The key principle behind donor response

Dani Cluff: Here we go — we’ll give it just a second as people join. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you so much for joining us today. Happy July! I personally can’t believe we’re already halfway through the year, so I need to slow down a little before I start thinking about planning for 2027.

I’m so excited to have everyone here today, and to have Chris joining us to talk about the key principle behind donor response. Chris, thank you so much for taking time out of your week to join us. Can you remind me where you’re Zooming in from?

Chris Barlow: I’m in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Dani Cluff: Oh, awesome. I’m headed to Colorado later this month.

Chris Barlow: Oh, awesome. Very cool.

Dani Cluff: First time in a long time for me, so I’m hoping the weather is nice.

Chris Barlow: Nice. It should be. It might be a little hot, but it’s pretty nice.

Dani Cluff: Awesome. Well, just a couple of housekeeping notes before we get started: we are recording today’s webinar.

As we work through the session, if you have any questions, you can put them in the Q&A area of Zoom. You can also add them in the chat and I’ll try to keep track of those, but the Q&A area is going to be your best bet. We’ll do a bit of Q&A at the end of today’s session, where Chris will go through as many questions as we can get to. But as we’re going through the session, please feel free to chat with the other participants on the webinar too — we’re so glad everyone could join us.

And if you’re not familiar with Bloomerang, we’re a CRM, fundraising, and volunteer management platform all in one, built to help you reach your fundraising goals. If you’d like to learn more about how Bloomerang can support your organization, we’ll have a poll at the end where you can opt in to hear more from both Chris and from us.

And I can’t skip the chance to introduce, once again, and welcome Chris Barlow. Thank you so much for joining us — I’m incredibly excited to hear your presentation today and learn more about these key donor principles.

Chris Barlow: Awesome.

Dani Cluff: And I’ll stop sharing so you can get to the information everybody really wants to hear.

Chris Barlow: Alright, well, thank you, Dani, and thank you each for being here with us today, for taking the time to join. I want to honor that, and make sure we have time for a lot of questions — I’ll share my contact information a couple of times throughout the webinar, along with ways to stay in touch or reach out with questions, in case we aren’t able to get to everything that’s on your mind today.

I’m excited to talk to you today in a way I hope will be both grounding and practical. Grounding, in the sense that no matter what’s happening in the world today, or how fast technology is changing, you can walk away with a sense of where to go to stay effective in reaching donors through your marketing. And practical, in that we’ll look at how to apply what you’re learning right away.

With the speed of technology, and how AI is showing up everywhere and changing fast itself, I think the truth is that none of us can really keep up with what’s happening. If keeping up were your full-time job, maybe you could. But for the rest of us, it’s going to outpace what we can learn on the side while we’re doing our other work. That can feel anxiety-inducing — maybe you know the feeling, like Ron looking at his machine and thinking, I need to just throw this thing in the dumpster.

So today we’re going to look at three things. First, the antidote to feeling left behind by constantly changing technology in a fast-paced world. Second, what motivates donors to act. And third, how those two things — the antidote and what motivates donors — connect, and how we can apply that to be effective in your marketing and digital fundraising.

By the end, you’ll have practical strategies to stay calm and focused regardless of what’s changing. You won’t be worried about chasing the newest thing if it doesn’t make sense for you, but you’ll know what to focus on and how to apply what’s important. You’ll see what actually motivates donors to give and how to speak to it, and you’ll see a way to be more effective across all of your marketing.

When I talk about this feeling of being left behind, I wanted to pull some data together to show just how common it is. There was a nonprofit technology survey done a year ago, and here’s what it found.

Only one in five nonprofit leaders feel confident using technology — so most of us don’t feel confident about it. There’s just too much happening these days to feel like, yes, I know what I’m doing. Layered on top of that, only twenty-nine percent — less than a third — of boards talk about digital strategy in their board meetings, meaning most boards aren’t even addressing the strategy. And if leadership isn’t thinking about it in an organized way, how much more are the people on the ground — the directors, the fundraising and digital staff — left not knowing what they should be doing?

Directly connected to that, only twenty-four percent of nonprofits have a formal AI strategy, even though eighty-five percent are exploring AI tools — meaning about ten percent aren’t even exploring them yet. So most of us are experimenting with what AI can do in some capacity, but without a formal strategy that would help us feel confident about what to do. Part of the reason, I think, is this final figure: almost half of nonprofits rely on only one or two people to make all the decisions about AI and technology — and those are often the same one or two people managing IT overall. There’s just not enough capacity in the sector to keep up.

So how do we overcome these limitations, and how can we be effective in spite of them? I want to look at this using the analogy of a tree, starting from a high level and then getting into the practical ways we can apply it.

Let me give you some definitions, because I think it’ll help us think about what we’re really feeling — what’s the real problem we’re facing, and what’s the fake problem. What’s the problem that feels real but isn’t the actual issue — it’s just creating anxiety that isn’t based on our real capacity and capability.

There are three layers here: tactics, strategies, and principles. Specifically, we’re looking at reaching donors, motivating them to act, and being effective in marketing. Tactics are the actions, tools, and techniques we use to carry out a strategy. They’re visible, and they change the fastest. In some ways, we’re already used to tactics changing — we know a peer-to-peer fundraiser happens around the same time each year, or that testing an email subject line is a short-term thing to try, or that we’re posting short-form video today. We’re used to tactics shifting, but they shouldn’t lead our decisions — they’re effective when they’re already serving a bigger purpose. In this analogy, tactics are like the leaves or the fruit of a tree: visible, practical, important, but it’s in their nature to change.

At the next layer, we have strategies — our plans for applying principles to accomplish a goal. Your strategy might be, we want to grow our email list, because we want to build long-term donor relationships. Growing the list is a strategy, a channel, a tool to accomplish that underlying principle. Strategies can last for years, because they’re rooted in principles and usually don’t change fast — though a strategy that worked well in one decade, or with one audience or communication environment, may need to evolve.

A strategy might be using email, running ads in a certain way, or hosting an annual fundraising event. They’re long-lasting, but not necessarily permanent. Direct mail is a great example — for decades it was the primary way to reach donors through the written word, and it still exists, but it’s evolved, and we don’t use it the same way we used to. Digital channels are another way that’s come about since. In this analogy, strategies are like the branches of a tree: they give us structure and direction, but they grow, they adapt, and sometimes a tree even drops a branch.

But at the deepest layer, we have principles — the truths we can rely on that don’t change based on trends, tools, platforms, or technology. No one can just say a principle has changed. In nonprofit marketing, one principle is that people give when they feel connected to a cause and believe their gift will make a difference. That’s true regardless of whether that connection and impact is communicated through direct mail, email, social media, a phone call, or some future technology that hasn’t even been developed yet. The principle holds. So we can ask: what’s the principle behind everything here? What’s the ultimate thing driving what we need, want, and want to accomplish — and how do we apply that?

Principles help us because they guide wise decisions even when everything around us is changing. Continuing the tree analogy, the roots and trunk are the principles. Roots are unseen — we don’t usually notice they’re there, though they might show a bit at the surface. The trunk is unmoving, but it supports and nourishes everything. So, in summary: tactics are what we do, strategies are how we plan for success, and principles are the truths we base everything on. That’s the antidote to feeling left behind.

Now, I’m not just here to tell you a cliché and say, great, principles, that’s it — that reminder only helps so much. I want to look today at one specific principle and apply it throughout, as an example of how you can do the same thing with other principles. What we go through today won’t just be useful for that one principle — it’ll also show you something you could try as soon as next week or next month, practicing the discipline of going back to the principle that drives everything and helps you stay effective no matter what.

So today I mentioned we’d talk about what motivates donors to take action, and I want to start by asking you a new question — I’d love to hear from you in the chat. What do you think helps people decide to give to you? Put your answers in the chat; there’s no right or wrong answer here, and we’re not going to dig into the psychology or science behind it.

Impact of the work, trust, feeling connected to the mission, caring about the cause, stories, transparency, belief, relationships, a sense of urgency, impact statistics, long history, personal relationships with a peer — this is great. Again, there’s no right or wrong answer.

I want to share my two responses to this question, and what we’ll look at in terms of understanding what motivates donors to act. Obviously, we could look at everything you’re sharing here. My two responses are, first, that your donors are the experts on why they give — which should make us want to ask them what made them decide to give, and I’ll get into that later. And second, your value proposition, which I’ll define in a bit.

But I want to talk about value propositions from a high level first. Something that doesn’t get talked about much is that nonprofits are actually competing with for-profit companies for donors’ disposable income. As a consumer, if I want to buy something for myself — say, some chocolate — I don’t really need the chocolate company to give me a strong value proposition for why I should want chocolate. It’s kind of obvious. They might, and should, give me a value proposition for why I should buy their particular chocolate — why it’s unique, or special, or delicious — as opposed to someone else’s. But generally, they don’t need to convince me why I’d want to do that in the first place.

Whereas we, as nonprofits, don’t have that obvious, immediate, surface-level desire fulfillment for our donors. We’re offering something usually a lot less tangible. There are a few exceptions — if you’re a museum and someone’s buying entry tickets, sure, they’re getting entry. But why they should donate to your museum is a different question. What we’re offering people is built on trust. Our donors usually aren’t the direct recipients of our work, so they have to rely on our storytelling and our reporting to see the fulfillment of that trust come to pass. That’s why the value proposition matters so much — it’s a reason people choose to give to you.

I want to look at two pieces of data that support this, and then we’ll get into the definition. I think it’s interesting to see data on the effectiveness of adding a value proposition. The company NextAfter — I love their content, they put out a lot of good experiments in nonprofit marketing — ran an experiment with two identical donation pages, same donation form. One page was just the form; the other added a value proposition in the form of a couple of paragraphs. The page with the value proposition increased donations by a hundred and fifty percent.

They ran another experiment, same donation form, but one page added a single sentence telling the donor why they should give monthly instead of one time. The page with that single sentence resulted in four hundred fifty-six percent more recurring donations. It’s simple — just two pieces of data, though there’s a lot more out there supporting the power of a value proposition. Common sense and the data both tell us it matters.

Before I go further, I want to define this and look at how we build an effective value proposition — but first, just a reminder, if you have to leave at any point, there’s going to be a recording sent to you afterward, so no problem if you need to go. If you want to stay in touch with me, or if you have questions that don’t get answered before you have to leave, feel free to email me or follow me on LinkedIn — no sales pitch, just, hey, I wanted to ask about this. And if you want a resource to help you attract and reach new donors and motivate them, grab our free ebook at the QR code or URL on screen.

Alright, let’s go back to it. What is a value proposition? It answers this question: why should I give to you rather than to another cause, or not at all, and spend the money on myself instead? The more clearly, simply, and compellingly you can answer that question, the more likely your prospective donor is to give. A value proposition can take different forms — a single sentence, like a headline; a short paragraph, like an elevator pitch you’d give if someone asked what your organization does or why they should give to you; or a full page, or something in an email, where you make a fuller case.

Regardless of format, I learned a helpful analogy from a nonprofit value proposition index study: your value proposition is like a scale, with the donor in the center. As they decide whether to take this donor journey with you, they’re constantly weighing the value of what you’re offering against the cost. Think about it from a donor journey perspective. You send an email, and they see the subject line — they weigh the value of clicking, like, that’s interesting, or that piques my curiosity, against the cost of taking the time to click on your email instead of all the other emails in their inbox, or doing something else. The value has to be higher than the cost.

Once they click, they look at the email and weigh it again — is it overwhelming, or does it draw me in right away with a story? Do I want to keep reading? When it comes to a call to action to donate, they weigh that next click. And on the donation page, they go through the process again — do I want to keep reading, do I feel motivated to give, versus the cost of doing so? And it’s not just the cost of the donation itself, which of course the value proposition has to outweigh — it’s also the time and effort it takes the donor to think through what we’re saying. Are we saying it clearly and simply, without making them work to understand it? The more value-heavy we are throughout that donor journey, the more likely we are to get to a yes.

I want to look at a few variables within a value proposition, briefly, with an example, so we know how to increase value relative to cost. A value proposition has three things: appeal, exclusivity, and simplicity. NextAfter talks a lot about the first two, and I’ve added the third. Appeal answers the question: how badly does my ideal donor want to make this impact? That’s the outcome. Exclusivity asks: can they do this anywhere else? What’s unique about your organization and mission compared to others doing similar work — why should someone support this cause through you rather than a different organization? And simplicity, the one I’ve added: can you express it in a single sentence or short paragraph that nobody has to think hard about?

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital is a good example. Years ago, their value proposition focused on the scientific aspects of their work, and it wasn’t effective — people didn’t get it. Now they have one of the simplest, most compelling value propositions I’ve seen, expressed in just four words: finding cures, saving children. It doesn’t get bogged down in medical procedures or research — it speaks straight to the heart of why someone would support their cause, while still saying how they do it.

So how do we write a value proposition that’s value-heavy and cost-light? How do we communicate in a way that resonates with our donors’ feelings, thoughts, and values — what’s the principle behind all of that? We might think our value proposition is really compelling when we write it. But the question that matters is: when donors read it, or see it, whatever medium it takes, do they give? Do they take action?

We need an easier way to step into our donors’ shoes and learn what they’re thinking — how they feel about what we’re saying, what’s motivating them, what concerns they have, and ultimately, why they chose to give. As I mentioned, my two responses to the earlier question were the value proposition, and that donors are the experts on why they give — so we should be asking them. The key to a powerful value proposition, the principle underlying all of this, is that people depend on and thrive in relationship. And a key, lived-out part of that principle is active listening.

If we ask our potential donors and donors questions, and we actually listen, we’ll understand what they care about — their feelings, their motivations, the words they use to describe what matters to them. If we really listen, we can speak to their hearts, and we’ll know what’s really important about our mission and what we should be talking about. So one strategy to improve your value proposition, create higher-converting donation pages, write more engaging emails, and write ad copy that gets a response, is to listen. For the rest of this webinar, I want to talk about how we take this principle of listening and apply it across your marketing — with specific ideas you can try, both to be more effective at motivating donors to act, and as a model for applying other unchanging principles you know to be true.

Going back to the tree analogy at a high level: our principle is connection to donors — connection to our mission, to relationships. What builds relationships? One way is through digital channels. We do digital fundraising, so maybe we use a donation page and send people there through channels like email, text messaging, or ads. As far as tactics go, we want to optimize the donation form so there’s as little friction, and as little cost, as possible, and as much value as possible. That’s the high-level view — now let’s look at specific ways to actively listen.

Active listening means both capturing the words people use and understanding their emotions and motivations, and we can do that pretty effectively through digital channels. On your website, one way to start is with polls — there are tools that let you run a small pop-up poll where visitors don’t have to opt in, they can just answer a question. Three great questions to ask: what brought you to our website today, did you find what you were looking for, and do you understand what we do? Your goal isn’t to get people to sign up for your email list — it’s just to get direct feedback from visitors who are there right now.

I’ve also recommended sending a survey to your email list — go to our site, spend sixty seconds there, then come back and answer some questions, like, do you understand what we focus on? I’ve gotten really insightful, helpful feedback doing that with subscribers. You make assumptions about what people understand when they’re on your website, and you learn what they actually think when you ask them.

Another tool for more indirect listening is analytics and heat maps. In analytics — whether Google Analytics or another tool — you can look at where people are dropping off your site, where they’re spending the most time, which pages are working and which aren’t. Then, more granularly, at the page level, heat maps show you where people are clicking, where their mouse is moving and lingering, how far down the page they’re scrolling, and where they drop off. You can use that to start improving the user experience, both at a high level and page by page.

I want to talk about a case study where we did this — not with analytics, but with a simple survey — for one of our clients, Connected Families. They offer free ebooks and digital resources to their audience, and they wanted to improve the landing page for one of their top resources, a book about helping kids with anger.

We put together a two-question survey and asked people on the thank-you page, after they filled out the form: which guide or resource did you download, and why did you download it — a simple open-ended question. We didn’t ask for their information; we just wanted to hear why people wanted this book. After a couple of months, we compiled the answers and rewrote the original landing page, leveraging the words, phrases, and emotions their audience had shared.

The old landing page converted at about seven point eight percent — out of a hundred people, seven or eight would opt in. The new page converted at about ten percent, a twenty-eight to thirty percent improvement — and this page was driving ten thousand new subscribers a year. That was a significant improvement, achieved just by listening to what their subscribers cared about and adjusting our communication accordingly.

My favorite way to do this, and the one I recommend you all go try, is a post-donation survey. When someone makes a donation on your site, I recommend sending them to a separate confirmation page — thank them, confirm the donation, let them know a receipt is on its way — and include a one- or two-question survey. Ask what method of communication they prefer; it’s a great way to collect their address or phone number if that’s their preferred channel, so you can segment people based on how they want to hear from you.

Then the key question: why did you choose to give to us today? They just made a gift, they’re thinking about it fresh, and they can tell you why they chose to. That information — the thinking, the words, the emotions, the reasons — is very powerful, and the more responses you collect, the better you’ll understand your donors and the more effective your communication will be.

Two more questions are optional, but I love them because they help identify potential mid-level and major donors. Anyone who takes the time to answer a question like, I have a vision for your mission, or I have a personal story I want to share, or here’s how I think your organization could improve, is thinking about your organization at a different level than most donors. People who write long, thoughtful answers to these questions are worth a personal, one-to-one follow-up from your fundraising team — you don’t always know who’s behind it, but it’s often either a mid-level or major donor with real capacity, or someone deeply connected who’s worth the relationship either way.

That’s my favorite way to really begin to understand your donors. Let me share a few other strategies. For your content, instead of offering people a newsletter — which sounds like, let us talk to you and tell you about ourselves — consider something like a quiz or assessment with a bit of interactivity. It’s not quite listening, but it starts to signal that you want to provide something relevant and helpful.

I worked with a nonprofit incubator that helps people starting a nonprofit, or a couple of years in, and we built an assessment — based on the person’s responses, it gave them more customized resources at different stages of growth, rather than one generic answer. Another organization we worked with does work in Ethiopia, and their quiz helped people identify what kind of Ethiopian coffee they should try — just a fun way to get people onto their email list.

Speaking of email — I think email, and maybe text, is probably your best channel for active listening. Typically we see email as a one-way channel for sending messages to subscribers and donors, and our goals reflect that: get the open rate and click rate as high as possible. But what if our real goal was replies? To me, replies show more connection than any other kind of click. If we write and structure our emails to invite a personal response, because they feel personal, we’re showing much better listening.

Other, more indirect ways to listen in email: look at who your most engaged subscribers are — maybe your fundraising or development team should reach out to them personally — and look at who’s stopped engaging altogether. Maybe you need to unsubscribe them, or send one last email saying, we see you haven’t engaged in three months; if you want to stay, click this link, and we’ll keep you, otherwise we’re happy to let you go and not take up any more space in your inbox. That’s listening too.

Our client Connected Families, whom I mentioned earlier, created what they call an insiders team — a special segment of subscribers invited to give feedback all the time. They get emails saying, hey, we’re developing this, or here’s a resource, we’d love your feedback before we share it with our whole audience. The point is personal interaction — letting people see the organization from the inside and be part of shaping it, as much or as little as they want.

Interestingly, I think the area where we could most quickly apply active listening in email is the welcome series. Most of us treat a welcome series as a chance to connect, put our best foot forward, and tell the new subscriber or donor more about ourselves. But what if, instead of spending that time talking about ourselves, we used it to get to know our subscriber or donor better? I have to thank Lee O’Connell, a nonprofit writer, for helping me see a better way to do this, and I’ve applied it a bit myself in my own email marketing.

In my own welcome series, one email shares three personal things about myself, and then asks the subscriber to hit reply and share three things about themselves. I get more replies to this email than any other I send. I ran two versions as an A/B test, and one of them — which I’ve since turned off — had a really high reply rate, around three percent, which is high for replies, and I got dozens of them. I can’t necessarily say those replies led directly to growth or new clients, but I don’t really care about that — getting those emails was valuable and fun on its own, and I’d encourage you to try the same thing.

Here are two quick ideas for your own welcome series. First, for new subscribers, I’d recommend sending an email in your second or third welcome message asking, what would you like to learn more about, with a link to a short survey. For example, we worked with an organization doing brain disease research, and they asked subscribers whether they wanted to hear more about webinars, stories of people living with brain disease, updates on the research, resources from partners, or news on research and development — giving the subscriber a way to say what they wanted to hear about, so the organization could segment them accordingly. In a similar survey, we asked new donors to share about their identity — who are you in the fight against brain disease — which was really helpful in getting to know who their new donors were.

So that’s email — probably the best channel for active listening, if you see it as a two-way conversation rather than a one-way message, one where you can get and encourage replies. Besides the post-donation survey, that’s where I’d put most of your effort. But you can actively listen in your ads too.

If you think of a Google search as the start of a conversation — the person types in their problem, question, or topic — Google tries to give them the most relevant response it can, and you can do the same with your ads. Your ad headline can repeat back to the user what they searched for, word for word or close to it. In one example, someone searched “cat adoption,” and the ad said “Adoptable Kittens and Cats, Front Range Cat Adoptions” — repeating the keyword in both headlines in slightly different ways, with similar language in the description and a call to action.

Studies have shown people spend a second or less reviewing search results before clicking — they’re not reading persuasive ad copy and being won over by clever writing, they’re clicking based on who feels like they’re listening to them best. One good principle in active listening is repeating back what someone said, and search is a great medium for that. With AI showing up in search now, and AI tools and GPTs being even more conversational than a search result, it matters even more that we think and treat our ads this way. The better we listen, and the better we know our audience and what they care about, the more effective our ads and messaging will be.

So, as we wrap up, let’s review the key takeaways. Principles are the antidote to feeling left behind by constantly changing technology. Your value proposition is what motivates donors to give, and how you speak directly to it — that’s one of the things you can control; there are other things that motivate donors to give that you can’t control, but this is one you can. And to build an effective value proposition, use the unchanging principle of active listening — building relationships through listening — which will help you be effective across all of your marketing.

Before we go to Q&A, your next step, if you’d like, is a custom GPT we built called Beeline GPT, based on our content, informed by your organization’s website and mission, that will create a custom digital resource for you. Instead of handing you something prepackaged, it does a bit of listening and understanding first, and puts together something relevant to whatever question or issue you have. If you go to the QR code or URL on screen, you can enter your biggest marketing question — say, we need help refining our value proposition, or, help us write more engaging emails, here’s our current newsletter, what would you do to make it more personal — whatever you need. It’ll create a custom digital resource, and when you click a button, it’ll email that resource to you.

When you get that email, you can actually reply to it, and it’ll come to me — I’ll read it, and I’d love your feedback on whether the resource was helpful or answered your question. You can also just email me directly; my email is right there on screen, so ask me anything. And if we don’t get to your question in this Q&A, whether we run out of time or it’s just something you didn’t want to bring up here, send it my way. So, with that, I want to open it up for Q&A — we have plenty of time, and might even end early. Thank you for your attention, and let’s hear your questions. I’ll do my best to answer them.

Dani Cluff: Well, thank you, Chris. One of the questions I want to get to — I know earlier in your webinar you showed the heat maps, and someone asked what some of the best programs are for developing heat maps like that.

Chris Barlow: That’s a great question. Microsoft has one — I should know the name off the top of my head, but it’s free to use, just search “Microsoft heat map tool” in Google and it’ll come up. There’s another one I haven’t used in years, but it provided heat maps, scroll maps, click maps, and also a way to run website polls. At the time, it was free for a certain number of website visitors — it’s called Hotjar, all one word.

Dani Cluff: Well, thank you for that. I did launch a quick poll as we move through Q&A, just in case anybody needs to hop off early. You talked a lot about value propositions at the beginning of the webinar — how does a value proposition differ from a mission or a vision statement?

Chris Barlow: That’s great. The difference from a vision or mission — and I think those can be defined a little differently from organization to organization — is that a mission or vision is more internal. It’s for the fiduciaries, the board, the people inside the nonprofit: what is our mission, what is our vision. You will communicate that to donors too, especially in annual reports or certain emails. But your value proposition is really for telling someone why they should give — it’s connected, but it has to answer, why does your gift matter, and what is it going to do? You can have a value proposition specific to a campaign, or a general one on your main donation page.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely. I have another question for you — you talked a bit about surveys. Someone asked, is it a good idea to offer a prize or gift for people taking surveys, since it can be hard to get people to fill them out?

Chris Barlow: I think the main thing is to make the survey easy and short. If you don’t need contact information, don’t ask for it — you’ll get a lot more responses. With something like the post-donation survey, you might want their email so you can match it up with the donor, or have a way to reach out. But especially for something like a post-download or subscriber sign-up, you’re really just trying to get feedback — ask only the questions you can actually do something with.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely. Next question: do you have any specific advice for balancing what your subscribers, members, or donors want with grant-funded directives, for organizations that are largely grant-funded?

Chris Barlow: I think the best advice is to look at how your donors are communicating about what’s important to them, and then highlight and focus on the parts of your work that your grant fulfills. You could say, we also do these other things, and our grant supports these outcomes or programs — or, our grant covers this, but with individual donors, we’re able to do these other things. It’s also just about learning what to focus on in your communication — what’s really important to your donors. I don’t know if that fully answers it, but that’s where I’d start.

Dani Cluff: Yeah, absolutely. I saw in the chat, someone asked, are there resources that don’t use AI?

Chris Barlow: If you’re talking about resources we offer, yes — let me drop a few into the chat, give me one second. I’ll also put a link to our digital resources in the follow-up email — we’ve got ones on how to attract new donors, whether the Google Ad Grant is a good fit for your organization, how to attract corporate partners, and more.

Dani Cluff: Perfect. Any other questions? Do you have any advice for reengaging with members who haven’t heard from the organization in a long time, due to operational transitions within the org?

Chris Barlow: Yeah — I don’t need to keep sharing my screen for this one. First, I’d take the attitude that those people still care about your mission, and treat them that way: this is important, we know it’s still important to you, we just haven’t been in touch. Remind them of what they cared about before. Beyond that, at a high level, since I don’t know exactly how things played out for your organization — send them value. Tell stories, show them what their gift accomplished in the past and what their support has made possible. Be the voice that says, you care about this, here’s what you’ve been able to do — rather than assuming they don’t care anymore just because you haven’t talked in a while. That’s the attitude, or principle, I’d point to.

I’m dropping three links into the chat now that aren’t AI-connected at all.

Dani Cluff: Absolutely, and we’ll make sure to include those in the follow-up email later today too, so everyone can get them. Any other questions? I think I saw one that was Bloomerang-specific, from Melinda — I personally can’t speak to the future of survey tools for Bloomerang, Melinda, but keep an eye out, and if you let our team know you’re looking for that, we can definitely put it on our radar for future development. But if there are no other questions, we can give everyone a few minutes back in their day.

Chris Barlow: Yeah.

Dani Cluff: Thank you so much, everyone, for joining us, and thank you again, Chris, for joining us and for taking the time to put this all together. I know many of you are incredibly busy and juggling a lot, so we really appreciate you taking the time out of your schedules to join us this afternoon. Chris, any final words before we go?

Chris Barlow: No — thank you for joining me today. Have a great day.

Dani Cluff: Fantastic. Goodbye, everyone.