Speaker 0: Hello, ParDreamin’. For those of you joining us today for nonprofit day, welcome. We have an amazing speaker joining us from the nonprofit space to provide some firsthand industry insights on using Pardot. So with that, I would like you to introduce you—I would like to introduce you to our speaker today, Catherine Moore. Take it away, Catherine.

Speaker 1: Thanks, Emma, and thanks everyone for attending today. Today we’re going to talk about post-COVID. My name is Catherine, as Emma said, and I’m the Digital Transformation Practice Lead at Heller, and we work strictly with nonprofits and higher ed organizations. I’m sure many of you have seen this photo last year sometime in March or April on the news or on the television. Everything changed for most nonprofits with COVID, but food banks were one—one of the types of organizations that saw an immediate impact. This photo was everywhere. This is San Antonio Food Bank, and they’re one of our clients. It didn’t take long for the kindness of strangers to kick in, and the food bank got 80,000 new donors in the first couple of months. At the time, they were using a different email system—really not an email marketing automation, just an email system. And they wanted to find ways to turn these new donors into long-term supporters. So that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Why should you care about these one-time crisis donors? How do you get started with nurturing one-time donors? And then we’ll just recap with some lessons learned from our clients.

So, this slide kind of walks you through the power of a recurring donor. If you think about a donor that makes a $100 donation once a year, you’re lucky if they stay on for ten years, and if they do, you might hit that $1,000 mark. But if you come down here at the bottom and you look at a $20 donation with a monthly commitment and the same ten years, you’re getting to $2,400. And this slide doesn’t include all the other things that might happen. You know, that donor might get a promotion and increase their monthly commitment. I’ve seen nonprofits getting $500 a month monthly commitments or sustaining gifts as people work up their career ladder. Because you’re not engaging with these one-time donors regularly, they might drop off pretty quickly, and you might start to see some lapsed donors, and that $1,000 after ten years is really only $400. But that’s not all. The power of a recurring donor can also lead to deeper engagement with other areas of your organization.

Often those monthly donors might start looking at your webpages. With Pardot, you can see what they’re looking at and reach out to them at exactly the right time when they’ve been looking at your volunteer opportunity pages. Then you can start getting their families involved in, you know, church or workplace volunteering, corporate opportunities, and all of a sudden you’re looking at lifetime engagement for someone, and that person becomes a true ambassador for the organization. We even have some clients that sell merchandise, and their volunteers love to buy the merchandise, and all of a sudden they’re getting free promotion as people wear their jackets and T-shirts.

So one of the easiest ways to get started with your transformational journey, transforming these one-time donors into recurring donors, is to start with a three-message email series. It can be really simple. You know, we often see clients send those four to seven days apart, and you want to have a call to action in each of those messages. In message one, you might, you know, have a subject line, “Thank you for your donation,” or “Thank you for being there for those in need.” The more you can customize that message to your mission, the more likely it will get open rates and to get engagement. You want to use a clear and direct thank you. You want to talk about how generous they are, regardless of the size of the donation. You definitely want to include the amount, the name of the donor or the organization that made the gift, and if you’ve allowed designated donations to a specific crisis, you want to mention that in the email. Really tailor that email and talk about the impact that that person is going to have.

We see a lot of great results with graphics, icons, numbers. Use numbers wherever possible. For a food bank, that might be the number of clients served, the number of meals delivered, the number of boxes packed. You know, for other types of organizations, it might be the number of children who attended a learning session or reading session or the number of rides that were provided to patients going to treatment of some sort. Videos are a great tool for this message, really short, keep them short, and if you’re able to include a direct quote from someone who was impacted, that really takes that first thank you message to the next level. Great calls to action for that first message are simple. Just get them to follow you on social media. Or if they watch that video, you see that they’re deepening their engagement, and you want to take that to the next level. Another great idea that we see a lot is share a badge on social media saying, “I donated to the food bank. You should too,” or “Will you join me? A challenge.”

Second message is a great opportunity to thank people for that support again. This time you don’t have to be as specific with the dollar amount or the dates or the commitment. In this second message, it’s a really great idea to learn more about the person. Messaging like, “Help us know more about you,” “Tell us what you’re most interested,” so that we can personalize our email communications and tailor them to what you are most interested in. You can put a survey link in. With Pardot, there’s a great form tool where we can put these really simple forms up and start using predictive forms and start asking for more and more detail the more times people fill out a particular form. These forms are also a great way to learn about people’s communication preferences and, again, start to segment more effectively. So my favorite call to action in the second message of a series is tell us more about yourself and using language and buttons like, “Tell us more about yourself,” “Refine your interests,” “Manage your own communication preferences.” And those are great things to test with different audiences and see which ones work the best.

Here’s an example of what the San Antonio Food Bank did. They used a really graphically stylized page with icons that resonate with their long-term supporters but are also easy to understand for these new, one-time crisis donors. Really easy to make your choices. Put that right in the email message with a button and call to action at the end. (Speaker clears throat/makes sound) The third message is that perfect opportunity to turn those one-time donors into monthly donors. Some sample subject lines: “Increase your impact,” “We need your continued support.” Always start with another thank you for the gift. It’s a good opportunity to tell people about the immediate needs. You know, in COVID, we were still in that crisis. Many places, we still are in that crisis. And so it’s easy to talk about those compelling statements that will help people understand why it’s important to give now, but it’s also a great opportunity to mention the benefits of giving monthly, how it provides an organization with a regular stable revenue stream and allows them to use that money more effectively because they can predict what’s coming in.

It’s also a great idea to provide benefits for monthly donors, and they can be really simple. It can be as simple as recognition in an annual report or impact, sending them a welcome package by mail that might just include a couple of pages or brochures about your organization and how they can get involved. You know, high end for that might be a self-service portal where people can manage their own monthly commitments and change them at any time, update their credit card numbers, so on and so forth. And then some organizations also use premiums. So if your monthly gift is of $x$ number of dollars, we might send you a keychain. Some of that swag that you might also see in a donate in a store where people can buy your merchandise. In that third email, I recommend having a call to action multiple times in the email, varying between text and buttons, and using, if you happen to have a monthly donor society name or a program name for that, starting to introduce people to the branding of that program.

Now, as I said earlier, there’s lots of other ways to engage those new donors. If they don’t convert to become that monthly donor, you have a great opportunity to convert them to volunteers and advocates. It’s a great time to engage advocates as ambassadors of your brand, of your, your organization’s cause. Most of us are doing virtual events these days. Pretty easy to invite people to attend these virtual events, and you might have an event about what your organization does. You might have events talking about how people can get involved, and you might also have informative events about, in the case of the food bank in San Antonio, about how to provide more sustainable food for people. And then it’s always great to ask people to get their friends and family and coworkers involved. Food banks have this great opportunity to have corporate donors come in, bring a company in, and do the packing and repacking and food distribution, and that’s a great way to get employees involved and then have those employees get their family involved.

So, San Antonio Food Bank has done a great job of employing all of these tactics over the last year. We’ll just go through some examples. They had a big give campaign that really challenged people to reach out to other people and bring in more supporters. And you can see the social media badge down here. (Speaker clears throat/makes sound) Over here. There we go. So, nice, clean, simple email, call to action at the top and the bottom with a button, and then something that they can do by sharing that digital badge. This is an example of getting, getting people involved in events. That time of year, the Turkey Trot, annual 5K in November, and this was from last year. And they got all kinds of people converted from those one-time donors into participants in this virtual Turkey Trot last year. This year, they’re going with a hybrid event, and so it’ll be interesting to see how they do.

And finally, we thought we’d talk about some lessons learned. Pardot makes this really easy using engagement journeys. We can create flexible templates, and then users who aren’t necessarily familiar with HTML or CSS can easily add images, and so it really limits the time that it takes to get something up and running or the time that it takes to actually tweak the messages in one of these journeys. We recommend that you don’t wait too long after these one-time donors come in. Start building that welcome series and dropping people into it as they make those donations. Keep that running, monitor the performance, and tweak the messaging as you see how well each email is doing. Leverage every news story. San Antonio Food Bank was in the news a fair amount, both print and broadcast. And so they were able to send emails related to news stories and share the pictures that were widely available, and so that really resonated with people and people kept giving. Anniversaries of major events, crisis. We’ve seen a lot of emails over the last few months around the anniversary of 9/11. It’s a good opportunity to do special reports or, you know, anniversary celebrations. I’ll show you one of those in a minute.

And then I think the other thing that we’ve seen really, really work well for our clients is when you start to break down internal silos. A lot of our clients start out where, “I’m the volunteer manager, and these are my volunteers,” and “I’m the donor relations person, and these are my donors,” and they don’t necessarily want the two lists to mix. But where you can really start leveraging that lifetime relationship is when you do start mixing those groups. And as I said earlier, if you see that a donor is visiting the volunteer opportunities page on the website, you know it’s a good time to send them an email about volunteering. If a volunteer happens to visit the event page on the Turkey Trot, it’s a great time to send them an invitation and tell them more about the event and encourage them to include their friends and family. And then, finally, real-time images are incredibly powerful. This one, I don’t think many of us will forget this. It is a great opportunity to really leverage something that is resonating with people.

Couple of other examples we can see that the food bank has used, you know, real people telling real stories and being able to include those stories and those direct quotes as content in their email messages. Great opportunities will unfold if you start to listen for those stories and then develop a mechanism to get them into your content plans. And that’s really all for me today. I just want to say thank you to Cercantes for hosting this event. It’s a great event for nonprofits today, and thanks to Emma for moderating, and really thanks to all of you for attending and for everything that you do to help your nonprofits increase their impact every day.

Speaker 0: Awesome. Thank you so much, Catherine. Such a great session on a really important topic with some amazing examples. Do have a few minutes left, so I’m going to give just a minute or so for anyone to type any questions they might have into the Q&A. If anyone’s got any questions for Catherine, please add them in now. In the meantime, I will just say a big shout out and thank you to our sponsors who you see up on the screen right now. This event definitely wouldn’t be possible without them and their support, so please make sure you pop over to their sponsor booths to learn more about what they do and their products, get your points. You’ll win some cool prizes. You can see them demo some of their products tomorrow morning at the Demo Jam. And I also wanted to shout out coming up later today at 2:15 PM eastern, we have our special Birds of a Feather session. Seats are limited for that session, so make sure you register now. Doesn’t look like we’re getting any questions in the Q&A, so I will let that conclude our session. Again, thank you so much, Catherine, for all of your knowledge. We appreciate it, and I hope everyone has a great day.

Speaker 1: Take care, everyone. Thanks.