Hey, it's Mike. Quick note before we get started. My company, BuildGood, publishes this podcast that you're listening to. But our core work is to actually build a multi-channel metrics-based fundraising program for nonprofits that focuses on building the long-term value of new and current donors. So we actually helped nonprofits in the US and Canada build a broad base of donors. We helped them with acquisition, with retention, with monthly giving, and with mid-level giving programs. Now, every year, we take on a few new clients. And we tend to work with international development organizations, hospital foundations, children's hospital foundations, and local poverty relief like food banks or homeless service providers, those kinds of organizations. Now, here's the thing. If you're raising at least $5 million, and you're looking for a partner to help you raise more money with your digital and direct mail programs, or if you're going into an RFP process, you can get a hold of me at
[email protected]. And someone on our team will make sure that the email gets to me, and I will personally get back to you. Alright, let's get the podcast going. [Music] Well, hello, builders of Good. Thank you for tuning in to the BuildGood Fundraising Podcast. Fundraising isn't easy, but it should be simple. So on this show, we take the mystery out of raising money. Now, on every episode, we coach you to build your fundraising like a flywheel. The flywheel has five steps. Number one is listening to donors. Number two is engaging them. Number three is asking the right people for the right things. Number four is celebrating every gift. Number five is reporting back in a real time and responsive way. If you master the five parts of the flywheel, your fundraising flywheel will start to spin reliably with less effort on your part. Your revenue will grow and so will your career. Now, every week, we focus on one part of the flywheel. And today, we're focusing on asking, we've got another session recorded alive at the BuildGood Summit. We're just trying to give you lots and lots of value here if you couldn't make it to the summit. And we're also hoping that you're going to consider coming to the next BuildGood Summit. In this session, we're joining Nathan Hill from Avid about how to acquire more recurring donors. How to actually grow a monthly giving program. Now, you may have been very inspired by listening to Victoria from charity water on this podcast on how they built a spring. Maybe you were very inspired by UNICEF Canada by Victoria who was on this podcast talking about how they build postcards from Paddington. And you might be wondering, do I need a branded monthly giving program? And the answer is not really. And in this podcast episode, Nathan Hill is going to walk you through. If you're getting started and you don't have a branded giving monthly giving program, there's still lots that you can do to convert recurring donors. And during the one time donation process to actually upgrading one time donors after they've made their first gift. And to launch like recurring giving acquisition campaigns using a proven framework. I think you'll get lots of actionable steps out of this podcast. I think it'll encourage you to basically reboot your monthly giving program, refresh it a little bit, try some new things you haven't tried yet. I think there's stuff in here that you can go back to the office and you can implement like tomorrow if you wanted to. So let's get right into it. Here's Nathan Hill recorded live at the build goods summit. How to acquire more recurring donors. Thank you for that introduction. That's a brand new intro statement for me. So it was fun to hear it back. I never remember what I actually send in as like the little blurb. It sounded pretty good. Cool. I'm pumped to be with you. I've been kind of watching from the outside as build good as putting this summit together. And I've been so stoked for this event. It's been on my calendar forever. And I have been so excited to actually make it and be with you. So we're talking about what I think is a really important topic today. Anyone think recurring giving is an important topic? Yes, yes, yes, yes. Probably everyone this way here. Okay. Cool. Glad you're excited to be here and don't just feel obligated to be in the room. We've got a lot of ground that we're going to try to cover in a pretty limited amount of time. A lot of the content that we're going to go through today is actually pulling from a full training course that I put together about a year ago. We're condensing it down into a pretty limited time stamp. So we're going to try to move quickly. But we're talking all about recurring giving specifically. How do you go acquire more recurring donors show of hands who is actively building and growing a recurring giving program right now? Everybody is anyone in the face of like we're just starting we're just trying to figure this out. We're kind of almost all the same. I think we're all just trying to figure it out as we go regardless of what stage you're at. So I think if you're if you're in the stage of like we're just building this we're just figuring out how to even get launched. You're going to get some great ideas today. If you're in the stage of like we've been doing this for years. This isn't something new. But we're always trying to grow. I think you're also going to get some really practical things out of today. We're going to look at a lot of A, B tests and proven concepts about what really truly works to get people to say yes. To signing up to becoming a monthly donor. Later on we're going to look at an actual campaign and how do you go build out a dedicated acquisition campaign with a template key tactics all that sort of stuff. What data should you be looking at with your segmentation. So those are kind of the two main buckets of where we're going to go today. We're going to start first by looking at just the value of recurring giving. I think all of us know because we're in this room that it's really important. But I want to give you some of that concrete data that you can take back to your teams to stand on two feet with confidence of like yes. We are going the right direction as we go pursue this stuff. I've just got the great introduction. So you know about me. It looks like that. I don't know what that's supposed to say now. I didn't review every slide. So we'll see if it's all in a different character language here. We'll see. This should be fun. As was said, I think that's supposed to say I'm the VP of trading at Avid. This is going to be a great hour and a half. A little bit about me. So I spent about the past decade, nine years at an agency called Next After. I know a lot of you from my days at Next After. Either engaging on a webinar and a training course at a conference event, that sort of thing. On the next after side, again, we did a lot of A, B testing trying to bring real concrete data statistical science to the table to really understand what moves people to say yes to giving. There is a lot of thinking out there. There's a lot of quote and quote, I'll put them quotes experts that have ideas about what works. We wanted to really bring data to the table so that all of us together as an industry can stand confidently and say these things are really going to move the needle. When I go implement this tactic, I know how much it's going to improve results. So we can be confident in the strategies that we're implementing. So I spent about nine years kind of looking in on all the things we were learning from testing and optimization, building training courses around it, trying to understand what are those like macro level trends across our sector that could move the needle on revenue. Now on the Avid side, I'll tell you a little bit about Avid. Avid is a system that we were building inside of the agency. It was kind of the operating system for how we work with organizations to identify problems, opportunities, trends, where do we go next. And as we're building this out, we said, you know what, if we want to have greater impact, this needs to not live inside of a consultancy. This needs to be accessible to all of you. And so we launched this system called Avid. It's the first fundraising agency in the cloud where in short, what we're trying to do is go connect all of your systems. Who would say that all their systems are cleanly talking to each other and they all get along and all your data is in one place? Anybody? Probably not. We all know that our tools are disconnected, our data lives in silos. We're trying to bring that all together so it can actually talk to each other usually for the very first time. Through that, we're using AI tools to understand where the key insights, key opportunities, problem areas that need to be solved before they get out of hand. And then ultimately, how do we go run plays and campaigns automatically using AI tools? It's 2025. There's lots of tech that's available to us to go make your lives easier so we can be more effective and more efficient and then actually get like eight hours of sleep at night and not burn ourselves out. And so that's what that's what Avid does in a nutshell. It combines all your data together, makes it talk and actually leads to what do we do about this? How do we take action on it? So that's the background you can expect today is this a blend of what I've been learning as we are doing lots of A, B testing more in the creative side of what works blended with now the data side of what are we seeing at the macro level in terms of trends and segmentation all that sort of stuff. So we're going to look at a lot of A, B test some data things today. Any data people in the room you just geek out about data you love living in a spreadsheet. Okay, a few of us cool cool cool cool. We're in good company. Here's our goal today. We are going to demystify what it takes to get started with acquiring more recurring donors. There's a lot of ideas out there kind of like barriers to entry to actually really growing a recurring giving program that might not actually be applicable. They might just be holding us back from really getting started and leaning in. And I want to make sure that you're empowered and your team is empowered to go implement proven tested tactics to grow recurring giving. This sound like a good roadmap for what we're going today.
Awesome, we're gonna have a few like little break, excuse me, breakout activities today. Nothing crazy, you'll take some notes, you'll have some ideas, you'll share with the neighbor, we'll get talking a little bit. Before we get to an activity though, this is where I wanna start. The value of recurring giving, you all raised your hand and said, you think recurring giving is valuable, that's a good thing, you're in the right room. Let's give you some concrete info as to how valuable it is. That sound good? All right, let's go. Retention rate. I think we all know this. You probably see it in your data, you know kind of intuitively. If someone signs up to give you a monthly gift, on an ongoing basis, they're probably gonna retain better. Here's what we're seeing as we look across about 110-ish and growing organizations that we have a 360 degree view into their data. Someone who gives a one-time gift, gives episodically every now and again, their average retention rate is 49.6%. That's pretty good. It's pretty good when you consider the global averages for retention. When you look at a recurring donor, again, to give you some concrete data here, their retention rate goes through the roof. That's huge. That's a huge jump, up to 87.2%. It's almost a guarantee that they're gonna give to you next year and the year after that, the year after that, if you move them into a recurring giving relationship. So this is a positive thing for all of us investing in recurring giving. It's gonna improve retention rates in a world and in a time where overall retention is actually on the decline. So this is a primary strategy to go solve what I'm seeing as like a growing crisis in donor retention across our sector. Secondly, it's not just about getting them to give to you again next year. It's also about the value to you this year, which again, we all know, okay, if they're giving on a monthly basis, those gifts stacked up, it leads to greater value, but concrete numbers, a one-time donor on average, and there's a lot of fluctuation, on average, their 12-month value to your organization is $121. If you can move them into a recurring giving relationship, their value goes up almost $3x to $338. Now, we'll look at a few different organization examples today. There was one I was diving into where they're seeing like their average recurring donor is like 1.3 grand annually. There's some that's more like at the $150 annually, but regardless of the organization, the trend is still there. It's almost like two to three x improvement on the revenue per donor per year if you move them into a recurring relationship. So it's better retention, it's also greater value, even in the near term. This is something that's not talked about quite as much. Everyone who's growing their giving program on the broad-based side, ultimately the play that we're going for is how do we build a pipeline to upgrade people into mids and into majors. And there's other value in like growing a grassroots movement and all that sort of stuff, but ultimately we want to move people up the ladder to mids and majors. Your recurring donor is the most likely type of donor to actually move into a mid and major giving relationship. So if you're a major gift officer in the room, or that's part of your thinking, it's one of the many hats you probably wear, this is a great source and a great pipeline for you. If you invest in recurring giving, it's a better pipeline to go build these higher value donors over time. So huge improvements on the likelihood to upgrade as well. As we're looking across the avid universe, here's what we're seeing in terms of the growth rates of recurring donors. There is a pretty significant growth rate year over year over year. This is this charter showing the percentage like the slice of the pie of a donor program that is recurring versus one time. And every year it's going up by a couple percentage points. In 2020, what are we looking at? 15.5% of the average donor file was a recurring donor as of end of 2024, it's up to 22.5%. So there is a natural kind of organic growth happening in the marketplace. There are more people like you that are investing in this as a strategy. We won't dive too deep into this today, but you hear lots of talk about like the subscription economy and that sort of stuff. There's some natural headwinds that are moving people in this direction just on the consumer level. I don't want to get too deep into that today because I think there's a massive difference between subscribing to Netflix, subscribing to products on Amazon that show up in your doorstep versus choosing to give away your money to a cause to go make a significant impact. So I don't want to like conflate the two too much. I want to draw sort of a dividing line there, different parts of our brain, different ways to think about it, but there are some organic kind of headwinds in the marketplace that are moving more people in this direction. So some common beliefs about getting started. There are a lot of theories, there are a lot of ideas that are present in our sector about what is required to start acquiring more recurring donors. And I want to dispel maybe some of the ideas that when we look at the data, don't actually hold up. So maybe some of these will be shocking to you, depending on things you've heard and who you've listened to on LinkedIn and all that sort of stuff. Here's a question. Also, I just really like the slide. It looks like the little Mario question block or something, so I like that. I have a little like Mario Kart poster, my wall behind me in my office that I look at through the Zoom camera, like when I see my picture back. Anyway, it makes me happy. Do you really need a brand name for your recurring giving program? Who has a brand name for their recurring giving program? Many of us, okay. Is it helpful? Okay. Some head nods, some affirming yeses, it might be. Is it required? That's a lot of head shake and no. It seems like from the things I hear, the people that I hear talking about recurring giving most of the time, it seems like it's a barrier to entry and a requirement to really even get started. I want to look at some data that says otherwise. If this will go forward. Couple examples here. And we're going to revisit these organizations a couple of times today. Organization number one, I'll tell you about them and then we'll talk about what their data says. This is a higher ed organization. They have a media organization's kind of attached to them, that's kind of their big outreach arm. When they ask people to give monthly, they just simply ask them, "Hey, will you become a monthly partner?" Would you call that a brand name? It's not really kind of any of us could say, "Hey, become a monthly partner." It's a pretty common language. They don't have a brand name for their monthly giving. This is a well-established organization. They've been around for about 100 years. They have a lot of legacy donors. Big existing one-time donor pool. They turned on recurring giving about 10, 12 years ago or so. And this is where they're at. 2020, they had about $7 million in annual recurring revenue from recurring donors. By 2024, they're up to $9.6 million. You can see the trends of upticks in their total recurring donor program all without having a brand name. They're building and growing this program without leading into a brand. So is it required? Probably not. It's kind of a barrier to entry that doesn't really need to be there. This organization, very different organization. They're actually pretty new. They were founded about three or four years ago. You can see that in the trends like 2021. I believe it was their first year of existence. And they went to market with an opportunity to become a monthly donor. And you can see the trends. There are policy and advocacy organization. Their call to action is not branded. They just say, "Give monthly." Pretty straightforward, pretty simple ask. You can see the growth rates. Because they work in policy, they're based in the US. There's ebbs and flows and fluctuations when things like an election happens. So you see a little bit of a dip in 2024. But you see the growth rate without even branding the program. One other organization example for you, again, are very different organization, but the same types of trends. They simply ask people to give monthly. And you can see the up and to the right trend in terms of the revenue and their active recurring donors. So again, to dispel this rumor, we don't need a brand name for our program. If that's keeping you back from leading in further, because you're trying to get all the branding right and the name and the logos and the design and the whole thing, that might not be a requirement for actual significant growth. So that's question number one. Question number two, or maybe rumor number two. Do you really need a monthly giving product? Does that resonate with anyone who has a monthly giving product, like a package of incentives? When you sign up to become a monthly donor, you're gonna receive this thing, that thing, this other thing, invitations to these types of events. Maybe we're gonna send you a swag bag. You're gonna get this type of thing in the mail, I've recorded that kind of thing. It's more of a service than it is just signing up to give on a monthly basis. There's a very different mindset when it comes to selling a product, versus actually asking someone to give generously out of their own funds, out of their own pocket to make significant impact. The way the brain works and understands the process of those things is very different. If you sign up on Amazon to go subscribe to get, I don't know, toilet paper on your doorstep every two weeks to reload you so you don't have to go to the store. Whatever the product is, the benefit and the payoff of that doesn't happen in the transaction process. The benefit and the payoff comes when the thing that you ordered shows up on your doorstep. Or if it's a Netflix subscription or a Disney plus subscription, the benefit and the payoff you receive maybe every day when you're spending way too much time just staring at the screen in the evening 'cause you need to turn your brain off. That's when you get the benefit and the payoff of your subscription. With something like giving, the benefit and the payoff doesn't happen because something shows up on your door. It happens before you even make the gift. It happens when you're understanding, oh my gosh. This caused me so much to me, I could make such a great impact if only I chose to give. I'm so encouraged because this organization cares about the same thing I do and we can go make this huge impact in the world. That's where the payoff comes. And then we have this limited window to get the conversion, to get someone to actually then pull out the credit card, fill out the form, that sort of thing. So it's a fundamentally different buying experience. Do we really want to do that?
really need to build out a product for this. Here's some quick data on the AB testing side. So again, we're gonna have fun with all these labels that got converted to this fun little font here. That apparently means control. I don't know what the other one is, but we'll just call it version B for now. How about that? Okay. (laughs) Version A, very simple navigation. Has a big donate button in the corner. Version B simply adds a give monthly button in the navigation. Side by side with the donation button. Who thinks version A is gonna lead to more monthly gifts? Anyone, anyone, anyone. Okay, pretty simple test. Who thinks version B? Yeah, y'all are winners today. Awesome. That led to a 75% increase in revenue. Is that amazing? It's not just for monthly gifts, by the way. Certainly there's more people clicking that button and choosing to give monthly. It's also leading more people to click the one-time donation button. For a variety of reasons, it increases visibility of both options. It also creates some choice and autonomy for the person considering, okay, I came with the intention of giving. Now I see I have options in terms of how I support you. And giving people options gives them choice and power and can also push them further down the funnel and down the process. Now there's diminishing returns. If we added a third button or a fourth or a fifth, well, you're gonna start to see the opposite trend happen. By giving people a little bit of choice, can help them say yes more frequently and more likely to either option. Here's another example. Version A versus version B. Version B, all they did was turn on the recurring gift button on the form. There's no fancy product. There's no fancy brand name. You don't get any of the additional incentives. They don't even really talk about what the impact is of giving a recurring gift. They just put the option out there. Now in this test, they were throttling their traffic. So they were sending about 80% to version A over here. They were sending about 20% to version B. And what they saw in that testing window was that version B led to eight new people becoming a recurring donor within the two week time span of the test. That's huge. Zero to eight. That's pretty good. Go put all your traffic there. Now you're at like 40 new recurring donors over the course of two weeks and then off and into the future, all by just make it the option available. No product, no brand name. One more for you. All this organization is doing is adding this little gray box right by the make this monthly gift check box. It gives a one sentence statement basically just saying, hey, it's better if you give a recurring gift. Not a lot of substance there, but increases the visibility shows the option and it led to a 28% increase in donations. More people choosing to actually click that button and give a monthly gift as well. None of these have a big incentive package wrapped around the monthly giving option. It's just increasing visibility. It's also starting to lean into the value proposition and the impact of making that monthly gift. So I wanted to dispel those couple of ideas that are out there that for some of us are creating a barrier to actually really getting into monthly and recurring giving in the first place or maybe holding us back from leaning in further. If those things don't matter, what matters? What's the single most important thing? Any ideas? What matters? Relationship? Any other ideas? You shut them out. Story telling. Giving the option, asking, it's a great answer. What was that? Trust. Ooh, I like that answer. That's a great answer. Yes, all these things are critical. All these things are important. I would submit to you and I'd kind of encapsulate all of those in this single question. This is an idea that actually comes originally from a company called MEC Labs that did a lot of AB testing conversion optimization in the for profit space. This has been now adapted into our space. This is the primary value proposition question. If I'm your ideal donor, why should I give to you rather than to some other organization or even give it all? Because nobody has to give. No one's hand is forced to give. We have to inspire action and we have to create differentiation between our organization and why you would give to us rather than some other similar organization or even non-similar ones. So I want you to take a moment. Consider this question. We'll spend like two, maybe three minutes. I want you to grab a pen, open your notebook or if you want to pull a laptop, phone, iPad out. jot down a quick couple sentence answer. For your organization, as you think about giving as a whole, not just recurring giving, but giving as a whole, how would you answer this question? So again, take two to three minutes, jot down some answers and then I'll have you share a little bit. (upbeat music) - All right, everyone. Today's episode is brought to you by the Build Good Fundraising Academy. Here's what the academy is. A year ago, we decided we're learning all of these things in our everyday agency work with clients. We should turn around, take everything we're learning and then pass it on and teach it to smaller and midsize shops who maybe can't afford an agency like Build Good or who maybe need to train up their staff and their team. So we create the fundraising academy. It's an online community. It is a bunch of trainings and playbooks and resources, but it is also weekly coaching calls on Zoom where you get live feedback on your stuff. That's right, you show up with an appeal letter. In our copywriters, our strategist will look at it and be like, "You know what? I think here's a bunch of ways you can make that a lot stronger." You show up with a thank you letter and we say, "You know what? Here's a helpful tip on how you can improve this." You show up saying, "Hey, I'd like to do a donor survey. I know those are important, but I don't know where to start." And our team goes, "Here's a playbook. Here's a bunch of samples we've done for clients and come back next week on the call and let's walk through some of the questions that you started to work on." That's the Build Good Fundraising Academy. It is our team, helping your team and a community of other fundraisers who get it, the peers of yours who are in a very similar situation and who can also help you out in community. If you'd like to learn more about that, go to buildgood.com/academy. You can book a call there and I can demo you around. I can show it to you and we can have a chat about it to see if it's a good fit for you. Buildgood.com/academy. Alright, now back to the part. I'm so glad you're having a great time. I'm so glad you're meeting good people. There's a ton of good people in this room. As you shared with each other, I was going to ask these questions, but you're all deep in it. So, things to think about as you think about your value proposition, even as you think back on what you just heard from your neighbor. If you try to put yourselves in the shoes of their ideal donor and you listen to their value property, you listen to their value proposition messaging. Some questions to ask. Number one, is it clear? Do you have a clear understanding of what they're actually even talking about? I think sometimes we can get so embroiled in the details, in the nuances of our cause and the programs that we have and how we're making impact, that sometimes we forget to like how to talk to a regular human being that doesn't understand all the nuance. I'm guilty of this. I think we're all guilty of this. So, first and foremost, is it clear what you're talking about? Is it clear what you're saying? Does it matter what you're saying? This is a really tricky question, but it gets down to kind of the core of the message. Like, if I'm your ideal donor, and I can actually resonate with the things that you're saying, does this really matter to me? This is a hard one to answer on your own. It's very subjective. The only way to really get clarity is through testing, through optimization, through trying this message and that message and seeing what sticks and what works. Three, is it unique? Is it different from the organization down the street that does similar work to you? Or could anybody take that messaging and just go copy and paste it into their next direct mail? Or onto their donation page? It needs to be different, distinct, differentiated. And then fourth, is it believable? I assume that everything you jot it down, you shared with your neighbor next to you, is true and genuine. And you didn't just make up facts about the impact of your organization, but you might be doing such incredible work that it's hard to believe that you're making this level of impact with this amount of money. So, is it believable? Or do you need to maybe bolster it with testimonials and data and credibility factors, things like that? So, key questions to think about when you consider any of your messaging. I want you to, I'm going to skip this one, because we don't have time for me to get on my soapbox today. (Laughter) Let me just leave that up. If you just stare at the sign guy for a moment, we can think about this sign for a second. I still, this from my friend Courtney Cruz, that she's got a great soapbox and I'll let her have the glory there. We won't spend too much time here. I just want to encourage you to take a moment, maybe jot a note down. If you think about this same question, but now framed under the umbrella of recurring giving monthly donations, if I have already given to you, I am your ideal donor. Why should I give you now a monthly gift? Rather than just give you another one-time gift, or even give at all again, because I frankly, I don't have to give to you again. So, we have to get ourselves into this frame of mind when we're thinking about making a recurring giving ask. Especially if we're not leaning into all the incentives and the productizing of the monthly giving program, the most effective way to go acquire more recurring donors is through the answer to this question, your value proposition, your messaging. Help you them understand, why is it more impactful? How is it more impactful if I choose to give in this method, rather than just giving you another one-time gift right now? We have to have the differentiation. So, take a moment, you can jot the down. I'm going to keep going, but feel free if you've got notes to take. Jump into your notebook, keep jotting them down. This is a really interesting stat. So, I spend about a year and a half doing a lot of research into donor retention, trying to really understand what moves the needle to get more people to retain and give to you next year. We all spare you all the details, but we donated to 200 some organizations. We looked at their performance metrics. We also looked at the full donor experience, everything from making the donation to the follow-up communication. How do they try to reactivate?
these donors at year end. Lots of interesting things there. This is shocking to me. Maybe it's not shocking to me because I wasn't surprised by it, but it is a pretty um, powerful number. 86% of nonprofits, including many in this room, we have no unique reasons inside of our main giving flows as to why someone should give a month of gift. That doesn't mean that there's not an option to give a month of gift. We just don't do a lot as a sector in the giving process to help people understand what we just talked about. The value proposition, the impact of giving that monthly gift. And there's a lot of low-hanging fruit. If we're just trying to figure out how do we get more recurring donors, we'll just, we need to put the button in the navigation. We need to give a little bit of messaging on the page to say, not only is this an option, but it might be the better option for you because here's the additional impact that you can make. Many of us are missing out on the low-hanging fruit just simply because we have no messaging in the main giving process. So huge opportunities here with just something you can probably log into your website today and make one little tweak and then start to see an uplift in recurring giving. So interesting stat. Here's where I want to go next. I want to look at, we're going to look at a bunch of different tests and AB tests and really practical things that you can do inside of that one-time donation experience. When someone lands on your homepage, they click that donate button in the navigation, they land on your donation page. What can we do in that process to prompt more people to actually consider giving a monthly gift. So should we dive into that? Get tactical for a little bit. All right, cool. I see some excitement in the back, some big head nods, big smiles, love it. You may. It is both. It is both. Yep, there's a blend. So prompting one-time donors for monthly gift. Key principle, it's not all that complicated, it's not all that shocking. But we want more people to give a gift, give a monthly gift, we need to make a compelling call to action and we need to make sure that it's highly visible. Again, 86% of organizations have nothing resembling a compelling, highly visible call to action inside of their donation flows. So prove in tactic number one, which is where we have to camp out for a moment. If you don't have a super clear donate button in your navigation, you absolutely need one. Now, this is probably about 5% of us in this room, but I just always want to put this up here because it leads into the next one. It's a requirement for it's a prerequisite for proven tactic number two. It also is just, it's super low hanging fruit stuff that increases visibility, increases traffic, increases donations. Here's one quick example. You see the difference? There's a donate button in version B. Would you like to see the performance difference? It's crazy. It's a lot. 34% increase in traffic actually going to the donation page and now considering giving. That powers your funnel significantly. There's a ton now that you can do with that traffic to optimize your pages and your forms and lead to greater giving. That's a huge win, but just putting a big purple button in the corner. We can do that. We can do that. Proven tactic number two. We need to have the first one so we can have the second one put the give monthly button in the navigation. We looked at that test a moment ago. This has been proven now time and time and time again. Initially, when we are testing this and I was watching different experiments come into the library of people testing this out in the wild, there is some skepticism. Does this really lead to this big of a lift in revenue, in donations? In donations overall, not just monthly giving. Are we tracking it properly? Are we counting gifts that maybe we shouldn't? Because it's a really simple tactic. You start with this, you move to this, you add the give monthly button, 200% increase in recurring donations. I cannot guarantee exactly get 200% increase in recurring donations for you, but I can tell you that there has never been a time this has been tested where it lead led to a negative result. There's a few times it's been kind of flat, but more often than not, it increases recurring giving and it might increase overall revenue in total donations as well. We looked at this example very briefly. Again, this was a 75% uptick in revenue, not just monthly giving, but also individual like one time donations as well. Because again, it gives that autonomy to the donor to understand my choice in the matter of how I support you leading to greater giving on both sides. This is a really interesting one. Another little tactic you might test is put a little value language just on these buttons. I think sometimes we have an idea of what an navigation looks like in our heads and that's what it's going to look like forever. Did you know you can add more things there? You can add a little more text. It says donate, save a life today. Give monthly saved lives 365 days a year. That sounds better than the first one. And you know what? It led to a 67% increase in donations by adding some value language, even just simple copy to the call to action button, providing more context, starting to inch closer to answering that key question of why should I give you a month of gift rather than just a one-time gift or even give at all. So lots of opportunity there. Proving tactic number three, make the process simple. We don't need a million steps in the process. You don't need, excuse me, an additional full landing page that unpacks all the details of why someone should ever become monthly donor and then have a call to action that leads to another step that has more information and then maybe the start of a form and then another step where you complete the, like that's too much. People don't need that one stop, one page, all the info form on the page. Here's an example version A versus version B. All they did was remove a step in the process. They combined the form onto one page. Now you have like the initial step and a second page. Removing one of the pages in the process led to a 97% increase in donations. So when someone clicks that donate button they should go straight to the page with the form on it. When they click the give monthly button they should go straight to the recurring giving page, default it to monthly giving, single step process. There's lots of tools that are out there to make this super simple and easy. But look, this is the performance difference. It's radical. Proving tactic number four. Is this blowing anybody's mind yet? These are all simple things. You can probably implement all these like later today. If you go carve out 30 minutes to an hour you can make a lot of a lot of headway. Quick question. Yes. There's a lot of movement. Okay. Some vendors even in the room around the mobile process. Yeah. There's this one page. You know, a lot of next after testing really focuses on a one-age form. Yeah. But then there's other maybe kind of victory information about a whole process that works better. Yeah. Yeah, it's tricky because a lot of the modal forms that exist it's really hard to go get a clean test of like, you know, this type of an approach versus how you implement the modal. Some of the ways that that that we had implemented the modal previously is like have the value prop copy on the page and then trigger the modal with a call to action button at the bottom instead of sending to another page. But sometimes you go at it's worth a test. But sometimes you go to a page you click the give button in the corner. The modal pops up but you're really limited in the copy that you can provide there. I would test some different approaches to really know for your organization what's what's most effective because they've seen it go both directions. But there's ways you can go implement that modal keeping these principles in mind. And those modal's most of them not all. Most of them, it's still technically a single step experience. It's not loading a new page. That's the biggest problem is if you have a page load in the process. You just go to Google Analytics. You can see how many people fall off when the page loads. So yeah, great question. Great question. Proof in tactic number four, just introduce a quick little values proposition statement on the form. Doesn't need to be lengthy. Doesn't need to be huge. This is one sentence that basically says, look, a monthly donation helps equip people in need with critical resources every day points directly at the option to give monthly. Here's a test version that shows the impact. They turn these little radio buttons into just a single checkbox with a statement that says your monthly support is going to power thousands of sites each month. Quick little value statement. This led to a hundred percent increase in donations. A little bit of copy goes a long way to draw the eye and the attention and also lift the strength of the impact and the value. Tactic number five on the design front. Some of us use radio buttons. Some of you have a little check box to make the gift monthly using this sort of design like tabbed approach where you ask for the gift frequency first makes a tremendous amount of difference. It does a couple of things. One, it increases visibility. It's not these tiny little radio buttons. It increases visibility of the option, but also it sets the appropriate context for your next decision, which is how much am I actually going to give? If I choose the one time option, yeah, I have a particular amount in my that I'm going to give you. My monthly gift is going to look radically different than my one time gift. So we need to set the expectation first of the frequency before we ask for the dollar amount. Here's an example. This organization tested exactly this. They moved from the little check box down below to a tab design that comes first asking for the frequency and then they asked for the gift amount. This led to a 15 percent increase in donations, simple design fix, simple design tweak, radical difference in performance. So these little things can go a long way and start to add up to better results. I got two more of these for you. Number six using a dynamic gift array. We need to make sure that we have tools that can empower a dynamic ask on the form. So when someone clicks the one time option, they see a certain range of giving options. When they click the monthly option, they see a different range of options. That's more relevant. I see a lot of head nods. This seems like basic stuff. A lot of our tools don't empower us to do this. So we need to make sure we have the tools to do it. There's hacks. There's always workarounds, but we need to think about these things. Version A. When asking for the gift, it actually starts with the highest amount and walks down to the lowest amount. Version B, they tested flipping the order for a monthly gift. So it goes from low to high and it also uses smaller dollar increments. And what they saw was this led to an 11 percent increase in monthly donations because it was contextualized for the person considering a monthly gift. By the way, almost every time when this has been tested, going from low to high, high to low, low to high almost always wins out in terms of conversions.
and you don't really lose a lot on the average gift site. So something worth testing. Last little proven tactic here, number seven, when someone gets to the end of your donation form considering a one time gift, they filled out the whole thing. They're ready to go. They hit the donate button. What you can do is fire a little pop up that says, hey, before we process your gift, would you consider something? Include some value proposition copy here, a value statement unpacking why it's more impactful to give this gift on a monthly basis. Don't ask them to convert their $150 one time gift into $150 monthly gift. Walk it down, maybe it's a small percentage of that. Maybe it's 30 bucks, 40 bucks, something like that. But prompting them in this process can be incredibly effective. Here's a quick experiment where doing exactly that, asking them to consider upgrading their gift to recurring, led to a 288% increase in monthly donations without harming overall giving and conversions on the page. This is worth testing, 'cause in some cases higher-density campaigns, it doesn't always work, but it is worth a test because 288% lift is worth a test. That's a huge increase. And that's not just one off, we've seen that in many, many times. So I want you to take another couple of minutes. I want you to think about your giving process, maybe pull it up on your phone, a laptop. You don't have to make a gift you can if you want to. But I want you to walk through those steps and start to look at, okay, what are the things that I can tweak? What are the things I should test? What ways can I optimize this process to be more impactful based on these proven tactics? So I'll put these up on the screen. These are kind of the seven things that we just looked at. I'll give you like two, three minutes, pull up your homepage, walk through that giving process, and make a couple of notes. What am I gonna do later when I get back to my office or back home to actually tweak and improve this process? I'll get out of the way for your picture. All right, do we have any brave souls who want to share what's one thing you're gonna tweak, try or test in order to improve your recurring giving? Anyone, any thoughts, anything you wanna share? We got a mic we can pass around. What's one thing you wanna tweak, test or try in your giving flows to improve recurring giving? Anyone? Yes. We have a mic here? Yes, perfect. Share your name, organization, and then what you're gonna try. I'm Sarah. I work for We Animals, which is an animal photojournalist agency. Okay. And when I was looking at our site, I noticed that on our give page, like on our main give page, if you click on donate now, it takes you right to our CRM to the donate page, and if you click on give monthly, it takes you to another page that explains giving money, before it takes you to our giving page. So that extra click is probably not great for people falling off. Yeah, I think you're right on. Move that form over to the same page, keep it exactly the same. And then you can test that messaging and all sorts of things, but that's great. Thank you so much for sharing. Anyone else? What are you gonna change? What are you gonna try? What are you gonna test? Yes, over here. Again, share your name, organization, and then what you're gonna try. I'm Jen with the GBG hospital foundation in Midland. Okay. I noticed when we went on that we have pop-ups to subscribe. Okay. And on all of our pages on our website, but I think we're moving that from the donation page would be helpful so that they don't get distracted. Yeah. Also, we don't have a give monthly button on our. Okay. So adding that. Yeah. Simple win. That's a simple win. Even the pop-up thing is interesting. Depending on the type of page, one thing you could also test is like, go deploy the pop-up as like an exit intent when someone's leaving the page because if you've lost the gift, maybe there's an opportunity to capture the email and then go follow up and that sort of thing. So lots of cool things you can do there. Thank you for sharing. That's awesome. Let's do one more. Anyone else? Try, share. Yes. Oh, she's got a mic for you. Sorry. I can hear you. Thank you. Hi, I'm Collette from Moreland's Kids. I think we're gonna look at adding the value added language. Okay. Right on the website, donate, uh, Shem Page, the buttons, and then how they would work on our donor cards that we send out. Oh, okay. Awesome. I love it. Yeah. I mean, a lot of these tests, they're kind of focused on donation pages and online channels because you can test really fast and online channels. You can love about AB testing with digital. As you can learn some cool stuff really quick and then go directly implement it into your other channels as well. Where it direct mail is gonna take way longer to get those learnings and results. But a lot of the same tactics, especially in the messaging side, are gonna apply across channels. So it's a great little testing ground testing lab for all of your channels. Um, okay. Let's keep moving. Thank you for those ideas. We can keep chatting about those later on too. Well, hopefully have some time for other questions and things at the end. I'm gonna get to this. We've talked about how do you move people inside of the giving flow to continue to consider giving you a monthly donation. How do you go turn this into a campaign, create a little more urgency around it, have some dedicated messaging, set some specific goals, that type of thing. There's also a lot you can do to go automate this. Once you've run this campaign once, you can set it up, automate it and set it and forget it. And there's lots of tools to make that happen. We'll look at some of that in a little bit. But big opportunities here. I will share before we jump into some of the details and specifics a quick little story. Um, there's an organization that I did some work with about a year and a half ago, two years ago, maybe where, you know, I didn't have the context that they had when we jumped in. Oh, and I jumped in. They were basically looking for, hey, can you help build us a testing plan? Looking at all these things we've looked at today, our whole library of experiments, you know, what should we be trying? What should we be testing in order to move the needle on donations and revenue? And so we walked through their donation flow, kind of like what we did today went super in depth. Here's 60 different things that you should be trying and testing and tweaking and optimizing all that sort of stuff. And they said, awesome. This is great, super helpful, cool piece out. See you later. Um, I, I learned a couple months later that before we started down this road of like building some testing plans, they had run a recurring giving campaign. It was their first ever attempt at a recurring giving campaign, bringing people in the door, never had launched one before. They put some emails together, a couple of direct mail pieces. They send this campaign out, everybody's pumped, they put a ton of work and energy into it. They're excited to see what happens. They got no new recurring donors. That's like your heart kind of drops. That's awful. We put all this time and energy and resources into it. Then they went through this whole process of really just looking at the main donation page flow, like what we just did. Then they went back and said, okay, based on all this stuff, what if we added more value proposition language, what if we improved our pages? We optimized the flows. We sent a few more emails kind of following the template we're going to look at. They ran this campaign unbeknownst to me and they brought in 40 new recurring donors. So they went from zero the last time to 40 new ones and now they have a repeatable flow. Excuse me, that they can automate and build into their campaigns for sustainable growth in the recurring giving program. So that's what we're going to look at is a template that's been tested and proven as a starting point. There's always more you can do. And as a starting point for how do you start getting more people in the door? I'm not going to read all this to you. We're going to dive a little bit deeper into this in a few minutes. I just want to show you briefly kind of the template. This is a five email campaign. There's more channels than email that you can use, but this is five emails to kind of be the centerpiece of your campaign. And it starts with cultivation. It ends with a very clear direct appeal with deadlines and goals. But there's lots of interesting things sprinkled in here, like the reply back email, actually creating one to one connection. Making people to respond to you in the inbox, which is really scary because then you have to reply back and that's a nightmare. But it can be really effective. So it starts with cultivation ends in this deadline email. This all happens in the span of two weeks, but there's lots of segmentation you can build in, all sorts of other channels you can add to the mix. And so this is where what we're going to look at. I want to look at some of the data side of this before we dive into maybe some of the more tactical things. We've looked at a bunch of optimization strategies. Let's look at some of the data side. Does he? How do you go power this in a meaningful way? Here's my little Mario question blocking. Who is most likely to become a recurring donor? A critical question that we must ask before we launch a campaign. We've got to get our targeting right. We've got to get our segmentation right. I'll just ask the room. Who's most likely to become a recurring donor? Any thoughts? Shout it out. New donor. People have made multiple one-time gifts in the same year. Any other thoughts? Who's letter engagement? High-engaged contact subscribers. That sort of thing. Yes. Okay. Giving to a direct mail campaign consistently throughout the year. Lots of commonalities kind of between these. Some nuance. New versus kind of existing. Yes. Yeah. You can plan for it. You know when it's coming in, when it's going out. Yeah, the comment for the rest of the room was people who are budget conscious and thinking about where their funds come in, when they're going out, they can plan for it. That's awesome. Do one more, shout it out. Volunteers. Volunteers. Ooh, interesting. I like that. Lots of ideas in the room. I'm going to say none of you are wrong. None of you are wrong. It's a complicated, the answer is no. Let's look at some data and we'll see why. I'm going to introduce you to two different buckets. Who loves putting their donors in buckets? We love putting donors in buckets. Let's be real. We like to apply labels to. These are my offline donors. Let me introduce you to them. They're never going to give over here and online. These are my online donors. They're never going to interact in the mailbox. That's not how humans work by the way. But we love to do that as fundraisers. Here's two buckets I want to introduce you today. One is the instant recurring donor. This is effectively what you said. This is the, someone who has never given before. They're first time giving to you. They are giving on a recurring basis. Woohoo, that's awesome. Acquisition at its finest. Then over here, this bucket, the blue one, these are downstream recurring donors. This is what kind of everybody else said, which is someone who. has given in some degree before some capacity before, but they gave in one time capacity. And now they're upgrading to become recurring. Maybe that's two weeks down the road. Maybe it's two years down the road. There are downstream recurring donor. We're gonna look at these two categories for a few moments here. Those three organizations we looked at at the very beginning that are seeing growth despite not having brand names for their program and not having big incentive packages and products. Here's some of their deeper dive performance. Organization number one, keep in mind, they're a large organization, they're a legacy organization. They started turning on recurring giving 10, 12 years ago, something like that. So big pool of existing donors, trying to move a lot of them into a recurring giving program. What they find in their data is that 96% of their recurring donors started as a one time donor. For them, historically, it's more effective to go to your existing donor pool and ask them to upgrade. Okay, this is why no one's wrong in your answers because it's nuanced, it's different from organization to organization. This is the importance of understanding our data, having it at our fingertips to visualize what's really happening to build out segmentation, personalization, all that sort of stuff. Organization two, again, a new organization, new in the past three to four years, it's pretty much split. About half of their recurring donors start as a recurring donor, about half of them start as a one time donor. So they got flows on each side, trying to acquire them and bring them in, also trying to upgrade new ones. This might be the healthiest approach. I'm just gonna guess at that. This other organization, the third one, they're pretty unique. They're kind of mid-sized. A lot of their donors are often temporary because they work in more of the health type of space. And so a lot of people giving are oftentimes giving because they have a friend or a family member or a loved one who's going through some type of health journey or a crisis. And ultimately, they choose to give once. And then they kind of back up and they say peace out and they go somewhere else. So they struggle with retention, that's kind of just part of the nuance of their program. What they see is that only 19% of their recurring donors start as a one time donor. Their best acquisition source of a recurring donor is going straight to new people that are just showing up. So depending on your context, your organization, this might be different for you. So everybody's answer is probably right to some degree, but we have to understand this inside of our own programs. We need this data at our fingertips in order to understand where to go next, how to build our segmentation. Here's another interesting question. What's the most valuable source of recurring donors? So there's a slightly different approach to the question. One is who's most likely to give one. Now who's most likely to give more? Any thoughts on this one? Most valuable source of recurring giving. Not your scare because the answer isn't nuanced, right? Existing donors. Anyone want to challenge that? I'm going to go with the gay people again. Engaged people. That's great. All good answers. Again, the answers might be nuanced, but there's starting to see-- there's more data work to be done-- but starting to see a bit of a trend in the answer to this question. This organization, again, the big legacy organization. Here's what they're seeing. They're instant recurring donors, the people that show up and give for the first time as a recurring donor, they give 20% more than the donors that are upgraded from one time. So their best acquisition source was existing donors, but their most valuable recurring donor is someone who's new. That's pretty interesting. It's kind of nuanced. We have to know this in our own data to know where to go, where to target. This organization and that one, they both have the same sort of trend going on, where their most valuable ones are the people who have given before that they've upgraded. Again, I've not done the full macro data analysis to fully understand what's the trend across the industry. Annac, totally what I'm starting to see more of, is more organizations look like these latter two, where your most valuable recurring donor is often times someone who has given once before, they like dip the toe in. They're like testing it out. This looks interesting. I want to give to it, but then they get into your cultivation flows and they start to understand who you are and they start to understand the real meaningful impact of their gift so that when they give that recurring gift, they give it a higher level. Rather than trying to upgrade an existing recurring donor to a higher level, which is harder. So this might actually be your most valuable flow is how do you take your existing donors and then upgrade them into recurring? That might be the way to see the most value from your recurring giving program. So this is kind of a key principle to jot down or keep in mind, your most valuable recurring donor might already give to you. We just need to figure out how to ask them in the appropriate and effective way. So to put this campaign together and we're going to move fast, I've got seven steps for you. Step one, we need to use our analytics to understand who's most likely to become a recurring donor and who's most valuable. Just like we just looked at, there's lots of ways to do this. You can go pull lists and spreadsheets from your donation platform, from your CRM, from your email engagement data, try to merge all that sort of stuff. There's lots of ways to get at this. A lot of times it's really hard and that's a lot of manual effort. Quick screenshot, just from avid, it puts this data at your fingertips, answering these questions, which lifecycle segments are most likely to convert into recurring? Who is most likely to convert, is it instant or is it downstream? Who's the most valuable type of recurring donor? Even things into specific channels, what channels are most effective for recurring acquisition? And all these you can click in, you can drill in, you can deep dive, you can build audience segments, all that sort of stuff. But we have to start here answering these data questions. Step two, we have to set a goal for our campaign. This type of campaign is most effective if you have a clear goal. Not a revenue goal, but a specific number of donors. We're looking for 30 new monthly giving partners. That, excuse me, that type of goal. There's lots of ways you can go about setting a goal. If you have not run this type of a campaign before, you have no baseline as to what to expect. One thing you might do is go look at your conversion rate for existing appeals. Go look at how existing donors respond when you go send out an email appeal or a direct mail appeal. What's the conversion rates? It's going to help give you some of these insights as to what should I expect? And maybe you temper expectations. Maybe you say, OK, we'll take 40% of our average response. We'll set that as our goal, keeping in mind you can always add a stretch goal later. Better to set small and grow, then to set big, and like totally miss it. So that's step two. Step three, as we've talked about, you got to lock in your value proposition. This is like the most important thing, thinking about not just your overall campaign, but also those different nuanced segments. Questions to ask, what unique impact is going to be made by someone giving monthly? How is it different from giving a one-time gift? Can you quantify the impact? Can you quantify the additional impact of a monthly gift versus a one-time? Are there unique incentives if you start donating monthly? Again, you don't need to have a product. You don't need to have a million incentives. But incentives can help do one of two things. They can help people say, yes, now, rather than later. So speed up the conversion process. Or it might actually help them choose to give a little bit more rather than less. But again, the incentive is not the reason to give. It is a way to get people to say, yes, faster, or give a little bit more. Lastly, can you quantify the impact of various giving levels? What happens if I give $20 a month, $30 a month, $40, $50, et cetera, all these things can help you start to think through your value proposition messaging and make it tactical and meaningful for someone. Step four, and you're going to see, we're getting nuanced and getting into a lot of different work that goes into these campaigns. Drafting your copy for the primary recurring giving donation page. There's a-- I have a whole hour long session on what these pages should look like. I'm going to show you three specific things that we should think about on these pages. We're going to go really fast here. I'll just put them right up on this screen. Number one, someone just asked this question, should we be defaulting the page to a monthly gift? If you've made a direct call to action to give a monthly gift, absolutely. Default that page to a monthly. You might even get rid of the one-time option. Make it abundantly clear in your headline, in your copy, in your call to action. Over and over, repeat that it's a monthly gift. We have to set the proper expectation. Otherwise, someone might sign up, realize later, oh no, this was monthly, and then they want to cancel. And now we've undone all the good work that we thought we did in the campaign. One test actually saw this lead to a 339% increase in donations by just affirming at every step. This is a monthly gift. Number two, we've talked about this over and over today. But craft is unique, differentiated value proposition. One test saw this lead to 138% increase in donations by leading into differentiation. How is it more impactful to give monthly than one time? And then even down below, it's different in the transaction the anxiety level of the donor. If I am giving you a one-time gift, you're charging my card one time. If I'm giving you a monthly gift, you're storing my payment information, and you're going to charge me every month. So my anxiety level, my fear level, is very different. I need to be affirmed that my card's going to be safe. I'm not going to be double charged. My information's not going to be stolen. You don't even have to improve the security of the page. We're going to assume it's secure. Just put a little messaging up there that says, your information is going to be safe and secure and held private. That sort of thing helps reduce anxiety. And in some cases, significant boost to donations and conversions. So there's a few little things to tweak and to try on these pages to give yourself the best chance of winning over a current donor. Step five, draft all your copy. Pretty straightforward. We've got to get that done. Here's your five emails. We need to start with a story of impact. We're not even talking about a campaign yet. We're just cultivating. Many, many experiments and tests have shown that more cultivation leads to more people giving over time and even in your next appeal. It's really hard to measure the direct impact of cultivation. So sometimes we don't index enough on it. But if you look at the long term and the long tail impact of sending more cultivation messaging, stories of impact, testimonials, inviting
don't are in, asking for their thoughts, asking for their feedback, it leads to greater returns every time. So we're starting with gold evasion. You send a campaign, kick off email, it says, "Hey, here's what our goal is, here's why we think you should give, here's the deadline, all the details, additional incentives, that sort of thing, big kick off email to start the campaign." On day nine, send a testimonial email. It's just a story of impact. You could throw a little PS in there like, "Okay, if this is meaningful to you, if you want to help more people like this, you can give a monthly gift personally. I like to keep cultivation as cultivation and let it stand on its own." But definitely throw a testimonial in there, giving more context to show the impact of the gift, boosting credibility. The reply back email, this is my favorite kind of email. Does anyone send these? Are you actually asked the donor to hit the reply button? Jody does, I know he does. Yes, awesome, there's a few of us. These are super powerful, but they're also really hard to manage sometimes because you get all these responses back. There's ways to kind of triage messages that come in. You can have a part time around your staff that's looking through their responses, sending some canned replies. Most replies back are going to be, "Hey, thanks for this information. I'll consider it." But opening the door to a one-to-one conversation, just like we would with a mid-level donor, a major donor, establishing that there's a trusted relationship, goes so far to getting more people to sign up and say, "Yes, whether they sign up right away," or they might ask you a question and say, "I'm really interested in this. I have this concern. That concern can you help me?" That just opens the door, builds trust. Someone said, "Trust earlier as a key factor," and moves people towards giving. Then finally, after all this cultivation, establishing trust, building the relationship, close with a high- urgency deadline email, talking about the deadline that's coming up, asking them for a clear donation, all that sort of stuff to boost urgency, as you know, well in those high- urgency campaigns. That's your whole campaign from the email perspective. This is the core of your messaging, the core of the outbound channels. Step six, though, is, oh man. Now we've got to talk about segmentation. You might have a lot of segments. You started in the day to see who's most valuable, who's most likely to upgrade. You might have three, four, five different segments across your five different emails. Now this is stacking up and starting to sound scary because that's a lot of copy that you now have to write and review and set up and approve. But segmentation is critical in 2025, where everybody expects an absolute personalized experience. It's one to one. You know me. I know you. If you mess up, then it's really scary because then people are upset that you don't know them personally. This is tricky to do, but it's now required in 2025. It was required 10 years ago. Let's be real. But it's definitely required today. And then step seven, you've got all the other supporting channels. Yes, you need emails. Yes, you need donation pages. You might drop a postcard. You might send some kind of direct mail appeal. You might put some pop-ups and you'll banners on your website. You might send some SMS text messages out to people you have phone numbers for to cultivate and to prompt them about the deadline. You might, doesn't even know what slide broadcast is. A few of us. Yeah, it's awesome because it takes the whole concept of let's call our donors because that's going to lead to more people converting and more people retaining. Lots of research around that. It allows you to do it at scale, dropping a voicemail message directly in their voicemail box without you having to dial every single phone number and call and all that stuff. So it gets you many steps closer to like direct personalization, but doing it at scale. Super powerful tool. So I would recommend all these different channels in your campaign to run an effective fundraising campaign in 2025. I've got a little worksheet for you. We don't have a tremendous amount of time to go through it, but I will give you a couple of moments here. I put this worksheet together for you. There's a quick little form to fill out. First name and email and then you've got options to either grab this into like Google Drive or download a PDF. I'll get down to the way. This is going to help you walk through. Whether you fill it all out today or you take it back and you work on it, thinking through your value proposition, thinking through what channels you're going to use, what segments you're going to use, what emails are you going to send, all that sort of stuff. So please go grab this and you can use this for the next few minutes to kind of work on your outline of your campaign. So I'll give you a moment to scan this, make sure you get it, maybe start in on your outline, we'll take two or three minutes here and then we'll wrap up with some kind of closing thoughts and some concluding questions, things like that. Sound good? All right. So get to work on filling out your outline for the next few minutes. Let's move on. We'll kind of move to wrap up here. Some things to think about. I mean, even just as we went there, we had a lot of steps in that process. There's a lot of copy to write. There's a lot of creative. I want to put that in terms of numbers for you to create. I think you'll feel maybe some of the tension because who feels like they have all the resources they need right now to do every part of their job super well. All of us, we are, yeah, we're crushing it, right? Nobody feels burnt out at all. We're just, we're rocking. Yeah, okay, cool. Here's basic requirements for this campaign. You got five emails. You got one donation page. You got one voice mail message and you got two SMS messages. Maybe one early in the campaign to kind of like warn people up, cultivate, share that testimonial link and then one at the end to go remind of the deadline. Even if they don't give through the message, they might be prompted to give through another channel. Now, you add in your segmentation, right? Let's see, you got three segments. Whew. It's a lot more work now. Uh-oh. Add into this. Okay, we've also got other channels we should probably put in the mix. Maybe got social posts. You're going to work in there. Six might be the minimum over a two week campaign, posting here and everywhere about why someone should become a recurring donor, sharing your testimonial store, maybe sharing a video, that sort of thing. You might have some retargeting ads running during this time. You might jump into meta advertising and go push your target list in there to run some cultivation ads, some branding campaign, maybe some direct asks. You go test a few different approaches to the creative. That's more time and effort and energy and creative and copy and all that sort of fun stuff. Tracking analytics. Oh my goodness. It's a lot. At least one website banner. This is probably like the bare essentials, right, to running a campaign like this. And that's a lot of work. I attempted to the best of my ability. Actually, I'll show you this. This just made me laugh as practicing this and rehearsing like, it just feels like we're the very hungry fundraiser. One piece of chocolate cake, one slice of Swiss cheese. I had my five-year-old just finished kindergarten and she's like so proud of learning how to read. She read me this book the other night so it's just top of mind. But very hungry caterpillar. I got to love it. I did my best to put some time estimates in here of like, okay, what's the bare minimum to go get all this creative put together? It's a lot, right? Time to create for an email from everything from writing it to editing it, to getting the right approvals, to setting it up in mail, chimp or constant contact or whatever you use. One and a half, is that, is that low? I think it might actually be low all in. So these are probably like the bare minimum estimates. Times the amount of them you need if you're running three different segments, you're total time on the right. Whoo, bare minimum. This is like a full week of dedicated time and energy and effort because 33 is probably not even accurate. It's probably higher than that. Does this feel right from the amount of time? Who feels like they have a full week to burn on this campaign? Jody does. Go talk to him. You have to help you. This is a lot. And we're not even talking about time for all the segmentation, all the list building, cleaning it up, pushing it out to the different channels. If you want to go A, B test, any of your messaging, which you absolutely should to know that it is actually working. I guarantee you your gut instinct is not always right. We have to challenge it and test it to see what works. So we're not even cleaning all that work in this kind of time estimate. This is a lot. Because I just passed few months talking to a lot more fund raises about this type of thing. A lot of people feel overwhelmed. Is this fair? This is not a real person, by the way. That's AI generated. She's very afraid. Even the AI is afraid. We're overwhelmed already. Nobody has the time to burn on a campaign like this. Even though we just look to have valuable it is, this is the right thing to do if we want to have sustainable, emotional impact. But we don't have time for it. This is where I've kind of been concluding just the past few months talking to more fund raises about the current state of fundraising in 2025. We've probably felt this way 10 years ago also. We've probably always felt this way quite honestly. Modern fundraising today requires more review than you have time for. Even if you're at a small organization all the way up to like a $100 million plus organization you got a team of 20 to 30 people, we all feel the same thing. I don't have enough resources for the scale that my organization and mission needs me to operate at in order to grow and be successful to have true meaningful sustainable impact. We don't have enough in us to get it done. That's the reality. We need more things to be done for us. Again, it's 2025. There's some conversations today and at this conference about AI and the tools that are available to us to go make us more effective, make us more efficient. I would suggest to us we have kind of a crisis in our industry in the nonprofit world around a lot of things quite honestly. But on the data side, does anyone feel like their data is in chaos? Their systems are in chaos. So they're going right up as fast as possible. Our systems are in chaos. They need clarity. We need them to talk to each other and most of them don't. It's really frustrating when we're trying to get to the level of segmentation that we need for these types of campaigns. On the strategy side, oftentimes because we are so focused on hitting this year's budget and solving funding problems that are right here right now, we get stuck in short-term thinking that is not your fault. That is ultimately, I think, the fault of the technology that's serving us because we don't often have the tools to help us get our eyes up and look at how is what I'm doing right now actually impacting the long-term health of my mission. How does this campaign we're talking about impact my results three years down the road? Because the reality is, you might see a small bump in your giving this year, but you're going to see major returns next year, year two, year three. We get so stuck at looking at the 12-month cycle as opposed to the three years.
to five year that sometimes we can make the wrong decision today if we're thinking about long-term impact. So our missions require long-term thinking and sometimes our tools don't enable us to do that. Execution, again, we're all under-resourced. You need more focus, you need more efficiency. So my quick little plug for you thinking about AVID, I don't think that the solution is just more random AI tools and other little like widgets and features to go add to your text stack. I think the solution is that we need an actual system to go run our fundraising programs on top of. So AVID is bringing all these tools under one roof, aggregating all your tools, finally connecting them and making them talk together, everything from your donation forms to your ads to your emails, your analytics, your CRM, all the other like lingering CSV files you have in a downloads folder or somewhere this that in the other place, making it all work and talk to each other, visualizing what's happening using intelligence, using AI-driven tools to show you what's working, what's not, where do we go next? Customize not just to your organization but to you because the needs of a gift officer are different than the chief development officer, are different than the digital fundraising manager, you all have different needs and need different insights. So it's customized to you. Automatically, building out all these segments that we just talked about, syncing them to the proper channel so you don't have to do the late night list pull to get the suppression list so you don't email all the people that already gave and make them really mad because you keep asking them for money. That's just done for you in the background, segmentation, automation and then ultimately, we need campaigns that build themselves. If we're expected to go spend 40 hours a week just writing copy and creative, that's not sustainable and you can go use chat GPD to help you and that's great but ultimately chat GPD isn't talk to the rest of your systems because they don't even talk to each other in the first place. We need campaigns that understand what's working, what's not, where do we go and that's what that's what avid provides. In fact, if you look up there, that's the whole playbook that we just talked about, the whole recurring giving acquisition campaign. You go click on that and it builds your whole campaign for you. All you got to do is edit and hit deploy. It's like magic, but it's called avid. Strategy, creation, deployment. I'll leave you with those things to think on. If you want to talk more about how avid can fit into your program into your fundraising work, we can absolutely have a conversation. We've got some time, I think, for a few questions. We've got a booth out there we can chat to, but I want to give you a chance to get this ebook. This is some of our thinking on just what does the future look like if we truly empower our teams with AI tools. There's so much conversation around AI and the ethics of it and the applications of it and all that sort of stuff, but it is absolutely undeniably the future. It's also the present really. So, if you're interested in learning more about that, you can scan that QR code, grab this ebook and learn a little bit more. I'll get out of your way to scan that QR code. Learn a little bit more about what does the present and the future look like as we really empower our teams with these AI tools that are coming on the market to hopefully help us and not you take over the world, but fingers crossed. Cool. That's all I got for you today. Thank you so much for joining me and going through this conversation I'm recurring giving. I really hope it's helpful for you. Well, that's all for today. This has been a live recording from one of the sessions at the Build Good Summit. If you want to be part of next year's Build Good Summit, just go to buildgoodsubmit.com and hit, you know, maybe there's like a join the wait list button or maybe there's a pop-up that comes up depending on when you're listening to this. Just enter your email there and we're already working on it and we're going to announce the dates very soon and we're going to do a private launch first with deeply discounted tickets for listeners of this podcast and people in the Build Good Universe. So make sure you sign up for those updates so you don't miss that. As always, thank you for hanging out with us around the fundraising campfire. If you're listening to this, you're my kind of people and you're kind of people. Thank you for the work you do. I'm your host, Mike Durgson, cheering you on as you build Good In The World.
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