Speaker 1 (00:00:00):
All right, everybody. Thank you for joining us today for the state of year end multi-channel fundraising research preview. So we just are wrapping up some research with virtuous here. So we're so excited to share it with you guys today. Um, before we happen, we're going to go over a few housekeeping things and then I'll hand it on over to Nathan. So, um, just some things to note here as we get going. Um, if my clicker is going to work, give me one second guys. All right. So before we get started here, I just want you guys to know you will receive a recording of the webinar today. Um, we get this question all the time, so you will get that along with the slides, um, and any other links or resources we share with you today, we'll send that all out after the webinar. Um, and at the end here, we are going to have some time for Q and a.

Speaker 1 (00:00:54):
So if you guys drop those questions in this specific Q and a chat, there's two chat boxes, the normal chat box, where you guys can send in any comments you have, but then the Q and a chat is where you'll put any questions so that we can hit those at the end. Um, and one thing I want to share with you guys before we get going, we have our Neo summit coming up here in September, um, September 21st through the 23rd, two full days of awesome speakers, um, fundraisers, just like yourselves. So we would love to have you guys join us in Austin. So I just wanted to share this cool video with you guys before you get started,

Speaker 2 (00:01:44):
Come with me and you'll be in a world of giving innovation, take a look and you'll find inspiration. If you want to make a difference, now's your chance to step up to anything you want to do, do it here. You're free as can be, to give wings to every new creation in the sky. Let them fly. Who knows where the winds of change?

Speaker 1 (00:02:40):
Yeah, that's our fun little video. I hope you guys enjoyed it, but, um, actually the last discount for Neo summit tickets ends tomorrow. So tomorrow is your last chance to get discount on tickets. Um, you get $300 off, um, until the end of the day tomorrow. So if you're interested in coming to Neo summit, you can get those tickets@neosummit.com, um, and just rest assured that our tickets are 100% refundable. So if you have something come up in your plans and you end up not being able to come, we will refund it for you, but tomorrow is your last day to get that discount. So, yeah, we'd love to have you there. Um, so now I'm going to hand things on over to Nathan. He's going to be going over, um, the new research with you. And then at the end, we will hear a little bit from Noah, from virtuous who, uh, partnered with us on this research also. So we will hop on in now.

Speaker 3 (00:03:33):
Awesome. Thanks so much, Riley. Uh, this is kind of a fun day. It's a fun, fun webinar to talk about, uh, some brand new research related to year end, which if you aren't aware your end's coming up like really, really fast. So hopefully this, if you haven't started on really any of your plans specifically online, hopefully this has kind of a good jumpstart with some new ideas and thoughts as to how you can start building your campaign and then integrating your online campaign with your direct mail and things like that. But if you haven't been on a next after Institute webinar before, uh, I just want to give you a little insight into what our, our mission is and where this research comes from. So our mission is to really decode what works to increase generosity and to grow fundraising, and then make all those learnings as accessible to you and other fundraisers that nonprofits, uh, as possible and to do so as much as we can.

Speaker 3 (00:04:24):
That's the only way we're going to unleash greater generosity and see generosity grow is by equipping you, hopefully we're not doing a research for just the sake of research, but actually seeing the fruit of that with you implementing new ideas that can work to grow giving. So we do a couple of different types of research here at next. After one of those is what we're looking at today is what we call forensic research, where we're going to go out into the marketplace. And we're going to try to understand how are nonprofits. You're trying to get more people to complete their donation form, or how are nonprofits trying to cultivate their donors via email. And in this specific study, we're looking at how are nonprofits using multi-channel communication during the year end season? So that's one type of research is like forensic research. What are people doing?

Speaker 3 (00:05:05):
The other side of that is AB testing and applied research where we can take some of these tactics and strategies that we observe out in the marketplace and then actually put them to the test to see what works to grow giving. So it's two different types of research from that data. From those insights, we produce lots of different resources from webinars like this one to eBooks and tools and how to guys and podcasts and things like that as well as more formalized training, uh, through the next after Institute, uh, through certification courses, as well as our Neo summit, like Riley mentioned is coming up here pretty, pretty quick. So that's kinda what you can expect from today is we're looking at the data, trying to decode what works and the side of it we're looking at today is what are people doing to try to draw insights and ideas that you could actually build into your campaigns during the year-end season.

Speaker 3 (00:05:53):
But before we really dive any deeper, I think we need to address this, which is why does he ran matter? Why, why is he here and important? And I assume if you are here today, you probably have some sort of, uh, intrinsic understanding of the value of year end. So you may be wondering like, why do we even need to ask this question? We know year-end is, is so important, but over the past few years of doing more and more teaching and training and instruction around here ends specifically, how do you grow your online? Year-end giving I've come to realize that there are quite a lot of fundraisers and nonprofit, uh, people, nonprofit staff members that maybe know that year-end is important, that maybe don't have the data and the insights to know just how important or even more so than that, which days in which time periods throughout the year and season are actually most critical to growing your fundraising and increasing your revenue.

Speaker 3 (00:06:43):
So I think we should start here. Why is your end giving actually important? And we at next step to work with about 40 different clients, uh, which is just nonprofits that we work with on a consulting basis to help them figure out how do we actually grow revenue and grow generosity in a meaningful way, specifically online. And as we look at the revenue from 2020 that came in online, we actually have found 35% of online revenue for the year comes in during the year end season, which is quite a lot. Uh, we look at basically November 15th through the end of the year as the year end season. That's the window we're looking at. So it's about 45 days. So in 45 days, 35% of online revenue is coming in just during that short time span, which is, is significant. It's more than significant. It's critical.

Speaker 3 (00:07:29):
And you may look at that and you may say, well, you guys do a lot of stuff like with online fundraising and digital focused organizations and things like that. So is this data skewed? Is it too small of a sample, but we can look beyond our own data and see some similar trends as well. So there's a study produced by neon one that showed that one third of annual giving occurs just in the month of December alone, which again is pretty, is pretty significant, so slightly different window, just as significant of a revenue impact. And then beyond that, there's a study from Bloomerang and pursuant a couple of years ago that that, that observed this, that 50% of nonprofits receive a majority of their donations from October through December. So during Q4 overall, so these are like three different lenses to look at how important is this year and season and whatever the exact number is.

Speaker 3 (00:08:19):
The truth is pretty clear, which is that there's a lot of donations at stake. There's more than a lot. There is an unbelievable amount of donations and revenue at stake during a very limited time period. So we have to be intentional in our fundraising and our communication to make the most of this, this urgent timeframe. Now about a year ago, we produced a study again with virtuous, our friends at virtuous, uh, who sponsored this study, put it on, uh, along with us called the state of multi-channel donor communications. And now this original study, here's kind of a look at what it, at what it analyzed. We went out to a hundred organizations and we made a $20 donation online. So we found their donation page non-profit dot org slash donate, essentially went to their donation page, made a $20 donation at least tried to. And then what we also did for these same organizations is we wrote in a donation through the mail.

Speaker 3 (00:09:14):
So the same hundred and 19 organizations. So now we have two different donor personas. We have the person that donated online, and then we have, it was actually a separate individual who donated through the mail because the goal was to figure out, is there any differences in how organizations treat these two different types of donors and what types of channels are they using to communicate to these types of donors? And so through that process, we captured 12 key data points about the giving process. So we're looking at the donation page. We're looking at the thank you page. We're looking at the ways to give page and kind of everything involved in the donation process. We're trying to, to capture key data points. Um, but we didn't stop there. We then track all of the follow-up communication that we received from these two different donor personas.

Speaker 3 (00:09:58):
So over four months we received like almost 2300 messages. This could be, uh, through the email, through an email over the phone, it could be direct mail sending us a letter. It could be a text. It was mostly email and direct mail, not so much phone and SMS. We'll get to that in a moment, we received a lot of messages over four months and we classified each one of these messages as either cultivation. So something that's trying to build a relationship or solicitation, something that's directly asking for money, asking for a donation. And then from those, we started to break it down and we did some analysis, uh, of 47 direct mail appeals and 64 email appeals. So very extensive trying to understand how are nonprofits using multi-channel communication to grow their donors and hopefully increase generosity. And so for this year end focus study, what we did is we took the same dataset and we've been actively opening emails so that we stay engaged so that we don't actually get suppressed from emails and things like that.

Speaker 3 (00:10:53):
And then we looked at the year end window from the same hundred and 19 organizations. So again, the urine window being November 15th through December 31st, so a 45 day period. And we wanted to understand how do organizations cultivate and solicit and communicate overall with these two different types of donors, an online only donor and a postal donor or a direct mail donor. So before we get into the data, before we get into exactly what we learned, what we observed, I do want to define a few terms, which number one is the two different types of donors. Number one is the postal donor. And number two is the online donor. So these are, you'll hear these terms and you'll see some of these badges throughout the session today, the postal donor versus the online donor, uh, number two is, is the different types of communication channels. Now I'll share a little bit of what we saw related to the phone and SMS in a second, but you're going to see these different categories throughout today.

Speaker 3 (00:11:50):
Mail. So people that are sending direct mail, we got a from them email, which is fairly self-explanatory mail and email. So organizations that are sending both of these at the same time to the same donors, and then this fourth category, which I wish we didn't have to have, but the category of none, which is organizations choosing to send nothing, either to both donors or to one type of donor, but organizations that are basically opting out. So you'll see this as a category as well. And then finally, we broke these down again into two types of communication, solicitations and cultivation. Solicitation is essentially any message that's asking for donation. Cultivation is essentially everything else, something that doesn't have a direct donation ask tied to it, and ideally is working to build a relationship with the donor. So these are some terms you're going to see throughout.

Speaker 3 (00:12:38):
You might see some of these badges throughout just so you kind of have your eyes out looking for these different things to kind of latch on throughout the session today. Uh, but the types of nonprofits that are represented in the data, uh, is fairly consistent. We have a good representation from kind of each major category, a little bit skewed towards faith-based. Cause there are quite a lot of faith-based nonprofit organizations, but trying to take, uh, a fair sample size of the nonprofit sector, this nonprofit landscape to get a good idea of what are all these different types of organizations doing. Uh, and then beyond that, we're trying to understand even at some different levels of, of resourcing different levels of revenue, what are organizations doing? And what's interesting throughout different types of studies, even beyond just multi-channel is, is you might tend to think that, oh, if you have bigger budgets, if you're a hundred million dollar organization, you must be incredibly sophisticated, but that's not always the case.

Speaker 3 (00:13:29):
Sometimes, you know, smaller to midsize organizations actually have really sophisticated online fundraising and communications programs because you can actually move faster. And sometimes with a larger organization, maybe there's more, more money, but there's a lot more red tape. So you see a lot of variants in there as well, but this is just sort of a snapshot of the organizations that are in this study. And in this dataset through this year end window, we received 1400 messages, 1,415 messages. Now these could be emails or mail. And what we found was that we received 1,193 emails to our email inbox split across the online and the postal donor. We saw 261 pieces of direct mail come into, uh, our mailbox. Again, split across the two different types of donors. We received a whopping one phone call, one voicemail, and you ready? Zero text messages, zero text messages, which is it.

Speaker 3 (00:14:25):
I want to stop here for a moment because I think this is interesting. There's so much research and so much conversation in the nonprofit and fundraising space today around how to use phone, to cultivate a biscuit, a new donor, and, and the, the likelihood of someone giving again, or maybe giving more, if they get a follow-up phone call from you. There's lots of conversation around that, but only one of these hundred and 19 organizations sent a voicemail. I made a phone call and then nobody sent a text message. If you're going to go out to a conference or a nonprofit conference, whether it's in-person or virtual, you're going to see a lot of different tech providers that are promoting like SMS marketing and, and text to give. And, and it's, it's been a conversation in our space for a long time, but no, one's really doing it.

Speaker 3 (00:15:08):
Apparently. That's what, yeah. The data sets at least during this year end windows. So I think that's interesting. So throughout the rest of the session, we're really going to dial in, okay. Email and direct mail with a primary reason, being that that's what we have data from. We don't really have data from the voicemails and text messages cause no one's really using them. So keep finding like, um, one a if you will, is maybe you should figure out how to use it voicemail and text message. That's a conversation for another day, but let's break down the, the messages we did receive and look at which type of donor they, we came into, as you might expect. The online donor received quite a lot of emails, especially in comparison to the postal donor. So we received 1,168 emails to the online donor persona and 118 compared to the postal donor, only 134 emails.

Speaker 3 (00:15:57):
So some organizations are using email with their postal donors and 140 pieces of mail sent to the post-it Sedona. So you just see kind of top level, here's the comparison kind of interesting. And then we can break this down into solicitations versus cultivation. You see the green bar is solicitation. So these are emails and direct mail appeals that are asking for money directly. And then cultivation is those that are just trying to sort of build a relationship or maybe prime someone for an ask. That's going to come later. The ratios we'll get into this in a little bit as well, but the ratios here are comparable, but it looks a lot more extreme as the online donor. There's quite a lot of solicitations compared to the amount of cultivation with the postal zone. Again, the ratio is comparable. It's just not quite as extreme because there's not as much volume of communication, but right off the top, we see that solicitation messages actually accounted for 73% of all the messages I received during the year end period, which in some ways makes sense because it's urgency time of year.

Speaker 3 (00:17:00):
We're trying to make sure we get these donations and donations in before the deadline. So there's gotta be a lot of solicitations, but we'll dive in, in a few moments into, you know, what's really the right balance or what do we observe as the balance? And maybe what's, what's a better, so we'll get there as we compare to them two different studies again, the year end window versus the year original study, the year end window, the year, right study. So I have more than half as many emails as you original study, which is noteworthy because of the time periods are, are very different. The original study, we were looking at communication over a four month span for the year end study were only looking at a 45 day window. So if we do a little bit of math, we can calculate, well, how many messages did we receive per day?

Speaker 3 (00:17:42):
And I think that's maybe more interesting. So this original, like normal time of year, this four month window outside of your, we received 18 pieces of communication every day. But during year end we received 31, which we like to look at conversion rates and like present lift and percent decrease. So in this case, this is a 72% increase in emails being sent. And I think you and I both know this kind of anecdotally, as we look at our own inbox is during the month of December, primarily, you're not just getting lots of communication from nonprofits, but you're also getting lots of communications from everybody else, from Nike, from Amazon, from all these different companies, trying to get you to buy a gift for someone through their company, or maybe just buy yourself a present during the year during the holiday season, there's so much, uh, kind of attention grabbing going on to the inbox, both from non-profits and for-profits during the season.

Speaker 3 (00:18:37):
And we see this in the data. It's a very cluttered inbox during this time, this time of year. But I want to ask this question was the communication and the experience from these different types of donors was it was the communication really different from a normal period, even outside of just the volume? Are we keeping the same strategies and just for ratcheting it up, or is there a difference in strategy between these two different types of donors? So if we look specifically at the postal donor, one interesting insight that jumped out right away was that there were 24 more organizations who did not communicate with the postal donor during the year end season. So you can see this chart in front of you. The blue bar being bar is this year end window. And what we saw was this pretty, pretty big jump in the organization's choosing to just not communicate at all with their postal donors.

Speaker 3 (00:19:34):
It's not like they're just choosing one channel over the other, they're not communicating at all. So it's kind of interesting that there's a lot of organizations choosing to, to more or less ignore some of their active donors during the year during one of the most critical giving seasons. So if this is you, you may want to take a look at that. You may want to actually question, are we actually communicating number one with our active donors during this critical season. And as we look more into multi-channel and how many organizations are using multi-channel communication, we saw a slight decrease in the total number of organizations sending both mail and email to the postal donor. So a slight, slight decrease there. If we look at the online donor, we see some similar trends, maybe not as extreme with this, with the people that are opting out of communication, but there were 12 more organizations that chose not to communicate with the online donor during the year end season.

Speaker 3 (00:20:28):
Again, we see this kind of jump. So an increase in those that are sort of opting out of keeping in touch. They're not, it's not just solicitations, but also cultivation. There's no communication happening with these donors during the year end season. And we see an even more significant decline in the amount of organizations choosing to use multi-channel strategies to communicate with an online donor. So a fairly decent amount of organizations that were using mail and email to communicate with an online donor. And now that's, that's dropped off quite a bit during the year-end season. And when I look at that type of a data insight, my gut would tell me, oh, because they're probably just using more email to communicate with their online donor you're, they're using another online channel to communicate with their online donor and sort of foregoing direct mail. That's also not what the data says.

Speaker 3 (00:21:16):
Here's, here's what it says. There was a significant jump in the amount of organizations using only direct mail to communicate with the online donor, which was actually a surprise to me. So these are just some interesting data points. And what I can't tell you is as if these are intentional strategies or if just something is broken or some something is, is missing. So this might be something to go start to, to ask around your organization, around your staff, around your team. Number one, are we actually communicating? Is there something maybe broken in our processes where we need to sort of close a hole or close a gap in order to just communicate with donors during this critical season? One of the most interesting things to me that jumped out from all of this data is this. We actually received 233 pieces of direct mail from 132 organizations that we didn't donate to.

Speaker 3 (00:22:10):
Let me highlight this again. So you don't miss this. There are 132 organizations that sent us mail that we were not expecting to hear from. So we did not go out and donate to these organizations. We were not trying to track their communication. We donated to a hundred, tried to donate to 119 nonprofits. We were successful at 103. Mm. And then 132 other ones sent us the male, which actually accounted for 44% of the mail that we received. Now, I'm not here to dog on this type of a strategy because there can actually be something effective here for donor acquisition. Lots of, lots of fundraisers and organizations will choose to either buy or rent a donor mailing list as a way to try to acquire new donors for their organization, especially during a time of year where there's such high urgency to give, and this can be an effective tool, but what's, I think most notable for you is this, that as we dove in and looked at the postal donors specifically, the postal donor only received 50, or my mail from 58 organizations out of the hundred and three that we were successful to donate to.

Speaker 3 (00:23:15):
So that's basically a 56% conversion rate. If you go receive 58 organizations communication out of the 103 that they had actively donated to throughout the year. And then what's interesting is that they received the received mail from 90 organizations that they did not donate to. So if we kind of put these numbers together, we can deduce that during this season, postal donors are actually more likely to receive direct mail and hear from organizations that they don't know, or at least don't actively support than they are to hear maybe from you, from the organizations that they have supported during the year. So if, if, if this is the experience of your donor, how much are we letting them down? They've expressed interest in this because they've given to you, they're actively supporting you. And then there's so much other competition basically coming into their mailbox, but you're not involved in it.

Speaker 3 (00:24:08):
You're not part of it. So if we expect to actually see donations from our existing donors, if we want to be good stewards of our donors, we actually need to come to the table during this year and season and communicate and communicate effectively. Otherwise there's a lot of other organizations that are going to do that instead. So we have to come to the table and communicate effectively. Now on the flip side, if we look at email, we received 10 emails from one organization that we did not donate to. And so what this says to me is that there's actually an opportunity here where this type of a strategy of like buying or renting a mailing list is, is, is it can be effective on the postal mail side of things, but this is can also be effective on the email side of things. You can go out and you can buy, or you can rent a, an email list of potential donors.

Speaker 3 (00:24:55):
And so there's opportunity here that maybe we're missing because only one organization took advantage of this type of a tactic. So maybe consider this in your plans this year. Is there a way you can buy or purchase a list to run some sort of a donor prospecting campaign through online channels, but overall, how did each persona compare a lot of different areas we could go and data we could dive into, but overall, it's look at a few interesting insights from the data between these two personas. Number one, we're asking this question, are organizations just communicating with their donors? Overall, what we saw was that 43% of organization just chose not to communicate with their postal donors. That's almost half, which is pretty alarming that there's this many organizations not communicating with someone who has given to you through the mail, this something to consider number two.

Speaker 3 (00:25:46):
And we also saw that 7.5% of organizations communicated with postal donors via online channels. So this is awesome for the 7.5% of non-profits. They're choosing to use an online channel to cultivate an office online donor. And hopefully they're actually using both. So this is an interesting insight, but then there's a whole, the majority of organizations are not actually using this kind of multi-channel approach with postal donors. So there's probably an opportunity for you here to use online channels, to cultivate a postal donor. And then number three 35% of organizations sent messages to both types of donors, which kind of leads us to key finding number one, which is really the inverse here that 65% of organizations are not communicating with their online and offline donors and multiple channels. So if you take away one thing from any of this data from this whole webinar, it should really be this one that we just have to start communicating and actively communicating during such a critical time of the year.

Speaker 3 (00:26:51):
And maybe you're trying to maybe your intention and your strategy is to communicate, but maybe something is broken in terms of getting people onto the mailing list or onto the email list and making sure data syncs up and getting everything integrated into your CRM and sending out all these mailers at the right time. Maybe something's just broken. Maybe it's not intentional, but from the donor's perspective, there's so many organizations that are just, you're choosing not to communicate with me during this critical season. So maybe I'm not going to communicate with you after this. Maybe that's the reception. So consider this key finding as you plan your campaigns, but this really leads us to another critical question, which is why is multichannel even important? The idea of using multi-channel marketing has been around forever. We talk about it all the time and not just we as next after, but we as a fundraising community, how do we use multi-channel to really foster these relationships and doing all these different, cool things with mail and phone calls and online channels and social media and all of this stuff, but why does it matter?

Speaker 3 (00:27:49):
Is it just cool or is it actually meaningful and important? And so, as we look at the different non-profits that we work with and do some analysis of the donors and the lifetime value of those donors, we can start to segment them out into these different donor cohorts, if you will. So we have online online, only donors, offline, only donors, offline, only donors, but they have an email address. And then multi-channel donors. And what we find is that multi-channel donors are actually 210% more valuable than someone who only ever gives to you offline multi-channel donors are 230, 3% more valuable than someone who only ever gives to you online. And they're even that much more valuable than someone who gives to you through the mail, but then you can cultivate through email. So it's interesting, definitely significant value here, but on top of the value, they also retain at a much higher rate.

Speaker 3 (00:28:39):
So multi-channel donors have a 55% higher retention rate than offline, only donors. And they have an 86% higher retention rate than an online, only donor. And this isn't just our data. But from this study from Blackbaud, they found across these different age demographics, you're much more likely to retain into your next year as a donor, if you are a multi channel, uh, multi-channel donor. So multi Jen was clearly important. In fact, if we dive even deeper to look at which one of like the online only donors or the offline only donors is one of them more likely to become multichannel. We actually can found that an online acquire donor is 463% more likely to become a multi-channel donor to your organization than an offline acquired donor. In fact, that might even be as high as 14000% more likely to become a multi-channel donor, which leads us to a couple interesting tactics.

Speaker 3 (00:29:34):
And I'm going to call this a completely earth shattering tactic, number one, but it might not actually be that earth-shattering try mailing your online donors. I don't know if this just blew someone's mind that you can do this, but this it's actually a fairly, fairly simple idea, fairly simple tactic. You can try mailing your online donors. And if you do that, you can start to cultivate them and maybe they start to give to you through the mail as well, and they can become a multi-channel donor and that much more valuable to you. And what we see in the data is actually there's a fair amount of organizations of those that are sending mail that are actually sending to both personas. So that's great. Granted, the overall volume is kind of low, but for those that are choosing to engage with these donors, they're sending a decent amount of mail to both.

Speaker 3 (00:30:17):
So we see this over time. You can see sort of the, the drip of postal mail campaigns over the year-end season. And they were pretty much in stepped between the online donor and the postal donor throughout the full year end season. There's only this one little window where they started to break away. There's actually more mail coming into the online donor box than to the offline donor box. But this is something you can try if you're not already doing it, it's actually just send mail to your online donor earth. Shattering tactic. Number two is sort of just the inverse. Try emailing your postal donors. This one might be more complicated. This one might be a little trickier if you don't actually have the email addresses of your postal donors, that becomes fairly difficult. If you're not trying to capture that email address through your direct mail campaigns who maybe you don't have a means to do this.

Speaker 3 (00:31:05):
But in this case, when we mailed in our gift, each one of these organizations also had our email address. We gave them our email address as well. And as we monitor the communication, even those organizations that had our email address, they're still not really choosing to send email to the postal donor, which is interesting. So you see a pretty significant disparity between emails going to the online donor. That's the blue line and emails going to the post donor. That's the green line. So pretty drastic difference over the year end period of those organizations using email for an offline donor. So try sending email to your postal, don't time it then begs this question of when are organizations actually focusing their communication? When are they sending and for us, as we, as we think about when to actually send these communications and send these messages, we end up always asking this question of, you know, which is more important giving Tuesday or December 31st.

Speaker 3 (00:32:07):
What's the priority of these two days. And then when our organization is actually sending our organization's prioritizing one over the other, and this always leads us back to the data, into the question of how much revenue comes in on these days. And as we look at giving from 2020, again, through the organizations that we're, we're tracking as our clients and organizations we work with, here's what we found online. Year-end revenue specifically, and Tuesday represented 4.6% of revenue coming in online during the year end season in 2020, December 31st. However, so the last day of the year represented 16.5% of online year-end revenue. And if you expand that to the entire last week of the year 38.9% of all online near end revenue came in during this last week. And again, we like to look at percent lifts and percent decreases in conversion rates. So let's look at this December 31st is 253% more valuable than giving Tuesday in terms of total revenue.

Speaker 3 (00:33:09):
And then focusing on that entire last week, the last week of the year, it brought in 734% more revenue than giving Tuesday. And I'm not here to dog on giving Tuesday there's value in giving Tuesday. In fact, there's some data to suggest that it might be a better day in terms of trying to acquire new donors is sometimes there's more opportunity, especially with a significant social media reach to actually reach new people. But as far as overall revenue is concerned, there's really no comparison here. And so then when we look at the data of what messages we received, both mail and email, we see some interesting, interesting things stand out again. We saw 74 organizations that chose not to send anything during either week, either the whole week of giving Tuesday or the whole last week of the year. This is not, not great. There are 103 organizations that we were successfully able to donate to.

Speaker 3 (00:34:04):
So 74 opted out, that's basically three out of four organizations are not sending during these two critical giving weeks during the year end season, but let's break this down even further. So 80% of organizations, uh, sent nothing to postal donors during either week 40% sent nothing to online donors during either week. So if you're the online donor, you're more likely to get some communication, but that's still a significant amount that are just opting out. If we flip to the other side, how many organizations communicated during both weeks? Well, the online donor is, is getting probably a better experience. 59% of organizations communicating with the online donor during giving Tuesday and the last week of the year, but only 10% communicated with postal donors. So postal donors are really not being communicated with during some of these critical giving weeks, but let's look at giving Tuesday week versus the last week because of those organizations choosing one or the other.

Speaker 3 (00:34:59):
It's really pretty evenly split. There's some disparities, but it's pretty evenly split. These weeks appear to have equal priority for most organizations, but they shouldn't have equal priorities. We just looked at this at this data. These weeks should not have equal priority for most organizations because there's so much more revenue at stake during that last week of the year. So we need to make sure we get these two, uh, giving days and giving weeks placed in the right priority in our communications and in our strategy. And in our time and efforts, as we look at the different types of communication coming in over the span of the season, we see some, some big peaks, right at giving Tuesday and December 31st, the green line being solicitations. Most of the stations are coming in during those two weeks and we see cultivation starting to drop off over time.

Speaker 3 (00:35:50):
But again, that's about the same amount of solicitations we received on both of these days. So key finding number two that I want you to keep in mind and, and take away from today is that there was very little difference between the number of organizations soliciting during giving Tuesday versus the last week of the year. So to say it one more time, we have to get these weeks in the right priority. If there's so much more revenue at stake during the week of December of December 31st, the last week of the year, we need to make sure that we put first our time and our efforts and our energy and our money and our finances, our investment into that last week of the year before we focus on giving Tuesday, if you can do both, that's awesome. But if you're going to pick one, I would pick the last week of the year.

Speaker 3 (00:36:35):
All right. That's key finding number two, moving on, let's look at the total volume of these different communications that are coming in. And some of the different types of messaging. When we look at the volume of mail by donor, this is what this chart for us. And this piece of data is pretty interesting for us. We had some conversations around it and it's a bit confusing for us too. So I might, I'm going to ask you for your insights here in just a moment, but when we look at the online donor versus the postal donor, they received roughly the same amount of mail from different organizations. Now, I would expect that the postal donor would actually re if it's going to air one way or the other, I would expect the postal donor to receive more mail, but that's not what happened. We actually saw a slight increase in mail coming to the online donor.

Speaker 3 (00:37:19):
So that's, it's interesting. But then when we look at the number of organizations that are mailing, we see again, the same type of thing where it's about the same, but it's actually a little bit more organizations that are choosing to send mail to the online donor. And so, again, the difference isn't that much, but it did raise some questions for us. As we're looking at some of this data as to why would this be, why would an organization choose to send more mail to the online donor than the offline donor? In fact, we had eight organizations that sent postal mail to the online donor only. So is this an intentional strategy or is maybe there may be something broken or is there an issue? So if this is you, maybe if this is your tactic or strategy, if you're choosing to send more mail to an online donor versus a postal donor, I'm curious.

Speaker 3 (00:38:09):
Just, just why, so you can think about that. You can feel free to drop it in the chat. If you have thoughts, cause we're, we're open to suggestions and ideas, uh, to kind of help us gain some more insights into this data. So what do you think, why would an organization choose to only mail their online donors? Feel free to drop that into the chat. We're going to keep moving because there's lots of data to get through, but if you have some thoughts there, I'd love to hear them moving on to the volume of email. Seven times more organizations actually send email to the online donor compared to the postal donor, which is understandable. It may be is the, the, the, uh, easily understood expectation that more organizations are going to choose to send an email to the online donor. They're both online communication channels.

Speaker 3 (00:38:54):
The online donor actually received almost nine times the number of emails that the postal donor received, which again is expected. There's more organizations sending emails to online donors, thus the increase in volume. That makes sense. But then let's look at what types of communication were being sent. Was it a solicitation? It was a cultivation because we see a slight difference between these two different donor experiences. If I'm an online donor, I'm actually a little bit more likely to just be solicited more often. And because the volume of communication is even higher, that probably feels even more extreme. So 70% of communication coming in to the online donor was asking for money and only 30% was cultivating content for the postal donor. The ratio was a little bit more balanced, 60% solicitations versus 40% cultivation, but it probably feels less extreme in terms of how many solicitations you're getting, because the volume overall is significantly lower.

Speaker 3 (00:39:52):
But this then begs the question of like, what's, what's right, what's the right amount of solicitation versus cultivation. How do we get the right ratio? And I'm not here to say that we have it all figured out, but I asked this question as we were going through the data, what is sort of the right ratio? And I looked back at our year end training course because we have a certification course on year-end fundraising. And we, we recommend a specific timeline. And this timeline is based off of strategies that we use with different organizations we've worked with that are continuing to grow their year-end revenue year after year after year. And so, as I ran these different emails, suggestions through our lens of what's a solicitation, what's a cultivation and basically came out to 60 40. So again, this is not necessarily like the golden ratio that's going to magically transform your year end forever.

Speaker 3 (00:40:38):
But this is a typical strategy that we're using to try to grow, to try and grow revenue during the year end season. Granted, it's a more complicated than just appeals and just cultivation there's nuance in there, but it's maybe a good rule of thumb to consider for your own communication. But as we dove even a little bit deeper to look at not just the volume of communication, but what organizations are choosing to send cultivation. Some interesting things came up. 60% of organizations sent cultivation to online donors, 20% sent cultivation to postal donors. The inverse of these metrics is what's most interesting to me, cause that means 40% chose not to cultivate their online donor and 80% chose not to cultivate their postal donor. So many organizations are just opting out altogether of cultivation during the year end season, which is key finding number three, most organizations, many organizations aren't cultivating their donors during year end that you may wonder, is this, is it even important?

Speaker 3 (00:41:39):
Do we need to be cultivating donors during year end? It's a higher urgency season. We're just trying to get the donation. Why do we need to send some cultivation? Can't we be doing that the rest of the year? Well, you should be doing that the rest of the year, but cultivation is still critical. Why is it important? Because cultivation can affect how much your donors give. Here's an interesting experiment. This organization had some declining email engagement metrics and email engagement rates, and they wanted to figure out, is there a way that we can increase engagement and then ultimately affect revenue as a result? And so what they did was they split their email file in half. And basically the first half received the same old communication that they had been sending the same track, the same time periods of same volume, but version B the other half of the email file started to receive a weekly cultivation email.

Speaker 3 (00:42:33):
This email was not asking for a donation, not even like a soft ask. It wasn't an appeal. It was an email sent from a real human being. You can see it on your screen. Looks like it's sent from a real human being, not like a really bold marketing email with images and flashing things just looks like it was sent out of Gmail or outlook or something like that. And it links to an article or a piece of content that's free. You don't have to give a donation to get that content. It's just cultivation. And it's drawing people in to have a deeper understanding of the cause and their impact on the cause through their gift. And by sending this weekly drip of cultivation analyzing this over a six month period, what they found was that led to a 42% increase of revenue. So the people receiving this email were more likely to give more generosity was increased as a result of an increase in cultivation.

Speaker 3 (00:43:26):
So this can be critical for you, for your donors, for your organization, even during the year end period. And what did the experience look like specifically for the online donor in terms of what types of communication, what channels of communication? Here's what we found as an online donor. Here's what we experienced cultivation overall via email and mail was, was fairly low. We looked at those ratios cultivation through the mail was almost non-existent an email was on a steady decline over the course of the year end period, email cultivation specifically again, mail was almost non-existent. If we overlay solicitations, we can see sort of the inverse trend, which is that email solicitations that are on the up and up throughout the whole season, which makes sense. We're getting closer to the deadline. We need more direct appeals and then solicitation through the mail. You can see it was fairly flat and pretty consistent throughout email had two spikes, again, one on giving Tuesday one on December 31st and then saw a steady increase over the rest of the weeks.

Speaker 3 (00:44:30):
If I'm the postal donor, what did my experience look like? I look at a little bit different cultivation. Email is still the same kind of downward trend, less and less over time solicitation email, same kind of upward trend with some of these same sort of spikes, just at a lower volume, because again, fewer people were sending emails to the postal donor, but the postal donor mirror is basically the same experience of the online donor. From the email side of things. The mail is a little bit different and here's what we see. Basically these mailers. One thing I want to call out is that these mailers related to giving Tuesday or December 31st actually came in the week before, uh, those key deadlines and those key giving days, which makes sense. We're trying to get those mailers in, in time, especially during 2020, when there's a lot of mail delays and things like that, trying to make sure that we don't miss the day and we don't send a giving Tuesday mailer and it comes in the week after that wouldn't be good.

Speaker 3 (00:45:25):
Or the December 31st mailer coming in the first week of January. That wouldn't be good. So this is coming in the week before to make sure they get there in time. Well, let's take a deeper look because I think it's helpful to see how certain specific organizations crafted their communication and see what insights we can draw from it. We had a four organization, 74% of organizations send three or fewer unique messages. So these could be mailers. They could be emails. These are unique messages being sent to the donor. So three out of four send three or fewer unique communications, the median here. So the media and organization sent for communications. Again, this could be mail or like in the mail. This could be email, but basically for communication. So maybe this is one piece of communication every week of December, something like that. But on the extreme end, the highest volume sent to a single persona.

Speaker 3 (00:46:18):
One person received 54 unique messages from one organization. Don't really need to say any more for you to kind of probably feel the weight of them like 54 over a 45 day period. If you do the math on that, that's 1.2 messages per day. So that's basically I'm hearing from this organization every single day throughout the entire year and season, plus at least one extra communication every single week, which is quite a lot, even if it's in a good balance of solicitation to cultivation. If you have even like a dear loved one or a dear friend who sends you an email every single day, you might start to opt out of that opt out of that communication. Maybe it starts to go in a separate folder that you check every once in a while, but that let alone from a nonprofit organization that's that's, um, emailing you or sending you messages.

Speaker 3 (00:47:08):
So the grand winner of, of most communication sent during the year end season in 2020 was actually the Alzheimer's association. And I'm not here to really judge specifically the strategy or the communication, but rather to look at the data and look at the insights and see what can we learn from it? As we observe their strategy and their tactics from the donor experience overall, they sent 57 total communications, 95% of that was sent to the online donor and 88% of that communication was a solicitation. So it's not quite in that like 60, 40 balance of solicitations cultivation. That's pretty high on the high end of asking for money. Again, as we break this down, across each type of donor, we see quite a lot of communication for the online donor, but the postal donor experience is very different. They both received three mailers. The postal donor received no email.

Speaker 3 (00:48:02):
On the other hand, the online donor received 51 emails. So that's quite a lot. 89% of communication was sent via email to the online donor. And if we map this communication over time, you can see a comparable trend too, to the overall trend, which is that communication is going up over the course of the year end season. You see a spike during giving Tuesday, you see a smaller spike, but still a spike during the last week of the year. And again, I'm not here to be too judgmental of the specific strategy because I don't know their data. I don't know what their results were, but for you, as you're considering your plans and your campaign, I would again, make sure that we get these two days giving Tuesday in the last week of the year in the right priority. Now, if you have a major social media reach and, and maybe they do, maybe Alzheimer's association does, and they see lots of revenue coming in from giving Tuesday because of their specific situation, maybe that's different, but for you, as we're looking at the revenue coming in during these two weeks, make sure we get those in the right priority.

Speaker 3 (00:49:01):
But what's, I think most interesting to look at here is the volume of email compared to the amount of email, those actually making it to the primary inbox. What we saw was that 41% of the email that was coming in was actually being marked as spam is actually going to the spam folder. Two out of five emails from Alzheimer's dot org. We're going to spam during year end. If we zoom out and we look at these spam rates over a larger period of time, we can see that it was actually the spam rates were heightened during the year end season, where they're sending even more. If we zoom in just on year end spam ratings spike during this 45 day period, because there's so much mail being sent granted, there's probably room for improvement on some of the spam rates even later, but it's definitely higher during the year-end season.

Speaker 3 (00:49:50):
So what I want you to consider here is a few things. Number one, are you sending enough cultivation? Even if you're sending every single day, I'm not sure if you are or not like Alzheimer's is, but are you sending enough cultivation? Are you cultivating your donors enough? Are you just asking them for money every single day we'd need to be building a relationship. We've looked at that experiment that shows the impact of that. Number two, are you prioritizing the right giving days, September 31st versus giving Tuesday, and then three, are you sending emails that people want to open or is it all solicitations that all end up getting kind of marked as spam because that can hurt you over time. If you're continually sending more and more and more and more messages to try to try to break through the spam filter, you might actually be harming your sender reputation.

Speaker 3 (00:50:38):
If we send more email that people want to engage with, I E cultivation, we're actually going to start to improve. Obviously our donor relationships, we're also going to improve our sender reputation so we can actually get in contact with our donors more frequently and actually make it to that primary inbox. So just a few things to consider from that organization's experience. But another interesting thing that we found in the data was that there were two organizations that treated both donors exactly the same, which I think is pretty difficult to do so it's it's noteworthy, but they treated both donors exactly the same. And they sent stuff. It wasn't like they treat them the same cause they sent nothing. They actually sent communication. And so one of these I want to highlight is hearing health foundation. Let's take a look at their campaign and their strategy.

Speaker 3 (00:51:24):
Overall, there was a four to one ratio of solicitations versus cultivations for both donors. They each got 16 solicitations. They each got four cultivations for each type of donor and noteworthy that both donors receive multi-channel communications. So they're cultivating a little bit sending a lot of solicitations, but they're doing so across multiple channels. Uh, you see 18 emails coming into both donors. We see two mailers coming into both donors. And then as we map this over time, you can kind of see the trends overall with the exception of this very first week, you see this upward trend of more frequent communication over time. The giving Tuesday campaign actually kicked off the week before giving Tuesday. So priming people for the giving Tuesday ask that's coming up in a few days. If we zoom in on one of these emails that was sent, it said this because the research, uh, here at HHF is getting, uh, is so urgent.

Speaker 3 (00:52:18):
We're getting an early start to giving Tuesday effective. Now every dollar you donate will be matched by generous benefactors. So the using a matching challenge, uh, as an opportunity to try to acquire donations on giving Tuesday, we see this to be an effective strategy. As we put this type of, of, of matching challenge to the test version, a had no matching gift version B had a triple match. And in this case led to an 88% increase in donations. So this can be an effective strategy, even at giving Tuesday and beyond that, making sure that people are abundantly aware of your matching challenge is critical as well. Because in both versions of this donation page, they both have a double match, but in version B, it's got this high contrast sticky bar calling out the matching challenge. A generous donor will match your donation today up to $645,000.

Speaker 3 (00:53:06):
This led to a 44% increase in donations. So you can use this type of match, both on giving Tuesday at the end of the year, to try to get more people to give to you. Now, now, as we got towards the end of the season, here's what we saw from their communication. They use direct mail to reinforce the deadline and the urgency around their final appeal. So we received this postcard from them on the 21st of December, it says your year-end donation will be doubled so that science doesn't stop. The deadline is Thursday, December 31st. They sent this basically the week before the last week of the year. They're priming us for this final push. And then we received this email on the 28th, which is a high urgency appeal to get ready for this last deadline there, they're making a direct appeal asking us to donate. And this type of priming through the mail can be a really effective strategy, uh, in a experiment from a few years ago, we saw this play out even through a Thanksgiving postcard.

Speaker 3 (00:54:04):
So half the donor file received just normal communications, but then half the donor file received a special personalized postcard and Thanksgiving with a special Thanksgiving message. And there was a link text to go to a page to watch a video from the president of this organization. You can see the Thanksgiving message and there was no direct donation asks it wasn't a hard donation. So there was like a soft one after the video, but the primary goal of this mailer was not to get a donation. It was to cultivate and that's actually led over the course of the season to a 204% increase in the likelihood of someone actually giving. So those that received this postcard were 200, 4% more likely to give during year end. So it can be a very effective multichannel strategy. And then again, what this did, was it primed for this final donation?

Speaker 3 (00:54:50):
Push urgency was super high on the last day of the year. In fact, they're called the action button said donate before 11:59 PM Eastern done right on the call to action button. And we see this type of countdown or high urgency in an email campaign be incredibly effective version a versus version B. They're the same email except version B uses a dynamic countdown clock in the email to increase the sense of urgency. And it led to a 63% increase in donor conversion. So some interesting tactics to take away from the hearing health foundation. Now, overall, if we step back, we look at this overall, I just want to remind you of some of these key findings. What can we take away from this research? Because I think there's some important things to consider. So going back to key finding number one, again, if you take really one thing away, make sure it's this, that you, you actually engaged during year, end this year with your donors, both postal donors and online donors because 65% of organizations, whether they intended to or not.

Speaker 3 (00:55:46):
The donor experience was at 65% of organizations chose not to communicate through multiple channels. So we have to come to the day will to communicate with our donors and hopefully do so in a multichannel fashion. Number two, we have to get giving Tuesday versus December 31st in the right priority. Understanding that last week theater represents so much more potential for revenue. So put your efforts first towards the last week of the year, and then key finding number three, many organizations just aren't sending cultivation. And we've seen several examples today of the importance of cultivation to lead to greater generosity. So consider if you don't normally send cultivation or maybe you send a little bit, can you just add one more email or maybe one more mailer that just cultivates and builds the relationship? Not another appeal don't even ask for a donation and a PS, but consider how you can use content and human relationships to actually cultivate your donor during this season.

Speaker 3 (00:56:44):
What should you do next? Because research for the sake of research is, is of some value, but if we're not actually able to implement the learnings and ideas, then I don't think it's quite as fruitful as what it could be. So what I would encourage you to do next, I would love for you to join our year-end fundraising workshop. We have this available as an on-demand course, but we're also going through this course in a live workshop at NIO summit on September 21st, we'll be going through this whole email timeline, looking at all the different emails you can send during the year end season, again, hitting that like 60, 40 ratio of solicitations to cultivation. So we're going to spend some time going through this together to equip you to implement an effective online campaign that you can hopefully also support through your offline channels as well.

Speaker 3 (00:57:27):
So again, you can learn more about that. You can sign up for a ticket and you can add the workshop on@nirsummit.com, save a few bucks, uh, when you get your ticket before the end of the day tomorrow. Now I'm going to hand things over to Noah for the next couple of minutes, Noah from virtuous, because virtuous, uh, has sponsored this study. They've allowed this research to come to you, to be for free for you to learn from and to benefit from. So I'm going to throw it to Noah. If Noah, you're there to just share a few words about virtuous, uh, who you are, what you value and why multichannel is so important for you all. No, are you there? I'm

Speaker 4 (00:58:02):
Here. Hey Nathan, it's great to see you. How are you?

Speaker 3 (00:58:05):
I'm doing well. I'm doing, I'm a bit winded at this point, but I'm feeling well.

Speaker 4 (00:58:09):
You, you, you definitely said a lot of words in the last 47 minutes, so I can, I can know that you, you probably are winded, but we're so grateful for our partnership with the next after Institute. Um, and with, uh, Neo and everything that NextAfter is doing, because there's so much alignment with what we advocate for here at virtuous as a technology company, really helping or nonprofit teams grow generosity in these types of insights. We believe in the power of strategy and systems, people, platforms, and processes coming together to actually make that happen. So we're grateful to be able to partner with you all on this type of research. And it's something we've been curious about. We've had a hypothesis around multichannel and the impact that multi-channel has on supporter engagement, donor retention, lifetime giving rates. And so it's, um, something we were grateful to be able to kind of explore with you all.

Speaker 4 (00:59:03):
And it's interesting to us to see the continued gap between what we know is working and how you can have a multi-channel single conversation strategy yet seeing the dissonance between what organizations are actually doing is, is just, there's still this huge gap. And I think the opportunity it provides for those on this call is how do we actually not just socialize the impact of multichannel, but how do we bring it into solutioning? How do we bring this to life? And so we're going to be talking a lot more about this, um, over the coming months and continue to do so, uh, in partnership with you all at NextAfter, but thanks again for the research and excited to kind of roll out the full research and all the things that we're doing around multichannel during Neo next month.

Speaker 3 (00:59:52):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much, Noah. We're grateful for you. We're grateful for our partnership and the, again, the ability to, to bring this, uh, interesting, uh, hopefully interesting to you research to, to all of you today. Uh, if you want a copy of the full study, we are just pedal to the metal, trying to get that thing done. Uh, if you come to Neo summit, you can get a, uh, be the first to get a hard copy of this research study, and then we'll be releasing it digitally after that as well. We are at two o'clock. So if you need to drop off and go that's okay, but if you can stick around for a little bit of Q and a, that would be even better. So it looks like we have a few questions. Uh, Riley's going to come back on and walk us through some of the, uh, the questions that we have Bradley. Welcome back.

Speaker 1 (01:00:35):
Thank you. That was awesome. So thanks for sharing you guys. Um, so first question, actually, super interesting to think about this, but Danny was wondering if when this research was being done, was it taken into account the significant postal delay in last year's giving season?

Speaker 3 (01:00:52):
Yeah, that's a good question. Uh, so what the, what I showed today and what the data is doing is showing the experience of the donor. So we're not trying to go back and understand like, well, when did this actually hit the mail and all of that stuff, we're trying to see what, what did the donor experience, and when did that mail actually arrive? So we're not trying to, I, we're not trying to, you know, do some calculations to figure out like how long were delays and things like that. We're trying to look at it from the experiential side of things. So in that regard, I mean, maybe the answer is no, but that's kind of the perspective we're taking it. It's not so much what's the intention, but, but what's the actual experience of the donor.

Speaker 1 (01:01:30):
That's awesome. Um, and then we have a question from an anonymous attendee here that asks, if you guys have any recommendations on how to capture email addresses from postal, donors and postal addresses from online donors.

Speaker 3 (01:01:44):
That is a great question. And Noah, you can jump in here too, if you have answers. I mean, the first thing that comes to mind for acquiring an email address from a postal donor, uh, is you can actually take those mailing addresses and your info, uh, about your postal donors. You can go to Facebook and you can actually create a customer audience that you can then re target, uh, online through advertising. So that's one, that's one options. Then you can run. Uh, something that we might do is run advertising around a free ebook or, or maybe it's a quiz or it's a petition offer, but some sort of free content offer that you have to give, uh, your address in order to interact with. So we can start to target those people, even through online channels, through these customer audiences, through something like Facebook, and then hopefully acquire an email address that way. So that would be the goal. No. Anything you'd add to that?

Speaker 4 (01:02:33):
Yeah, no, I think, uh, there's a couple of things there's also, you can go out to third party data source sources. It's not always accurate, but you can depend on your donor file, uh, for email addresses. But I think the most organic one is to actually just task and provide a compelling reason, uh, for that. So I remember when, when I was running fundraising at an international relief, nonprofit on every like appeal, like if, when we would send a reply device, it would say like, stay connected to the work around the world, provide your email address because we were sending impact stories via email. And so even though we were mailing that out, we wanted to provide them the opportunity to put that input. And it wasn't give us your email so we can blast you with our year-end campaigns or give us our emails so we can include you in the annual fund, but it was like giving them a compelling reason that aligns with the care for the cause.

Speaker 4 (01:03:20):
Um, we talk a lot about like everything you do should build connection, increased confidence or reinforced care for the cause. And that's really what drives long-term donor connections. And you can do that by asking for different things. You can ask online donors to say, Hey, we mail this special report out every year to all of our supporters. And so as a dedicated partner, we want to be able to do that. Could we get your mail mailing address or same way with email? You said, you can say, Hey, you know, we would love your email address. We actually sent out a postcard campaign where you could have like a postcard that they could send back where we just asked for their email address. So we actually did a mail campaign to acquire email addresses, and that was the sole purpose. And it was kind of this compelling appeal to say, Hey, we're moving into this digital environment. We want to be able to send you up pack, impact stories and keep you closer to the mission and the story that we're doing around the world. And we can do that more efficiently by sending you emails, give us your email and we'll send you an introduction.

Speaker 3 (01:04:17):
Love it. That's awesome. That's awesome. The

Speaker 4 (01:04:20):
Other thing too, I think is interesting is as major gift officers, this goes back to having like a line data is if you have people talking to donors on a regular basis, like they should be asking whether it's your donor care team or your major gift officers. Like if you don't have correct information on file, like, it should be part of the, the like ethos of the organization that we want to capture this information and also capture preferences too. So there may be a lot of ways that you're already interacting with donors, that you can just add that layer so you can capture this information.

Speaker 3 (01:04:51):
Love it. Thank you, Bradley. What else we got?

Speaker 1 (01:04:54):
Um, so we have something from Laura here. She says we have a large group of constituents who are not yet donors. We can identify who are most engaged in our newsletters and regular communication. Do you think it is worth the investment and the investment to send print appeals to a portion of this audience?

Speaker 3 (01:05:13):
Good question. I mean, the real answer is you don't know to try it, so that's something you should start. You should certainly, uh, test, especially. I mean, we often, we look at some of that data about those different cohorts and we saw that there are offline donors who are actually more valuable just because you have the email address. It can cultivate them that way. So sometimes I think we can look at donors through these isolated lenses of like, oh, they're not like, oh, they're an offline donor, but people are more holistic than that. And so just because they're just a newsletter subscriber, they've never donated online doesn't mean they might not donate offline. So that would certainly be something to test and to try out to obviously make sure that you can measure that and tie that back to your channels. And maybe you run an AB test to see what's the likelihood of one of these newsletter subscribers actually giving, if you send them a direct mail appeal and actually tested. So, you know, for sure what's the impact of sending, sending this appeal. Cool.

Speaker 1 (01:06:06):
Um, and then we have a couple of questions here from Melissa and Stephanie to verify kind of some of the data points. So, um, were cultivation eat or was the cultivation mailings in this study? Um, we're thank you. Letters and receipts like that considered into that kind of realm of stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:06:25):
This point in the study, we, uh, uh, that was definitely a category in the first version of the state where we just made these donations. And then now we're looking at the year end season where we haven't just given. So everything that's coming in is basically either a pure cultivation or a solicitation. So there's not like new receipts that are coming in during that year end season. So it wasn't exactly a factor through this, this, this lens, the year end lens of this study. Um, so we really have pure solicitations or we have something that is building the relationship and essentially just isn't asking for money typically, if there's a thank you letter that has a direct appeal in it, we would classify that as a solicitation and not a cultivation because sometimes our, our receipts have that type of followup, uh, secondary asks

Speaker 5 (01:07:07):
In them. Cool. Thank

Speaker 1 (01:07:09):
You for clarifying that. Um, and then Jessica here is asking, are there any text messaging platforms you would recommend? Do you have any additional info on how you would set up a text messaging program? No. You want to jump in on this one?

Speaker 4 (01:07:24):
Well, I'm biased because virtuous has it, uh, embedded into our fundraising responsive fundraising platform. Um, but there are a lot of other tools. Like we have friends over at rally up and a few others that are just focused on SMS. Um, if you're not using the bat, the virtuous platform, but one of the values we see and I, no matter what a donor management or CRM platform you're on, I would actually go ask them first and start there because having that data lay over top of all your other donor data. So you can have that universal view of all the communications enables you not just to have a text messaging strategy, but I think what this multi-channel studies continue to reveal is that you need to have a donor value strategy and use multiple channels to communicate one conversation to those supporters. And that's where you start seeing the impact.

Speaker 4 (01:08:11):
So it's not just adding text message, but it's where should messaging fit into your multi-channel mix, where it makes more sense to use that medium, to communicate with your supporter or reinforce. So it could be, you know, Nate, that I know you all do this sometimes with your webinars where it's like, Hey right before the webinar, like let's text you the link to join the webinar. Like that makes sense. It's not that that's a text messaging strategy. That's, you're using that medium to communicate something to me because it's more contextual relevant in that moment. I know I got a text message after donating to an organization on giving Tuesday where they said, Hey, Noah, I, things are busy around here, but it's Dan. I wanted to say, thank you for your donation and send you this video from our founder. Now that was an automated text message.

Speaker 4 (01:08:57):
But what they wanted to do was kind of convey this, like, Hey, we saw your donation. We noticed you, my name is Dan. I'm a real human. I saw you, Noah. Here's a quick link to a video. And these mobile devices is where we consume video, where we watch stuff. I don't need you to email me that, but I might want you to email me, you know, something else where it's a story or it's an appeal that I can get to. So that's two things. One on the platform question, I would definitely talk to your provider. If you're on a legacy or a traditional platform, I would encourage you to look at your overall fundraising platform, um, and take a look at virtuous. But then from there, if you just need a separate text messaging platform, just make sure that's integrated with the rest of your communication strategy.

Speaker 3 (01:09:39):
Love it. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for sharing that.

Speaker 4 (01:09:42):
I actually add one more thing, sorry. I think this is another thing that gets mixed up too is, and I think it's, it's a challenge we're trying to figure out. And I would love feedback from you. All is like a lot of organizations are actually oriented around channel where it's like, oh, there's the digital person over here. And there's the direct mail guy over here. Or maybe even outsource direct mail. And then you're like, oh, we should add SMS or social or advertising or phone calls. The challenge with that orientation where, Hey, we have multiple people running different channels is that you're not really holistically leveraging all the channels in a unified way to cultivate the relationship with the donor. And so when people ask the questions, which they typically do, which is like, well, do people really want text messages? How many emails is too many?

Speaker 4 (01:10:27):
I don't want to bother my donors with phone calls. We're actually embedding our own beliefs into what we think donors are doing. And also that, like, we actually, aren't looking at it as a holistic communication strategy. And so I would just encourage organizations thinking about multi-channel to question their own structure and say like, how do we even get the right, like break down the right silos from a people standpoint and get the right people collaborating to be able to do multi-channel well, cause I think that's why people don't do multi-channel well is because there's not the internal collaboration from a people standpoint and the data is disoriented or disconnected. And if we can solve those two things, collaboration, and then integration of data, I think organizations are going to be able to be more multichannel focus and ultimately responsive.

Speaker 3 (01:11:16):
Cool. Yeah, that's a great, that's a great point. And even looking at like solicitations versus cultivation, as we try to tease those things out, sometimes like the solicitation stuff lives with the fundraising department and what we would classify as cultivation, you know, as a donor might live with a totally different apartment and be in the marketing world and maybe those two people don't ever really talk and they have different goals as opposed to what you're saying, which is like looking at it from the holistic view, how does all of this community can communication actually shape and mold a relationship with someone? So those silos can easily break that experience now.

Speaker 4 (01:11:49):
Yeah. It's also how you might be getting 54 communications from one organization because there's three or four teams that are only sending 15 or 20 and it just happens that they each see you as their donor and the organization and, you know, ALS or like the Alzheimer's association is massive so that the problem is amplified, but they are probably like, we did a good job. We sent 15 this, this year and 54 from the donor's perspective. Cause it's one brand, it's one organization. They don't care. You're in a tick internal structure. They experience you as one organization. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:12:23):
That's a good word. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (01:12:25):
And then, um, I don't know if we'll have the direct answer to this question, but maybe we can chat about it more broadly. Um, Holly was asking, did you receive any direct mail pieces with a QR code linking to a donation form or other online content?

Speaker 3 (01:12:39):
Yeah, I don't actually know the answer to that, to that question specifically. I don't know which ones had QR, has anyone had QRS? Um, yeah. Noah, what's your perspective on that? Putting a QR code in a mailer? Good thing. Bad thing. Something you should try.

Speaker 4 (01:12:54):
Yeah, I know. I can't speak to the tactics, uh, alone. I do think there again, it goes back to an integrated mail digital strategy because a lot of reasons why a direct mail program wouldn't have a QR code or wouldn't even try that, or even put a URL to say, Hey, go donate at X, Y, and Z slash multi-channel or whatever, you know, save the pets is because they want to get credit for it. You know, so they don't want to promote digital giving because they're being measured on the value of their program. And then we're budgeting and resourcing accordingly based on the value of the channel in a direct correlation way where I know what we found was we saw just, and this is a direct mail, the direct mail comparison, but when we would send direct mail packages, if we just considered the value of that direct mail package, we would get one kind of return our investment number.

Speaker 4 (01:13:49):
But if we would layer in the white mail, we received back from individuals that also received the direct mail piece. I would be completely different because we sent them a mail package with a reply device. That's how we're tracking it, but they might just like write a check for it in an envelope and send it off. They might go to their bank and have a mailed check sent to you from Y and Z bank. And that's not necessarily getting credited back to that campaign. It's saving with digital. And so what we started doing, and this was even seven years ago and it was like pioneer land at that point is just being able to say, okay, we're sending a communication to this segment. Yes. There's a direct mail piece. Yes. There's emails. Yeah. We might have white male come back or mail bank checks. We're going to assume for a period of time that donations generated are coming from that campaign.

Speaker 4 (01:14:40):
And then we can break it down by sources, but we could say, oh, direct mail, reply pieces, online giving forms, email, email donations. Cause we know they clicked through and donated versus coming direct and then white male solicitations or even phone call donations. Like what is the universe of that campaign? And then evaluating the effectiveness because I think we cut ourselves too short when we consider channel specific or device specific response rates. And I think that's why a lot of people cut their direct mail programs and those that haven't are the ones raising the most money.

Speaker 3 (01:15:12):
Yeah. That makes total sense. Yeah. And again, just going back to this idea of like, we may have the best of intentions with some of the, with, with these channels and with these campaigns and, and even with our analytics, but then when you look at it from the donor experience, it might feel completely different because they don't look at it on a channel by channel, by channel, by channel basis and things like that. They, they understand a holistic relationship. So I love that. That's absolutely cool. Well, I think, uh, I think that about wraps it up. We're at two 16, we're out of questions. So Noah, thank you so much for joining questions and sharing more. Thank you all for tuning in and listening in today. We're going to have more info about this report soon. Uh, again, if you come to Neo summit, which we'd love for you to do, uh, you can get a hard copy of this report. And then after that, we'll release it digitally as well. I see Laura and the chat is coming and it's coming to the workshops, the Laura excited to see you in person at the year end workshop. That will be awesome. Uh, and to the rest of you, hopefully we see you at Neo as well. And if not, we'll see you on the next webinar. Take care. We're rooting for you. Best of luck. We'll talk to you soon.