0:18  
You can welcome people now say

0:22  
hi, everyone.

0:25  
Thank you for joining today's webinar.

0:28  
Looks like we have quite a few folks shuffling in.

0:54  
Hi, Catherine. Thank you. So folks, we do have at the bottom of your zoom screen. I'm sure everybody has been in many zoom meetings lately. So we do have the chat box available. You'll also see the q&a section available for questions and answers, of course.

1:18  
And we'll get started here in just a moment.

1:39  
Yep, so um,

1:41  
a few things here first, for those of you that are just joining, and it looks like we do have still folks coming in, we do have the chat box at the bottom of your zoom window, as well as the q&a. Feel free to ask questions throughout today's webinar, everything will be recorded and shared. And we do have a variety of resources available after.

2:17  
So we're about two minutes after, so I'm going to go ahead and start the presentation. So thank you, everybody, for joining today's webinar on building donor connection with neon serums donation forms. We this is something and a product update that we were super excited about. We've seen a lot of current clients utilize the donation forms and pretty fantastic ways. So I'm excited to really kind of jump right in today.

2:46  
So as far as the agenda goes, we're going to do a little bit of introductions in terms of housekeeping, introduce who I am, really dive into the what, why and how to optimize your donor donor experience through neon serums donation forms, I'm going to highlight some best practice tips in terms of the donor form optimization provide a bit of a relationship building tip, we'll focus on a few client examples. And then take a look at the actual form builder itself.

3:21  
And so my name is Sam and I am the Product Marketing Manager here at NEON one. And I've actually been with neon for over a little over six years, I was actually on the sales side. So working with maybe maybe some of you during the onboarding process of neon CRM, I have over 10 years of nonprofit experience. So I actually worked with an arts organization as well as at the direct programmatic client level with a social service organization. I'm very excited to be diving into neons donation forms today. Some of my my biggest passions within the nonprofit sector sector are youth empowerment, economic and racial justice in mental health advocacy.

4:13  
So going over a little bit of housekeeping for those of you who have just joined, you'll take a look at the chat box included in your your zoom area. So feel free to chat away.

4:27  
This session is going to be fully recorded and distributed after today's presentations. And there is also a q&a section within the Zoom meeting area. So my colleague Tim San Antonio, will be answering questions throughout today's demo. And we'll also be taking a look at this after to make sure that we're following up with any questions that unfortunately maybe didn't get answered today as well. And

4:56  
we are also going to be sharing the deck as well as the slides.

5:00  
We have resources after today's webinar as well. So be on the lookout for that email.

5:07  
So diving right in, let's jump in to figure out how and why it is important to build connection with your donors. And we can do that through a fully optimized donor experience. And so first, let's discuss really kind of the main problem that we're trying to solve.

5:25  
Over the past two years, and so forth, the pandemic has really accelerated the need for everyone to move and shift to an online way of communication. And with that, here at NEON, we really saw a need for creating a more modern and optimized donor experience. So this is important, because research has showed that a very short, clean, concise, streamlined donation form actually helps in driving page conversion, and it can help your organization of course, raise more money.

5:57  
So really, with the accelerated push to online and mobile giving, we're going to spend a little bit of time learning about the ways that online donations have helped our current client base. So over the past year, we actually conducted analysis against our own neon CRM client base to really get a better understanding of online giving behavior. So we see a few statistics here, one that really sticks out to me is actually this average monthly recurring gift. So as we can see, the average monthly gift amount was $64. That if we times that by 12, of course, is $756 a year per donor. And so when we start to think about donor form optimization, we really also have to start thinking about optimizing the recurring giving process, as well. So with neon, we can take a look at our donation forms. And we've actually included the option to now highlight monthly giving as a default type. And you can also actually include prefilled, suggested giving levels as well.

7:07  
So the benefit, of course of the the Form Builder is that we can easily create your donation forms, and set up monthly giving options, all within one connected system, which is neon CRM, bringing to light the term, as we see here, connected fundraising. This means that really, we have put you in the center as a nonprofit fundraiser. And we want to make sure that we're able to connect you with all the tools that you will need in order to expand and grow your fundraising initiatives.

7:38  
And then last but not least, we really want to make sure that we're continually thinking about the donor experience. If you're able to ride in easy donor experience for your donors, they are more likely to donate and communicate with you on a continuous basis. So that's starting with really kind of building the relationship. So the question here really relies on the fact of where to start, how do we begin to build that donor relationship? And really, we can bring it back to the basics. So one of the questions you can ask your donors on your donation form to start that process is simply Why are you inspired to give today,

8:20  
this is really going to be effective, and just understanding what parts of your programming or services resonate most with each donor. And then we can build upon that. So taking all of that knowledge and understanding let's go ahead and transition into showcasing a few

8:40  
kind of best practices found on three current me answering client examples. So up on screen here, I've highlighted three of my favorite organizations.

8:54  
This one lighthouse, immigrant advocates services is actually based in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, I actually helped onboard story district. So I do have kind of a special connection with each of these. And then Tim holds actually a special place in his heart with Damien's place here as well. And so we're going to go ahead and merge out here and take a look at Damien's place. So I've I brought to light kind of these three examples in particular, because they do a good job at showcasing some of the best practices. So Damiens place, as we can see here does a lot with evocative imagery. So they're a Family Food Pantry. And right away when I enter into their donation form, I can see this beautiful high resolution image on screen. So right away, I already have an evoked feeling and I can understand what type of message they convey what types of programs they perhaps offer. I'm also a big fan of this simplistic version here. The color it is

10:00  
scheme is matching across the form as well.

10:04  
And just if you haven't, if you haven't taken a look at some of our forms, it's going to be more of this kind of widgetized format. So it's really going to walk the donor through the donation experience, as we can see here.

10:17  
The next organization is Lighthouse immigrant advocates. And so I have chosen their form in terms of best practices for a very clear call to action, as well as evoking an emotional impact for the donor, they have done a really great job of using a very nice high resolution background image here.

10:42  
The color scheme is kind of shared across the page. And then as we can see, they have very explicitly laid out in stated ways in which your money can help. So as we can see here, these numbers and these giving mounts directly correlate, so the donor knows, hey, if I get $40, I can help one person. So we can kind of read about that. And I think that's very important, whether that's kind of bullet pointing it or kind of having it summed up in your text area, they've also actually included a nice little video as well. So even if this is perhaps a first time donor, this is a great way to share maybe a welcome video for your donors as well.

11:31  
And then last but not least, story district. And they have also done a really great job in terms of call to action. I'm a big fan of this simplistic kind of view of their page. So really kind of focusing on the donor, and including a message directly from their executive director, I think this is very impactful, especially with them being a storytelling organization. They're telling their story. They're they're taking their their kind of mission. And they're putting it in a concise area right here for the donor to simply take a look at read and feel moved by their message. So here again, the same process, this form has done a great job of optimizing the recurring default option. So as you can see, when I came to this page, it was already defaulted, defaulted, excuse me to a monthly donation of $50. So throughout our forum experience, and we can kind of walk through some of these, there is the option, of course, to dedicate your donation in honor or memory of someone. So this is a cool feature that we've highlighted. This is what's called conditional logic, where I'm selecting the box, and it is dropping down a new set of fields or criteria here as well. So we're going to go ahead and just kind of walk through this form.

12:59  
Just to kind of see the process of what it's like for a donor

13:07  
to in my address

13:14  
Oops.

13:18  
There we go, we can select Next, and then we're set up with payment details. So another another great thing that we've included on our forms and pages is going to be donor cover fees that we see here, here. So this is also something that they have defaulted on their forms. This is really, in the small sense, just giving donors the option to cover those processing fees. So we actually found that 42% of visitors opt to cover the fee. So you know, what's it what's $1.80 Not even a cup of coffee nowadays. So it's a great way to just kind of, you know, make up extra money or kind of fill those voids as well.

14:05  
We also see here that we have our new pay with Google Pay. So this is is offering a variety of popular payment options for your donors. The reason that we've included this, and the reason that we actually just launched our capability for neon pay to support Apple Pay and Google Pay is that it actually reduces donor friction, which also means it provides the user with a very seamless experience. So this is automatically going to pop up depending on which device or browser you're using. So in today's instance, I'm using Chrome so it is popping up with the option to pay with Apple Pay, or excuse me, Google Pay. When I'm actually on my mobile phone, my iPhone, it's actually going to pop up with an Apple Pay option as well. So I do have the option here of course to pay with my debit or credit card.

15:00  
And then there's other options to offer as well, like things like PayPal as well as as ACH. Also,

15:09  
one last thing that I wanted to point out, just in terms of kind of starting to think about the personalization of the content that you're putting forth through your donors, I think it's, it's really smart to start thinking about

15:27  
how we're, how we're forming this, this message here. So really reinforcing the reasons to give is going to help your supporters kind of cross the finish line by really kind of reminding them why they're about to give. Remember the to only kind of provide content that is directly supporting the act of giving.

15:50  
So the next step, of course, would be for me to simply make that donation.

15:56  
So now we're going to go ahead and actually transition into the neon CRM system. So the beauty of this is that the Form Builder actually lives inside of your neon CRM system.

16:09  
So this will look familiar to many of you. This is my demo account system. So we have our course navigation menu up here at the top. And I'm simply going to navigate over to forms and pages here.

16:24  
I can click into forms.

16:27  
And this is of course, where we're going to actually start the building of the forms. And so we have a few kind of prompts up here as well. If you have, if this is your your very first time taking a look at the neon CRM form builder, we're going to walk through the different areas on how to create your your form today. But when you sit back down on your at your office, if you want to log in, these should be prompted in your system. And you can actually take a tour of the builder this way just to re familiarize yourself. If you have any questions for our team, please feel free to enter in some questions here and send us feedback. We can also do that within the q&a section here, asking Tim and we'll be following up with some some answers after today's webinar as well.

17:17  
So down here, this is going to give us a list of all of our archived forms. So these are forms that have been published. The beauty of this is also that we're able to create not only just a donation form for your general donation, but we can also start creating donation forms specifically for selected fundraising campaigns, and also allocate to designated funds in purpose criteria within your system as well. So if I am starting very bare bones, and starting from the basics of building a brand new new donation form or account form here, I can do so up here, I'm going to walk through the steps of a form that I have created and built myself,

18:02  
which is called the studio Sam foundation. So I'm simply going to come up here to my right corner. And this is going to bring me into the page editor area.

18:12  
And so really, in terms of donor optimization,

18:17  
the reason that we created this form builder is that we wanted to provide you and our clients with modern branded templates, and ethic with basically ethical design in mind. And so through this form builder, you're going to be able to easily create donation forms using our drag and drop form builder, which we're going to go through today, we do have a variety of kind of stock images that are built in as well in terms of the stock image library, you can easily upload high resolution images from various sources in terms of maybe free stock photo websites, as well.

18:54  
And we've also created donation forms and kind of the optimization of those donation forms with ethical design practices in mind. So this is including really smart recommendations for color contrast on buttons, as well as other user face elements as well. So we'll kind of just be discussing those. Also, we can see an example of this in terms of the opacity of kind of this green area up here. So as I scroll through, it's very pleasing to my eye. So starting up here with our page editor.

19:32  
What we're going to do first is simply title or name, our our donation form here. So as you can see, as I'm typing

19:45  
viewed,

19:48  
we can see that text formulating over here to our right, again describing your cause. So again, we're going to want to go in and start narrowing down in terms of

20:00  
have text, how to reinforce the reason to give. So whether that's including kind of your mission, whether that's including a message directly from you as the development director or Executive Director, maybe it's a short story about how money is being put into your programs and the effectiveness of that money.

20:22  
So we can go ahead and enter that here. As we see, we see this media tab. So if we recall from Lighthouse immigrant advocates, they included that short video down at the bottom of of their page as well. So this is another place maybe to put perhaps like an infographic of your of your programs, or maybe a direct link that shoots them to to a video

20:48  
in terms of form content, or form alignment here, depending on you know, the the background of your forum, we are able to have it centered to the left, which in my personal preference for today's forum, I like this look, we can take a more centered approach.

21:07  
And then we can also shift it to the right as well.

21:15  
clicking over to actually the the crux of the form, so the guts of the form, we can start by building out the different sections. So again, we're going to want to keep simplicity in mind, we're also going to want to think about how long it takes a donor to give and what we're really asking of them. So we know that the donor experience really plays a heavy role in creating a stronger emotional connection between you and your donors. So what we have defined here is a very clear multi step process on our donation forms, which is really going to help walk the donor through the process from start to finish. And so as we can see here, we have the donation frequency. So we're able to come in and actually set the defaults. And if we recall on story district, they actually set their default to monthly recurring giving. So this is of course, dependent on your constituents, what your ask is. And the nice thing about this is that maybe on your general donation form, maybe we're not trying to optimize recurring donors, maybe we're just simply asking for individual giving. So that's a really nice thing about the forms is that we're able to come in and kind of customize per campaign.

22:41  
The same is going to hold true for the donation amounts and levels. These are all customizable, as we can see here, we can easily add new amounts.

22:52  
In terms of best practice tips, I don't recommend having

22:57  
tons of choices, right? We want, we want to kind of offer a range of giving that make someone feel valued. So not giving too much or too little, which who can give too much. But I'm really kind of working with your team to analyzing your data inside of your current CRM system, just to start to understand maybe giving patterns or kind of giving buckets. And that's where we can start to define these these default donation amounts.

23:31  
So I'll click out of there.

23:33  
In these, these all of these areas, as you can see, when I click into them, we can easily remove them. So we can easily see the different trash cans over here to our right. So maybe I don't want to include a tribute or acknowledgement field, I can simply come in and remove that that area if need be. And so this is also going to be a two page format. I'm a personal fan of the two page format rather than the long school scrolling form. It kind of provides a more interactive experience for the donor in my opinion, but you can absolutely set this up to have more of a two page process. So I can simply select the one page here, I'm not going to go ahead and switch I'm going to keep it at my two page process. But that is an option.

24:20  
The next step is going to be adding fields. So of course basic fields, first name, last name, contact information, as we can see here, email address, and you can make certain fields required within your system as well. So maybe you're requiring that they fill out their email, as well as their phone number so you can can continue to communicate with those folks.

24:49  
As we talked about before, in terms of kind of starting the process of collecting donor insights and building that donor relationship. We can actually

25:00  
Custom fields here as well. So these are two of my favorite questions kind of in previous development work to ask people. How did you hear about us? How did you hear about our organization, I like to leave it as an open text field, just because it gives the donor the capability to kind of expand, hey, it was my friend who brought me to this event, it allows them to shed light on on different answers, the same process is going to hold true for why are you inspired to give today? Was it an event they just attended? Was it

25:39  
maybe it was a was an email, maybe it was a story within your email newsletter that you just sent out. So really trying to understand and avail different ways in which people feel connected to your organization.

25:54  
So all of these fields are going to live over here to your left. And these will include all of your standard mianserin fields, as well as any of your custom fields that you create here as well. So in our demo system, we have quite a few. The nice thing is that it will reside in alphabetical order here at the bottom. And all we have to simply do is pull these over. So it is a nice drag and drop capability in terms of pulling those fields over. If I did not select the right field, I can easily come in and delete that field. We can also come in and actually add field descriptions here as well. So if you want to shed to light, maybe give a little context about why you're asking the question, we can do that here as well. And if I want to make sure that it is required, again, I can simply turn that on here.

26:49  
In terms of payment options, this is pretty self explanatory, but it's going to give a variety as we covered, we're able to pay in credit card debit, we just launched our Apple Pay and Google Pay, which comes standard with neon CRM in neon pay.

27:11  
So now that we have that form, or kind of our fears field selected, now we can dive into the actual theme. So this is my personal favorite section just because it's kind of fun to come into design and test new things out. So inherently within your neon CRM system, there will be a variety of templates that are already pre populated. So if you're not a design person, you don't have a design i We have you covered, you can come in here, you can start by selecting a variety, you know, building off of a template. If you want to come in to build a brand new template, as we see here, we can easily build a new theme, it's going to walk you through the steps of easily uploading an icon image, a high resolution background image, and then it's going to walk you through the steps of selecting the colors as well. So we have tons of bees.

28:07  
We also have some information just in terms of on like design best practices and tips as well.

28:14  
And then we want to make sure that we're thanking the donor, we're also wanting to to make sure that we're moving that donor through the stewardship and cultivation process. So what are the next steps for your donor?

28:30  
So this is going to be your standard kind of exit page or your landing page, Hey, I've made my donation. What are you trying to say to the donor, you're trying to thank them, of course. So this, of course, is also all customizable as well, I can come in and add a title just as I did here, which will populate in this area, I can add text. And we can also add certain fields that will you know, certain emails here and things like that. But really, we just want to briefly thank the donor for their contribution to us.

29:03  
The next step here, and I think this is a very small thing, but I think it's very important is that we can actually create a call to action button from our landing page. So I've included hey, sign up for our studio, Sam newsletter, you know, click this button here, if they're not already signed up. So this is a great way to maybe you have an upcoming event, maybe it says you know, thank you for your donation. perhaps consider registering for upcoming event register here and it can redirect that that donor directly to your events page. Or perhaps you're looking for volunteers or trying to up your volunteer pool. This is a great way to initiate that conversation as well.

29:49  
And then of course, social media links. So these are you know, things that we all have nowadays. We can easily allow for sharing from the exit page like

30:00  
Simply select that here, input, our Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, you know all the all the fun feeds that we have today.

30:09  
And then last but not least, we can take a look at settings here.

30:14  
We didn't walk through this at the beginning. But as mentioned, you can create really an unlimited amount of forms. So I think the first thing to do is to start with your general donation form. And then we can start to come in to build various donation forms that are allocated to a specified campaign. And you can also give donors the option to allocate their money to be put toward a specific appeal a specific purpose. So maybe this is hey, come and donate to our our spring appeal. You know, we have the following initiatives this spring that that we are focused on, please feel free to donate your money towards a certain program or something of that nature.

31:08  
And then we can come up here to our preview options. So this is really nice, because this is going to give you and show you insight into what your form is going to look like on multiple devices. So of course, we can see you know, the computer here, we can switch over to the tablet view.

31:29  
And then my favorite is always to switch over to the phone.

31:33  
Because as we know,

31:36  
over 50% of people are now getting on their phones,

31:41  
we actually just actually launched. And I'm just going to highlight this right now I know we're honing in on time, the option to actually create a QR code. So we see this little QR code up here at the top. So the big benefit of this is that we can create this QR code that will take us directly to this giving form. So this is a great way to create the code printed out, you can put it in direct mail pieces, you can put it in your marketing, collateral, and outreach. If you're having it hopefully soon. And in person event, you can simply post the code in various places throughout the event, perhaps put it in the middle of an event table. So these are super fun, we can come in and actually customize these here by adding an icon, you can add in your own branding here. And then we can simply easily print those. And a person takes their camera phone just like we've all used QR codes due to the pandemic easily scan it and it will bring you directly to this donation form. So that's something that we're excited that we just launched. It's something very small, but I think it's something that is going to be very beneficial for thinking about any of those direct mail pieces as well.

33:06  
So jumping back here, I just wanted to dive back in to talk briefly about further resources that we're going to disseminate after the webinar today. So I've included four blog posts here. So if you're interested in diving in a bit further about the the best practices and why we built our donation forms in the form builder the way that we did, I would recommend taking a look at this blog post here. If you are interested in the questions that you should be asking to collect and gain better donor insight, I'd recommend taking a look at kind of the survey questions as well as donor personas, to start delving into those connections and kind of building those more sustainable relationships. And then we also have a self guided tour. So if this will be your first time building your donation form using neon serums Donation Form Builder, this is going to give you a step by step process for walking you through selecting build a form. And we'll walk you through the various features on creating that form.

34:21  
And then last but not least, I just wanted to highlight

34:26  
a fantastic report that our one and only Tim Sarrantonio has put together in our entire team,

34:34  
which is our donor report. So we're giving you early access to sign up for this report.

34:40  
It is coming out soon in a couple of weeks to be available to the public but I really encourage you to sign up there's going to be some really there is some fascinating research that is has been put into this about who your donors are, why they support you where they are, where they live, why they give to your audience.

35:00  
integration and how they give. So it's a really in depth look

35:06  
into that. It's fascinating. So I highly, highly encourage everyone to sign up there. And then q&a. I'm going to go ahead and take a look at a few questions here. But it looks like Tim does have quite a bit answered that there's been a lot. So I'm trying to keep up. And and I have been primarily focusing on the dedicated q&a section, folks, as opposed to the chat.

35:35  
Just linking to pullets question on

35:38  
the fact that you don't, you know, will merge duplicates for you. So, let's see. Yeah, Sam, do you? Is there anything that you want to take live answer live? Um, I see. Yeah, I see a few questions just in terms of I know, we do have a few membership organizations, or organizations that do donations and fundraising as well as membership.

36:02  
So the short answer to that is that we have implemented, of course, our form builder for donations and account forms. And we will be releasing our membership forms in the form builder in a couple months. So be on the lookout for that. But those are our two separate entities. But in in April, we will be launching the form builder for membership forms.

36:30  
And then I just see one here, how do we sign up for the donor report? Um, so I'm gonna put that in the chat actually chat in the chat. It will be included within the presentation. And within the slide deck, I've put all the links in there. But yeah, Tim will go ahead and send that as well.

36:52  
Okay, and yeah. And I see things like, like examples of organizations, I mean, neon, neon, one has 1000s of organizations, including arts, cultural organizations.

37:05  
You know, somebody like Huntington Arts Council, over in Long Island has done some really awesome stuff. So we're gonna continue to hone and provide different organizational examples. So Sam, that's a good flag to say, hey, you know, here's an example for every type of mission out there. That would be Yeah, I think that's yeah, I'm not sure who that was. You brought that up. But I think that's, yeah, really good point. And maybe even in some follow up, I'm just kind of taking a look at at verticals in terms of mission and how they're kind of relaying

37:39  
kind of their or honing in their text for donors.

37:44  
Because I think there's some good insight in that as well.

37:49  
And I see some questions here also about

37:53  
the, regarding the effectiveness of donation, or just kind of like, the different ways that we can display fields. So with custom fields, yes, while while I was kind of simply stating that an open text field allows the donor to kind of shed some light on why they're making the gift. Within your CRM system, you can of course, create fields that are a drop down menu, so they only have a select amount of options to choose from, you can create your radio buttons as well. And all of those fields can be pulled directly into your your donation forms.

38:31  
Hey, we might need to dive into things. Is there anything that you want to answer live? Sam, we want to be under a little bit over time, maybe maybe one question that you might want to grab? Finally, there's a lot. See, I know, there's

38:46  
I've answered 37 questions. It's like one question a minute, so.

38:51  
But I know that there's still a lot open, we're gonna kind of oh, here, I do have one that I didn't cover. So thank you came Lambor. She asked the question, what are the items in the top right about events, our gallery partners. Thank you. I totally skipped that. But this is a great point. So I'm going to go ahead and view this form again.

39:13  
I'm sorry. So these these areas are actually fully customizable. So you're what you're doing is think of that think of your donation form almost as kind of like a mini microsite or branch off from from your main website. So the idea here is that you can include up to three links that will link the donor out to other important topics, or areas of your website. So for this kind of

39:43  
example, personally, I wanted to drive the donor to make a donation of course, but then to are also better understand more about our mission and our organization. So if they clicked and I'm not going to click this, it's not a real organization. But if you do click it's going

40:00  
to clink, click open a new window in terms of the the, you know, the mission about the organization. Because of donors giving money, I thought they may be interested in events and workshops. So these are all customizable. You can I mean, we could put simply, you know, sign up for workshops here, volunteer, we see a lot of organizations,

40:21  
putting volunteer opportunities up at the top. So it's really the idea that we're driving the constituent not only to make a financial gift, but we're also driving the constituents to further connect with us in other ways.

40:40  
So, yeah, I want to thank everybody. I know that was really short and quick. And I talked super fast, I just, I knew that there was a lot to get covered. And so I appreciate everybody, you know, asking questions and interacting with one another. And be on the lookout, we will gather this information and the resources in the slide deck, the recording, and then further resources to come. We look forward to doing more of these kind of more product focused demonstrations and best practice tips. So I thank you everybody who joined and thank you, Tim, for being a rock star and answering all of these q&a questions. Try and we will Yeah, well, well, we'll have to recap everything. But folks, thank you very much. And thank you, Sam. Thank you

Transcribed by https://otter.ai