The new donor playbook: fuel your fundraising funnel

Lacey Jackson: Afternoon. I was a little early starting today. Good afternoon, everyone, or I guess, is it good morning anywhere right now? We are going to wait for a couple of folks to trickle in this afternoon, good evening, and good night. And we’re gonna be talking about the new donor playbook, fueling your fundraising funnel.

I’m really excited about this one as a marketer myself, but we’ll get into descriptions in a couple of slides about who will be on this webinar and hosting for you today. But I am gonna just give us a little warm-up in the chat this afternoon. I’m in Indiana, which is very close to our Bloomerang office, and I have already been resisting my Midwest urge to talk about the weather.

But instead of that, we’ve had some fun icebreakers on these webinars previously. So I would love to hear something like a win from your week, if you’ve had anything that was a win from your week this week. It doesn’t have to be work. It doesn’t have to be nonprofit or fundraising related, though I would happily listen to your work wins this week.

I’ll share one from my week. We have an ECHL team, a hockey team, in Indianapolis, and I finally was well enough to be able to go because I was sick last week. I was finally well enough to go to the game, and we absolutely cleaned. We resurfaced the ice with the other team. It was six to two. It was incredible. Really good game. I don’t know if anybody else is a hockey fan in the audience today, but that was very fun. And I would love for Indianapolis to get an NHL team.

Oh, we got someone donating, up $1,000 for a sec. Very nice. Brandon, do you have a win this week? Something exciting to happen?

Brandon Tremblay: It’s kind of a lame one. We’ll count last weekend as this week, but I got all my spring cleaning done. Cleaned out the garage, cleaned out the basement, and it actually feels really good to get it done. So I count that as a win.

Lacey Jackson: Oh, that is a huge win. I similarly, we’re having some crazy weather. This was a couple weeks ago, and we weren’t gonna have hail and tornado or whatever. It didn’t end up being anything too serious, but I was like, oh, I need to be able to park two cars in the garage. I’m gonna have to clean. So it spurred me on, but I know exactly that feeling right now. So very good for you.

Brandon Tremblay: Yep. Feels great.

Lacey Jackson: Oh, I love hearing Katie has finished a migration from another software to Bloomerang. That’s a huge win. Also feels spring cleaning adjacent, I feel. Oh, and we have a Penny user. Amazing. Thanks, Penny. Love that.

Well, I think we’ve gotten a little bit of banter out. Please, as you’re joining, feel free to add any wins that you had from the week, work, nonprofit, fundraising, or otherwise. Feel free to keep doing that, because I also love to bring the vibes up. We’re all working so hard to get things done, and it is so exciting to hear when people have wins. And big congrats to everyone for the wins. My win was not work, but you know? Big congrats to my team.

So as we get started, just a couple of housekeeping notes. We are recording this session, so no need to scramble and take notes. We’re gonna send a recording of the session afterwards so you’ll be able to revisit anything or share it out with your team. Secondly, I’d love for this to feel interactive and to keep the good vibes going in the chat. This is a great opportunity for nonprofits especially to share what they’re thinking, to commiserate together about some of the challenges, and also to talk about how you’re approaching new donors and what tactics you’re using. So compare notes in real time, all of that. Please feel free to keep leveraging the chat.

There is a Q&A button at the bottom of your screen, I believe, and that’s where you’ll be able to have someone from Bloomerang type out a question or a response to your question, or to have myself or Brandon answer them live at the end of today’s session, as we are able to. We’ll leave a couple of minutes at the end to answer any questions that might be dropped there, but it’s a much better place to do it than in the chat.

And speaking of excellent ways to engage with your fellow nonprofit organizers in your community, this is a slide about our GiveCon, which is coming up. It’s our annual conference that we have every year. This year it’s going to be in Saint Louis. It’s just in a couple of weeks, so I’m very excited. I will be there. Very excited to get to see, hopefully, some of the folks that are attending today in person.

If you have not been to GiveCon before, it’s really where the best in giving gather for a couple of days to share insights. We’re gonna have a ton of speakers from the industry and a lot of resources, plus speakers from Bloomerang. Again, I will be there, so you could come and talk to me. It’s a great place to connect with each other and to learn more about what’s going on, not only in the industry, but also what’s the latest and greatest in terms of Bloomerang. So, hopefully, I’ll get to see some of you there, and that’s coming up in just the next couple of weeks.

All right. So, kicking things off. This is a little overview of what we’re gonna talk about today. We are gonna get into the challenges with new donors, and some new donor tips and tricks. We’re gonna talk about what’s making it really difficult to meet donor expectations today, and how you’re able to build lasting relationships, particularly with those new donors. Then we’re gonna go over what might be challenging you as you try to grow your network, and walk through a scenario of an ideal experience. What might that actually look like, finding a new donor and really cultivating them to become a lasting supporter and constituent?

Then we’re gonna walk through why getting to that ideal state can be really hard, and what the hurdles are that you’re trying to overcome today. Finally, we are going to walk through what it looks like to find and build new donors in the Bloomerang giving platform specifically. That’s why we have the lovely Brandon here today. We’ll get into introductions on the next slide. We’ll share some of the tools and strategies that we talked about earlier and how you might be able to see them in action in the Bloomerang solution. And then we’re gonna wrap up with a customer story, I believe, and a Q&A section. Even though there’s gonna be Q&A at the end, feel free to drop your questions in the Q&A section all throughout the session as they come up. We will also have someone in the chat trying to answer those in written form, and we’ll take some of them live.

So, obviously, I am sharing the stage today. I’ll introduce myself first. My name is Lacey Jackson. I am a senior product marketing manager here with Bloomerang. I am focused on our Bloomerang Volunteer solution as well as our services offerings like coaching, consulting, and data conversion. I know we have someone who maybe just completed their data conversion in the chat today. I’m also focused on our integrations. But I am joined today by Brandon. Do you wanna go ahead and introduce yourself?

Brandon Tremblay: Yeah. I’m Brandon Tremblay. I’m on the solution consultant team with Bloomerang. My day to day is actually demonstrating the platform, Bloomerang Fundraising, Bloomerang Volunteer, and Bloomerang CRM, to nonprofits every single day. For the last six years, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to a lot of different types of nonprofits and show them how Bloomerang can make their life easier.

Lacey Jackson: Love that. Brandon will be joining us in a few slides, after I get a little bit of setup on our tips and tricks, to go through the actual platform.

So I’ll dive right in and set up some of the challenges. We know that relationships fuel fundraising growth. That’s a pretty obvious connection: if you have strong relationships, we all know this, you can continue to grow and cultivate those relationships, and that’s what’s going to result in being able to raise more funds for your nonprofit. But if it were as easy as I’m saying it, we’d all be absolute experts at doing it amazingly, which I think a lot of people in the chat today really are. So why is it a challenge?

Donor expectations have been consistently increasing over the last few decades, especially as technology changes, things get easier, and we continue to prioritize convenience. Think about the general consumer experience. If you buy something online, there’s an ease of experience if you just go to Amazon. It saved your credit card information. You click a button, tap your card, whatever, and they know who you are. They know your preferences. They know what you’ve purchased in the past. It’s made very easy for you. Now, granted, consumer experiences don’t always translate to fundraising. It’s not always what’s accepted for fundraising. But what donors experience in that consumer world is certainly going to bleed over and heighten their expectations for their nonprofits, and they want seamless, personalized experiences when they give. That’s what we start to expect.

And there are fewer donors, fewer people who are willing to give, over the last few years, with the way that’s been shifting in our general fundraising donor base. To meet those donor expectations, you have to not only find donors who are willing and ready to give, but also meet a higher expectation.

I want to keep this chat interactive, so please leverage the chat. I’ve got a question for you all. I’ve added little letters here to make it a little bit easier so you don’t have to type everything out. In the chat, limit yourself to your top two or three: how do most of your new donors actually first discover your organization? I wanna see a couple of answers in the chat if we can. How are donors actually discovering your organization?

Oh, love it. There are a lot of things that feel word-of-mouth related, but also a lot of events. Alumni. Love seeing the peer to peer options. Cool. Okay. I think there’s a lot of variety happening in here. And we have some new folks, so hopefully this is gonna be an interesting opportunity to also share information in the chat, as we see some people who are maybe new in their roles.

So one of the most powerful and, unfortunately, often underutilized assets for any nonprofit is your existing community of supporters. These are the people who already are convinced and believe in your mission. What you’re trying to do now is identify how you actually empower them to become champions, to become ambassadors, and that’s all about activating your network.

If you’re considering, as some people in the chat mentioned, launching peer to peer campaigns, this is a year-round solution where you’re able to empower your supporters to create their own fundraising pages and reach out to their personal networks with fundraising asks. If you think about it, a request from a friend or a family member is far more personal. It’s far more compelling than a generic appeal. And the data certainly backs that up. While 10% of donors in the US and Canada already participate in peer to peer fundraising, there is so much room for growth. These are campaigns that can extend your reach exponentially, really bringing in new donors and people that you might not have connected with or been able to reach otherwise.

Secondly, you can make it incredibly easy with Peer to Peer to share your mission. This can be as simple as a page on your website with prewritten posts for social media, including powerful images of your organization in action and direct links to your donation page. When you remove friction, you make it effortless for someone to share a post, share an email, or text a friend about an important cause that they care about and are invested in, and that they think their friends might be invested in as well. You’re giving your constituents the tools to help you tell and amplify your story.

Finally, remember to recognize and reward your advocates. This doesn’t have to be a complex or expensive program. If you’re acknowledging top fundraisers, you can do so in your newsletter, or give social media shout-outs to someone who’s consistently sharing content online, or offer exclusive updates to your most dedicated ambassadors. A sneak peek is something I hear about from customers, because it really does help people feel that they’re a part of your organization, that they’re in the know. A little appreciation tends to go a long way in showing your supporters, constituents, donors, and volunteers that their efforts are valued, and it encourages them to be advocates for your mission.

By taking your supporters from that supporter role into more of an active partner role, you don’t just raise more money. You build a dedicated community of people who are willing to help fuel your growth for years to come.

A one-size-fits-all approach really is not going to work, even just from seeing people add in the chat how people hear about their organization. There’s a lot of variety, and a lot of people putting “other” with a really unique way that people are hearing about their organization.

So our supporters span multiple generations. Each generation has very unique motivations and very unique communication preferences. Someone from the boomer generation is certainly communicating differently than someone from Gen Z. That also impacts their ways of giving. To truly connect, we need to engage across those generations, and that requires tailoring the approach to them.

First, if we talk about the message itself, we need to craft generation specific messages for Gen Z and millennials, for example. This might mean focusing on immediate social impact, the things they care about, transparency, and authenticity. They often connect with causes through dynamic social media content. I myself am a millennial, and that certainly is one of the ways to get me. In fact, we know that women, for example, make up 67% of donors. We also see that younger donors are far more likely to be inspired through something like a social media post. On the other hand, with Gen X and boomers, we see they’re often responding more to stories of long-term results and legacy-building opportunities, delivered through channels like direct mail rather than something like social media and email. I will say, for me as a millennial, emails do tend to get lost in the abyss. However, direct mail does still, I’m a little old school, I do like a bit of direct mail. But the message is what you’re trying to tailor, along with the way they receive it. It needs to match the audience and the mindset they’re in.

Secondly, we need to diversify our giving channels. It’s all about meeting donors where they are. For a tech-savvy audience, a seamless, mobile-friendly donation page or a text-to-donate option, for example, is essential, because any friction in the process is gonna lead to a lost donation. If you reach a hurdle, you’re like, I’m just gonna step away from this, or I forget, or I get distracted by something else. But at the same time, we do wanna make sure that traditional methods like mail-in forms, checks, and giving at an in-person event remain accessible, at least for supporters who tend to prefer them, especially given the differences across generations.

One final point for this slide is that giving isn’t always about money. Of course, I’m representing the volunteer component of our platform as well, talking about the entire giving platform, and I always have a soft spot for volunteers. But it’s not always about money, and we should highlight different ways that people are able to contribute. For generations who may have more time than disposable income, maybe the Gen Z folks who want to advocate for your organization by taking action, volunteer opportunities or even digital advocacy roles can be a much more powerful way to help them get involved, and then move them from that volunteer spot into a donor, converting them into donors.

For more established donors, people who’ve been doing this for a long time, providing clear information on planned giving, endowments, and major gifts is gonna allow them to make a lasting impact with their financial goals. By understanding and respecting these generational differences, we’re able to build stronger and more meaningful relationships, with every supporter feeling supported in the way they’re able to ensure that the mission is resonating with them, and in the way they’re able to amplify it.

So, once you’re reaching out to people through the right channels, this is another one for the chat. Let me know in the chat what you’re thinking here. The next question is: where are you seeing your new donors drop off? Or where do you expect them to, if you’re maybe new to the role? Have you seen gaps in where you think these folks might drop off in your process? I’ve, again, got your A, B, C, D, E options here. Let’s see here. Okay. We got a lot of A’s in there, and I think a lot of E’s too, where it’s trying to identify where that is actually happening, being a little bit unsure. Excellent. Okay.

So I think there certainly is a little bit of hesitation in there too. The moment right before someone gives a first gift is an incredibly important moment. It’s either where trust is built or trust is lost. That could be someone who’s lost forever, so that they are not coming back. The next thing I’m gonna segue into is what helps someone move from interest into confidence, and what needs to be true in order for that confidence to ultimately turn into a gift.

Facts and statistics can validate our impact. But when it comes to actually connecting with donors on a meaningful level, nothing is more effective than showing the true story behind your mission. So powerful. Share authentic stories, bring forward the real voices of the people that you serve, the stories that help donors see the way their gift can make change possible. A personal story about a single life transformed is what creates that emotional bridge that data points alone can’t create. It doesn’t serve the same purpose. And that kind of authenticity is what moves someone from interest, right before they’re about to click the button, into action.

Secondly, the data point still serves a purpose. The authentic stories are so important, but there is also a way to visualize the impact that someone is able to make, or the impact that your organization is making as a whole as a result of donations. Things like infographics, progress photos, and short videos can bring to life the difference a donation is able to make. If you really reflect on the algorithms that are so popular today, those kinds of quick visuals are what power us to engage with something. That’s why the progress bar is something people are constantly leveraging, because we love to see ourselves reaching up to that goal.

So instead of saying something like “we served 500 meals,” which is powerful, you can show faces around a table or a time-lapse of your work in action, and make it super engaging. We know that 32% of donors are most inspired after seeing those kinds of visuals on social media. Your supporters are then able to see that transformation in real time. That’s something we all want to be leveraging. And the last point for this slide is just keeping that narrative alive and timely. Donor relationships are built on ongoing trust, not just your one-off successes. When people feel like they’re included and involved in your story, when they feel like they are actually moving that progress bar toward the top of the arrow, or whatever your visual is, they become a part of the mission. That leads to more donations, committed support, and supporters who stay with you longer. So it’s not simply telling. It’s a show-don’t-tell situation. You wanna make sure that all of your donors want to help you grow into your next chapter.

If you’ve inspired a donor with your mission, and you certainly have, you wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t, they’re ready to make a gift. This is a super critical moment. Any friction in the giving process can cause folks to abandon the gift entirely, and that’s why a seamless, digitized giving experience is not just a convenience, though it is convenient. It’s actually essential for your organization to turn interest into impact.

First, we need to optimize for mobile. Mobile is crucial. Nobody’s going anywhere these days without their phone, and more and more people are engaging with causes and making donations directly from their smartphone. If your donation form is difficult to navigate on a small screen, you’re losing money, flat out. Those are donations that are not coming, and it’s that simple. A clean and responsive design for your forms is what’s gonna get people to actually engage. Data shows that mobile-optimized pages see a 50% increase in completed transactions, and that’s what makes it easy for someone to give on the go.

The second thing is that you need to offer multiple payment options. People expect the same ease of use from a donation page that they get from something like Amazon. That’s what we’re working with here. This means you need to accept credit cards, but you also need to use digital wallets, things like Apple Pay, Google Pay, and PayPal, or direct bank transfers. By offering a variety of choices, you remove one of those barriers and allow donors to give in the way that’s most convenient for them in the moment when they have the thought, I wanna make a donation. The goal is really to say yes to every possible form of payment.

Third, simplify the checkout process. Every extra field a donor has to fill out and every additional click they have to make increases the chance that they’re gonna walk away from that form. So review your donation form. You need to be ruthless. This is something I know as a marketer: the fewer the form fields, the better. Can you reduce it to just two or three steps? Are you able to make a fast and simple process that respects the donor’s time and ensures their generous impulse is captured before it goes away? Right in that moment is when it’s crucial. By making the act of giving as easy as possible, you’re showing donors that you value their support and their time, and you make it far more likely that they will complete their gift and come back to give again.

So we’ve talked about the channels that bring these new donors in and the moments where they drop off. One last reflection here, before we talk about actually scaling this. Where do manual work or disconnected tools slow down your ability to acquire new donors today? If you can answer in just a phrase or two, I think this is probably very top of mind for folks.

You can’t just say “everywhere.” Where do I feel disconnected? All of the places. Yes. Multiple layers. Decision makers, though, Laura, I think is a great call-out there. Anyone else have a place where it’s manual work and disconnected tools? Where are you getting slowed down? What’s slowing you down in your ability to acquire new donors? If this one thing could just get taken away, that would really make my life so much easier. If these two tools would talk together, that would really change some things for me.

Garrett mentioned so many systems. And do those systems even speak together? How well do they speak together? What data are they exchanging? Also, are different people on your teams leveraging different systems? Maybe there are multiple sources of truth in here. I’ll be waiting if there are other ones. Also, accuracy of your data. Elliot added data accuracy, data hygiene. Crucial.

This is where technology can support your growth. Not by adding more to your plate, but by making it so you’re able to work smarter, make better decisions, and spend your time on the right things, the things that are actually going to move the needle. In today’s world, the most successful nonprofits aren’t just passionate about their mission. That’s so important. But they’re also smart about their time and their operations. Technology allows us to scale our efforts, deepen our relationships, and ultimately drive more impact.

Here, we’re gonna get into how you’re able to leverage technology for growth. First, you can automate that outreach. Think about the critical touch points in your new donor journey, what’s unique to you: your welcome message, the thank-you note or the phone call after a donation, the first impact update, the first email they receive. These can and should be automated opportunities. Setting up a simple email journey ensures that every single donor, which is how it should be, receives timely and personalized communication without adding hours of manual work for your team. That consistency is what builds trust and keeps your organization in the forefront of their mind.

Secondly, centralize your data and have a single source of truth. If your donor information is scattered across, heaven forbid, spreadsheets, email lists, and event rosters, you are not able to see the full picture of who is giving. So use a giving platform that brings all of your information into one place, something that’s able to track every interaction, every gift, volunteer hour, and event attendance. That unified view is the foundation for effective personalization. It allows you to understand your supporters on a much deeper level and tailor your communications and outreach to them.

Thirdly, using that centralized data to analyze and identify opportunities is key to driving your team to use their time wisely and make effective decisions. I saw more than one person in the chat saying, I’m a team of one. So that time is incredibly valuable, and the right technology is there to help you do things like uncover hidden trends. Who are your most consistent donors? Who has the potential to become a major donor? The data that you’re hosting is where all of your answers live, to who you should be reaching out to next and what your next action should be. By focusing your outreach on the most promising segments, you’re able to maximize your efforts. And we know that nonprofits using automation and a CRM see a 61% increase in matching gift revenue alone, simply by identifying eligible donors and automating how they follow up with them. Sixty-one percent. Nothing to shake a spoon at. I don’t know what that phrase is supposed to be. But that is very valuable.

Finally, AI is an important part of the way we operate today and continues to incorporate itself into everyone’s work, I think. It’s transforming how nonprofits are able to connect with their supporters. It helps you work smarter by predicting donor behavior, so you’re able to focus your time on the right opportunities and reach out to people at the right time, when they’re ready to give. With AI, you can really personalize that outreach, and you can be much faster with that personalization and create meaningful connections that are gonna inspire action and inspire donation. It also streamlines the way you analyze the data that you have and offers insights to optimize your campaigns.

Of course, time saving is so important, but what are you doing with the time you’re getting back? If you’re able to automate things, you’re also able to use this data to say, okay, actually, what is my next best step? Who should I be having coffee with this week? All of that helps you achieve your mission and hit your fundraising goals much more efficiently, with more data-driven decision making. If you’re embracing the right tools, you’re freeing up your team to focus on what they do best: building relationships and fulfilling the mission.

So why is it actually hard to meet some of these expectations? Time. We had some teams of one in the chat today. You’re overloaded. You have to wear a lot of hats, and you’re building a lot of relationships. How do you have time to write personal communication for each of your donors, or change the approach based on how they give? Do you have the right systems? Are you able to make up any time by cobbling all of your systems together? That’s ultimately creating complexity for you. It doesn’t work super well. It adds to cost: time, money, resources. Jan, that’s right.

This is really what we’re up against. The average nonprofit is using 10 to 15 different tools, and I think, from the vibes, there are people in the chat using more than that. You’re using 10 to 15 different tools just to communicate, track, and thank your donors. You’ve got a marketing tool over here. You’ve got your CRM over here. Volunteer data, if you’re capturing it, is somewhere else. It’s chaos. And every extra login means another chance for donor data, a single donor, to fall through the cracks. The reality is that you’re spending your time across so many different tools that you have to use every single day. I would love to hear in the chat if you have a sense of how many tools you log into over the course of a week.

I know we had a few. Okay, five, Katie. Five. So that sounds like some integration. Oh, we have Kevin with two. Five, seven. And across your teams too, are other people on different teams logging into different tools as well?

What we know is that donors who are connected with your mission’s impact are more likely to give. But to fully understand those donors, you need a holistic view where everything is integrated. We’ve got some people doing a pretty good job of connecting their tools and having fewer than the average, which is amazing. But you need that holistic view of your donors, and that’s really hard if you’re using 15 different systems.

So I’m gonna speed through this so that we can make sure we have enough time for Brandon and questions. What could a path for a new donor look like? As we go through this, I’m throwing in a couple of tips and tricks so that you can think about what stage you’re in and where you’re trying to acquire new donors.

Let’s look at the path of Melanie, and we’re gonna look at Melanie through John. Melanie doesn’t know your organization yet, but she loves a cause like yours. She knows one of your board members, John. She knows him really well. And you had this idea to try and engage your board. Pro tip: Your board is a great fundraising tool for you. We all know that engaging the board and getting them to serve or engage with your team and your constituents can be a challenge. So we’re going to have them use the peer to peer tools to host a board peer to peer event. Peer to peer is a great way to engage your board. Each board member can set up a page to show their fundraising progress, which inspires a little bit of friendly competition and gives transparency and insight to your organization.

That board member then goes out and reaches out, cultivating their network for donations. In this example, John is one of those board members, and he’s gonna reach out to Melanie. John invites Melanie to give. Melanie already knows and trusts John, and because of that relationship, she’s super open to hearing about your organization. She also connects with the mission, something about the work that’s super meaningful to her, and she decides to give. From your side, you don’t see Melanie just yet. You’re not aware of her. She’s not in your database. You don’t know her personally. She has never given to your organization before. That’s important, because this is how many donors first enter the picture: not through a direct appeal from your team, but through someone they already know and trust.

So you’re excited. John received a gift. Huge win. But before you can see who made it, you’re stuck doing manual work. You are exporting data from your peer to peer platform, then importing it into the CRM, or however you’re managing donors. So you’ve got a clunky, time-consuming process that can easily take you two hours or more. By the time you’re done, you still don’t actually know who Melanie is. She’s just one of 70 donors in the campaign sitting in a spreadsheet, waiting to be sorted through.

Now she’s in your CRM, and you wanna figure out who, of those who just gave, could really be a good prospect to be an ongoing donor. So you might add wealth insights, like the total amount Melanie gave last year to a different organization, her biggest gift, and the organizations she typically gives to, to see if there are any parallels with your mission. You’re doing a lot of analysis in a separate wealth screening tool, and that might take you four hours, because you’re looking at all of those different things for Melanie, and then however many other donors, 70-plus donors from your peer to peer campaign. You realize, okay, Melanie came through, and she’s a really good prospect to ultimately build a deeper relationship with.

At that point, you’re saying, okay, Melanie, we’re gonna invite you to volunteer with the organization, based on the information we know about you. That’s a great next step for her in the journey to continue to engage her. But maybe this takes a while. You’ve identified a good number of those prospects that you would also want to encourage to volunteer, and you’re writing up the emails, and there are 50-plus people on that list. That’s a huge lift, and it ultimately delays your engagement with this prospective new donor.

Say Melanie gave her original donation through John to your organization over two weeks ago, and she didn’t hear anything back from your nonprofit. She’s happy to support John. She knows and trusts John. But she does wish she’d heard more about how her gift could have impacted your mission, because she was very interested in the mission. Then she receives your volunteer invite. She’s been put on this list. She receives the invite, and she’s thrilled about that. She signs up to volunteer as soon as she hears from you. Although, again, she’s a little disappointed that it was a long time. But she’s getting in with your organization now, and this is a process. It takes so much time in between each of those steps.

As soon as she volunteers, she has an amazing time. You now have this engaged, passionate person who is dedicated to your organization. But all of her hours are logged in your volunteer management tool. You have to export all of those hours and import them into her record within your CRM, and it takes a while to do that. There were a bunch of people at the volunteer event, so you’ve got another three hours on your hands there. And of all the people who volunteered, there are a few that you do wanna cultivate, encouraging them to give again, to give more time, to give financially.

You bring Melanie, as one of those donors, into a gift campaign, and you’re trying to nurture those donors into this new campaign. That takes a lot of time: emails, texts, phone calls, meetings, and all of these things need to be manually tracked. Ultimately, it does work for Melanie, and she does decide to give again. The second gift is a huge milestone. She’s moving from a one-time donor toward a real relationship.

Melanie gives again. You’re thrilled. She’s thrilled. She’s been engaging and volunteering with your organization for maybe a year, and you wanna recognize and continue to cultivate her. So you host another volunteer event for her. We’ll say that takes 10 hours or more of staff time to put on, but it pays off. Melanie goes ahead and deepens her commitment and becomes a recurring, sustaining donor for your organization, which is really the ultimate signal of trust and connection. She’s telling you, I’m in this with you for the long term.

Now Melanie is so connected to your mission that the final step in this journey is that she decides she wants to give back. For her birthday, she’s gonna do her own peer to peer event, where she brings in her network just like John did. This is gonna be a cycle of continuous growth that helps her engage with your organization. She wants to multiply her impact based on what she’s experienced so far.

But when you step back and look at Melanie’s story, it’s certainly inspiring, but it is incredibly inefficient. Every step of her journey required hours of manual effort from your team to get her to this place. If you add it all up, we’ll say in two years, your staff is spending well over 50 hours just to move Melanie through this process. And despite all of your efforts, it’s very possible that, in reality, because we outlined a perfect situation here, Melanie won’t get to that final step because it takes too long. She may not host her own P2P fundraiser, or become a recurring donor, or give a second gift, because the follow-up took over a week. Or she may never volunteer, because she never knew how her first gift was used. With your current tools, the donor journey takes a long time. The tools are too disconnected, and you aren’t able to help your supporters understand what your organization is capable of.

You know that she is a good-quality donor, that she is a good-quality prospect. But because at every single step there is an opportunity for a failure point, given the interconnectedness of the systems and how much time it takes to get from one step to the next, it’s possible that Melanie may not move at all, because she didn’t know that you knew that she gave.

Fundamentally, we are here to talk about a better way for fundraising. Imagine if Melanie’s journey didn’t require so many hurdles, there wasn’t so much manual effort, the systems weren’t so disconnected, and the donor story looked like Melanie’s, getting to the end the same way, but without all of the inefficiencies, without all of the time and manual effort. That is what we are here to really dig into today. I think I’m gonna jump off of this slide and pass the mic to Brandon to actually get into the demo and talk about Bloomerang. Let me stop my share here.

Brandon Tremblay: Yeah. Thanks, Lacey. Definitely excited to show you guys a visual representation of what Lacey was talking about here. I’ll pull my screen up. It made me happy to see everyone doing peer to peer in the chat right now, because that is a great way to tap into your current network and bring new donors through the front door.

Now, if you’re like me, you probably heard of peer to peer through an endurance campaign, maybe a walk, maybe a 5K. Maybe you’ve seen it on Facebook, people doing fundraising for their birthdays on Facebook. That’s become very popular. Our customers have been pretty creative in the way they’ve used peer to peer, and Lacey touched on this, but one very successful way that we’ve seen is using peer to peer for board fundraising. This is an example of a board member peer to peer page. We have Virginia here, who’s on the board, and we created this page. This page was a template, but Virginia still had the ability to put her own profile picture in here. She was still able to write why she’s raising money for the cause. I know a lot of people that work with nonprofits usually have a personal tie to your mission that makes you so passionate. So it’s a really important place to put that personal tie in there.

Because this is Virginia’s page, she can share it really easily with her network. She can share it with her friends and family. You can see on the bottom right here, there are easy ways to share on social media as well, to capture maybe those younger age demographics.

When we think about recognition, something as simple as the fundraising thermometer can go a long way. Virginia has a long way to go to her goal. She just started. She has a goal of $50,000, and she’s only raised $250. But that number is gonna be updated in real time. So if I were to give to Virginia’s page right now, that number is automatically gonna go up. It’s that instant recognition, that instant front-facing gamification aspect to it.

Again, Lacey touched on this. If someone comes through and gives through Virginia’s page here, that money’s nice. That gift is nice. But you also have a new donor who entered your CRM, who maybe never heard of your organization before. They’re just a friend of Virginia. Typically, the next step is that disconnected journey, where there’s a bunch of manual effort to engage that new person who entered your CRM. Lacey went over that disconnected journey. We have a way to connect that journey together. It’s called Journey Automation, which is where it got its name. Think about the manual effort that goes into emailing people and following up with them, maybe remembering to give them a call, and engaging with them as soon as they enter your CRM as a new donor. Journey automations make that ten times easier, probably twenty times easier, probably a hundred times easier.

This is a very simple example of a journey automation, but it relates back to the peer to peer campaign example we talked about. Someone might give through Virginia’s peer to peer campaign, maybe it’s Melanie, and she enters the CRM as a new donor. So she’s automatically gonna enter this journey that we set up. This is where the automation can take place. Instead of me going in and manually sending that acknowledgment email to Melanie, the system does it automatically. I still create the email, so I can make it engaging, put the pictures and the videos in there, make it personalized, and make sure they understand the impact that they’re making. Because they’re a first-time donor, it’s also a really good spot to educate them more about the organization.

This journey automation specifically is set up to convert first-time donors into people that give monthly or recurring gifts. Right after that acknowledgment email, we put in a time delay of 31 days. So we’re gonna wait a month. And then, automatically, because we set it up this way, another email goes out to this person. This is the email that makes the ask for a recurring donation. Again, you customize that email so you can make it very impactful and engaging. Then we go a little bit further with it, and we wait a week. For anyone who hasn’t set up that recurring donation, we actually get a task created to remind us, hey, we need to call this person and maybe make that personal ask for the recurring donation instead.

So journey automation is a really good way to connect that journey a new donor would go through, that you’re maybe doing manually right now. It saves you a ton of time, and it keeps things intentional as well.

You don’t have to do this for recurring donations. A lot of people will use this to get people engaged in the organization in other ways. Think volunteering. You might have someone come in who gave through a peer to peer campaign and has never heard of your organization before. Maybe they don’t have a lot of money to give, but they do have the time. This is a really good opportunity to get some volunteer activities in front of them, so they’re aware of your organization’s volunteer opportunities. You could link them to a page like this. Bloomerang allows you to highlight those volunteer opportunities and explain the impact of volunteering within the organization so they understand that. Make it visual. Make it fun to discover these. And whenever they’re ready to sign up, they get a really easy registration form that allows you to collect all of that volunteer information: skills, availability, interest, anything that you’d collect on the volunteer side.

Quick shout-out: we do have eSign capabilities, which comes up all the time when I’m in conversations. So, waivers, liability forms, consent to background checks. It’s really easy to bring a new volunteer into the system this way, because you’re collecting all the information up front and getting them to sign any kind of documents up front as well.

So this is all great, and you have a lot of people entering the CRM and interacting in different ways: volunteering, maybe participating in a peer to peer campaign, giving as a first-time donor. Maybe they’re opening newsletters and emails that you send them. It’s a lot to keep track of. Actually, I’ll pull up Jill here.

For those of you who are Bloomerang customers currently, you’re probably familiar with this screen. For those of you who are not Bloomerang customers, this is a constituent record within the CRM. Everybody that interacted with your organization, whether they signed up to be a volunteer, gave through a donation form, attended one of your events, or signed up for a newsletter, is gonna have a profile like this. Instead of having information scattered across different systems, this is where that one-platform aspect of Bloomerang comes together and everything lives in one place.

If we go to the timeline activity at the bottom, this is where you’re able to get that 360-degree view of all the interactions this person has with your organization. If they open a newsletter, it’s gonna be in here. If they volunteered, it’ll be in here. If they donated, it’ll be in here. I think you get the idea. All of that will automatically populate on the timeline.

Again, Lacey touched on this as well, but the reason this is important information to capture is that Bloomerang makes it easy. We don’t want you to go to everybody’s constituent profile and scour their timeline activity to see how engaged they are with the organization. That takes a lot of time. We have what we call predictive giving insights. This is a lot of people’s favorite feature within the platform. I’m referring to the engagement level and the generosity score that you see on the right-hand side.

To put it simply, engagement level shows you how engaged they are with the organization. It’s taking all of those timeline interactions and showing you who might be ready to give. Who can we engage with right now? Generosity is a little bit different. It’s a wealth screening tool. It’s showing you somebody’s giving capacity. Does this person have the capacity to make a major donation to the organization? In this case, Jill does, and we know that, so we can take that into account when we go to make an ask. So it’s really important information to have, and very easy to find. These are reportable metrics, so you could pull up a list of people in your database to easily find people that meet certain criteria here.

The last thing I’ll show you, and then we’ll jump into some Q&A, is Penny. Kevin had a shout-out for Penny at the very beginning of the webinar here. I’ll expand that a little bit. Penny is an AI fundraising assistant, and it’s different from something like ChatGPT. It’s not a generalist. Penny was built on best fundraising practices, but it also has access to all of your data in the CRM. So it’s a really good tool to develop some strategy, maybe make some custom lists for you, and give you actionable next-step information. I just put in a simple prompt here: “Hey, I need to close a $50,000 gap in fundraising by the end of the quarter. Where should I focus my time?” I don’t have much time. Where should my time be spent? Penny’s able to break this down for me and help me understand where I should spend my time, but also why, which is really important. It gives me these top three priorities. And then you can have a conversation with Penny and go back and forth. Hey, show me my 27 lapsed major donors that didn’t give this year, and it’ll show me that. So Penny is a great tool to allow you to work more effectively. We recently rolled this out, and we’ve seen a lot of success with it. Again, I think it was Kevin who had a shout-out for Penny at the beginning. Hopefully, you’re still here, Kevin. But Penny is great.

That is everything I wanted to show you. We’ll open it up to some Q&A. Lacey, is there anything else you wanted to go over before we do that?

Lacey Jackson: I think we’re coming right up on time, so I think we’re perfect to go into Q&A next. We only have a couple of questions, and I will scroll through the chat and see if there’s anything there as well. First, though, we’re throwing up a poll. If you would like to learn more about Bloomerang, get an online tour of a particular product or feature, or get a live demo, do feel free to fill out that poll that’s popped up, and we’ll make sure someone reaches out to you. The poll will stay up for a minute until you are able to answer.

Now, a question from the Q&A section: is there a tutorial for building beautiful emails in Bloomerang? In order to create these automations, you need a bunch of emails, and I’m finding it challenging to make them look polished and current. I figured I will drop some links in there to some resources that we have. But, Brandon, I thought maybe you could talk a little bit about the email builder.

Brandon Tremblay: Yeah. The email builder is meant to have a lot of functionality that rivals other email marketing tools like Mailchimp or Constant Contact. We try to make it as easy as possible to use, and that’s why that click-and-drag mechanism exists in the email builder. There are also templates that you can start from, which, at the very least, act as a good starting point. But definitely feel free to lean on those resources that Lacey will send you. If you’re really struggling, contact support. I mean, we’re here to help you. We have our support team, and our support team is always happy to help as well.

Lacey Jackson: Definitely. And I think the other thing I’ll add is, if you have not leveraged Bloomerang chat, as you’re walking through and maybe coming across specific things that are challenging, Bloomerang chat is a great place, in the lower right-hand corner, to type in a question like, how can I add something like this in? Maybe that’s images, or however you would like to add design, and we’ll give you step-by-step answers. And, of course, you can easily connect to a person through the chat, but that’s a great resource.

There was one more question: where do you access the development of the peer to peer personalized pages? It’s in the Bloomerang Fundraising module. It does come at an additional cost to have access to the peer to peer functionality, same with auction functionality or outbound texting. So you might not see it, and if that’s the case, then you might not have the subscription for it. If that’s the case, you should have a CSM or an account manager that you can reach out to, who can give you a quote for pricing and then go over the next steps and what that would look like.

And then we did have a question from Laura. I was just going through the chat: how can we activate Penny? Penny is currently in beta, so it’s not the most final version. It comes with a little bit of a caveat. But I believe the button is in the upper right-hand corner of your screen, and it looks like a little star, because, you know, Penny is a star and is here to do great things to help us out. I think we’re good there. I don’t know if I see anything else here.

We do have an additional question: is Journey Automation an additional fee? We use Bloomerang CRM and Bloomerang Fundraising. Thank you, Omniscient Voice from above. Brandon, can you speak to that one?

Brandon Tremblay: Yeah. There are different prices associated with Journey Automation. Typically, with the main CRM and Fundraising bundle, you’ll get up to three journey automations that you can run at a single time. The next step up is unlimited, so there’s no limit to how many journey automations you can have set up. That does come at an additional cost. So, again, you should have an account manager that you can talk to, and they’ll be able to talk through that with you.

Lacey Jackson: Awesome. Okay. Well, we’re just one minute over time today. Thank you, everyone, for the engagement in the chat. Much appreciated. And if you filled out the poll today, someone will be reaching out to you. Have a great rest of your week. Bye.