside of the AppealMaker system system. The donor perfect API integration that they built actually views all the gifts that you receive nightly. It finds those with a matching thank-you letter code that you’ve identified in AppealMaker system. The letters are printed, stamped and mailed out overnight from the AppealMaker officers, within 24 to 48 hours. Fully automatic. LI was saying, really should be thanked seven times to know that there’s an appreciation for their gift that is out there. This is just one of those ways that you can actually streamline one of those touch points, and still give them that paper copy, that paper feel that you might have out there. What you do for the other six ways? Could be the email thank you, could be the video email thank you, it could actually be a handwritten note. Some of those don’t need to go away but you need to consider who your donors are and what kind of appreciation you should be showing them. Here are some examples of products that AppealMaker offers, that actually can work with the integration. If you wanted to send a holiday thank-you card or something to that effect that is actually tied directly to the thank-you system as well as they can do all of the campaign materials. If you wanted to do a mass mailing campaign. Once you’re inside of their system, this is the fully electronic layout to your letter or message that you want to communicate to your donor, and to give them thanks. Then here is what the integration looks like., where you can select the thank-you code inside of the donor perfect system. You can add multiples of those. Then the next one is, is it actually runs through the process and gives you the list of all the people that it found that gave you a gift, that it will actually be sending out a direct mail piece. Some creative innovation, leveraging some technology that’s been around for ever which has been direct mail and direct mail thank-yous, but just another way that you can connect with your donors, and try and streamline your efforts. We are at about 10 minutes past the hour, and I just wanted to start to do a wrap up here. These are just highlights to some of the products that are out there that help you make the connection with your donors and increase engagement. If there are any questions, go ahead and send them into the general chat or Q&A. Let me just take a quick peek on our Q&A here. The addition cost for DB Text is either at a– they have both event pricing in your round pricing. I believe the entry level’s at $89 month right now for DP, text or $500 for a single event. Then how do you access the thermometer showing the results of the campaign? DP Text itself now includes both a pledge thermometer. so the gift thermometer. You would get a separate login to the gift thermometer and all Dp Text accounts are now including both of those thermometers. You also can buy the thermometer independently for $10 a month if you just want to put a campaign on your website and allow them to click the link and go ahead and see the people that have contributed to whatever that campaign is. I took a cruise thorough a number of our client’s campaign meters, and I’ve been seeing a lot of them that are actually not just for the gala event, but they are for hitting a specific target. I know with my non- profit, when COVID hit they set out a goal trying to reach a $250,000 Close the Gap campaign. Over a period of three months we ended up getting those donations and grants that actually allowed us to close that gap. Was super effective in being able to communicate what our success rate was and how far we were from goal/ and beeing able to nudge that along. All right, any other questions out there? Go ahead and put them in the chat or put them in the Q&A. Happy to go ahead and answer those, all right. Well, I guess I’m taking a look at what’s coming up next on our agenda. I believe we are headed for a bit of a 15-minute break here today. Yes, from 1:30 to 1:45, you will be able to take a little bit of a break. If there are no other questions that you have, feel free to visit page inside of our VolunteerLocal lounge, where you can also just one on one chat with her if you go to their exhibit groups. I just want to thank everyone for your time and attention with this session. I guess feel free to reach out to me, either if there’s a product that you feel that D DonorPerfect should work with or we are currently working with and you’d like us to extend that functionality, go ahead and reach out to me. Thank you so much and enjoy the rest of the conference. Paige: Bye, thank you, everyone.