0:03 All right. Hi, everybody. I am excited to see so many of you logging in. We have a really wonderful session for you today. And I cannot wait to get into it. So let's go ahead and dig in. Today we are going to be talking about where our donors give. In the donor report, we uncovered some really fascinating insights into how location impacts giving patterns. And we have a wonderful opportunity to learn more about that today. Before we really get into things, I do have a couple of housekeeping items. So just to reassure you, we are recording this session, and at the end or tomorrow, you're going to get a link to the recording. You'll also get a link to the slides and the transcripts, and any other links that we have included in our session today. Another quick note, we do have a plenty of opportunities for q&a. So there are opportunities to chat with us and with each other in the chat. But if you do have a specific question, try to drop it in the q&a box. And the chat can move pretty quickly. We want to make sure we get all of your questions at the end. If you have read our donor report, you know that this is a section in that report. If you have not read that report, get your smartphones ready, I have a QR code for you that you can scan to pull that up on the next slide. And then if this is an interesting topic to you, if you are interested in how your donors behave, and how donors industry wide are behaving, this is a really great resource for you. So that all said I am really excited to introduce you to Farrah trumpeter, she has a really wonderful presentation kind of queued up for you. I had the opportunity to peek at her slides, and you guys are in for a really great next hour. So Bear, I'll turn it over to you. 1:56 Abby, before I bring up slides, your slides were not up. Did you want to bring them up for a moment so folks can can get your QR code action? And we can bring it back up later to? 2:06 Yes, I knew I was forgetting something. Thank you. Yes. So as I kind of alluded to earlier, we are going to send you the recording and the slides and transcript. And if you are interested in the donor report, this is how to get it you can scan this with your smartphone. Or you can just head over to me on one.com and download it over there. And thank you for watching out for me that is embarrassing. 2:32 Hey, you know, we're all friends here. We got to look out for each other. So it's all good. All right. Well, welcome, everyone. Thank you to Abby and the folks at NEON one for inviting me to present and be part of this conversation about where your donors are. So before we get started, I'm going to I want to try and get to know you all as best I can in a webinar format. I was going to launch a poll. What's your connection? What's bringing you here today? What's your affiliation if you've got a professional affiliation? So Abby can launch that poll? That'd be great. Absolutely. All right. So we'll give it give it a few seconds, just pick the best answer. You may be all of the above. But pick the one that you're kind of your mindset is in in the next our 3:19 wonderful, guys are very on the ball, we've got around 60% of you are in development. And we have a fair amount of you who are in management and communications as well, which is really exciting. 3:34 Right. All right. Looks like answers have kind of slowed coming in. Can you 3:45 see them now? No, you weren't 3:49 working? Let's enter both and then there 3:51 we go. Now we can see it. All right. Yeah. So well, about half are in development. And then we're kind of split otherwise between management, comms programs, consultant and others. So thank you all for, for answering this question. We're gonna keep going. All right, so this is me. I am many of those boxes, but currently really the consultant box. So I'm Farah trumpeter, I use she her pronouns. I am co director and member owner of big duck. I'll tell you more about big duck in a moment. For those of you who I'm not already connected to I saw at least two familiar names, there may be more in the participant list. Please feel free to connect with me. After today's conversation. I always love making new friends. You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn at Farah, you can also find big duck in those channels as well. And you can always drop a line at Farah epic duck.com. If you want to learn more about me, you can do that on our website. But briefly, I will just say I've been working in the field of nonprofit communications and fundraising for over 25 years. I got my start really more squarely in fundraising doing individual donor fundraising work, direct mail All telemarketing everyone's favorite. And then really getting into online fundraising, online advocacy, broader comms, branding, big fundraising campaigns, the whole thing. And now I really sit at the intersection of communications and fundraising. And I'd like to often think about the interplay of those things. So you'll likely notice that bias in my conversation today. So big duck, for those of you who may not be familiar, we focus on helping organizations use communications to achieve their mission. And we do that particularly by helping organizations develop strong brands, strong campaigns, and strong teams. And in our team's work, we do a lot of capacity building and our conversation today, actually, we'll kind of touch on all of those topics. As we go. And again, you can learn more about us at Big duck.com. In particular, I want to mention, we have a podcast we produce every two weeks called the Smart communications podcast, as well as blogs and ebooks and all sorts of things that I'll refer to throughout today. Also, as of six months ago, big duck went from having one owner to over a dozen we are now worker owned. And that process came about after being around for almost 28 years, we became a worker owned cooperative, that really came through our work to share and distribute power, and really look at how we can center values even more so and how we run as a business. And always you know that that is news to some folks and an interesting idea. So I know sometimes I answer questions about that, I'll do my best if that's something you're wondering about as well. So for today's conversation, we're going to talk a bit about like, again, literally finding your donors as we think about where they are, how we can use communications, we're gonna talk a lot about audiences, particularly how we prioritize and then how we understand who our audiences are. And I've got some mixed feelings about personas, which you'll hear about in just a moment. And then some other things you can do. And we'll make sure there's some good time 1015 minutes for questions and answers. As Abby said, feel free to share those questions you've got as we're going, we'll try to keep an eye on those too. So I know David and Isaac shared with just us so I'm going to invite everyone to answer this prompt and pull down the everyone in your pull down to just say briefly who you are. Maybe your first name, the organization you're with. I donate to x because y that x could be a very specific organization could be a general issue, you could think about donating your time donating your money, donating your talents, whatever it may be. So for example, Farah, big duck, I donate to LGBTQ IA organizations, because I'm queer. I donate to infinite hope rescue because I got my two cats from them, right? Anything you want to share? In that that just lets us know your mindset. And you can put it all on one string. You know, Farah, big duck, fill in the blank, whatever it may be, just helps us get to know who you all are and kind of what you connect with. And whatever you feel comfortable sharing, I think is just helpful for us to build community together, but also tap into the idea that many of us give for lots of different reasons. Whether it's part of our identity, part of experiences, we've had part of something that we're passionate about politically, right, all different reasons of things. You know, why we give to things and oftentimes, our donors are giving to us for lots of different reasons to so thank you all for sharing. I see some good things coming through. Right, Abby is giving to River Conservancy because she's passionate about preserving ecosystems where she hikes and camps. And you know, lots of people talking about different things they're given to offer baby mom, Yay, thank you, Dawn, here's to the for baby moms, and dads and other types of parents. So thank you all. So please keep sharing. It's great to see your what your passions and what you give to. 8:52 So just briefly to share, and some of you, by the way, are sharing to hosts and panelists make sure to share to everyone if you want more than just Abby, and ITC responses. I've been on a journey with my own giving. I am very glad that I still have this picture. This is me and I want to say third grade age eight. My dad was very involved in something called The Hunger Project, which still exists. He was a volunteer who ran the chapter in Long Island in New York. If you can't tell by my charming accent, he ran the Long Island Chapter of The Hunger Project and I was very excited. Here I am fresh in my soccer uniform after a game to see The Hunger Project advertised on a bench. So when I was in elementary school, I was participating in walkathon hosting bake sales in my elementary school for The Hunger Project. And that was my first foray into fundraising and donating. And then as I got older, I got very involved in causes that felt like they matter to me and my peers and my community. And I went from sort of doing things that it was came through my family to actually getting involved in things that were around me. So this was actually in the 90s and this was when I was in college at MIT Aachen University in DC, and I helped organize the campus to get involved in the AIDS Walk. This is probably around 1995. Yeah, in the headlines and 95. So this was marching in the AIDS Walk. And then more recently, you know, there's my dad on the other side of Chelsea Clinton. This was at the Pride Parade. In New York City a few years ago, I went from being influenced to my dad to bring my dad into causes that matter to me, like LGBTQIA rights. And then of course, I continue to get influenced by people around me, and this is my peers, some of my friends and I getting some postcards out in the election cycle a few years ago. So again, you know, our influences where we, where we participate, how we participate, who we participate with changes in our lifetime, as we have different experiences around us just sharing a little bit about me. So, let's now go, let's, you know, we've all talked a little bit about ourselves, and what drives us and why we've connected to giving. Now I just want to talk about your donors. And I'm going to, you know, touch on a little bit of the report, I will say that I did not write this report near our friends at NEON one day, and when I'm doing my best to represent some of the content in the chapter around where your donors are. So the biggest thing, you know, one of the biggest things in that, and this is not surprising, is people really give and part geographically, they give where they live. And this was, this is this slide is really summarizing some data that was pulled from a 2015 article in this voluntas journal, but that people are often giving in their home communities. I think a lot of times, we saw that, especially the past few years, where people saw what was happening with the COVID pandemic, literally in their backyard, people really participating locally. And people participating in things that they have a direct involvement in, often not exclusively in person, but often things that they see touch feel like I shared earlier, with my love for fur babies, I have a connection to a local nonprofit that rescues animals, in part because I got my cats through their animal rescue efforts, like right here, locally, I know their work, I see their work. And we also see that especially with disaster. So again, here in New York, we saw a lot of people giving locally, time and money when Hurricane Sandy hit about which I can't believe was 10 years ago. This kind of thing is what really brings people in so some of you who are connected to organizations that are direct services or on the ground may be experiencing that as well, certainly, you know, invite comments in the chat as we go. And I think we're also seeing that donors give through certain communications channels, part of where they give us through channels. So this is some data that was in the report that looks at you know, most people are going to the website to give followed by you know, there still are people who are getting that direct mail piece, and sending in a check, or getting that direct mail piece or seeing an ad on social and then go on to the website. So mail and web still tend to be the primary places people go to literally make a gift. Although again, we're seeing some use of you know, email, driving traffic, social ads, driving traffic, phone calls, even phone calls are still a thing people are so responding to telemarketing and tele fundraising. Right. So people are coming there to make gifts. 13:26 But we're also seeing obviously, and I'm sure many of you are experiencing that when we talk about giving through the web, or giving through mail. We do see some generational gaps, older donors still very much preferring to give through the mail. Younger donors more comfortable with giving online, we are seeing a greater use of video to tell stories and get people to engage and be brought in. And people are being part of those stories whether that is contributing through a fill in the blank photo campaign participating in video submitting their stories. And some of the other trends we're seeing again, a shared in the report, I just want to kind of frame us big picture. And then we'll get into things are more and more organizations really applying segmentation and personalization and donors responding to that. Donors looking to participate in multiple ways whether that is fully virtually in person or a hybrid mix, I think we're going to see in the next year more and more hybrid events, and people thinking about accessibility both in hosting those events, but in having hybrid events, who that opens up for participation. And again, more and more donors starting to look at equity and how they give and we'll talk a little bit about that. But I'm curious, I want to you know, we're gonna have a few polls on a few channels because I want to get to know you all as best we can in a webinar. When you think about how you're using communications to reach your donors. Which of these specific channels tends to be best? Direct mail, email, social media, text messaging, phone calls other not sure. And again, we're going to pick the best one for this and then we're going to look at Get some of the data about that. 15:04 We are getting some really interesting answers right now it looks like direct mail and email are kind of neck and neck. But social media has a pretty decent showing here as well. 15:16 I like the way you're giving us some real time. It's like we're watching the races. 15:20 Yeah, I feel like one of the old timey like horse race announcers. It's a pretty good. Yeah, so it looks like, it looks like answers have kind of slowed. So let me share these results. So you can see what you guys have to say. 15:35 Right? So yeah, it looks like email followed by direct mail. Pretty close there. And then we we go down to a number of people who are not sure. So this might be a good follow up. And then a few of you noting social and text and phone calls. So direct mail, email, tend to be the best way to reach and engage. And again, that may be those are also the most direct ways to get people to give I see a question from Rick, what do you mean by best way? We have great email open rates, but mail is better for soliciting money, right. And this question was kind of deliberately meant to be open to see how people interpreted it. And again, because that I wanted to pull on a question that was asked of donors where they were asked donors, how would you prefer, most prefer nonprofits communicate with you? And we can see actually a bigger difference. You know, I think email came in number one followed very closely by direct mail. But we're seeing donors at least saying in this study, they want to most hear from nonprofits through through email, followed by direct mail. Again, and I think these kinds of responses may be different for your, for your donor base. And I think to come back to Rick's question, donors might say, I most prefer to hear from you by email. But in fact, they might be more likely to respond with a direct ask when they get something in the mail, or the phone or some other type of communications channel. So there's always the information people report on and then the actual data of what they do and what we'll talk about both of those as we think about getting to know our donors. Donors also gave you there's lots of other reasons why donors give, again, some of these reflected in the chats, many of you shared about why you give, because they give for lots of reasons they trust you they see the results you're having, they want to feel like they're part of something bigger, they are personally connected to your cause. Maybe through services they received or someone in their family received. Somehow you've showed up on their radar, some people are giving because they want that tax write off, although obviously that has changed over the years. So there's lots of reasons why donors give this was again reported a few years ago, I want to uplift though, it is important to understand why I why I why our donors give, it's also important to not 100% center everything about them in our communications. And I think there's been a good push to getting us to examine how we use donor communications through the community centric fundraising movement. These are the 10 principles of the community centric fundraising movement. If you're not familiar, we don't have time to go into them deeply. But I would just say get familiar with them. If you're not at big duck me personally, we're big fans of the community centric fundraising movement. And I think this idea of how do we like this whole conversation, we're talking about how do we understand donors? How do we meet them where they are? But I think it's important to remember, how do we make sure we don't just do every single thing that donor wants us to do? How do we bring in other audiences and other communities to our conversations? How do we value other forms of participation, beyond just giving, and so that, you know, wealth isn't worth. So I think these are important things to think about. And I just want to uplift the community centric fundraising movement. And again, if you go to community centric fundraising.org, you can read these, I'm hoping many of you on the line are familiar with this. So another request to chat in I won't I won't hit you up with too many of these, but just trying to keep you all engaged this afternoon or morning depending on where you want. But we talked about why you give I'm curious, why do people give or take action with your organization? Why do they volunteer their time, their money, their clicks, whatever it may be? If you can, you know share with everyone? Why do people do whatever kind of action it is with your organization? So feel free to chat all I would just love to hear from a few of you if you feel comfortable sharing. So again, why do people volunteer donate or take action with your organization? Do you Do you know why? It's because x right? What is driving people giving to your organization? So I see some answers coming in. We're accustomed resource within the community they give because they see the change we make in the lives of their family members, people given by I'm here because the cause is very important. supporting children who've experienced abuse and neglect, they believe in the mission, they themselves or people close to them have had brain injury, that mission direct benefit, people have attended the school, we speak with a larger voice than individuals, right that belong to something bigger. There's lots of things I'm gonna try and keep up with all these for those listening to the recording, I don't know if you can fully see the transcript, we'll just go through, we build excellent bike trails, people believe in our mission, people love the arts, great. So feel free to keep chatting in and getting to know one another. You know, people are again, given for lots of different reasons. 20:37 People also stopped giving, right and, again, if you've been on I'm sure other neon one webinars or other webinars in the space about fundraising, you also heard about the problem with donor retention, which is, you know, it can be hard work to get that first gift, it can be even harder to get that second gift. And what we have seen over time is that, again, we're holding on, you know, every for every two donors you get, it's hard to hold, you know, you're only going to hold on to one. Or maybe you know, if we think about if we get 10 donors, we're only going to hold on to four of them. Maybe that's a better picture to show. So how do we, you know, what I want, what I encourage you to think about is how do we use communications, and put ourselves out there not just to get donors to give but to get donors to give again. And again, we can break this down. And this is data from the AFP Fundraising Effectiveness Project, we can look at how that is different in terms of new donors versus repeat donors, right, if we get somebody to give twice or three times, we're much more likely to hold on to them. So that's why it's really good to have a strategy around monthly giving programs once we can get somebody to commit. And once they start giving to us, then we're likely to stay, then getting them after that first time. And we can see this has become an even bigger problem, especially with new donors. And I'm not gonna spend too much time on this because again, I think there's lots of content out there, but I did, I am just curious for you all, to know, you know, what, how's donor retention showing up for you? So again, we only have a few more polls, this might be the third to last. Do you have a donor retention problem? Yes, we have a hard time keeping most of our donors know our rates are better than the average nonprofit is? Or is those data I was just showing you or you're not sure you don't know what your general retention rates are either overall, or across different groups. 22:29 Watching the changes and percentages is mesmerizing. We are we have a remarkable split. So around 40% of you are having a hard time keeping your donors around 40% of you aren't sure what your rate is. And then around 24% are on a pretty good path. So maybe another second or two to get some answers in there. And I am going to share this with you. 23:01 Okay, all right. So we're kind of almost split right about, you know, a third of you are having a hard time with retention, a quarter of you, your rates are better than average, which is awesome. For those of you who check that know our rates are better than average, feel free to also share some pearls of wisdom as we go. And almost half of you are not sure what your rates are. So I would encourage you to do some calculations later. And if you're not sure how to calculate donor retention, if you Google, you know how to calculate donor retention rate, you can get some exact formulas. But in essence, you're looking at the change of donors year over year, the difference between people who gave year one to year two divided by that year, year two. So let's talk about the bulk of what I'm hoping to talk with you all about today, which is using communications to engage your supporters. And one way we think about donor communications, we wrote an ebook at big duck a few years ago, particularly around capital campaigns and major donor communications. But I really think you can apply this to all sorts of fundraising communications, which is inspire and form and reassure. So we need to get people to understand what we're doing see the greater vision and purpose behind our work. Why does it even matter? We need to make sure that they feel like they understand where their supports going, and what we're doing with the organization, making sure that we are coming across consistently not just being compelling, but being consistent across our communications. And we need to let them know that this is a good investment, they can trust us with their gift. And again, and this isn't to say to do all of this at the expense of other forms of communications or other audiences, but that when we're communicating with donors, inspire, inform reassure can be a helpful framework. And, again, if you want to read more about that, you can get that in the capital campaigns ebook and I'll work with Avid to get some links to you all after today with the recording so that you can go back And look at that. I do want to again, you'll, you're gonna hear a lot of like you should do this. But also think about this because again, I think if you're doing any of you out there who are doing diversity, equity, inclusion, anti racism work, looking at how justice shows up in your work, I think any kind of fundraising, quote unquote Best Practices comes with some challenge. So we have a dark are constantly looking at things we've said and done with, with more of a closer lens. And it's important to me to share that lift that up. So you can think about what makes sense, given how your fundraising, these are some questions you can ask when you look at the stories you're telling in your donor communications. While we're inspiring and we're trying to inspire our donor community, I think we've also seen moments where people are sharing stories that remove the dignity from the person whose story is being told that makes, you know, tries to get people to feel guilty, as opposed to get people to feel engaged. And again, you have to come to what's right for your organization. But these are some questions to look at, you know, what, what feelings are you trying to elicit with the words and the images you're sharing? Why are you trying to do that? Are you making something too reductive and missing context and nuance and what you talk about? Are you reinforcing harmful stereotypes? So these are important questions to look at. And I think one thing you might do as we think about your fundraising communications moving forward is look back in the past few years and look at, you know, your direct mail pieces, your emails, the appeals you've sent out there, your newsletters even and see what stories you've been telling. So 26:40 it's a lot of context. And I think theory now I want to really get into audience engagement, which is really drives the heart of any good communications, whether it be fundraising or overall marketing, and communications, which is first and foremost, who are we trying to engage and why? So we wrote a blog, my colleague, Catherine, strategist, at big deck, wrote a blog a few months ago, or in different ways you can think about prioritizing your audiences. And I wanted this was just this is general for communications, not just fundraising. And I wanted to share some some ideas from it here. So I think it can be helpful, which is, when we're thinking about communication, and we just talked a lot about retention. And that may be where our focus is, we need to think about who's already in the fold. Who's in our database? Who's in our CRM? Who do we have the chance to communicate with? Who are people that we already are on the radar of and we want to deepen our relationship? Who are the people that should be responding to the content we're putting out there better not? Who are the new people we need to build relationships with? What do we have the time for? Because as you know, connecting with these audiences, coming up with the right content, getting out there takes time? How can we grow, and really, who are the people who are most likely to do something with us whatever that action is volunteering, showing up applying, donating whatever it is, based on what we're trying to do. And when we think about our organization, and where we're going, who do we need to bring with us on the journey to accomplish our mission. So those are important questions to think about, when we're determining who we might focus, and then there's lots of different ways we might then go about prioritizing our list, we might make a list of first, you know, primary and secondary. This is a framework that comes from a book that my colleague Sarah Durham, the founder of big duck wrote the nonprofit communications engine, and in the book, Sarah suggests an audience's exercise where you make almost like a bull's eyes. And just really plan out audience groups, who are the people we must engage, right? That might be our board, our staff, our program participants, our major donors, or alumni, right, who's who's in the must category, who then becomes in the should category, these are people that it really would be helpful for me to engage with, it's really important. And then who was in the could. And again, one of the things that I I enjoy doing is removing the general public for most people's communications plans, because if it's too much and too expensive to reach everyone, for some of our organizations, spending time in the could, maybe it's something that's a great opportunity for us, maybe we have to given circumstances, right. COVID kind of flipped a lot of things for folks. But for many of us, we can get distracted by the Quds. And we really need to focus on the musts and the shoulds. So even doing this kind of exercise can be a helpful thing, even with your colleagues, because it can be interesting to see if different audiences show up in different places, and then use that to have a conversation and build some agreement. Another way you can think about prioritizing audiences, this is potentially slightly more complicated, but I think also interesting to think about, which is how much time it takes and to reach somebody or how much money it might take, versus how are they showing up? And how engaged are they already. So again, you can take those same audience groups and even you know, apply both and think about how they map because there may be a group that takes a lot of time to reach and engage and they're not really engaged with us now. No, versus an audience like audience for that super engaged. And in fact, it's easier to reach them because they're coming to us. They're asking for things to do. And that doesn't mean we put everything all of our eggs in the audience for basket. But it can just be helpful and lead to good conversation. When ideas and opportunities come up to the side, where should we be spending our time? 30:22 So, as we're thinking about prioritizing our audiences, we then might also think about segmentation. And there's lots of ways to do segmentation, I pulled up a few. I'm curious for those with active segmentation programs, again, feel free to chat in how you segment, we might segment by how they're connected to us maybe a role that they have in terms of participation. We might segment by what we know they're interested in, I know, there was a few I think health organizations, maybe they're someone who's interested in research, maybe they're interested in care, maybe they have a connection to a specific programming area. Or we can segment by actual things we've seen people do, maybe there are actions people have taken, that can help us understand what they're likely to do. Once we figure it out segmentation, we can use things like our CRM, to then think differently, or apply the segmentation to things like a donation page. are we sending everyone to the same donation page? Or do we know based on someone's giving history? Do we send them to a donation page or reply device in a direct mail piece that has a different ask string with different amounts being shown based on that person's previous contributions? Or maybe we just have an open field for everyone? These are the kinds of things we can think about? Do we see that people respond differently to an email that comes from different senders or if we highlight a different program? So there's lots of different ways we can apply segmentation, we can apply personalization, things like name or previous actions people took, and the more I think, I think donors and other audiences are almost getting used to more segmentation because we're seeing that from, you know, being on things like, you know, I get emails every week on Netflix telling me what TV show or movie they think I'm gonna like, because of the other things that I have watched. Right? It makes it easy. If I can't, right, yeah, I probably am gonna and then I turn on Netflix. And that show is right there. Right? It kind of makes life easier if we're doing segmentation well, and often leads to greater response. So I think this is my last poll. And then I'm going to share some content around personas. And then we'll open it up for question and conversation. So given all these audience priority conversations, who is your number one audience priority in this moment, so you're just going to pick one, as you think about what's bringing you here today and thinking about your donor communications, who feels like it's the most important audience for you to reach. 32:53 You guys are a diverse bunch. We have a great split this time. It looks like a little over a third of you are really emphasizing major donors now that it's said that it's dropped a little bit, but program participants and community members is also up there as as first time donors. So it looks like around 75% of you have gotten some answers. And I'll give you another second. And then I will go ahead and share this. All right. Let's take a look. 33:24 All right. So 20, or 28% of you major donors, that's our biggest category. And then we've got 20% of you thinking about program participants and community members, followed by first time donors recurring donors, some folks think that lapse donors great, so a little bit, a little bit all over. So again, I think thinking about your audience priorities, and it may be that you want to reach multiple audiences probably on this list, you might even need to reach all of them. Some of these audiences may take unique strategies and tactics to engage versus others, some you may be able to apply a similar so as you think about prioritizing your audiences, it can be helpful to think about what are the best ways to reach them? What are they looking for? And how best can I use communications to engage them. And that's where coming up with a sense of who these who these audiences are, and what drives them can be helpful in making decisions around communications. One of the most common tools that myself and other consultants and people out in the world have been talking about for many years are personas. And I want to share the kind of pros and cons as I have been evolving to think about personas with you all. And I welcome you know, feedback and thoughts in the conversation. But so personas are meant to be a tool that when we look at a segment of our org, an organization or I'm sorry, we look at a segment of our audience helps us think about how are they connected to us? What do they care about? What drives them? What are the best ways to show up for them? Where do I find them and more, right, so this might be where we think about where our donors are, what channels are, where are they located? Uh, but just creating a persona doesn't mean that you're free from ever doing research doesn't mean they're easy to apply. I saw a question come in to the q&a. I'll touch on this one briefly, is there a way to segment audiences without a huge amount of capacity? It depends, right? Because I think some audiences, we might, it depends on how we're applying segmentation, we might say, well, let's send this email out to anyone who hasn't donated to us. And then we're gonna send this version out to anyone who's donated previously, well, that might be one search in our CRM to get to our email list to pull that different list. And basically, it might be the same email with a slightly different ask or a different landing page. That's an easier segment, perhaps, than others. So I think there are ways to do segmentation. But it comes back to what kind of data do you have? What systems are you using? And what do you have the ability to do in that system? So yeah, I'm sure our friends at NEON one and others can share more about that. But back to personas, you know that, you know, sometimes, when people do personas, they just focus on donors, and they don't think about other elements of the community. Or they think once it's done, it's done. Personas are meant to be evolving and come back to for reflection. They can help us they can help us think about getting out of my personal mindset. Let's say, I'm Head of Communications, and I'm making decisions based on what I Farah like to do. That's less helpful. And then thinking about, well, what am I donors? What am I volunteers? What am I program participants? What are they looking for? Where are they spending their time? Where are they showing up? What's the kind of tone and style that engages them? Where does it make sense? Where are we seeing the biggest response? Maybe we're bored of sending everything by email, but that's where we get the response. So we need to keep focusing on there. Maybe everyone on our board is telling us we need to show up on tick tock, but it turns out, no one on our community is there yet. So we're not sure how much time we should invest in that. Personas can be helpful when we go about creating them, and helping us make decisions and go from our mindset into the mindset of the people we're trying to engage. But they can also be harmful. As I think many of us have come to learn and question over the past few years. You know, typically, personas look something like this. I know I first got to know personas, probably about 20 years ago when I was doing exactly that. I was doing website marketing. Back in the again, this was about 20 years ago, maybe even older than that. And typically in website personas, they were very much you find the picture you right, you make up a name of somebody you write how old they are, where they live, what their religion is, what their race is, what their gender identity is, maybe you're renting their sexuality, like you're writing a whole story about them, where they shop, where they eat, what brands they like, you can see like I'm looking at one that's showing the big Nike swoosh, right? And they tend to, 38:03 they have tended historically to focus very much on what we call demographics, again, things that are very much about my identity and less about psychographics, which are about what motivates me what values I have, what beliefs I have, and really about the actions I take. And those to me the personas that do that are much more effective. So some of the harm is that they can be very reductive. They can assume everybody fits into this pattern. Everybody looks like this. Right? They can vote they can tend to focus on again, I know my initial experience was through the website, right? We create personas, who people want to look for x, we're looking for people who want to go to our website and find the donate button. So we might focus on that. They can really reinforce bias and stereotypes, especially when they have lots of dem demographics in them. And if we say like, we can only do this because this is our persona, then we never we kind of limit ourselves from imagining and trying and testing different things. If you have personas, I'm curious. Well, I'll do I think I have a chat about this. If you have personas, I just want to say you're not to completely, you know, rip them up and shred them. I would encourage you if you have personas, we're really moving to doing audience summaries instead of personas and keeping them more categoric. So instead of you know, looking at if you've got pictures and names, take them away. So you shouldn't have a persona named Farah or Jane or Abbey or, you know, Billy, or whatever the name might be. Just no name. It might be more like first time donors, donors who are motivated by crisis donors who live locally, right, whatever that group may be. And if you have demographic data, things about people's age, religion, race, ethnicity, sexuality, whatever it may be, question if you really need that there. It may make sense given your mission, you know, again, it's hard to come up with things that work for every single organ This session, but I'd really look at how you can have psychographic information again, values, motivations, beliefs, and challenge any assumptions you've put in there and ask like, Is this really true based on things we've seen and observed? And actually notice what data or do we just make this up? Look at the data. Understand if that look at the actions behaviors, people take not just what they've said in a survey, right? That's the difference we spoke about earlier. And once you've come up with an audience summary, or you've updated your existing personas, ask other people on staff to review and give feedback because it can be very easy when you're doing it on your own, or just two people who are interacting in this, to lose sight of that. So the more people who review things, the better the results will be. I do think that these the exercise of thinking about our audiences, and categories thinking about what motivates them what barriers they have, can be helpful in making decisions about reaching our donors showing up where they are. So here are some of the questions that you might think about when you're creating these summaries. What matters to this audience? What do they care about? What stories are going to really connect to their passions? And how do we make sure we're not being exploitative? Are there things that we should start doing things that we should test? Are there things we should stop doing? Right? As we build out this audience somewhere and get to know this audience? Maybe they're not caring or interested in certain kinds of content or communication channels? Should we stop spending as much time there? Where is this audience spending their time? And do they actually want to see us there just because an audience is spending time in a certain channel may not necessarily be that that's where they want to hear about your organization and get involved? There may be other channels that are better for that. And another question to ask is, how do we build our community? How do we speak to people beyond those we already have access to? How do we reach more people? How do we be a place where other people are inclusive? And how do we even think about being more accessible? And all the different ways many of us need to be? So big chanin. Last one is? Do you use personas? If you use them? How do you use them? Do you love them? Do you hate them? Where are you at with personas? I know one person chatted indirectly to us personas can be divisive, which I think is true. But if I want to encourage people to chat, everyone, if you have any experience with personas, again, love them, hate them, use them, don't use them. 42:24 I think that even if you don't use them, the idea of thinking about your audiences even running through having a conversation with these questions can be really helpful. So it's interesting, some people are saying that personas are new to them. They don't use them. This, you know, I think I still hear people talking about personas. As something helpful. It is something we do think about creating audience summaries. Again, I think good communications are centered on really understanding who our audiences are. Again, we're not talking about privilege in one audience over another, but understanding an audience what motivates them what gets in the way, who else do they support? Right? These are helpful, so that we can round out how to use communications better. So I want to share a few more steps you can take, and then we'll open it up to questions. So one thing that I really love to suggest people consider doing is to become a secret shopper, I don't know if any of you are I don't know if that show even still exists the undercover X Undercover Boss or something. I only watch so much reality TV show. But in essence, look at your organization's communications from the lens of a potential x, right? Whoever your audience priority is a potential donor or potential program participant or potential volunteer? What are the actions you would want them to take when they come find you? And what's that experience? Like? What is it like when you sign up on your email list? What message shows up on screen? What do you get in your inbox? How quickly do you get that in your inbox? What does it say? Who is it from? I've done this test with some organizations. And they're surprised that like the generic welcome message comes that was when they first set up whatever email tool they were using, it might come from someone who doesn't work at the organization anymore. Like it's helpful to do something like this on a regular basis. Make a test gift, try giving your organization five bucks or something through your website or through social and if you're, you know you're all cookie and in the system, have a friend or a roommate or your best friend or your significant other do this and see what happens when they do it. If you accept donations by the phone or by mail, make a gift that way and see what that experience is like how long does it take to for you to be acknowledged? What does that look like? What happens when you make a five or $10 gift to organizations like yours? Again, it's not necessarily trying to be better than them but it's trying to understand what's happening in the ecosystem of other groups that your donors are also interacting with. And keep an eye on again, how quickly you see things what you see what those follow ups are If you want to go even further, I wrote an article a few months ago about conducting an online audit. These are the kinds of questions that I think can be very helpful, especially for potential donors or new donors. For those of you who are thinking about that first time donor audience to think about if I was to go to your website, find you on social look at you on email, you know, hover, I might come across your content, if you offer in person programming, if I was to go into your space, you know, let's say, a museum, whatever it may be, what I understand what you're about, if I go to your website, does the What's New have content that's from two years ago? Are you still talking about an event that already happened? Is it easy for me to figure out how to get on your list? And when I get on your list, what happens? What if I want to take action in other ways? If I go to your donation page, is it clear why I should give? How quickly and what does that thank you look like? You know, these are the kinds of questions that I think it's helpful to just kind of run through your, especially your online tools to look at what story you're telling to donors when they show up there. And then again, I am a fan of any kind of tool to get to know your donors directly. Right that might look like this was when I gave to the Museum of the American Indian, I got a survey in the mail. That's a very common direct mail thing, trying to get to know me and what I think about not just generally but in connection to the work they do. So sending surveys out by mail or email, calling people up on the phone and interviewing them if you're hosting events, or webinars asking questions. So I think there is both a good moment for qualitative data and having conversation but also quantitative data, what does the data tell us about our donors, what they care about where they're spending the time, you know, looking at our Google Analytics and seeing sources of traffic, looking at both of these to understand our specific donors beyond our guests of what people do. And again, here are some more questions. Again, we talked about questions. These are the kind of questions you can ask like, how did you find us? If you're talking to your donors, what are you looking for? What are your goals? Why you support us? Who else do you support? Where do you go, if you wanted to learn more, get more involved in our issuer community, I'm really listening for communication channels and where they're spending their time. 47:21 You can also call your donors. This is even just good for relationship building, we wrote a very simple script that a man will send links to for a thank you call, but just calling donors up after they give and saying thank you so much for supporting us. If they're game to send on the phone with you, you can then ask them some of those questions on the screen before, but just even leaving messages that can be helpful and help you make an impression for donors when you're trying to connect with them. So that's it for my schpeel. I think we've got some time for questions. As folks are chatting into the q&a, I just want to share a few quick resources. So please feel free to chat into the q&a If you've got questions. Big duck. As I mentioned before, we help organizations with developing communications plans, creating campaigns coming up with really specific messaging to get people to give or participate. Looking at a communications and development teams work together developing branding. So if you have any questions about these things, you can always email me, it's Farah at Big duck.com. We also as I said, We blog a lot around fundraising and branding on our site, if you go to big duck.com/insights. We recently just did a fundraising series on on our site and all the videos from that are available at on our videos page within the Insights section. And as I mentioned, we've got an ebook on capital campaigns. For those who mentioned major donors as a key audience that might be interesting, just also looking at donor communications philosophy. And finally, we've got a podcast called Smart communications podcast that you can find on our site, but in all the places. So that is it for my schpeel. And now we're going to turn it over to your questions. 49:07 We've got some really good ones, too. So I love this question, because it's very timely. Judy asked, Do you think it is better to use open ended type questions on a survey? Or is a checkbox kind of survey question a better choice? 49:24 I will share my two cents and I'm always you know, there's a wisdom of the crowd. So feel free if anyone else has thoughts to churn into everyone. You know, the typical consultant answer duty is it depends. There is a little bit of depends here because it's about how big of a list is that survey going to? What are we really trying to find out? I often recommend a mix of closed ended and open ended if there's a big group you're trying to hear from and they may only spend a few minutes. If it's a lot of long answers. They're not going to fill it in. If it's a lot of checkboxes you much you'll you're more likely either get responses and maybe you'll have one or two open ended, if you're going to a much smaller group or a group that's really close to you, and is really likely to respond to that survey, I think you can probably get away with more open ended responses. That also takes a lot of time to analyze. So I generally recommend a mix with maybe a little bias toward more closed ended questions, just to make it easy to review and spot trends. But again, if it's an audience that you know, loves you is really cares about you will spend the time taking a survey, you can probably do more open ended ones as well. Perfect. would you add anything to that? Me? 50:36 No, I just I love that I have gotten surveys that are just a bunch of checkboxes. And that's fine. I like being able to complete them quickly. But as a donor who has received donor surveys, I'm totally fine expanding upon some answers. But if you send me a list of like 15, open ended questions, I probably am 50:55 not. Exactly. That's all balance. Yeah. 50:59 Well balanced. bets, you had a great question. And they asked if you have recommendations for communication strategies to encourage donor affinity groups. 51:14 You know, I can't say that that's an audience I know intimately? Well. I would think that if it's if we're about bringing groups together, based on certain connections, that's probably likely going to be an ambassador strategy, because people are likely to participate in a group that somebody who has their identity or affinity is like them in. So I might look at how do I tap existing people in those groups to give them the tools they need to reach their friends or networks to bring people in? I don't know if I'm following your question. But that's kind of where my mind was going. And I wasn't fully clear on what you were thinking, Betsy, feel free to chat and more, and we can try 51:52 to elaborate. Yeah, definitely. I love that idea of ambassadors, too, because a lot of times, you can overcome a lot of skepticism, like by recruiting someone that those people already know. And trust. Yeah. So I saved this question for last, because I feel like it's gonna launch a bunch of really cool discussion. So one thing to consider as we're building these personas, and reaching out to different donor segments, is not only where they're spending their time, but also how they prefer to donate. And David had a really fascinating question. Is this a good time to start looking at accepting cryptocurrency donations and the younger generation of donors that are using crypto? 52:32 Yeah, I mean, I think it goes, it goes back to exactly that. If there are people in your community that are following crypto passionate about crypto, then I think it could be worth adding that in. I don't know enough about how that it probably depends on who you're processing donations through. And whether they have that as an option, or if it means you're gonna have to add in a separate donation processor. I know, groups like the American Cancer Society have started doing crypto, I've read about that. And that's a pretty big nonprofit. I know there's the giving block, I think they might have done a webinar with you all or they were also in the donor report. And the given block, I know has been putting out a lot of great content on crypto. So if that's something you want to learn more about, I would encourage them as a good resources. I can't say I am an expert on crypto. I'm definitely intrigued slash overwhelmed by it. But I think it's the kind of thing you could ask your donors like, Do you know what NFT is? Do you have crypto would you want to give to us crypto, or see what a like a low key experiment might like might be, but this is where doing that secret shopper or experiment like looking at your peers. And if other organizations in your space, have crypto as an option that might be important for you to that might be a sign that people in your community are starting to do more with that. So I would it's a good question. And I would say this is a good time to learn about it. And if you're doing any work to learn more about your donors, whether you're gonna create audience summaries or personas, or you're just going to do interviews or a survey, that could be a good question to 54:00 ask. Yeah, I love that. That is a question. that's top of mind for so many fundraisers right now. There. I don't think there are any really good answers yet. 54:10 We're getting there. Exactly. It's 54:12 definitely an important question. So thank you for that. Yeah. All right, everyone. Those are all of the questions we had. So thank you so much for spending your time with us today. I know how busy you are as a fundraiser. And I know that it is a huge deal to take an hour out of your day to learn how to connect with your donors. And Farrah, I really appreciate you sharing your expertise. You have so many great tactical things that we can take away from this, and I really appreciate 54:39 it. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Definitely. 54:43 All right, everyone. Farah has been kind enough to drop her contact information in the chat and do keep an eye on your inbox. We will be in touch with you with the recording slides, transcripts, and then we'll make sure that the same page that includes the Recording also includes links to the resources that were referenced today as well. So, keep an eye on your inbox and everyone I hope the rest of your day is wonderful. We'll talk to you later. Thanks, everyone. Transcribed by https://otter.ai