Sam Nyland  0:00  
Action Hello, everyone, we're just going to take a few moments while we let people enter today. I hope everyone's having a great Thursday.

Hello, for those of you who have just joined, thanks for joining our webinar today, just to let everybody know, there is the chat functionality. And my colleague Tim Sarrantonio just mentioned, today's webinar, of course, will be recorded. And we will be sending out a recording after today's session. And we can also then find it on our neon, one website as well.

So we'll go ahead and get started here. For those of you who have just joined, thank you for joining, I hope everyone's having a great Thursday afternoon. Excited to be with you here today. Because today, we're actually this month is actually volunteer Appreciation Month. So excited to show you a few stewarding techniques and tips and how we can track that information in neon. But without further ado, we'll get started here. So first, we're going to touch on just the agenda. We're going to do a short introduction or I'm going to do a short introduction about myself. We'll do a few housekeeping rules. Then we'll dive right into the importance of supporter stewardship, I'm going to touch on a few best practice tips. We'll take a look at NEON CRM, as well as a current client example, showcasing volunteer engagement and their forms. Then we'll touch on cultivation strategies and how to further steward your volunteer pool. So introducing myself, my name is Sam. And I've actually been with neon for six years, I was a member of the sales team for five of those years, five and a half of those years. And I just recently moved over to the marketing team. And I am the Product Marketing Manager. So excited to really kind of dive into some of neons newly offered functionality. I have over 10 years of nonprofit experience. So I've worked at an arts organization, I've worked at a social service agency. So I've sat on the board of a nonprofit. So I really hold nonprofits very near and dear to my heart and really understand the full kind of realm in the nonprofit landscape. And some of the personal causes that I am personally motivated and care about our within the Youth Center economic and racial justice in mental health. A few housekeeping rules. As I mentioned, this webinar will be fully recorded, of course, it's going to be sent out to you after and then if you miss that, you can also find it on our resources events and webinars page. We will be taking questions. So if you take a look at the Zoom chat functionality, my colleague, Tim Sarrantonio, will be answering any questions. So please, throughout the walkthrough today, please go ahead and enter any questions there. And then we're going to actually be focusing on some practical usage. So while we why, while we will be talking about tips and tricks about volunteer stewardship, I'm going to be showcasing neon CRM today and some of the ways that you can put those practices to use and then following up we have a ton of resources that we'll be sending over to you after the walkthrough today. So the big question, what are we learning about? We're learning about why stewarding non transactional supporters aka volunteers is important. We're going to be taking a look at a few best practice tips for uncovering your volunteer motivations. Three how to collect and then use that data to further steward and cultivate your volunteers inside of your neon CRM system. And then lastly, we'll we're going to go ahead and touch on the foundational building blocks for really creating a communication strategy that is both timely as well as engaging and really 100% authentic. So the big question here, of course, is why. So a lot of times, nonprofits, of course, are focused on the donors. So we see that down here, kind of a common mistake made by many organizations is that they're placing too much effort and time on people that are already donating financially. The number one kind of reason that we want to take a look at this is, as we see here, within this chart, this information and statistics are taken directly from the CSS fundraising philanthropic landscape report. So we can see here that 30%, of American adults volunteer, and from those 80%, also donate to charity. So, in this chart over here, we also understand that roughly 53% of donors, volunteer at the organization. But we're going to be focused on this 39% folks that actually volunteer at the organization, but have not yet made a donation. So today, we'll be talking through ways in which we can further steward those non transactional supporters to become financial supporters.

So the first step we're gonna do here is go ahead and uncover some volunteer motivations. So I'm just going to talk briefly about a few best practice tips in terms of how we can start to understand who our volunteers are, and why they want to volunteer with us, or why they want to volunteer to support our mission. So there's really many of these reasons, of course, why people feel motivated to volunteer, they may have a strong desire to help others, they want to give back to the community, they want to develop new skills, or actually use the skills that they currently have, and maybe a different way. Maybe they are working for a tech company, for example, and want to be able to use their interpersonal skills or socio emotional skills. They also maybe want to try something new. So maybe trying out new experiences. A lot of times volunteers volunteer to expand their social network to make new friends, or maybe they're tagging along with a friend who volunteers at your nonprofit organization. So the importance here is really starting to understand why people are coming to you why they're giving you their time, why they are giving you their skills. So the first step that we can do to actually go ahead and start to uncover some of these motivations is by asking open ended questions. So I'm not going to read through this entire list of questions to ask, but these are just some ways that we can start to gain an understanding of who our volunteers are. Because as we know, volunteers are an incredible resource. And you should be asking about their skill set to see if there's any additional ways that they can potentially contribute. Perhaps they have skills that could be used in your your marketing or fundraising teams. Perhaps they have like photography skills that they can utilize to take pictures of some of your programming, event develop event planning or development. Other information that you may want to gather on top of these open ended questions could be perhaps like languages spoken, current employer or organizations that they have volunteered with in the past.

So using a CRM system to track your non financial supporters is going to be important when starting to understand who your volunteers are, what they're interested in, and how they can best serve your organization at any given time. So really, supporter stewardship starts with a great database in place as well as with a great forum experience from an online perspective. Using a system like neon, you're also going to be able to help measure the impact of your volunteers. So Neon is a truly connected system. We have of course, volunteer management that is built in on top of tracking financial information such as donations, such as Event registrations, so really having the capability to measure not only interests, but also to track things like volunteer hours, volunteer projects, perhaps tracking the number of volunteer projects one has completed. So we're going to take a look here at an example of a current client that's using neon serums tools. And there's a few ways that I'm going to kind of focus are few areas I'm going to focus on today. So touching on individual tags within the system. So being able to identify when a volunteer comes into the system, and being able to segment volunteers, account custom fields, so building out any of those open ended questions, or perhaps building out a checkbox or a drop down menu to inquire about what day of the week a person is interested in volunteering to. And then I'm also just going to point out the areas in which we can start to track individual volunteers, group volunteers, different volunteer projects, and then even numbers of hours that are tracked per project. So I'm going to go ahead and open up a new window here. This is an example of a form that is created that was created inside of our neon CRM system. So just going to walk through a few aspects here on this form. So as we can see, we're driving the volunteer. So I think a big portion of understanding volunteer motivation. And in starting to also motivate volunteers, the vice versa, is to start telling them explicit ways in which they can make an impact to your organization. So perhaps that's different volunteer opportunities that you would like to list so they can start to get an idea of how they can help. Even adding in an impact or contribution statement. Why is there Why is their time going to be important to driving your mission? As we scroll down here and get past kind of the initial general information, I've inserted some open text questions. So how did you hear about us, we'd like to leave that open text just to start to understand rather than a drop down of, you know, Facebook, internet search, things of that nature. This really will provide color to the context in how they came to us, perhaps different skills that they offer. So even if we're outlining explicit ways in which they can volunteer with us and make an impact, it's always great to start to understand other skills and interests that they may have preferred days. So again, this is building out segmented custom fields. So on the back end of the CRM, if I want to quickly pull a report of all volunteers that are available, or prefer a Wednesday, Volunteer Day, I can easily do so creating a volunteer start date. So maybe you have a person or a constituent who just recently moved to the area, they want to get involved with your organization, they have a personal connection, they want to build out their their network. But maybe they haven't moved yet, or maybe they're not quite ready to volunteer. So this is a great way to kind of get a good feel for what volunteers are out there and what days and availability they have. Another great option is to ask how they would like to be communicated with. So in terms of my personal preference, I would prefer email and text, I work at the computer most of the day. So I'm constantly checking email. And as we all know, we all have our phones by our side as well. I also added a nice picture here. So really trying to convey any type of mission. So Agloe Nature Center, we're a nature center, we're our mission is to help conservation and the environment. So we've just added some volunteer pictures here as well.

And then I did want to showcase a current client who is using our forms, which is capital routes. So again, here we can see a very nice high resolution background image. So that's one thing too, we never want to go to a page and see like a blurry photo. So there's a lot of free resources and stock imagery and things like that, that you can find online to be able to input if you do not have any, any high resolution photos of your your own programming. So just walking through this form as well, as we can see they've titled it differently. So this is all customizable with neons form builder. So volunteer registration, understanding a person's basic information here. This is a wonderful question. Are you able to volunteer on a regular basis or occasionally? I think that's that's fabulous because we want to start to understand Three ways in which we can retain volunteers. So if we get an understanding of a volunteer who is only able to volunteer maybe once a month compared to somebody who is committing their time, once a week, then we can start to understand and build out different communication strategies for those two different types of volunteers. Again, very similar in terms of day, but this is more so Hey, are you available in the evenings, weekends, weekdays? Great expanding on the skills? If you don't have any special skills or can't think of any what interests you? What are some of your hobbies? So just understanding some deeper, deeper motivations here? What is your past volunteer experience and volunteering experience? So this is also a great question to ask just because it also offers some color and brings some context on top of their skills and interests. So have they volunteered at past organizations that align with their interests and hobbies? Or is it something that is completely unrelated? Is there anything else you would like to share with us great questions, very open ended. I mean, this can literally be anything that's kind of exciting to be able to read some of those answers. And then down here, a nice call to action, would you like to receive any further means of communication from our organization? Great, let's sign up, you know, to be entered into that distribution list. So I'm now going to just go ahead and jump into neon CRM, just to kind of highlight a few areas here. So as mentioned, we do have full volunteer management that's built into the system. So it's one connected fundraising system. As you can see, here, we have the capability to track individual volunteers, of course, we can start to group together volunteers. So if your organization has perhaps a corporate volunteer group, if it has school groups that are coming in, we can start to group together those just for better reporting purposes. We have our volunteer, of course, application, answers here applicants that we can dive into. And then we can also start to build out volunteer projects or opportunities, volunteer projects, or opportunities can live ala carte, they can also be tied to a larger event. So depending on your organization, you may have an array of volunteer opportunities such as, you know, some type of gardening every week. So these are very specific things that folks can sign up to, for unrelated to an overarching event. Whereas maybe you have a yearly fundraising, Gala, or maybe you have some type of luncheon, where you have to have where you have volunteer opportunities, such as guests check in, closed down, things of that nature, where you need volunteers specifically for the set event. In reference to building out those volunteer forms and pages, we're going to navigate to our form builder here. And I'm going to click into forms. I will click into the Agloe form that I was creating. So this will look very familiar. I was just building this out. So just a walk through a few of these, the Form Builder is is used for our donation forms. If you are a membership driven organization, or perhaps thinking of launching a membership program, we are launching our modern new membership forms actually, next weekend. So that's a big exciting thing on the horizon. But as I come in here, I'm taking a look at our initial page editor.

So I'm gonna actually head into the theme editor here first. So I like to click in here first, just to get an understanding of some of the themes that perhaps some of my colleagues have created, perhaps some of the ones that came built in with neon to build off of so we can come in here to take a look. It's super simple to build out a form. As you can see, as I'm scrolling there's there's tons of different graphics different colors here. I believe I chose one that looks kind of down here further. So I've already chosen as we can see my theme. So when I come back up to the page editor, there's various ways I can come in for form alignment. I'm a big fan just in the way that this image in the background is positioned. I kind of like this, this left look where I can have my story here. Still kind of see that spanning River, I can also come in to customize my title here. So become a volunteer, we want to drive interest, I can come in here to customize exactly, you know my my impact, explicitly stating my volunteer opportunities, what it means for a volunteer to contribute their time how they're helping us. And then as we can see here, I can go ahead and enter in a picture I've seen many organizations even add a short like impact video that is super impactful, you can just go ahead and click it, and it's going to play the video straight through jumping to the form editor itself. So this is where we are going to select our various custom fields to be displayed on this interest form. So as I scroll here, I've already kind of built out my form, maybe one thing I want to add actually is birthday. So it might sound a little weird, but it is a great way to further engage volunteers as well as your entire constituency, really asking about their birthday, and then being able to create an automated email to be sent on their birthday. So you can create kind of a graphic in the actual language in that email beforehand, set it up, and then it's good to go. So it's just another quick piece of of added touch point that you can have with all your constituents. And as you can see, it's an easy drag and drop capability. So I can come up here to search any of my fields. As you can see, do they on a pet so I can search fields, but all of my standard fields are going to be located here, as well as any of my custom fields that I've built out. So again, I've created these two custom fields with open ended questions. I've created a checkbox format in terms of preferred days, I'm also asking about their volunteer start date. So we can also easily come in to move those around if need be. We touched on the actual theme builder itself. And then we have our exit page. So this is fully customizable, as well. So hey, thank you so much for your interest in volunteering with us, we're gonna you know, a confirmation email has been sent. So just other ways in which we can, can further engage, we can add another button here, which could be a quick call to action, it could be, you know, sign up for our newsletter, click here. And then I've also added our social media links here. So if I want to quickly share, you know, my my volunteer, hopefully potential experience at this organization. And then from there, I can easily again, go ahead and preview my form, we can take a look at what that looks like on a browser window, of course, tablet. And then the same is going to hold true for the mobile phone.

So jumping back to our our slide deck here, we're gonna go ahead and click Next. So just talking very briefly about a few other ways that we are able to engage and connect with your volunteer pool once they've signed up. So once they have actually gone in and submitted that form. So while you're in the process of uncovering your volunteers motivations, you also have to play the role, of course, being the motivator, motivating, motivating volunteers once they show interest. So this really is a time to fully invest in your volunteer engagement strategy and relationship building. So the first bullet point here, the easiest thing to do is to say thank you. And I know that sounds kind of like a no brainer. But more often than not, it doesn't happen or it doesn't happen in a timely fashion. But really, this is one of the most important things you can do. It's honestly one of the easiest things you can do. If you if you don't have time, or perhaps you have a huge volunteer pool or volunteers are continually signing up. Great. We can attach a simple system email to that volunteer form. Once a volunteer signs up, they'll receive a confirmation email, you can spread your thanks. And there, you can also push them into something like an automated workflow with neon CRM to continue to send them cadences of emails. Happy birthday, so I just quickly mentioned this as well. You're easily able to manage any type of birthdays inside of your neon CRM system and create that automated, Happy Birthday email to be sent out. You can even go ahead and create To automate a letter that's generated, and perhaps that's generated a few days before their birthday, and you can then print it out, send it in the mail, things of that nature, hosting a volunteer Appreciation Day or event. So many smaller organizations, I hear a lot that are like, you know, we just don't have the budget, we don't have the budget to be able to host something like this. And really, it doesn't have to be something extravagant. It doesn't have to be a full catered lunch or full catered dinner. I one of my organizations that I've worked with, in the past, we had monthly volunteer potlucks, and it was a great time for volunteers to actually bring in some of their favorite foods or recipes. And you know, other folks bought brought store block cookies, which is totally fine. But it's just a way to build camaraderie with volunteers and get them engaging with not only your organization, but also with one another. And then illustrating impact. So while it's very important to be able to do that outward facing to start to recruit volunteers, it's also hugely impactful to continue to do that throughout the volunteer process to be able to retain those volunteers, demonstrating you know, exactly what it is and how they're making contributions. And it doesn't have to be full data points and numbers, it can just be, it could even be if they're doing some type of tutoring, it could be the progress maybe a student has made a could be a quote from one of the parents, anything like that, promoting future volunteer opportunities within your volunteer base. So just as we're all complex individuals, we you know, just because we're volunteering with your organization, and maybe you know, working on something within the fundraising or development department, doesn't mean that, you know, we also have things to offer, perhaps to the clients that you work with. So continually promoting different type of volunteer opportunities throughout the organization, will become very impactful as well to be able to retain those volunteers, and then get to know more about your volunteers. So, you know, a lot of organizations at the beginning process are going to figure out some of this information, and you will have an influx of volunteers that are volunteering more often, so you get to know them better. But what about the ones that perhaps can only volunteer once a month? That's a time where I would recommend setting aside if you have time, a few hours, one or two hours every week to put together a list of volunteers that perhaps you don't communicate with very often, and just pick up the phone and give them a phone call, say hey, how are you doing? You

know, this was the last time you volunteered, I know you're interested in XYZ, we have XYZ volunteer opportunities upcoming on the horizon, you know, give me a ring back, or I'll shoot you an email and let's let's get those scheduled, like we'd love to have you. And then last but not least, really the main takeaway here is that volunteer cultivation is very much like donor cultivation. So using really a solid CRM system like neon to be able to track all of your volunteers or non transactional supporters, is going to be important when measuring the impact to your volunteers, just as it is measuring the impact of your donors. Neon is a connected fundraising platform that has of course, as we mentioned, and some volunteer management built right in. So on top of tracking your volunteer interest, you can track and measure things like those volunteer hours that are tied to a specific project. Volunteer tracking and recruitment is also going to be critical to your mission. So when thinking about that, just know that there's ways within the system that we can segment volunteers to further reach out about communications. So being able to pull reports based off of certain interests, certain days of the week, certain skills that that they have, and really tailoring personalized messaging and communications which with each one of those donors, or each one of those volunteers, who we then steward to become donors. And last but not least, when it's all said and done, I mean, the magic words, the magic word for magic words is Thank you. The best way to continue to cultivate volunteers is by understanding number one who they are in number two, why they are volunteering with you. So with that use that information to develop continual authentic communication And be sure to show your volunteers their impact and recognize their hard work. At the end of the day, they want to see the results of their impact in their time, and the work that they've contributed to your organization. So they just want to hear you say thank you. And they want to understand the reason why you're saying thank you. So with that, thank you all, for joining today. Oh, I didn't click to that slide. That's a fun slide. So thank you. Thank you all for joining today, we'll be following up with some further resources to dive into. So if you want some more volunteer, just in general recruitment techniques, if you're thinking about launching a volunteer program, great. This is a great blog article to read. If you have a volunteer pool already, or hopefully, unfortunately, due to COVID, I can assume that many volunteer programs are ramping back up, here's a way to earn a few tips to start building out that volunteer pool again, and then retaining those volunteers. This is the report that I referred to, with the chart from the beginning. And then also take a deeper dive into our donors. Understanding that future of individual giving report is a fabulous resource. It really talks about the psychology of the donors and mentions, volunteers as well, and how to cultivate volunteers into donors. So thank you very much, everybody, for joining. Again, if you have any questions that we were not able to answer inside the chat, I will definitely walk through those to make sure that we can answer some of those. I'm gonna go ahead and take a look quick here at the chat. Um, thank you, Tim, for answering tons of these. Donna, yes, the new form is available. It's actually titled account form under the Forms builder. But as you saw, you're able to customize that account form to be anything so it doesn't have to say volunteer. It could say not sure what else you would call your volunteers, but definitely customizable from that regard. Let's see. Yep, there's some in terms of like the the design and things like that. There's definitely some capability just in terms of moving to the left center and right, yes, that's true. Thank you, Tim, for answering that. Conditional emails. Yes.

Oh, and thank you, Susan. Yeah, social media recognition. Thanks and reengage as volunteers. It definitely does. And people like, especially on their social media feeds to be able to say, Hey, I volunteered with this nonprofit organization, or even on LinkedIn, you know, it's a great way to even say, hey, you know, find us on LinkedIn, find us on Facebook, tag us tag pictures of your volunteer opportunities. So, thank you again, everybody, for joining today. I hope this was helpful and go thank your volunteers. It's volunteer appreciation. Thank you.

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