Maximizing donor touch points with Journey Automation

Diana Otero: Hi, everybody. We are one minute out from starting our webinar, so you still have time to grab your coffee or tea, whichever is going to help get you through the morning. But good morning again, and thank you everyone for joining us today. We’ll start in just about a minute.

While we’re waiting for folks to join, if you’re so inclined, please let us know in the chat where you’re calling in from and what the weather is like in your area. I’m just looking at my weather app right now. It is a sunny seventy-six degrees in Indianapolis. Chad, Cody, what’s it like where you are?

Chad Barger: It is just about the same, low seventies in Hershey, Pennsylvania. A gorgeous bluebird sky day. We don’t get many. I just got back in from a walk. Gotta take advantage.

Diana Otero: Love that.

Cody Lawson: It’s seventy degrees and sunny and beautiful in Denver, Colorado.

Diana Otero: Beautiful. I love this fall weather. I’ve been waiting for it all summer, so I’m excited that it’s finally here. And just to make sure you all are in the right place, today we’re going to talk about maximizing donor touch points with journey automation. We have Chad Barger joining us today, so I’m very excited.

Before we get started, this webinar is being recorded, and you will get an email with a link to the recording, so keep an eye out for that. If you have any questions, we do have our Q&A area. We ask that if you have tips to share with everybody, put those in the chat. But if you have questions for our panelists today, please put those in the Q&A. It helps us keep better track of your questions and make sure that we answer all of them. And if we don’t get to all of your questions today, no worries. We’ll make sure to send a follow-up via email.

And if you are not familiar with Bloomerang, Bloomerang is a giving platform that is built for a purpose. We have donor management, volunteer management, fundraising, event management, peer-to-peer, integrations, anything and everything that nonprofits need to be successful. We are here to support you. And without further ado, I’m going to pass it off to Chad Barger. He is a longtime Bloomerang partner and advocate, so we’re very excited to have him here today. Welcome, Chad.

Chad Barger: Great. Thank you, Diana. Pleasure to be with you here today, back on the Bloomerang webinar series and platform.

We’re going to hop in here and cover what we’re doing today. So, game plan. Yes, we’re going to look at Bloomerang’s brand new journey automations tool. But first, I want to provide a little context, because you need to know what to put into it. We’re going to talk briefly about donor retention. You all know donor retention is important, but we’ll look at the numbers. And then I want to talk about donor touch points. That’s what goes in these automation tools.

So I want to briefly define them and give you lots of examples of creative donor touch points. I don’t want you to use this great new technology to just do what you’ve always done. It’s a great opportunity, as you’re building these new journeys, to do some creative things to really engage your donors, because it is difficult to get their attention these days. More difficult than ever.

I’ll give you a mapping tool that can help with this process, and then we’ll look at designing journeys. I’ve actually built out a sample journey. It’s my event attendee to becoming a donor journey, because they don’t usually do that on their own. You’ve got to take them through a process. I’m going to show you that journey, and then I’m going to toss it back over to Diana, who is a pro with the journey automation tool. She is going to actually show you, and I believe try to create my journey, within the platform. We’ll have time for your questions and comments as we go along. Please use the Q&A feature.

Real briefly before I hop into this, who am I? Folks, I’m a fundraiser. It’s all I’ve ever done. I had the honor of serving the organizations you see in the top row as development director and executive director for over twenty years. I’m an advanced certified fundraising executive, one of only a hundred and seventeen in the world. These days, I spend my time with my firm, Productive Fundraising, providing fundraising strategy, training, and coaching for small to mid-sized nonprofits. I also have the honor of serving on the faculty at both Temple and Messiah universities. I am coming to you from just outside of Hershey, Pennsylvania, where we make your chocolate bars. And yes, our street lights are Hershey Kisses. Please come visit. We have a great theme park, resort, all kinds of stuff, great family fun.

But let’s get into it. As we already mentioned, you are going to get the slides. We have resources, the recording, all of that coming for you. I actually have a free template as well, so we’ll make sure you get all of those links.

Let’s hop into the content. Why does donor retention matter? Well, we’ve got to keep donors. It is hard to get new donors. If we just focus on acquisition, that’s not good enough, because let’s look at the numbers. Forty-three percent. Forty-three percent is the average donor retention rate for nonprofits. So the average nonprofit loses over half of its donors each year. It’s even worse for first-time donor retention: nineteen percent. This number used to be twenty-nine percent. I’m hoping it’s a short little blip, but yeah, less than a quarter of donors make a second gift to a nonprofit.

Why? Because we’re so focused on getting new donors in. Right? And we forget about the ones that are already here and making sure they have a great experience. So journey automations can be used to certainly acquire donors. We’ll look at some of that. But my favorite way to use it is retention, keeping donors and automating some of that so I can focus my time on trying to acquire while not losing the donors that we already have.

This process, we’ve seen this. It’s in every fundraising 101 book, the pyramid of giving. It’s not how it really works. It’s not all nice and neat and tidy. I still like this slide, though, because it says a donor moves up through education, involvement, and more personal solicitation. That stuff all takes time, but that’s how we get them to move up the pyramid. The journey automation tool can really help to automate some of this and at least just remind us of what we need to do when. I like this graphic much better, much more how it really works, with the swirling around, coming, going, those types of things. And this is a great donor pyramid too. Donors who don’t care yet, donors who care a little, donors who care a lot.

When we look at retention efforts, two of my favorite people on this earth who really focus here are Jon Lapp and Jen Love with Agents of Good in Toronto. Jon says trust that money follows the love. So we’re just showing donor love here. And when you think about it, what’s more expensive than thanking donors? Acquiring them. We actually have the math. Lynn Wester with the Donor Relations Group did a study. She found it’s seven times more expensive to acquire donors than it is to retain them. We just need to take the time. You have to water your plants so they’ll grow. Now, I’m not saying water your donors, but cultivate, steward, all these things, not just solicit all the time.

The key to fundraising success for me and my clients is that we spend at least as much time on retention as we do on acquisition. It is just as important. It’s hard, though, because you don’t see that new money coming in, and it’s tempting to always focus there. But you really have to. You really have to.

All right. So, donor touch points. What am I talking about? What is a donor touch point? Basically, it’s anytime a donor has an interaction with your nonprofit. It doesn’t matter who it is or what channel. Anytime they have some interaction. They get something in the mail. They get a phone call. They see your social media posts. They go to your website. That’s a touch. Some of them, today, we’re talking about proactive touches, the ones where we’re actually doing something on purpose. But sometimes reactive ones just happen on their own, that the donor instigates. That’s why we have resources like our website and our social media pages where they can interact on their own time.

But we have a rule. It’s referred to as the fundraising law of seven. The fundraising law of seven says that donors want to hear from us at least seven times between gifts where we’re not asking for anything. We’re not asking for anything. We’re thanking them. We’re reporting on impact. We’re inviting them to something that’s free, some kind of engagement activity. So we have to map this out. Some of you are thinking, seven, I wonder how many we have. Most organizations don’t know what that looks like. I’m going to give you a tool to help you map this out with your organization. But with these seven touch points, let’s look at, like, twenty quick creative examples of things you can do, and then we’ll look at the tool to help you remember to do this stuff and automate portions of it.

This fundraising law of seven comes out of this book. It’s a forty-thousand-person research study across the US and Canada looking at what donors want from us in order to keep giving, so we can improve those pretty dreadful retention numbers that I shared in the beginning. A fabulous book.

All right. Real-life, creative donor touch point examples. Remember I said it’s just hard to get people’s attention. My goal is to inspire you a little bit here in the first portion of our webinar today, so that you’ll maybe think about doing things a little different, little tweaks, and just add some creativity, some fun. This is the fun part of fundraising, right, where we get to show what we’ve done and inspire people. So let’s start right at the beginning.

Your reply email. Somebody makes an online donation to your organization. What do they get? I do test donations with all of my clients. I usually am not too inspired. It’s usually “On behalf of the board of directors of ABC Nonprofit, we hereby certify your one hundred dollar donation made on date.” But you can edit that text. “Dear Lynn, because of you, countless children and their families have a reason to be thankful. Because of your recurring support, patients at Children’s Hospital Colorado can celebrate health and healing and look forward with hope and strength, knowing that donors like you are there to support them every step of the way.” Yes, it’s automatically generated, but it’s much more personal. It’s even coming from a person. You can reply to it. That’s an easy one, and that’s an automated touch point. You already have that automated touch point. We’re going to give you more after you see how to use this tool today, but that’s one that you already have. Just go change the text, put in a story, put a note in your task management system to change it every six to nine months, whatever works for you.

When I talk about donor touch points, most people instantly think newsletter. Oh, I’ve got to do a donor newsletter. Oh, I don’t have time for a donor newsletter. We don’t have the budget for that. You can do an email newsletter once a month. That’s very affordable. You can actually use Bloomerang’s built in email functionality to send it. You already have the tool. You just need to do it. But I do love a mailed newsletter a couple times a year. Certainly not monthly, maybe quarterly, maybe two, three, whatever. Here’s a super simple one from Achieva in Pittsburgh. See the front cover? You’ve got a story about Jamie. Page two, we continue Jamie’s story. There’s a little bit of impact statistics. Page three, we’ve got a second story about Dominique. And page four, finally, a little bit of information about how you can help. That’s it. A simple donor newsletter. It doesn’t take that much time. They repurpose stories they already had. It doesn’t have to be the twelve-page thing. They don’t want the twelve-page thing.

Thank-you notes. Incredibly powerful. I always keep on right here in my webinar backdrop, this is all of the thank-you notes I have received so far this year. People keep them. People put them on their bulletin board. I had multiple times in my career where I show up a year later, and the thank-you note I sent is pinned right on their bulletin board. They see it every day for a whole year. Incredibly powerful. They don’t have to be super complicated. “Thank you for your generous gift to clean water. Your partnership means lives are saved through hygiene, education, sanitation, access to clean water, and experiencing the hope. We deeply appreciate your gift. Gratefully, Mike.” There we go. Simple. Here’s my simple formula: thank them for what they did, state the impact, say what you appreciate about them. That’s all we’ve got to do.

Anytime you have a boring touch point, maybe your gift acknowledgment letter, and your boss doesn’t want to put a story in there, they want it to be super official, anytime I have to send that, I like to snazz it up by paper-clipping something to it. Incredibly powerful. My favorite thing to paper-clip is a photo. Go to Target, Walmart, or Walgreens, wherever, and get prints made, like a hundred prints of your program in action, and then just clip it to your thank-you notes, your gift acknowledgment, something like that, to bring it to life. People don’t get those either. Very different.

We walk around with these high-powered cameras and video cameras at all times, and we forget to use them. So how could you use it? Here is Magee Rehab in Philly. These are the physical therapists. They raised money for a new piece of equipment. They just installed it. They hand this poster board to the physical therapist. They smile, take the photo, and they simply email this out to the donors. “Thanks so much for your contribution. The equipment’s in, and the PTs are excited to use it,” and insert the photo. Not a formatted email blast, a personal email. You can send twenty of those off in, you know what, five minutes. There you go. And a journey automation could either automate that for you or remind you to do it. I love the “tell me to do it, put this on my task list” feature as well. So we’re going to get there.

As I said, it’s also a video camera. I don’t want to mess around with the sound here today, so rather than play the video, I’m just going to do this for you. You can watch the sample. It’s like a three-minute video when you get the slides, to walk you through the logistics. But how about this? “Hey, Mary. It’s Chad with ABC Nonprofit. Thank you so much for contributing to our recent project. I just wanted to show you. We are here. It is all ready for next week’s grand opening. We couldn’t do it without you. You’re the best. I can’t wait to see you guys at the grand opening and the kids using it the week after. Thanks so much, Mary.” Could you do that? “Hey, Rick. It’s Chad with ABC Nonprofit.” You can roll off ten of them pretty quickly.

Why is it so effective? Because I said her name. Personalized it. My favorite way to deliver those is to upload it to YouTube as an unlisted video, so you can only see it if you have the link. Then I send the link via email, subject line “Short video for you, Mary.” People are very comfortable clicking on YouTube links, not random videos. The other easy way to deliver it is via text, if you have text, because people will click on almost anything on their phone. They’re a little more hesitant on their computer.

So, donors. I just said text. Donors are getting more and more open to receiving texts from nonprofits that they support. I’m seeing that they don’t really want solicitations, though. Maybe at end of calendar year you can sneak one in, but they love impact. You could text a photo. You could text that photo we showed earlier. Ninety-five percent open rate on texts. It’s less than twenty percent on emails. It’s less than two percent on social media. So a high open rate. Even if they just open it to make it show as not a new message, they’re at least going to glance at it and see what happened there.

One of my favorite tools here is postcards. I love postcards. Here’s a simple one. It’s got a great photo on the front and a quick little story on the back. That’s all we’ve got to do. Simple postcards.

I also love kids’ art. If you do anything with kids, always have markers, pencils, paper around. They didn’t really ask for this. This just happened. “Thank you for letting us do all the fun labs. Thank you, sponsors.” Kid, unprompted because he’s a kid, adds a joke: “Think like a proton. Be positive.” Can’t make this up. So they scan this and send it to donors. Another organization I work with just invited this. They had postcards premade with a coloring sheet on the back. Before their program starts, the kids color, they collect them at the end, put a stamp and a donor address on it, and send them out.

This was my favorite postcard of all time. This has a die-cut line around it, so I actually sent a violin. That’s the front. Here’s the back: “Because of you, two hundred eighty-three thousand residents of the capital region had an arts experience last year. Thank you for your ongoing support.” I had people calling me saying, Chad, you mailed a violin? I didn’t know you could do that. So the next year, I mailed a ballet slipper, and then an artist’s palette, and kept the train going. This costs the same amount as the jumbo ones, as long as they have the die, the thing that cuts it out. So talk to your printer, see if they have them. If they don’t, this shop in Tampa, Florida has a couple hundred. I don’t have a financial relationship with them, but people struggle to find these dies. This place has a ton, so the contact info is in there for you.

I’m showing you all of this because this is what we’re finding. You need to send your donors a piece of generous communication every month in hopes that they’ll actually see or read a quarter of it. You can get to your seven touch points, but did they actually see it? One of the reasons I love postcards so much is they actually have to physically touch it. They have to physically hold it. They have to walk from their mailbox to wherever they process their mail, probably standing over the recycle bin. They have to touch it and look at it and say, “Oh, what’s this? Oh, ABC Nonprofit. They do good work. I like that.” Pitch. That’s fine. That’s fine.

All of these things. Different is better than better. This is a quote that I’ve been using a lot this year, because it’s so hard to get everybody’s attention. If we all do best practice, it all looks the same, and it doesn’t stand out from the crowd. It doesn’t cut through the noise. But doing something just a little different, that can really work. Different is better than better. Something to think about.

Other touch points. The phone. A fabulous donor touch point. Not for solicitation, for stewardship. Donor thank-you calls. We have our statistics. Calling to thank donors generates a fifty-six percent increase in first-year retention. Wow. So that nineteen is going to go up by fifty-six percent, and a seventy-two percent increase in revenues. There’s another statistic. I don’t think I have a slide in here. If the call comes from a board member, it’s even a thirty-nine percent increase above that.

Who should you call? You can call everybody. I don’t care who you call. I always say, if you can make sure all your donors get a call within a three-year cycle, that’d be fabulous. But here’s who people call. First-time donors, great group. Everybody calls the middle group, repeat donors of five hundred plus. It’ll still be successful and appreciated, but not as much as some other groups. I like calling monthly donors on the anniversary of when they first signed up for their gift. But it doesn’t matter who you call. Just call.

When I started my fundraising career, I was in higher education, and there was a big, big focus on donor visits. You have to go meet with your donors. I was working in the annual fund, so we were meeting with five-hundred-and-thousand-plus donors. We were meeting with a lot of five-hundred-dollar donors trying to get them to a thousand. And I had a visit quota. I was supposed to do five visits a month because I had other responsibilities. Major gifts officers, a lot of them were at fifteen. This is going away. It’s not as common because it’s difficult to get people to meet with us, especially in the post-pandemic era. People didn’t have to do it for a year, year and a half, whatever. So it’s not so high on the priority list anymore. There’s a growing movement for meaningful engagement versus necessarily having to do donor visits.

Let’s dissect that a little bit. What could a meaningful engagement be? Maybe a five-minute conversation when you bump into them somewhere. Coffee shop, grocery store, chamber mixer. An email exchange. That’s actually an exchange. You tell a story, they react, they ask a question, like an email conversation. Maybe just a ten-minute phone call to check in. A little bit more than just that quick thank-you call. We actually have a conversation. You talk about something that’s going on. That’s the key element. You have to actually talk about the work that your organization is doing for it to count. But a touch point could simply be reaching out to the donors. For major gifts in small shops, my rule is you need to have some kind of meaningful engagement with your major donors at least once a quarter. At least once a quarter. So you could set up a journey automation to ping you to have a meaningful outreach with the donors that are in, say, a major donor journey.

Okay. I want to cover a few in-person touch points that you can do. You don’t need two of me. Here we go. Tours. You’re not doing beer tours. Well, maybe you are, but probably not. It’s hard to find a photo of a tour, but you all know what’s going on here. Offer a tour. You say, Chad, we’re in a boring office building. You have doors marked “employees only,” places where they can’t go when they come in. Just a behind-the-scenes tour. Even if they don’t come, it’s an invitation. It’s a touch point. Invite them to a host-a-business mixer, have an open house, have muffins in the morning with the executive director, some kind of free informational thing that you can invite them to. Easy touch point.

This is one of my favorites, and I included it because I was polishing this slide deck yesterday. It was Labor Day in the US. Everybody’s doing picnics. This is my favorite summer touch point. On the weeks that have one of these summer holidays, like Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, the Thursday before, put a grill in your parking lot, put a chef hat on your CEO, let them flip burgers and hot dogs, and send out an email the day before to your donors. Say the CEO is going to be flipping burgers in the parking lot, come through for a drive-through lunch and a quick story about the impact of your support. Your CEO will have better conversations standing by the grill in the parking lot than they do at your gala or your other major event, and it’s basically free. Everything you would do here is super cheap. You’ll get people that you never see anywhere. You invite them to stuff, they don’t come. They’ll come for the free burger over lunch. It’s just like a different subset.

Some of you are saying, Chad, excuse me. I get that we need to do this. I get the importance, but we’re really small. We don’t have the time to do this. We don’t have the money to do this. I don’t have a stewardship budget. If I’m going to mail something or print something, I have to steal it from somewhere else. Let’s not steal it from somewhere else in the budget, not another organization. But my reply is, don’t worry about being small. Worry about being silent. That’s how those donor retention numbers happen. That’s how you lose over half of your donors each year. We only keep less than twenty percent of first-time donors. Worry about being silent. Find some way. And this quote: the things that matter the most to donors don’t depend on big budgets or big staff. I didn’t show you a thirty-page annual report that’s all glossy and has amazing photos. I didn’t show you a ten-minute spotlight video. No. I showed you lots of basically free or inexpensive things that you can do that basically just take time. And in a minute, we’re going to look at a tool that can even save you some of that time.

My final touch point to show you is a completely free one. This was done in house. It’s a one-third sheet piece of cardstock, so about the size of an envelope. You print three up, front and back. The top panel there is the front. The bottom is the back. “It’s been a fun-filled summer. Because of your support, kids are having fun in the sun, learning about science and nature, reading books, volunteering in our community, and enjoying nutritious and healthy food. Next up, back to school. You make all this and more possible.” They did it on the office printer. They had the cardstock in hand. They had the number ten envelope that it went in. They scribbled a little note, hand-addressed the envelope. The only cost was the stamp. And my trick to get stamps when you have no postage budget: once a year, ask your board and senior volunteers to donate a roll of stamps. Every time you get one, that’s a hundred chances to spread some donor joy. A hundred touch points that you can get out. Will they all do it? No. Can you get six, seven, eight, nine hundred stamps pretty easily? Yes. Once a year, ask them to consider a roll.

Okay. So those are touch points. Those are what they are. Some creative things you can consider. Now, how do you figure out, am I at seven? What’s going on? This exercise is what I highly recommend: donor touch point mapping. Here it is. I have it for you as a free download as an Excel file. We have the weeks of the year going across the top. And coming down the rows are the categories of ways we reach out to donors. We have our asks, our mass communication, and personalized stewardship. You just tweak these to be what you actually do, and then you change the color dot to be when you do that. What’s the cadence on your email newsletter? Looks like this one’s roughly monthly, maybe a little more frequently. They have a print newsletter. Looks like it goes five times a year. They’ve got that annual report. We’re just putting those dots in. Once you have it all in, you have a visual representation of the donor experience. What do donors get from us? You can see where the gaps are. We’re super clustered at this one time of the year. Could we spread that out a little bit? Do we need to do all this? Are we at way more than seven? There looks like a solicitation gap there in October. If we’re going to add something, where’s the gap to fill? It looks like we could use some more personalized stewardship, maybe in the March, April time frame. So it just gives you a sense of what’s missing, where’s the gap, and what do we need to do. A great starting point before you start adding things in. Let’s figure out what we already had. What’s the donor experience so far?

Okay. So that’s touch points. That’s how you look at it. Now let’s talk about journeys. When we combine touch points together, we form a journey that someone could go on. What kind of journeys can we do? These are some typical journeys. First-time donor journey. What happens when somebody makes a gift for the first time? Whether they make it online or you enter it in Bloomerang, this journey could trigger that. Automatically, they’re going to get the gift acknowledgment email. That one’s already in there, or you’re going to send the mail gift acknowledgment. Then maybe you want to wait two weeks and send some kind of welcome kit. We could create a journey that automatically sends that if it’s email, or prompts you to mail it. Maybe even creates it, and you just have to print and assemble. And then maybe we wait four weeks and email an invitation to a tour of the facility. Then we wait another two weeks and create a reminder for the CEO to make a thank-you call. So we have all these steps as we go.

These are some common ones. New monthly donors. You could have a major gift journey: somebody makes a donation of five thousand or more, whatever it is at your organization, then this happens. A mid-level gift journey: somebody makes a gift of five hundred or more, or between five hundred and four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine. We could also do lapsed. Somebody, it’s been fifteen months since their last gift. They could go through this journey of, maybe we’re going to send an email or two to warm them back up before the lapsed renewal solicitation goes. Planned giving prospect. Somebody checks the box that they’re interested in learning more, or they submit a web form. They could go through an education journey. We probably have a bunch of different things we want to do before we’re calling to meet with them and have that conversation.

But as I teased in the beginning, the one I wanted to walk through today is event attendee to donor. Usually, I see this all the time, people say, “People come to my events, and I put them on my mailing list, but they never become donors.” Yeah. Most won’t. That’s our standard thing. We just throw them on the list. They just get all the stuff that everybody else gets. There’s no indication. They might not even remember who you are, because they were just a guest of somebody else. So it doesn’t work. You have to walk them through a process.

Here is a sample donor journey. That’s my fanciest slide as well. Quite proud of that one. This journey actually starts before the event itself, with some exciting pre-event communication. That could be set up as soon as somebody buys a ticket. All of a sudden, this journey begins. At the event, we’re doing some things to inspire them. We want them to do something at the event, take a first step, buy a raffle ticket, whatever it might be. We make them feel appreciated there. And then, getting to number five, this pretty much can all be automated: the day-after-event email, the final results email a few weeks later, prompting someone to write a thank-you note, inviting them to an engagement activity. And then maybe six months later, the impact letter. What did we actually do with the funds? We’re communicating all these times so that when they finally get the ask, and I like to do it as a separate segment of our end-of-calendar-year appeal, I can begin with, “Thank you again for attending our event six months ago. We’ve reported to you what we did with those funds,” and so on. You put it out there. You supported us through the event. Now we’re asking you to support us with an unrestricted gift at this time of year.

I don’t have the time to go into all the details here. I do a whole webinar just on this. But we’re going to play with this as we get into the journey automation tool. I’m about to pass the mic over to Diana so she can demo the product for you. Real quickly, since we’re at the end of my portion, I just want to encourage you to connect with me. I go by Fundraiser Chad on social. I’m most active on Facebook and LinkedIn. Always sharing great new research, articles, all kinds of good, top-notch fundraising stuff. I like to think of myself as a curator of excellent fundraising education and knowledge. So feel free to connect with me on your platform of choice.

In our follow-up poll a little later, you’ll have the chance to opt in to my email list. On that, I’m always sharing examples of things that have worked. I call it Nonprofits Cutting Through the Noise. It’s the name of my keynote this year, and it’s creative things someone did that worked that you can take to your shop and do too. A lot of them are touch points. So if you want to keep fresh and have future examples, feel free to sign up there. You’ll also see information about my free monthly webinar. Every month, I do a different topic. This month, we are doing donor retention. So you’re going to see some of the examples I shared today, but also lots more creative ways you can reach out and thank your donors. With that, I’m going to toss it over to Diana, and we will look at the tool.

Diana Otero: Awesome. Thank you so much, Chad. That was a lot of great information. I almost found myself scribbling all of those notes, and then I remembered we’re going to get the slides. So that was fantastic. Thank you so much for that.

Before we start, I do have a poll for everybody. I just want to ask if you’re a current Bloomerang customer or not. And if you are, what’s your level of experience with our donor journey automations? Or if you’re not a Bloomerang customer and you’re using something else to set up your donor journey automations, please let us know as well. While that’s going, Chad, there was a quick question earlier, just to wrap that section off. Does a monthly newsletter to the whole database count as part of the seven touch points?

Chad Barger: Yeah. I would definitely count a monthly newsletter. People will ask about social media. Does a social media post count? I say, not usually. If they actually engage with the post, I’d count that. But if they’re physically going to see it, if it’s an email newsletter, then, did they open it? Twenty percent is the average open rate. That’s why I love mail so much, because they actually hold it. But yeah, I would count it, but maybe not as high as something else.

Diana Otero: Great. I love that. Thank you. I love what you said about physical mail as well. I’m also the type that keeps those postcards on my bulletin board or on the fridge. And if I got one of those, “Be like a proton, be positive,” I would keep that up forever. So if that’s something that your nonprofit can do, I highly encourage you to do this.

But all right, let’s go back to our poll. It looks like we do have a lot of Bloomerang customers on the call, but most of them have not tried journey automation yet. So thank you for your responses there. Let’s jump in and take a look at journey automation.

If you are a Bloomerang customer, you can go to Communications and Journey Automation. If you’re not a Bloomerang customer yet, see if this is something that your tool can do. You can follow the same steps here, but we’ll use Bloomerang to show you how it works. I’m going to collapse this so we have a little bit more space. Because not everybody is familiar with journey automation yet, we’ll give you a little tour before we get to building the actual journey that we have for our event attendees.

Once you get into journey automation, you’ll see a couple of things here. You’ll see any automations that you have running. These are ready. These are published. These are sending out emails, creating tasks for you. Anything that’s paused, you can see as well. Anything that’s in draft, so let’s say you’re still working on something and you need to go back to it at a later date, you’ll see drafts and any archive. These might be previously running, but you don’t need them anymore.

Let’s take a look at some of the different journeys that you can set up, and Chad talked about this a little bit earlier. First, I’m going to be very creative and just have my test automation here so I can show you our different entry points. This is just a starting point for now. Journey automation from Bloomerang released about a month and a half ago, and every month we’ve been coming out with new enhancements for it. Some of the journeys that you can set up right now: we have our first-ever donation, first initial recurring donation, initial membership payments. Chad talked about this earlier. This is for welcoming and acknowledging donors who donate for the first time. You have a little bit more control over this as well, and you can have some filters. For example, if you want different journeys for different amounts that your donors gave, you can set that up. If this particular journey is, let’s say, less than or equal to five hundred dollars, this is your journey for them. Or, for example, this is your five hundred and one dollars to four thousand nine hundred ninety-nine, you can set up a different journey for them as well. So you can really customize what the journey looks like for where each of your donors are and what journey you’d like to take them on. Perhaps for your higher-level donors, you’d like to create a task for your priority phone calls. You can set that up in the automation. So you can really tailor the journey based on where the donors are.

You can also have journeys for the next donation. Donors enter this automation for each donation that isn’t a first-ever. This could be their second donation or third donation, whichever is going to be their next donation. You have more controls as well in terms of what the different donor types are, and these are the same filters that you have with your first-ever donation. You can customize the amount. You can even customize the funds, campaigns, and appeals.

You can also set up, and this is one of my favorites, happy birthday milestones. Chad was saying earlier that you want those touch points between the asks, not necessarily to be ask-oriented. I think birthdays are a great way to do that, because you’re really not asking anything from your supporter. It’s really just all about them. It keeps you top of mind, and if it spurs the donor to give as a result of that, then that’s fantastic. But just that touch point of you’re not asking for anything, this is really all about the donors and making the donors feel good and making the donors feel seen. This is fantastic. So you can easily set up milestone automations, and for this one, you can start with birthday automations right away.

You can also select an entry point where a donor or supporter is part of a group. This is where I would fall. Chad showed us earlier the journey from an event attendee toward a donor. The way I like using this is by setting up those groups. Groups are a great way to set up your segments, and they give you more control of what the journey is going to look like. For example, I already have a group for my event invites, but I might need to refresh here because I just created a group today. So we’re going to go back into my test one, two, three, four, five, and it never goes away. I already started that, and whatever I’ve done doesn’t go away. For this one, let’s say this is my event attendees. I can select the start date for when this automation runs. Let’s say this is my pre-event donor journey, and I want to start communicating about my event six weeks before. That might be different for your organization, and you can really tailor that based on what you’re creating. So let’s say we’re having an event six weeks from now, October fifteenth. I want my automation to start running tomorrow. Now, I’m only prepping this a day before, but you can prep this as early as you want.

I can select an exit criteria as well. This exit criteria is great because if a supporter makes a donation, then they don’t have to go through the full journey. Since this is for my event invites, I’m going to keep that as is, but we’re going to see that in a little bit as well. So we have our group. I’m going to rename that my pre-event journey, and then we can start building our automation.

We’ve defined how supporters enter our automation. Now we’re defining what happens when they enter our automation. As Chad shared earlier, you can take a look at your donor touch point calendar and start building those in as automated journeys. Let’s say six weeks out, we’re going to send an email inviting our supporters to our event. I can start from a template. I can start from any of our prebuilt templates in Bloomerang, or if I’ve already saved a template for it, I can use that as well. Let’s say we have our Silent Night event coming up, so I’m going to use this as my event announcement. I’m not going to go into customizing the email right now. We have a whole class that shows you how to do that. We’re going to select all of our email interests here. We’re going to pretend that we’ve customized our email with our merge fields and filled in the event details, and then we’re going to go back to our journey automation. Once our constituents enter the automation, they’re going to receive that email.

Maybe somewhere down the line, they have another email that’s going out. We’ll use the same template, and we’ll customize that for this being the second email that they’re receiving. We’ll make sure to select the email interests. And now we have two emails that are going out. Right now, it says that they’re going out on the same day, but that’s not what I want. This email is going to go out on the second, and I do want some time between the two emails. I can go in here and click time delay, and I can either choose to wait for a certain number of days before the next email is sent, or if this is for a particular event that’s coming up and I want to send it on a specific date, I can plug that date in here as well. So let’s say the first email is going out on the third. I want the next email to go out on the seventeenth. I’m just going to go ahead and put that in, since we know when our event is happening. So we have a time delay, and then that second invite is going out.

Journey automation isn’t just for emails. You can create tasks as well. When you create a task, you can decide what that channel is. Based on our example earlier, if they’re going to get a postcard, you can select a task to say “Mail out event postcards” as a reminder. This is our special event. You can choose who you’re going to assign that to. We’ll assign that to me. Add any notes. It also asks you to complete the task within how many days. And you also have the option to decide whether or not a supporter continues on the journey before they move on to the next step in the automation. This time, we’ll click yes on that. Once you create a task for someone, that’s going to send them an email notifying them that a task has been created.

You get the idea. You can create your emails here. You can put some time controls in between. You can create some tasks as well. I should put a time delay here as well. We have our first email going out on the third, our next email going out on the seventeenth. Let’s say we want to create this task for the twenty-ninth, and they have two days to send out those postcards. What we’re building here is every two weeks leading up to the event, we’re building that momentum. We’re building that excitement leading up to the event. Now, if I’m happy with this automation, everything’s already premade and set up, I can go ahead and publish the automation, and it’s just going to start running. It’s going to pick up everyone within that group and take them through the journey until the point of our event.

I’m not going to publish right now, but what I will show you is our post-event journey. I’ve broken this down into two different journeys, our pre-event journey and our post-event journey. The reason I did that is I do want to have a little bit more control. Based on your event attendance, how do I want to segment those donors or supporters? Maybe I want a different journey for folks who have been coming to our events regularly. They go on a different journey versus folks where this is their first time to attend the event, and maybe this event is their first introduction to your organization. Maybe they were brought as a guest and have never given to your organization before. We’re going to take them on a different journey versus event attendees who may have also given before or supported in other ways. So I’m going to create different groups for my different segments, and I’m going to tailor the journeys based on where I want to take them.

In this case, I’ve prebuilt our event attendee to donor journey. We have our group here. I wanted to show as well, this is already prebuilt, but I can go in here anytime and edit my journey. Let’s review our entry source real quick. This is for my event attendees group, which I’ve already segmented beforehand. Our event is happening on October fifteenth, so I want this to start sending on the sixteenth, the day after our event. Again, you can set all of this up beforehand so you don’t have to stress those couple of days leading up to the event, or stress about trying to set this up right after your event happens. You can fill out your donor touch point calendar, see what the journey looks like, and prebuild this all ahead of time.

This time, I am going to select an exit criteria. This journey is specifically for folks who attended the event but haven’t given yet, and I’m leading them toward a journey where we make an ask, and hopefully they give. So I’m putting in here an exit criteria where, if a supporter gives as a result of this journey, or as they’re going through this journey, they don’t have to finish the entire journey. And you can customize this based on the funds, campaigns, and appeals. I’ve customized it here because they attended our fall gala, and the emails that I’m sending are tied to our fall appeal. If they give to our fall gala and our fall appeal, whether through email or if they mail in a check, they’re going to exit the automation. We’re going to go ahead and save that.

So we can see how we’re building the journey here. This journey is going to start on October sixteenth, the day after our event. They’re going to get an email. This email is your thank-you email that’s a little bit more personalized. You can share stories from the event. You can share some pictures from the event. I also want them to receive a thank-you phone call, so we’ll take a look at the details here. This is also a great way to personalize. You can assign this to a board member. You can assign this to the relationship manager. If you have volunteers willing to make phone calls, you can do that. It’s really one of those more personal touch points that you want to include. And again, this is a great touch point because you’re not asking them for anything. You’re thanking them for their involvement last night. This may also be a great opportunity to ask them some questions. How did they find the event? What did they like about it? What suggestions do they have for the future? Would they be excited to attend the event again next year?

And then, after they get a thank-you phone call, we’re going to wait seven days, and we’re going to send them an invitation to some kind of engagement activity. Like Chad said, if you’re still doing tours of your facility, you can do that. Maybe it’s a quick video call. Maybe it’s coffee. Whatever that engagement activity is, you can send them that invite. And then afterwards, we want to send them an impact letter. Again, we’re mixing the different channels here. They’re getting emails, they’re getting phone calls, they’re getting something that’s physical, so that you’re always top of mind with them.

I haven’t built out a full journey here yet. We don’t have the seven touch points here, because we have our email, we have our phone call, we have an invitation, we have an impact letter. That’s four. Go back to your donor touch point calendar. Since you know exactly when your event is happening, you can plot out what other touch points they’re having with your organization, so you can see how many touch points you’re having with them and where you can fill in those gaps and build more into your automation as needed.

I know we went over that really quickly, but I hope that gives you some ideas on what you can do with automation. Chad was saying earlier, if you’re a small organization, don’t worry about what you can or can’t do. Worry about being silent. I think this is a great way to address that, because no matter the size of your organization, this allows you to personalize your engagement at scale and make sure you’re always doing those donor touch points throughout the year, throughout the quarter, throughout the month. We do have a couple of minutes for questions as well. Cody, are there any questions that are jumping out at you that would be good for the group to answer, or to answer with the group?

Cody Lawson: The ones that have already come in, I’ve been answering. We’ve got three that I haven’t yet gotten to, which we could talk about live. Or if anybody else has any questions they want to ask, make sure that you bring those in. So we’ve got one that says, does Journey Automation connect with Qgiv [now Bloomerang Fundraising] auctions? Could we set up a day-after-the-event email to people who are marked as checked in in the Qgiv [now Bloomerang Fundraising] auction event? Right now, the way that you would connect that is basically the way that Diana showed, with the group automation. You can create a group that would be event attendees and then create a series of emails to send out after. There isn’t one that is specifically triggered by checking in to an auction event at this time. If that’s something that you would like, we always recommend, and this goes for anybody else who has questions about functionality that isn’t there, submit ideas through the feature portal, which you can access. Is it the question mark icon up at the top right corner? I know that we adjusted the view of that recently. So yeah, submit those ideas. People like me on the product side are always reviewing those and making sure that those get prioritized based on our customers’ needs.

Chad Barger: I’ll add in there too. Now is a great time to do that, just as you start using it, because this is not the final product. They’re still evolving journey automation. There are ideas. There’s an active pipeline that they’re working on. So get your ideas in, the sooner the better.

Cody Lawson: That’s right. Just as a side note, Chad, you mentioned something earlier that I thought was worth mentioning as a very soon to be available feature, which is that Bloomerang will be introducing video acknowledgments built into our mobile app very, very soon, and that’ll be included with all of our fundraising bundle platform functionality.

Chad Barger: You don’t have to do my YouTube trick.

Cody Lawson: That’s right. And that fundraising bundle platform will give you unlimited automation, so you can set up as many of these campaigns and touch point events as you need to. Oh, all the questions came rolling in now. I opened the floodgates. I shouldn’t have come off of my hidden video. Let’s see what else we’ve got here. Diana, can you maybe read through the other ones as I’m answering this top one, to see if maybe we can get the ones that are the prioritized ones that might be the most effective? Is automation replacing the idea of creating tasks based on recurring reports? I think that maybe you’re referring to the ability to create multiple tasks from a constituent report. I don’t necessarily think it would be replacing. They may satisfy different use cases. As a constituent enters a donation automation, there may be a reason that you want to draft a letter. And if you want to draft a letter and you want to make sure that you get it out within a short period of time, time is of the essence when thanking a donor. The longer you wait, the less effective that thank-you is. The journey automation gives you the ability to create that task right at the moment, or within a certain period of time after that donation comes in. So if Cody makes a donation and Diana gets a task to write a thank-you letter or send out that little small cardstock within seven days, she can get that done. If Chad donates three days later, well, then there will be another task to be completed within that seven-day period of time. So I don’t think that it necessarily replaces. It might satisfy different reasons why you would use the report tasks versus the automation ones.

Diana Otero: Right. Cody, I think this is the next question to answer, and I don’t want to put him on the spot. But Chad, if you can think of a question for us as well, that would be great. In the meantime, does time delay just serve as a visual reminder, or does it force the next item in the journey to a certain date?

Cody Lawson: It is actually a time delay. If you have two emails separated by a seven-day time delay, email one will go out, and email two will not be sent for seven days. The other thing that is somewhat related to that is within our tasks. You might check to complete the task before a constituent moves on. If there are two constituents at the same point, they receive email one, and then there’s a task to send out that thank-you letter. If you accomplish one in one day, that constituent would then have seven days after that. But until you complete that task, they don’t move forward. So any time delay or hold until something is done actually impacts each individual constituent that is moving through. It’s a customized journey based off of each constituent moving through.

Chad Barger: Right. I don’t know that I have a question, but maybe a clarifying comment. I see a lot of the questions are talking about groups and dynamic updating. So I think just reiterating the fact that this is kind of a set-it-and-forget-it, almost. I don’t want you to forget it. I want you to create a task, say three months from now, to come back and look at it and update it. But as people meet your criteria, they’re going to automatically go through these journeys. When we were doing our event one, that was kind of one time, everybody’s on the same schedule. But you could have two hundred donors going through this journey all at different stages, and you had to do nothing to get them into that process. They just met your criteria, and now they’re walking through that journey. That’s the true power to me of set it up once, there it is, and that’s how, especially my small shops, you’re a shop of one or two, now all of a sudden your stewardship can be going on in the background while you’re doing all the other things you have to do.

Diana Otero: Love that.

Cody Lawson: I think it’s important to clarify. What we showed today, a group entry source automation, is a single pull of the group members at the time that Diana had set it up. The other items, like happy birthday or a donation automation, trigger at the point that the constituent does the thing. So understand that the group entry source one is based off of you wanting to reach out to a segment of people that have some sort of specific characteristic or commonality. But normally, the constituents would just enter at the time they make the donation or have a birthday.

Diana Otero: Love that. Well, we’re right at time here. We have a poll for you. We’re here to support you even after today’s session, so please let us know if you’d like to connect with us, chat for more resources, if you’re a Bloomerang customer and want to learn about additional products, or if you’d like to take a tour of Bloomerang. Thank you so much for joining us today. We had a lot of great information. As a reminder, everyone’s going to get an email with a link to the recording and the slides and the free resources, the free downloadables that Chad shared. I love that so much. So please take advantage of those resources, and we hope to see you in another webinar soon. Have a great day, everyone. Thanks for joining us.

Chad Barger: Take care, folks. Happy fundraising.