Personalized donor communication: Using custom fields

Kim Torres: I can’t see it.

Dani Cluff: Perfect. Okay. We’ll give it just a second and let people get logged in. Good morning or afternoon, depending on where you’re joining us from today. My name is Dani Cluff. I’m the channel marketing coordinator over on the Bloomerang team. I’m still in my morning. I’m over in Minneapolis. Kim, you’re in Texas.

Kim Torres: Houston. Houston.

Dani Cluff: Okay. So a little bit different weather than I’m working with up north.

Kim Torres: Absolutely. Oh, look. We got Rutherford, Texas.

Dani Cluff: Oh, I love seeing that. If you want to drop in the chat where you’re logging in from today, I love seeing where people are coming from. I know sometimes we get some Canadians. I love seeing people from all over the place. Well, to make sure Kim has enough time, I’ll run through a couple of things for us.

Before we get started, a few house notes. We’re recording this morning’s session, so the recording and slides will be sent to you later today. While Kim is presenting, if you have any questions, you can put those in the Q&A area. I’ll keep track of those, and Kim will go over them at the very end of today’s session. If you put them in the chat, I’ll do my best to keep track of those, but the Q&A area is really going to be your best bet for making sure they don’t get missed.

In case you’re not familiar with Bloomerang, we’re an online platform for your donor management, volunteer management, events, online fundraising, and so much more. If there’s anything we can help you with, you can indicate that in the poll at the end of today’s webinar.

I know we’re almost at the end of April. I think we have two days left now. I’m not a hundred percent sure what day it is today. But we’re currently offering a great special. If you purchase donor management by the end of this month, you will receive two years of Giving Plus for free [note: this offer is no longer valid]. You can scan that QR code to learn more. There will be a chance in the poll at the end of today’s webinar, and you’ll also be able to select if you want to hear more from Kim after today’s presentation.

And then, of course, Kim Torres, we’re so excited to have you with us today. Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to join us. I’m going to keep this as brief as possible and hand things over to you so that I’m not taking up more of your time.

Kim Torres: Fantastic. Thank you, Dani, for a great intro, and hi, everybody who’s joining us today from all over, most places that are not as humid as Houston, Texas. So, yes, I am Kim Torres, and I’ll give my quick little intro. I am the founder and CEO, whatever term you want to put in there, of Thrive Nonprofit Solutions. My cat, Otis, is right here. He’s the chief joy shedder. He attends all Zoom meetings with me, so if you see a cat, it’s Otis.

I entered the nonprofit sector about ten years ago, and, gosh, that would also be the kiddo— maybe it was more than that. Fourteen years ago, when my son was diagnosed with Down syndrome, and I became a user of nonprofit services. Ever since then, I’ve been trying to instill a business mindset into all of the nonprofit work and then infuse that with just joy. That’s the premise behind the work I do.

So today, let me start sharing my screen, and we will get started. Today, we are going to talk about personalized donor communication and how we use Bloomerang’s custom fields to do that. I absolutely am a huge fan of Bloomerang. I’m just going to tell you right off the top.

The average American receives 121 emails per day, with some studies showing that the average American has between 200 and 500 emails in their inbox at any point in time. If that’s you, you can totally emoji in the chat. That is not me; that would send me into major anxiety. There has been a 157 percent increase in text spamming since 2023, and 87 percent of people say they will not answer their phone for an unknown number, which, totally, right here, I just hit the off button for my ringer. So how in the world do you personalize donor communication when you have those statistics up against you?

I love a little good pop culture. According to Oliver Wendell Holmes, you need to speak clearly, if you speak at all, and carve every word before you let it fall. And my favorite singer, yes, I went to the concert, Miss Taylor Swift, has stated in her song “Mastermind” that if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. Strategy sets the scene for the tale. So today, we’re going to be talking about how you strategize the exact words and communication you use so that, when all of that communication is coming at people, they actually see yours.

The first one here, let me see if I can move this little guy out of the way. Okay. We know that when you pursue personalized communication, you get meaningful and relevant experiences, which build stronger connections, and those lead to positive outcomes. We know this because here comes Otis to join back in. We experience this in our lives all the time. I’m going to start on the right with our picture of the Soul Barber Shop. If you’re like me and you find someone to do your hair and you go there all the time, you usually walk in and say something like, “Go with the usual,” or “Remember what we did last time,” and that’s how you start the communication. You and the person cutting your hair act like you’re best friends, like they memorized everything about you. The truth of the matter is the person cutting your hair doesn’t know everything about you. In fact, there’s a good chance they have a system of note-taking behind the scenes, and right before you sat down in their chair, they looked over your history of how they cut your hair before, because they can’t remember it all.

Great doctors do the same thing. I went to a doctor’s appointment the other day. It was not Mrs. Doubtfire. But I went to a doctor’s appointment, and she started off the conversation with, “Hey, how was your vacation to London?” And I thought, you’d be really good at fundraising. In her notes, she didn’t just note what I was at the doctor’s appointment for previously, or my health outcomes or questions I had. She noted that I was going on vacation to London. So the next time I came in, even though it had been six months, and she probably doesn’t even remember what I look like, she could mention that and build rapport.

So how do we do this in a day and age where we are strapped for time and there’s so much data to track? And what do we track? I think of three things we need to track, and Otis completely and utterly agrees with all three of them, as he always does. We want to track the important things in life. We want to track core memories, and, yes, that’s a core memory from the Inside Out movie. And we want to track grapevine insights, and if you’re as old as me, you can probably sing the California Raisins song right now.

Let me go through the three things I like to track for donor engagement. First, the important things in life. A lot of times, when you get into your donor management system, and I hope it is Bloomerang, you’re tracking things like their giving ability, or whether they attended an event, or whether they opened their email. Those are not the donor’s important things in life. They’re your important things in life. So I like to use Bloomerang’s custom fields to track the donor’s important things in life.

For me, where I am in my stage, if you were going to track my important things in life, you would know that I have two kids. You would know I’m a swim mom and a volleyball mom and a dance mom. You would know that in my spare time, I’m reading historical fiction or running. Those are important things you’re going to track about me as a donor. So the next time you reach out to me, amid all of those five hundred, six hundred, seven hundred texts, emails, and phone calls people are getting, you start with, “Hey, I was out the other day around this park, and I saw some people running this amazing trail. It made me think of you. How’s your running going?” If you send me that, I’m going to reply, because I like talking about running. Then we can turn the conversation into fundraising and your mission and things like that. There’s a good chance I’m going to reciprocate without you even needing to lead the way.

Second, core interaction memories. These are the primary memory you have from a conversation when you’re interacting with someone. The primary memory you’re going to have from this conversation is that I have a cat who absolutely loves to interrupt conversations, and I’m pretty talented at getting rid of him while we communicate. Another core interaction memory you might have is if you’re sitting at a table having coffee with someone and they divert the conversation to how much they love Starbucks coffee and how they’ve purchased ten of their collectible mugs and switch between them one day at a time. That’s a core memory from your conversation, something unique and interesting. It could even be something like you’re sitting at Starbucks with a potential donor, and all of a sudden somebody walks by walking four Great Danes. And you guys stop your conversation and go, “Whoa. Who can walk four Great Danes?” You save that in your database, because that is something that brain science says is going to be a conversation starter later on.

I’ll divert to a little Netflix show I saw. I told you earlier, I’m the mother of a child with Down syndrome, and I’m always looking at research on brain science. We watched this show on Netflix once where a researcher stood in Hyde Park in London and started conversations with random strangers. In the middle of a conversation, he pulled a spoon out of his pocket and held it. Not a single person in that research study could continue the conversation. Their brains shut down, because no one pulls a spoon out in the middle of a park and just holds it. We don’t have connections in our brain that tell us what to do next when someone does that. So your core memories are trying to create that spoon impact in donor cultivation. In your interactions, you are trying to remember those little bitty things that are going to stick out. Four Great Danes all walking on a leash together is a core memory that’s going to incite more conversation between you and your donor than any greatly crafted email you can write.

The other thing I like to track is what you hear on the grapevine. We’re going to look in just a second at how to track these things in Bloomerang. Grapevine insight can be important, or it can be not important, but I like to keep track of what I hear in the news, in the world, and in conversations about my potential donors. If Susie says she saw Steve at the Taylor Swift concert, I might list that as a grapevine insight. I don’t want to list that as something I actually got from Steve, because then he’s going to say, “What? Are you just stalking me on the internet?” I want to list that as a grapevine insight, something I might be able to pull in later. I might be able to say, “Hey, do you like Taylor Swift?” in the middle of one of our conversations, and that continues to keep the interaction going. Notice we haven’t talked about anything about fundraising yet. We’re just talking about being a priority in the conversation with our donors.

Okay. I’m going to stop sharing this screen, and we’re going to hop over to Bloomerang and look at how you track this stuff. And, yes, “stuff” is the very technical term for what we’re talking about today.

So here is my very fun database. In Settings over here, we have what we call custom data. This is where it’s at in my world. I love custom data. When we open up custom data, we can see that you can do custom fields for anything you’d like in the Bloomerang database. Today, I’m going to look at custom fields for a constituent. You’ll see that there are people on the Bloomerang team who have access to this account and have added all these amazing custom fields. If you host a marathon race, you can put information in about that person. If they have memberships, or if you have volunteer specifics you’d like to include, you can add all of those custom fields in here.

My favorite, though, is what I consider the interest category. I want to know the things that are going to get my text, my call, my email answered. The category I added the other day was kids’ names. This is my trade secret here in consulting. I do this with my clients. I keep track of their kids’ names and their birthdays and their favorite football team, if they tell me. I was watching the Arizona Cardinals the other day, and I’m immediately writing that down in the file, because these are the things that keep people connected. So here, I created a new category called Interests, and then it’s just as simple as adding a custom field of what you’d like to list there. Any information is possible.

We can do the same thing with transactions. Oops, let’s go back. We want to go back here to interactions. We can add any sort of information about the interaction you’d ever want to know. All of this is great information that other people have put in here with custom fields. The Kim Torres addition to this is the core memory moment. This is the interaction insight. This is where I write about the four Great Danes, so I can go back to that story and build a connection. The same is true with notes. You can add all sorts. Look at all these notes about grants data. You can track your awards dinner, any information. And here’s the Kim Torres one: what’s the grapevine saying?

So when I go in here to Tim the Toolman Taylor, who is an active donor in our pretend database, and if you don’t know Tim the Toolman Taylor, that means we’re just not the same age. I’m a little bit older than you. That was before you could even record television. I’m going to look up his profile right now. His basic information, standard fundraiser information, is all in here. I can find anything about him. But, voilà, his interests. I can enter his kids’ names here. Let’s edit him. Let’s say his kids’ names are— where did my kids’ names go? Oh, I’ve got a copycat. There we go. His kids’ names are Aiden and Samantha. I’m going to save those in there so that when I’m sitting at home one day and something pops into my head that reminds me of Tim and how he’s the soccer dad, and he likes soccer, and I’m watching something on TV about soccer, I think, “Oh, I know Tim. He’s a great donor for us, and I know he would reach out, but he’s super busy and has twelve billion emails in his inbox. But he likes soccer. Oh, what are his kids’ names? Ah, yes, Samantha. Samantha’s the one who plays soccer.” I can send Tim a text that says, “Hey, how’s Samantha doing in soccer right now?” I guarantee that conversation is going to go back and forth, and you can even lead the conversation into donations. “Oh, I forgot to ask the other day. It doesn’t look like you’ve donated this year yet. Are you still planning on doing that?” Because you’ve already talked about things that are important to Tim, he’s going to reciprocate and do the same with you. “Oh, yes, I’ve just been at soccer, like, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. I’m going to get that donation to you. Can you send me a reminder later?” It becomes very, very personal.

We can also go back up here to the timeline, and we can look at our interactions, tasks, and notes. We can see very specifically what was memorable about the conversation and how we can pull that person into our story line.

So the next question is always: how do you do this when you’re a small nonprofit, or a mid-sized nonprofit, and you’re struggling with all the things in the world, and now you want me to track dogs and grapes and children and soccer? The trick here is to use your resources. And it’s not even on this side. I’ll be honest: nine times out of ten, it looks like something like this to me. This is my little notebook that’s with me at all points in time, and it’s a little note I put off to the side that I work on scratching out later. I often hand this off to my administrative assistant: “Can you please add this to the funder’s profile?” The other thing I use a lot lately— hey, Hayden, can you stop that? Yeah, thank you. The other thing I do lately is use AI. I use AI a lot. I may tell Copilot in Microsoft, “Can you please make a note about this person and remind me to input it into my database later?” Then, don’t laugh, I schedule time on my calendar to actually put these inputs in and make sure they happen.

As soon as I get them into the profile, I immediately schedule a task on Tim’s profile, and I say, “Follow up with Tim. Don’t forget we saw the four Great Danes walking in front of Starbucks.” I give myself eight weeks from now. I close the task, and in eight weeks my brain will have totally forgotten about that, but Bloomerang is going to remind me exactly how to go about interacting with my donor.

My last slide here is really back to my favorite Taylor Swift song, about being a mastermind behind communication. If you’re a Swiftie, you completely understand me right now. If you’re not, I’m sorry, I’m probably annoying you with my reference. But you’re going to have an interaction with somebody. You’re going to take notes about the important things, the core memories, the grapevine notes. You’re going to assign yourself a task to follow up with those things, and now you have a pre-planned connection. The connection is what brings the donor back to the table, not the five hundred emails, a hundred and twenty-five text messages, and ten missed calls that they purposely hit the decline button on. It’s the connection that brings them back.

Okay. Well, I did it. I made the thirty-minute timeline. I think we’re supposed to go to chat.

Dani Cluff: Yeah. I’ve got some questions for you lined up if you’re ready to go. I’m going to launch that poll just in case anybody needs to jump and has something they need to run to. Give me just a second.

Kim Torres: Oh, Otis onlyinterrupted, like, seven times.

Dani Cluff: You did great. Well, perfect. I have a few questions for you. Someone asked: if I take a gift or give them anything, I’ve been putting that at the end of the note with stars in front of it to make it visually stand out. Is there a better place or custom field for something like that, since it’s date-specific with that meeting?

Kim Torres: Absolutely. From my brain, and maybe your brain works with it— Otis. Maybe your brain works with, the bigger the note, the better. But my brain wants to be able to find that information instantaneously. So I would make a custom field of Gift Given so that I could easily sort that out, and it would just say “gift given, see meeting notes from November seventeenth.” Because, again, you don’t want to show up with the same gift twice. Right?

Dani Cluff: Absolutely. We’ll move on to another one for you. We are an organization that offers our services virtually only. I feel like this poses a challenge in gathering interest information and relationship building with donors at times. Do you have any advice?

Kim Torres: I’m going to disagree with whoever wrote it. I do almost all of my consulting work virtually from my in-home office. And I think that Dani and I, for example, had a great conversation before this. Would you agree, Dani, that for ten minutes, we—

Dani Cluff: Oh, yeah.

Kim Torres: We chatted it up virtually, and I can tell you about where she’s been recently, how her flight experience was, where her bookshelves were purchased behind her. It’s all a matter of starting to purposefully embed that conversation in there. The next time Dani chats, I’m going to totally tell her, “I ran into somebody the other day who had the same IKEA bookshelves as you, and I’m super jealous.” And that’s going to build a connection for us to talk again. Sorry, Dani. I gave away that they’re from IKEA.

Dani Cluff: That’s okay. I’m a loud and proud IKEA lover. Well, perfect. We have another question for you. How do we decide what info to pull out as separate custom fields, kids’ names, et cetera, versus something like grapevine insights, which seems more generic, when you will have information for a limited number of constituents? What information have you found best to try and track?

Kim Torres: Great, great question. You’re right. Grapevine insights is going to be much more general, and I wouldn’t pull out as many things. I hate to give you the in-the-middle answer, but I think it’s really just going to depend on you and how much specificity you want to be able to pull out and see instantaneously. I originally started this process by having just insights, and I would type out paragraph notes in there. At one point, it just became too much for my brain. I had too many things going on, and then I started having categories like family, kids, activities, loves, and I kept them very general like that. I think it’s going to depend on how you process information yourself. I don’t think there’s a right way or a wrong way to do this.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. Well, it looks like my camera has decided— apparently my camera’s done for the day. Apologies, everyone. But we have another question that just came in. I think we have just enough time before we wrap up. Bloomerang custom text fields are limited to, off the top of my head, we’ll see if you know this, around 255 characters. Do you know the limit off the top of your head? I’m struggling to remember it, so I thought I’d throw it out there just in case you do.

Kim Torres: Okay. I don’t know the exact character limit off the top of my head. So, great insight from the viewer. Great insight. I’d have to look that up. Dani, do you want to have a race afterwards to see what the character limit is?

Dani Cluff: Oh, yeah. I think you’d probably beat me on that one. You’re already open. Well, perfect. We are right up at the end of our half hour, I guess, not the end of the full hour. But thank you, everyone, so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Kim, for taking the time out of your day. My apologies again, everyone, that my camera decided I’m done for this morning. But it was so great hearing from you, and so great that all of you got to join us today. Thank you for bringing Otis along.

Kim Torres: I keep seeing Otis’s name in there. I’m feeling a little jealous. Otis is getting more love, and according to them, he probably knows how many characters are in the custom field. Probably. I’ll ask him later. Fantastic. Thank you.

Dani Cluff: Thank you all.