Acquire New Donors and create an engaging Donor Journey

Steven Shattuck: All right, Robin, I’ve got 4:00 Eastern. Is it okay if I go ahead and get this party started?

Robin Cabral: Let’s go.

Steven Shattuck: All right, cool. Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks for being here for today’s Bloomerang webinar, “How to Acquire New Donors and Create an Engaging Donor Journey in 2020.” It’s 2020. We’re recording late June, 2020. I hope you’re all doing okay. Hope you’re all staying safe and healthy. It’s so nice to see you all here. Thanks for being here. I’m Steven. I’m over here at Bloomerang, and I’ll be moderating today’s discussion, as always.

Just a couple of housekeeping items before we get going. We are recording this presentation. We’ll send out the recording and the slides later today, so don’t worry if you have to leave early, if you get interrupted, or if you miss something. We’ll get all that good stuff in your hands later today.

Most importantly, I know a lot of you already have, but please feel free to use that chat box. Send us questions, send us comments, introduce yourself. We’re going to try to save time at the end for Q&A, so don’t be shy. We’d love to hear from you. There’s a chat box and a Q&A box, and I’ll keep an eye on both of those things. I’ll also keep an eye on the Twitter feed if you want to send us a tweet. But either way, we’d love to hear from you.

If this is your first Bloomerang webinar, I just want to offer you a special welcome and tell you what Bloomerang is, just for context. We do these webinars all the time, a couple of times a week nowadays. But what we’re most known for is our software. We’re a donor database provider. So if you’re interested in that, or just curious about us, check out our website. You can watch tons of videos, you can talk to us. It’s pretty easy to find us. But that’s just for context, in case you’re wondering what the heck Bloomerang was.

Don’t check us out now, because we’ve got a real friend of the program joining us from beautiful (this is not a joke) Australia, by way of my hometown, New Bedford, Massachusetts. Robin, how’s it going? You doing okay? What time is it there? What day is it there?

Robin Cabral: I have no idea. What is it? It’s 6:00 a.m. on Thursday morning. It is a Thursday.

Steven Shattuck: Wow. And it’s 4:00 p.m. Wednesday for me, which I never quite understood how that worked. But wow, this is a treat. In case you folks listening haven’t discovered it, Robin very graciously fit this into her busy schedule. She’s over there for work. She splits her time. It’s really awesome to have you, Robin. Thank you for doing this. I know you’ve been up early talking to clients, and you’re talking to clients after this. Squeezing this in, so I’m just so thankful. You’re one of my favorites.

Robin Cabral: Aww, shucks.

Steven Shattuck: You’ve done webinars for us. We’ve collaborated on cool things, and you’re all in for a treat. Robin’s awesome. She speaks all the time. She writes all the time. She does lots of great coaching. She’s been doing this for many, many years. You’re going to want to connect with her afterwards for sure. I learned earlier that Australia is kind of a hotbed for digital fundraising, so she’s been able to glean some of those insights and wants to share them with you. So, Robin, I’m going to make you the host. I hope it works. Here we go. Change host. And I’ll let you pull up your slides.

Robin Cabral: Yep, I’m good to go. All right. Can you see the slides?

Steven Shattuck: Not yet. I still only see your smiling face there.

Robin Cabral: Oh, wait a minute. Oh, boy. What am I doing wrong?

Steven Shattuck: You might have to hit the share button.

Robin Cabral: I share my screen. Gosh, here we go.

Steven Shattuck: There it goes.

Robin Cabral: All right. Oh, my goodness. All right, so we’re ready to roll, Steven.

Steven Shattuck: All right. The floor is yours, my friend.

Robin Cabral: Let’s take it away. Welcome, everyone, to “How to Acquire New Donors and Create an Engaging Donor Journey in 2020.” As Steven was saying, this is direct from Australia. I mean the learnings. I’ve been learning a lot since I’ve been here, and I’m going to share everything I have learned with you today. As Steven mentioned, I am the owner of a small consulting firm, Development Consulting Solutions, in the northeast United States. I mainly do coaching these days of executive directors and fundraisers, both strategic coaching and career advancement coaching.

You know what a CFRE is, you know what an MA is, but you probably don’t know what an MFIA is, right? And you’re wondering how you get one of those. You have to be a member of the Fundraising Institute of Australia.

So here’s what we’re going to look at today. We’re going to look at what a multichannel approach to donor communications is. As I was mentioning to Steven, I’m going to bring in some for-profit techniques. You’re probably thinking, “No, sales and fundraising don’t go together,” but I’m going to show you how to use lead magnets and customer sales maps to acquire new donors, and guess what? Very cost-effectively and efficiently. Then, how do you align these strategies to create what they call here in Australia a donor journey? I’m going to talk more about that. As part of the donor journey, you will find that we build meaningful relationships through timely touchpoints, and then we’ll talk about how we actually track and measure those. I believe I’ve provided Steven with some resources, or I can send those out to you after the webinar.

So what is a multichannel approach? I have a lot of information and I’m going to go through it rather briskly, so save all of your questions and comments until the end. A multichannel approach is an integrated approach that targets multiple streams, both offline and online, both direct and indirect channels. Sometimes we forget that multichannel is more than just digital. It’s also things like face-to-face fundraising, for those of you in the UK. I saw someone here who was actually from Scotland. Face-to-face fundraising is like street fundraising, those kinds of things. Direct mail is part of a multichannel approach, as is what we call here in Australia EDM, electronic direct mail. Pretty fancy, huh? Social media, targeted ads, Google Grants if you have one of those. Your website is part of your multichannel approach. Even things like peer-to-peer fundraising, corporate partnerships, and traditional marketing.

Here in Australia, they still use, get this, radio and TV ads. They actually do planned giving ads, believe it or not, for the Salvation Army. If I’m watching YouTube and I see those ads come across, it’s probably UNICEF or the Salvation Army. Text messaging, SMS, right? Electronic direct mail again. Video messages have become really huge. I use a lot of video messaging in my work these days. And then MMS, multimedia messaging services. Who knew there were so many forms of text messaging these days?

So why a multichannel approach? Because today, as consumers, we’re in control. We choose which channels. We no longer have three TV channels and that’s it for our information. We have a plethora of channels available and we get to choose which ones we’re using, whether it’s mail, email, or, if it’s online, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, WhatsApp, whatever it is. Advances in technology equal information that is available instantly on multiple devices. It’s coming at us from all kinds of angles. And prospective donors can really quickly seek out the causes that align with their passion and their values. We know that people go to your website first before they actually come to you.

What are some other benefits of a multichannel approach? There are numerous benefits to a diversified marketing approach. What we have found is that multichannel communications can significantly move the dial in donor revenue. I was asked this by a coaching client last week, what percentages were significant, and I’m going to show you in a second. A multichannel approach also opens you up to new options. Remember the days when all we had was direct mail? Now we have Facebook fundraising, Instagram ads, and electronic direct mail. Remember when advertising used to cost so much? Not anymore. It improves and develops deeper relationships with existing and new donors, and we’re going to talk about how we attract new donors today. Certainly, you also need to be more collaborative. Much of what I do in terms of digital lead acquisition and digital marketing these days, when I’m coaching clients, often has to interface with the marketing department or marketing team.

So look at this stat from NextAfter. Offline only, the average gift was around 159 benchmark revenue per donor by cohort. When you add in email, offline and email went up to 301, and online only dropped to 148. And then look at totally multichannel. Look how far up that went. It’s like the COVID numbers that are happening today, right?

How about retention? If you use a multichannel donor approach, what we find is that retention... Hopefully, retention rates are better than this. But offline only, we know it’s in the 40-something percent. Offline with a valid email, it jumps up to almost 60%. Online only drops to 36%. And then multichannel, look at retention with that: 67%. So who is not in for a multichannel approach? I am.

I’m going to talk to you now about, number one, what the donor journey is, and then how we actually acquire new donors using for-profit sales techniques. How many of you have actually heard of something called a donor journey? I don’t know if we call that a donor journey in the United States, but in other countries, like here in Australia, we do. Carrie is raising her hand. Cool. Let’s see some others if you’ve heard of donor journey. Oh, wow, you’re waving on my screen. Stop, stop, stop. That is so awesome. I just wish she could see that. I’m like, “I can’t see my screen anymore. They’re lighting it up.” Oh, my gosh.

So a donor journey is basically what? It’s a unique fundraising experience tailored to each donor. What we’re learning is that donor relationships matter much more than a single transaction. We’re not about transactions, we’re about transformation. A journey implies just that: you’re telling a story, you’re taking a donor on a journey. It starts from that initial contact and builds up to the ask. It has positive, consistent encounters, wow moments.

But you know what? This is no more than what you would do offline with a major donor. Do I hear an amen? A donor journey is a multichannel approach to something you would do through a cultivation process with your major donors. Bingo. I actually just wrote a blog post this week about how we can do qualification through digital strategies. You can take your offline relationship techniques and move them online, not just for your major donors, but for every single donor category.

As an example, I stole this from the web, a great donor journey. What we recommend is that you sit down and actually create a donor journey map that looks something like this. I’m not a great drawer, so I had to copy and paste from the web. However, I recommend doing it, and I’m going to talk about, number one, recognizing that not all donors are alike. We know that. Everyone is an individual. I’m going to show you how we can qualify donors through lead acquisition magnets that can demonstrate the different identities of your particular donors as they come into your donor journey stream.

We need to treat them accordingly. We need to figure out what motivates them and what they are interested in, and build a journey around that particular interest. So we need to understand things about their charitable behavior, like how often they donate, how much they donate, and when they are most likely to donate, and then come up with what I would call an ideal donor persona. I do this all the time with my own clients. I have a client persona: what does he or she look like? The reason I do this is that you’re going to need it when we talk about lead magnets and advertising, because you definitely want to create advertising that is targeted to your donor personas or lookalike audiences when you do Facebook advertising.

So you’re going to create a donor journey map. I want you to go through and sketch this out from the initial moment someone comes in contact with you. Oh, Jeff just joined us. I mentioned you earlier in the webinar, Jeff, and you are here. I just saw that come in. We’re going to map out each step of the donor journey, step by step. You’re going to make little stick figures, donors walking, whatever. And you’re going to have all of your touchpoints. I’m going to talk about timely touchpoints later in the webinar, what those should look like, but you’re going to map out every single one. And you may have multiple donor journeys. Let’s take the example of cat and dog donors. If you have a cat lover, you can put them in a completely different donor journey for cat lovers versus dog lovers. You’re going to map that out, and it’s going to be donor-driven: cats, dogs, whatever it is you can identify your donors around. You’re not going to do a one-size-fits-all approach to developing a donor journey stream. The focus should be on the donor experience instead of income, and you don’t want to focus on the short term. This is about long-term cultivation strategies.

Here’s what I love, love, love. In Australia, they are really, as Steven was saying, huge on digital marketing strategies. I hope there are no Australians on the webinar. They do not do major gift work as well as we do. That does not happen. But digital marketing, yes. So I’m going to share concepts from them on how to acquire new donors and how they actually do this. When you think of for-profit techniques, I will say most of the digital marketers here are not fundraisers. They come from a digital marketing sales background. I like the fact that I’m taking their information and giving it to fundraisers so we can learn their tools and translate them into more transformational relationships.

So think about sales. When you think about ordinary sales, you have your funnel, right? I want to see you light up my dashboard again. How many of you have heard of the sales funnel? Oh, look at that, you’re doing it. Not as many as last time. That’s so awesome. The sales funnel is almost like our donor pyramid. There’s a whole universe of potential prospects out there, and you have to attract their attention to drag them into your funnel and then bring them along the donor journey. HubSpot works that way, of course it does. It’s sales. It’s automation. You see how the donor journey now ties into the sales funnel? Bingo. And at some point, you make a sale or you make some kind of ask. The sales funnel is widest at the top and narrow at the bottom, because at the top we’re trying to bring awareness to what we’re doing or who we are. By the time we get to the bottom, we’ve brought them along on a donor journey stream and we’re asking. So we know we have our best prospects at the bottom.

It really is this for-profit industry concept that I’m bringing to you. And I know, I know, Robin, fundraising isn’t for-profit. But there are some concepts that can work very well if you have an open mind. Every stage of the donor journey is aimed at pushing your prospect into the next phase down the funnel, eventually to where you get to that ask. And those who are not a fit drop off. I say to people, even in my own business sales funnel, “If you unsubscribe, bless you. That’s great, because you’re qualifying or disqualifying yourself from my services. It’s wonderful. You’re saying, ‘I’m not interested.’” Same thing here. It’s qualification of donors, like we would do offline. Is this making sense? I don’t want to say light up my screen again, because I can’t see when you... Oh my gosh, there you go. Okay, uncle.

All right, here’s the sales funnel broken down. At the top, you have all those prospects out there. You’re just trying to get their attention and bring awareness to who you are. Then you bring them into your funnel and put them into your donor journey, or as they say in sales, your customer journey, and you raise interest. Then you bring them to a decision, a sale or an ask. Get it? Christina here is saying, “We can’t hear you.” Can other people hear me?

Steven Shattuck: Yeah, you’re okay, Robin.

Robin Cabral: Okay, good. They keep lighting up my screen. I think they’re liking that now. Oh my gosh, I can’t see.

So what are the stages of a customer journey? The first one, as I showed you, is awareness and discovery. This is where you say, “Hey, donor, we’re over here. Do you want to give to us, or do you want to know more about us?” This is where they enter your funnel. I’m going to talk about lead magnets and the importance of attracting people, but you’re going to use things like PDFs. You may have a petition, you may have a survey, something that a donor will opt in to gain confidence about your cause, and you drag them into your funnel. High-level stuff, bulleted information, like Bloomerang giving away the policies and procedures manual that I created for you. That is something someone out there would say, “I want that. I want to learn more.” There is a better chance of increasing a donor base if donors know you, if they are aware of you. So that first top of the funnel is to build awareness and take people out there in the universe and turn them into prospects. Got it?

The next stage is what I call the donor journey stage. That’s where people are learning more about you and determining whether or not, “Is this a cause I’m actually interested in? Should I consider supporting them?” This is where they’re looking for more in-depth information, things like success stories, testimonials, all that stuff. This is where they start to get more emotional or personal about their decision-making. So that’s why we have donor journeys. We’re providing them with touchpoints based upon what we think they may want to know about us. Our job is to make that information readily available once they’ve come into your donor funnel. Your donor journey is going to give them that information when they need it and want it, so that we take prospects and, hopefully, make them potential donors.

Then at the bottom end of the funnel, this is where we get to decisions. You’re going to provide them with an ask. In sales, we would provide them with an offer. You’re going to do the same thing. You’ve cultivated them through the donor journey up until this point, and you’re going to make your donate button visible. You’re also going to send them an ask email and make your donation ask very, very prominent, so that the outcome at the bottom of the funnel is, hopefully, that an ask has been made and they’ve answered positively.

So how do we get them into your funnel? This is what I love. I’m so excited about this stuff. I just love, love, love it. It’s lead acquisition and lead conversion. How many of you, and you can type into the chat box, use some kind of lead magnet on your website, a pop-up, what have you? Not just your newsletter signup. We know that those are not converting to any great extent any longer. How many of you are using some kind of lead magnet, a survey, a petition, a PDF download, something? I don’t see many hands. Okay, I see you lighting me up. Not as many, though, just about half a screen.

This is important stuff, because this is how you get them into your funnel. I said to someone the other day when coaching them, “Yeah, newsletter signups, that’s not going to do it.” How many of us have signed up for something, even on L.L.Bean’s website? You’ve downloaded the free top 10 tips to whatever, greening up your kitchen or making Swiss cheese hamburgers. How many of us have signed up for that? Same concept. A lead magnet is something of value that someone will find enough value in to exchange an email address. So you’re basically saying, “Give us your email. Here’s some great content that I think you may like and enjoy.”

Someone here is asking what nonprofits are using as lead magnets. What I like to see is surveys, and I’m writing a blog on this, for those of you who can go to my website, not right now, later this week. Sign up for my newsletter and you will actually see a post on using donor surveys to do qualification. In the survey, you can ask qualifying questions, like what’s motivating you to give? Are you interested in cats, dogs? That way you can take that information and put them into the right donor journey stream.

The other thing I see used a lot here in Australia is petitions. Will you sign this petition against legislation, or against violence against women, or against more funding appropriation, whatever it might be? You’re starting to qualify people and get them involved. I also see things like guides and handouts. I took one from the Royal Flying Doctor Service here in Australia about snakebites. I was like, “Oh, I’ll take a survey on snakebites.” It was a quiz on whether I know this kind of snake or that kind of snake, and what to do if I get bitten. After I took the quiz, they said, “Would you like this free download on snakebites?” That’s further qualification. And I was like, “Yeah, of course I would. I don’t want to get bitten by a snake, and I want to know what to do if it happens, because snakes here are huge. They’ll eat me for lunch.” So that’s actually double qualification.

Quizzes, courses. I actually have a course on my website, for example, on leveraging your brand as a fundraiser. You can do all of that. I hope that helps the person who asked. It’s something you can make available for digital download, and it has to be of value. I’m not talking about something of fluff. It has to be something that impresses and wows, and gives the prospect something they may be interested in.

So what are the benefits? Well, it’s a defense against donor attrition. It’s part of a healthy donor retention initiative. And for me, in this particular webinar, it’s low-cost donor acquisition. What is the cost of doing this? The cost is designing something in-house, a PDF. You can repurpose content that you already have, maybe get SurveyMonkey or some kind of survey tool, maybe put a pop-up on your website and let it roll. And then on the back end, have some kind of donor engagement stream, drip emails, emails scheduled to go out at a targeted time. Every system can do that. Gone are the days when we have to pay hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to rent lists and do mailings for donor acquisition. Amen. Do I hear an amen? So this is an effective means of doing all of that.

So what is a touchpoint? Now you’ve got your digital lead magnet, your PDF, your quiz. I was talking to someone a couple of weeks ago who went through a very similar webinar, and she emailed me immediately to do a coaching session and said, “Can I talk to you?” She was a park in New York City. If you don’t think you have to be a big fundraising shop to do this, no. I have small clients. One of my clients, the Friends of the Blue Hills, is doing digital lead acquisition, a small, all-volunteer organization. The woman from the park in New York City, I turned to her and said, “Do you know how many Google hits you’re getting on your website per month?” How many of you know that? How many of you actively look and say, “This week we had X number of unique new visitors to our website, and we converted X number of those into signups?”

She said to me, “We have about 500 unique visitors visiting our website per week.” And I went, “What? Five hundred? Do you realize that’s 2,000 people a month? Potential prospects that you are not capturing?” How many of you are now going, “Bingo”? Two thousand people a month, and how many of them are you actually converting into potential prospects and putting into your donor funnel? Now you see the magic behind having some kind of lead. Your newsletter signup is boring. It’s not going to do it. You need some kind of lead generation or lead magnet in order to do that. Is that story illustrative? How many of you know your Google Analytics, and now you’re probably going to go find out? “Do we have 2,000 people, and we converted one person to sign up for our newsletter mailing list this month?” Not good. People are visiting your website. You’re not having to go out into the universe to attract them. You just need to get their email address and exchange something of value in order to pull them into your funnel.

Now, once we’ve got them into this donor journey funnel, as I’m calling it, we need touchpoints. A touchpoint is any marketing point of contact or interaction between the nonprofit and the donor. Things like social media, blog content, and email marketing. This is part of that donor journey mapping. You have to say, “Okay, when do we send an email here? Okay, we’ll send them another email.” And here in Australia, they still pick up the telephone, so we’ll make a phone call. We may do something on Facebook with retargeting. You can upload your list of names and retarget advertising or content to them. Yes, yes, yes, you can do all of this. You need to incorporate multiple, timely touchpoints to build that journey. A donor journey should include scheduled touchpoints that make the most sense for that particular donor or group of donors, cat donors, dog donors, whatever.

Keep it simple. Develop that map. Don’t get caught up in overthinking, and start with some kind of overall plan. But you want to capture each of those interactions throughout the funnel. Why? Because you need to analyze each point of interaction with the donor and how they responded to you.

Now I’m going to talk about the importance of the halo effect. Yes, halo, as in what angels wear. We call it a halo effect because multiple touchpoints using a multichannel approach can leave a very positive perception of an organization, person, or product that can influence their opinion. So having multiple touches gives them a more positive impression of your organization. Building the halo effect is important. Remember those stats I showed you on donor retention earlier, from NextAfter? Content coming in multiple ways definitely increases the response rate. Someone may get a direct mail appeal and then see you on Facebook and go, “Oh, yes, I’ve got to fill that out.” The right content, delivered in the right way at the right time to the right person, this sounds like fundraising, will eventually have an effect, and if it’s done in multiple different formats and ways, that just boosts it.

So how can we leverage this? Be active, stay connected, and develop your donor journey plan. Have that steady campaign with really strong email subject lines and brand messaging. Make sure this donor journey is multichannel. All the channels I showed you earlier can boost the halo effect and deepen the relationship with your supporters.

Now, measurement. This means nothing, nothing, nothing if we do not do analysis. We all know that what gets measured improves. And, of course, we always seem to have to justify our budget, don’t we? Amen. If we can show an ROI from the multichannel marketing and donor journey approach and donor journey acquisition, we can justify our spend rate. So I would recommend that you set goals for your lead acquisition campaigns. We’re going to convert X number of unique website visitors per month, and here’s how we’re going to do it. We’re going to run Facebook ads, those Facebook ads are going to have a certain return, and this is what the content is going to look like. Set goals for each part of your campaign. I also don’t want to not mention Facebook advertising, but I’ll talk about that.

Success also provides testimonials to reinvest for more success. If you can say, “Our donor acquisition rate went up by 20% by using digital lead marketing techniques in the month of May,” that’s just going to prove beneficial to reinvesting in that as a strategy. There is growing evidence that a positive donor journey will result in loyalty, retention, and generosity, resulting in more net income. So the question is, how do you develop measures to analyze that multichannel approach?

I’m going to share some tools on how to do that. There are donor metrics, of course, but also automated analytical tools out there in the world. Surveys, we’ll do that as well. When we talk about metrics, there are certain key metrics that I look at to determine the health of a development program. For me, those are acquisition and retention. Why is that? Because we have a retention problem. We don’t retain, what is it, almost 48% of donors. And we’re losing about 10% to 15% of our donor base naturally through death, attrition, moving, no forwarding address, and all of that. So if you are not retaining your donors and you’re not bringing new donors on, guess what? Your development program is in decline.

What we saw recently with the Fundraising Effectiveness Project numbers is that, I don’t know if it was donor retention or donor acquisition, but one of those numbers for the first quarter was down tremendously. Steven can probably talk more about that at the end of the webinar, because I know he’s involved with that project.

Those are two very key metrics. I also look at upgrades and downgrades. Are we moving people up the giving pyramid or not? And also the number of gifts. How are we doing with donor loyalty and the number of gifts a person is giving? You need to be able to track donor activity throughout the funnel and throughout the donor journey. I believe this is a good investment of your organization’s time and effort. By tracking this data, you will build a good view of who your donors are, how they interact with you, and what some of their behaviors may be. But you need a baseline from which to move forward, then analyze, and then come up with some lessons learned to map out future paths and refine them.

So determine what your baseline metrics are. How many Google hits? How many conversions are we having? What’s our donor retention rate? What’s our donor acquisition rate? Then set goals for each of them and measure against those. What you want is constant analysis, and I don’t mean every year. I mean every month. Where are we at with our goal for donor acquisition? Where are we at with conversions of donors who are coming to our website? There are industry standards out there, and you can compare yourself against them. But you cannot compare yourself completely against industry standards, because not every organization has the same kind of cause or your unique solution to the cause. By developing a baseline, you’re coming up with your own blood pressure reading from which to do analysis moving forward. You’re trying to move your needle forward, not anyone else’s, really.

Here are some key metrics again. Growth in revenues is important, to keep your eye on that bottom line, especially since we have two new reports just out, Giving USA and the Fundraising Effectiveness Project. Are you looking at those and measuring yourself against them? I see some more hands. Keep the hands coming. I love them. You should keep pace with what you’re seeing in those reports.

Another key metric is donor attrition, because as I said, donor bases are naturally attriting somewhere in the range of 10% to 15% per year. Oh, I skipped ahead on myself. My brain does that with these slides. I have so much information up there, I just want to get it all out. Then the number of donors upgrading. To me, that’s neglected. I don’t think we do enough moving donors up the giving pyramid, but we definitely need to use that as a metric, and, conversely, look at downgrades. And then the number of donors retained. We know we have an issue with donor retention, especially compared with for-profit companies. Starbucks would not have a customer retention rate of 48%. They wouldn’t be selling any more lattes. They’d be closing up.

The number of annual gifts per donor is another key metric, and you should be looking at getting that number up, because to me that demonstrates loyalty. All of these together show that you have a healthy and growing development program. That’s critically important.

Now, when we get to the topic at hand, those are the big metrics. But when we’re looking at lead acquisition, putting someone into a donor journey, and then finally making an ask, that sounds like qualification, cultivation, and solicitation, right? Bingo. Just digitally, and using some offline approaches. We want to set targets for those. So look at your Google Analytics, pull it out, and get an understanding of your baseline. How many conversions are you making? And then ask, “How do we measure them?”

When I say monthly, even here in Australia, where I’m getting these learnings, they actually do Facebook advertising, and some organizations’ spend on advertising is in the thousands, not like $1,000, like $20,000, $30,000, $50,000 per campaign. But in each campaign they’re bringing in 3,000, 4,000, 5,000 new donors. They are looking at the back end of their Facebook ads every single day at the performance of every single ad. They may be running 20 different Facebook ads, each geared toward a different audience, or toward the same audience with different content and different graphics, and they’re doing a ton of testing. They’ll go into the back end, look at the analytics, and say, “Ad A is not performing as well as ad B. Let’s shift more of the money from ad A to ad B.” It’s almost like playing the Facebook ads stock market every day. They’re like, “Okay, we’re day traders here. Let’s go in, analyze our metrics, move money around to what’s working, de-invest in what’s not working.” And they are acquiring donors tremendously. Does that help? That’s like, wow. Holy moly. I’m not doing that. I do it now for my business, but I didn’t do it before.

Looking at Google Analytics, are you doing that? How many of you are looking at it on a weekly basis and asking, “Where are we at? Where are donors coming from?” You get all of the demographic information. It’s like a gold mine. You see when they’re interacting with you, and you see what content they’re interacting with. You could say, “They’re really interacting with this blog post. Let’s promote that, or put a pop-up or a lead magnet there, because we know that’s where we’re getting that much traffic.”

For a small, one-person shop, how much of this is realistic? I run a one-person business and I do all of this and see clients. It’s realistic. So, Google Analytics: track donors across social media and your website. There are things called pixels. How many of you are using pixels? This is where you go and visit Nike, and now all of a sudden you see Nike ads all over the place. Look at you, you started to light up my screen. That’s because you’re using pixels. You can look at Google Analytics and follow those pixels along. How long have they stayed, traffic source, browsers? You can get all of this, and I love looking at it. How many of you love looking at your Google Analytics and going, “Wow, 30% of us used a mobile phone to come to our website. What does that say? We’d better make sure our website is very mobile-friendly.” You can get all these analytics.

Automated dashboards: mostly folks are using Excel to track their benchmarks and those kinds of things, doing complex pivot tables to look at ROI. And, of course, your email application tracks stats. As you put people in a donor journey and you’ve got different emails being sent to them, look at the results. Someone asked, “How can I do this if I’m a one-person shop?” My client, the Friends of the Blue Hills, is a one-person shop, and the rest are all volunteers, but it’s so important, because she’s bringing in 28 to 30 new members a month. Her membership program is growing to that extent, and she’s investing maybe $500 worth of Facebook advertising, minimally.

You want to look at things like heat maps, and that’s more complex. But your email system, that’s where I was going with this. I recommended to her, as she was putting people in her donor journey, to track each email and find out whether people are unsubscribing, whether they are continuing along, whether they are opening and clicking or not. What needs to happen to each of those emails in your sequence so that you can increase the open rate and the click rate and decrease the unsubscribe rate? You want to analyze all of that data as you go along. You get all of that data right now, even in the most basic of CRM systems. You know when someone’s opened your email and how many people clicked on a link. Analyze that. When you create your donor journey after you’ve done your lead magnet work and they’re in your funnel, analyze your emails and analyze your Facebook.

How many of you look at your Facebook Insights on a regular basis and start to see data from it? Let me see you light up my screen if you do. And I don’t mean this as a look every quarter. This is a take-a-glance-weekly kind of thing. I look at it nightly to see what’s happening and what’s trending within my own business, because it’s that important to building a donor base.

This is a continuous learning feedback loop, so adjust strategy as you go along, and then, of course, do things like website optimization. Again, if you find most people are using mobile phones, be sure your website is highly mobile-friendly. Look at blogs and articles. We found an interesting article that Judy mentioned. People are coming to one article about bees, for the Friends of the Blue Hills. Why is that, and what should we do with that content? Can we make it into a lead magnet that people would want to download?

So analyze all of these things through your Google Analytics and ask yourself questions, like how many people are visiting our donate button and clicking on it? If we moved the position around on the web page, would that change things? Look at all of those variables. Test, test, test, test, test. We don’t do enough testing, and that’s what they do really well here. Then, of course, ad optimization: having different variations, driving imagery, stories, and content. Do you do just organic Facebook? What does that look like? You can find that in your Insights, as well as paid ads. Video is becoming really large on Facebook ads.

Landing pages. Do you have a standalone landing page created for your lead magnet? What happens when the donor lands on it? How many conversions do you have? You can create something very simple in Leadpages and just put it up on your website. Like everything in fundraising, it should have a very specific, clear call to action. And one thing I want to say: search engine optimization. How many of you are actually doing search engine optimization? You should be doing that for your LinkedIn profile if you’re looking for a job, but that’s another story. How many of you are doing SEO, making sure your content has the keywords you want to be known for? I’m saving this for last, but make sure that’s part of it as well, so that you’re found.

I want to end here and take some questions. We have about 10 minutes left. Here’s what we looked at. I went too fast on that one. We looked at what a multichannel approach is and how you begin to develop one. We looked at using digital lead acquisition to capture people’s attention and put them into your customer journey, as we would call it, or your donor journey. We talked about some timely touchpoints and how we should craft and map them out. Then we talked about how we analyze them and adjust strategy as we go along, to make sure that people stay within our donor journey stream, just like offline donor relationship management. Isn’t it? How many of you now see that connection? Light up my screen if you do. It’s like, wow, that’s an epiphany. We would adjust our strategy if we were meeting with a donor. Mr. Smith says, “You know what? I’m really interested in this aspect of what you do.” You say, “Oh, okay. Next time I visit Mr. Smith, I’m going to make sure I provide content related to that particular program he’s interested in.”

Does this all make sense? Has this been helpful? I just want to share one thing about Facebook advertising and donor lead acquisition. People will say to me, “Do I have to do Facebook advertising?” For the woman I was speaking to in New York City, we looked at her Google Analytics, and she had 500 unique visitors to her website on a weekly basis. I said, “You know what? You don’t need to do Facebook advertising right now. You’ve got enough traffic that you are not capturing and converting. Start there, before you even move ahead.” I bet many of you don’t have to invest in Facebook advertising at all. You can create a lead magnet and just move unique visitors from your website, and start the conversion process. I bet you will start to see that conversion.

The other piece, as we remember with direct mail acquisition: if you just do one mailing to a cold list, maybe with a premium, you will get donors, or prospective givers, who give to you. But if you don’t have a welcome series to follow the acquisition piece, you’re going to lose them. So think about how to engage new donors digitally once we do have them, and that could be the content of a completely other webinar. Once you have them, once they’ve gotten your magnet and gone through the funnel, and you made the ask, it doesn’t end there. How do you create another donor journey for them, in regard to actually moving them through that stream?

So, Steven, I will stop there and see what we have here.

Steven Shattuck: Wow, that was a lot of stuff. Thanks, Robin. That was really cool. Man, that was chock full of stuff. I can’t believe you crammed it into an hour. I really like what you said about unsubscribes. I feel like people get bent out of shape when someone unsubscribes. It’s like, no, it’s just the list getting better. Right?

Robin Cabral: Yeah, that’s just qualification for me. And Gifford here is saying it needs much more how-to, and certainly we could do a webinar on how-to, but that would be either half a day or a full day, to actually go through each of these strategies and set them up. This is really a taste of the fact that you can be doing digital lead acquisition and how to begin doing that. So yeah it's interesting.

Steven Shattuck: We’ve been seeing people chat in all the different things they could use as a lead capture, a little downloadable or things like that. But, Robin, a lot of people have asked what a one-person shop can do. It seems like our community is a lot of small nonprofits. What can that one-person shop do first? What do you think is most important for them?

Robin Cabral: I think repurposing content that you already have. For instance, as I was mentioning with the Friends of the Blue Hills, they noticed on their Google Analytics that this one article was the most visited article, so maybe they could repurpose that content and use it as a PDF download. You can simply create a landing page that people can go to with Leadpages very easily, leadpages.com, and create a landing page where people can get that content, or add a pop-up.

Is it realistic? I think I said this during my presentation: I would not have a business right now if it weren’t. I’m acquiring about 300 to 400 new business prospects per month using digital lead acquisition, and I’m doing it by myself with very limited experience in digital marketing. So I definitely think it’s doable. Again, it’s finding the time within our small shops and making it a priority. Far too often, we have not made acquisition a priority, because we’ve been focused a lot on retention, but it’s just finding the time to do this.

Steven Shattuck: Yeah, it’s a cultural thing. I hear you totally.

Robin Cabral: Yes, yes, yes.

Steven Shattuck: We’re recording this in June of 2020, a unique time to say the least. If you had given this presentation at the same time a year ago, when we weren’t dealing with the virus, and with the social justice and racial justice things that are happening here stateside, are there any different considerations you think folks should take right now, in light of the atmosphere we find ourselves in, versus a more normal time, if that’s a good word for it?

Robin Cabral: I will tell you that people have never been on digital more than at any point in time than during the lockdown and the coronavirus. So if you haven’t been on digital, you have certainly been missing the boat on moving toward more digital strategies. I definitely think this is going to be the wave of the future. I’ve seen campaigns here where they’ve had digital ad spends in Australia of maybe $20,000, and the group has gone on to raise $100,000 and bring in 3,000 new donors from that. It’s very impressive, the results. If you look overseas and have a more global perspective, which being in Australia has provided, there are tremendous things happening with digital forms of communication that have not been as widely adopted, as I would say, in the United States.

Steven Shattuck: It’s always interesting to hear perspectives from other countries. In Europe, it seems like face-to-face and telephone fundraising is big, and that’s not big here at all. And hearing what you said about major gifts not being as big in Australia is just... I knew it was going to be fun to hear your perspective, because I don’t know that a lot of our audience is exposed to the Australian situation. So it’s been kind of cool to hear all this. It’s already 5:00 p.m. So, Robin, I’ll give you the last word. Where can folks learn more about you and get more information from you? You’ve got lots of recordings and webinars.

Robin Cabral: Yeah, I do have a lot of webinars. Why don’t I just do this? Wouldn’t this be easy enough, if I was smart enough to come to my contact screen?

Steven Shattuck: It’s a little early.

Robin Cabral: Right? There we go. Oh shoot, I did it wrong. Oh, darn.

Steven Shattuck: I saw it for a second there.

Robin Cabral: What a dummy, a consultant, right? Right here is all my contact information if anyone wants to get in contact with me. So yeah, absolutely.

Steven Shattuck: Definitely reach out. She’s obviously a wealth of information. Robin, you need a cup of coffee and some fish and chips. We won’t keep you. But thank you for doing this. If folks didn’t catch it at the beginning, it’s 5:00 a.m. Thursday morning her time. So thank you so much. It was awesome to hear your voice again.

Robin Cabral: You’re welcome, Steven. It’s so good to see you again. And thank you, everyone. Awesome.

Steven Shattuck: Thanks to all of you for hanging out. I know it’s the end of the day here on the East Coast and a busy time. Maybe your fiscal year is wrapping up next week, so it was nice to see a full room. We will get you the recording, the slides, all the goodies. And we’ve got an awesome webinar on Friday, two days from now. We’ve got Kristal M. Johnson, another friend of the program. We’re going to talk about virtual fundraising, so it’s a nice dovetail from this one. Friday afternoon, also free. Kristal’s awesome. Just visit our webinar page and you’ll see the link there. Hopefully we’ll see you again. But if not, have a good rest of your Wednesday. Stay safe. Stay healthy out there. We’ll talk to you again soon. Bye now.

Robin Cabral: Awesome. Thank you, Steven. Bye.