Ep 44: Emailing for Good: Next Level Donor Communication with Abby Jarvis
EPISODE 44
Transform Your Nonprofit's Outreach with Data-driven Strategies
48% of donors prefer updates and appeals through email. Nonprofit email performance data has been historically challenging, especially for smaller organizations — today, we’re sharing data of what works, what doesn’t, and trends that every nonprofit needs to know!
Ready to revolutionize your nonprofit email marketing strategy? Abby Jarvis, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Neon One and nonprofit tech expert with over 10 years of experience joins us to discuss the groundbreaking Neon One Nonprofit Email Report, packed with data-backed insights. Learn how to optimize your campaigns for maximum effectiveness, and discover why now is the time to break the rules and think outside the box.
We explore the top-performing sentiments and words identified by the AI engine in the Neon One Nonprofit Email Report that you can use to optimize your next fundraising campaign.
We dig into how to effectively communicate with donors, make your emails scannable, and track your own metrics for continuous improvement. By the end of this episode, you'll be equipped with new strategies and inspiration to take your nonprofit email marketing to the next level.
Curious about the different communication preferences of Gen Z and Gen X? Find out what different generations prefer and how to use the latest data to inform your next campaign.
“Permission to expermient! Your list and clients are unique. Play around with this. I hope the findings in this report signal to people to experiment.”
About Neon One
Neon One provides social good organizations with connected fundraising tools
and services they need to help fulfill their mission. The team works hard to
help nonprofits raise more money and build sustainable, long-term growth
with software, services, and resources. Their products are designed to manage
the full range of nonprofit operational needs, from fundraising and donor
management to program operations and financial reconciliation. Download The Nonprofit Email Report:
Data-Backed Insights for Better Engagement.
About Abby Jarvis
Abby Jarvis is a writer, marketer, and speaker at Neon One. Her 10 years in the nonprofit technology industry have been dedicated to understanding how and why donors support their favorite causes, studying donor trends and behavior, and sharing data-backed best practices nonprofits can use to build successful fundraising programs.
Special thanks to Neon One for sponsoring this podcast episode.
“Question the presuppositions you may have about different generations of people and how they want to interact with you.”
Make Your Emails Highly Scannable: To capture readers' attention and encourage them to delve deeper into your email content, it's essential to make it easily scannable. Break down your message into concise sections with clear headings, bullet points, and numbered lists.
Track Your Own Metrics: While external benchmarks and industry standards are helpful, tracking your own metrics provides invaluable insights into your unique audience. Start by pulling up your email service provider's reports and maintaining a simple spreadsheet to monitor metrics like open rates and engagement rates over time. By analyzing these data points, you can identify trends, understand your audience's preferences, and tailor your email campaigns accordingly.
Embrace Incremental Growth: It's essential not to get disheartened if your performance doesn't match industry averages or benchmarks. Instead, focus on incremental improvement. As long as you observe growth in your open rates, click-through rates, and other relevant metrics, you are on the right track. Comparing your current performance to your own past results will provide a clearer picture of progress and enable you to refine your strategies effectively.
When it comes to nonprofit email campaigns, optimizing scannability and tracking your own metrics are key to success. By making your emails bite-sized and tailoring them to your audience's preferences, you can boost engagement and drive desired actions.
Links may be affiliate links which means I may earn a commission at no cost to you.
TRANSCRIPT:
Speaker 1: 0:02
Welcome to the Purpose and Profit Club podcast for nonprofit leaders, mission-driven creatives and social entrepreneurs. Get ready to stop dreaming and start doing. Here, ideas become action. We prioritize purpose and profit. You ready, let's go. Thanks to our sponsor, neon1, who provides social good organizations with connected fundraising tools and services they need to fulfill their mission. They just released the Neon1 nonprofit email report and it is packed full of data-back insights you need to boost your next email campaign. You can grab a copy of the report by heading to the link in the show notes. And let me tell you, with 48% of donors preferring to receive updates and appeals via email, you do not want to sleep on your email marketing strategy. Welcome, abby Jarvis, to the Purpose and Profit Club podcast. I'm really excited for this conversation all about email today.
Speaker 2: 0:59
I love email. I cannot wait to start talking about it.
Speaker 1: 1:03
So the first thing I want you to do is just give us a little backstory, Tell us about you and your role at Neon1 and what you've been working on with this report that I've like. I've kept this report on my desktop. I can't put it in a folder and I'm very organized. You have real estate on my desktop because I keep pulling it up is all I'm trying to say.
Speaker 2: 1:24
I'm good to hear. I've been in the nonprofit tech industry for a little over 10 years now. When I started, i was doing social media marketing and I was cold calling people. I learned I don't like to talk on the phone and I don't like social media. So when they asked me to start at my last job, they asked me to start building a blog and running webinars, and I discovered I'm really passionate about researching and understanding what motivates donors to give to the causes that they love to support, and not only doing that research but also transiting it like okay, this is what your donors want. Now what do you do? So I've been doing that for oh my gosh, more than a decade, which is absolutely wild to think about. And most recently I have been working with Neon1, been here a little over a year and we just released an email report that we started scoping out in, i think, september of last year and we just released it in April. So it's been a tremendous labor of love And I'm so excited that it's finally here.
Speaker 1: 2:26
And we are linking to it in the show notes. You can download a copy. And, like I said, this is for me anytime I'm doing a class, a workshop, anytime I'm even doing my own research and I'm looking for insights from our sector. You hear me say things like you know, in the for-profit sector da-da-da-da-da, because the depth of the data there isn't anything like that. I mean, i don't even know how many pages this is. It's many, many pages.
Speaker 2: 2:51
It is. It's pretty long And I mean the reason we were so passionate about it is because, like you said, like we are in a space where a lot of times we do have to look at what the for-profit sector is doing But, like, donors aren't consumers and nonprofits aren't for-profit companies and people interact with these organizations differently And if you're taking your cues from Amazon or that clothing retailer that you really like or whoever, it's not going to hit the way it probably could. So this has really reiterated to us, especially when we start digging into the findings and finding things that just openly contradict for-profit best practices. It has really driven home the absolute necessity that nonprofits have their own statistics and their own benchmarks and their own best practices.
Speaker 1: 3:37
So Okay, so what were some of the big differences that were different from what for-profits are doing?
Speaker 2: 3:45
My favorite one was around the days that people send emails and when donors are most likely to interact with those emails. So in the for-profit sector, i have had drilled into my head you only send emails on Tuesdays and Thursdays. That is when people will interact with them And frankly, like that's what I've seen, people interact with their emails best on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I have also been told you do not ever send emails on Friday afternoons. People will not open them, they're not at their desk And that ended up being the most the day. I guess that has the best engagement. So I asked our team like hey, can you please pull engagement numbers for different days of the week and tell me which days are best for nonprofits? And they came back to me and said that Friday afternoons and Wednesdays were the best. And I laughed out loud. There's no way. And sure enough, in terms of overall engagement, friday afternoons are the best time to send an email.
Speaker 1: 4:42
So I'm smiling because so we're partnering on a workshop later on this week And one of the slides basically just says break the rules. Because it's a really good reminder, that it's like not only is it okay to try something new, because listen, the marketer in me too was like Mondays are bad days because everybody's inboxes are full, fridays are bad days because it's a front Like we have all these different things that we've been spoon fed And maybe those were true at one time. But also like user preferences change, lifestyle change And the people on your list may love a Friday afternoon email. And it's like just being willing to try that And I feel like this report is permission to just go ooh, what have I not been doing? that could be kind of cool to try and do.
Speaker 2: 5:31
That's kind of my biggest hope for this report is giving people permission to experiment, and I mean I've been talking a lot about this research recently for, like different groups of people And the big thing that I keep trying to tell them like these are useful benchmarks, these are useful statistics, but your list is unique, your mission is unique, your clients are in your community, are unique. Play around with this And I think, especially for nonprofits who are really working to reach set goals or don't have a large team, i think there's a lot of trepidation around experimenting because you're afraid that something is not going to work, and I really hope that the findings in this report signal to people that it's okay to experiment and you might be shocked by what your donors are actually responding to.
Speaker 1: 6:22
Yeah, i think that it's also it's easier to do what you've been doing, like that you have. you have built that muscle. So, whether it's a monthly newsletter that's long form and has a subject line, that's not so you know, it's not so punchy and innovative. It's makes sense why it's easiest to keep doing it and why it may feel intimidating or hard or scary even to try something new. But time and time and again the organizations that I have worked with that are really following what's in here and being willing to go Ooh, what if we do a weekly email that's shorter? Or what if we actually have a different subject line? that's a little different? Or what if we do send? what if we sent an email on Sunday?
Speaker 2: 7:03
Ooh, you know, like, and seeing how their audience responds, and then evaluating, like you don't have to send an email on Sundays forever or Fridays forever, but just see right, absolutely, and the experimentation is so cool, and now that I've like been talking about this data for so long even the things that I have taken from this report and I say like maybe don't do this. I'm seeing people doing those things, i'm saying onto it and they're doing it successfully. I recently someone asked me about emojis and subject lines and you can get into that in a minute. But I said if you're going to use an emoji and a subject line, stay away from emojis that can feel spammy. And the siren emoji is one that I cite is feeling spammy because I see it a lot in my spam inbox.
Speaker 1: 7:46
This morning I got an email and it said good news alert with two siren emojis, and I opened it and I was like, Abby, isn't that interesting, Because it's like it probably ends up in your spam folder when I'm thinking of, like large fast fashion retailers are overusing that emoji. But it's like, ooh, what if a nonprofit uses that emoji, Then that use case? boom, you opened it up. So it is. It is like again just, it's okay to break the rules a little bit, Absolutely, Absolutely. Oh, that's awesome. Okay, So let's dig into maybe some of the for-profit trends that you're like okay, yes, these are some good ones that showed through. Or some other trends that showed through in the report of do more of this, do less of that.
Speaker 2: 8:35
The one that really stood out was the result of some AI analysis that our friend Sherry and Kushi with Nonprofit Operating System did. He fed an AI program all of the subject lines for all of the email campaigns in this dataset So that was just under 38,000, i think email subject lines and asked the AI to look at performance engagements and identify what is improving engagement. The engine told us that emails with positive subject lines perform better than those negative subject lines. I started paying attention more to subject lines that I get in my inbox every day and I started noticing that the for-profit world does a pretty great job of eliciting positive emotions when you're sending these things. I get a lot of emails from clothing retailers and if you send me an email that's bombing me out, i'm probably not going to open that and look at your dresses or whatever. I get lots of positive feedback and positive emotions in my inbox. I know that it can be difficult sometimes to send very positive, uplifting subject lines when you are dealing with systemic problems or you are working to meet a really big need or you're facing a very urgent deadline or something like that, but we identified that positive emotions far outperform negative ones. So there are a lot of things that the for-profit industry does. That is not necessarily going to translate well to the non-profit industry, but the idea of creating positive emotions in people before asking them to engage with you is very effective. It's something the for-profit world is really taking off with, and non-profits who follow suit are seeing really wonderful results. I love that.
Speaker 1: 10:23
So it's reminding me of a couple of organizations I work with are dealing with diseases that, at this time, there are no cure for, and so one of the things that we've been talking about is like, all in all, it can feel like really heavy news, right, an email to your audience where you're like still no cure today. So how do you talk about what your organization is doing? How do you talk about fundraising? How do you talk about an urgent need in that way? And one of the things that what you just said I was picturing is there's somebody on the receiving end of the inbox who is going to make a donation because they feel terrible and it's almost like ah, make a donation, click end. And there's another person who, on a different email, would make a donation because they're like I hear you, there's no cure yet and I'm with you, like let's see what we can do, let's see what's possible, and it's almost like this aspirational piece And I think with that, that motivation, we see more attention too. So even when it feels like, oh, there's an urgent need, and it feels really doom and gloom, christina, I still feel like there's a way to make that land in inboxes that motivates people for a larger change versus like a one-time gift.
Speaker 2: 11:35
That makes me feel so? Absolutely Yeah, and I think it's important for me to clarify that positive emotions don't necessarily have to equal happy emotion. So when we looked at the feedback that the AI engine was kind of spitting out, the top performing sentiments were identified as relief. That was a huge one. How much can you share relief when you are talking about someone who's getting medical treatment, or the hope that's coming from some of the research that's out there? Gratitude was another very high performer. So even if you can't announce that you found a cure, you can thank the people who are supporting your work as a search for one Pride, excitement and optimism. Optimism was another very high performing sentiment, and so you don't have to share happy news all the time. It doesn't have to be rainbows and kittens and unicorns. It can be good news or even just a hopeful attitude about the work that you're doing and then inviting people to contribute to sustaining that sense of hope and optimism by getting involved. So it doesn't have to be happy. There are a lot of other positive emotions.
Speaker 1: 12:44
And I feel like this might have been in the subject line part of the report, but it made me laugh And I was like, yes, there was one where it was like the top opened words are in subject lines And I think then it was like the not open to the least performing And it was like meeting appointment or something.
Speaker 2: 13:01
Was that the?
Speaker 1: 13:01
subject line one And I was laughing, it was like, yeah, no one wants to go to the dentist, no one wants to go have a meeting reminder, and so those are some of those obvious things, but we forget it, cause boy do we put those things in the subject line or boy do we lead with those? If that is, i mean that first paragraph, those first few sentences matter, and it's like we want to make sure we're leading with, like you said, it's not all rainbows and daisies, but that optimism coming through right, absolutely.
Speaker 2: 13:30
And the top performing words in the subject lines I thought were really great. The support was the first one. Just the word support increased open rates like more than 300%, and then the other two that I really loved was a survey, so I am a huge component of surveys, so. But then donate was in the top words And I love that. I mean it's like you said, it's not all rainbows and daisies, but if, even if you're asking someone to donate like you can still do that in a positive feeling way that inspires people to be able to do it, just avoid subject lines and say remind or remember meeting, because that will probably take your case in my rights.
Speaker 1: 14:14
Yeah, i mean, i think it's even interesting that donate was in there, because there is a mentality of like well, hang on, i gotta like tell them a really good story and then I'll slip the donate button way, way, way way down there, cause I feel bad, cause we just had a fundraiser. It's like oh no lead with the thing, lead with the thing that you want, and maybe that leads into what I want to talk about, which is conversions. the idea, of like we're using email. The entire point of this is to drive action, and so sometimes that action is donate, sometimes that action is to sign up to volunteer, to buy a ticket to attend, but like we are not just emailing for just email sake, right.
Speaker 2: 14:54
Right, yeah, keeping an eye on your conversions is really important And there are a few things that you can do to kind of track that. Of course, you can look at your performance reports. So, whoever you're using whether you're using, i don't know, mailchimp or campaign monitor or someone like Neon One you can look and see what links people are clicking on. So, if you are sending an appeal, look and see what your click-through rates are where you're asking people to donate. But, like you said, you have to actually ask them to donate. They're not gonna do it if you just like hint at it and then throw it in the end. So keep an eye on that. The other thing I really recommend doing, if it's within your power, whatever your CTA, is whether call to action. I shouldn't use marketing terms and assume that everyone is asking. If you're asking them to donate, send them to a donation form where you know that the people who are landing there are from your email, if you're asking someone to volunteer, point them to a form and have a way to tell who is landing on that form because of your email. Some of the things you can do if you are pretty tech savvy and you're familiar with Google Analytics, you can use QTM codes to track where people are coming from. But a simple way to do it is to spin up a unique donation form for that campaign. So if you just clone your standard year round form and give it a special name and use that as the kind of target page in your appeal, you'll be able to say confidently these people donated to this campaign because they wouldn't have been able to land on this donation form if they hadn't. So keeping an eye on those conversions can give you some really interesting insight into your supporters and what motivates them, and you may find all kinds of kooky stuff. Maybe you notice that your open rate is high and your click-through rate is high, but your conversion is low, and that may be an indicator that you need to revamp your donation form to make the process better. If you notice that you have a pretty high open rate but your click-through rate is low, maybe you can reevaluate the way you format your links or the way you phrase your calls to action on buttons. You can get a really cool picture of what's happening if you track different parts of your conversion through those whole process.
Speaker 1: 17:15
The business owner in me is like really nerding out right now because this is spoiler alert all the stuff I do for my own business And one of the things is like it really helps me go. what do I need to double down on doing And what is just a low ROI activity? So, for example, if I'm using these tracking links for a social media platform, i can track and go is anyone? coming and listening from this social network over here. And if it's, the answer is no, i don't have to keep doing that, and neither do nonprofits right, they can reevaluate their strategy. Same thing with email is okay. Well, people are reading it, they're opening it they're reading it, they're clicking to the page, ooh, but they're not taking the action I want them to take. That tells me, like you said. Do I need to tweak the headline? Is something clunky with the form. I know we see things where it's like boy, if they want too much information, that's too much friction, i'm out. Okay, how do I reduce some of the friction And, like you said, have like, instead of those single step donation forms, having it broken up into pieces?
Speaker 2: 18:18
yeah, Yeah, yeah. So I think this is so important because and I see a lot of fear sometimes in nonprofits because like, oh, we did this and we found this really low ROI thing. We have to fix it. You don't necessarily have to fix it. It's okay for you to stop doing something if it doesn't work for you. And I think that's something that it's important for us to tell other people like it's okay to stop if it doesn't work. It's okay. You want something really valuable if it doesn't work.
Speaker 1: 18:46
So I mean, i've worked with organizations. I can think of a handful. They're like Twitter, there's our place, and I can think of a handful where they're like we have sunset, our Twitter, and I think there's. You get to decide same thing with a blog. A blog is amazing for SEO. Well, you can start to realize are people clicking it or people what's happening on it? you know, and I want to give the caveat that, like, while I'm nerding out on this, this, that's not my zone, but I can handle tracking codes, i can handle duplicating pages or forms. So if I can, anyone else can. Yeah, that is not like I look into a Google analytics dashboard, like I'm out. This is too much. But what we're talking about is a very high level and easy to digest.
Speaker 2: 19:25
Absolutely, and that's why I gravitate toward coming up with unique forms. Because I'm a content marketer, that's my job, and I still get overwhelmed when I go into Google analytics. Yeah, yeah, totally.
Speaker 1: 19:37
Yeah, okay. So one of the things with call to actions before we move on is just this idea of maybe we even put the word donate in the subject line if we've got a fundraiser happening. So we've got that, we've got our story and just a reminder to people I know this was in the report of like you need to say it multiple times, you need to link to you know, to your form. You need to say it multiple times in that email, not just to the bottom, not just once in the middle, but lots and lots of times. Yeah.
Speaker 2: 20:07
Yeah. So another thing that Chary and used AI to look at was how was the relationship between the number of times someone links to a form and the click through rates to that form? Now I'm going to throw in the caveat that when we talk about including multiple links in an email, as they relate to a call to action, it's important only to have one call to action in an email. So if you want people to donate, ask them to donate, but don't ask them to donate and volunteer and watch video and follow you on Instagram and all the things, yeah. So when I say to include lots of links to a form, i mean one form.
Speaker 1: 20:44
I'm so glad you said that. Yes, everyone on my email list knows this, because they know, if I'm in the middle of any sort of launch, all my links go to one place. I'm not like, oh, let's check this thing out, check this thing out, what about this? Do you want to learn? No, but there are multiple links and multiple buttons, and this is what we want to see for you as well.
Speaker 2: 21:04
And I do like to hyperlink.
Speaker 1: 21:05
Sometimes I like to hyperlink the text. Sometimes I like to add a button right And a combination of both, so you get to mix it up too, because we also want to appeal to the skimmers of the world who are really just their eye, like mine, is gonna go to the bolded text or the button. And then we want to appeal to the people who are gonna read every word you typed and we want to make sure that they don't miss it either.
Speaker 2: 21:27
Absolutely So, kind of like you said like link your header image to your donation form. Link, include a call to action in the first paragraph or two and link add a button. Talk more about your story. Add another opportunity to click over to your donation form. Add a donate button at the end, add a like card appeal in your postscript and then link to that. I think off the top of my head I don't remember exactly, but I want to say we saw a positive correlation in the number of times you link to a single form and the number of clicks up to I think nine or 10 links to the same form in one email. And it works especially for skimmers. I'm a skimmer And if you give me multiple opportunities to click, i'm going to do it. And also think about it from your donor's perspective, as they're reading it at every point in your story. They may be inspired to give. They may not make it to the end of your story, but they should never have to scroll up or down looking for a way to click to your donation form. If they want to. They should be able to know two lines above me I can click to get to your donation form. The easier it is for them to get there, the more likely it will be that they give.
Speaker 1: 22:38
That's a really good pro tip. So if you are telling an important story and that story is, let's say, three paragraphs long, do not pick people, scroll back up or scroll back down to actually click. Take the Action Great tip. The last piece I want to talk about with email, before we switch gears, is knowing what you know, being as involved in the sector for as long as you have with your expertise. What's your recommendation on email frequency? How often do you wish organizations would email their audience?
Speaker 2: 23:09
So it depends on the kind of email you're talking about, because my recommendation or my preferences would change based on the kind of email. So I may give the answer that everybody hates and the answer is it depends. It depends largely on your donor base. So I can say with some confidence that many donors in your list want to hear from you at least monthly. I can say that because it's some research I did at my last job. We asked donors of different ages, we asked them to self-identify with a particular generation And then we asked them their preferences, especially around communications with the nonprofits they support, and many of them, particularly Generation X and Millennials, wanted to hear from them by email at least once a month. That said, if you are only sending one email a month and that email is always an appeal, it's not going to land well, yep, julia Campbell, who I adore, recommends to her clients that on social media they do an 80-20 split. 80% of their content on social media should be educational, uplifting, entertaining, whatever. And 20% should be appeals, and I really like that mix for email too. So I would tell you to experiment with regular updates, occasionally with appeals on a monthly basis, and then I would ask you honestly to talk to your donors and see what they want. Some people may want more frequent emails and you may want to send an update and a monthly newsletter, and sometimes you may want to send one email appeal a month as well. Other groups, especially if you're donors into skew older, may want less frequent emails. They may want to hear from you on a quarterly basis, but with a longer update. So I think the biggest thing, instead of telling you a hard cadence to go with, is, i would say, communicate when you have something important to communicate. Don't send an email for the sake of sending an email. If you have a valuable update or a really beautiful story or something, feel free to share that, whether or not you feel like you're emailing too frequently or too infrequently. The other thing I would do is keep an eye on your performance metrics. If you start sending or if you start increasing your email cadence and you notice that open rates drop or unsubscribes go up, then pull back a little bit And then it can be, or maybe segment.
Speaker 1: 25:39
So we could. That would be a case for segmenting, because I'm thinking of a lot of my students who were able to. They were at the quarterly and they increased a monthly, or they were at the monthly and they increased every other week, and so many people it has increased their donations. They have more major gifts coming in and more meetings coming in because simply they're top of mind for those prospects. But you're right, there might be some people on there who are like. I'm remembering somebody a few years ago who responded to one of my emails and said can you email me monthly? And I'm like I can put you on a monthly newsletter list. Yes, like literally that was his preference versus somebody who's like. There are other people Now. I'm thinking of an ED who says when I don't email every week, people email me And they go. Where's your email?
Speaker 2: 26:24
What's going on? So it's like yeah.
Speaker 1: 26:28
So it's OK to you could ask people, you could survey them and ask them to kind of self-elect, of like, give me a monthly or let's try a bi-weekly or something like that. Right, absolutely.
Speaker 2: 26:38
Get top of mind. And experiment with it and see how people react.
Speaker 1: 26:43
Yes, totally So. Let's talk a little bit more about those generational preferences. So we've got different generations that prefer different things, whether it's social media, email, direct mail. What are some of the through lines that you've seen as important takeaways and best practices?
Speaker 2: 27:02
So I think the important takeaways really is to pay attention to what's working And I know that that sounds so trite. I know that it does, but especially if you are working with a small shop and you have a lot of things on your plate, it's hard to carve out time to go back and look at your performance and evaluate your campaigns and evaluate how things are going. Another thing I would encourage you to do is to question the presuppositions you may have about different generations of people in different segments of people and how they want to interact with you. This is actually very top of mind. Do you know T Clay Buck? He is a wonderful Another podcaster, amazing, yes, and this morning he posted something about millennials and direct mail and the fact that millennials are responding very well to direct mail, despite the presupposition that a lot of people have that millennials don't care about mail. And it's true. We saw when I did that research millennials and Gen Z loves direct mail, appeals and updates.
Speaker 1: 28:09
I have in front of me some ones recently that are like on my desk that I'm like ooh, i like this. Ooh, this got me Direct mail. They're so good.
Speaker 2: 28:16
They're so good And I respond to direct mail and donate more than I probably respond to email appeals. However and this is the tricky part millennials and Gen Z and increasingly in some of the older generations, especially after the pandemic, i will read and respond to your direct mail piece, but I want to donate to you online.
Speaker 1: 28:35
That's what I was going to say. You need to have some tracking. Yeah right, in the check, figure out.
Speaker 2: 28:39
No, I truly don't think that's a lie. I know where my checkbook is, but it has my address from two moves ago on it because I literally never write checks.
Speaker 1: 28:48
We're down to like one paper check. that, i guess, is our in case. Yeah, exactly, just give us a QR code to scan, make it super easy, make it mobile friendly, and you can still send me that direct mail piece. I'm with you.
Speaker 2: 29:04
Absolutely. Yeah. I keep direct mail appeals. My husband like saves them for me now because they got brought me these and it's just piles of them and I love them. So there is a lot of presuppositions out there about how different donors and different donor groups want to engage with you and support you, and questioning those and experimenting and trying things anyway may have some pretty cool results.
Speaker 1: 29:29
That is so interesting to hear because it is like, oh, we just think baby boomers, that's our direct mail folks. And then the opposite to of like, well, they're not on email, but I'm like I'm thinking of some of them and they love an email, they love email.
Speaker 2: 29:44
So just really not deciding.
Speaker 1: 29:46
Yes, yes, they're hanging out on Facebook for sure. So just not deciding for people, but not throwing spaghetti at the wall and going great. So I'm just going to do everything to everybody versus. let me try this strategy, let me evaluate this strategy and then decide whether or not I want to keep going or move on.
Speaker 2: 30:05
Definitely. Yeah, that's huge. I like to tell people I think you and I are both team survey like send your donors a survey, ask them what they want. If you don't have the capacity to do that or if you're not confident in doing so, sit down with your model donor and ask them what they want. If you want to know what millennial donors are going to do, sit down with one of your millennial donors and ask them.
Speaker 1: 30:27
So, yeah, we had Emily Taylor on the podcast and she talked about the importance of the and the difference between the surveying versus the interview I'm going to, i'm going to miss the stat, but basically she said if you could just interview five people, i think you'll get to like of the type of person right, so five donors who are of that demo that you're looking to get the information right about interview five, you'll get 80% of the data right. so there's that piece and then, with the surveying piece And she, that conversation I was like, oh, i got to survey my audience, i, you, i do it, i would say, twice a year. but it was a good reminder and I just surveyed a segment of my audience this week And I said, and it gave me so much clarity of where I could be clearer, where I, where people were like, oh, i'm missing this. And we can do the same thing for nonprofit emails of like something in your email was a little clunky or something in your email didn't dial up the urgency or didn't tell the story or I assumed people already knew this about my organization. And surveys are so helpful. just make them short. That's my only.
Speaker 2: 31:31
I actually the other day received an email survey from a nonprofit that I support and it was so long. I got through the first five pages and was like I just don't have time for this.
Speaker 1: 31:41
Yeah, make it short, make it your juiciest questions that you really want the answer to, and then you can have a little. I always leave a little additional feedback point at the bottom, so if somebody wants to tell you more, they can. But even if 10% of your list responds to that survey, it is so helpful and it's a jumping off point to like get on the phone with people or do individual outreach. So survey, survey, survey yes.
Speaker 2: 32:06
Truly. And then I'll say it like experiment in addition to your survey, because I think people like to talk about what they want to want, And I'll use myself as an example. Someone asked me if I would ever donate to a nonprofit using Venmo and is like why on earth would I donate to a nonprofit using Venmo? No, I would never do that. Then I donated to an on-profit yesterday using Venmo because it was easy and I was right there and I had money in my Venmo account and I was like sure, we'll send it over to you. So experiment and combining your survey results and your performance results can give you unprecedented insight into what people want.
Speaker 1: 32:44
Yes, i just want to recap, because I feel like there are people who are not marketers, who don't wear the hats that we have, who could listen to this and go. I don't know, i'm not sure where to start. Right, I'm like oh, talking about tracking codes and duplicating forms. So, high level, do this today and I promise you it won't be painful. I would say, consider increasing your frequency. Definitely add more links in your emails when you're fundraising or creating any action that you want people to take. Multiple links to the same page. What else comes to mind?
Speaker 2: 33:21
Two things. One, make your emails very scannable. You alluded to it, i alluded to it. People do not read emails all the way. Very frequently, people will scan an email and decide if they actually want to read it. I am very guilty of that, which drives me bananas, because you and I are marketers. I'm like you need to read the email. I wrote it, you need to read it and people don't. The other thing I would do is tell you to start looking at your own metrics. Pull up your report and your email service provider and just start a simple spreadsheet and see what maybe your open and engagement rates were for the last three or four cents and then keep an eye on them. And as you track your own metrics, you will start learning about your audience and what they want as a unique group of people responding to you, a unique nonprofit. Having benchmarks is really helpful, of course. that's why we put together this report. But benchmarks external benchmarks, industry benchmarks are not as useful as your own benchmarks. You may not be hitting the open rates and click the rates that some others are. You may not be reaching the average, and that's okay. As long as you are seeing incremental improvement in your own emails you're doing fine. So I don't want people to freak out if they read this report and they're like Abby, my open rates aren't this high. or Abby, i'm not raising this much per email send. That's okay. You don't have to look at your own performance, track your improvement over time, and as long as you are seeing growth, you're doing great.
Speaker 1: 34:58
I love that. Yeah, i like to see, because there is a breakdown we didn't really talk about, but a breakdown of, like, the total amount raised per campaign on average, right, and you could look at that number and you could have one of two thoughts. You could well, i guess, you'd have three. You could say, yay, that's us Okay. Or you could say we're not even raising close to that, right. So then we want to use this as a beacon of you know what we can get there And we're going to make three simple changes to get there. And then you may have the thought of, oh, we're totally doing that and we're past that. And then to that I say let's have some fun, because if you're already there, you absolutely can turn up the volume on what you're doing to really use your list, even make more profit.
Speaker 2: 35:41
That way, absolutely. And I actually have this conversation the other day because I showed the fundraising totals for emails and people panic a little bit And I was like no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't want to panic. So some things to keep in mind. And I had to tell them like, when we pulled these numbers, we needed to pull fundraising email information. We looked at more than 37,000 campaigns. We didn't have a way to identify the type of email for everyone. So what we did was we looked at fundraising totals during the four biggest fundraising days of the year giving Tuesday and the last three days of the year. People are already primed and ready to donate on those days. So, of course, the fundraising totals are going to be higher than they would be for the email campaign you sent in the spring. Yep, it's OK. The bigger thing that I wanted people to take from that and I had to work really hard to phrase it this way is like don't necessarily look at your overall fundraising totals. Look at how generously your donors are giving to you. Look at the average amount per contact and see how you're doing there. If you are doing a good job of engaging your donor base, it doesn't really matter if you are measuring up to that, frankly, kind of arbitrary number there. The number is useful for benchmarking yourself, especially if you're looking at your end of your campaigns. But that's the double-edged sword of data, is it's?
Speaker 1: 37:00
very useful. Don't use it against yourself.
Speaker 2: 37:03
Don't use it against yourself And don't stress yourself out trying to hit these numbers that other people are achieving It doesn't? that's not as important as you doing a good job, reaching your community?
Speaker 1: 37:14
And I hope it's, i hope what it is for me, what I hope it is for everybody else, what it was for me, which is like motivational, of like, oh yes, like I'm excited. Where is there room for every single nonprofit to look at this and go, oh, i see our next best move, this is what we can do, and so we will link to it. It's free, which is like, oh, it's free, like this thing is robust enough to be a paid thing. Like I said, it's staying on my desktop this year because I keep referencing it, so we will link to that for people to download. Now the last question that I ask all my guests, which is what is one thought that you like to think on purpose? So this could be a mantra and affirmation, something you are just working on, believing, or that has helped you in your role when you're, you know, feeling a little shaky and need a little guidepost for the day.
Speaker 2: 38:04
Absolutely, because I really love data and gravitate toward data and concentrate on data Most of my working life. It's really easy for me to get caught up in the data and kind of panic about it or forget that it represents real people doing real wonderful things. So, as you are working through your own data, don't do what I do. I have to make myself take a step back and look at things more holistically and stop fixating on the minutia of what the data is saying. So I need to take a step back and look at all of the beautiful things that are happening in the nonprofits who are doing this work. So when I look at 157 million plus emails like It's hard for me to remember that those are emails going to more than 157 million people who want to change the world. It's easy for me to make the data points here a monolith. I think that is the case for a lot of people who deal with data. If you are listening to this podcast, don't be like me. Don't get so fixated on the numbers. Instead, take a moment to appreciate that the data in your CRM or your Excel spreadsheet or whatever you're using represents people who love your mission and love your work and want to make a difference with you. Fixating on performance can cause stress. You're always wanting to improve your numbers. You want to figure out why the conversion rate is lower than it was the last time you sent an appeal. You're still working with people who are proving to you day after day that they want to make a difference by supporting your work. Remember that, especially if you start getting stressed out, take a step back, look at the bigger picture and realize that, even if there are areas to improve, you're doing amazing things.
Speaker 1: 39:56
Likely, the place you are right at this moment is the place you were dreaming about years ago or last year. It's easy to get stuck on it, especially if you've been tracking it. you're like I still want my open rates higher. I still want this higher. You're like wait, it is actually I am doing this. It is working. That was great, Abby, Thank you so much. Good, Tell us the best place for everyone to follow. connect with NeonOne. I know you guys. I feel like this month has been the month of email. There's some really great webinars People can watch on demand. Yeah.
Speaker 2: 40:30
Yeah, they can watch on demand. If you go to neononecom, all of our research is there. All of our webinars are there. There are so many blog articles. Those are all free. You can share them with whoever you want. You don't have to be a client to use it and get good meaning out of it. We also have a group. It's our connected fundraising community. It's a Slack group. You can find that on the website as well. Again, so many people who are in there are not clients. They're just people who are interested in data or want to support each other. They're fundraising staff. There are consultants. There are NeonOne employees. There are people that I don't know what they do, but they're there and they're adding to the conversation. It's a cool way to connect and get some resources, sometimes even just encouragement if you need a good word during the day.
Speaker 1: 41:23
I feel like for so many of us that are work from home. I love a good Slack channel. I was excited to join yours, You guys. and then we have Atlanta coworkers. There's a Slack channel for Atlanta people who are basically entrepreneurs. It's so fun. Sometimes we just need to celebrate the wins, celebrate, ask questions. That's a lot of what the Slack channel that you have is. We'll link to that as well. Awesome, Very cool.
Speaker 2: 41:49
Thank you for today. This has been great. This has been cool. Thank you for letting me talk about this. I know, and keeping me focused, I have a tendency to get too excited about all of the research that's happening. I'm like we have to cover all of this ground. I'm glad that we got to touch on some really important, hard-hitting things today without getting too in the weeds Awesome.
Speaker 1: 42:11
Thanks, Abby, like what you're hearing and want to take this to the next level. I want to invite you to go to purposeandprofitclub to watch my free class. In there I will tell you the number one thing that's keeping your nonprofit or social impact business stuck and what to do instead. Go to purposeandprofitclub.