How Let’s Save the Strays uses video to thank donors better

Marissa Johnson: Hi, everybody. Happy to have you. If you’re unsure where you are, you’re in the Bloomerang customer spotlight webinar. We’re going to be talking about how Let’s Save the Strays International uses video to thank their donors better, and we’re very excited to have Amy here. Before we get too deep into it, we’re going to start with some housekeeping.

We are recording this webinar, and we will send you a video recording and a copy of the slides later today. If you have any questions, the best way to ask is with the Q&A option in Zoom. You can use the chat for more general discussion.

We have a little agenda going today. We treat our customer spotlight webinars like a live case study. We’ll start with Amy telling us about Let’s Save the Strays’ mission, and maybe you’ll find some similarities to your own organization’s challenges or successes. Then we’ll chat with Amy and our product marketing team member Tiara to explore the product a little and talk about how Let’s Save the Strays has found success with mobile video acknowledgments. Just as we partner with Let’s Save the Strays, we take on your mission, struggles and goals as our own, because Bloomerang is built for fundraisers by fundraisers. Finally, we’ll close out with about fifteen minutes for Q&A. Again, the best way to ask those questions is with the Q&A option here in Zoom.

Now, our speakers. I apologize if there’s an echo. Is everyone hearing an echo? I’m not hearing one, but if you are, you may try turning your volume down a little. I’m going to go ahead and introduce everyone.

Dr. Amy Shroff, VMD, is the founder and president of Let’s Save the Strays International. This is a volunteer-led nonprofit focused on humane population control and rabies prevention through the TNVR method, which is trap, neuter, vaccinate and return. She is a Massachusetts-based veterinarian who previously owned the Veterinary Emergency and Specialty Center of New England before dedicating her work to global animal welfare. Through her organization, she works with local teams to serve the underserved and improve the lives of free-roaming dogs, while building strong connections with the donors who make the work possible.

Next, we’ve got Tiara Stephan. She is on our product marketing team, and she is passionate about helping nonprofits find the right partner to make fundraising smarter and easier so they can stay focused on doing good. And I am Marissa Johnson. I’m on the customer marketing team, and I work with customers like Amy to share these types of success stories. I also manage customer reviews and referrals, so if my photo looks familiar, you may have gotten one of those campaigns from me. We’ll move on to Amy.

Amy Shroff: Thanks, everybody, for coming. I really appreciate this opportunity. Bloomerang reached out to me to talk about this because we record a lot of thank-you videos, and it’s very easy to do. We’ll talk about that later in the webinar.

First, a brief history of Let’s Save the Strays International. My training is in emergency and critical care. I’m not a boarded specialist by any means, but I used to own a large twenty-four-hour veterinary hospital that I sold to BluePearl Veterinary Partners. After that, I wanted to give back. That was in 2013. My family on my dad’s side is from Mumbai, India, and that’s where I learned a lot about trap, neuter, vaccinate and release work as a way to humanely manage the free-roaming dog population that exists in Asia and many parts of the world.

In the United States, some states have more free-roaming dogs than others, but in much of the West we don’t necessarily see that. In Asia, especially, there are quite a few. There are probably more dogs than there are people and cats. In some of these countries, namely Myanmar, culling or poisoning was the familiar way of controlling the populations. We know that it’s inhumane, and some of you may not know this, but it doesn’t work. These animals reproduce constantly. Sadly, the average puppy in these countries, especially Myanmar, only lives a few months. So how can we control the population in a humane way, stop the suffering, and also address rabies, which kills thousands of children, dogs and cats every year?

I started volunteering in Thailand, also volunteered in India, and then went to Myanmar. For me, Myanmar is the most important focus for Let’s Save the Strays International, because no one else goes there. We are the only large international group doing this kind of work. We treat about six hundred animals a month in two cities, and the work is locally led. There aren’t foreigners going in to do it. It’s Burmese veterinarians, Burmese nurses, street feeders and volunteers who do this work every month. We’ve treated about thirty thousand animals now, probably closer to thirty-five or forty thousand, since we started in 2017.

I love that we work with local communities, because that’s what makes it sustainable. That’s what makes it last, and that’s what makes it work. Other large organizations have tried to work in Myanmar, but my thought was, let’s just show the country how it works by starting to do it. We don’t have a memorandum of understanding with the government yet. We’re working on it. But by having local people do this work, we’re engaging other local people, and it keeps growing. I’m the one heading the whole thing in terms of helping the organization work to international standards of surgery, sterility, pain control, ethics and humane handling.

We’ve also started doing education. We hold monthly education days in the government schools with about a hundred kids in each city each month, because these are the children who live among these animals. We teach them why TNVR is important and how to handle a bite, because dogs are the number one vector for rabies transmission, and children are the group most likely to succumb to the disease in Myanmar. By teaching them humane care and what to do if they’re bitten, they’ll talk with their parents about it too.

The last thing we do is mentor veterinary students. These were not my ideas. They were ideas from the team in country. There’s only one veterinary school, and they don’t have an active surgical training program. So the students come every month. Some of them take an eight-hour bus ride, and we house them and feed them. They work in our TNVR days. They start off as assistants, then move to anesthesia, and we train them. A lot of them have joined us afterward. It’s been a wonderful experience for them too. If you’ve been on our social media pages or our website, we have a lot of photos of that work.

Myanmar is also one of the poorest countries in Southeast Asia, and it’s in the middle of what they say is the world’s longest civil war. There’s active fighting, not where we are in Yangon and Mandalay, but in other parts of the country, and it’s severe. It’s among the top three countries for the most severe humanitarian crisis, next to Gaza and Syria. It’s just not a country that gets talked about much, because there aren’t a lot of international stakeholders interested in Myanmar. It suffers a little bit in silence, until today, where we’re getting a chance to let people know about it.

We’re all volunteers here in the United States. We do pay the teams in Myanmar, but about ninety to ninety-three cents out of every dollar goes directly to the program, so we’re really excited about that.

Marissa Johnson: That’s amazing, Amy. Thank you so much for sharing. I’m really struck by the idea that you have veterinary students taking an eight-hour ride to come. That just shows how impactful and important the work is that you’re doing. It makes a huge difference.

Amy Shroff: They’re amazing. They have so much drive and so much compassion. It’s an amazing country. It really is. It stole my heart.

Marissa Johnson: It’s very cheesy, the “teach a man to fish” idea versus feeding him for a day, but it’s cheesy because it’s true. You’re not just coming in and fixing things. You’re teaching them how to do it for the future.

Amy Shroff: How to have a country solve its own problems. I think the goal is to change the mindset of how a country sees its free-roaming animals. And we can’t keep up with all of the requests to do this work.

Marissa Johnson: Wow. That’s great. And that’s why you’re fundraising, right? To keep spreading it.

Amy Shroff: That’s right.

Marissa Johnson: Amazing. Thank you for sharing that mission with us. It’s really powerful, and you’ve offered some helpful context for the conversation today. I’m going to pass the mic over to Tiara, who has some questions about your use of Bloomerang, and we’ll jump right into the focus of today’s webinar, mobile video acknowledgments.

Tiara Stephan: Absolutely. First off, thank you so much, Amy, for taking time out of your day, your week, your busy month to speak with us about this today. And thank you to everybody else for being here as well.

I’m really passionate about mobile video acknowledgments. For a little background, I’m part of the team that helped launch it, and I got to test it in its early stages, so I know why I love it. But Amy, I want to hear from you about why you love it. We have a dashboard where we keep track of usage, and you are our primary power user. I think you’ve sent about two hundred and eighty mobile video acknowledgments since we launched in October. What is it about mobile video acknowledgments that you really love using?

Amy Shroff: We were with Network for Good, and the one feature we really loved there was that you could use your phone to record, in real time, wherever you are, a quick thank-you to a donor. It’s a little different with Bloomerang, but I use it on my phone. You can also take that opportunity to tell them a story about what’s going on that particular month. We have thirty to thirty-five regular donors, and I’d like more. When they donate every month, I don’t want to send the same video every month, so I try to record a different story.

When we joined Bloomerang, back when it was Bloomerang and Bloomerang Fundraising, you didn’t have that feature, but you said you were working on it. I was in Myanmar in November when I saw it come across, but the Wi-Fi there is not great. I think I recorded one video, but I wasn’t sure it ever worked. As soon as I got back, probably in December, we just started doing it, because it’s really easy to do. Our outreach coordinator, Dana Leppler, records a lot of the videos too, so it’s not just me.

I think it’s a really unique, heartfelt and personal way to thank people. I donate to quite a few organizations as well, and you get the “thanks so much for donating” message. You don’t even look at that. But this is a way to create a relationship. This is a way to build something bigger than just a thank-you. People want to know that they are donating to something that really has impact.

As you can tell, I talk a lot, and Erin will certainly confirm that based on family discussions, but I don’t have a problem thanking people. I’ve done it in person, I’ve done it with my dog, I’ve done it in different locations about the house. Now, when I go back to Myanmar, I’ll be doing it from there.

Tiara Stephan: Amazing. I love that. I was definitely testing it out, and I grabbed my roommate’s cat and pretended to film a video acknowledgment with her. It was so easy to do. I think the number of video acknowledgments you send really speaks to that ease of use. Along those lines, how do you decide who gets a mobile video acknowledgment? You’re sending out a ton.

Amy Shroff: Bloomerang makes it easy. On the app on your phone, you click on it, and there’s an activity section. You click on that, and it has the whole list of people. We’re doing it for every donation. Our goal, obviously, is to grow, and at some point, when we have many more donors, which we’d love, we’ll have to figure out how to handle it. I don’t know whether it’s prerecorded, or maybe we have more people doing it. That’s what I would love, more people doing it. But right now, we just do it for everyone.

The rule of thumb, as we all know, is to do this within twenty-four to forty-eight hours after the donation. We’re not always able to do that. Sometimes it’s a few days after, sometimes a week. But we do it, and I’ve gotten really wonderful feedback. In the video I’ll say, “Can you let me know that you got this video?” Some people respond and some people don’t, but my hope is that everyone is getting it and seeing it.

It’s really about who’s on the list. As a matter of fact, we have a wine tasting event on May ninth, for those of you in Massachusetts or New England who’d like to come. Even for the people who have registered, where there’s no donation yet, I send a quick video: “So excited that you’re coming. Can’t wait to see you. Bring all your friends.” It’s not hard. It does require a little bit of time, but if you have a group of people who want to do it, you can split it up. You can also re-record, and you can customize the message that goes along with it. It’s really great.

Tiara Stephan: Even if you’re sending it a week after a donation, I think the video acknowledgment format in and of itself helps those thank-yous stand out to your donors. Can you tell me more about the response you’ve received from sending them?

Amy Shroff: Some people don’t respond. Some people aren’t always opening their email. But the people I’ve asked to respond do. They usually say, “Thank you so much for this fun video,” or “this great video.” And they usually answer the question I have for them at the time. I’ve only been home since December, but as we’re talking, I’m thinking about other ways we can use these thank-you videos to answer questions, tell more stories and learn more about the donor. It becomes a little bit of a back-and-forth conversation, because we do this for our regular donors. I’ll say, “Hey, it’s me again,” and I want to make it interesting. People will engage if you make it interesting.

Tiara Stephan: One hundred percent. I love that even as you get bigger, you want to keep sending these to as many donors as you can. As you continue to grow, what do you envision these videos looking like? Are you sending them from volunteers in Myanmar? From your house? How are you going to split that up among your staff?

Amy Shroff: Right now we’re relatively small. Someone asked whether it can be sent via text. I don’t know. It just goes right through the app, so it goes as an email. As for growth, I think we’d have more volunteers do it. We’d probably just segment it out. I would love to have the people in Myanmar do it, but that’s a good question, and maybe it’s something for you to answer, because I’m not sure how prerecorded would work. It would have to be prerecorded if it were Myanmar. We did do some thank-you videos with the team when I was there, but not using the app. If there were a way to do something prerecorded, I could get the team involved, and it would be super special for donors to get a thank-you from the team directly.

Tiara Stephan: Absolutely. Prerecorded is not something we can do quite yet, but the team is a hundred percent aware of it. We’ve gotten so many requests for that from people who have started using mobile video acknowledgments. The team is definitely looking into it, and we’ll provide updates as we continue down that path.

Going back to the content of the videos and how you connect with your donors, what makes a good thank-you video, to you?

Amy Shroff: Making it unique each time. There’s the straightforward “Thank you so, so much, we’re so grateful that you took the time to donate.” But also talk about what makes your organization different. I think just saying thank you is almost not enough. You want to talk a little about the impact, about what it means. Our minimum monthly donation is thirty dollars a month. Thirty dollars a month is all it takes to spay or neuter, vaccinate, deworm and give flea and tick medication to one dog, and that’s a gift that keeps giving. So each month I try to say something unique and different. It’s really off the cuff. I don’t rehearse it.

I think it’s about taking the opportunity to tell a story, to say something brief and unique each time. Like, “We saved this many dogs this month,” or “We were in this location.” Make each one unique, always be thankful, of course, and say key things, like “partnership.” I ask myself, what would I want to hear if I got a thank-you video? I put myself in the donor’s spot.

Tiara Stephan: Absolutely. Authenticity, and making it so personal, is a really great way to connect with donors. I love that you’re making videos from different places in your house. It brings those donors into the behind-the-scenes work you do as a fundraiser.

Amy Shroff: Someone asked about the monthly donation. We ask for a thirty-dollar minimum to become part of our Stray Guardian Circle, which is our monthly donor group. Thirty dollars is the number because that’s what it costs to treat one animal. But you could donate two dollars. It doesn’t matter. If you want to make a one-off donation, that’s so kind.

It’s about authenticity and being personal. And it’s okay if it isn’t perfect. As Erin probably knows, we have a beagle, and she snores. She might be behind me right now. I was recording a video in my kitchen for someone I know, because I do know a lot of these donors, and Mary Anne was snoring. I stopped and said, “If you can hear that, that’s Mary Anne from Thailand. She’s snoring in the background, and she’s a rescue.” It doesn’t have to be perfect. I don’t even wear makeup all the time.

I love the idea, for organizations that work with groups in country, of being where you’re doing your work. Obviously, Myanmar is far away for me, but be where you can do your work, and show that. Just show the work you’re doing.

Tiara Stephan: One hundred percent. One of the primary reasons we made this available on the mobile app, before thinking about desktop, is that you can take your phone to work with you. You can show the animals you’re working with and the people you’re working with, live in real time, and send that out to your donors so they actually get to see your work in action. That’s one of my favorite parts about this feature.

Amy Shroff: I’m also thinking, and maybe this is something for the future, let’s say I’m in Myanmar and I want to send a video. Here, it’s after a donation, and I understand it as a thank-you video. Is there a way to do something live, or something where you can tag your donors? I know we have social media and the blog, but I don’t know. Just food for thought. It’s a wonderful feature. It really is.

Tiara Stephan: Love to hear that. Marissa, should we move on to the next slide?

Marissa Johnson: We’re going to talk about what challenges Bloomerang is helping you solve, both with Bloomerang overall and with mobile video acknowledgments. I know you mentioned you were using Network for Good before Bloomerang. What drew you to Network for Good, and what made the move to Bloomerang possible for you?

Amy Shroff: When we first started, there weren’t as many CRMs or donor management systems out there as there are now. It’s really changed. We didn’t know any better, so we interviewed a bunch and decided to go with Network for Good. In the beginning it was great. But as organizations get bigger, how do you maintain that personal touch, that live customer service from a knowledgeable group of people who can help you? It worked for a while, but as they were growing and changing, the customer service really declined. We had some issues getting paperwork and things to donors, and that left a bad taste in some donors’ mouths. So we thought we needed to move on. I know Network for Good has made some changes for the better, but that’s when we did a deep dive and interviewed different groups, and that’s how we found Bloomerang and Bloomerang Fundraising at the time. They were separate then, but now you’re all one, which is great.

Now we’re using Bloomerang. We have a fundraising coordinator who is ex-USAID, and she’s super savvy. She has helped us analyze our donor data and maximize our use of Bloomerang, and I still don’t think we’ve used it maximally. It has so much functionality that we haven’t taken full advantage of. But it has really helped us reach out to donors, whether through the email portion or a survey we did through Bloomerang and SurveyMonkey. It’s also been a great resource for seeing where donors are in their ability to give. There’s a rating for each donor so you can see what kind of donor they might be, which helps in targeting different people. It’s been great for reaching out to our donors, especially with video.

Marissa Johnson: Love to hear that. Beyond the thank-you videos, there is so much more to Bloomerang than mobile video acknowledgments. How is Bloomerang helping you solve some of the communication challenges nonprofits regularly come up against?

Amy Shroff: We use the email feature quite a bit. We send out regular emails, which is great. And all the reporting has been really super. It has a really nice reporting functionality.

For us, the challenge is telling the story. Why does Myanmar matter? There are so many nonprofits out there, so many animal welfare organizations doing work. Why does Let’s Save the Strays International matter? These are all real photos of real animals. See that beautiful incision? You can barely see it. Really gorgeous. That dog was spayed, and this little guy is showing the dog’s incision. This is a photo that was sent to me by the team. Bridging that gap and helping to tell the story is a really key function.

Then there’s keeping track of donors, being able to make reports using different filters. Do we want to reach out to our international base, or our New England base? You can focus your communications on lots of different groups of people you want to target. It’s been a great resource for communicating, monitoring and assessing our donor base, and helping us tell the story.

Marissa Johnson: I love it. I’ve been seeing in the chat and the Q&A that we’re getting so many requests for more information about mobile video acknowledgments, so we’re going to skip ahead a little, show everybody, and then come back to these questions. Is that okay, Amy?

Amy Shroff: I’m yours. It’s all good.

Tiara Stephan: Love that. Let me touch on this quickly to answer some of the questions we’re seeing. Mobile video acknowledgments is a way to create authentic thank-you videos to donors, from anywhere, through the Bloomerang CRM mobile app in particular. You can record, send and then track the performance of those videos within the app. It automatically connects to your CRM, so you can look at donors who have given recently and click the video button. An interface comes up where you can record a video with your front-facing camera. I’m not sure how many people have taken selfie videos before, but that’s basically what it is. Once you’re done filming, it takes you to a page where you can send an email along with the video, saying, “Thank you so much for your thirty-dollar donation,” or “your three-hundred-dollar donation, we really appreciated hearing from you.” You can address your donors by name. It’s a very personal way to thank a donor.

You can review the video before it’s sent, Katie. Yes, you absolutely can. We also have a short one-minute video that gives an overview of what the interface looks like. It’s not a clear-cut demo, but it will give you an idea of what the experience is like. Marissa, do you have the video?

Marissa Johnson: One second. Let’s take a look at this video.

Tiara Stephan: I’m not sure if you can hear the sound, but what you’re seeing is donations rolling in. There’s a plus-video sign that shows up next to every donation. Once you click that, it brings up the front-facing camera view. Every video is sixty seconds long. We have a sixty-second limit because we want to encourage nonprofits to keep the video short, sweet and to the point. Then it comes up with the email subject and email body, which you can edit. Once you’re done, a check mark shows up next to the video button to let your staff know that a video has already been recorded. The video gets sent to your donors by email and shows up in their inbox. They can revisit it as many times as they want. It is theirs in perpetuity.

Hopefully that answers some questions. Sarah, it is not sent to groups. It is sent to one person. These videos are really intended to be very personalized. We will get around to everybody’s questions. Marissa is keeping track of everything in the chat and the Q&A. She is really great at that, so we’ll get to everything in the Q&A section. But I want to get back to our interview with Amy.

Marissa Johnson: I was going to say, is there anything you want me to show? I’m just scrubbing through here. I think it’s really helpful to see that you just click plus video and it’s really easy. I know it’s individual, but I think that makes it even more relationship-building. When you film individual videos, it does take some time, but Amy had a great suggestion of splitting that up among your staff or your board.

Tiara Stephan: Absolutely. We can scrub through and look at the specific steps during the Q&A, but I want to finish the interview with Amy first. Keep sending those questions. I love seeing the engagement in the chat. Marissa, can you go back to the challenges slide? I just want to wrap up a couple of questions there.

Marissa Johnson: Sorry for that little detour, Amy.

Amy Shroff: I could have shown one of my videos, but it doesn’t matter. Next time.

Tiara Stephan: A hundred percent. Next time we’ll send out a bunch of resources in a follow-up email so everybody gets a better idea of what mobile video acknowledgments are about.

My next question: how are you using Bloomerang for in-person fundraising and outreach? We’ve been talking primarily about mobile video acknowledgments, but you mentioned a wine tasting event coming up. How are you using Bloomerang to prepare for that?

Amy Shroff: Everything we do at Let’s Save the Strays International runs through Bloomerang. For all of our events, we have a sign-up, and the links and everything go through Bloomerang. With the wine tasting event, the link on our website is connected to Bloomerang. When the event happens, we’ll be able to easily download a list of registrants. It also captures all of their information. When people register through the link, they put in their information. They can even put in their financial information. We’ve done this for bigger events where people enter their financial information ahead of time. Some people want to, some people don’t, and it’s very secure. This way you have everything in one place. That’s how you build your donor base, by having people attend these events, and that’s our goal.

Our overarching goal with our donors this year is to get more regular donors, more monthly donors, and to grow our donor base. This event includes people we’ve never met before. Some are recurring donors who have come to other events, but a lot of them will be new. We’ll capture their information and profiles, and we won’t capture financial information until the end. There will be a QR code for donations at the end of the night. Clicking on that QR code takes them to a link where they can put in their financial information, again all through Bloomerang. Nothing really gets done without Bloomerang. It’s not only the donor profile information that’s stored, but also all the event sign-ups, the event reporting, the funds raised, and all the work we can do to assess that data afterward. It’s all there in Bloomerang. If somebody donates through a donor-advised fund, where they don’t do it through Bloomerang, our operations coordinator manually enters it in.

Tiara Stephan: Love to hear that. You’re speaking to something we’ve been striving for a long time, which is to make Bloomerang your one-stop shop.

Amy Shroff: One-stop shop. There’s an events module, and there’s even an auction module. This event won’t be an auction, but we may have one in the fall, in which case we’ll use Bloomerang that way.

Marissa Johnson: I would love to know, thinking back to before Bloomerang, when you were with Network for Good and doing everything without this one-stop shop, what has changed the most in how confident you feel running fundraising campaigns and engaging your donors?

Amy Shroff: Running a nonprofit was a new thing for me. I didn’t know anything about what it meant to run a nonprofit. Let’s Save the Strays started as a small, self-funded effort where we were doing TNVR on twenty animals a month. As it grew, we needed to become a nonprofit, a 501(c)(3). Then, how do we manage all these people? Everything from donor engagement to tax reporting. We have a bookkeeper and an accountant. We needed one place to generate all that information: seeing how donors have been donating, where and when, or whether they’ve lapsed, all the way through to generating reports for our accountant and bookkeeper.

I think any and all nonprofits need some sort of donor management system, and of course I stand by Bloomerang, because we love it. It’s hard because we’re a small, volunteer board, and I’ll be honest that a lot of this falls on me sometimes. But it’s important to have it and to take advantage of what Bloomerang can help you do. I’ll also say that the customer service aspect is essential: being able to reach out, ask questions, and get answers from real people with a relatively quick turnaround. That’s super important. It’s been a good experience overall.

Marissa Johnson: Love that. For another nonprofit that’s growing quickly and feeling really stretched, what would you tell them about choosing the right giving platform and the impact it makes?

Amy Shroff: I’m still feeling stretched. But yes, that’s really key. Take the time. It could be that you listen to this webinar and think, “Oh my gosh, Bloomerang’s the one for me.” I still encourage you to look at all of the different ones and interview them. Not every donor management system is right for every group. Bloomerang does work with a wide range of organizations, which is a good thing in terms of their knowledge. But take the time to look at different ones. Even ChatGPT will do an analysis for you. See what kind of customer support is offered and what kind of educational tools are offered. We started out with a board of family and friends, and now we’re growing, but all of you will be coming into it as a new organization. What’s the training like? What are the follow-up questions? How quickly can people get back to you? What are the people like that you’re speaking with about solving your problems? I think that’s really important.

We’ve been really happy with that. Sometimes we’ve had emergency needs, or maybe it always seems like an emergency, like “I need this question answered now.” Bloomerang has been really responsive. Not everybody can answer immediately, but they’ve been responsive, educating and offering tools to help us grow and engage our donors in a unique way. That’s important too.

Marissa Johnson: Definitely. I think our customer support team is one of the best out there, so I love hearing from you firsthand how helpful they’ve been. I know they’re all pros at what they do, so I’m going to pass that feedback along. What has Bloomerang made possible for your organization that felt out of reach before? I know you said you’re still feeling stretched, which every fundraiser does, but has Bloomerang helped you dream bigger and reach those goals?

Amy Shroff: We have a blog, and we do a lot of email outreach, because we have donors across the globe. We probably have just as many international donors as national ones. The email feature and all of the communication features have been really super in helping us expand and communicate. I know we’re talking about the video portion, and the video portion has been a real game changer. A super game changer.

The ability to keep track of and manage event registration has also been so easy. For example, we’re super stretched right now. My operations coordinator is very busy with her other job. We have this event, and it’s small, but she sent an email asking, “[name unclear], how are we going to handle the registration?” It’s so easy. We’ll have it on our iPad and bring up the list. There’s no manual signing in. We’ve also done paper if we have multiple people, and multiple iPads for a bigger event. It just makes it easy, and that’s what you want. You have too much going on with your nonprofit to have your CRM or donor management system be something that impedes you.

I also love how easy it is to make interesting emails. You have a lot of templates for newsletters and things. We use the blank template and design it ourselves, and it’s easy. Our operations coordinator took to it like a fish to water. That’s important, because if we bring on another person, how are we going to onboard them with Bloomerang? It hasn’t been hard. You’ve been really great at onboarding people, and that part is super important.

Marissa Johnson: Thank you so much for that feedback. We very much believe your tools need to grow with you, fit your needs, and make your life easier instead of harder. That’s what we always strive to do here at Bloomerang, so I’m glad that has been the case for you. Thank you for walking us through that. It’s been a wonderful conversation, and it’s been so great to get to know you, Amy, and your organization and how you’re using mobile video acknowledgments. We have so many questions to get through, so let’s move on to Q&A.

Tiara Stephan: Awesome.

Marissa Johnson: I’m muted. But yes, absolutely. We have several questions asking for an example of a video acknowledgment. We did show that video, and we’ll send it out again after the webinar with the recording.

I’m also getting questions: is there an option to send via text, or is it just email at this time?

Tiara Stephan: At this time, it is just email. If people really want to see a video sent by text, I know that’s something the team has talked about. Mobile video acknowledgments are still a relatively new feature for Bloomerang. We just launched and released it in October 2025, so we’re definitely looking for ways to make this feature even more impactful for nonprofits. We’ve heard text more than a few times. The team is well aware of it, and it’s on the list to take a look at. Keep telling us your feedback on what you want to see. You can help shape the road map and where we take this feature in the future. For now it’s email, but text is definitely a consideration.

Marissa Johnson: Lots of questions about the bottom line, Tiara. What does it cost to use this feature, and how do people access it?

Tiara Stephan: Mobile video acknowledgments come included with the Giving Platform bundles, Giving Platform Standard and Giving Platform Pro. That means you get Bloomerang CRM, Volunteer and Fundraising, or just Bloomerang CRM and Fundraising. If you have one of those bundles, mobile video acknowledgments are included. If you’re on a bundle and you see that option grayed out in your app, please reach out. That should not be the case. You should be able to access it, and we want to fix that right away so you can make videos quickly and easily.

Marissa Johnson: We’ll follow up. I’m going to send out the recording, and you can reply directly to that email. Tiara and I will make sure you have access to mobile video acknowledgments if you have a bundle.

Another great question: someone said that right now they do a phone call as the first step in their welcome series, and people never answer the phone or never add a phone number. They’re wondering if this would be a good option. I think yes. Amy, it sounds like you might have experience with it.

Amy Shroff: As an aside, we send out texts, for example about this event or about a campaign, through the Textedly app, and that dovetails really nicely with Bloomerang. Bloomerang works well with a few other platforms. We can easily upload our donor lists and their phone numbers to Textedly. Does Bloomerang have a text feature? You don’t have any text?

Tiara Stephan: We do have text fundraising capabilities with Bloomerang.

Amy Shroff: Right, that’s text-to-donate. I think we decided to use Textedly just for informational texts, but it works really well with Bloomerang. I think we’re planning on using the text-to-donate feature, if we haven’t already. It’s a great way to reach out to your donors. I don’t always make telephone calls. I’ve been doing some for this event, and I love the idea of a telephone call because it’s personal, even if you just leave a message. But if you don’t have that ability, send this video. People are going to be curious. They’ll go, “Oh, what is this?” And they’ll click on it. And then, “Oh, that’s so nice.”

Marissa Johnson: Totally. Another question: is there a limit for the length of the video?

Tiara Stephan: Yes. I said this earlier, but I’ll reiterate: these videos have a sixty-second limit. The intention is that your donors aren’t sitting through a three-, four- or five-minute video that may not grab their attention right away. Sixty seconds keeps your donors’ attention, makes sure they watch the entire thing, and makes sure you’re giving thanks in a way that keeps them engaged and connected. We found sixty seconds was our best option. If you have feedback that you’d like to see longer, that is something we can take into consideration.

Marissa Johnson: We just got a question: can you send the same thank-you video to multiple donors? At this time, we aren’t doing that, correct?

Tiara Stephan: Correct. These videos are intended to be highly personal and specific to each donor you send them to. So just one donor at a time, for any donation you receive.

Marissa Johnson: Great. And do the videos sit in interactions in the CRM?

Tiara Stephan: There are a few ways to access the video button. The way I always recommend is going to your activity feed, but you can also access it when you’re looking at a donor’s profile. As a reminder, this is specifically for the mobile app. You will not see the video option in the desktop or web app. It is only available in the mobile Bloomerang CRM app. It is not available in the Bloomerang Fundraising app, just the Bloomerang CRM app. If you download it and you’re on the Giving Platform bundle, you’ll see that plus-video button in your activity feed as you scroll, and you can record a video directly from there.

Marissa Johnson: Here’s another great question: is there a limit to the number of videos that can be sent out?

Tiara Stephan: No. You can send an unlimited number of videos. Amy can speak to this. She’s been sending videos since pretty much the day we launched.

Amy Shroff: I can’t believe how many I’ve sent. Really? Did I really send that many? But we just do it every week.

Marissa Johnson: It’s just part of your schedule. You build that in. I love that. We’ve got another question: can we create reports with “video sent” included as a filter?

Tiara Stephan: That’s an amazing question, and I think we’ll have to look into it a little more and send you an answer after this. Amy, do you have any insight into how you look at your video performance?

Amy Shroff: I haven’t. That’s the straight answer. But I would love to know. We need to do this, but what’s the open rate? I think that would be helpful. Everything is about data, of course, but I’m doing this with a little bit of faith that people will open the video and take a look. I’ve had some regular donors who said, “Oh, I didn’t check my email,” and I said, “Well, check it again.” You can also resend it. I’ll ask, “Did you get my video?” and they’ll say, “No, please resend it,” so I’ve done that. Now that we’ve done this, and it’s been a whirlwind since I got back, I’d like to take a deep dive and see who has opened it. Can I see that with the videos, the way you can with emails?

Tiara Stephan: The primary way to view video performance is through your email send performance. Let me reach out to the product team and get more specifics for you.

Amy Shroff: That would be a fun motivator to share with Dana, who does them with me. It’s something to talk about at a board meeting, maybe.

Marissa Johnson: I know this isn’t really about mobile video acknowledgments, but Amy mentioned onboarding for Bloomerang, and someone would like to learn more. Tiara, are you able to speak to onboarding? I have a little bit of knowledge of what that process looks like.

Tiara Stephan: Absolutely. I know there’s no fee for Bloomerang onboarding. That is included. Do you want to speak a little more to that, Marissa?

Marissa Johnson: Sure. Each person has an onboarding specialist they work with, someone they can ask questions. I don’t want to speak to the number of calls, but I know there are at least a few individual calls. They’re also really good about sending out our Bloomerang learning resources. If you’re a current customer, you probably already know we have tons of those: our learning management system, group training, prerecorded webinars and our help center. These pieces are really accessible, but I know that sometimes all that information can be overwhelming. The goal of the onboarding specialist is to send you the specific resources you need for the individual pieces, for example if you have a specific question or want to launch sooner rather than later. I think that’s really helpful. Amy, was your question about onboarding initially, or onboarding additional people?

Amy Shroff: The onboarding process initially was very smooth. It was similar to Network for Good, but I love the individuality. They help train you on all the different modules, and you can have as many people attend as you want. For new people, like new board members, there’s also an onboarding. You can do a mini onboarding with a live person if you want, I believe. Or there are modules they can look at for training, which are pretty easy to use.

Marissa Johnson: Absolutely. We also offer office hours across all of our products. Those are free, so definitely tune in if you have more questions about how to use things. That is all free and included with your Bloomerang CRM. So yes, lots of resources for customer support.

We’re coming up on time, so I’m going to add our poll in here. If you would like anyone to follow up with you, you can have Bloomerang follow up for a live demo or a self-guided product tour. If you’re a current Bloomerang customer, you can let us know if you want to talk about additional products. We can also connect you with Amy so you can learn more about Let’s Save the Strays and what they’re doing. I’m going to let this poll run for a minute.

We want to thank everyone for their time. We’re so glad you were able to join us today. If you want to check out Amy’s organization, it’s at letssavethestrays.org. Seeing the mission-driven work she’s doing, and the ways she’s using Bloomerang and mobile video acknowledgments, has been really impactful. I really appreciate your time today, Amy. Thank you.

Amy Shroff: Absolutely. We’re always looking for volunteers on this side of the pond. Anyone who’s interested, reach out. Thanks so much. We appreciate it.

Marissa Johnson: Thanks so much. We’re going to go ahead and close out. Thanks, everyone, for coming today.